HARVARD UNIVERSITY ‘THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES THESIS ACCEPTANCE CERTIFICATE The undersigned, appointed by the Division East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department East Asian Languages and Civilizations Comminee Professor Stephen Owen Professor Patrick Hanan have examined 2 thesis entitled Hearing Things: Performance and Lyric Imagination in Chinese Literature of the Early Ninth Century presented by Robert Rutledge Ashmore candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and hersby certify that it is worthy ofHearing Things: Performance and Lyric Imagination in Chinese Literature of the Early Ninth Century" A thesis presented by Robert Rutledge Ashmore to ‘The Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts September, 1997UMI Number: 9810732 Copyright 1997 by Ashmore, Robert Rutledge All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9810732 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. ‘This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road ‘Ann Arbor, MI 48103© 1997 by Robert Rutledge Ashmore All rights reservedThe groundbreaking research of the late Ren Bantang in the field of Tang dynasty performance culture’ represents one of the most important developments in modem scholarship on the literature and culture of the period—one whose full implications have yet to be fully worked out. His proposal of “sung poems” (sheng shi) as a separate generic category within Tang shi poetry, in particular, has important implications for the way we conceive of Tang lyric in general. For regardless of how far we accept the rigorous distinction between “sung poems” and “poems without music” (tu shi) proposed by Ren Bantang, the voluminous primary source material on Tang lyric performance which he amasses forces us to a realization that Tang lytic texts are not products of a single type of “authorship,” but are rather artifacts of a wide range of performance practices, and that to fully understand them we must take into account the ways in which they are imbedded in those practices. One question suggested by this new perspective on Tang lyric has remained relatively unexplored: that is, how did Tang writers themselves reflect on the relation between literary composition and performance? Taking this question as its point of departure, the present study argues that a wide range of literary texts from the early to mid-ninth century reflect a preoccupation with a certain notion of lyric as performance. ‘Whereas traditional hermeneutic approaches tended to “naturalize” lyric texts as utterances by historically determinate authors in response to determinate lived * See Wang Xiaodun 1996 for an overview.experiences, this characteristically “ninth-century” preoccupation involved the idea of lyric as a type of experience sharply distinct from the poets historical self, a mode of access to other times, other identities, or other realms of existence. Examining historiographic and early prose fiction texts as well as lyric texts per se, the present study attempts to show how even such disparate texts attest to a distinctive sensibility towards Iyric—and more generally musical—performance that is an important part of the makeup of the distinctive literary culture of the era.Introduction: Du Fu’s Question Chapter One: The Wine-shop Singing-bet Chapter Two: Performance and the Lyric use of the Past L “Rhetorical” and “Performative” use of the Past IL. The Performance of Personality IIL Performance and Time Excursus: The Problem of “Borrowing” Chapter Three: Fragmented Music Chapter Four: The “Song Culture” of the Pingkang District: Erotic Lyric Bibliography 3 au 38 92 126 157Du Fu's Question Kee AR FHARARY> Ke HAGE MERITS Mes > Molding and smelting the self, what is it that’s preserved? done revising a new poem, I chant it long to myself. Tknow the two Xie’s fully, almost master of this craft; and am quite a student of Yin and He in bitter mapping-out.' This misleadingly simple quatrain may be read as asking a misleadingly simple question: where does the voice of the finished poem—the voice that “chants slowly”—come from? ‘Du Fu, “Twelve quatrains to relieve restlessness” (t BE] + = # ), number seven (Chou Zhaoao 1979, p. 1515). Notes: 1. 1: “molding and smelting the self” was a standard phrase for literary composition. 1.3: Bt: here used in the sense of # , “ripely.” The “two Xie's” are the Southern Dynasties Song 9 poet Xie Lingyun WH # &_ (385-433) and the Qi HF dynasty poet Xie Tiao Ht BE (464-499). 14: Yin, He: Yin Keng P& 9 (d. circa 565) and He Xun 47 9 (d. 518), renowned poets in the Chen BR (557-589) and Liang 3 (502-557) dynasties, respectively.For readers trained in the traditional hermeneutic discipline of Chinese poetry, which reads poetic utterances against poets’ biographies, and sees the poem's significance as residing in its status as a “response” of the poet to his lived world, the answer is self- evident: it comes from Du Fu, of course. This reading strategy, which has been and must remain the primary one for Chinese lyric, naturalizes the poem as an utterance by its author on a particular occasion.” In the case of the poem about poetry cited above, however, it seems that such an answer was not entirely satisfactory for Du Fu himself. ‘At the end of the labor of composition—the process through which, according to the standard expressive account of poetic composition, some “response” of the historical Du Fu to his world was molded into verse—Du Fu reflects on the finished product, and listens to himself chanting it. Yet, once completed, the poem has become something extemnal to him; the question voiced in the abruptly colloquial cun di wu A JR. 4a “what thing is preserved?” carries the suggestion that this “thing” cannot simply be equated with the poet's self. In this playful poem, in which Du Fu as it were steps aside from and reflects on his activity as a poet, a gap opens between Du Fu in his day-to-day existence and the voice that speaks from his own finished work. The poem can no longer be seen as fully “naturalized” as an utterance in a particular biographical context; what emerges around and beyond the notion of the poem as an utterance—as simply saying something—is a sense of the making and chanting of the poem as performance—as a *“must remain,” because the mode! informs not only traditional Chinese poetic criticism but poetic practice as well. The idea that one might purposefully set out to compose a poem ‘as if it were an utterance by me” is redolent of paradox, but it is just this paradox, and just this “as that traditional poetic praxis tended (with unusual exceptions, some of which will be the object of study in the following chapters) to make invisible.distinctive kind of activity, distinct from the activities and concems of the biographical poet. Whereas for later readers a finished Du Fu poem “preserves” the voice of the historical Du Fu, for Du Fu himself, it seems, the voice of the finished poem could, at least occasionally, be heard as if coming from beyond the self of his daily experience. Of course, the impetus behind Du Fu’s question is not some intimation of a mysterious external source of poetic inspiration; The mood is self-congrautularory, and Du Fu here is reflecting in a very writerly way on a growing sense of mastery over his poetic craft. The second couplet of this quatrain may be read as providing an answer to the question of the opening, but it is an answer of a special, oblique, kind. Rather than state positively what sort of thing is “preserved” through Du Fu's poetic composition, the lines suggest a kind of continuity and a kind of knowledge that is accessible only through the practice of the craft itself. This suggestion is contained in the ambiguity of the poem's close. “Knowing the two ‘Xie’s fully” is at least partially synonymous with being “master of this craft:” putting it this way suggests a convergence of propositional knowledge and craftsmanly know-how, “knowledge thar” and “knowledge how.” This sense is heightened in the final line, where the “biter mapping-out” seems capable of referring equally to the compositional intentions that underlie the poems of Yin Keng or He Xun, or to the “bitter application” with which Du Fu himself studies those poems, or to the strenuous negotiation between intention and craft to which Du Fu himself submits in the process of his own lyric composition. An adequate reading of the line requires that all these senses be included, and openness of the line's reference thus taken reflects the larger issue of the indeterminacy of the agency that forms thepoem as an artifact, thus pointing us back to the question with which this “metapoem” began. ‘The suggestion of the poem's close is that, whatever this agency may be, it arises out of the interaction between Du Fu and his forebears in the craft of poetry. The voice that “chants” is forged from a deep understanding of the “chanting” of those former poets: it is in “chanting” that he knows them. Du Fu’s intense and often ironic self-awareness as a poetic craftsman sets him apart from all but a very few of his predecessors or contemporaries; the question adumbrated in this poem about the odd asymmetrical relation between the voice of the poem and the mundane self of the poet was not one that preoccupied the poets of his age—if it even occurred to them. Beginning a generation or two after Du Fu’s death, however, writers in a variety of genres began to focus intense curiosity on the question “where the voice comes from.”” Beginning around the tum of the ninth century, the idea of lyric as performance—as a medium of expression radically set off from mundane existence, and offering access to strange and otherwise inaccesible realms of being—came to occupy a central place in the literary imagination of writers of many stripes. As we have seen, Du Fu, while self-conscious enough to reflect on the gap between his daily self and his poetic voice, ultimately locates that special poetic voice in the special sort of commerce with literary predecessors constituted by the craft *In connection with this claim that Du Fu’s reflections on the status of poetic creation anticipated issues that were to become central for many early ninth-century writers, it is interesting to note that the preeminence of Du Fu, with Li Bai, in the poetic pantheon is itself a critical phenomenon datable to the early ninth century. For a detailed discussion of the radical changes in the stylistic norms of poetry that took place around the end of the eighth century, and the establishment of the critical doctrine of the “unique preeminence of Li and Du” (Li Du du zn $3495 # ), see Wu Guangxing 1992 and 1994,itself. The early ninth-century writers we will be studying, by contrast, reflect more intensely and more obsessively than any other literary generation in the Chinese tradition on the possibility thar the lyric voice really does come from outside the biographical self of the author, that—for the ostensive author himself as much as for the reader or lisiener—the experience of lyric performance is one of a radical alterity. Among these ninth-century writers, perhaps the most direct successors to Du Fu’s thought about the paradox of lyric craft—the self-transcending aspect of the labor for perfect ~self-expression”—is the grouping of poets, represented most prominently by Meng Jiao 38 and, later, Jia Dao %f f , associated with the term ku yin & “ , or “bitter chanting.” Where Du Fu was self-conscious of his craftsmanship, these poets become self-conscious about their self-consciousness, taking a sort of satisfaction in the way their relentless search for perfect lines belies, and even contributes to, their lack of personal well-being. Composition is likened in their poetry to sickness, possession, or drunkenness—states that are alike in combining aspects of the pathological and the visionary. While these poets and the stylistic changes they brought to Chinese poetry are interesting in their own right, viewed in a broad perspective their attitude towards lyric composition bears a family resemblance to certain other contemporary developments in literary culture. The early decades of the ninth century also witness the first full burgeoning of poems of the title-type “Composed in Dream” which was to endure as a significant minor form throughout the subsequent history of Chinese lyric. While such texts may tell us something about the structure and content of the dream- world itself, it is of more immediate interest from our perspective that it was in this periodthat Chinese writers began to feel that a dream would be a good place to expect or look for something of specifically poetic value: such an attitude may in the end reveal more about how these writers thought about the relation between the realm of lyric and ordinary life than it tells us about the kinds of dreams they had. The unifying element of these ninth-century approaches and attitudes to lyric composition is the assumption that poetic knowledge is not something readily available to the quotidian self of the poet, but rather only sporadically, during particular moments, and in particular experiential states.’ Perhaps the most forceful and thoroughgoing expression of this attitude is the full-blown “involuntarist” theory of composition most closely associated with Han Yu # 4, which views the influx of an overwhelming force from outside the author—an influx likened at times by Han Yu himself to spirit-possession—as the sine qua non not only of good lyric composition, but of good ‘writing in general. To speak of these ninth-century tendencies towards viewing lyric as an expression of and mode of access to realms of experience far removed from the mundane is likely to recall to us the term qi that is such an important part of the landscape of literary values of this “This notion of lyric as emanating from a visionary state sharply distinct from normal awareness may be viewed as the introduction of the structural features of the rhapsody 8, —in which the “rhapsodic” section proper is often set off from “normal” speech through the device of frame dialogues—into lyric poetry. See discussion in chapter 2. ‘Of course, the case of Han Yu is complex, and his notions about composition, as expressed, for example, in the famed “Leteer in Reply to Li Yi? & 43% # , are not limited to lyric composition alone. I would argue, however—and hope to make clear in the following chapters—that, taken in its “involuntarist” aspect, Han Yu's view is more representative of early ninth-century views of lyric than of other types of composition.period, and the genre of the chuan qi #4 , or “accounts of the strange” that was then in its heyday. While this genre is typically considered part of the history of Chinese prose fiction, many chuangi texts focus on lyric performances, and can tell us a lot about contemporary Preoccupations surrounding the possibilities of lyric performance. For example, in his “Record of a Dream of Qin” #34, Shen Yazhi tt, BX (815 jinshi) describes a dream in which he finds himself in the court of the Warring States Qin Mugong # . His adventures culminate in an elaborate parting banquet where he composes laments for his late wife, Mugong’s daughter Nong Yu 4 & ° When we go on to read historical lyrics by Shen Yazhi's friend Li He 4% (790-816) in which the latter composes lyrics in the person of historical figures, and also writes imaginary “occasional verse” in response to long-dead poets,” we may be excused for suspecting that what appear superficially to be unrelated genres are here working out some of the same ideas—whether we choose to say that Li He brings a “chuangi-like” mentality to some of his historical lyrics," or that Shen Yazhi is exploring possibilities in a new way of approaching the composition of historical lyric by making explicit an imaginary narrative context. In this and numerous other connections, then, the following chapters, while focusing on issues conceming lyric performance, will remain aware of the significance of developments in chuangi, and will frequently use chuangi texts for the “See text in Wang ig 1987, pp. 195-97. In Shen’s story, he marries Nong Yu after the ifiany death of her husband Xiao Shi # & . The traditional story, of course, ends with Nong Yu and Xiao Shi ascending into heaven together. See the discussion in Chapter 2. “As is suggested, for example, by Wu Qiming 1986.light they shed on comtemporary cultural attitudes towards lyric performance.” Perhaps the most telling symptom of the changes that were taking place in notions of lyric during this period is the heightened attention given by the writers of this generation to the actual musical performance practices going on in the society around them. Bai Juyi & #& % (772-846), Yuan Zhen A Ai (779-831), and Zhang Hu FAK (c. 790-c. 855) were among the many poets of this era who composed scores of poems on musicians, singers, dancers, and musical performances, and who prided themselves on their erudition and expertise in the minutize of music and dance pieces and performance styles of earlier ages as well as their own. “Music”—yinyue & #& —is the paramount category throughout Chinese literary history for thinking about the broad significance and function of poetic writing; what is distinctive about literati attitudes toward music in this era is the degree of attention and reflection devoted to the pragmatics and aesthetics of actual musical performances. Apart from expert knowledge of contemporary musical practice, much of the lore about music during the early ninth century centered around performers and performances from the Kaiyuan Bf] AL and TianbaoX W eras (713-756)—the reign of Xuanzong * 3 . ‘The catastrophic rebellion that had brought that reign to a violent close was, already in the eyes of literati at the turn of the ninth century, an event that had left the empire and its culture ‘weak and imperilled. If any single image were to capture the changed sense that early ninth- "The intimate linkage between poetry and narrative for writers and groups engaged in chuangi composition was first given attention in Chen Yinque 1958, and has not been entirely neglected by more recent scholarship. See, for example, Li Zongwei 1985, p. 50 ff.cenrury literati had of the nature of music and musicians, it would be the dispersal of ‘Xuanzong’s “Pear Garden Academy,” whose members were scattered throughout the empire to seek patronage where they could find it. The music of Xuanzong’s reign could represent, for literati looking back to it at a distance of two generations or so, the prosperity and cultural flourishing of a lost age, or a dangerous, excessive, foreign-influenced infatuation that had both foreboded and precipitated the final catastrophe; aging and cast adrift in the world, the surviving musicians were a sad reminder of the passing of a better time, but at the same time their art, unlike any other thing in the post-rebellion world, had the capacity to preserve—or even recreate—that