An Effort to Return to the Earth: A Study of Poetic Language

The shift of poetry from “orality” to “writing” is at once a process by which the poetic quality of language is sedimented and brought forth, and a process by which language steadily moves away from its folk mother-source and turns toward the aristocratic; at once an expanding of the spiritual universe and, in many cases, a sloughing off of the sensuous body and a betrayal of the deeper impulses of life. For poetry, for poetic language, this is a genuine dilemma. Poetry and its language are therefore forced to oscillate between the two, in search of a balance, in search of a path that links the two and keeps the poetic quality of poetry and its language ever fresh and luxuriantly alive.

1. The Power of the Institution and the Drift Away from the Folk

Poetry and the language of poetry were destined to take the road of institutionalization and aristocratization from the moment they parted ways with ritual.

A central feature of primeval ritual is that it embraces, at the same time, two mutually contradictory extremes. On the one hand, it is highly formalized. Formality is the necessary form in which ritual exists. One could say: without formality there is no ritual. It is precisely through prescribed forms that one expresses reverence toward gods and ancestors and so receives their blessing. To abandon the form is to slight, insult, and ultimately to defect from the gods and the ancestors. On the other hand, ritual is also thoroughly carnivalized. It not only permits but requires its participants to enter a state of revel and intoxication, to give full play to their vital potential, and in that revel and intoxication to commune with the gods and the ancestors, to share joy with them and become one with them. Revel and intoxication are the means by which the gods are entertained and a state of co-being and unity with them becomes possible. On the face of it, formality severely represses the carnival impulse and stifles the release of vital force, while carnivalization, by sheer unbridled momentum, tries to burst through whatever forms confine it. Carnival needs no rule and no form; it is anti-rule and rule-less, anti-form and form-less. And yet primeval ritual holds these mutually contradictory extremes together within the whole. The separation of poetry and ballad from ritual, and likewise the separation of poetry from ballad, is precisely the result of this unitary state breaking apart.

Because the ballad is ritual chant that has flowed down to the folk — the means by which ordinary people borrow the outer husk of ritual chant to give vent to emotion and to express their sensuous life — the inherent formality of ritual chant gradually lost its inviolable solemnity, the solemnity proper to honoring gods and ancestors, and degenerated into a device serving only memory and singability, no longer producing severe repression; the carnivalizing side of ritual, on the other hand, was inherited and intensified. It was carnivalization that allowed human vitality and feeling to be expressed without reserve, displaying and prolonging the abundant life-force of the folk.

Poetry, by contrast, developed directly from ritual chant, and naturally inherited the sacred form of that chant and the strict constraints that came with it. [1] As a language for communing with gods and praying for blessing, it had to maintain its own sacredness and gravity; in diction and in syntactic patterning alike, it had to follow particular rules and meet particular standards, marking itself off from the everyday language of the folk. To do otherwise would be a desecration of gods and ancestors. As ritual became the prerogative of rulers, an instrument for the rulers to sing their own praises, the formal character of ritual was infused with an institutional content that registered hierarchy and rank. Poetry, emerging gradually and becoming independent within the privatization of ritual and the institutionalization of ritual form — emerging from out of song, dance, and music — necessarily bore the stamp of institutionalization. The privatization of ritual also determined that poetry would be cut off from the broadest tribal membership and would become the privilege of a non-folk privileged group, marked from the start by the brand of the aristocratic. At their very source, poetry and its language were institutionalized and aristocratized. Even folk ballads, once admitted into and seated within the “hall” of Poetry, had no choice but to comply, to be domesticated, to take on aristocratic airs and to be absorbed into the cage of the institution.

Writing further intensified the gulf between poetry and ballad, between hall and folk. Writing is power. It belongs only to the lettered and has nothing to do with the folk. If poetry was already stamped with the marks of institutionalization and aristocratization at the moment it parted from ritual, writing fixed those marks: by setting up letters — which the common people had no capacity to master — as a barrier, it shut them out of the kingdom of Poetry. Poetry then became a sign of social standing — a refined activity through which men of the scholar-official class conducted introductions, exchanges, and verse-exchanges, a calling card for visits to potential patrons, and even directly a stepping-stone to office. Poetry was incessantly “sanctified,” its market value became dazzling, and so it intensified its institutional armature still further and established its own status precisely through its distinctive institutional form. The opposition of “elegant” (ya) and “vulgar” (su) was thus no longer merely a stylistic mark but a mark of identity and rank. “Elegant” meant orthodox, with social standing and authority; “vulgar” was disparaged, suppressed, beneath the notice of the lettered and even driven out. Between hall and folk, between poetry and ballad, between poetic diction and folk speech, an entrenched hierarchical distance took shape — and that distance was consciously and continuously widened.

