Meaning the Words:
The Genuine as a Value in the Tradition of the Song Lyric
Stephen Owen
The word "genuine" constitutes the skeleton beneath the song lyric. When the emotions are genuine and the scene is a genuine one whatever has been written is always excellent and it's easy to consider it complete
K'uang Chou-I, Hui-Feng Tz'u-Hua (1936)[1
][Note: "consider it complete," t'o-kao, "to get out of draft stage," a cliché for finishing a literary work, implying a reflective process of revision. Does this mean the lyricist revises until the words "sound" genuine, or until they "are" genuine?]
Only a Song
With conscious purpose the layered curtains hide our most intimate words .
YEN CHI-TAO, TO "CHE-KU T'IEN"[2]
The phoenix cover and the lovebird curtain are nearby
Where I would go if I could get there.
Shrimp-whisker brushes the floor and the double doors are still.
I recognize the shuffle of embroidered slippers
Invisible in the bedroom,
Her forced laugh, her voice
Light and lovely, like a woodwind.
Her makeup done,
She idly holds a lute.
Her favorite love songs—
Into every note she seems to put her fragrant heart.
Listening outside the curtain
Gets me so much heartbreak!
[1] K'uang Chou-i, Hui-feng tz'u-hua , ed. Wang Yao-an (Peking: Jen-min wen-hsüeh ch'u-pan-she, 1982), p. 6.
[2] Ch'üan Sung tz'u , ed. T'ang Kuei-chang (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1965), p. 227. Hereafter CST .
Misery such as this
Only she could share.
Liu Yung, To "Listening Outside the Curtain" ("Ko lien t'ing")[3]
Moments of accidental "overhearing" were a common motif in the song lyric: sometimes overhearing words, but often overhearing song. Words overheard were clearly not directed to the accidental listener; however, the song overheard is a more interesting case, raising many questions of whom the song words are for, if anyone, and what kind of claim they make on the heart of the singer. Overhearing song, the listener may be stirred to think on his own case, or he may feel a sudden rush of sympathy for the singer, finding himself in the ancient role of chih-yin , "the one who knows the tone," the person who knows how the music and the song word reveal what is in the singer's heart. In poetry we can trace this motif back to "In the Northwest There Was a Building High" ("Hsi-pei yu kao-lou") from the "Nineteen Old Poems," in which a passerby overhears a woman singing a song of sorrow for a lost or absent man and feels immediate sympathy for her. In his conclusion, however, the passerby wishes that they might become a pair of birds and fly away together—hearing a song in which a woman is longing for another man, the overhearer is both touched and attracted, and inserts himself in the place of the beloved.
Liu Yung's song is a very special mode of overhearing: it is eavesdropping. And this eavesdropper is so personally implicated in what he hears that a group of questions, usually repressed, comes to the surface
[3] Translation by James R. Hightower, "The Songwriter Liu Yung," pt. 1, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 41 (1981): 375. CST , p. 30.
of the lyric: how true the singer's words are, what kind of truth those words claim to have, whom the words are meant for. To the singing girl's guest on the other side of the curtain, the man who is the direct recipient of the conversation and song, these words all seem as if directed to him and true—or at least he is willing to suspend disbelief and take them as true for the moment. In this case, however, the eavesdropper knows—or thinks he knows, or wants very much to believe—that there is a difference between true words of love and a merely conventional performance of love's words. There is someone else sitting in the place that he wishes to be his own. His unease at being replaced, in discovering how individuals can apparently be interchanged in what is supposed to be a very particular relationship, is somehow connected to the way in which the same song can be reperformed—for different guests, by different singers, in different circumstances. From the outside the eavesdropper discovers how fine and almost invisible is the boundary between "meaning it" and a skillful performance of "meaning it."
The lyric begins with the site where the unseen performance will be concluded: the invisible bed, itself named by conventional synecdoche as layers of coverings—quilt and bed-curtains—both further hidden behind the curtains of the room outside which he listens. Such coverings are peculiar barriers, creating a maddening closeness (chih-ch'ih ) that cannot be crossed yet permits the clear passage of sounds, sounds whose intent and truth are uncertain, open to interpretation.
He reads the event in its sounds. First, against the stillness of the room there are the sounds of things brushing the ground: the swish of the "shrimp-whisker" fringe of an inner curtain as she enters the room, then the scraping of her slippers as she comes forward to entertain the invisible guest. That intensely audible proximity paradoxically intensifies his sense of his distance from her: yao-yao , less "invisible" than "remote and indistinct." The next phase of her performance is pleasant banter, laughing chitchat. Here we might observe that any sounds or words from the invisible guest are silenced in the words of this song, for the eavesdropper makes himself the singular audience of this intimate performance, even though he is an audience displaced, receiving sounds apparently directed toward someone else. Her voice is "forced"—or so it seems to him. Is this some quality he thinks he detects in the sounds or only an assumption he wants to make? If the guest were to become aware of such "forcedness," the performance would fail by becoming patently false. Whether compulsory performance or willing performance, her words have already become a kind of music, the "woodwind" that will complement the strings of the p'i-p'a in the next stanza. It is
verbal music that is ch'ing-ch'iao , "light and artful": a positive quality in terms of an artisan's skill, but questionable in a human who cares.
As we move into the second stanza, she becomes as if visible—probably an inference he makes, hearing the music and knowing the set phases of the performance. He has, no doubt, been there before himself, sat in the very place the guest now sits, taken all the words as genuine, which compels him to question the genuineness of what he overhears now. The phases of the "entertainment" are a set sequence: the entrance, the conversation, the song, bed—with a coda often consisting of lover's vows that this place in the heart will be occupied by no other. Liu Yung has heard such vows and believed them.
Although the phases of the love encounter differ from one culture to another, traditions of love poetry often place special emphasis on the stage just before consummation. The penultimate phase is often the displaced double of union, sexual or spiritual, and at the same time the deferment of consummation and ending. As a medieval treatise has it, Gradus amoris sunt hii: visus et alloquium, contactus, basia, factum ("The phases of love are these: seeing and then talking together, touching, kisses, the act"). And there is a long tradition of classical and European poems on the penultimate phase of kissing, at once the imitation, the prelude to, and explicitly the deferment of the sexual act. In the Chinese "phases of love" the penultimate stage is usually singing; and although the lyrics often remind us that the lovers go to bed after the song is done, we should remember that this bedding is part of the lyrics of a song, at once promise and deferment.[4] Through song the woman, who is supposed to be reticent and shy, is given a voice and authorized to speak what is supposed to be heart's truth (and since these women were paid singers, to hear such songs as if they were true would be reassuring). The Chinese poetic tradition was as fascinated by the expression of female desire as the Western poetic tradition has been fascinated with male desire. Once the song has permitted the woman ritually to speak the desire that is elsewhere silenced, the couple can go to bed.
On her p'i-p'a she plays "melodies of love-longing," hsiang-ssu tiao (love songs), which Liu Yung claims are her "favorite type," ai-p'in . And at this point the conventional bedroom scene of the Chinese love song begins to go astray, revealing the motives of this man standing outside the curtain, one who believes himself to be the true lover. He knows that she likes this kind of song and by such knowledge shows his own intimacy with her. Moreover, by commenting that the song she plays
[4] Cf. Chou Pang-yen, "Ying-ch'un yüeh" (CST , p. 616).
belongs to her "favorite type," the eavesdropper calls into question the truth of the words she is singing to the invisible guest, their genuineness as address—perhaps she chooses a love song at this moment because she "likes" such songs in general. But he does not know why she likes this kind of song—whether only because it is a song, or because she enjoys the love game, or because she cares about him.
The observation that she seems to lodge her heart in every note is even more troubling and ambiguous. He seems to hear her confiding real feeling into the song she is singing, but feeling for whom—the guest who sits before her, or for him, the absent beloved who is secretly standing outside the curtain? On another level, we are not certain how to understand the "seeming": is this a function of his perception—that it seems to him that there is true feeling in the words, though of course he cannot be sure—or is the "seeming" the quality of the performance itself, an appearance of feeling when feeling is, in fact, lacking? Song, which was supposed to be the voice for the heart's truth that must otherwise be kept veiled, here becomes the source of uncertainty and pain, heard from the other side of the curtain.
At this point the speaker explicitly positions himself on the other side of the curtain, introducing himself into the scene with the situation that is also the title of the melody for which he composes the lyrics. Like so many song lyrics, this song is reflexive, concerning song and the truth of song. Both the lyricist and the invisible guest receive the "declaration," kao , of her song; the guest believes he understands the message and is surely filled with joy and desire; the eavesdropper and we, the audience of his song, receive the message but don't know what it means—we can't be certain. If there is genuine love in the words of her song, is it for him or for the guest; or is it perhaps only a song, the pleasure in the craft and the skilled performance of a feeling that is not there?