earlier and better time unchanged. In each one of these aspects, legends and surviving performers and performance traditions from the Kaiyuan-Tianbao era proved inviting topics, and powerful metaphors, for ninth-century lyric composition. Rather than attempt to offer a causal explanation of changes in approaches to lyric in the period, the following chapters will document the change itself, through close reading of a variety of literary texts. The hope is that by deliberately crossing the generic and stylistic boundaries that have formed the basis for most literary-historical accounts of the period, it may be possible to see how prose and lyric genres, or poets as different as, say, Bai Juyi & AE H and Wen Tingyun % A $§ , can be seen in one aspect of their work to be reflecting ‘on common preoccupations that are characteristic of their period. Indeed, the unprecedented variety of styles and genres of literary production witnessed during the first half of the ninth century makes it that much more helpful and important to attempt to outline some of thecharacteristic tums of a collective literary imagination that writers of the period to some degree shared. The first chapter will attempt to lay out some of the methodological principles and conceptual tools of the study. We will examine what is without doubt the most often-cited source in the scholarly literature about Tang lyric performance: the famous “Singing-bet in the Wineshop” a& 4° 8 *% episode recorded in Xue Yongruo’s # Fl &% Jiyiji RR Ie (Assembled Records of the Fantastic). Our analysis of this anecdote will provide a heuristic ‘model for further discussion of the performative aspect of lyric. In opposition to a dominant tradition which attempts to “‘naturalize” the poetic text by emphasizing the organic link between biographical poet and lyric utterance, this story will be read as an exploration of the possibilities of an alternative view, which delights precisely in the effects of unlinking the composing poet and the performing voice. Xue Yongruo's anecdote will also give us an opportunity to examine the ways in which the “‘scene of performance,” as opposed to the traditional naturalizing “scene of uterance,” results in an altered view of lyric authorship—a view that will be seen to inform much ninth-century thinking about lyric composition. The second chapter, in two main sections, will deal with issues relating to the use ofthe past in lyric poetry. A model of “rhetorical” use of history, analogous to the citation of precedent in the speech genre of the court policy speech, will be opposed to “performative” use, which centers on the mimetic illusion that a past moment is being re-enacted within the “performance time” of the lyric. As the former mode is analogous to the court policy speech, this performative mode may be seen as analogous to musical performance—bearing in mind the broad connotations of the Chinese term yinyue, which includes not only “music” in our narrow sense but what we would term “narrative song and dance ensembles,” as well as what was traditionally viewed as the highest realm of music, namely yayue #ft SH, the repertoire of lyric and performance modes employed in imperial sacrificial ritual. ‘The analysis of this topic will be divided into two main sections, focusing on the two complementary aspects of the performative use of the past: the reenactment of the identity of a person from the past, and the reenactment of past time. ‘The third chapter will begin with an examination of an interpretive issue in a short song by Li He—his “Biter Reeds: Mocking Prelude” $€ #4 % 3]. This song, which narrates events supposed to have happened in the mythic time of the Yellow Emperor, draws on traditional material, but contains an aspect that appears to have been the poet’s own invention; namely, the idea that when the Yellow Emperor ascended into heaven he took all but one of the twenty-four pitch-pipes, which were the basis of the institution of music which he founded, with him. The suggestion seems to be that music as we know it is only a fragment, a fragment of a whole that belongs essentially to a different order of reality from our “post-mythic” world. This chapter will examine the possibility that this legend—thoughuncanonical and absurd from the perspective of mainstream thinking about music and lyric for most of the history of Chinese literature, both before and after this time—captures something essential, not only to Li He’s relation to music, sound, and poetry, but more generally to the imaginative worlds of a number of poets and texts about poetry during this period. ‘The fourth chapter will focus on early- to mid-century developments in erotic lytic, beginning from an attempt to reconstruct the imagined setting within which such lyrics were imagined as unfolding. While its date of composition technically falls outside of our period of focus, the Beili zhi 4, & & provides us with valuable historical documentation in this connection, both as to the actual settings of literati romances and as to the milieu of “those fond of stories” who form the audience among which narrative and lyric texts based on such romances would have circulated and taken shape—the ostentatious and secretive world of the Pingkang -F AR district, the Chang'an pleasure quarters. This model of the “culture of gossip” surrounding the capital pleasure quarters will in tum give us a point of departure for a consideration of what is distinctive in the erotic lyrics, or yanti @it #, of ninth-century lytic writers such as Li Shangyin 4 #j ff and Wen Tingyun. While the relation of their works to the world depicted in the Beili zhi is oblique at best, they can be seen adopting aspects of the typical setting of the stories from the Pingkang district, in particular the notion of “ovethearing”—the situation in which a listener cannot be sure of getting the “message” of the song right. This type of lyric is in one sense closer to the model of the “scene of 12uuterance” than the types examined in the other chapters, since it implies that there is a dewerminate message intended by the poet, and grounded in the poet's knowledge and experience. However, the focus in this type of poem is not on the expression of the message, but rather on the possibility of mishearing—and the resolution of the poem into its message may be deferred indefinitely.“The Wineshop Singing-bet:” issues in lyric and performance Religious Experience and Lay Society in T'ang China, Glen Dudbridge’s recent stuly of the mid-eighth century text Guang yi ji St & #2, , in addition to expanding our knowledge about religious belief and practice during that period, is valuable for the example it presents of the resourceful use of primary texts. Dudbridge's argument itself constitutes a persuasive demonstration that non-canonical texts from the catch-all rubric of xiaoshuo +)» #,, often evaluated simplistically on the basis of the factual truth or falsehood of their content, or seen simply as reflections of a mass culture that remained more or less static throughout China's history, can in fact, if treated with careful critical attention, and against a sufficient array of alternate sources, reveal much about levels of historical change that would otherwise remain invisible. As Dudbridge shows by his example, there is much to be gained from overcoming the all-or-nothing attitude that treats such sources as either factual or worthless, and learning 4rather to assess them in terms of what they reveal indirectly about the assumptions and preoccupations of the culture that produced them.' This chapter will consider the single most often-cited source concerning lyric performance during the storied “High Tang”—a source which, I may as well admit from the outset, I do not believe to be circumstantially accurate as a record of a real event—and examine it to see what it can tell us about the attitudes and Preoccupations that surrounded lyric performance in the culture that produced it, around the middle of the ninth century. Seer In the Kaiyuan period (713-742) the poets Wang Changling £. & # (4. circa 756), Gao Shi ¥ ii. (c.702-765), and Wang Zhihuan = 2 ® (688- 742) shared equal fame. At the time their careers had yet to take off, and they made the rounds of more or less the same stratum of society. One day, when the weather was cold and a light snow was falling, the three of them went together to a wineshop to buy a drink. Suddenly a dozen or so musicians from the Liyuan § ff] academy came upstairs to hold a party. At which the three poets left their seats, and gathered to ‘watch by the light of the brazier. In a short while, four singing-girls arrived ' In this connection it is interesting to note the comments attributed by Xu Baogeng # 4 Pt to Wang Yao E. 3 on the so-called “Qinghua school” (#f 4H # 3 ): E—FRHZEHEARERTKTRARH “te” KOR” HBR HAA NMS” LAD ‘The main characteristic of this school is that it did not take an encompassing attitude of “faith” or of “doubt” towards traditional culture, but rather expended its efforts on “explication of the past” (shigu: this term is used by Xu as an equivalent for the western theoretical term “hermeneutics”)... (Xu Baogeng 1997, p. 180)as well, one after another. They were lavishly attired and bewitchingly lovely, the pinnacle of cosmopolitan clegance. Then they began playing music—it was all famous songs of the day. Changling and the others secretly made a deal among themselves, saying, “we are all famous for our poetry, but have never settled the question of ranking. Now let’s watch in secret to see what these musicians sing—we'll say that whoever has more poems (shi # ) included in their song lyrics (ge ci #34] ) wins.” Ina short while one of the singers, beating out the rhythm, sang RGRRARs FREER LH BMRAMM — RAGVARS- Cold rain stretches out over the river, passing into Wu by night; I see off a wayfarer at daybreak; Chu hills look forlorn. If loved ones in Luoyang ask how I'm doing— the heart, one shard of ice in a pitcher of jade.” Changling raised his hand to make a mark on the wall, saying, “One quatrain!” Ina litle while, another singer sang MERE LEMOS RESRE: BATER> As [open the case, tears soak my breast, looking over your old letters. How cheerless is the terrace of the shades! Still it is home to the recluse Ziyun.” ‘And Shi raised his hand to mark the wall, saying “One quatrain!” In a while another singer sang SRFAERM + BE DAH AH BMARRBE: MHBHAHR- “This is Wang Changling’s “Seeing off Xin Jian at Hibiscus Tower” © 3% HE ik = Fi (first of two). See Li Yunyi 1985, pp. 159-160. “This is the opening four lines of Gao Shi’s “Weeping for shao fis Liang of Shanfu, ninth of his generation” & JE SC 3K AU wy AF. See Lin Kaiyang 1981, pp. 87-89. 16Broom in hand, as the golden hall opens at daybreak, she passes the time pacing to and fro with her round fan. This jade face can’t match the luster of black crows that still gleam in the sunlight on Shaoyang palace." CChangling again raised his hand to mark the wall, saying, “Two quatrains!” .- then Zhihuan pointed to the most beautiful of the singers, saying, “Wait and see what this one sings; if it is not one of my poems T will not dare contend with you as long as I live... When it came to the tun of the one with double braids, she sang KRALL GEM: — FBRE HY LGR: AMRREMNM © The Yellow river rises off into the distant white clouds a sliver of lone citadel, ten thousand fathoms of mountain. Why need the nomad fife resent these willow-sprays? ‘The spring breezes stop at Yumen Pass.” And Zhihuan teased the other two saying, “Clodhoppers! Was I putting you on?” At this they began joking and laughing loudly. The musicians id not know what to make of it, and went over to them and said, “For ‘What reason are you young masters so exuberant?” Changling and the others told them the story, and the performers all bowed to them, saying “Our worldly eyes could not recognize immortal gods. We beg you to demean your pure majesty so far as to join our banquet.” The three went with them, and they caroused all day long “This is Wang Changling’s heptasyllabic jueju “Autumn Song from Changxin Palace” 4& AKT BF (third of five). See Li Yunyi 1985, pp. 142-143. “This is Wang Zhihuan’s “Song of Liangzhou” 3& HH #4] = Hf The “willow sprig” was a token exchanged at parting, and appeared in the titles of a number of parting songs. “Fi yiji RK FE (record of collected marvels”), compiled by Xue Yongruo # ffl 89 (Al. arly ninth c.) The translation above follows the text given in SF, p. 5293, except for the name Wang Zhihuan, which consistently appears there as “Wang Huanzhi” i 2. 7Of all the anecdotes that sprung up around the political and cultural lions of the Kaiyuan and Tianbao periods—an era that seems to have attained the mythic stature it was to enjoy throughout Chinese history within a generation or two after its passing—this is perhaps the favorite among those who have loved and studied the poetry of what came to be known as the “High Tang.” A brief survey of the many scholars and poets who have alluded to and analyzed it serves as ample indication of the power of its allure as an evocation of the charms of a lost era’ In this chapter, however, we will be taking this beloved tale as a point of departure for a discussion not of the literary world of the eighth century, but rather of a set of literary preoccupations that mark the anecdote itself as an artifact of a characteristically “ninth-century” literary imagination: at the center of Xue Yongruo’s tale is a scene of Performance, and it will be the concem of this and the following chapters to suggest that scenes of performance, in various guises, constitute a central strand in what belongs most uniquely to Tang literature from the Yuanhe 2, fe (806-21) to Dazhong KP (847-860) eras. Anecdotes about poets and poetry form one of the main types of material to be found in the collectanea of historical trivia in which later Tang writers memorialized their illustrious forebears. One could cite any number of cultural and historical reasons for the abundance of this kind of historical gossip, but quite apart from extemal causes, the trend can be seen as a natural outgrowth from traditional hermencutic assumptions about the fundamental nature of the shi as a poetic medium. One of the most basic assumptions was, in effect, that the shi "Ren Bantang 1982 cites and discusses over a dozen analyses and references from premodem critics. For another treatment of this passage in English, see Owen 1981. 18represented a moment in the experience of the person who had composed it. The tsk of the reader was thus in a sense to “work back” from the words of the lyric to the experience that gave shape to them.* This task, however, was rarely a simple one, for as everyone who has tried to become literate in the language of Tang shi knows, that language is laconic and often highly indirect, giving voice to the experience of a poetic “present” by drawing on a store of literary reference from a continuous tradition of historiography, belles-lettres, and speculative treatises which, by the time of the Tang, already extended over a thousand years. And just as “This complex of hermeneutic assumptions can be traced back to some of the earliest traditionalist texts, particularly Mencius. See, for example, this passage from 5A ( € +) KAS RULER RUMES NERS A HAZ > Following Yang Bojun 1960 (pp. 215-218), this passage may be paraphrased, Those who explicate poetry must not misconstrue statements because of the way they are written, nor misconstrue the poet's original intentions because of the way they are stated. Using one’s own sense of intention to reconstruct the original purpose of the poem—that is the right way. Liu Xie’s 3] & treatment of the central hermeneutic concept of “knowing the tone” a # could be read as a commentary to Mencius—though where Mencius is stating the case negatively, Liu Xie is more expansive about the positive claims of this approach towards reading: ARLSRHARE: MLARTUAM BRE KR PHL REL HG RLMLES > As for the one who composes the written pattern: the affective state is moved and the verbal expression is produced; as for the one who looks at the written pattern: one “puts on” the writing so as to enter into the affective state. Secking out the source by following the waves’ contour, though [the source] be obscure, yet it will certainly become manifest. The [writer's] age is distant, and none can see her face; by consulting the writing, one directly views her mind (Fan Wenlan 1962,part of being a good reader of these poems meant having an intimate knowledge of this tradition, it was assumed that one needed to know about the situation of the poet at the time of ‘composing the poem in order to receive its full message—for regardless of how heavily the poem might rely on leamed allusions or stock themes, its “meaning” was in a sense defined as its meaning as an utterance of a particular person, grounded in a particular set of historical circumstances—the meaning of the poem thus conceived arises from what me might call an imagined “scene of utterance,” in which even the most indirect and allusive lyrical expressions may be “naturalized” as part of a response to lived circumstances. Part of this grounding function was performed by titles, which often in shi are not so much hints at the poem's “contents” as miniature diary entries, thumbnail sketches of what was happening in the poet's life at the time of composition. But when the title did not give enough information, when the language of the poem itself seemed particularly opaque, or when the poem had in the course of its transmission passed far beyond its original historical and social milieu, it was only natural that readers should have felt a need to get the “story behind the poem” from some other source. This is perhaps a plausible explanation for the genesis of one species of the genre that came to be known as “shi hua” #+# or “talk about poetry.”” In the case of the ninth-century story given above, however, it is clear that something entirely different is going on. Yes, this is a story which connects famous poets of the past with well-known lyrics. But quite unlike pp. 713-718). “This rubric is also used to designate desultory comments on technical and stylistic matters. 