This drift away from the folk left poetry and poetic language without their richest and most variegated source. Poetry confined itself within the narrow circle of the lettered and became a play of words and an exercise of erudition.① To win poetic quality, poetry and its language had to rely on the poet’s rack-brained, lamp-lit chanting and turn-over-and-over polishing. Although this path did bring it successes and at times splendor, opening up one poetic realm after another, the cost was the betrayal of the mother that nourished it — the betrayal of the earth. Even as the realms and language of poetry became ever more refined and ever more conceptualized, they let slip the broad, rough generosity of the earth and the simple, candid honesty of the folk. Speaking of Yuefu poetry, Hu Yinglin once observed:

The Han Yuefu mixed pieces, apart from the suburban sacrificial songs, the Naoge martial songs, and the works of Li Ling and Su Wu, were largely lane and alley airs of the folk — of the same kind as the high-antique “Earth-Striking Song” and “Southern Mountains” — uttered straight from the mouth and entirely without ornament. So they are deeply unadorned and direct, true through and through, and stand alone above the ages. From Cao Cao and his sons on, with the literati taking literature as their calling and a circle of guest-clients gathering, the literary scene at Jian’an coalesced. But the manner of the gentry was already at odds with that of the folk; their imitations diverged from the “Six Creations”; and as the flowering of phrasing flourished, the true unadorned voice gradually thinned away. [2]

The result of aristocratization is the weakening of the life-force of poetry and of its language.

Writing, even as it offers the warmth of exchange and communication, is at the same time a violence of repression. As warmth, it offers itself only to the lettered; as violence, it not only deepens the gulf between hall and folk — flaunting the authority of the written word above the populace and, by its privileged status, rejecting and disparaging oral works, folk songs and folk ballads — but also imposes, by means of the lexical concept, the written norm, and linear order, a constriction on poetic expression itself. The fluidity and spontaneity of oral expression, and the freshness that comes with them, are forced under the hammer-blow of writing into the narrow circle and threadbare content of language-concepts, are forced to accept the binding of written norms and the constraint of linear order, and thereby give up a great many extraordinarily vital meanings. Writing is the privilege of the lettered: it crystallizes their wisdom and at the same time carries the prejudice and narrowness of the lettered as “upper persons,” saturated with the ideology of hall and ruler.

Poetry was conceived and delivered out of the maternal womb of primeval ritual. And in the very process of leaving that womb and growing up, it turned around and used its privilege to despise the populist quality of primeval ritual, used its ever-stronger institutional armature to suppress the folk’s carnivalizing manner, and used the cold consciousness of the hall to scour away the humor of the folk. Writing fixed the splitting of these opposed sides within ritual, deepened the rupture between poetry and folk custom, and pushed poetry and poetic language onto an arduous road of self-repression and self-exile. Wen Yiduo once compared poetry to “a dance in shackles.” He said this not only because his own poetic work valued regular form, but also because he was naming a basic feature of poetry: in the course of its development, poetry has naturally grown into an institutional form that cannot be shed, with structural casting, allusion-based phrasing, comparison-and-evocation rhetoric, diction, and tonal and rhyme schemes all bound by institutional regulation. The poet can only display his talent within a circumscribed freedom, can only express his “form of life” under the bondage of fetters. Even a literary master like Su Shi was reproached for being “out of tune.” In the end, the poetic quality of language is the experience of the spiritual freedom that language gives to the heart, and it is precisely this “institutionalization” that strangles that freedom — and thereby damages the poetic quality of language.