The next phase of the "performance" should be the bed; at this point song lyrics often speak of the lovers' going together inside the bed-curtains, her shyness at undressing, the bedcovers' rolling like waves. But the poet has displaced the waiting bed, unoccupied, to the beginning of his song; and in place of describing the final movement to consummation, which must cause him pain, the eavesdropper simply writes his pain: ying-te , this is "all he gets out of it," the experience of eavesdropping. In this phase he can no longer pretend to presence; the difference is too clear: another "gets out of it" joy and pleasure, "all he gets" is hurt.
These last lines in Liu Yung's song have their own mark of authentication, slipping into a more colloquial voice, as song lyrics often do at
the end. As previously there had been a question of the woman communicating her true feelings through her song, the problem now is communicating what he feels. Although there was uncertainty about her song, his own song closes with the bold claim of her "knowing," chih-tao . Most important, he explicitly rejects the general promiscuity of song: the truth of his feeling could only be known when together with her—or expressed here negatively as a rhetorical question: "Unless together with her could it be known?"
He offers a song for a song, an attempt to sing back through the curtain and replace doubt with sure understanding and intimacy, doubt about the communication of her feelings with certainty about the communication of his own. Yet when he is "together with her," this peculiar circumstance, the occasion of doubt and pain that produces in turn the ostensibly true song, will be past.
Or perhaps there is nothing deep here, nothing that finds footing in the heart. Perhaps Liu Yung is writing only a clever variation on a common boudoir scene, something "light and clever," ch'ing-ch'iao , for any skilled singer to sing. Now we may recall, with some unease, that this song, whose tune is listed among the melodies of the T'ang Music Academy, the chiao-fang , belongs to that class of lyrics that elaborate the situation implied in the title, just as lyrics to the tune "Tsui kung-tzu" often describe a wife's reaction when her husband returns home drunk from carousing. We wanted to believe his words, we thought he "meant it"; now we doubt.
Even if this is so—and in our modern distrust, we guess it may well be—we cannot help hearing the question of the song's genuineness, even within the conventions of song. Is he merely performing or does he "mean it," and if so, how?
The Reliable and the Unreliable
When I meet her, can I interpret whether she cares or not?
YEN CHI-TAO, TO "HUAN HSI SHA"[5]
The true word, the word meant, has great power: it brings lovers together and keeps them together across spans of time and physical distances. Other things may fade: the memory of a face. Dreams may try to span distances but cannot. In "Ts'ai-yün kuei," after describing the scene of his travels, Liu Yung moves in the second stanza to recollection
[5] CST , p. 239.
of the beloved, as he so often does.[6] There are two powerful remainders: the lingering smell of her body and a "line" or "sentence." The one is dissipating, but the other stays clearly in mind.
Since we parted, most painful of all,
barely detectable in my sleeves and gown's fold,
there is still her lingering scent.
And I'm sure that she, on phoenix pillow, under lovebird quilts,
cannot help brooding on it through the long nights.
But the only thing that really pulls at my heart
is that one line, when we were about to go our ways,
that I cannot forget.
We do not know the content of the line, only a claim of its power. And perhaps the content of the line cannot be adequately reproduced in these lyrics he now writes, where they would become mere words of song, deprived of their connection to a person and a moment, open to repetition by anyone.
But the words of lovers may sometimes prove to be untrustworthy, as in the problematic conclusion to Liu Yung's "Ch'iu-yeh yüeh."[7] The opening stanza is a conventional situation in which the poet reencounters the beloved, but instead of their steamy and joyous reunion, something goes wrong.
Back then we met only to part
And I told myself there was no way ever to see her again.
But the other day I met her unexpectedly at a party.
While we were drinking she found a chance
To draw her brows together and sigh,
Rousing any number of old sorrows.
Her eyes brimming with tears,
In my ear she whispered
[6] CST , p. 36.
[7] Translation by James R. Hightower, "The Songwriter Liu Yung," pt. 2, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42 (1982): 18. CST , p. 23.
A thousand secret reproaches:
"Too bad you had things in your heart
There was no way to see."
I would like to believe she is telling the truth
And has no other ties.
Maybe I'd better just curb my fancy
And go on with her forever.
If the speaker is uncertain what is in the other's heart, the song's readers or audience are equally uncertain who is speaking and what is being said. Hightower's decision in handling the conclusion here is only one among several possibilities. For example, we might easily extend the woman's speech two more lines, so that instead of having the man doubt her sincerity in turn, we finally have only her distrust of him, at which he is so ashamed that he decides to stay true to her.
"I'm certain that in your heart
things were concealed.
I would like to believe what you say is true,
and that you were not involved with anyone else."
At this I can't help reining in my fancies
and going on with her forever.
Another, no less plausible interpretation would have the entire end in the voice of the male speaker, distrusting her, yet deciding he can't help returning to her in the end.
I'm certain that in your heart
there are certain things concealed.
I'd like to believe she is telling the truth
and that she's not involved with anyone else.
Yet I can't help stopping these fancies
and going on with her forever.
Someone distrusts the words of someone else; each reader or member of the audience may tell the story according to his or her own anticipations. Although the decision is less urgent for us, we stand in the position of Liu Yung outside the curtain, hearing the repeatable words of the song and not knowing to whom they are directed.
We might want to believe the lyricist when he tells of his pain at hearing his beloved entertain another man; but he may be only inventing a situation to elaborate the title of an old melody. In his lyrics he wonders if the beloved "means the words" in the song she sings. But the singer may be no more than a bird that repeats the same syllables with meaningless and mindless skill. In the famous Tun-huang version of "Ch'üeh t'a chih" ("Tieh lien hua") the exasperated woman locks away the magpie that keeps bringing the good news of her husband's return, words without any truth to back up their repeated syllables: "You bring good news, but when has it ever had any basis?" sung-hsi ho-ts'eng yu p'ing-chü . As the magpie later complains, the words were only to cheer her up, pure rhetoric—perhaps like the singer's profession of love in the song. And at last the magpie wishes for the husband's return so that the message of its words will be substantiated and it will be set free.
The love song is both the stylized imitation of love and at the same time the words in which a truth of love can be spoken. The singer is both a professional, paid to enact passion, and a human being, to whom love, longing, and loss can actually happen. We would be overly credulous to believe every statement of love-longing is indeed love; we would be foolishly cynical to believe that every statement of love-longing is purely professional or part of a hollow game. And we can't tell the difference. We may, as readers eight centuries later, say it doesn't matter; but it did seem to matter to the lyricists whose songs we now can only read, who were ever looking for evidence that the singer really meant it. We can say, with more acumen, that the fantasy and role-playing of these love games easily blurred into genuine feeling; but the participants themselves were concerned with an unambiguous experience of genuineness. Because overt statements and gestures were always potentially unreliable, they looked closely for the accidental slip, or some gesture or expression coming from the woman when she thought she was unobserved, free of the pressure of performance. If voyeurism is an impor-
tant motif in the song lyric, it comes from an intense concern with the genuine; and that concern in turn follows from a suspicion of mere artfulness, of being manipulated.[8] The lyricists knew that the singer's skill could instigate unskillful passion in the listener:
Before the song comes to its most tender moment,
her brows take on a seductive expression;
as the drinking companions grow tipsy,
their eyes become still wilder.
Ho Chu, to "Che-ku t'ien"[9]
She is not speaking what is in her heart: she is performing a text; she knows the words that are coming and strikes a pose for their appearance.
Yet there might be a moment, barely noticed or dimly seen, when role and true feeling come apart, as in the following lyrics to "Ts'ai sang-tzu" by Yen Chi-tao:[10]
I saw her then, under the moon,
in the western mansion,
trying to smooth over her tear-streaked powder unobserved;
and when the song was over, she knit her brows again;
I regret I could not see her perfectly,
across the smoke rising from the censer.
Since we parted, the strands of willows
dangling beyond the mansion
have how many times changed their spring green?
Yet I, weary traveler in the red dust,
will always recall that woman in the mansion,
her powder streaked with tears.
[8] For a discussion of voyeurism in poetry, see Paul Rouzer, "Watching the Voyeurs: Palace Poetry and Yuefu ," Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 11 (1989): 13–34.
[9] CST , p. 516.
[10] CST , p. 251.
