When humankind first uttered a sigh of exclamation, poetic language was born. Yet that language differs sharply from what we today call poetic language; it was no more than the embryo of poetic language. The generation of poetic language is a historical process, and its poetic content was vastly enriched only with the independence of literature. Within that process, poetry’s shift from orality to writing was the decisive factor: it was the transformation of the medium that brought poetic language to maturity and at last gave it its own independent character.
1. Primeval Ritual: The Womb in Which Primal Poetry Was Conceived
The “Ancient Music” chapter of the Lüshi Chunqiu records: “The music of Getian-shi of antiquity: three men, grasping the tail of an ox and stamping with their feet, sang eight stanzas. The first was called ‘Sustaining the People,’ the second ‘The Black Bird,’ the third ‘Reaching the Plants and Trees,’ the fourth ‘Rousing the Five Grains,’ the fifth ‘Honoring the Constant Way of Heaven,’ the sixth ‘Reaching the Achievements of the Sovereign,’ the seventh ‘Relying on the Virtue of Earth,’ and the eighth ‘Pole of All Birds and Beasts.’” In the primeval period, poetry was song, and what we call poetry, music, and dance were fused into one. Although all eight ancient songs recorded in the Lüshi Chunqiu are lost and only the titles survive, the content can be inferred to be a celebration of ancestors, heaven and earth, the five grains, and the birds and beasts — that is, primeval sacrificial ritual. Through these god-entertaining rituals, the ancestors prayed for the abundance of crops and for their own multiplication. When they took up the ox-tail and, singing and dancing together, prayed for blessings from ancestors and gods, they entered a sacred and mysterious realm. To the primeval mind, these god-entertaining ritual activities determined their fate; their importance even outweighed production and other modes of subsistence, because it was ritual that determined whether productive and other activities succeeded — not the other way round. Ritual activity was always placed at the head of all activity and was treated with utmost seriousness by the ancestors. As an indispensable component of ritual, eulogistic poetry developed in step with it. One can say: it was precisely these utilitarian ritual activities, bound up with human existence at its closest, that were the earliest — and the principal — source of literature and art. Because ritual was a solemn activity of “communing with the gods,” it required a language of communing distinct from everyday usage, and this gave rise to the first distinction between the language of ritual chant and everyday language.
Wang Guowei held that the rise of poetry, song, dance, and drama “began with the ancient wu (shamans).” He wrote: “In serving the gods, the wu must use song and dance. The Shuowen jiezi (volume 5) says: ‘Wu: an invoker; a woman able to serve the formless and, by dance, to summon the gods. The character pictures a person with two sleeves in the form of a dance, sharing meaning with gong (work).’ Hence the Shang shu says: ‘Constantly dancing in the chamber, drinking and singing in the hall — this is called the wind of the wu.’” [1] Li Zehou, speaking of primeval art, likewise wrote: “The song, dance, drama, painting, myth, and incantation of later ages . . . in the remote past were entirely fused into the undifferentiated, chaotic unity of magical and ritual activity — like fire and like a boiling cauldron, like intoxication and like madness, devout and yet savage, ardent and yet exacting.” [2] Ye Shuxian has offered a linguistic argument: he points out that the Shuowen jiezi glosses shi (poetry) as zhi (aim, mind), that zhi and si are homophonic loan-words, and that the etymological source of si is “officiator of sacrificial rites” — so “poetry” (shi) is also the eulogistic invocation used by the “officiator” in primeval ritual. [3]
Primeval ritual was unlike the later hall-temple ceremonies that were confined to a few: it was very nearly the affair of the whole tribe, with everyone taking part, and song and dance lay within the reach of every tribal member. Because the song component of ritual song-and-dance was less constrained by environmental conditions, it was able to detach itself from ritual and circulate widely, gradually crystallizing into an independent form. At the same time, as human individuality grew, individual feeling began to separate out of the collective and to mature, and poetry that borrowed the form of ritual chant in order to express personal feeling and aim was thereby born; folk songs and folk ballads, under the twin force of the spread of ritual chant and the independence of the individual, also flourished. Thereafter, although ritual chant kept drawing nourishment from folk song and ballad, on the whole both folk poetry and ritual poetry derive ultimately from primeval ritual. Wang Kunwu holds that, from the standpoint of philological