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.