In The Rules of Art, Pierre Bourdieu put forward the concept of the “literary field.” He wrote:

Many of the practices and representations of artists and writers . . . can be made intelligible only by reference to the field of power, inside which the literary field (and so on) itself occupies a dominated position. [3]

Literary creation is constrained by the literary field in which it is situated, and the literary field is in turn dominated by the field of power. The constraints that the field of power exerts upon different literary genres differ markedly. Across the long course of Chinese history, poetry and ballad stood in very different relations to the field of power. Poetry was honored as “canon” from the very beginning, placed under the wing of the ruler, and treated with special favor; later, the institution of “selecting officials by poetry” gave it a particular glory. Until the rolling tides of commodity economy and mass culture began to arrive, poetry had never set down its “laurel crown”; its noble standing had seemingly never been overturned, and had never even been questioned. Poetry’s eminent identity destined it to be governed by the field of power in the most direct way — and the result was that poetry had to keep strengthening and refining its institutional armature in accord with the demands of power. By comparison, the relation of ci (lyric song-text), as “poetry’s residue,” to the field of power was looser, the constraint smaller; the relation of qu (drama-song) looser still. The further from the hall and the closer to the folk, the lighter the impact of the field of power. As for mountain songs and ballads, that impact was more indirect still. So material and vocabulary that, by habit, could not enter Poetry could enter ci and qu openly; mountain songs and ballads had still fewer taboos.②

“Literature becomes literature only through the interplay of selection, consecration, and institutional legitimation.” [4] The institutionalization and aristocratization of poetry are bound to lead to the ossification of poetic language. In The Predicament of Tradition, Zhang Guofeng analyzes in depth what he calls “the danger of systematization” in poetry. He points out that the Qing-period Complete Tang Poems lists more than 2,000 poets and 48,900 works, of which only a tiny number are genuinely enduring; the bulk are third- and fourth-rate, mediocre pieces.

Analyzing those third- and fourth-rate works, we readily find that many of them stem from the author’s lack of his own distinctive experience of life and from the borrowing of images that everyone had already used to weariness, of phrasing that everyone had already used to weariness. These phrasings had already lost their original image-bearing power and had become a concept, a sign. What they call forth is only a conceptual association. [5]

The poetic refinement of poetic language is an arduous and tortuous process: it requires the continual sedimentation of linguistic meaning, yet must not let that sedimentation silt up the spring of life — on the contrary, it has to keep seeking fresh sources of running water and keep extending its frontiers. This is just what dooms poetry to never being able to break free of the folk soil that nourishes it.

2. The Pursuit of the Spiritual and the Betrayal of the Flesh

Primeval ritual contains a twofold orientation. One is toward the spiritual world. As an activity of offering and prayer to gods and ancestors, ritual naturally carries within it a spiritual orientation, and this orientation is concentrated in ritual chant. The other orientation is attachment to the flesh. Within the horizon of primeval thinking, the desires of the gods are the desires of men: entertaining the gods and entertaining oneself are one and the same. To indulge one’s body, to revel in feasting, to give voice without restraint, to take pleasure to the full — this is itself the sacrificial offering to gods and ancestors. The enjoyment of the body and the intoxication of the senses — this feature has been preserved in later folk carnivals and folk songs.

The spiritual orientation of ritual chant was reinforced after poetry became independent and was given the form of writing. Oral language belongs more directly to sensuous life — it was originally the cry of life itself — whereas writing is more closely tied to reasoning and logical thought, and because its medium is indirect, it can never quite avoid being one membrane apart from sensuous life, even as it opens up a space for metaphysical reflection. Oral language can only be of the now: it arises and is gone in the same instant — yet precisely because of that immediacy, it can directly and truthfully seize the instantaneous experience of life and lay bare the original visage of life. Writing pursues the eternal, but precisely because of that pursuit, it forfeits the on-the-spot presence of the present moment. Once the word is inscribed, it has already become past — has already become an object available for reflection and critique. One could say that the shift from orality to writing implicitly carries with it a shift from the on-the-spot expression of life to rational reflection. As the words of the writing process are turned over again and again, polished, and screened by the literati, they grow ever more remote from the ur-state of life.

Speaking of ballads and other forms of popular literature, Zheng Zhenduo observed with sharpness that, although their character is often coarse, they are also fresh, preserving vivid color, unleashed imagination, and great spirit. But once their forms are taken up by the literati,

and they become a branch of orthodox literature, those features all gradually disappear; what was once lively eventually grows old and stiff, and becomes a hollow corpse with only the shell remaining. [6]

To be sure, the literati’s picking up and reworking does enrich and develop poetic form and language; but it cannot help losing the soul of the folk ballad. The Greater Ziye Songs say: “The strings and pipes give voice to song / and borrowed instruments raise a clear sound. / Yet the marvelous quality of folk song is not known: / its power and stance come from the mouth and the heart.” The essence of the folk ballad is that it is the direct utterance of blazing desire: it is rooted truly and concretely in the depths of the heart, and uses language that is direct and frank, and therefore extraordinarily vivid and alive, to express life on fire. In his preface to A Collection of Ancient Ballads and Proverbs Liu Yusong wrote: “Ballads and proverbs are all the natural music of heaven, the direct utterance of one’s aims, like wind moving over water, naturally taking shape.” [7] The poems written by the literati, however skillful in phrasing and however given to deep reflection, lose, precisely on account of those very strengths, the essence of the folk ballad.