gloss, yao means “bare song,” that is, unaccompanied human chant, and that what distinguishes it from yong is its lack of fixed musical structure; from a literary standpoint, yao is folk singing that is distinct from artful verse. As to the origin of yao, the old saying “the songs of Kang Qu and Stamping-on-Earth opened the channel of sung poetry” has been current, but, judging from many traces, the linguistic mode and stylistic form of yao are tied to song (song meant here in the eulogistic sense). [4] The close connection between yao and song in linguistic mode and style is, from one important angle, evidence that folk song and ballad originate in primeval ritual. Liu Xie, in the “Encomium and Praise” chapter of Wenxin diaolong, hails song as the height of poetry and writes: “Song (song / encomium) means ‘to contain’ — it praises the splendor of virtue and gives form to its appearance.” To eulogize great virtue through song and dance is just the principal content of ritual activity, and the “song / encomium” used in ritual is the most beautiful poetry, the height of poetry. Beyond eulogistic poetry, the Western scholar Marcel Granet held that the Guofeng (“Airs of the States”) section of the Book of Songs evolved out of various rituals and ceremonies. Liu Shilin goes further: “In fact this is by no means limited to the Guofeng: the entire 305 pieces of the Book of Songs must initially have been primeval song-and-dance or ritual chant.” [5] Zhao Peilin, in discussing the origins of xing (“evocation”) in primeval cult, likewise notes: primeval poetry and primeval religion are extremely closely linked; in many cases it was bound up with sorcery, oracular speech, divination by objects, and reverent prayer to gods; sometimes it was itself the song-text of sacrificial and other religious ritual. [6] Whatever the case for the direct ritual origin of the various pieces of the Book of Songs, one point can be believed: poetry has its source in primeval ritual, developed out of the song component which was an organic part of primeval ritual. In the primeval cultures of other peoples there is no lack of like examples. The poetry, kitharode song, music, and drama of ancient Greece all originate in the Dionysiac sacrifice. Or take the rain-praying ritual of East Africa: people dance the rain-dance, joyous and solemn, the rumble of feet imitating thunder, the rustling of skirts mimicking the falling rain, singing and dancing wildly until the sun goes down in the west. Poetry and dance, fused in one, made up the central content of ritual.
Indeed, antiquity laid great weight on “the teaching of music” and “the teaching of poetry,” and the root of this lay precisely in primeval ritual. Ritual, through collective song, music, and dance, transmitted the tribe’s aspirations and norms of conduct from generation to generation. By the time of the legendary Sage-Kings, this function of ritual was fully attended to. The “Canon of Shun” of the Book of Documents records: “The Emperor said, ‘Kui, I appoint you to take charge of music and to teach the heir-son. Be upright yet warm, generous yet firm, strong without violence, simple without arrogance. Poetry gives utterance to aim; song lengthens utterance; tones follow the syllables; the pitch-pipes harmonize the tones. Let the eight sounds harmonize, none usurping the order of the others, so that gods and men are at peace together.’ Kui replied, ‘Oh — I strike the resonant stone and the lithophone, and the hundred beasts dance after one another.’” [7] What is here called “the hundred beasts dancing after one another” must refer to the masked dance within ritual. Within the horizon of primeval thinking, which had not yet dissolved, one became whatever one disguised oneself as.
Ritual, as a god-entertaining sacrificial activity, had a rather strict formal scheme, and the formalization of ritual in turn provided the basis for the hierarchization of ritual. The Guliang Commentary, under “Yin Gong, Year Five,” records of the dance of the “Great Xia”: “In dancing the ‘Xia,’ the Son of Heaven has eight rows, the dukes six rows, the lords four rows.” With the emergence of private property and the system of rank, ritual gradually became the prerogative of hall and court and was given strict regulation, in scale and form, according to rank — that is, was given the content of “ritual propriety” (li). Beyond its original functions, ritual now took on a further function more strongly weighted and emphasized by the rulers. By the time the Duke of Zhou “shaped ritual and made music,” the content of “ritual propriety” within ritual was strengthened to the extreme. Zheng Xuan says: “Anciently, the teaching used the Book of Songs and music: recited, sung, set to strings, danced.” The forms here — singing the verse and dancing the song — are just ritual that has taken on “ritual propriety,” and are the lingering breath of primeval ritual. Ritual is always supported by primeval thinking as a residue at the depth of its mind.