The curtains that hid the singing beloved from Liu Yung here in Yen Chi-tao's lyrics become a partially transparent veil of smoke. He thinks that he has seen her trying to wipe away the tracks of tears unobserved and frowning once she relaxes the professional pose assumed in song (those brows having been trained to assume a seductive frown when she reaches the most tender moment in the song). But k'an wei chen , he can't see clearly enough, can't tell for sure (the chen here being the term of the "genuine"). These gestures and expressions on her face are marks of hidden distress, a code of loss and love-longing, but for him or for someone else?—we cannot be sure, and perhaps even he could not be. It almost doesn't matter: the particular object of love here seems less important than the moment when genuine response appeared, an uncertain vision that is fixed in memory and celebrated in this song. Such a moment, like the reliable words of Liu Yung's beloved in the earlier lyric, is something that survives time's passage, that stands in contrast to the world of public life in the red dust.
Tears or the inexplicable frown were among the oldest tropes of genuine feeling rising to a concealing surface, as in Ho Ning's famous "Ts'ai sang-tzu," where after a lovely young girl has been described,[11]
For no reason she knits her brows,
making her mother suspicious that she has springtime longings.
Or in Ho Chu's "Su chung-ch'ing":[12]
Facing the wind again, she sings of the circular fan,
her true feeling fixed on which man?
Lightly she jokes,
then barely frowns:
you can tell it's love.
Song lyric teaches a close attention to the most subtle expressions—"barely frowns"—for it is in such ripples in the surface of public
[11] Lin Ta-ch'un, ed., T'ang Wu-tai tz'u (1933; rev. ed., Shanghai: Wen-hsüeh ku-chi k'an-hsing-she, 1956), p. 102. Hereafter TWTT .
[12] CST , pp. 530–31.
appearance that reliable marks of true feeling are to be found. And yet once these become motifs in song, these too can be feigned.
One of the most striking examples of the inexplicable frown is in Chou Pang-yen's "Wang Chiang-nan":[13]
At the party with singers
the most wonderful things are those glances of love.
Jeweled coiffures glitter, from which jade swallows hang aslant;
embroidered shawls, soft and glossy, gauzes steeped in perfume.
There should always be plenty of what people like.
For no reason at all
how come she furrows her brows?
Lightly made-up, as if seen in a painting.
Yet her brilliant conversation is better than hearing her sing,
not to mention the swaying dance.
The opening stanza of the lyric is the opulent naming of paraphernalia that is typical of one type of party song, concluding with a wonderfully crass statement of indulgence—the more of what people (sc., men) like, the better. Into such unreflective pleasures intrudes the frown "for no reason at all." Other lyricists may be quick to interpret the frown's meaning, a certain index of love; but Chou Pang-yen offers it to us as a question: "How come?" And in leaving the frown as a question, he raises a larger question of interiority. The frown is the mark of interiority—silent expression, as words are voiced expression. But there are two kinds of words: those produced from oneself and the formalized words of a song. Chou first gives us the "pretty as a picture" cliché to objectify the frowning singer, but then be qualifies this "speaking picture" with one of the more unexpected statements in the tradition of party song: her conversation is superior to her song, even though song is the phase that will lead to bed (or the bushes). The frown undercuts the
[13] CST , p. 615.
momentum of the party song; the appearance of the genuine complicates the love game.
Repetition
Attention to the presence of genuine feeling and the marks by which it could supposedly be recognized sustained many conventional motifs in the thematic repertoire of song lyric. The inherent contradiction here should be obvious. Insofar as figures of genuineness became categorical terms in a stylized language of feeling, they could be used—as the terms in any language can be used—to lie. Through such thematization of the genuine, we can see the pervasiveness and depth of the concern; but the genuine itself can never adequately appear in its thematization, which is open to repetition and "use."
The genuineness of repeatable words is inherently suspect. And yet the song lyric was a form in which repetition in performance was essential. Here we must distinguish two versions of repetition: there is one in which the repeated words belong to the singer's present; and there is another in which repetition recalls words said at a given moment in the past, in which the singer is enacting words recognized as belonging to another person and another time.
This appears figured in one of the strangest passages in all of Liu Yung's song lyrics, in which two voices are superimposed, each repeating the same words. One of those voices is repeating words that matter, that are recognized as belonging to another person and to time past; the other voice is a mockery of performance, the merely skillful repetition of sounds that have no footing in the heart:
She leans on the railing beside the pool, sad, no companion.
What's to do about these living alone feelings?
Together with the parrot in the golden cage
She says over the things her lover said.[14]
[14] "Kan ts'ao tzu" (CST , pp. 14–15). Translation by James R. Hightower, "The Songwriter Liu Yung," pt. 2, p. 10. The rare use of nien , "to recite," is interesting here in that it has another usage in tz'u , in the prose nien-yü or "recited preface," that may precede the performance of a lien-chang (tz'u sequence). Here the performer speaks the words of the author, words explicitly the author's own. In contrast to the lyrics themselves, where the speaker is often indeterminate, in the nien-yü the singer "performs" someone else's words, as the woman does above when she "recites" what the beloved said.
The human version of the parrot's repetition, speaking in an eternal present, is, of course, more complicated. The repeatable party song often takes precisely this aspect of its performance as a theme, speaking for complete absorption in the present moment, forgetting past and future; such songs appeal to the human yearning to become animal and to take the animal's anonymous pleasures, to be free of memory. Yet their absorption in the moment is something desired, articulated against the human truth of memory and anticipation.
As an example, we may quote the famous version of "Huan hsi sha" by Yen Shu.[15] This represents a normative language in song, to be sung by any singer to any guest at any party; its version of "the moment" is any moment and every moment. The singer may "mean the words" or she may be only skillfully repeating the words; but the words belong to no fixed moment in human history when they were or were not genuine:
Only a moment, this season's splendor,
this body, a bounded thing;
to part now as if it didn't matter
easily breaks the heart;
so don't be hasty, refusing
the party's wine, the banquet's song.
Mountains and rivers fill our eyes, but care
is wasted on things too far;
besides which, this grief at spring passing,
at wind and the rain bringing down flowers;
it is better by far to take as your love
the person before your eyes.
As the performer who sings such a song can be endlessly replaced, so too can the body, the anonymous "person before the eyes."
Most of Ou-yang Hsiu's song lyrics are similar to Yen Shu's in this respect, including a party song to "Yü-lou ch'un" beginning "North and south of West Lake, a vast sweep of misty waves."[16] However, when Su Shih hears Ou-yang Hsiu's ("the Drunken Old Man's") lyrics being performed a generation later, we note that a significant change has
[15] CST , p.90.
[16] CST , p. 133.
taken place. When the lovely woman stands before Su Shih and sings the pleasures of the party, instead of taking delight in "the person before his eyes," Su Shih responds quite differently:[17]
In lingering frost I've lost sight
of the sweep of the long River Huai;
I hear only the trickling current
of the clear Ying.
The lovely woman still sings
the songs of the Drunken Old Man;
but forty-three years have gone by
like a sudden sheet of lightning.
Ou-yang Hsiu's song lyric no longer inhabits an eternal present; hearing it recalls its maker and a particular time in the past.
We might consider the analogy between the two modes of understanding song above and the versions of song in Liu Yung's "Listening Outside the Curtain." As Liu Yung listened to the beloved, he wondered if and how the beloved "meant the words"; he recognized those lyrics she sang only as a category, "her favorite type" (ai-p'in ), "love songs" (hsiang-ssu tiao ). In the second version, the question is whether Liu Yung "means the words" of his own song lyric, a question that can be answered only by understanding the words of the song in terms of the circumstances of its composition (this question of meaning the words in regard to the circumstances of composition can be posed here, as it cannot be posed in Yen Shu's "Huan hsi sha"). This is a reading of the song lyric on the model of shih . Whether the singer ("the person before your eyes") does or does not invest genuine feeling in the repeated words must remain forever suspect; the most immediate and familiar model for genuine words was one of words bound to a particular moment in the past, words that always recalled the circumstances of their origin.[18]
Between Li Yü at the very beginning of the Northern Sung, and the
[17] CST , p. 283. The first stanza of a "Mu-lan hua ling," the same tune pattern as Ou-yang Hsiu's "Yü-lou ch'un," and matching his rhymes.
[18] We might note how important this act of displacement into the past became in the thematics of later love songs. Later, and often even in Liu Yung, genuine romance was rarely the problematic, perhaps dubious "person before your eyes," but more often a love recollected and its sites revisited.
time of Su Shih, the song lyric underwent a transformation from a normative and typological song form to a highly circumstantial form, sometimes truly occasional and sometimes not.[19] I would suggest that the problem of genuineness was an important factor in this transformation.[20]
To remark on the interest in genuineness and its consequences for both reading and composition, is in no way to suggest that such lyrics actually are genuine, either in the sense that the author "means the words," or in the sense that they are necessarily occasional or grow out of real life experience. In "Listening Outside the Curtain" Liu Yung may simply have been elaborating an incident suggested in an old tune title; however, as he persuasively dramatizes his own "genuine" concern for the genuineness of the beloved's song words, he drives the reading of song lyric toward being more like that of shih . Later, when the singer performs this lyric by Liu Yung, the words will be understood as representing Liu Yung's sentiments, and no longer those of the singer. This has two important consequences. First, it contributes to the formation of the legend of the great lover Liu San-pien (Liu Yung) as a biographical frame for reading the lyrics. Second, the reperformance of such lyrics contributes to a dramatized Liu San-pien, who eventually became a popular figure in Chinese theater.
