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]."