2. From the Unity of Poetry, Music, and Dance to the Independence of Poetry
That poetry was unified with music and dance is well attested in ancient sources; primeval poetry was simply one indispensable part of ritual. Wang Yi’s Chuci zhangju records of magical ritual: “Anciently in the southern Ying region of Chu, between the Yuan and the Xiang, the local custom believed in shamans and loved sacrificial rite, and the sacrifice always included song, music, drum, and dance to give pleasure to the gods. Qu Yuan, in exile, . . . saw the ritual of the common folk that was unrefined in courtesy and the music of song and dance, and the words were vulgar; for them he composed the songs of the Nine Songs.” This usage carried on for ages without break. Liu Yuxi, in the preface to his “Bamboo-Branch Verses,” writes: “In the first month, sacrificing at Jianping, I saw the joined singing of ‘Bamboo Branch,’ short flutes blown and drums struck to mark the beat. The singers raised their sleeves and joined in fellowship, and at the time the song was reckoned the more the better. Listening, the tone falls within the yu of the huangzhong mode; and the closing stanza, sharp and brisk, is like the sound of Wu. Although the high and low notes were hard to separate, the meaning twisted and wound like the Yi and the Yu — like the sound at Xiang. Anciently Qu Yuan, dwelling between the Yuan and the Xiang, found the language of his people’s spirit-welcoming songs uncouth, and so for them he composed the Nine Songs, and to this day the people of Wu (i.e., Chu) sing and dance to them. So I too have composed nine Bamboo-Branch Verses, that those who sing well may continue them.” Wang Yi on the origin of the Nine Songs and Liu Yuxi on the “Bamboo-Branch Verses” both speak to the relation of folk song and ritual: when these folk forms were taken up and reworked by the literati, they became “poetry.” Guo Shaoyu likewise holds with the view that poetry originates in magical ritual. He observes that in magical ritual, “dance must go with song, and song must have words . . . and song-words, having been ornamented and made to fit in song-form, already display the skill of art — which is the rough outline of literature.” [8]
The fact that primeval poetry comes from primeval ritual and is fused with music and dance determines the features of its language. In the joint state of poetry, music, and dance, the directness and intensity of musical feeling and the richness and vividness of bodily movement greatly outshone linguistic expression, forcing it into a secondary position. Language could only avail itself of signs and figure forth feeling and meaning indirectly — and this fact left people, in the heat of song and dance, with no eye to attend to it carefully, much less to weigh it in detail. Language, slighted in this way, did not need to dress itself up; it had no reason to insist on its own richness. Even if linguistic expression had been the first impulse of song and the link that coordinated music and dance, once one entered the realm of “sighing it, drawing it out, hand-dancing it, foot-stamping it,” language could only play a supporting role. The early state of unity among poetry, song, music, and dance determined that the linguistic features of primeval poetry could only be plain, direct, shallow, and sensuous: it always “spoke its feeling straight out” and “spoke its facts straight out.” Grosse held that
the lyric poetry of the lowest civilization takes the quality of music as its principal element, and the meaning of the poem is merely a secondary thing. [9]
Citing the dance-songs of the Australian aborigines of Kuluburapan, Zhu Guangqian also points out:
The words they sing are often jumbled and out of order, ungrammatical, with no real sense — and they themselves cannot explain them. The chief use of the words is to fall in with the beat of the dance; meaning is not important. [10]
An ancient saying likewise has it: “Poetry lies in sound, not in meaning.” [11] When the meaning-bearing function of language is left in the shade, the formation of poetic content within it is hard to come about.