The Categorical and the Particular
Insofar as meaning the words (or the appearance thereof) became a value in song lyric, those texts that somehow managed to embody "genuineness" within the words themselves would be particularly valued. Here we should stress the lyric's difference from shih . Shih could
[19] This transformation has been amply documented by many historians of tz'u , such as Kang-i Sun Chang in The Evolution of Chinese Tz'u Poetry: From Late T'ang to Northern Sung (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). The normative and typological tends to be associated with hsiao-ling , while the circumstantial tends to be found in man-tz'u ; however, this formal division is not at all a strict one: Li Yü writes circumstantial hsiao-ling , while Liu Yung writes typological man-tz'u . I use the term "circumstantial" as referring to a category broader than the "occasional," which it includes. Thus, we might consider many of Chou Pang-yen's lyrics as circumstantial, but not truly occasional; that is, although we may doubt that such lyrics were composed for a particular experiential occasion, they create a strong sense of a particular, non-repeatable moment.
[20] It is significant that Yen Chi-tao, the last master of the Northern Sung typological party song, was also the lyricist for whom the question of genuineness posed the largest problem. In his song lyrics he raises the possibility of the beloved's lack of true feeling and potential falseness with remarkable frequency.
make the assumption of genuineness (which is not to say that all shih are genuine or aim for that value). In contrast, genuineness was a problem in the song lyric.
In addition to a circumstantiality that increasingly bound (or seemed to bind) the words of the song lyric to some moment in the past, the song lyric sought other ways to embody the particularity of feeling and experience. The desire to write genuine feeling into language, in the text rather than in the performance, inevitably encountered a basic limitation of language. Words like "love," "longing," and "sadness" are general categories and only crude ways of articulating particular and constantly changing states of feeling. Using categorical language, the song lyric sought ways to speak of states of feeling more particular, more immediate, and more variable than language readily permitted.
As we might expect, both the particularity of feeling and the inadequacy of categorical language came themselves to appear as themes within the song lyric. Older statements of the inadequacy of language, such as the anecdote of Wheelwright P'ien in the Chuang-tzu or T'ao Ch'ien's famous fifth poem of "Drinking Wine," tended to declare the absolute ineffability of "what" was known. In contrast, the lyricists usually accepted the essential validity of categorical language and faulted only language's capacity to convey adequately the precise quality of feeling. Comments on the particularity of feeling occur frequently in the song lyric tradition, as in the famous passage from Li Yü's (attrib.) "Wu yeh t'i" (or "Hsiang-chien huan"); first he gives the category ("the sorrow of being apart"), then declares its singularity:[21]
Cut but not severed,
put in order, but then a tangle again—
that's the sorrow of being apart.
It is a flavor all of its own kind in the heart.
Or when Liu Yung speaks of a sensation of being ill at ease after sex, he says: "It's a disturbing quality of feeling all of its own kind."[22] And Li Ch'ing-chao, perhaps echoing Li Yü, describes an elusive apathy in spring's bad weather: "It's a flavor of tedium all of its own kind."[23]
[21] TWTT , p. 231.
[22] "Yü-ch'ih pei" (CST , p. 21).
[23] "Nien-nu chiao" (CST , p. 931).
In the passages from Liu Yung's song lyrics quoted earlier, the lover does not give the precise words the beloved said; he or she can only declare that there are words remembered and repeated. In the same way, the lyricist cannot "name" the distinction of the feeling; he can only gesture toward it, often using the phrase pieh-shih , "all of its own kind."[24] It is significant that Li Ch'ing-chao picks up that phrase pattern, indexing singularity, when making the first statement of tz'u 's own singularity as a genre in the "Tz'u lun." "Tz'u ," she says, "is something all of its own kind." She is not able to define the particular quality of the genre with precision; rather, she can only point to its distinctness.
Perhaps the finest, and certainly the most famous, statement of the
problem of categorical language and the particularity of emotion is to be found in Li Ch'ing-chao's "Sheng-sheng man":[25]
Searching and searching, seeking and seeking,
so chill, so clear,
dreary, and dismal, and forlorn.
That time of year when it's suddenly warm, then cold again,
now it's hardest of all to relax.
Two or three cups of weak wine—
how can they resist the sharpness of the wind that comes with evening?
The wild geese pass—
that's what hurts most—
and yet they're old acquaintances.
Chrysanthemum petals fill the ground in piles,
looking wasted, damaged—
as they are now, who could bring herself to pluck them?
Keeping by the window,
how can I wait alone until the blackness comes?
The wu-t'ung tree, and on top of that the fine rain,
until dusk,
drop after drop.
In a situation like this
how can that one word "sorrow" grasp it?
To see how song lyric claims for itself the capacity to immediately convey genuine feeling, we should begin with the vernacular question at the end, which appears at first glance to be a simple critique of language's capacity to represent feeling. The precise phrasing, however, redeems the closing lines from being merely a restatement of the commonplace critiques of language. The first and most obvious element is the specific reference to the single categorical word: i-ko ch'ou tzu . Not only is the problem explicitly located in the single word, the term used is tzu , "the written word."[26] Yet this reference to tzu , the written word, is made within a sentence whose syntax and diction mark it strongly as colloquial; and even though the text as we have it is written, not performed, it presents itself to us not so much as "the written language," but as using the written language to represent speech.
The second important element in this passage is the term used to indicate what the written word cannot do: liao-te , "fully get it," with a strong sense of finishing or completion.[27] The single word (i-ko [ch'ou] tzu ) is not essentially wrong, only radically incomplete; and thus her rhetorical question is filiated to a long tradition of statements on lan-
[26] This is not to suggest that Li Ch'ing-chao is thinking of "writing" per se here. Rather, when she wants to isolate a single term from the more or less natural phrasings of speech (yü-tz'u ), this is the only term she has recourse to.
[27] For parallel usages see Lung Ch'ien-an, Sung Yüan yü-yen tz'u-tien (Shanghai: Shang-hai tz'u-shu ch'u-pan-she, 1985), p. 39.
guage's quantitative inadequacy (e.g., the Hsi-tz'u chuan's "yen pu chin i" ). Liao-te is the militantly vernacular phrase (yü-tz'u ) replacing the more classical word (tzu ) chin , "to exhaust," conventionally used negatively in statements of poetic value: that a poem should "contain inexhaustible meaning in reserve," han pu-chin chih i .
"Meaning" (i ), of course, is not the issue here, not what she hopes to convey, but rather "this situation," che tz'u-ti . Che tz'u-ti is gestural, ostensive, referring to something present and particular, unlike the more abstract "meaning" (you might even say: tsen i-ko "i" tzu liao-te ). "Situation," tz'u-ti , encompasses both the inner state and its external determinations, without raising the issue of the conventional dichotomy in poetics between "scene" (ching ) and "feeling" (ch'ing ).
We now come to that venerable question in the philosophy of language, which is how it is possible to speak the "what" of "what language cannot convey." With the colloquially ostensive "this," che , she gestures toward it; but by this point in the song lyric the object of her gesture is no mere blank space. We cannot tell whether the "situation" to which she gestures is the full sequence of experiences given earlier in the lyric or the precise moment that is their outcome. But a tacit claim is made through the gesture that we should recognize "this situation"—that the lyric has already adequately given us the object of the ostensive "this." "Tz'u is something all of its own kind," says Li Ch'ing-chao, implicitly articulating the genre against shih , which, though still recited, had already become very much "written poetry." Song lyric should enable the reader or listener to "fully get it" through language, if not in any particular word. Shih may chin i , "exhaust the meaning"; song lyric turns the phrase into the vernacular with significant substitutions: [chiang] tz'u-ti liao-te , "fully get the situation."
From the time of Chang Tuan-i's Kuei-erh chi of the 1240s, traditional critics recognized that Li Ch'ing-chao's "Sheng-sheng man" was an exceptional song lyric, and I do not believe it is rash to assume that Li Ch'ing-chao recognized in writing it that it was a great lyric. Rather than despairing of language's power to convey the immediacy of feeling, the closing passage may be taken as an oblique expression of her pride of accomplishment (the reader shakes his or her head and says: "Yes, how can a word express this? "). Here, then, is a rare case in which the theme of the problem of expressing genuine feeling in words is conjoined to what tacitly claims to be a successful example of genuine feeling embodied in words. At this point our discussion moves from the relatively simple task of describing the question and showing that it was an explicit concern in song lyric to the far more elusive problem of how
song lyric "does it," how it actually gives the sense of genuine feeling in words—not only in categorical words, but in some of the most hackneyed images and motifs of the tz'u tradition.[28]
The remarkable series of doublets (tieh-tzu ) that opens the lyric has always caught the attention of critics. Since such accumulation of doublets was generally avoided, we may wonder what made them so effective in this case.[29] In addition to describing qualities (often implicitly unifying external and interior conditions), such doublets may also suggest intensification and continuous action.