The development from orality to writing was at once advance and retreat. In Of Grammatology, Derrida wrote:

Progress as retrogression is the development of writing as reason . . . This is a model we have already tried: it is need rather than feeling — light in place of heat, clarity in place of desire, exactness in place of force, thought in place of feeling, reason in place of heart, syllable in place of tone. What is natural, what is beneath and prior to language, intervenes in language afterwards, intervenes after the origin, and brings on decline or retrogression. [8]

Writing has strengthened the clarity of language, intensified the logic of thought, and greatly extended the range of exchange and communication, expanding effectively the spiritual universe that language constructs. But even as writing has gone busily about its own creation and expansion, it has woven itself into a tightly-organized net of language-concepts suspended above the earth: it has gradually parted from the rich soil on which it grew, has let slip from memory desire, force, feeling, and heart, and put in their place thought, reason, need, clarity, and exactness. The process of writing-becoming-pervasive is the process by which language leaves the mouth and turns its back on the body; it is also the process of taking leave of the folk. In the course of this process, language increasingly becomes a rootless, pale concept and can hardly evade the fate of withering.

Xie Zhen in Four Seas Poetics greatly praised the language of the Nineteen Old Poems as natural and frank, and had quite a few jibes for the heavily-wrought Qi and Liang dynasty works: “In the poets of the Wei and Jin, household speech and official speech share the page half-and-half, but from the Qi and Liang on, the moment they open their mouths it is all official speech. Official speech expends effort; household speech saves effort. Official speech is forced; household speech is natural.” [9] The spread of writing is the process of language becoming official, hierarchized, and powered. In this process, language gradually builds up its own norms and its own order. Though writing still works to innovate so as to enrich itself, it inevitably wears away, bit by bit, the natural quality of the folk’s “household speech,” and snuffs out the original visage of life and its vital force that this natural quality carries with it.

Officialization further establishes for language a clear hierarchical scale — the politeness, coarseness, or even obscenity of phrasing, the elegant or the lowly — and ties folk oral speech to the coarse and the lowly, downgrades it, and then drives it out of the “hall” of Poetry. As Bakhtin puts it:

They have not been preserved from the past, have not generally been consolidated within an abstract semantic context (have not been reworked so as to enter the literary publishing world); it is as though they were born for a single actual use and then disappeared forever. Within the language of abstract norms they have no right at all to enter into the system of worldview, for that system is not one of conceptual word-meanings — it is living discourse itself. They generally express the non-standard, the non-official, the non-serious situations (in which people sometimes laugh, sometimes sing, sometimes quarrel, sometimes hold festival, sometimes carouse — situations, in short, that depart from the routine), and so they cannot serve as representatives of the solemn official language. But situations and intonations of this kind do not die, even if books may forget them or even shy away from them. [10]

The officialization of the language of written works erects a fence around itself, self-consciously or otherwise preventing folk discourse from rushing in directly. For example, “wine” has to be called qiongjiang or lüyi, “the moon” has to be called yupan or chang’e, and so on. Only in this way does language appear elegant. When such a “re-naming” first appears, it does indeed enlarge the imaginative space and renew the felt world; but once it becomes routine, repeatedly used, copied from one to the next, it appears all the more empty and vague — far less alive than the plain everyday designation. For this re-naming runs counter to the folk and counter to life itself. Once the folk — that richest, most inexhaustible source — has been lost, the official discourse is doomed to lose its base color, becoming ever paler and drier, and finally a conceptual net floating above everyday life, deprived of any anchorage in the heart.

The poetic quality of language is a vast spiritual universe; it ought not to be a rootless realm hanging in the void. It should be rooted in the depths of life, the sublimation of the deepest desire, the splendid flower of the heart in bloom. Only when the spiritual realm is constantly nourished by the heart and always tugs at and stirs the desires of life — only then, as men roam the heaven of that spiritual realm, do they at the same time return to life itself, to the depths of the soul, and from that return draw the deepest tremor of the heart.

