Paula M. Varsano. Tracking the Banished Immortal. The Poetry of Li Bo and Its Critical Reception. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003. 368 pp. $49.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8248-2573-7.
Reviewed by Richard Serrano (Department of French and Program in Comparative Literature, Rutgers University, New Brunswick)
Published on H-Asia (December, 2004)
Still Immortal, NO Longer Banished
Paula Varsano?s Tracking the Banished Immortal is arguably the best book in English entirely devoted to the Tang poet Li Bo. However, to consider this as merely a book about Li Bo--in itself a great achievement--would not do justice to its sweep and erudition. Varsano brilliantly uses Li Bo?s poetry to explore both the literary tradition that follows it and the one that which precedes it. As a result, reading Tracking the Banished Immortal not only allows a reevaluation of Li Bo?s work and its place in Chinese literary history, but brings us to understand the Chinese literary tradition in both its length and breadth. Before reading this book I had wondered how any scholar could possibly add to the millennia-long discussion of Li Bo, but having read it, I now wonder how any scholar of Chinese poetry could do without Varsano?s work.
The first half of Banished Immortal, "Reading the Critics," places Li Bo in the context of critical attempts to account for his poetry by future readers, critics and imitators. Varsano demonstrates how our understanding of Li Bo has been informed by these critics as they primarily defined him against and with the poetry and life of Du Fu. Along the way, Banished Immortal becomes as much an insightful survey of Chinese literary history as an analysis of reception of Li Bo?s poetry. Li Bo would seem to be a sort of Rohrschach blot against which we can read the obsessions and preoccupations of the Chinese literate class over the past 1300 years. I would be tempted to assign Varsano?s book (rather than a standard literary history) to graduate students who needed a smart but concise introduction to the evolution of Chinese poetry and poetic theory.
The second half of Banished Immortal, "Reading the Poems" necessarily focuses on Li Bo?s relationship to the past. Varsano carefully explains the complexity of the allusions in Li Bo?s poems. There would seem to be no ancient text to which Li Bo did not allude in such a way as to transform our meaning of it. As Varsano points out with reference to the understand of Li Bo by an early fifteenth-century critic, "the beauty of Li Bo?s work lies in his apparently effortless mastery of the very paradigms he appears to override" (p. 67). This is but one of many lapidary sentences in Banished Immortal. Varsano always earns her generalizations, thanks to her erudition and rhetoric.
At first glance, the organization of Banished Immortal would seem counter-intuitive, since we do not engage in sustained reading of Li Bo?s poetry until the second half. However, by the time we reach the end of the book, we understand that part of Varsano?s argument is that Li Bo comes to be read as a classic (jing), of equal stature to the classic texts he knew so well (although Varsano points out that there was some debate about how well Li Bo knew the classics). We first see how Li Bo, as a construction of literary history, comes into being, and only then do we see how Li Bo?s own relationship to literary history is crucial to how he creates meaning in his poetry. We realize that Li Bo reads the tradition as his work itself has come to be read.
Varsano has mastered the enormous body of Li Bo scholarship in China and the West and has a substantial knowledge of literary theory in general as well. She wears her erudtion lightly, however, and never trots out a theorist or scholar out of mere thrill for intellectual parade. Although Varsano writes with enviable clarity, the non-specialist reader may on occasion lose his way, simply because a book of such ambitions necessarily includes many names unfamiliar to those outside the field. The translations are lucid and convincing, but since this book spends much of its second half devoted to close reading, the reader with no Chinese may find himself running google searches on intensive Chinese language programs. Banished Immortal leaves you wanting more Li Bo.
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Citation:
Richard Serrano. Review of Varsano, Paula M., Tracking the Banished Immortal. The Poetry of Li Bo and Its Critical Reception.
H-Asia, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10075
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