The detachment of poetry from ritual was a long process, in which two directions of differentiation can broadly be discerned, giving rise to ballad (yao) and poetry (shi) as two great categories, mutually distinct yet mutually linked and mutually influencing. The root cause of the transformation lies in the emergence of private property and the system of rank. Only with the rise of private property could the idea of “the self” gradually strengthen and grow toward maturity, and only then could individual feeling separate out of the group and become a personal experience. Take love: among primeval tribes, songs that sing of erotic love are extremely rare. After extensive investigation of tribes still in a primeval condition, Grosse drew this conclusion:
In primeval lyric poetry, apart from a few extremely coarse cases, it is hard to find any description of the relation between the sexes. Among the Australians, Mincopies, or Botocudo we cannot find a single love song. [12]
Apart from collective song-and-dance of a magical character, the disorderly and group marriages of the primeval period could not give birth to a stable feeling between the sexes, and so could not produce love songs grounded in the feeling between the sexes. Only with the rise of family and private property, with the gradual establishment of a stable relation between the sexes, and with the gradual maturing of the idea of “the self,” could the love song at last be born. At the same time, it was because of the rise and development of private property that everyday ritual activity gradually broke away from the whole tribe and was seized as the privilege of a few. Under heavy labor and the hardness of subsistence, only certain seasonal-festival rituals were preserved in the folk, and ritual song-and-dance gradually came into the charge of specialists (shamans or performers), no longer the work of all tribal members directly. This was a degeneration of primeval ritual; the original meaning of ritual gradually altered and blurred. But ritual song, being less constrained by external conditions, began to break out of ritual, circulating widely and gradually developing into the folk ballad. If the rise of the self and the independence of individual feeling were the inner cause of the birth of ballad, then the privatization of ritual was an important external impetus to its birth. When most people lost the right to take part in ritual, they turned to borrowing the form of ritual song to give vent to personal feeling, to give voice to repressed desire and life-force, to sigh over the cramped fate and the indignation of the heart. This was the birth of the folk “ballad.” “The chanting of the wilderness, the music of the metal and stone,” [13] — the privatization of ritual was bound to bring the decline of ritual, and folk lyric composition correspondingly grew ever more abundant and ardent.
On the other hand, once ritual became the property of the few and of the hall, it shifted from a means of praying for blessing for the whole tribe to a means of safeguarding the interests of the few; the rank-strengthening “ritual propriety” (li) was thrust into it, and “to sing the merits and praise the virtue” shifted from praising the gods and ancestors to praising the rulers themselves — and was favored by the latter far more than ever before. This necessarily led to a renewed weight on the content of language. The Book of Rites, “Suburban Sacrifice,” says: “When the offering is made and the musicians raise their song, it is the giving forth of virtue. The singers above, the strings below: this is the prizing of the human voice.” “Prizing the human voice” means just the emphasis on chant, on poetry — accentuating the meaning of linguistic expression, the better to “give forth virtue” for the king.
Zhu Xi said: “Whenever the sages and worthies speak of poetry, those who treat of its tones are few, while those who set forth its meaning are many . . . Aim (zhi) is the root of poetry, music its branch. Even if the branch withers, the root is not harmed.” [14] Such a view does carry the partiality of the Neo-Confucian preference for content; yet in the course of the historical development of poetry, the weight given to “ritual propriety” drove a weight on poetic language, and objectively drove forward the development of poetic language. In turn, the weight on content and the development of poetic language pushed poetry to detach from song, music, and dance — as Guo Shaoyu put it:
In ancient times, thoughts and aims were simple and words plain; though one felt a stirring within, one could not bring it out in detail to the outside, and so could not but rely on other arts. Later, with progress, poetry first detached itself from the relation with dance, then further detached itself from the relation with music; and when the technique of description had advanced further, the meter that musical accompaniment had left behind could also gradually be broken open. [15]
The increasing independence of poetry and the development of poetic language stand precisely in a relation of mutual driving.
Although the trend toward independence is the inevitable course of history, the lingering force of ritual remained. Hence Liu Xie writes: “As for ornate songs and varied airs, abandoned poems and refined verses — the lewd melody is in the tune, while the upright echo flies away! And yet the common ear races after them, busy chasing the new and strange; lofty notes warm and quiet only make one yawn and stretch; eccentric phrases that strike the heart bring on dance and tapping. Poetry and sound have all become wanton (zheng) — this is the very stage that began it.” [16] The wilful pursuit of new and strange ornate songs and odd phrases could become a reality only after poetry and ballad had moved toward independence; and just then, the poetic quality of language received an unprecedented weight.