3. The Effort to Return to the Earth

Language, in its essence, is the product of man’s pursuit of a spiritual realm. By nature it tends to shake off material immediacy and entrust itself to the free abstract concept. But just as with a flying kite, it always needs a string held in the human hand and tied to the real world; once that string is severed, the kite drifts off and is lost. Likewise, poetry is the spirit of the universe: poetry and poetic language always carry within themselves the impulse to pursue the heavens and the impulse to return to the earth, and it is these two vectors that constitute the inner tension of poetry and its language and the oscillating bearing of its course. As poetry dreams its metaphysical dream and grows ever more institutionalized, it constantly makes an effort to return to the folk, to return to the earth, to return to the oral, to return to life.

Take, for example, the Eastern Jin in our own history. On the one hand, the upper classes threw themselves into the writing of metaphysical verse (xuanyan shi); on the other, the folk was creating and circulating the “new sounds and varied airs.” The Greater Ziye Songs say: “Of folk songs there are hundreds of varieties / yet Ziye is the most lovable. / With strong feeling it gives forth a clear sound, / clear and turning, issuing forth from what is natural.” [11] These clear sounds, issuing from nature, are precisely the true outpouring of the folk’s heart; compared with the upper classes’ painful searching after the deep and obscure, they are far closer to the candid avowal of life.

In Literary History of the National Language, Hu Shi divides Chinese literature into hall literature (aristocratic literature) and folk literature (field literature):

Hall literature can fetch official rank and wealth, but it cannot give voice to the joys and sorrows of the common people. Not only can it not draw a single tear from a common person; it cannot even draw an ordinary smile. Hall literature, however fashionable, however victorious, in the end has no “vital breath,” in the end has no “human flavor.” [12]

As against hall literature, what really carries vital force and gives expression to the unclouded sensuous life is folk literature, common-people’s literature. Folk and common-people’s literature carries on the features of oral chant and song — that is, “vernacularized” creation. For Hu Shi, the whole history of Chinese literature is the history of literature steadily moving toward “vernacularization.” In writing his Literary History of the National Language he was, in effect, finding historical grounding for the literary revolution of the May Fourth period — for the call to vernacular literature. The development of literature is the process of “vernacularization”; and so the May Fourth call for a vernacular literature naturally becomes a historical inevitability, in step with the tide of history.

It must be granted that Hu Shi’s stress on the importance of literary “vernacularization” and his treatment of it as the overall direction of literary development are sound. Looking more concretely, however, within this overall trend of “vernacularization” there is also another opposing drive: the drive toward “becoming-written.” This double drive is what makes up the inner tension of the language of literary works and the oscillation, in the course of literature’s development, between the two poles. If “vernacularization” is “popularization” — the effort to win the broadest body of creators and audiences, the return to the lower strata of society and to the unadorned original state of life — then “becoming-written” is the trend of “aristocratization”: even as it builds up its own spiritual universe and its reserved poetic quality, it is also a process of life’s weakening and wearing-out. Vernacularization-as-popularization, with its folk character, its directness, and its dialogicality, ties language to life in the most direct way and makes language the blazing avowal of life, the direct creation of life — and the most exuberant and unadorned creation of life at that, a dialogue of life with life. This is a homecoming of language from “the written” back to “the oral,” a search for the lost mass character and carnivalizing quality of language. The richness and variety of life make this vernacular language unbounded in richness and exuberant in tangle; the ardor of life makes it a “carnivalized” language. Folk vernacular language is necessarily “polyphonic”; it is a gathering of all manner of voices, a carnival of language. “This ‘strange round-table’ of carnival accommodates everything, mingling the coarse and the sacred, the lowly and the sublime, the spiritual and the material.” [13] “Becoming-written,” by contrast, is the purification and standardization of language. As it tempers and elevates language, it uses the linear ordering of writing to discipline the living, leaping spoken word into shape and then admits it. The process of “becoming-written” is the process of “disciplining”: by the value-scheme of the hall, it ruthlessly selects from and prunes the spoken word, cutting away its tangled branches in order to conform to the elegant lessons of the ancients. Such ostensibly “pure” language is no longer the polyphonic carnival but a monologue, a soft and life-less monologue. On the language of poetry, the Qing scholar Qian Yong held that “Spoken speech can all enter poetry; once it is well-fitted, it forms a fine line.” [14] Liu Xizai went further, holding that “Strange phrases are easy, ordinary phrases are hard,” and counted the skillful absorption of folk language into poetry a “critical pass” of the art of poetry. [15] These views all see the freshness and life of folk oral language and its direct bond with the existence of life.

