Narrativity Without Narrative: Topoi and the Prefiguration of Visual Narrativity in Chinese Pictorial Art

• In Event: Degrees of Narrativity in Chinese and Japanese Visual Tradition

Abstract

This paper explores the role of topoi or “common places” in prefiguring narrativity in Chinese painting and poetry. Topos (Greek: lit. “place”), from which we derive the term topic, was originally the location in semantic space in which one situates and thus frames an argument rhetorically. This notion of topos will be extended to the spatial and temporal practices in Chinese pictorial art in order to examine the inextricable relations that obtain between depictions of the identity and conduct of represented human subjects and the settings and seasons within which they are depicted, and their effects on viewer subjectivity. In Chinese painting and poetry, place and season (the lived experience of space and time), and the cultural and social associations they connote, play an essential role in the prefiguration of the world they intend to represent. The events represented by imagery associated with the depiction of a particular season and place convey nuances of mood and meaning identified with a poetic or pictorial theme. They are, therefore, as much literary and pictorial topics as they are temporal and physical phenomena. This ideas will be illustrated in a poem on the theme of parting and separation by the great Tang poet, Wang Wei (701-761), entitled, “Seeing Off a Friend,” Traveling in Springtime, a painting attributed to the sixth-century painter Zhan Ziqian, in the Palace Museum, Beijing, and Listening to the Lute by the Southern Song court painter Li Song (fl. ca. 1190-ca. 1230), in the National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Author

• Stephen Goldberg, Hamilton College