We may note that although every pair in the first three lines is formally a doublet, each line represents a rather different kind of doublet; by placing them together, Li Ch'ing-chao uses their formal identity to make them work in similar ways. Hsün-hsün and mi-mi are doubled verbs, each not surprising in itself, but neither commonly doubled and unusual in being put together. When we find paired doublets, it is usually with bound mood terms, such as we have in the third line (where, again violating convention, we have a series of three, rather than a pair of doublets).[30] Verbal doublets, such as hsün-hsün and mi-mi , tend to suggest continuous and intensified action; however, by pairing these verbal doublets in the manner of mood doublets and by placing them in a matrix of mood doublets, the "action," intense and continuing, tends to take on the quality of a mood or a state of mind.
The next pair of doublets, leng-leng and ch'ing-ch'ing , are physical sensations of qualities in the external world, but also carrying strong
[28] Although the close stylistic analysis that follows tries to show how tz'u "does it," the present author is painfully aware of the incongruity between his topic (conveying immediate and genuine emotion) and the inevitable heavy-handedness of stylistic analysis, more appropriate in the classroom than in writing. Therefore, any reader who wishes at this point to skip ahead to the next section is forgiven beforehand.
[29] Rather than being categorical names for conditions (such as "sorrow"), such doublets give a more differentiated sense of a condition's quality: "how" it is. About such doublets as they were used in the Shih-ching , Liu Hsieh said in the "Wu-se" chapter of Wen-hsin tiao-lung: i-yen ch'iung li . . . liang-tzu ch'iung hsing , "One phrase gave the fullness of the principle [of the thing] . . . two characters gave the fullness of its form." (Note how the question of adequate presentation returns here, though using ch'iung , rather than the roughly synonymous and more commonplace chin .) The Southern Dynasties poet Chiang Yen could write a poetic exposition on "Grief" ("Hen fu"), giving many examples; likewise, one could look up the categorical emotions in an encyclopedia, which would provide a storehouse of precedent cases. However, the doublets, such as ch'i-ch'i or ts'an-ts'an , are not such categories: one cannot write a poetic exposition on one of them as a "topic," nor can they constitute headings in an encyclopedia.
[30] By "bound term" I mean two-syllable words whose individual syllables are normally, though by no means always, compounded.
mood associations. Like the verbal doublets in the first line, each of these is normally a single syllable (or compounded with another word). Making these syllables into doublets suggests intensification of the sensation (hence the translation "so"). Each doublet in the third line, ch'i-ch'i ts'an-ts'an ch'i-ch'i (in the Sung the first and third were phonologically distinct), primarily describes a quality of feeling, though often with ties to external circumstance. These are bound terms, and as mentioned above, it is common to find them in pairs, but not in groups of three.
Each line of doublets is, in some way, twisted away from habitual usage; and by placing them in a common matrix, they are made to be "of the same kind." What would normally be distinguished as action, physical sensation, and mood here blur together. Thus, the initial "action" is joined to sensation and mood and becomes itself an interior state; on the other hand, the terms of mood are linked to physical sensation and the (mental) restlessness of the opening line. The matrix works to break down conventional distinctions between the exterior (wai ) and interior (nei ).
Most important is the initial hsün-hsün mi-mi , "searching and searching, seeking and seeking." Of all actions, these verbs of seeking require an object in order to be complete. Seeking, to be itself, must seek something . Without an object, it becomes more of a condition than an act. Moreover, made into doublets, the verbs connote intensified and continuous seeking, lacking an "end" in several senses. Moving to the second and third lines, the seeking is left incomplete, without an object; and the strong associations of isolation and the absence of another in the second and third lines echo that sense of incompleteness. Thus, emotion here is given the form of intensely purposive movement, but only the pure form, lacking objectified purpose.
That time of year when it's suddenly warm, then cold again,
now it's hardest of all to relax.
Weather and human emotion are often associated (in Western literature as in traditional China, where both are qualities of ch'i ). From the intense steadiness of the opening, where the chill was an ongoing condition, there is all at once a volatility.[31] The mode of the opening was con-
tinuation of the same; all at once we enter "suddenness" and alternation of opposites (warmth and chill). From a language of vague poetic mood, we suddenly enter a discursive language: placing, explaining, commenting. In contrast to the opening, where interior and exterior conditions were undifferentiated, here external changes are observed, changes of the weather that also anticipate changes of sensation and feeling: as in the conjunction of the second and third lines, physical sensation blurs into state of mind. Emotion (the Greek pathos , "what is endured," kan ) is involuntary, being the object of forces over which one has no control. The voice, restless but unable to attach her restlessness to any object, tells us explicitly that she cannot settle down, cannot "get hold of herself," cannot relax.
The opening was pure condition; these lines introduce a self-consciousness in which she is aware of the weather as something external, its variability due to the changes in the season. She can conceive of the possibility of relaxing, even though it is beyond her powers. In contrast to the opening lines, here she attempts to "define" her position, to explain her restlessness in terms of this particular moment of the year; now relaxing is "hardest of all," a comparative difficulty. Insofar as song lyric can embody feeling in language, it does so through movements —not in statements per se, but in the way one statement "sounds" in relation to other statements. The movement here from the immediacy of the first three lines to the "explanation" offerred in these two lines is the dominant "move" of this lyric: using words to try "fully" to grasp a condition that is both changing and beyond one's control.
"Suddenly warm, then cold again": she stresses the unexpected suddenness of the changes (even while restricting them to this particular time of the year). This is neither a steady "in-between" condition nor a set of predictable alternations, but sudden and unexpected change, all the more forceful because she anticipates the possibility of sudden
change without knowing when it will occur.[32] No wonder it is hard to "relax," chiang-hsi , combining rest, relief from pressure, and taking care of oneself.
As she futilely tries to get the situation under control in words ("It's that time of year, you know"), she also tries to control it by action—not the sudden spells of welcome warmth recalling departing summer, but the chill that always returns with the evening wind in autumn. She takes wine against it, wine that might promise both warmth and relaxation; but it is inadequate in quantity and strength. We should take careful note of how she phrases the failed intention of the act: tsen ti . She wants to "oppose" or "counterbalance" those external forces that can work upon her, that affect her mood through physical sensation. But this gesture of opposition also fails, either in fact or in anticipation (if we read the lyric as the course of a day, with evening falling later).
The wild geese pass—
that's what hurts most—
and yet they're old acquaintances.
"The wild geese pass," yen kuo yeh : the beauty of the line depends on the yeh . It isolates the fact, separates the statement from the flow of discourse. It is given to us a neutral observation (another consequence of the quality of yeh , as opposed to more emotional particles), something safely external. But immediately this mere fact impinges on her mood. Suppose we combined the first two lines into a shih line: yen kuo cheng shang hsin , "The passing of the wild geese hurts most" (or "is what hurts right now"). That would be a simple statement of feeling. But yen kuo yeh / cheng shang hsin first delivers something ostensibly as a neutral fact, then seems to "discover" a consequence of the fact, a relation to it. The cheng ("most of all" or "at this moment") attempts to localize response, to give the real source of the mood by focusing response on the preceding scene. But that too fails adequately to explain why she feels as she does. Ch'üeh-shih chiu-shih hsiang-shih , "and yet they're old acquaintances." She generalizes, compares past and present, contrasts how she ought to feel (welcoming old acquaintances) with how she does feel (cheng shang hsin ). She takes an old cliché of song (the wild geese appearing as old acquaintances) and uses it against the feeling, but it rings hollow. We don't believe it is a valid consolation; she doesn't believe it is a consolation. The poetic cliché is as thin and weak as the wine. Its
[32] "Anxiety," as Freud defines it against "fear" and "fright" in Beyond the Pleasure Principle , depends on knowing that you may well encounter something without knowing exactly when.
value in the song is not "what" it says but its function as gesture, as a futile attempt to interpret the emotional force of the fact.
Chrysanthemum petals fill the ground in piles,
looking wasted, damaged—
as they are now, who could bring herself to pluck them?