3. The Book of Songs: The Turning Point from Orality to Writing
After poetry began to break apart from music and dance, language gradually became the chief bearer of poetic content. Yet the on-the-spot quality of oral composition — the bodily language of the performer, facial expression, and the marked musicality of oral recitation — still played a role of the utmost importance. So long as poetry remained oral, it could not free itself from music and dance and become independent. Oral poetry takes in and contains within itself elements of song and dance, or residues of them: this is at once the inevitable residue of poetry just emerging in differentiation and a need answering the inadequacy of language’s own expressive power. As Ma Suoyuan put it:
Oral literature without written record relies on rhyme so as to be easy on the lips and easy to circulate, and so generally takes on a sung mode and is passed down by tune and meter. Without tune and meter, poetry would lose its very soul. [17]
The on-the-spot quality of oral poetry — the scene that listeners and author share face to face — brings every detail of the scene, even its mood and atmosphere, into the expression of the poem and so makes up an effective context for poetic language, vastly enriching the meaning of the words. All these factors in turn eased the pressure on the language itself to express the poetic. Feng Menglong, in the preface to his Mountain Songs, wrote: “Since the Chu tunes and Tang regulated verse have vied with one another in skill and beauty, the resonance of folk feeling has been kept out of the platform of poetry; what is set apart from them is called mountain song . . . Only because they are not enrolled on the poetry platform and are passed over by the gentry-scholars is the authority of song reduced, and the heart of the singer thinned as well.” Zheng Zhenduo, in his essay “On Guazhi’er,” likewise wrote:
The pure tunes of the folk are often coarse beyond bearing, hard to bring into words. [18]
“Thinned heart” or “coarse beyond bearing” both point to the inadequacy of poetic quality in the language of folk song and ballad.
Beyond this, early oral poetry combined many functions in one work, and these utilitarian functions often took the principal place. This too constrained the generation of poetic quality in language. Under the harsh conditions of survival of the ancient ancestors, early oral poetry had to possess such utilitarian functions as “making right what is gained and lost, moving heaven and earth, stirring gods and spirits,” [19] if it was to have stubborn life and pass down across generations. Moreover, primeval poetry comes from primeval ritual, and this likewise determined that it could not escape entanglement with the utilitarian. The Rites of Zhou, “Spring Officer · Grand Music-Master,” says: “The Grand Music-Master uses musical virtue to teach the heir-sons — middle, harmonious, weighty, peaceful, filial, friendly — and uses musical speech to teach the heir-sons — to rouse, to guide, to remonstrate, to phrase, to converse.” Confucius said: “Poetry can rouse, can observe, can group, can complain; serves the father and the lord; gives one knowledge of the names of the birds, beasts, and plants.” [20] The words of Confucius both stress the multiplicity of poetry’s functions and indicate the blurredness of its early generic features. The Guanzi, “Mountains and Authorities,” holds: “Poetry is what is used to record things.” Eric Havelock, speaking of oral culture, writes:
In fact, poetry furnished a storehouse and treasury holding rich practical knowledge — a kind of ethical, political, historical, and technical encyclopedia, and the core of the educational reserve from which the knowledge-pursuing citizen had to draw. [21]
Zhong Jingwen, for his part, stresses the “role of social and moral norm-setting” of oral folk art:
Oral folk literature is oral art created, used, and transmitted by the broad members of a certain group (an ethnic group, for example) in the course of production and life, in answer to the needs of survival and development. [22]
The key to the poeticization of language lies in the shift from orality to writing, and the turning point at which poetry took the step from orality into the written was the formation of the Book of Songs as a book. Before that, written works did exist. For example, Guo Moruo’s A Comprehensive Account of the Oracle-Bone Inscriptions records a piece of oracle text: “Cracking on a Gui-mao day, will it rain today? Will it rain from the west? Will it rain from the east? Will it rain from the north? Will it rain from the south?” Some take this as in fact a piece of well-balanced and easy-on-the-mouth verse — the first song to be set forth in writing, in which, through inquiries opening out in all four directions, one sees a fervent longing for the coming of spring rain; the strong feeling overflows of itself between the inked words on the page, and so this becomes the earliest poetic form recorded in writing, the “authentic trace” of written poetry. [23] Yet to read this oracle-bone text as poetry is only the later reader’s view; in substance it remains no more than a divinatory oracle. Its function never went beyond divination and prayer for blessing. The shaping of the text of the Book of Songs, by contrast, came at the height of the flourishing of poetry; and although many of its included pieces still derive from ritual chant, its function differs sharply from that of writing as it appeared within the horizon of primeval magical ritual. The oracle-bone text remains only the inscription of ritual, while the text of the Book of Songs effectively pulled poetry out of ritual and fixed it from out of orality, driving forward poetry’s independence and its move toward maturity.