Li Jinxi once set the Ziye Song lines — “Pity the wutong-thrush / it forcefully says it knows the day is breaking / and for no reason cries at the third watch / so that my dear one slips off into the dark” — alongside the diction of the “Zhao Nan” section of the Book of Songs, and commented with a wry smile:

The wording of Five Dynasties ci is already quite close to modern speech; “my dear one” (huan zi) of five or six hundred years earlier has long since become ancient, and so is not as “lowdown” or as offensive to the eye as the Five Dynasties’ “charming sister” and “dear elder brother.” As for the Book of Songs from a thousand years before the Northern and Southern Dynasties — its diction is unintelligible without philological gloss, so no matter what kind of “lowdown talk” it may contain, it never offends the eye. [16]

In fact, beyond the estrangement created by the lapse of time, the deeper reason is that, once these oral pieces were taken up by the gentry, they had already been domesticated; the originally “lowdown” coloring had been rinsed and washed until it no longer pricked the eye. “Admission” is “domestication,” which is also “weakening.” When the spoken language no longer pricks the eye, it has already been absorbed into the value-system of the gentry, has already been absorbed into the system of written language, and so has lost the original visage of life and its force of impact. John Fiske writes: “Oral culture exceeds and resists ‘official’ language, and so is opposed to the rules of official language.” [17] But official language holds power, and is in a position gradually to domesticate and assimilate oral culture. Beyond the self-creating activity of the literati, then, there is for poetic language another and more important dimension: it must keep snatching oral vocabulary from the folk and keep disciplining it. It is precisely this latter dimension that keeps poetic language rooted in the most fertile soil — the folk — and that allows it to receive a constant flow of abundant nourishment and exuberant vitality. This is a process of replacement. The old dead words are gradually weeded out; new folk speech, fragrant with the soil, is taken in, domesticated, and then itself gradually weakened and aged. The folk is the inexhaustible spring of language’s most luxuriant life-force and its never-drying creative power. The emergence and flourishing of yuefu, ci, and qu show not only poetry drawing on the formal resources of the folk but also poetry’s direct learning of spoken language from the folk, and demonstrate a powerful will for the written to return to the oral.

Speaking of Song ci and Yuan qu, Liao Kebin points out that, as social life changed, the discursive resources of the folk grew ever richer, and so large numbers of vulgar characters, vulgar phrases, and vulgar expressions, along with vulgar things, vulgar feelings, and vulgar manners, entered the dictionary.

The aesthetic realm shifted from the deep, rounded fullness of shi (poetry) to the fine-wrought, dense beauty of ci, and then to the sharp, freshly exposed quality of qu; and aesthetic taste shifted from the elegant to the vulgar. Here we see that everyday life truly received vivid mimetic depiction, that the human inner world truly received finer and more vivid sketching, that all kinds of subjective feeling truly received unstinted release — and that this is what made ci and qu feel more intimate and natural and more in keeping with human feeling than shi did. [18]

The use of folk oral language in poetry is especially marked in Yuan qu. Take, for example, Zhang Kejiu’s “Shanpoyang: Boudoir Thoughts”:

Hair piled like cloud-coiled spirals; mandarin-duck quilt warmed with incense; she shuts the spring chamber, just lying down for a sound, dreamlike spring nap. A willow flower drifts down. Little Qiongji, a maid, cries out: “Snow is falling, an auspicious omen!” And the dream of reunion is jolted awake. “Who, who has spoiled the moment?” “Pah — it is you!”

The piece writes of a young wife, husband absent, who in spring thinks of her man and falls into a deep sleep beneath the mandarin-duck quilt. Suddenly, because the little maid sees floating willow catkins and leaps up crying “Snow falling — auspicious omen!”, she is jolted awake from her dream of reunion. The good dream cannot return; vexation rises at once — yet, because the maid is naively muddled, the wife is at a loss for what to do. The two lines of plain speech — “Who, who has spoiled the moment?” “Pah — it is you!” — at once express how mistress and maid keep each other’s company in close affection and harmony, and bring to life on the page the wife’s coy, peeved manner and the twists of her heart. Or take Guan Yunshi’s “Hongxiuxie”:

Pressed close and leaning together, by the cloud-window we sit. / Cradled and held tight, on the moon-pillow we sing in pairs. / Listening, counting, anxious, afraid — already the fourth watch is past. / The fourth watch is past, but the feeling is not yet enough. / The feeling not yet enough, and the night goes like a shuttle. / Heaven, oh — what harm in one more leap-watch beyond?