The first stanza was too full of motions and countermotions to bear a strong stanzaic shift (huan-t'ou ). The fallen flowers are, of course, the counterpart of the aging woman. And the realization that no one will pluck them brings in the absent figure of the man or friend, someone who might pluck blossoms—even these last blossoms of the year—but only at their proper time.[33] Inevitably in the background of such a scene we find T'ao Ch'ien, who did pick the chrysanthemums in their season, who watched the birds fly off to South Mountain (their passage did not "hurt"), and from such a scene attained an aloof pleasure, rising above the shifting "flavors" of depression that beset Li Ch'ing-chao. And we may recall also that in the same poem, the fifth "Drinking Wine," T'ao concluded with the difficulty of finding the right words for what was in his mind.
"As they are now, who could bring herself to pluck them?" She sees herself in her figurative double, and in being herself unwilling to pluck the tattered blossoms, she recognizes her helplessness, being the object of outer forces—the weather, the passage of time that wastes persons and flowers, and even in the most hopeful situation, dependency on someone to pick and appreciate. Li Ch'ing-chao is not passive, but she is impotent: she is the object of outer forces, scenes, actions. She opposes them by constructs of words and deeds, but she is always defeated, always overcome. Although tempting, the question of the author's gender is not, I think, of paramount importance here; such helplessness, the condition of emotion (ch'ing ), is equally a convention in the lyrics of many male poets—though one might argue it is an essentially feminized stance.
Keeping by the window,
how can I wait alone until the blackness comes?
[33] One may note the relation between this passage and the earlier attempt to unify the exterior and interior qualities. Here as she looks out into the exterior scene, she finds the figure of the bedraggled flowers as the self's double; and as she has no inclination to lay claim to the blossoms, so she herself is unclaimed (the refusal to pluck balancing the seeking of the opening). There is an interesting relation between poetic modes of isolation and the solipsistic project of unifying interior experience (ch'ing ) and the external world encountered (ching ).
The wu-t'ung tree, and on top of that the fine rain,
until dusk,
drop after drop.
Although her mood may be restless and uneasy, her body is fixed to one spot, gazing out the window that gives her one scene after another that reminds her of autumn. The shou-che , "keeping to," is as if willful, drawn to this frame of disturbing visions. Then, instead of another depressing item in the visual iconography of autumnal melancholy, the next thing that is to appear is night's blackness, an absence of vision. In such darkness, for all its ominousness, she might have been able to escape from those visual impressions that impinge on her mood and cause pain. But even though the visual world might be muted, there is an equally oppressive aural world, sounds traditionally associated with melancholy and loss.
The song lyric aims for a "way of speaking" that sounds genuine, and often it depends for its effects on particles. The eventual darkening of the scene is the external fact. The vernacular tsen sheng te , "how can I wait," places her in an intense relation to the fact. More subtle, but no less important, is the keng-chien , "on top of that." She might simply have said wu-t'ung yü , "rain on the wu-t'ung tree"; but keng-chien "adds" the elements, as if they were not a unified scene but some itemization of the causes of her painful impressions, like the "drip-drip drop-drop," tien-tien ti-ti , each single one drawing attention to itself and adding to the store of pain.[34]
Li Ch'ing-chao, intensely aware of the tradition of the song lyric, is here troping on the second stanza of the sixth of Wen T'ing-yün's "Keng-lou-tzu" lyrics:[35]
On the wu-t'ung tree
rain of the third watch
has no concern how feelings at being apart are at their most painful.
on every single leaf
sound after sound
drips on the empty stairs until daylight.
[35] TWTT , p. 62. The admiration for this passage in the twelfth century is suggested by the fact that it was singled out for praise in the T'iao-hsi yü-yin ts'ung-hua—hou chi , chüan 17 (dated 1167), one of the few comments on Wen's song lyrics in the Sung.
From the indeterminate "seeking" of the opening, to "keeping to" her window, to the rains lasting until dusk, the lyric reinforces the idea of "continuing," bound in uncertain anticipation of some hidden end. Outside is a drama of autumn, which she somehow feels compelled to watch and listen to until the true darkness of night, with the dripping rain serving, like the water clock, as the monotonous marker of time. At last she brings in her act of interpretation, the failure of naming, gesturing to "this situation," which can be crudely classified as "sorrow" or "melancholy," but whose particularity belies the "single word." The name should "complete," should fully account for the phenomenon; yet here the name is held up for comparison with the "situation," which throughout embodies incompleteness, continuing, uncertainty, seeking in vain some end that will make it a whole and thus to be understood and named.
In the song lyric the conventional name always sits uneasily and imperfectly on experience that can only be lived through, or it has more detail and nuance than the appropriate categorical word. At last the categorical word may come to be used ironically, implying its own failure to account for the complexity of "this situation."
Every phase of the heart, every yearning:
there is no adequate way to tell them all—
it's just "love-longing."
Yen Shu, to "Su chung-ch'ing"[36]
Taxis and Quotation
The song lyric sought the means to embody and convey apparently genuine and particular phases of feeling in categorical words.[37] It was
[36] CST , p. 97.
[37] Literary genres are inevitably the recipients of historically diverse interests, and it is wrongheaded to try to characterize them by any single question. Often genres take shape around sets of antithetical values; and it is through such contradictory pairings,rather than by any single quality, that the genre takes on a distinct in relation to other genres. In song lyric the concern with embodying genuine feeling was bound to an antithetical interest in obvious artificiality, figuration, and overt marks of conscious craftsmanship. Careful craftsman and helpless victim of passion are frequently conjoined; it is less a contradiction to be reconciled than an antithesis whose poles lend energy to the genre.
early discovered that this could be accomplished, not by the words themselves, but by the relations implied between phrases, lines, and stanzas.[38] The words themselves belong to a common normative language, but the quality of movement from one normative verbal segment to another may imply an interior motion of mind or feeling, a motion that can seem immediate and private. This is to suggest that the verbal embodiment of subjectivity was achieved not "in" words but "in between" words (and since the smaller groupings of words were often conventional, primarily between phrases and lines). The relations between these verbal segments are the empty spaces, which make the workings of the song lyric so elusive to describe.[39]
In a large sense this is a question of taxis ("arrangement," the sequencing of words and periods); however, I would like to distinguish the general question of taxis from a more particular case, which I will call, for want of a better term, "quotation." By "quotation" I mean an interplay between segments recognized as "classical" or "poetic" (in the sense of shih ) and more discursive, often vernacular elements. In "quotation" the received poetic language loses its exclusive authority: by being embedded in a longer discursive unity, it is as if placed inside quotation marks.
The taxis of T'ang shih was based on a tradition of rhetorical exposition that had roots in a shared assumption about the order of the world, both the order of the physical world and the normative order of experience. Such assumptions supported the role of shih as a social and secular rite, particularized by the moment, place, and person; all that was particular found a reassuring place in normative pattern.[40] There was room
[38] Sometimes this occurs in the relation between individual words; however, in tz'u the primary semantic unity is more often the compound or phrase than the individual word. In this tz'u approached, in its own way, the polysyllabic and phrase-oriented vernacular.
[39] "Empty," hsü , was the attributive of feeling (ch'ing ), and linguistically was associated with the subjective quality of a statement, most commonly (though not always) achieved in the "particle," or "empty word," hsü-tzu .
[40] To give just one example of normative taxis in shih , shih generally made an assumption of temporal linearity: first things come first, second things second, and so on. Unmarked flashbacks are rare. However, in tz'u , governed by the time of subjective con-sciousness, rather than the time of external world, unmarked flashbacks are not at all uncommon.
within the form for non-normative sequences of lines and subjective associations, but these usually had to be reconciled with a normative structure of exposition.[41] In much of the best eighth-century poetry everything private and subjective was reconciled with normative order.
This gross generalization is in no way meant as an adequate description of all poetry in the T'ang. During the ninth century that older structure of exposition broke down; middle and late T'ang poetry differ from High T'ang poetry far more in taxis even than in diction. However, such a generalization can serve as the starting point from which to consider large shifts in literary history and generic economies. From the mid-T'ang moving into Sung there was a strong interest in making shih into a medium that could persuasively embody the particularity of a mind's movements and of experience (subjectivity). One solution was the "rambling" shih , in which the elements and their sequence were not bound together by any recognizable structure other than the accidents of experience and the quirky associations of mind.[42] Another example was the witty poem, in which a clever interpretation, articulated against the normative and commonplace response, was the signature of the singularity of this poet's mind. In different ways both of these tendencies in mid-T'ang and Sung shih were shared by the song lyric.