The Book of Songs is not a work of original written composition; it is a gathering and editing of oral works such as ritual chants and folk-air poems. Yet once these were written down, and on a large scale gathered and edited at that, the influence on the formation of the poetic quality of later poetry and its language was decisive. The pieces were polished word by word and line by line, again and again. The chief aim of revision was to bring the content into accord with “ritual propriety,” but it was at the same time the tempering and reworking of language — and that, in turn, drove the poeticization of language.
In the introduction to his Selection of Folk Ballads of England and Scotland, Andrew Lang relates that when Walter Scott’s ballad collection Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border was published, many people congratulated him, but one honest old lady angrily said:
These songs were made to be sung, not made to be read. Now that you have spoiled them, no one will sing them anymore. [24]
Written record gives folk ballad the chance to span time and place and to be carried on indefinitely; at the same time it forcibly cuts the ballad off from singing — spoils the most expressive and the most life-bearing of “good things,” the singing itself. From this angle, written record has caught only the bodily shell of the ballad; in fact, the ballad has been preserved in name and lost in substance. Chang Hui, speaking of the collection and recording of ballad, likewise said:
Whatever one does, written words can never reach the tones and flavor; once it is set on paper it is no longer the same thing. [25]
Poetry that had lost its singing voice could only seek rebirth by speeding the poeticization of language: through linguistic creation and the gathering up of poetic content within language, it must repair the lost feel and flavor and rebuild, within a new system of expression, its own independent expressive power. The making of the Book of Songs as a book likewise faced this difficult yet fortunate situation.
“Poetry is the lyric of music; poetry and music are one.” [26] Although the pieces of the Book of Songs, after their compilation, were still set to chant and joined with music and dance; although in the long subsequent course of poetry’s development, poetry still had to draw nourishment from music and often could not free itself from singing, [27] writing did, all the same, open up a vast possibility for poetry to detach from song and dance. The Book of Rites says: “In spring and autumn, the teaching is by ritual and music; in winter and summer, by Poetry and Documents.” It was because of the appearance of written texts that the separation of the “ritual and music” of ceremony from the “Poetry and Documents” of writing emerged. As time went on, dance and music gradually fell away from writing; language became the core of poetic expression, and the rhythm and meter inherent in language itself gradually replaced the outer musical tune. Music degenerated into a mere appendix. Poetry at last became independent: the language of poetry at last shook off its reliance on music and on other outer factors and returned to itself as a pure realm of signs.
As a transitional work, the language of the Book of Songs still bears clearly the features of oral works. The large numbers of reduplicative compounds and particles are just what often turns up in oral works. The language of the poems also retains the unadornedness of the spoken word. Ge Hong once pointed out:
The Mao Poems are phrases of fine color, but they do not match the broad, abundant flow of Shanglin, Yulie, Erjing, and Sandu rhapsodies. As for descriptions of palaces and chambers, how do the hymns of Xi Si’s lodging compare with Wang Yansheng’s rhapsody on Lingguang? As for hunts, how do the poems of Shu Tian and Lu Ling compare with Sima Xiangru’s Shanglin? As for fine sacrifices, how do the words of Qingmiao and Yunhan compare with Mr. Guo’s lavish Suburban Sacrifice? And as for campaigns, how do the works of Chuche and Liuyue compare with Chen Lin’s vigorous Wujun? [28]
Within a tradition of revering the sage and venerating the classics, Ge Hong’s straightforward judgment puts a finger on just the inadequacy of the Book of Songs in poetic depiction. Jiang Liangfu describes the Songs as “unadorned and earnest, without ornament.” [29] More clearly still, what marks the oral feature of the Book of Songs is its line-form. The Book of Songs is built on lines of four characters, and the root of this lies in its tie to ritual song and dance. The commonest beat of song-and-dance is built four-to-the-bar; correspondingly, the simplest mode of poetic language is the four-character line, and this also matches the relative weight of two-syllable words in spoken Chinese.