20the type of anecdote that attempts to explain an “original” meaning behind the lyric in terms of the poet’s biography, this anecdote delights in the sense of happenstance in the meeting between the poet and his song. Part of the appeal of this anecdote is the sense it gives us of a look “behind the scenes” at poets and performers freed from the constraints of their public roles. In their unbuttoned banter, and, above all, in the spirit of unabashed competitiveness that prevails in the story, there is a suggestion that the way in which these poets are behaving is at least a bit outrageous. And part of what makes their behavior outrageous is precisely their gleeful betrayal of the assumptions about authenticity that are supposed to make a shi a shi. When the performance of a poem claiming to capture a moment of sadness at parting, or of grief at the death of a close friend, is received by the poet who wrote it with a self-congratulatory chuckle, something snaps in our ability to read shi according to the unwritten rules of the genre. The poet, listening to his own poem being sung, seems to fail to act “in character” when the poem is over, and to notice this incongruity is implicitly to see that the poem itself was, after all, only an act. Thus if the “standard” shi hua anecdotes of the type “the real story of what was happening when x was composed” seem a natural outgrowth of the shi as a genre for private reading—an informal precursor of the voluminous commentarial traditions that later accrued around the works of major Tang poets—then this anomalous story may be seen as working out in a whimsical manner some of the tensions that arise when a “private” poetic form becomes a text for performance. 2From the perspective of the shi’s rules, violence is being done in several ways in this anecdote. Besides the shock of seeing Wang Changling and Gao Shi act “out of character,""* the texts of the poems themselves are treated roughly. In the form in which it is preserved in Gao Shi’s collected poems, the poem containing the second quatrain in this anecdote goes on for another twenty lines. The original poem, moreover, is an occasional work composed to lament the death of Gao’s friend Liang Qia 3& %& (734 jinshi), so that the incongruity of Gao’s raucous response to hearing it sung in this story is all the more pronounced. Yet this quatrain gained a sort of life of its own, appearing in at least two very influential anthologies of poetry as a pentasyllabic jueju" as late as the Qing dynasty."* But what appears as a violation of the integrity of the poem, when we consider it in its “original” written form, with its tile duly recording the occasion in response to which it was ‘composed, may in fact simply reflect the sorts of transformations to which poems were subject within the broader “lyric culture” of the Tang. ‘There is in fact evidence apart from “Wang Zhihuan’s poem and the second poem of Wang Changling sung in the anecdote are in subgenres of which the requirement of “authenticity” would be relaxed or modified. The tile of “Song of Liangzhou,” for example, announces to the reader—by its ttle, by the type of natural imagery, and by a punning type of word-play associated in Chinese poetry with popular song and literati imitations of popular song—that it belongs to the subgenre of the “frontier poem.” It is thus to be read as a song such as the poet imagines a soldier at an outpost in the north-western border outpost might sing. “'Lwill use this term untranslated where it is useful, to emphasize that the “quatrain” under consideration is treated as a complete poem. "Wang Shizhen’s ¥ 4-#i Tang xian sanmei ji Ae WS. Ue M (1689) and Shen Deqian’ sit. 4 3 Tang shi bie cai ji A # #| BH (1717). It seems possible that the compilers of these anthologies based this classification on the Ji yi ji itself. While they have come in for criticism for this “mistake,” it seems perfectly defensible to take this ninth-century source as evidence that the quatrain was performed as a separate composition in Gao Shi’s time, and thus conclude that it is a perfectly “authentic” Tang jueju. See the following discussion for the Yuefis shiji evidence supporting this view. 22this account in the Jiyi ji that, though inconclusive, in my view supports the hypothesis, regardless of how far we trust the circumstantial accuracy of the Jiyi ji account, that this quatrain in fact circulated during the Tang independently of Gao’s collected works, as part of a performance repertoire. In the section headed “song lyrics of recent years” if i # in Guo Maogian’s3§ #& ft Yuefu shiji # At # SK (juan 79), we find substantially the same quatrain under the title “Liangzhou” 2 #4 .'° One of the two divergences from the text as given in Gao Shi’s collected works has 4% “jacket” for a “chest,”"“ apparently in the interest of gaining the extra rhyme for the pattern axa which is more common in jueju than the xaxa that appears in the poem in both Gao Shi’s collection and the Ji yi ji." Another Particularly intriguing variant is the reading “carriage” for #& “‘esidence.” This type of homophonic substitution—which does not change the sound of the line but which results, if we read the graph instead of listening to the sound, in nonsense—would be a typical result of oral transmission, or a copyist with an imperfect degree of literacy. What 1 would particularly like to suggest is that such a scribal error would be of no consequence whatsoever if the text were being used as a basis for performance. The case looks strong that it was not reckless compilers, but a living performance culture that gave these lines of Gao Shi’s lament a second lease on life as a song-verse. “ YSJ, p. 1118. “Liangzhou” was a dagu title (see Ren Bantang 1962, p. 153). “*No special claims are made for the reconstructions of Middle Chinese, in LP.A., which appear in this study; they are derived directly from Guo Xiliang 1986. “a more immediate reason for the extra rhyme would have to do with the dagu suite form which will be discussed later: as these often consist of a series of quatrains, with different thymes, the rhyme of the first and second lines helps to establish the rhyme and to articulate the shift from one quatrain to the next. 2BAA further interesting disruption of the conventions of reading which is brought about by the “Singing Ber” anecdote relates to the proprieties of genre. By grouping these four poems together as “song lyrics,” the story flattens subgeneric distinctions which would have set them apart within the conventions of shi reading; in particular, distinctions such as those between the first two poems, which are explicitly occasional shi, and the last two, which are built around stock themes which at least at the level of surface meaning involve an element of fictionality. In fact itis as if this anecdote were constructed with the conscious intention of juxtaposing a variety of shi subgenres.'* Thus far we have treated this odd anecdote as reflecting a number of ways in which Poems whose original contexts define them as “utterances” of a biographical author may be destabilized in new contexts and configurations, and we have suggested that this process might resemble the sort of thing that would naturally have happened in certain kinds of song “It seems to me that the most attractive definition for “genre” in the case of Chinese poetry would be as a class of poems composed around a common “typical theme.” In this sense each of the poems in the anecdote under discussion would fall into different “genres:” 1, an occasional parting poem; 2, an occasional poem on the theme “meditation on the death of a loved one;” 3, a poem on the stock theme “neglected palace woman;” 4 an imitation of popular song on the stock theme “frontier life.” By “stock theme” I mean the class of “typical themes” which tell the reader not to expect a direct depiction of the poet’s “here and now” at the surface level; though it might be present in a deflected form—"stock theme” genres were often read as political allegories. This definition of “genre,” however, becomes awkward where it is desirable to account for the fact that formal groupings based on linguistic and metrical considerations encompass many “genres,” with, usually, a strong tendency for any given “genre” to be treated in one and only one “formal grouping.” Thus for the purposes of this discussion I am using the term “‘subgenre” for the “genres” as defined above, and reserving the term “genre” for the larger formal types to avoid the awkwardness of a term like “formal grouping,” 24performance. Yet the question just what we can say about what that performance context might have been, has so far been ignored. While little is known for certain about the actual performance practices of Tang dynasty music, we do know that the notion of “music” in question is not our narrow modem sense, but rather a range of modes of what we would think of as “multimedia” performance, most of them combining sung lyrics with various types of instrumental accompaniment, and solo and ensemble dance movements. One form which we know about in its rough outlines is particularly interesting in the context of this discussion. ‘This is the complex musical form of the da qu ¥ (“big piece”). What we do know in the case of this form is a set of technical terms for the various sections of the form, the exact meanings of which are not precisely known in the absence of a better knowledge of the mode of performance, but which seem to include a combination of functional descriptions of structural elements—"loose prelude,” “breakdown,” and so on—with more direct descriptions of the mode of performance, like “‘shuffle.”"” The dagu was clearly some sort of suite form, composed of a series of musical sections of contrasting rhythmic and modal characters. From the perspective of the interface between shi forms and “song lyrics,’""* however, the most intriguing thing we know about the da qu is that each of its sogments was made up "A good overview is given in Liu Hongdu 1960. “The terminology of Chinese poetic genres includes a number of terms designating poems as intended to be set to music, but the designations always survive beyond the horizon at which the musical element falls into disuse. For the sake of simplicity, I will thus disregard the diachronic self-definition of these poetic forms, and instead use the descriptive term “song lyric” to indicate that, whatever the traditional definition of the particular genre, a given work is in fact being incorporated into musical performance in the synchronic context of ninth- century China. 25of four regular lines, rhymed aaxa. The quatrains making up each section show a variation between pentasyllabic and heptasyllabic lines.” In the da qu recorded in juan 79 of the Yuefu shiji under the title “Yizhou,” for example,” the order of the ten stanzas is two heptasyllabic, three pentasyllabic for the first large unit, then three heptasyllabic, two pentasyllabic for the second unit. Metrically the quatrains are identical to regulated pentasyllabic or heptasyllabic _jueju; in fact, it seems to have been common practice to incorporate independently circulating jueju into the da qu, apparently with no strong requirement that continuity of mood or level of diction be maintained. Thus this form of musical performance itself seems to echo in its very structure the kind of “unsettling” of shi subgenres we noted in the Ji yi ji ancedote—it seems to aim expressly for the effect of a pastiche of shi subgenres.” “Liu Kaiyang’s objection (see Liu Kaiyang 1981, p.88) that this poem of Gao’s could not have been sung at the wineshop because it is pentasyllabic, while the rest are heptasyllabic, is thus not to the point. I myself do not believe that the scene ever happened as described, but there is a crucial distinction between doubting its circumstantial veracity and denying the real basis in musical praxis that made it seem possible to a ninth-century audience. *Guo, op.cit., p. 1120. “while the meaning of the lyrics may have played only a very subsidiary role in the overall effect of the performance, it is interesting to consider the possibility that there was some relation between the perceived mood of lyrics and the corresponding musical sections, and that part of the appeal of the form was exactly this element of pastiche—the presentation in sequence of a variety of styles. One would thus expect some sort of feedback relation between “mode” as constituted for reading texts, and the concepts of “mode” thus performatively constituted. Owen 1981 examines, from a slightly different perspective, some of the possible implications of this kind of relation—one can only hope that some day it is Possible to describe the problem more concretely in terms of contemporary performance practice. 26Our discussion of this odd anecdote and the ambient performance culture which would have provided its context seems to lead us to a further speculation about the specific origin of the story: could an actual dagu performance in fact have given the impetus for its composition? As we have seen, such a performance—pethaps a version of the very “Liangzhou” dagu which survives in the YS°—could have supplied a maker of stories in the audience with the sequence of quatrains recorded in the Jiyiji anecdote. We can easily imagine a leamed audience member at such a performance playing the familiar game of “name the author” as successive quatrains were sung, and then imaginatively recreating the now-famous “singing contest at the wineshop” anecdote. Given the amount of evidence that survives, however, any such hypothesis must remain purely speculative. For the purposes of the present study, what we will want to build on will be rather the sense of this anecdote as expressing a curiosity about the “scene of performance” as a way of imagining lyric, sharply distinct from the “scene of utterance” that implicitly underlies traditional modes of reading shi. What we see in the Jiyiji story is people enjoying poetry in a way that must always have been familiar, but which for specific cultural reasons was rarely self-consciously reflected on in the Chinese tradition. This is what we might roughly designate the “mimetic” “Note that until we know more about how the singers’ repertoires were typically constituted, in particular whether or not they were primarily or at all based on written texts, there is no reason to think of any particular written version as the “authentic” one. Each performance, potentially, would be a “‘version” of the performance-type, but there would be no single fixed “standard” version. aaspect of lyric—the experience lyric provides, implicitly in private reading, and more Pointedly in a professional performance, of transporting us to another time and place, and into ‘another personality. Whereas the traditional Chinese hermeneutic favors a mode of reading that privileges the historical and biographical origin of the lyric—its status as a unique esponse to a unique moment in lived time—the focus on the experience of lyric in “performance time” that is hinted at in the above anecdote points toward a perspective from which we might agree that “the poem, as an utterance, had no initial historical occurrence. It is, was, and always will be the script for its own performance; like a play, it ‘occurs’ only when it is enacted.”” In the case of the first quatrain, for example, it will not have been irrelevant to listeners at our imagined performance that Wang Changling, at the time of composing the lyric, was exiled to a remote region far from his friends and from the objects of his career ambitions, that he had been slandered at court, that he perhaps feared at the time that that slander might isolate him, more irrevocably than even the great geographical distance, from the society he longed for. In the “scene of performance,” however, this would have been only ‘one among a range of imaginative possibilities. And compounded with this poignancy will hhave been another pleasure, that of seeing and hearing these emotions rendered in the form and voice of a professional entertainer—a beautiful woman, who, for a fleeting moment in a rich setting of music and dance, “plays” Wang Changling. Wang Changling, whom, in the “scene of utterance” that our training as readers of Tang shi teaches us to reconstruct in our Private reading, we see as a troubled individual responding to the pressures of a particular » Smith 1968, p. 17 (emphasis in original). 28‘moment, becomes, in the “scene of performance,” a distant, almost mythic figure. Or, in the words of the performers at the close of Xue Yongruo’s story, an “immortal.” To sum up, then, the suggestion we develop from the anecdote of the “singing competition” is the model of the “scene of utterance” and the “scene of performance” as two distinct modes of imaginative response to lyric poetry, two radically different ways of filling in the space around the words of the poem. The former is a way of naturalizing the lyric text as integrally bound to its roots in the poet’s experience; the latter, by contrast, frames the lyric, marking it off from the world as an artifact, and a means of access to something outside, for both singer and hearer. ‘The singer possesses Wang Changling’s words as performance; she may even be able to win the poet’s own silence and rapt attention for the duration of her song, as she does here, but her proprietary interest extends no further. During the song, indeed, she may well infuse the singing of Wang Changling’s words with her own feelings; some listener may even understand the way she thus uses the song—thus in effect she would ‘succeed in appropriating the words to a new “scene of utterance.”* But in the case we see in this anecdote, the singer, though she commands great power over her audience for the duration of the song, remains, like Plato's Ton, dependent for this very expressive power on a source outside herself, an original maker to whom her performance links her, through a chain of other performers and performances. We may note that to conceive of a lyric text in this way, as an ultimate source of a transforming power accessible through performance, is quite different from the traditional stance towards poetic texts, and involves a significantly different ™ For a ninth-century consideration of this issue of “borrowing,” see the Excursus to Chapter 2 of this study. 29view of the nature of poetic “making.” It is no wonder that from the singers’ point of view the authors of their songs appear as transcendent beings. But what of the poets’ view? In Xue Yongruo’s story, the tension between “utterance” and “performance” as modes of thinking about lyric was presented as the result of the appropriation of “private”: lyric luterances as performance texts. In the following chapters, as we examine lyric poetry of the first half of the ninth century, we will be considering the possibility that the mode of lyric imagination encapsulated in the idea of the “scene of performance” may inform not only the reception, but also the production of lyric texts. 