Tz'u 's formal asymmetries made possible certain moves, however, of which the more linear shih , with its internally complete couplet, was incapable. Tz'u could isolate a phrase, add a single long line as if an after-thought; it could formally enact a sudden shift, an odd association, a flashback, an image left hanging. Shih tended to balance and complete utterances. Tz'u tended to shifts that left things incomplete, to asymmetries, to elements standing alone.[43] It would be impossible in shih to put together the sequence of phrases that appears in the following characteristic example of a tz'u passage, which concludes Wang Yü-ch'eng's "Tien chiang ch'un":[44]
[41] It is significant that the T'ang poet with the most idiosyncratic sense of taxis was also the poet with the strongest influence on the tz'u tradition and the poet whose collection was designated not simply as poetry, but as "song and poetry" (ko-shih ): this was Li Ho.
[42] There are interesting analogies here to Surrealist literary theory, and the conviction that subjectivity can appear only in the complete abrogation of normative order.
[43] An exception in shih might be the closing image, a device adopted extensively by tz'u . Yet this is usually less an asymmetry than a framed figure for contemplation, a summation.
[44] CST , p. 2.
All that has happened in my life—
at this moment staring fixedly.
Who understands my state of mind here on the stairs?
We know that there is a relation between "all that has happened" in the speaker's life and his fixed gaze, but tz'u allows the components simply to be thrown together in ways that are impossible in shih (even when the two hemistiches of a line of a regulated couplet are thrown together in such an indeterminate relation, as occurs sometimes in the poetry of Tu Fu, Tu Mu, and Li Shang-yin, the indeterminacy tends to be counterbalanced by the second, often parallel line). Such rapid alternations and open juxtapositions are common in tz'u . They imply subjectivity because they cannot be unified as a sequence on the level of rhetoric or a simple proposition; they point to a subject who makes the connection for his own unstated reasons. They are a signature of what is private and interior. And it is significant that Wang Yü-ch'eng makes an explicit claim of just such inaccessible interiority in the final line.
The abrupt shift or indeterminate paratactic juxtaposition is only one way in which taxis is used to point to a subjective unity behind the words. The rich possibilities of non-normative taxis , invited by a given melody pattern and the ways in which lines are grouped by a rhyme unit, often require that we posit a unified movement of mind to hold the disparate elements together. To return to a passage quoted earlier, a (very weak) shih poet might write: li-ch'ou chien pu tuan , "The sorrow of being apart can be cut but not severed." That is a simple claim or proposition. The question is how such a propositional line differs from:
Cut but not severed,
put in order, but then a tangle again—
that's the sorrow of being apart.
It is a flavor all of its own kind in the heart.
In the first two lines here the topic, the "sorrow of being apart," is withheld.[45] Heard or read, these two predicates are apprehended as re-
[45] The analogous syntactic form in shih offers a striking contrast, as in the line from Tu Fu's "Pei Ch'ing-pan": "The green is the smoke of beacon fires, the white is bones."Ch'iu Chao-ao, ed., Tu-shih hsiang-chu (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1979), p. 316. In this case the displacement of the topic to a position after the qualification suggests the order of empirical experience: first one sees the colors, then identifies what they are. This is the way in which problematic syntactic sequence was explained in Ch'un-ch'iu commentary. Writing inscribes the external empirical order that governs perception.
ferring to a topic in the speaker's mind, a topic of which the auditor or reader has not been informed; that is, the speaker takes for granted something only he can know. This is a signature of interior monologue rather than address to others: the two predicates are given as if they are what comes to mind, what is important. Then when he provides the topic of the predicates in the third line, he does so not for the explanatory necessity of address characteristic of shih , but as a subjective claim, that in fact these two predicates explain the essence or the entirety of "the sorrow of being apart." Our hypothetical shih line, "The sorrow of being apart can be cut but not severed," offers a predicate that is only one aspect of the topic (presumably many more things could be predicated on "the sorrow of being apart"). This version offers a more extreme claim: "Cut it, but it's not severed; try to put it in order, but it becomes a mess again—that's the sorrow of being apart." The precise quality of the taxis here is open to other interpretations, but each interpretation must be more gestural and dramatic than our hypothetical shih line. Any particular decision on how the lines sound is less significant than the fact that some interpretation of the tone of the lines is demanded by the taxis of the tz'u , as it would not be by our weak shih line. Whether read as a surprising discovery, a hyperbolic definition, or an exclamation of exasperation, all are truly "voiced" versions, whose voicing is articulated against the unvoiced proposition: "The sorrow of being apart can be cut but not severed."[46]
The final line adds another qualification, in which the experience of this emotion is objectified for evaluation.[47] Here the vernacular plainness and unsurprising quality of the observation is played off against the importance and weight given to final lines. The poet's voice speaks as if curiously distant from an emotion that he has just informed us is over-
[46] By "voiced" here I mean something like what a good actor must do with a speech in poetic drama. The passage may offer a rich variety of possibilities in assigning stresses, pauses, ironic intonations—and anyone who has seen many performances of a well-known play knows how deeply such decisions can change the character and the effect of a particular speech. Some versions of dramatic "interpretation" are more effective and credible than others; but all are superior to an unvoiced poetic drone in reading the lines.
[47] The reader should not overlook the close similarity of this final "move" to the conclusions of Li Ch'ing-chao's "Sheng-sheng man" and Wang Yü-ch'eng's "Tien chiang ch'un."
whelming. The emotion has become a "flavor," implying both immediacy but at the same time reflective distance—it is an agony to be savored and judged. What is most important is that the categorical emotion, "the sorrow of being apart," is not itself the subjective condition, the state of mind, embodied in the lyric; rather, the subjective condition is in the poet's self-consciousness and changing relation to the categorical emotion, the way he thinks about it or feels about it. The categorical emotion is only the object on which the speaker broods, precariously balanced between torment and reflective distance.
Song lyric works with clichés, normative responses, and commonplace categories of feeling, such as "the sorrow of being apart." However, the real interest of the genre lies in representing particular experience, often involving a reflective relation to the normative category of feeling. Precisely through the objectification of one's own state of mind a changing relation is possible; for example, not simply "being in love" but exasperation at finding oneself helplessly in love. The song lyric's continual reflection on the categories of feeling is not a dispassionate distance, but the means by which the interiority and shifts of feeling can be represented. The mere fact that the sorrow of being apart "is a flavor all of its own kind in the heart" is uninteresting in its own right; what animates it is the tone in which we imagine the statement is made and, inferred from that, the way the speaker feels about the categorical fact.
The second means of embodying the particularity of feeling in categorical words is "quotation." Although we use the term in reference to a way of speaking rather than as actual citation of a text, it sometimes is citation, quoting a passage from earlier poetry or a commonplace. As with categorical statements of feeling, the nature of such "poetic" elements is qualified by the way in which they are embedded in more discursive language, often including particles (hsü-tz'u ) or vernacular elements.[48]
Let us consider a very ordinary, conventionally "poetic" line of seven-character regulated verse: i-chiang ch'un-shui hsiang tung liu , "A riverful of spring water flowing to the east." If this line had been set in the right context, an early T'ang or High T'ang poet could have made it a convincing closing for a poem, a universal truth of Nature that would in some way serve as the displaced embodiment of the poet's response. By the ninth and especially by the tenth century, such a closing line
[48] Northern Sung shih eventually evolved its own means of animating earlier poetic discourse by "quotation," most notably in the poetry of Huang T'ing-chien. The possibility that Huang's shih style was based on an aesthetic device primarily characteristic of song lyric awaits further examination.
would have become painfully banal, a device that had become all too familiar. But what happens if we qualify the line with a short phrase, not only set apart from the familiar rhythms of the seven-character line, but also markedly different in diction? Ch'ia-ssu i-chiang ch'un-shui hsiang tung liu , "It's just like a riverful of spring water flowing to the east." The poetic line has been "framed," put into the quotation marks of a speculative simile (we can exaggerate the effect in English by using an extra set of quotation marks: "It's just like 'a riverful of spring water flowing to the east'"). The conventionally "poetic" image loses its autonomy in the longer line, its status as simple natural fact. The first, seven-character line version had presented "what is"; the longer, qualified version reduces natural fact to only an image occurring in the poet's mind. The poet might have drawn this speculative simile from experience or poetry—we cannot know. We know only that it comes to mind at this moment as an appropriate "image." "Just like," ch'ia-ssu , he says, admitting there are degrees of appropriate comparison, and that in his purely subjective opinion, this "image" is the most apt.[49] This "empty" (hsü ) frame contextualizes the image, and in doing so, marks the difference between a poetic, permanent, and natural fact, and the circumstantial application of that fact in a private, subjective comparison. The beauty of the line is in its tone, humanizing the conventional image and making it immediate—"It's just like . . ."
This line of subjective comparison comes as a response to a question posed by the speaker himself. First we might consider how the lines would sound if the answer had been left unqualified by the circumstantial frame phrase:
I ask you, how much sorrow can there be?—
a riverful of spring water flowing to the east.