Lin Geng has offered a fine account of why ancient poetry developed from the four-character line to five- and seven-character lines: it was to break the limits of the four-character form by drawing on everyday language, and, by way of prose-ification, to take the necessary path back to a new poeticization. At the same time, it broke the over-monotonous “2-2” rhythm of the four-character line and moved toward the more variable “2-3” or “2-2-3” rhythm. That much is right. Beyond this, the shift from orality to writing is an important reason. With the appearance of written works, poetry shifted from being primarily “sung” to being primarily “recited.” Deprived of musical accompaniment, poetry could not but rely more heavily on the musicality of language itself — that is, on rhythm — and this forced the language of poetry to shift from the uniform “2-2” rhythm to the more varied “2-3” or “2-2-3,” strengthening the expressive power of language itself. The “becoming-written” of poetry also, from one side, helps to explain why seven-character poetry flourished before five-character poetry. Beyond the influence of folk ballad and of Indian Buddhist metrical verse, [30] there is a further reason: written works not only gradually detached poetry from dance and music, but also took from poetry the on-the-spot quality of oral works. The language of poetry thus, finally, had to bear almost the whole burden of meaning-expression alone. The on-the-spot setting that had once played a central, even decisive role no longer existed; the manifold performance, full of feeling and color, was replaced by the cold, unfeeling bamboo, wood, paper, and silk. The loss of on-the-spot presence severely eroded poetic expression and at one stroke robbed poetry of its original richness, leaving it pale. To make up for the resulting lack, the line had to be greatly lengthened; to preserve its own musicality, the seven-character line, with its rhythm rich in variation, came on the stage. Only once written works had matured, the poetic sedimentation within language itself had grown abundant, and the expressive power of language alone had grown stronger, could the more condensed form of the five-character line at last be widely welcomed and rapidly multiply. One could say: the becoming-written of the Book of Songs and the movement of poetry toward independence are the very process of poetic sedimentation in language — the process of the generation of poetic language.
4. Meaning Beyond the Words, Realm Beyond the Image: The Apex of the Poeticization of Language in Written Work
Writing cut poetry off from a populace without the capacity to write, and made it the prerogative of the literati and the eminent. If, in ritual chant, an initial split of poetry from ballad had emerged in two directions of differentiation, writing, by means of the written word, further deepened the gulf between the two. Poetry now stood in close relation with knowledge and became the fruit of accumulated knowledge; the spiritual home in which the literati sang of their own feelings; the field where the leisured tilled their cunning craft and vied in oddness and beauty. This greatly advanced the poeticization of poetic language.
Speaking of the shift from a pre-literate society to a literate one, McLuhan held: “The conversion from the auditory to the visual built up the inner life of man.” [31] The shift of oral work toward writing is itself a process of conversion from the auditory to the visual. Writing strips language out of its on-the-spot context and lifts it out into prominence, pressing it firmly into the depths of the mind. Writing also fixes the auditory impression that would otherwise fly past in an instant and makes of language an object that may be turned over and savored repeatedly. The appearance of written works dissolved the simultaneous, face-to-face relation between author and reader, abolished the on-the-spot atmosphere: the audience is no longer enveloped by the air of the scene, no longer touched by the author’s tempo, intonation, and tone, nor by such non-linguistic factors as gesture, glance, and facial expression, no longer dragged forcibly along by the author into the work to receive it passively in line with the author’s intent. The distance in time and in space gives the reader the freedom of his own understanding. This freedom cultivates the reader’s reason and his sense of self-independence; it extends the space of his thinking and the depth of his mind. Writing, by its determinate outer form, marks itself off clearly from the world of objects, and so opens up the possibility of entering a broader and remoter metaphysical world. One can say: without writing, there can hardly be the birth of an independent subject and reason; without writing, the construction of a metaphysical human spirit is hard to come about. In turn, the strengthening of human subjectivity and the building up of the spiritual world place new demands on poetry and on the poetic quality of language, and so form the most basic and the most powerful driving force of language’s poeticization. The depth and richness of the human mind determines the degree of the poeticization of language, and the poeticization of language in turn keeps extending and enriching the human mind. The mind-making of man and the poeticization of language are mutually cause and effect, and writing has played the role of important inaugurator.