30Chapter. Performance and the Lyric Use of the Past I “thetorical” and “performative” uses of the past ‘The assertion that historical tropes, allusions, and anecdotes play a crucial function in Chinese lyric surely needs no argument. It would in fact be impossible to construct even the most elementary lexicon of poetic diction for Tang poetry without including a large number of items whose semantic force comes about by invoking, explicitly or implicitly, historical narratives. I would suggest that the normal use of historical reference in Tang lyric may be seen as conforming to what could be crudely characterized as a “rhetorical” model. The lyric is in this sense cousin to the speech genre of court debate, in which the apt deployment of historical precedent was one of the primary means of giving force to one’s position. The characteristic of the “rhetorical” use of history thus defined is that while historical scenes and 31narratives are invoked, the force of the lyric uterance as a whole can be analyzed only in terms of the circumstances of the poet invoking them, in a compositional present which provides a stable temporal context for the utterance. To characterize the use of history in the Tang shi tradition in this way clearly involves some rather drastic simplification—the resulting category may, assuming it is granted some degree of merit, seem so general as to have litle explanatory power. My purpose in suggesting this admittedly crude “rhetorical” model, however, is to contrast it with a radically different approach to historical material which can be observed in a number of lyric texts from the early ninth century—what I propose to term a “performative” approach. While the “‘thetorical” use of history succeeds or fails according to how it illuminates and lends authority to the present situation of the poet, the latter model is one which emphasizes what we would call the mimetic aspect of the representation—which takes as its central preoccupation the identification of a performative his with a mythic or historical that.' While it was cenainly possible to write in this “performative” mode to achieve objectives of persuasion or self-expression —objectives which would in that sense be “rhetorical” ones— the special sense that the “performative” historical poem creates of a piece of time set off from the “biographical” time of both performer and audience—a disjuncture articulated through various framing devices and binary oppositions such as sleep versus wakefulness, “This notion of “mimesis” is thus the specifically performative one observable in the Poetics, rather that the idea based on the metaphor of painting, and traceable to Plato, of mimesis as a “reflection” of nature (or a reflection of a reflection of an idea). For a discussion of the historical issues, see Nehamas 1982. I am also indebted to the discussion of the “recomposed performer” in Nagy 1996. 32drunkenness versus clear-headedness, as well as more explicitly ritualistic notions of sacred impersonation or spirit possession—gives the “performative” poem a structural distinctiveness that justifies our treating it as a separate category. Thus if we identified our category of “‘thetorical” uses of history by the analogy to the court policy speech, we would take our corresponding analogy for the “performative” mode from the realm of “music” or yinyue -% 9 —bearing in mind the broad sense of the word yinyue, which encompassed, lyrics for use in sacrificial ritual, as well as performance modes that we would call “mimetic dance ensembles.” Debate on the much-belabored issue of whether the Tang dynasty had “drama” is fueled by a fundamentally anachronistic approach to the problem—that is, one first attempts to define, in terms of modem usage, what constitutes “drama,” and then, taking this definition as a universal, asks the question “did the Tang have it?” The methodological unsoundness of this approach should be self-evident. Unfornmately, the richest compilation of evidence on the subject of Tang performance—Ren Bantang’s Tang Xi Nong & Bi, A “—has been unjustly neglected, largely, I suspect, due to Ren Bantang’s own inexplicable fondness, in spite of his immense command of the primary sources and his undeniable methodological insights, for just this sort of argumentation. The questions that have to date formed the vortex of the debate on this issue, such as the period to which we should trace the origins of the formal feature of “speaking in character” (dai yan i *, © @), are of little significance for the purposes of the present study. For our purposes it will suffice to point out that, although many of the technical aspects of their performance remain unknown, the existence of mimetic 33musical performance modes throughout the Tang is an incontrovertible fact. It will be a recurring concem in the following discussion to consider possible ways in which lyric composition may have been shaped or influenced by these performance modes. I stress again the formulation of this section: the “rhetorical” use of history in lyric shows affinities to the overtly rhetorical mode of court debates; the “‘performative” use of history in lyric shows affinities to actual performances in ritual or musical (yinyue) contexts. The problems relating to the interpretation of the actual performance texts that survive from the Tang are thus important but essentially peripheral to the present study. eeerereereeneee The notion of a “performative” mode of historical lyric clearly involves questions relating to the generic definition of shi, in particular issues of topicality and occasion—whereas shi in an autobiographical mode are taken to be sioned” by events in the author’s life, performative historical poems, as we shall observe, seem motivated more by the need or desire to recreate the persona and temporal frame of a historically distant figure. The categories of “topic” and “occasion” are included in the Chinese term i 2€, and we may begin our examination of these issues in ninth-century lyric texts by looking at problems relating to fi in the poetry of Li He. Li Shangyin 4 # AE , in his “Short Biography of Li Changji” 4 && +) (#, *2v., Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1984. uMobserves of Li He’s approach towards poetic composition that he “‘never got the topic first and then went on to write the poem” ( i ‘7B AL PR 4% th He)” The term de AF, here rendered “got,” does not make it clear whether Li Shangyin is saying that Li He never wrote on a topic that was given to him—by a particular social occasion, or “given” more literally in the kind of game poets had played since the Southern dynasties, in which each member of a group of friends would be assigned (fu de && AF ) a topic on which to compose an extemporaneous verse—or whether the point is simply that in Li He’s own “creative process” hhe would never decide on a topic first and then diligently set to work writing it out. We recall that the basic function of titles in Chinese lyric was to make explicit the circumstances surrounding the poem's composition—this notion of “title” merges with the idea of “topic” within a hermeneutic that centers on the assumption that a poem has its significance exactly as a response to lived circumstances. Seen in this light, Li Shangyin's comment, which seems at first glance a compliment paid by one craftsman to another for being “true to his craft,” takes on more profound and potentially disturbing implications, for it seems to border on saying ‘outright that Li He’s poetry was not composed out of his own life experience. Such a reading would seem a flat contradiction in the terms of the traditional hermeneutic, and later critics felt compelled to deny such a possibility. Yao Wenxie vt 3% % , the Qing literatus whose commentary to Li Hes works, like Wang Qi's before him, strove to “rehabilitate” the poet by drawing parallels between his lyrics and contemporary politics, stated axiomatically that “only those who are good at reading history can be good at annotating books; only those who are ” Feng Hao 1988, p. 465. 35‘g00d at reading Tang history can be good at annotating He." Yao's friend and townsman Chen Shi, in his own preface to a subsequent printing of the Yao commentary, took aim specifically at the comment of Li Shangyin noted above, saying, ‘Yishan said when Changgu went about with those various worthies, he never got a topic and (then) made the poem. When it happened that he “got something,” he'd throw it in a beat-up brocade sack. When he got home he'd ‘grind ink, fold paper, and finish it out... Now, could there possibly exist such a thing as a poem without a topic?! But then again, I suppose that in speaking of He, such a suggestion is not entirely without truth. As for He's making of poems, there was no case in which he didn’t first establish a topic and then search for an informing principle (yi $). But then he'd tum around and, having established the informing principle, look for a(nother) topic (title). ‘The reason, for the most part, was that he took as his topics things that had to be kept quiet about, and so he’d make use of other topics (=titles) to obscure them. Master Yao's commentary to Changgu for the most part takes this as its point of departure.’ Clearly, for some readers the question of “topicality” in Li He's lyrics was troublesome enough to prompt them to assert that his topics were specifically designed to obfuscate the real origins of the lyric utterance. ‘These issues surrounding #i are important in a general way for our understanding of how Li He situated himself among the various strands of Chinese lyric tradition—the generic designation of his collected poetry as 4 # ge shi rather than simply as shi is an indication that from the earliest times his lyrics were seen as belonging to, or perhaps to an extent creating, a generic category distinct from the mainstream of shi poetry. Questions about ii are important in the context of our present focus on historical lyrics as well, for we find among “Cited in Wang Qi 1959, p. 192. *Sanjia, p.194.the ti of Li He such innovations as “posthumously responding to Liu Yun” if fe iH ‘a bizarre mix of historical imagination with the conventions of poetry as a social pastime. Rather than indicate how the ensuing lyric text is “grounded” in the poet’s experience, such ti indicate an imaginative leap, into another historical era, and perhaps into another personality. We will examine both of these aspects in the following sections, and attempt to come to an understanding of both how this odd type of imagined “occasion” is conceived of by Li He, and further to understand how this type of formal experiment fits in with preoccupations that ‘were in a sense common to the literary sensibility of the age. The imaginative processes underlying Li He's historical lyrics is most fully expressed in the few poems where the title itself is followed by a preface, allowing the poet to go into greater detail about just how the lyric was “occasioned.” We tum, then, in the following section, to one such lyric, the “Song on Returning from Kuaiji,” and its accompanying preface. 7IL The Performance of Personality 1. Lie 4&9 , Song on Returning from Kuaiji, with preface Lathe £A' BMERRG FH SREY Bie LF > ROH H Ri MEARE: AER: RERLAAT: ARERR CEACAR) LRER- FORME: RERER> ERRKA KREBS > RARE ARERR RRBER BEF > During the Liang era, Yu Jianwu composed songs in the “Palace style” in poetic exchanges with the emperor's son. When the state went under, Jianwu fled first to Kuaiji; only later did he return home. I infer that he must have left behind some writing (from this experience), yet today there is nothing to be had. So I composed the “Song on Returning from Kuaiji” to fill the lacuna in his sorrow. Lichen of the wilds yellows the pepper-scented walls; damp fireflies fill the hall of the Liang. The “poet by command” from the imperial city, dreams beneath an autumn quilt of the brass palanquin. ‘Wu frosts fleck my homebound temples, my body like these pond-reeds in the dying year. ‘With longing gaze, I part with the metal fish, a wayfaring subject, abiding in adversity.” “Wang Qi 1959, pp. 36-38. "Reading Notes: 38‘The poetic corpus of the Liang Jianwen emperor Xiao Gang if $9 (503-51)—the “prince” of this song—and his circle of court poets was one of the most important historical models for Li He's poetic craft. One need look no further than this song itself for evidence of the extent to which he had studied their poetic language. It was thus perhaps only natural that Li He, in addition to admiring and drawing on that corpus, should have felt a special interest in the history of the period, and in the fates of those poets. It is exactly in its melding of the roles of amateur historian and poet, however, that this song, along with its preface, represents a radical departure from the genres of poems on history that had prevailed up to Li He’s day. 1.3: “by command” A 4 : a set phrase that would be used at the head of a poem's title to indicate that it was composed at the command of the prince, L 4: “brazen palanquin” $4 4 : part of the crown prince's prerogative, used here to refer metonymically to him. 1 6: as Wu Qiming points out (Wu 1986, p. 324), this line echoes the following story about Gu Yue and the Jianwen emperor Xiao Gang Mf $94, as recorded in the Shishuo Xinyu te i, ‘WF 95 : the two were of the same age, but Gu Yue's hair had become streaked with white, while Xiao Gang’s remained pure black. Xiao Gang asked Gu, “how is it your hair has ‘turned white first?” Gu answered, “the allure of reed and willow is shed at the first hint of autumn; the essence of pine and cypress grows only more vigorous after a frost” (See Xu Zhen’e 1987, p.65). 1. 7: Most commentators have mistakenly read this as referring (anachronistically, for the poem’s Liang dynasty setting) to the “golden fish pouch” 4> ,@ $€ bestowed on high officials (of third rank and higher) during the Tang. But as Wu Qiming, following the hint of ‘Wang Funan, observes, “metal fish” must refer to the fish-shaped lock on the door of the crown prince's palace; Yu Jianwu would have had charge of this lock during his tenure as zhong shu zi BR in the retinue of the crown prince. The fish shape of the lock signified “watchfulness”—since fish never close their eyes (see Wu Qiming 1986, pp. 249-50). Thus, far from the sloppy historical inaccuracy some have read here, the “metal fish” is perhaps the single most effective image in the poem, combining as it does the poignant specificity of reference to Yu Jianwu's former intimacy with Xiao Gang with an ironic reflection on Yu Jianwu' s own present wakefulness. 39‘The awkward English translation given above for the closing phrase of the preface is an attempt at suggesting the jarring effect of the original. The use of the term bu #— patch” or “fill in”—to describe the intended function of a poem is previously known only in the Jin poet Shu Xi’s XK *f six Buwang shi 4% 1-3 , written to “fill in the gaps” in the canonical Odes left by those six which survive only as titles without words. Is Li He then suggesting that we extend the notion of “‘canonicity” associated with the Confucian Odes so as to include the works of later poets? Are we to think of the life of each poet as imparting a collective integrity to the sum of their writings, just as Confucius, by placing his seal of editorial approval on the canonical Odes, was thought to have defined their special status? These possibilities certainly bear consideration, but a simpler solution to the question just ‘what Li He meant when he said “bu gi bef” may be closer at hand, if rather than looking for precedents for the notion of “bu” in poetic works, we look instead to the historiographical wadition. Liu Zhiji #] Fo #& , the eminent historiographer of the early Tang, described the category of yishi {& F in the following terms: ALLE) RFK T- RRR: VHME- AA BHLEMEME The duties of state historians include recording events and recording words. As their seeing and hearing are not all-inclusive, there will unavoidably be that which is left out. Thereupon those who are fond of the strange fill in ‘what has been lost (bu qi suo wang #& Jt Hp). *Pu Qilong 1991, juan 10, p.1. Li Zongwei 1985, pp. 29-36, gives a valuable discussion of historiographical issues as they relate to the development of the chuangi genre, in which he cites this passage. While the usage of the term bu is under consideration, one might note in passing the chuangi title “Filling in Jiang Zong’s ‘Tale of the White Gibbon’” #& 3.48 ¢ © MAE) (waditionally thought to be an early Tang work; for an argument that its provenance is from the Kai Yuan period, see ibid.), as well as the example from Shen Yazhi 40That the affinities of Li He’s poetry with what we now think of as early “narrative fiction” genres go far beyond his reliance on such works for literary allusions was, to my knowledge, first pointed out by Wu Qiming: Though students of poetry of earlier times have picked out and commented on some of the phrases and allusions in Changji’s poetry that come from old xiaoshuo +J> #E , they have yet to self-consciously explore Li He's Poems in keeping with this artistic rule {ie., that of ancient xiaoshuo]— there are compositional conceptions (shi yi # % ) that clearly derive from. ancient xiaoshuo, yet these have not been picked out and commented on.* ‘This observation is of the utmost importance, both for our understanding of Li He’s poetry and for much of the argument of the present study. Though traditional critics often expressed unease at the use of noncanonical texts as sources of poetic allusions, the challenge that their use simply as literary allusions presented to traditional hermeneutic practice was in fact minimal. References to fantastic tales and the like could be treated simply as lexical items whose meaning in the poem could still be firmly grounded in the biographical and political existence of the poet; while the lexicon might be unsavory in itself, the ultimate horizon within which that lexicon was enacted in an utterance was still given by the historically determinable “intentions” of the poet. But when the relationship between xiaoshuo and poem is no longer that between lexical source and utterance, but rather one of model and imitation, or of story and reperformance, the ground on which standard hermeneutic practice might which will be discussed below at greater length. “Wu Qiming 1986, p. 323. 41function is removed, for the ultimate horizon within which the normative meaning of the poem is to occur may itself be imaginary. Tt would be misleading to speak of this difference in terms of a shift from an autobiographical to a “fictional” mode of lyric. For both kinds of poem claim to represent or embody a performance, and the givenness of the performance embodied in a poem in the autobiographical mode can only appear obvious under the accumulated weight of canons of interpretation and carefully-nurtured habits of reading. We can say only that, by the ninth century, a long tradition tended to ask the reader of a poem to imagine that poem as embodying a performance by the biographical author. In certain of Li He's poems, we are asked to imagine quite different things, some of them, as Wu Qiming has pointed out, clearly derived from the worlds of xiaoshuo. ‘The claim Li He is making for this song, simply put, is that it will serve to fill a gap in the historical record. While noting the paradoxical nature of such a claim, we should also observe that the practice of fitting historical narratives with a lyric outbursts at a crucial moment in the story of a central character was quite familiar within the Chinese historiographical tradition. In this connection we need not speculate on the precise origins of lyrics like the famous “Song of Gaixia” 3% F & supposed to have been sung by Xiang Yu on the eve of his final defeat; what is significant is that such songs were considered part of what constituted a “complete” account of a moment of high drama in history. But such lyrics, when encountered in historical narrative, could be assumed to stem from some independent oral or textual tradition available to the historian, and, ultimately, to someone who overheard athe actual “performance.” Li He’s preface, however, far from suggesting that he is relying on some independent source for this song, makes it clear that the song is both “made” by Li He himself and at the same time a “patch” in the historical tradition of the life of Yu Jianwu. Thus the problem that remains to consider lies in Li He’s claim to be able to recreate the song that “must have been” sung at a particular moment in the past. If we take that claim seriously, we see that the preface serves as a kind of frame, marking off the boundary between two fundamentally different kinds of utterance. In the preface Li He speaks to us in his own person; past the margin of the preface, however, he becomes a medium for the voice of Yu Jianwu.’ This type of “framing” function, while relatively rare in yuefis poetry, is reminiscent of some of the frame narratives and dialogues of the fis tradition. One might think, for example, of the relation between preface and “rhapsody” in Sun Chuo's 2f * You Tiantaishan fu 3 KA sh} In all the world there are few who can mount it; rulers have no means of ‘making sacrifices there. Thus matters pertaining to it are absent from standard “There were antecedents in the yuefi tradition for this kind of writing—see, for example, the Jin poet Shi Chong’s 4 #% “Wang Mingjun ci” E 8 & 3] (XQH, pp.642-643), ‘whose preface bears some strong resemblances to the Li He preface discussed here: “Wang Mingjun” originally read “Wang Zhaojun.” {t was changed because it broke the taboo of Wendi’s name. The Xiongnu were at the peak of their power, and asked for a marriage alliance with Han. Yuandi made the match with a daughter of good family from the palace women’s quarters, Mingjun. Formerly when the princess married Wusun, pipa songs were commanded to be performed on horseback, to comfort her longing on the road. When they sent off Mingjun, it must have been like that as well. The new tunes they composed were full of the sounds of grief and resentment. Thus I (now) recount it on paper. 8works; its name stands forth in records of the unusual. But can the stimulus behind all the maps and images be nothing? All but those who leave the ‘world behind and disport themselves in the Way, who cease eating grains and feed on the zhi & fungus, how could they float aloft and make an abode there? All but those who put faith in the remote and search out the dark, whose earnest belief communicates with the spiritual, how could they foster a likeness of it in flights of imagination? For this reason I spurred on my spirits and spun my thoughts about, chanting by day, waking by night—and, somewhere between bending down and gazing up, it was as if I had climbed it more than once. Having just freed myself of the entangling nets, I will entrust myself forever to this peak. Unable to withstand the onset of chanting and imagining, I briefly set loose lovely words as an outlet for my feelings.’ Sun Chuo’s preface tells of his experience as a reader musing over geographical treatises, and in particular over a tantalizing lacuna in those treatises. The preface speaks of a special kind of reading that makes the given text an object of meditation, at the end of which the limitation of the text is overcome. In conjunction with the text of the fit itself, this preface also serves 10 articulate a split in the voice of its author, between the musing reader of the preface itself and the visionary of the fit, who is able to report first-hand on the mountain that no one in this world has been able to reach. This kind of split seems to describe fairly well the function of Li He's “Song of Return from Kuaiji,” with the exception that the remoteness that Li He claims to be able to penetrate is not one of geographical location, but rather of time. While it seems, as suggested above, that the best way to make sense of this preface is to see Li He as importing the mindset of the yishi historian into the composition of lyric, we must also observe that his selection of historical theme is strongly informed by his “QSS, p. 1806.preoccupations as a lyric poet. Beyond the obvious level of connection mentioned above—Li He's involvement with the themes and style of the Liang court poets—the episode he chose to “patch” in this poem proves to be struck through with symmetries and ironies specifically tied to the performance and function of lyric. The biographical entry on Yu Jianwu in the Nanshi describes the situation in 550 to which Li He alludes in his preface. Xiao Gang had been enthroned as a puppet emperor by the northem rebel Hou Jing #@-%, who had captured the capital in the previous year, along with the entire Liang court (Yu Jianwu himself was serving in the puppet court as Minister of Revenues) ‘At that time the upriver border governors, based in their local capitals, were all resisting Hou Jing. Jing, usurping the name of the emperor, ordered Jianwa on a mission to Jiangzhou to deliver a communique to the Duke of Dangyang, (Xiao) Daxin. Daxin thereupon surrendered to the rebels; Jianwu took this opportunity to flee into the east. Later when the rebel Song Zixian captured Kuaiji, he caught Jianwu, and was on the point of killing him. He first said, “T hear you know how to write poems. Write ‘one right now—if you can do it, ll consider it ransom for your life.” No sooner had Jianwu grasped the brush than the poem was done. The diction was exceedingly beautiful. Zixian freed him then, appointing him sheriff of Fianchang. (But) Fianwu continued on, avoiding well-ravelled roads, to Jiangling” This background gives us important insight into the implicit structure of Li He’s song, and pethaps as well into his specific motivation for choosing the particular episode of Yu Jianwu's flight west from Kuaiji to “patch.” Li He's preface gives us a clue when be encapsulates the success and favor Yu Jianwu had once enjoyed by observing that he had “composed songs... in poetic exchanges with the prince.” The suspicion that this remembered. scene lies behind the (re)construction of the song Li He places in Yu Jianwu's mouth is NS, p. 1248. 45strongly confirmed by the full account given above in the Nanshi biography, revealing as it does that the term yingjiao ren “one who composes poems by command” at line 3 of the song is a binerly ironic play on words. In the remembered scene, the phrase had been a genteel fiction, a maner of showing deference to a prince who, in engaging in the game of exchanging songs, was in effect treating the poet as an equal. The “command” under which ‘Yu Jianwu composed his poem for Song Zixian, however, was clearly a brutally literal one. Thus more than simply expressing sympathy with the reversal in Yu Jianwu's personal fortunes—his fall from favored courtier to war captive and then penniless fugitive—Li He's song is a reflection specifically on the ironic reversal in Yu Jianwu’s status as a performer. One way of explaining the logic of this reversal would be to suggest that, as a court poet, Yu Jianwu functioned in a setting where what we have been calling the “scene of performance” and the “‘scene of utterance” seemed, tantalizingly, congruent. The style of the Liang court poets was frequently attacked in later ages as superficial and devoid of the grounding in lived experience that the traditional hermeneutic looked on as the life-blood of poetry. But mightn’t one suggest the possibility that at least for a poet who composed “palace style” poetry in the very palace that gave the style its name, such poetry might be both the “performance” of an omate poetic idiom and, at the same time, a perfectly well-formed “utterance,” a perfectly normal way of communicating, faithfully reflecting the conditions and surroundings of the poet's life? Certainly the notion that the style had its “native habitat” in the Liang court underlies the pathos of the scene in which Yu Jianwu, wrenched painfully from that habitat, produces a “piece” of that style, as he might have rendered up any other precious luxury item from the court, to ransom his life from robbers—the compulsion under 46which he writes then is no longer the proper kind of compulsion, and Song Zixian is clearly not the proper kind of audience. A reading along these lines suggests that it was the ironies of Yu Jianwu’s cruelly contrasting experiences as “poet by command” that constituted Li He's “informing principle” in the “Song on Returning from Kuaiji.” If this inference is valid, pethaps what arrested Li He's imagination was just this vision of lyric as an activity tragically displaced from its proper setting.* Let us now reconsider the questions of “topicality” with which this section began, in light of the curious relation between preface and lyric we have observed in this work. It would certainly be possible to point to aspects of Li He's biographical experience that might partially explain his choice of this picture of Yu Jianwu as a performer of court poetry tom irrevocably from the court—one thinks immediately of the critical commonplaces identifying the “taboo controversy” that prevented Li He from participating in the jinshi examination as the defining event in his career, robbing him of the social and political status to which his literary talents entitled him, or of his recurring references to his own standing as a member of the Tang ruling family, which made him, in his own mind at any rate, a sort of prince manque. But such explanations, though certainly relevant in a general way to an understanding of Li He's imaginative world, fall short when considered as potential motivations for the composition of ‘see, for example, the discussion of the phrase zhun jian i& # in Wu Qiming 1986, pp. 250-51. a7the “Song of Returning from Kuaiji,” for they do nothing to explain the particular form of historical fantasy that we see at work there. What remains as an unexplained residuum is exactly the apparent fascination with the odd polarity of immediacy and distance implicit in the act of performing an historical figure—insofar as the performance is successful, one is able to hear the voice of the recreated figure as clearly as one’s own, in a performative “now” that negates the lapse of intervening time. At the same time, to engage in such a performance is to hear one’s own voice as coming from outside oneself, from across a great distance.’ A final observation on the problem of “occasion” will bring our discussion of this poem to a close. It was suggested above that the historiographical precedent of including lyrics at crucial points in biographical narrative provided the proper context for understanding the generic constitution of this lyric by Li He, and we observed that, while relatively unusual, the independent composition of lyrics to fit such historical moments was not unknown prior to Li He's time. What sets the “Song on Returning from Kuaiji” apart, however, is that while it is clearly constructed within the general context of Yu Fianwu’s Nanshi biography, it is not set in an unambiguous situation within that biography—we cannot guess to whom, if anyone, or in what precise setting such a lyric might have been sung or written by Yu Jianwu. This sets this lyric apart from the “Song of Gaixia,” from Shi Chong’s song on Wang Zhaojun, and, indeed. from the song Li He might just as well have written in Yu Jianwu’s voice for the "It could be noted that this description of “performance” also fits very well with some traditional notions of the process of reading shi—to read a poet was to stand in his shoes at the particular moment from which the poem originated (see discussion in preceding chapter, especially n. 7). What makes the texts under discussion here unusual is the way in which they foreground the assumptions about “performative recreation” that remain implicit in private reading.occasion of Song Zixian’s demand of a poem for a life. If the “Song on Retuming from Kuaiji” were in fact to appear in Yu Fianwu’s collection, we would have to characterize it as lyric in a very private mode. What, then, does this “private” aspect mean, given that it was recreated by Li He? For an attempt at an answer we might retum once more to the odd phrasing of the preface, bu gi bei #4 % #%. The lacuna in the historical tradition that this lytic sets out to “patch” is not one that will be obvious to the casual reader; without an intimate knowledge of Yu Jianwu's sorrow one can have no sense of anything that might need filling in, and only one who has a deep sympathetic understanding of Yu Jianwu will feel that “he must have left some writing behind from this experience.” We saw in the case of ‘Sun Chuo's You Tiantaishan fu preface that while the mountain was “out there” in the real world, and documented in texts that would be available to anyone with the will to seek them out, the process that enabled Sun Chuo to see the mountain was one that drew on spiritual “teperformance” of Yu Jianwu, Yu Jianwu's private grief and Li He's unusual powers of sympathetic resources that set him apart from ordinary folk. In a similar way, in Li He’ understanding become flip sides of the same coin—both are given expression in a performance that belongs simultaneously to Li He and to Yu Jianwu. 2. He Manzi ‘The song He Manzi 4° s+ is an item from the imperial repertoire preserved in the Jiaofang 49HAH FR. The Yuefiu shiji describes the tradition relating to the origin of this piece in the preface to Bai Juyi’s ywefuu poem of the same title: RGRSA: “MRF MAPREAKRA BH] Bt BUR ERR” (RMR) NRE H FARMBAEH CTRF) MARR PE Fe” MH Be Bai Juyi of the Tang said: “He Manzi was a singer from Cangzhou during the Kaiyuan period (713-741). When she was about to be executed, she submitted this song to the throne to redeem herself from death. In the end she was not spared.” The Duyang Miscellany says: “During the reign of ‘Wenzong (827-840), the palace lady Shen Aqiao danced He Manzi. The tune, the words, and the manner were all alike lilting and free-flowing.” Thus we see this was a dance piece as well. Bai Juyi’s poem is as follows: ERRIAALZ + EXAM RHR — ORAS AARAMBH- From generation to generation it is told that “He Manzi” was the name of a person; only when she was about to submit to execution was the piece completed. A piece of four phrases, sung in eight repeats: from the beginning it’s all the sound of heartbreak. “Laurence Picken has reconstructed scores for a piece bearing this title based on Japanese S-string zither tablature. See Picken 1981, v. 4, pp. 10-21, and v. 5, pp. 64-66, for discussions of the relevant Chinese and Japanese sources. See also Gimm 1966, pp. 343-45. Ren Bantang 1982 presents an exhaustive analysis of the sources (v.2, pp. 61-67; 317-319). "YSJ, p. 1133. This poem appears in Bai’s collected works under the title “Listening to song: six quatrains.” 50Bai Juyi’s poem contains in narrow scope many of the characteristic elements that recur in the literature that grew around this piece. First is the story of the singer’ failed attempt at buying her life with a new song, an odd set of circumstances that have the result that what was once a person's name is transferred to a piece of music seamlessty—the musical number coming into being precisely at the moment of the death of the author whose name it takes. A second recurring aspect of reworkings of the He Manzi appears in the second couplet, which oddly justaposes a finical precision about the musical structure of the piece with the assertion that the sound of it is “all heartbreak.” Thus in the story of He Manzi—what we might term the myth underlying performances of the musical number He Manzi—there is a blurring of the boundary between “performance” and “utterance,” between song as product of craft and song as expressing a particular person's response to a particular moment of experience, that is somewhat reminiscent of the situation we observed with the “myth” of Yu Jianwu which formed the basis for Li He's song analyzed above. He Manzi’s song is presented first of all as an object of value, proposed by her as the price of her own life. At the same time it expresses her anguish in the moments before her execution—anguish that is there for discriminating listeners to hear. From the perspective of the present inquiry, it is this blurring of “utterance” and “performance” in the myth itself, and the uneasy balance between artistic “performance” and biographical “reenactment” that we will see in the anecdotal materials surrounding the subsequent performance history of the song, that make the He Manzi tradition a particularly interesting case.‘The most extended poetic treatment of this performance tradition is the long yuefie-style “He Manzi Song” 45f 3 F¥Kof Yuan Zhen A, 4K (779-831): LAT HERECH: ANF PU MF > RE ARRM: KMRTKRS - LABPTRE RZ: — CKREARMM: RG CTR) BDZ > PHAM KARE: TL REAR ERR: RAAT RMS GRAM A: BURA FE> WV. RRMA ER: EGRRPE MELE: bHELERE- V. SH ARR EZ + Kok FIM He > ARMOR ER : BRL - Vi Z GRA BH HVT FH? BEFRRAH: — — KAAKK: VLRASASMS > THRE WEE > MR MEKE R SKEREHR> VIL PREG: SHRM K > KGASELG: FERRER M- KMRERE HE BR MLAST > SLR RR MT LR RHE - XEPHRE PH: (RL) SRREM- PTR MH FHS RR: 32I He Man could sing, could lilt and twine; in the Tianbao years, she was deemed a rarity. Caught up in fetters, confined to prison; her mournful tone, in the “water-mode,” sang her frustration. 