English translators are often wise to join such questions and answers with a dash after the question mark, to indicate a discontinuity of level between the question and the answer. The autonomy of the "poetic" image, set against the more discursive question, gives the second line a
[49] There is an interesting question regarding exactly what the "line" of Li Yü's famous tz'u is: whether it is the text as we have it with the ch'ia-ssu , or the seven-character line "quoted" in the text. In the Hsüeh-lang-chai jih-chi (T'iao-hsi yü-yin ts'ung-hua—hou-chi , chüan 59), Huang T'ing-chien is supposed to have quoted it as the seven-character line, rather than the full nine characters of the text. Such reference to lines of tz'u by their "poetic" segments is not uncommon in the Sung.
peculiar authority, an answer that seems to occur in nature rather than in the human mind. Human questions seem to be answered by the world before your eyes or by a silence that lets the questioner know the answer is beyond words. This abrupt shift from question to image had been a favorite device of T'ang poetry.[50]
If we were to leave our "riverful of spring water flowing to the east" unqualified, we would have precisely such a poetic form. When the response is "framed," the human, with human uncertainty, poses the question, and then offers a merely human answer, a subjective opinion, a comparison. Nature as an external presence has been written out of the poem; it survives only as a possibility in mind, a "poetic image."
There are permanent things, things that are real and belong to the world but that are strangely foreign to mind. They survive in mind as "poetic images." The fact that such natural things are somehow no longer immediate is understandable if the person happens to have been removed from or to have lost such permanent presences—for example, a ruler deposed and taken away from his palaces and that Yangtze riverful of spring water. For such a person the world's permanent poetic "things" survive only as remembered images, to be "quoted" by mind:
Carved balustrades and stairs of jade—
I'm sure they are still there.
In this case the order of poetic image and subjective qualification is reversed: first the things are given—two parallel compounds—then the
supposition—ying yu tsai , "I'm sure they are still there"—qualifying the image as does the comment ch'ia-ssu , "just like."[51] In the line that follows, this poetic element embedded in a supposition is further framed by another thought, marking itself as a movement of mind in response to the supposition:
It's only the color of a young man's face that changes.
The beauty of this song does not lie in its hackneyed images, but in the relation created between the framing phrases and the embedded images. Chih-shih , "It's only the color of a young man's face that changes"—but it's not true: all things change and have changed, even lovely palaces in Chin-ling, as a ruler who once had his capital in that city of ruins must have known all too well. Chih-shih , "It's only that . . ." is an untruth that becomes a subjective truth, a mark of feeling rather than an opinion; and we read the words as such.
The formal sequence of these two lines is a poetic image that is qualified by a subjective frame and finally moves to purely private and interior response.[52] The initial image is permanent, parallel, and "poetic"; then comes the first frame comment, the supposition that joins the speaker to the "poetic"; finally there is the second qualification, which is purely subjective truth.
[51] The variant i-jan may be preferred by some. This will produce a loose heptasyllabic song line, also common in tz'u (the reading ying yu would be uncommon in T'ang ko-hsing or sheng-shih ). My concern here is not which is the correct reading but that the version ying yu tsai occurs. For an extensive discussion of the variants, see Daniel Bryant's essay in this volume.
To offer another example of such a sequence (in a tz'u we might strengthen this pattern by placing two examples of the pattern in the same position in two different stanzas), we could think of something permanent, a common poetic image, a parallel pair of compounds such as:
Spring flowers, autumn moonlight—
Like the "carved balustrades and stairs of jade," these are not what is before a person's eyes—in this case, because no one can see "spring flowers" and "autumn moonlight" at the same time. Like the preceding palace scene, these occur in mind, words drawn from older poetry. Then, duplicating the formal structure of the lines above, we would add the first framing qualification—here not a supposition but a rhetorical question that sets the "poetic" images in the context of the speaker's cares:
when will they end?
Like ying yu tsai , "I'm sure they are still there," this qualification establishes a relation to the poetic image and specifically addresses the question of permanence, the limits of subjective knowledge, permanence as inference. Finally there is the second frame comment that marks off the purely subjective truth, knowledge as idea:
How much of what is past can we know?
or:
I wonder how much has gone by?
There is an obliquity between this and the preceding line (what does "knowing what happened" have to do with the question of the eternity of "spring flowers" and "autumn moonlight"?). We can explain the relation between this and the preceding line in many ways, but that relation is not immediate; it requires explanation. As we suggested earlier, such obliquity is the signal of a private movement of mind.
Such purely subjective comments are, in traditional linguistic categories, "empty," hsü —and they need constantly to be reattached to something physical and tangible. If the poetic truth of the permanence of spring flowers and autumn moonlight is realized subjectively in the rhetorical question "when will they end?" then that subjective comment requires a supplement, a grounding in some particular event of cyclical
repetition—say, the return of spring's east wind that will once again bring back spring flowers:
In the small building last night,
spring wind once again.
Important here is the yu , "once again," the marker of repetition that explains why the preceding lines came to mind. Equally important is "last night," tso-yeh , locating the recurrent cycle as a particular event known from the perspective of an individual's place in time. The particular event is understood in its repetition and sameness with the past; from the perspective of today it is ranked with other past occurrences of the same (the spring wind arrived last night as it arrives every year). And since one repetition (the return of spring) can be captured by the retrospective mind, perhaps others can also be recaptured, images that go with the autumn moonlight and thus complete the opening opposition between "spring flowers" and "autumn moonlight." Let us round this out as a poetic couplet:
In the small building last night, spring wind once again.
To my homeland I turn my head in the bright moonlight.
One return and recurrence, that of the spring wind, leads to another, the possibility of return home, and the gesture, the turning of the head, that embodies desire. But if the desire is too strong, the impossibility of fulfillment makes it painful, and the gesture is repressed. Instead of actually (figuratively) "turning his head" to look back to his homeland, the gesture is only "quoted" in poetic words:
In the small building last night, spring wind once again.
To my homeland I dare not turn my head in the bright moonlight.
The "dare not," pu k'an , stands out as the intruded qualification that transforms the poetic gesture into the thought of a poetic gesture, a subjective relation to a poetic gesture.
Let me now draw the disjecta membra of Li Yü's famous song lyric, "Yü mei-jen," together:[53]
[53] TWTT , p. 221.
Spring flowers, autumn moonlight—when will they end?
How much of what is past can we know?
In the small building last night,
spring wind once again.
To my homeland I dare not turn my head
in the bright moonlight.
Carved balustrades and stairs of jade—
I'm sure they are still there,
it's only the color of a young man's face that changes.
I ask you, how much sorrow can there be?—
it's just like a riverful of spring water flowing to the east.
The question is why is this a beautiful piece of poetry (though its beauties may be utterly invisible in the translation above). By the standards of shih it should be neither beautiful nor even very interesting: everything about it is worn and hackneyed. The answer to the question of why it is beautiful should tell us something not only about the aesthetics of this song, but also about the aesthetics of song lyric in general.
As was the case with Liu Yung, the persuasive dramatization of genuine feeling tends to bind the song lyric to a moment in time; it contributes to the formation of a character, real or legendary, who could have written it. Liu Yung was only the second character created by good song lyrics; the first was Li Yü. One easy answer to this question of why the song is beautiful has to do with the tradition of anecdotal framing, the tradition of reading this song in the context of Li Yü's life. The art form in this case is not the song by itself, but rather the song in the context of an assumed story—irrespective of whether that story is historically true or not. That story is the supplement that the song seems to require, readers and exegetes finding the circumstances that can restore fullness to the words.
It is true that the beauty of Li Yü's song cannot be entirely separated from the later frame of story that has grown up around it, the exiled and captive ruler longing for his former kingdom. But the primary source of the song's appeal is within the song itself. It lies precisely in the way in
which a voice quotes and comments on the received images of poetry, changing them in the process and making them animate again.
Whether this song actually represents genuine feeling and "meaning the words" is beyond my knowledge and the knowledge of anyone else. Even Li Yü himself, were the question posed, would no longer be able to answer it perfectly. In one scenario the lyric just came out that way—the poet, a captive in Pien-ching, was overwhelmed by remembrance of his lost southern kingdom, which survived in memory as poetic images. In this scenario the form of the song lyric and the force of feeling in his situation came together to produce a lyric with a genuineness of voice almost impossible in shih . In another scenario (uncomfortable precisely because of the fact that genuineness was both a value and a problem) we can imagine Li Yü, under house arrest in Pien-ching, as the master craftsman, essentially happy and well fed—though a bit nostalgic. He works over the words again and again until at last it "sounds genuine." For "the word 'genuine' constitutes the skeleton beneath the song lyric. When the emotions are genuine and the scene is a genuine one, whatever has been written is always excellent and it's easy to consider it complete [t'o-kao : to complete one's revisions]."