7 - Song History as Grand Allegory

Summary

Chapter 8 introduces and establishes the theoretical premise of the “Narratives” portion of the book, namely that the received history of Song, as codified in the Song History of 1345, can be deconstructed as a metanarrative or “grand allegory.” The chapter explores similarities between daoxue historiography and Herbert Butterfield’s notion of “Whig history,” an account of Britain that rendered Whig political ascendency over the Tories historically inevitable. First, both are blatantly presentist: historical events are chosen because they contain positive or negative value as guidelines for present action. Both rely extensively upon abridgment to foreground these examples. Both generate clear heroes and villains whose earlier struggles presage the political conflicts of the present. And finally, both create a teleological trajectory of moral rectitude that ensures the ultimate intellectual and political triumph of the writer’s own beliefs. I use the term “grand allegory” because the Western notion of allegory indeed seems appropriate for how these late Song and Yuan historians accessed their own daoxue convictions to impose structure and meaning on the disparate data of Song history. The chapter introduces the three major thematic clusters that comprise the grand allegory as presented in the 1229 preface by Zhen Dexiu (1178–1235) to Chen Jun’s history of Song.