0 ‘The Pear Garden comrades reported to Xuanzong; her one song gained favor—the restraining nets were loosed. Then He Man was made the title of a song, inscribed personally in an imperial score, arranged by the Music Bureau. m When Yu entered the palace her skill ran out; ‘Ye, though blessed with years, could not sustain the song. From without, in vain they could remember just the words; the measure-beats barely established, it sounded outlandishly off. Vv I've come beyond the Lake, to pay a visit to the provincial governor, {just when the ash has flown from the jade pipe of mid-spring. ‘A grand banquet in the pavilion by the Yangtse is held for red rouge close by the seats, warm flower-branches. v ‘And now Youxiong treads the gaudy mat; before she’s said a fragrant word, her manner is bold and assured. Emerald brows: her roving glance rocks the sparrow hairpin; lapis sleeves: the tassels on her singer’s garb flip eggs of cranes. vi Face composed, eyes intent—the first note rings out; clouds stopped and dust falling—what need mention them? ‘Ata great distance a stone-chime rings remote and clear; cone by one, strung pearls, even and round. va Infringing on yu, leaving shang, she shifts the feel of the mode; lingering with feeling, divining the intent, she casts pipes and strings aside. ‘The Xiang consort’s omate harp comes over the water, beyond the void all is full of the sound of the daughter of Qin’s whistle.var Lingering and heartfelt, the repeated “break” is most eamest of all; arranging her garments, she’s quite relaxed and easy. Ice clogs a distant rill: choked, then clear again; ‘Warblers linger among evening flowers: their cries grow gradually lax. K Brows knit, voice choked, as though herself aggrieved; the Zheng sleeves are cast off, Xi Shi spreads them. On the dark mountain a wild-goose’s cry cracks bamboo at dawn; a mournful gibbon in the Wu gorges calls out for companions at night. x In ancient times, when feudal lords banqueted foreign guests, “The Deer Cries” was played thrice, jade tablets arrayed. How does that compare to this one song of Youxiong, just ended— the ivory tallies marking the game, in the red shell bowl?” “Yuan Zhen ji, pp. 309-310. Reading notes (by stanza): TI: Ye 3€ : it seems likely that the reference is to the singer commemorated in Shea Yazhi’sdt 2 A “Record of the Singer, Ye" A H FZ (see QTW, p. 7606; Shen Xiaxian ji, j. 5, pp. 1v-2v.) Shen Yazhi recalls hearing her sing near the end of her life, in Yuanbe 6 (811). [have been unable to locate any other mention of the singer “Yu Jia.” TV: just when the ash flies...: tradition had it that jade pitch-pipes could be made to match the “tones” of each of the months of the year. Ash placed over the opening of each tube would puff out with the coming of the corresponding month. V: cranes’ eggs: a figure for precious stones. VI: stopped clouds, falling dust: Liezi tells of the singer Qin Qing 4 , whose voice caused clouds to stop moving in the sky. The singing of her student Han E 4-44, stirred dust from the tops of the roofbeams. VU: Xiang consort: E Huang PY ff and Ni Ying + 3 , wives of the legendary emperor Shun, were said to have become goddesses of the river Xiang upon the latter’s death. Daughter of Qin: Nong Yu # 4 , daughter of Qin Mugong 4 ## 2b , was supposed to have ascended into heaven along with her lover Xiao Shi #f &. , who played the xiao 7 pipes. X: “The Deer Cry:” JR, %% , the first poem in the Xiaoya section of the Book of Odes, traditionally sung at banquets bestowed on ministers by their lord. Ivory tallies: drinking- parties during the Tang normally involved games with elaborate protocols, requiring guests or attending singing-girls to perform various musical and verbal feats; those who were judged to have violated the rules were made to drink. The tallies were used in keeping track of which ‘S54Bian Xiaoxuan dates this poem to year 9 of the Yuanhe period (814), and the fourth stanza tells us that the occasion of its composition was in the second month of the lunar calendar.” s of musical performance that he The poem is one of many by this author recounting seems personally to have witnessed. As is often the case with such works, the poem takes its name from the performance mode in question. Such poems are undoubtedly of value as documents of ninth-century musical performance; though their descriptive language must be approached critically. As is clearly the case in the present poem, our picture of the original performance is conveyed using a poetic vocabulary composed largely of stock tropes and allusions. Here Yuan Zhen has drawn on the story behind the musical number He Manzi— and perhaps some broad features of the performance mode itself—to pay what amounts to an. elabcrate and mannered compliment to the singer and the banquet’s host. ‘The first two quatrains introduce the story of He Manzi in outline. The second quatrain is of interest for two reasons: first, it gives pointed emphasis to the transformation, akin to apotheosis, of the condemned singer. He Manzi herself disappears from view after the fourth line, thus reinforcing the ambiguity of line 7, where we are told “He Man was made the title of a song.” There is a strong sense that not only the name but the person as well have rules were in force, and whose tum it was to perform. ° Bian Xiaoxuan 1980, p. 224, “As Chen Yinque (1958) observed, in addition to the stock diction in more general circulation, several tums of phrase in poetic descriptions of music were passed among members of the Yuan Zhen-Bai Juyi-Li Shen circle. Thus, to take the present poem as an example, the string of pearls in stanza VI and the icy rill of stanza VII reappear later in Bai Juyi's Pipa xing EAT. 55been transformed into the emblem of a seemingly unapproachable standard of performance. The second point of interest here, more immediately apparent, is Yuan Zhen’s statement, in direct contradiction to the received tradition, that the singer He Manzi received an imperial pardon in retum for the song she created. It is my suspicion that the explanation for this discrepancy lies not in an independent tradition about the origins of this musical number, but rather in the constraints of Yuan Zhen’s own position in writing this poem. For the poem as a whole is composed as a compliment to the singer Tang Youxiong, consisting in the claim that it is only with her rendition that the true tradition of the He Manzi has been realized. Clearly such a compliment would seriously backfire if the story of He Manzi were not purged of reference to the singer’s untimely death. The third stanza goes on to relate how, apparently in spite of the imperially-sponsored transcription of the work, subsequent performers have all been incapable of rendering it properly. Performers like “Yu jia” and “Ye shi,” who serve as foils for the successful performance by Tang Youxiong, are said merely to have grasped the extemals of the piece. ‘With the positive description of Youxiong’s performance, it becomes quite difficult to draw a clear line between the musicological and mythographic aspects of Yuan Zhen's rendition. ‘Some aspects of the description, for example the mention of repetition of the “break” as an. expressive high point of the performance, seem quite specific and plausible in terms of what we know of the structure of Tang song-suites*. We must bear in mind, however, that the “The “break” (po or ru po At, the latter rendered “entering broaching” in the materials prepared by Picken’s Music from the Tang Court group) is one of the structural elements in Tang suite-form songs. While the He Manzi score reconstructed by Picken does not have this structure, there is reason to suspect that the latter is not an accurate reflection of Tang performance practice. See Picken 1981, v. 4, p.15. Ren Bantang 1982 (v.l, pp. 208-9) argues that there were at least two versions of the song, one a song consisting of four lines 56dramatic situation underlying the He Manzi itself involves something akin to a notion of “breakdown.” The “myth” behind the work tells of an accomplished singer who, under circumstances of extreme duress, produces a single extraordinary performance out of those circumstances. It would in that sense be natural to expect accounts of this piece to present a picture of consummate control made poignant by expressive loss of control—the laner perhaps constituting the difference between simply reproducing the musical structure of the piece and actually re-enacting the original mythic scene—at what potential cost to the performer, we shall see as we continue our survey of the literature surrounding He Manzi.'* In this connection, the seventh stanza is the most telling. Its first line, again, is difficult to assess as a musicological document. As we have seen, given the degree to which the mythological material underlying this piece emphasizes aleatory deviation within a tightly-controlled structure, there seems no way to be sure whether the terms “infringing on yu" or “leaving shang behind” are to be taken as describing normal performance practice or, repeated once, the other a suite-form dagu number. Thus it seems possible that Bai Juyi’s oem and this one by Yuan Zhen reflect structurally distinct versions. “The recurring idea that performance of the He Manzi involved some form of loss of control for performer or for audience led Martin Gimm (1966) to speculate along these lines: Might an oriental, pethaps Indian, practice of some ecstatic, motor rhythmic cultic dance lie at the bottom of this piece? This possibility should not be discounted, particularly if we take into account that Ho, the “surname” of the ostensive originator, might indicate, after the usage of that time, its provenance from Ho-kuo, the central Asian state near Kushaniya appearing in Chinese sources from the time of the Northem Dynasties (pp. 344-45). While the ethnographical aspect of this hypothesis would need considerably more evidence to be persuasive, it is interesting as a reaction to the odd relation we have observed between musical performance and personal reenactment that we see in the tradition. 7rather, bold expressive liberties taken by Tang Youxiong during the particular performance ‘Yuan Zhen is describing here. The following line takes the ongoing play between control and loss of control to a rhetorical extreme. Pao xian guan 3 3 $ can only refer to a loss of coordination between the singer and the accompanying ensemble—an odd paradox in what is meant to be praise of a “perfect” performance. Recalling the myth, we might guess that in describing the performance in terms of consummate skill culminating in expressive “breakdown” might not simply be Yuan Zhen's rhetorical flourish, but might rather reflect something of how this piece was heard; for in the myth, it would be exactly the moment of such a breakdown that would have signalled the intrusion of the unique woman at the unique moment before her death into the crafted structure of the song. To test this guess, we must ‘tum to other texts documenting the tradition. Ronee In the Kaiyuan period, the Pear Garden Academy included the musicians Luo Presenter, He Huaizhi, and Lei Haiging. As for their musical instruments, there were some that had stone bridges, strings made of heron- sinew," and that were plucked with iron plectra. With the rebellion of An Lushan and Shi Siming, they were sent wandering about the outside world. ‘There was a provincial candidate named Bai xiucai, who was residing temporarily in the capital. Just then there were palace women and performers who'd come out among the people, and Bai took on a singing- "this is an ad hoc rendering of un ji, which Hong Xingzu says is “like a crane, yellow- white in color” (Hong 184). 58girl from among them. He went to Luo astride a donkey; that night the wind was clear and the moon brilliant, and this beauty suddenly sang a new song. Bai was startled—then she didn’t sing anymore. Over a year later, he travelled to Lingwu, where ministry chief Li Lingyao held a large banquet. Bai took part, seated among the least Prestigious of the guests. There was a grand display of musical performance by professional entertainers. At the point when one of them sang the song “He Manzi,” all the guests listened raptly, and all declared it ‘was surpassingly wonderful. Bai said, “I have a singing-girl whose mode of singing is quite different from this.” He was made to summon her—her hair was in a short bun, and her manner polished and elegant. She submitted the question, “What song was sung just now?” and the answer came, He Manzi. Whereupon she fixed the mode. She lifted her sleeves and let forth her voice. It was pure and brilliant, impassioned and lofty; and the assembled musicians could not follow her. Yet in the ensemble there was this one pipa; the highs and lows of its sound, its smoothings and twistings, revealings and coverings-over, all kept the beat without error. Thereupon [the pipa-player] asked, “Are you not Second Sister Hu from inside the palace?” Hu answered back again, saying, “Are you not Presenter Luo of the Pear Garden Academy?” The two faced one another, ‘shedding copious tears, and could not stop." This anecdote shares many common features of the body of stories centering on the “Pear Garden Academy” musicians who, with the rebellion of An Lushan and the end of ‘Xuanzong’s reign, were dispersed to roam throughout the empire. As is often the case, here there is considerable attention to the pathetic reversal of the singer’s fortunes. Her talents and training were directed towards performance for Xuanzong—a proverbially judicious critic of music—and his court, in the post-tebellion dispensation she is compelled to enter the service of a young man who lacks any particular distinction except, we assume, a fair amount of money. His title of provincial degree holder (xiueai), no less than the donkey he rides and his “Duan Anjic, Pipa lu SE 8% . See Ren Bantang, Tang shengshi v. 2., pp. 63-4. Gimm. 1966 provides a survey of the provenance of this text and its relation to the author’s Yuefic zalu 98 Rt ARAB (pp. 70-75). While I depart from Gimm’s translation (p. 306 ff.) at many points, his extensive commentary remains helpful. Pi]notably low position among the guests at the final banquet scene, signal that he is obtuse, clownish, and above all untalented. The whole point of the attention to the twisted web of political, economic, and cultural status within the story is of course the recognition scene: by recognizing each other within the musical performance that had its proper setting in ‘Xuanzong’s court, the two musicians are able, at least for a time, to attest to their former close relations with the former emperor, trumping all the petty claims of the provincial hierarchy within which they lead their fallen lives. The exact sequence of the recognition affirms our sense that the “He Manzi” involves a tension between technical mastery of the song as object of value, and expressive “breakdown,” indicating the revelation of the unique personal identity in the unique moment. Here, however, the “breakdown” involves the two musicians together, and the identity revealed is not that of He Manzi facing her death, but rather that of the two musicians, whose identities and whose sad fates are revealed to each other and to the audience. Yuan Zhen's rewriting of the ending of the He Manzi myth, we suggested, was motivated by the constraint of his occasion—his praise, which consisted partly in the claim that the singer whom he had just heard had surpassed all earlier performers by performing the “eal” He Manzi, would have sounded rather bleak if he had gone on to point out that the real He Manzi had sung the song just once, and then been executed. Moreover, our readings of some of the accounts surrounding the tradition have bore out the notion that an odd intertwining of the technique of performance and the fate and identity of the performer lies atthe heart of the way this performance tradition was received. We might ask then whether there were cases where the sense of ill-omen which seems in that sense structurally part of the He Manzi was made thoroughly manifest. A performance of the song He Manai figures in a cluster of anecdotes surrounding the last days of the emperor Wuzong (r. 841-846). The miscellany Ju tan lu 3X 4% tells the story in the following way: Meng Cairen”” was good at singing, and found favor with Wuzong. It happened that one day the august frame was taken ill; she was summoned and asked, “If I were to succumb to what can’t be avoided, where will you 207" She replied saying, “If it should be that your majesty's ten-thousand year span were over, let me no longer live!” On this day she was commanded to sing the piece He Manzi. The tone of the melody was moumful and choked, and those who heard it shed tears. When the palace carriage was late being hamessed,” she was in an agony of grief for several days and then died, and was buried at the side of Duanling.”* ‘The 13*-century historian Hu Sanxing 44 = Af cites this passage in his commentary to Sima Guang’s Zizhi tongjian, and comments, “I suspect that this story in fact relates to Wang Cairen, in a variant wadition.”" The latter was a favored consort of Wuzong, and numerous accounts relate her promise to follow Wuzong in death, and her subsequent burial alongside -airen, “person of ability,” was the designation of a class of imperial consorts. *a standard euphemism for the death of an emperor. “Site of Wuzong’s tomb. *ZZTI, p. 8026. 6Lin’an. ‘When the illness of Emperor Wuzong (r. 841-847) grew serious, he relocated to an informal hall. Meng Cairen, who had attained favor by ber singing and sheng-piping, was secretly summoned to attend at his right side. His Majesty looked at her intently, saying, “I am to succumb to what cannot be avoided—what will you do?” She pointed to the pouch of her sheng-pipes, and said, “I beg to hang myself with this.” His majesty was stirred with pity. She spoke again, “I have studied singing. Please allow of “He Manzi,” and, her breath running out, she perished on the spot. His majesty commanded a doctor to attend on her, but he said, “Though her pulse is still warm, her bowels are ruptured.” When the emperor died, his bier was so heavy that it could not be lifted. Those discussing the matter said, “Is he not waiting for the Cairen?” Thereupon they commanded her casket {to be brought]. When the casket arrived, the bier was able to be lifted. Alas! The “talented one” died through sincerity; the emperor gave his command through sincerity. Though one compare this with those stirred by righteousness in antiquity, there will be nothing found surpassing this. When the jinshi Gao Ju passed the examination, he received this [story] from the palace performers at the banquet. The following autumn, many of the writings of the provincial candidates took this as a topic. In the third year of the Dazhong 2 era (849), Lencountered Gao at Youquan.” He sadly told the tale to me, and I was moved to sigh: RAKR AGM HEE OR: RA BMAF) FREB ETA > By chance, because of the coy pout of her delivery, she studied singing in the palace for twelve springs. ‘Yet for the sake of one snatch of “He Manzi,” beneath the springs, she must lament the former “‘talent.”"* Yan Shoucheng 1983, pp. 68-69. mountain in Hangzhou prefecture, about twenty kilometers south-east of present-day 62This translation of the final line is not the mast obvious reading, which would be to take it as saying more immediately that we must now lament Meng Cairen, who has recently died. But the possibility of this other way of construing the reference is what gives the poem its effectiveness. Meng Cairen’s fate burst upon her from out of her performance of “He Manzi,” and it was the fate of He Manzi. The tradition surrounding the singer and the song bring to the surface some of the implications about the power and danger of lyric reperformances of personality we see in other texts of this period. 