When language still rested on the lips and had not yet taken on the form of writing, the separation of word from thing and of word from meaning was not yet clear; the relations among them were vague and murky. Only when language took on, in writing, a determinate outer form and so marked itself as a being distinct from things and distinct from meaning did the difficulty of bringing the thing into the word, of bringing meaning across in the word, and of carrying the Way (dao) in the word, become deeply felt — became a wisdom-pain hard to dispel. And it was precisely because of this pain that one was driven to seek new modes of linguistic expression: hence the quest in which “feeling must press the very figure to depict the thing, and the word must exhaust its force to chase the new” [32]; hence the pursuit of meaning-beyond-the-words, flavor-beyond-the-taste, sound-beyond-the-strings, savor-beyond-the-rhyme; hence the creation of “meaning born outside meaning, realm born outside the realm” [33] and of “secret resonance reaching across, hidden brilliance issuing forth” [34]; even reaching the realm of “depicting spirit-flavor outside the letter, outside the image.” [35] So language at last shook off the linear bondage that had come with becoming written, was transformed into a three-dimensional presence of thickness and texture, and further shook off the determinacy of the written word to chase the flow and infinity that match being itself, becoming what Lin Geng calls
a language rich in flexibility and melody, suited to the repeated dialectical interweaving of rich imagination with clear reason, of intuitive sensuousness with bright concept — a language with a three-dimensional feel, ever clear and yet not exhausted, never merely plain and obvious. [36]
When language moves from orality to the written, it breaks through the limits of time and space and circulates across long history and broad geography. Works that once vanished in a moment can now, anywhere and at any time, be recited and savored again and again; and across works, and across words, an intricate and abundant web of relations is built up.
The poeticization of language depends on the sedimentation of life-experience, and this is realized only through the transmission of written texts and their language. It is precisely written texts and their language that gather up the feeling of every individual and the spirit of every age and pass them on — and in this process the word takes in, fuses with, and lays down, layer by layer, all manner of meaning, flavor, color, and shimmer, so winning an extremely abundant content. The sedimentation of linguistic meaning was at work in the oral period too, but the instability and momentary character of oral works, and the limits of time and space they faced, severely constrained the pace of sedimentation. Writing, by contrast, greatly extended the temporal and spatial range of a work’s circulation; it cast the work and its words into a boundless ocean of texts and words, and so effectively widened the scope of meaning-gathering and quickened its pace.
Open a book, touch a piece of writing, and other pieces — ancient, modern, even foreign — appear at once in the mind, where they seem to tremble on the verge of speech. A voice leaps out from the black letters of the white page and addresses us; other voices, some echoing far off, some whispering reminders, some shouting protest, some by way of response extending into a broader space, some heaping themselves up and changing in shock, like a vast symphony orchestra, in a performance that our flesh ears cannot hear, converge into a surging and unbroken music. [37]
Plainly, with the limited time and space of orality alone, this grand symphony could not have been brought about.
Writing fostered the growth and maturing of the community of the lettered, and at the same time kept widening the gulf between the poems of the literati and the chant of the folk. Writing fostered the mind-making of man and powerfully drove forward the poeticization of language. At the same time, as writing built up a relatively independent system of the written word, the rift between it and the spoken language kept widening, and the distance from the everyday expression of feeling kept growing. Writing drove the generation of poetic quality in language and the refinement of poetic language, but at the cost of gradually losing the living force of oral language and the directness with which oral language expresses feeling. In seeking the expression of the mind, writing has at the same time been wearing away its own power of expression: it has built up its own refined system of expression, yet has often forgotten the true sound of life and the original face of things, and at unwary moments has let slip the genuinely poetic — that poetic quality that gives the truth of life its form. That poetry should learn from the spoken word — and above all draw nourishment from oral folk song and folk ballad — so as to break the icy crust of the increasingly closed poetic system and to recover the sensitivity lost in the repeated re-use of words: this becomes an indispensable dimension in the process of the poeticization of language. Poetic language is not only the fruit of the shift from orality to writing; it is, within that very shift, the child born of the joint nourishment of the oral and the written acting upon one another.
[Author affiliation at end of original: Department of Chinese, Wenzhou Normal College, Zhejiang 325027. Responsible editor: Yuan This.]