63TIL Performance and Time In addition to these unsettling and often ill-omened lyric experiments with song as the reperformance of a personality, another distinctive aspect of some early ninth-century writers’ treatment of the past in lyric relates to the sense of lyric time. In certain writers of this period ‘we see a type of evocation of the past that is quite different from most earlier historical lyric. In these ninth-century texts, the past is presented as partaking of a radically different temporal order from the quotidian present. Here again we might think of these stylistic and structural developments in terms of a ‘chuangi-like” mindset informing lyric composition—though the analogy with the framed discourse of the fis tradition, and in particular the older visionary poetics of the Chuci tradition, remain powerful underlying models. Once again, we begin with Li He. 1. Song of the Bronze Immortal Taking Leave of the Han, with preface! MLA RRR LR RAEHULFAA Be ETEFERRELEE BWA) RAE AR: STRFE WA BR bye RE > SHEHERS EH (PMMA RR “Wang Qi 1959, pp. 66-67 (cf. Frodsham, pp. 65-67).ARH RKRE: BM SRRAS > EMBBBRE) STATLER: RTERRFZ: RMREHHF- ZH RAL TM WS Rie GK > SMES MM LEAWKAHE > MER LAK: MRE BER) > In the eighth month of Qinglong Year One of emperor Ming of the Wei, palace officials under imperial command harnessed carriages and went west to take the dewpan-holding immortal of emperor Xiaowu of the Han, desiring to erect it a the front hall. When the palace officials had removed the basin, the immortal, as it was on the point of being loaded onto the carriage, shed copious tears. Thereupon the scion of Tang princes Li Changji composed the “Song of the Bronze Immortal Taking Leave of the Han.” Master Liu of Maoling, the “Autumn Wind” sojoumner— neighing of horses heard by night, but dawn reveals no hoofprints. ‘Cassias by the filligreed railing trail an autumn fragrance; in the thirty-six palace halls, mildew spreads an emerald hue. ‘Wei functionaries harness chariots, heading a thousand Li off; at East Pass, a sour wind shoots the pupils. Bearing nothing but the Han moon out the palace gate, pure lord-recalling tears—like molten lead. Wilted orchid sends off the traveller on the Xianyang road, if heaven could feel, heaven too would be old. the basin, he passes alone into desolate moonlight; the city by the Wei already distant, the sound of waves faint. 65In the preface to this lyric, Li He again follows the pattem familiar from historical writing, in which the historical narrative, having reached a critical point, it is interrupted for a transcription of the words of a song that is associated with that moment. Seen in this context, however, the present example is unusual in that Li He seems as it were to have written himself into the narrative. In the first example, there was a clearly articulated moment within the preface—where Li He had begun by presenting himself as a reader responding to the historical record—at which he announced that he would enter imaginatively into the person of Yu Jianwu, to recreate the words of a song that “must have” been sung. Here, however, the temporal lapse between the original event and Li He's composition of the lyric is glossed over with the word sui # , “thereupon,” which, while not specific as to the precise amount of time elapsed, within historical narrative is used in the sense of “the next thing that happened, following as a direct consequence from what has just been related.” The parallelism between the references to Han Wudi, Wei Mingdi, and Li He himself by their respective dynasties and formal titles suggests that all three are to be taken in within the same large-scale historical vista, a temporal perspective from which one could indeed say “thereupon” to describe the sequence linking the moving of the bronze immortal and the composition of a song by “Li Changji”— perhaps, the temporal perspective of the bronze immortal itself. At any rate, in referring to himself by his ai 5 , “Changji,” where normal linguistic convention would require that one use one’s own ming % in referring to oneself, Li He does give the impression that he is speaking of himself at one remove. The narrative voice that speaks to us in the preface would thus seem by implication to be not one of the actors in the scene, but 66rather a neutral narrator, relating a historical wadition about Han Wudi, Wei Mingdi, the bronze immortal, and “Li Changj.” But surely the form of Li He's reference to himself in this preface is only a hint. ‘What aspects of the song itself might we point to in attempting to explain its character as a “reperformance” of a historical scene? How, in other words, does the song set the time of its performance off from the biographical time of the poet? To begin with the most obvious point, the time of the song is set off as the time during which we must consent to believe that the bronze immortal is sentient. Along with this imaginative leap, we might group the most daring touches by which it is enforced upon us—the “‘sour” wind, the lead tears, and the moment of inversion when, in order to feel the pathos of the conditional “if heaven had feelings, heaven too would be old,” we must lose sight of the fact that this complaint is Presented in the voice of a being that, by our real-life standards, can neither have feelings nor grow old. These effects might be classed loosely as what Qian Zhongshu has designated “twisted metaphor” (qu yu #7 ¥).’ This notion seems quite helpful for our understanding of *Qian Zhongshu 1986, p. 51: ‘Two things bear a resemblance, thus one uses “this” as metaphor for “that”; however, the resemblance between “this” and “that” is only in one aspect, not in the objects as a whole... Changji, though, often starts from the one aspect that resembles, and extends it analogically to the other aspects that are not similar to begin with...“A Ditry from Heaven” says, “by the silver banks, flowing clouds imitate the sound of water.” Clouds may be compared to water, since both flow. Apart from this they have no resemblance. But once under Changji’s pen, then clouds flow like water, and are also like water in that they flow and have sound... Other cases, like “Spring Longing”: “the spring wind blows the tesses’ shadow,” “Going from Changgu to the Rear Gate of Luoyang”: “in the stony rivulet, the frozen sound of waves,” and “Song of the Bronze Immortal Taking Leave of the Han”: “clear tears like molten lead”—these are all analogical extensions that go yet one level further. 7the “estrangement” of lyric voice and lyric time that we have observed in Li He’s historical songs. In the context of the present discussion, however, we are particularly interested in the way the imaginative experience of the song is “staged” as an event in time, and the way in which the lyric manipulates our sense of chronology. For our purposes, then, we will focus in particular on the opening and closing devices in this song, and particularly at the role of sound imagery in creating a sense of altered temporality. The first couplet presents a daybreak scene—an opening device long familiar from the tradition of narrative yuefic poetry. Itis, however, a daybreak scene with an odd twist, far from the world of Dt RAM: RRRRR- ‘The sun comes out from the south-east hollow, and shines on the hall of our Qin clan.” For only on coming to the last words of the second line do we realize that the setting is in fact daybreak, and that the subject of the first line “Master Liu of Maoling,” the Wu emperor of the Wester Han dynasty (r. 140-86 B.C.E.), on whose orders the bronze immortal was cast, has been invoked only to have his presence denied. Before we come to the word “daybreak” (xiao 8 ), in fact, we might be inclined to consider the first line—two epithets, “Master Liu of Maoling” and “the autumn wind sojourner,” referring to the same emperor—as an odd prolepsis. For the association between Wudi and Maoling arose only when he was buried there, while “autumn wind sojoumer” refers to him by way of an allusion to the “Autumn Wind Lyric” (Qiu Feng Ci #k i ): His majesty bestowed the honor of a visit to Hedong, and sacrificed to the *“Moshang Sang” +. #%, XQH, p. 259. 68Earth Sovereign. He looked back on the royal precincts, and delighted in mid-stream [on his journey back, on the Yellow River). He banqueted with hhis assembled officials, and his majesty was exceedingly joyful. ‘Whereupon he made his own “Autumn Wind Lyric” ‘Autumn winds stir, white clouds fly; grasses and leaves yellow and fall, geese retum south. ‘The worts blossom, and chrysanthemums are fragrant; long for a lovely one, and cannot forget. Sailing our tiered ship, we traverse the Fen and He; athwart the midstream currents, raising pure waves. whistle and drum cry out, the rowing song goes forth; ‘when joy reaches its utmost, there is much sorrow; how long can youthful vigor last—what can one do about age7* As of the end of the first line of Li He's poem, we may still be under the impression that Wii is to be the subject of the opening section, and we may thus be confused by these epithets both referring to his poetry and anticipating his death.’ After a first line that is in effect one long name for Han Wudi, our expectation that he will be the subject of some action is thwarted in two stages—first, what we “hear” is not the emperor himself, but the neighing * XQH, p. 94. ‘Later critics tended to interpret these epithets as expressions of disdain. Wang Qi, Li He's most thorough commentator, even finds them excessive: to take an emperor of antiquity and dismissively refer to him as “Master Liu,” and on top of that to call him “Autumn Wind sojourner”—this was one of the points where Li He was lacking in “principle” (alluding to a criticism made by Du Mu in his preface to Li He's works). ‘Wu Qiming (pp. 266-68) responds to Wang Qi’s protest by showing that it was practice to refer to emperors—and even to address them directly—as “master” (Jang). I would like to point out in passing that Wu's examples in fact relate not to Tang emperors in general, but Tather to Xuanzong in particular. Thus it may be that the epithet “Liu lang” applied to Han ‘Widi here is neither an insult per se nor the mere application of a contemporary linguistic custom, but rather an indication that both Han Wudi and Tang Xuanzong are being assimilated to the same paradigm of the “emperor/performer.” On this subject, see section 3 of this chapter. 69of horses;* finally, when daybreak comes, we learn that even the existence of the horses is in doubt. The first line had named Han Wudi by reference to his performance of a particular song, but at the same time seemed to anticipate his death; the first couplet as a whole suggests that Han Wudi may be present, only to deny the possibility, and to inform us that in the moming scene that forms the setting for the first stanza, all that remains is a vaguely remembered sound.’ If we ask ourselves who it is who heard the sound and, in the light of dawn, vaguely remembers it, we find ourselves already in the strange temporal realm of the song. For the memory must be assumed to exist in the mind of the bronze immortal. This raises the further question just how to read the sequence of day following night—apart from the commonsense observation that bronze figures do not age at the same rate as humans, and thus might thus be thought of as experiencing duration differently, it was a long-standing commonplace of ‘narratives about immortals that they in fact lived at a different rate from humans.’ Given that we are being asked in this song to imagine a being who, having experienced the reign of Han “Two poems about horses are attributed to Wudi, and this may well be the ground of the association here. “The role of sound and smell images (the latter occurring in line 3 in the present instance) in Li He’s poetry is central, and while it is a commonplace in the critical tradition that he uses such images frequently, what is missed by treating the instances in terms of frequency it the structural function they often perform, which can only be seen when such images are studied within the temporal structure of the particular poem. It is worth noting in this connection that these two senses are associated, in historical traditions about immortals and ghosts, with moments of epiphany. The same two senses, moreover, take on a heightened importance in the context of sacrificial ritual. The sound, or imagined sound, of carriages and horses, in particular, was associated with both of these contexts, especially with the phase of the departure of the spirit. “The Chinese counterpart to Rip Van Winkle would be Wu Zhi, the woodcutter who paused in the forest to watch a group of boys who were singing and playing go. When he retumed home he found that he had been absent for several decades. 70Wadi (140-86 B.CE.), is, in the “now” of the song, experiencing his own removal from the Palace in 233 C.E., we will not be in a hurry to conclude that his days and nights are the same as ours. There is no way, in short, to draw any confident conclusion as to the temporal significance, in our everyday terms, of the daybreak alluded to in line 2. Opening this poem With a daybreak scene, as mentioned above, Li He may be seen as troping on a commonplace from the yuefis ballad tradition. But while its function as an opening device is maintained—it does serve as a clear marker of where the time of the story begins—it no longer gives us any Point of reference for the kind of temporality in which the story will unfold. Bearing in mind our doubts as to just what this “moming” may mean in our terms, the last two lines in the first stanza do remain readable as an early dawn scene. In fact the passage through the “autumn scent” of the third line, and the deferral of the first color word until the last position in the last line of the stanza may be seen as effectively conveying the sequence of an early moming—a slight stirring of the air, and the gradual strengthening of the sunlight. The following stanza, however, can no longer be easily placed in such a sequence. There are no time markers at all, in fact, with the strange possible exception of the “Han moon” that the immortal bears. The phrase should cenainly be seen as referring metaphorically to the round bronze dew-pan the immortal holds, and it may be no more than that. The adjective “Han,” however, forces the notion of temporality to the surface again, and leaves us, as with the “daybreak” at the opening of the poem, struggling with a number of ‘competing possibilities: does the immortal count dynasties as we count months, and does the bronze “moon’” in his hands serve him as our moon serves us, to mark divisions of time? Is the metaphor an ironic one, suggesting that the “real” Han moon is gone forever, like the 1dynasty itself, and that the immortal now “vainly” (kong) bears only an artificial, metaphorical one, one that cannot help him bring the real one back?’ But any effort 10 negotiate confidently between a “real” and “artificial” or merely “metaphorical” moon will founder once we remember that the constitutive rule of the poem is that we must agree to believe that the bronze immortal is real, and not artificial or merely metaphorical. A rule, by the way, that is itself, to borrow Qian Zhongshu’s phrase, a “going yet one level further” from the more basic problem, hinted at in the opening lines of the poem, as to whether such a thing as a “real” immortal can exist at all. Our reading of this poem shows how framing devices—both the poem's preface and in the odd opening and closing sound images within the poem—serve to create the sense that the temporality of the poem is one that cannot be measured in ordinary terms. The song presents itself as taking place within a disorienting suspension of normal temporality—rather reminiscent of the specifically temporal mode of strange (gi ¥) experience recorded in the “Tale of the Governor of Southstump” ( Nanke Taishou zhuan dh #7. F HE) or the “Yellow Millet Dream” (Huang liang meng #% 3 F )—to name only two of the more famous examples from the chuangi of this period. Perhaps, then, in this poem we see one of those “compositional conceptions” (shi yi #f % ) of Li He’s which Wu Qiming suggested could be traced to chuangi. °A further possible irony would involve a word-play on this kong, and relates also to the idea of the time perspective of the Bronze Immortal as incommensurable with that of mortals. The pan, whose function was to have been collecting dew to aid han Wudi in his quest for eternal life, is literally kong, empty. 722. The Kaiyuan and Tianbao eras—Tang mythic time ‘Thus far we have been examining some of the ways in which lyric poets of early ninth- century China explored a “performative” approach to history in their poems. Not even the ‘most cursory descriptive account of this phenomenon would be satisfactory without some consideration of the large volume of writing in lyric and narrative genres during this period that centered on what we might with justification term the myth, or myths, of the Kaiyuan and ‘Tianbao reign periods of the emperor Xuanzong—that is, roughly sixty to one hundred years Prior to the period we are now examining. At the center of these literary creations we find the image of Xuanzong himself, presiding over an era of unparalleled wonder and extravagance. And at the heart of many ninth-century accounts of that lost golden age are issues relating to ‘musical performance. In the present context we will be focusing particularly on the image of Xuanzong himself as an expert performer. Consider, for example, the following account: REZAREH: HEAR AA ERLE RY 1 SR MH: RE: KLFRRA RRR: REE PR KREBS BEA SH ERRTRK: SRO AME: PHA EF REAR: TEAR DRAF HEM he i RA: “HE BTRREA MZ FP?" ASME HMR? HHA TERS Rob REL BHRE-— He CAAT > (LAR) HSA BM HERO R ee MOLAR MATA: “k—- E> RRA RLTF 2” FRRR LRKCKAH) » EB KERR: METRY KZ LRARR BR EF — RB AG tose + 3‘Xuanzong was thoroughly familiar with the laws of music—on this path he gave free rein to his natural proclivities. In all matters of pipes and strings, he was sure to arrive at the most marvellous results. As for making his own compositions, he would follow his whim and it would be done—he didn’t set up rules and standards to ty to make it fit. The long and short responded to his fingers, and the ormamentation all accorded with the beat. He was particularly fond of the jie drum. He once said it was the leader of the eight tones'—none of the other types of music could compare. Once on a certain dawn carly in the second month, he'd just done dressing and grooming, an overnight rain had just cleared, the aspect of nature was bright and lovely, and the willows and gingkos in the courtyard of the small hall were about to bud. He looked on this and sighed, saying, “faced with these natural sights, how can one refrain from doing them justice?” The attendants looked at one another, and were about to call for wine; Gao Lishi alone sent for the jie drum, and shortly His majesty commanded it to be given him. Standing before the window, he beat out a piece called “Springtime is Lovely” (which he'd composed himself) with an air of satisfied assurance. When they looked, the willows and gingkos had all budded. He pointed to these and said, laughing, to the palace women and eunuchs in attendance, “with an event like this, can you fail to say that I possess divine craft?” And they all said, “Long live your majesty.” He also composed a piece called “High Autumn Wind.” When the autumn sky was high and clear, without the least trace of overcast, he'd play this, and every time, the distant wind would slowly come, the leaves in the courtyard ‘would slowly fall—the surpassing wonder, almost magical, was like this.* This anecdote reveals many of the central themes in much of the literature concerning ‘Xuanzong as a musical emperor. Musical gifts are presented as the culminating adorament of his absolute political sovereignty—an adomment, moreover, that possesses a mysterious power which we here see extending even beyond the human realm to exert an influence on the natural order and on natural temporal cycles. From another perspective, however, this ‘These “eight tones” \ # refer to the eight traditional types of musical instrument, rather than to musical pitches. °Nan Chuo # , Jiegu lu A 344K , cited in TPGI, sec. 1044, p. 352.power can be seen as dangerous. In ninth-century accounts of the musical performances of this period, the knowledge of the political disaster of 756, when the Sogdian general An Lushan led a rebellion that nearly ended the dynasty, forcing Xuanzong to flee to the southwest, is never far below the surface. And just as the above anecdote shows a musical performance by Xuanzong exerting a seemingly magical influence on the natural realm, it also became a commonplace in the anecdotal literature that those same performances played some role in bringing about the coming political catastrophe. At the most obvious level, this was simply a moralizing conclusion: Xuanzong paid too much attention to amusing himself, and paid a terrible price for his neglect of his duties as a ruler. But less rationalistic accounts abound as well. Consider, for example, the following suggestion that the prevalence of foreign elements in the music was inauspicious, and that the very technical language of the music experts of the time held within it omens of the disaster soon to come: ee aoe 1% CRA) CH) » CPW) SME Ke Rs RH oe | MREKEAEERR— “RG Musical pieces in the Tianbao period often took their names from the ‘ames of outlying regions, such as Liangzhou, Ganzhou, Yizhou, and so on. And the name of the section that had a lot of quick accompanying figures was called “entering breaking.” Subsequently, these lands were all engulfed and overrun by the Western Outlanders—“break” fi.e., the ‘musical term} was the presage of this.” One might be inclined to think that this sort of speculation was exceedingly trivial, considering its narrow focus on the technical vocabulary of music, This kind of parallel “cited from Chuanzai lu 4% 48,88 in TPGI, sec. 1044, p. 342. 78between the music and politics of the mid-seventh century, however, in fact assumed a Prominent position in ninth-century literary accounts of the period. To stick with the example given above, we might cite a well-known poem by Du Mu, “Three Quatrains on Passing by Huaging Palace” (second of three): hee FUHSH (KZ) HERG KR: RH STR - (ZR) — OPEL RAPREFR: ‘Yellow dust rises among green trees at Xinfeng; several riders, a scouting party from Yuyang, head back. The one tune “Rainbow Skirts” above a thousand peaks— only when the dance reaches the “break” will the Central Plain fal.” Du Mu here relies on the same type of parallel between music and politics that we saw in the anecdotes cited above. He takes them, however, to a new level of ingenuity, by suggesting a ‘more specific kind of correspondence in his closing lines—an eerie superposition of historical time onto the measured time of musical performance. * Feng Jiwu 1978, p. 139. 1 2: Fu Qiulin #3 Hk was supposed to have been sent to the northeastern frontier post of Yuyang, where An Lushan was based, to investigate the rumors that he was preparing to rebel; An Lushan was said to have bribed him heavily to report that there ‘was nothing to these rumors. 16The volume of literary creation devoted to the mystique of the era of Xuanzong’s reign, as noted above, is enormous. A representative survey would have to take into account the work. of Bai Juyi and his circle, the genre of “palace poems” developed in these years by poets like Yuan Zhen, Wang Jian £ 3€ , and Zhang Hu—as well as a large proportion of the collections of historical anecdotes and trivia that date from this period. The above example, however, shows that we can discover something of how the dynamics of musical performance time and historical time are treated in this literature by close analysis of lyric texts— indeed, it is only through close reading that we can come to a specific understanding, since the “time” with which we must perforce concem ourselves is a product of the temporal structure of the individual lyric. We will confine ourselves in the following discussion, therefore, to a single Jong poem by Wen Tingyun, making comments and observations on matters of more general application as called for in our discussion of that work. The poem itself is not particularly well-known—nor, perhaps, would connoisseurs of Wen Tingyun's style consider it one of his best’ Init, however, we can observe with striking clarity some of the issues relating to the performative construction of temporality that have concemed us thus far, and for that reason, itis presented here in full. GRERMAPRES RERARABR > KE * The poem does not appear in the SBCK edition of Wen Tingyun’s poetry. The text given here is based on Zeng Yi 1917 (juan 9, pp. 7-10) and WYYH ( v.2, pp. 15745). The poem uses one rhyme throughout, though thematically the poem breaks down into four-line units. The text is given here with these units numbered, to show the structure and for ease of reference. 7LELERAS BROT He DALH Me: HESKA> KMEEE ZHRRS> DGEREL: REBEL > GHRMS » — Te atm > IDEAS PAM AE: RALBR REX (BE) VR LAR: HD AI Bam TA SBE Re VHLNSR: GH AAS: GEERT: — BRB: WAFTKBR: FETRR KRM MM: KOLRRe VID LMHS SHERT SH - BMMER: £E oe MH VID FAT = Hh PSF? PREAR LEGER: KOHEAEM: AKL: EATER MFZER- XY) RRR CR CE SR LEH DRT MR HEARS MER REE - XDSRE RE CRREE> HEGEL RAM > XD SURE BALE: RRSSK: VME - XV RAF OF CHRRR: RHERS RSs > AVYK SMR: MORRIE —- SEAR: HLAME > XV) BRB Ms BRERE> RKSAK: REFZLH> XVID ARRAS > MOM ° I EK Ah RH XVID) 42 e A RE Rt toXQRAMER MHMEE: LLM MR? KR AEOH- XQESBKF SHAM + PeeH TH RRREM- At Honglu Temple there is a hall for banquets bestowed by the emperor, dating from the Kaiyuan period—the towers and terraces, pools and ponds were exceedingly grand. At the desolate site, there are now barely traces. I happened to come up with forty couplets. I When the Bright Thearch mounted the world’s pivot, his supemnal sagacity cast down brilliant light. His deep strategies loosed thunder and lightning; his fleet tracks outdid Yao and Tang. 0 ‘Westward emending to the piled-rock mountains, and north to the bald regions, there was the Xiezhi to subdue the four Menaces; ‘no mantis to raise a defiant arm. ig Demure, lovely—he found an unearthly beauty; intense, pungent—the fragrance of the state. On its purple band, the jie drum cried; the jade pipes blew “Rainbow Skins.” IV Lushan was not yet enfeofted; Linfu was but an intendant. His majesty's refulgent splendor blotted out sun and moon; placing just right each strand in the web of government. v The multitude of creanures reached the precincts of longevity; the hundred lords bustled about the Bright Hall. All within the four seas was calm and pure. not one dust-mote took to the air. VI ‘The son of heaven, for his part, “roamed and sported;” it was fitting his anendant ministers should revel in the moment. 9With a creak, the gate of heaven swings open, the red sun is bom at the Fusang tree. Var By the jade stirs, the dew-pans twine; in the gold pot, the water-clock drips and drops. ‘Sword and pendant strike against one another — attendant ministers troop clangorously about. var “Mysterious pearls"—twelve dangling strings; rouge powder—three thousand rows. Those on whom his fond gaze falls sprout feathers and wings, his shouts of displeasure swirl frost and snow. K ‘A numinous haze rises over the cloud pavilion; spring waters on Lishan’s sunward slopes. Ona platter, battle over the “nine sons” riceballs, bome in a basin, the “five clouds” nectar. x The two dice of capital craps, at seven drums—a Handan entertainer. Feathers ruffling, the jade cocks fight, luxuriant grasses—the hunting-ground of the emerald pheasant. xi Embroidered cloths cover the knees of the honor guard; ‘wrought gold adoms the forelock-pendants of the splendid steeds. Pepper-plastered walls close in the parrot; xm Ah! those reverend ministers, “flowers of the state,” temple-locks and heads all streaked with white. At the imperial feast, they have a grand time, their carriages and retinues truly splendid. xm ‘The painted heron shines on fish and crabs; neighing ponies confused with the bald cranes. rippling, ruffling—the blue waves str, glimmering, flashing—one mistakes it for Hengtang. 80xv Twining, twirling—dancers like whirling snow; supple, sinuous—the song resounds in the rafters. A stunning belt with ornate silver tassels; a precious comb in a gold-inlaid case. xv ‘Sunk in oblivion like the Han prime minister; ‘out drunk, one could take him for the Madman of Chu. ‘One day, east of the pole, the Turk star sent forth spines of glare. XVI Overrunning all, they followed the Leviathan, helter-skelter, driving dogs and sheep before them. ‘The fires they set raged red for three months running, dust of battle yellowed all for a thousand li around. XvVIr The Xiaohan Pass and its prefectural compound from that time on alike have been desolate. This place now overgrown with weeds; on the old foundations, walls collapsed and broken. xva—. The dried-out pool borders the fractured bank; “creek creek" cry the crickets. Withered lotuses rot into mud; dead bamboos bristle like spears. xix The traveller inquires of the old attendant, face to face, they're stirred to a moment's sadness. Must one see deer roaming before the scene merits an inward pang? xX Our good fornine is to live in a tranquil age, fine seasons to suit the festive cup. And who notices that in the hollow by the Serpentine, each year, a phoenix perches? 81Reading Notes: . preface: Honglu Compound was inside the administrative sector of the imperial palace at Chang'an, adjacent to the quarters for foreign emissaries. It was the location for imperial receptions of foreign embassies. See Xu Song 1985, p. 17. I-V: Opening. The unparalleled peace and prosperity of Xuanzong’s reign. [Bright Thearch: Ming huang, a “temple title” bestowed posthumously on Xuanzong. Here it is used within a broad array of metaphors equating Xuanzong with the sun (see discussion). IkPiled-rock mountains: the Jishi range, now known as the Animaging range, in southeastern Qinghai province. Xiezhi: a mythical one-homed creature that was able to intuit the just side ina dispute. The caps of magistrates mimicked the hom of the Xiezhi. Mantis: Zhuangzi speaks of an enraged praying mantis that raises its arms threateningly against an oncoming carriage-wheel—an example of vain defiance, and failure to know one’ s own capacities. TILThe first two lines allude to Xuanzong’s discovery of Yang Guifei. Jiegu: a small two- headed drum hung at the waist and played with sticks (see discussion above, with quotation from the Jiegu lu). Xuanzong was proverbially fond of the instrument, and of the Turkic- style music with which it was associated. “Jade pipes”: musical pipes were actually made of bamboo; jade pipes are associated in legendary materials with heavenly or supernatural music—and with the music of Xuanzong’s reign: In the Tianbao era, Xuanzong made several hundred palace maidens “performers of the Pear ‘Academy... An Lushan came to visit from Anyang, and presented several hundred sets of xiao-pipes made of white jade. They were all arrayed in the Pear Garden—from this time on, the sound was perhaps unlike that of the human realm. (TPGI sec. 1044, p. 342, citing Tanbin lu 33 SE ) ‘While Wen Tingyun may not be invoking this same legendary incident here, the connotations of transcendent music are in play, as is shown by the next item, “rainbow Skirts”: a musical number supposed to have been based on music that Xuanzong heard in a dream-journey to the palace of the moon. Yang Guifei’s dancing to this music became a central scene in the legends of the era. : Lushan: An Lushan, the Sogdian who became a powerful frontier general in the northeast, and in 755 began the catastrophic rebellion that forced Xuanzong to flee to the southwest, and spelled the end of the Tang's unchallenged imperial authority over outlying regions it had controlled up to that time. Linfu: Li Linfu, the prime minister whose factional intrigues were considered to have been one of the main factors leading up to the crisis of 755. V: Bright Hall: ming sang 8A €, the temple at which the most important sacrifices were held by the emperor, to heaven and to the ancestors of the imperial line. VI-XIV: “mythic time” and the various ways of passing it ‘VI: Roamed and sported: you yu, a reference to Mencius 1B.4 (See discussion). Fusang tree: 82a mythical tree in the far east, from beneath which the sun was supposed to emerge. VIII: The “mysterious pearls” dangle from the emperor's cap—the number of twelve strings was specifically associated with an emperor’s regalia. IX: Springlike waters: Lishan was a winter reteat, whose warm springs remained ‘ne even in winter. Nine sons zong: these appear in a love ballad from the Jin dynasty. Zeng 1917, ad loc., cites an anecdotal tradition recorded in the Kaiyuan Tianbao yishi MARURE that pasty dumplings were stuck to the inside of a platter, and banqueters made to shoot at them with small bows. One could eat the ones one hit. It not clear whether or not Wen Tingyun is alluding to that tradition here. X: capital craps: the Han minister Chen Sui was supposed to begun his career from an aquaintance made while playing dice. He eventually became chief prefect of the capital. Handan entertainer: an allusion to marionettes, which were called “Guo Gong” 38 2, and became associated with Handan by way of Gao Wei ® #, an emperor of the Northem Qi ‘who was particularly fond of this kind of entertainment. He himself came to be referred to as “Guo Gong,” and, when he was forced to flee to Handan on the eve of his capture by the invading Northem Zhou forces in 577, came to be known, derisively, as “Guo Gong of Handan.” XIIL: Painted heron: for the pleasure-boats, whose prows were decorated to make them resemble herons. Hengtang: a long dike on the Huai river. It had become a standard location for ballads on life on the southern rivers. The point here is that during the festivities, one might succumb to the illusion the relatively small pool in the compound was a real southland setting. ‘XV-XX: The catastrophe and its aftermath XV: Han prime minister: alluding to Cao Can, who spent his days as prime minister dead drunk. dogs and sheep: helpiess livestock, i.e., the defenseless population. XIX: deer roaming: see following discussion. XX: Serpentine: Qujiang Wy ix , the branching lake and its surrounding park on the southeast comer of the Tang capital Chang'an, site of imperial excursions, banquets for newly successful jinshi candidates, etc. Phoenix: here luan huang 3% JB, , “‘simurgh and phoenix.” The referent here, however, should be taken as singular—a bird that evokes the former emperor. One might compare other instances of the use of images of single animals in empty landscapes as closural devices in Wen Tingyun's longer historical poems. The usage of this term as a figure for an emperor is attested in the Dunhuang lyrics, and in an epigram anributed to the Tang emperor Taizong (see HYD v. 12, p. 1179). 83‘We might begin our discussion of this poem by reflecting on its occasion. Wen Tingyun himself seems to be doing so in the penultimate stanza, with the rhetorical question he asks there. The “deer” in 1.74 allude to Wu Zixu’s prediction that the state of Wu would be destroyed by its rival Yue, and its capital laid waste. Wen Tingyun’s rhetorical question could thus be paraphrased, “must the capital of the state lie in ruins before we may feel regret at the passing of an age?” An awareness that the present occasion, while sad, is not, all things considered, the worst imaginable, is reflected as well in the word liao’ —"for the moment”—in 1.74, and, most prominently, in the word ou 4% —"by chance” in the poem’s title. As he meditates on the scene at the garden of Honglu Temple, Wen Tingyun is, after all, standing in the midst of a Tang capital that is still very much alive. As the continued survival of the Tang empire showed, the banquet-hall and gardens at Honglu Temple were nothing absolutely essential; and by saying that he “happened” to come up with these lines, Wen to be telling us that the present poem was not something he absolutely had to Tingyun write, What he moums in this desultory way in this poem is not the fall of an empire, but rather the passing away of a certain kind of spectacle. ‘The poem opens with a series of figures for Xuanzong and his imperial might that may be termed astronomical or meteorological. The central implicit metaphor links ‘Xuanzong with the sun. The image, present as a suggestion in the opening lines of the poem, 84is retumed to in the fourth stanza, where the temporal implications of the imagery are first developed. For saying that Xuanzong’s splendor “bloued out sun and moon” suggests a suspension of temporal progression, while the first two lines of the stanza intimate the coming disaster. The expectation that emerges from these opposed forces is that, somewhere between ‘Xuanzong’s heroic exploits and the catastrophe that will be on the minds of all of Wen Tingyun’s audience, there will be a sort of temporal stasis. This expectation is fulfilled in the fifth stanza. Traditional notions held that ifthe state were administered perfectly, each person living in it would reach his or her maximum allotted span of life. The occupation of the high officers of the state with sacrifices at the imperial shrine also suggests that the political concems of the mundane world have been replaced by cycles of normative ritual. The fifth stanza presents a picture of a polity that has attained perfection. The kind of images we see there might under normal circumstances have served as a way of making sense of historical time—one could see the significance of any given historical era as a tentative approach toward, or a fall away from, that ideal state. But Wen Tingyun presents it here as a fait accompli, naturally suggesting a question that does not usually arise in thinking about history: that is, in the ideal polity, how would one, so to speak, “‘pass the time”? The answer, which we may see as implicit in the large central section of the poem from the sixth through the fourteenth stanzas, is play. The phrase “roamed and sported” (you yu) echoes a passage quoted in Mencius as a “folk-