This love song, full of folk flavor, vulgar yet vivid, plain and frank, with not a shred of coyness or concealment, is yet steeped with feeling-charged echo. The intensity of the love it expresses and the authentic, natural humanity it bears go beyond what ordinary poetry and ci can do. Oral language, as language not yet polished and dressed up, has the most direct bond with natural life; coarse and tangled though it sometimes is, it can still in the most heartfelt and concrete way express human desire and life itself.

4. The Arduous Road of “Homecoming”

The clash between “writing” and “the oral” found its sharpest expression in the modern “debate between classical and vernacular.” Huang Zunxian and others advocated a “poetic revolution” and called for “writing with my own hand what my mouth speaks,” gradually building this into a vernacular literature movement of large scale. It must be granted that modern vernacular poetry achieved real things in breaking up the unified reign of classical-language poetry and in overcoming the disconnect between classical written language and the spoken word; but in the construction of modern vernacular poetry — and especially in the construction of vernacular poetic language — it accomplished very little. The lack of poetic quality and poetic flavor in vernacular poetry has been its chronic ailment, and on that account it has been much rebuked and reviled. But the defect of vernacular poetry is not the result of returning to the folk and learning from oral speech: this awkwardness is the awkwardness of history.

The new poets of the May Fourth period raised the banner of “commoners’ literature” and replaced classical with vernacular language; but in fact, they used a shallow language — the spoken language of the literati themselves, or, more accurately, the “neither-classical-nor-vernacular, neither-Chinese-nor-Western” discourse of the lettered privileged — in order to express “their own” and even “imported” new thought and new feeling. They did not really return to the folk and immerse themselves in it so as to learn from its oral creation.③ For this reason, vernacular poetry obtained neither the rich resources of folk discourse, nor its rough vigor and vitality, and also lost the poetic quality long sedimented in the classical written tongue. It had nothing to lean on.

The classical written language used by classical poetry is the achievement of several centuries of unbroken tempering. Whatever its flaws, in the course of its use it sedimented an opulence of meaning and a glittering wealth of emotional coloring. In its allusions and diction it observed source-and-pedigree, building among individual poems and among the words of different poems a finely-interwoven web of relations — a vast network that transcends the limits of time and space. Hence one line of poetry, one word, was never merely itself; it always tugged along behind it world after world of meaning. This was just the sort of language fitted to build the poetic realm in which “words have a limit, but meaning has none.” The web of meaning woven by these relations would often carry one away from the rootedness of life, but it also offered to one a free spiritual space, a poetic utopia. All the more so for the literati, including writers of new poetry: they grew up bathed in classical-written language and in classical poetry, and although on the level of ideas they had taken up the new currents, at the deeper layer of feeling, taste, even of modes of reading and reception, they remained traditional. They were accustomed to the reserved, evocative expression and to the spiritual mode of classical poetry. But vernacular poetry severed the link with tradition. By comparison with classical written language, the language of vernacular poetry became a solitary language; clear and plain, but only itself — it did not, as classical written language did, enter a network of meaning. It could only be shallow, without aftertaste, hard pressed to carry the reserved, evocative expression of the poetic. This new mode of expression the literati found hard to accept and assent to, and even the new poets themselves often felt inwardly ashamed before it.

Moreover, the language used in May Fourth vernacular poetry was not taken directly from the spoken word but was a vernacular that had been put through Europeanized grammatical norms. It lost the flexibility of the spoken word, and even the flexibility of the classical written tongue. Saussure once placed languages on a continuum between those leaning toward the lexical and those leaning toward the grammatical, holding that the entire language-system moves between these two poles — and that Chinese is “the very type of the super-lexical.” [19] Languages that lean toward the lexical, because they are less constrained by grammar and logic, often have great freedom along the horizontal axis of association, and so are poetic. In classical-written Chinese poetry, words are extraordinarily free: they can be combined at the poet’s emotion and intention, as in “The parrot pecks the leftover red-bean grain,” “Slender grass, light breeze on the bank, / The high mast, lone night-boat,” or “The moon sets, the crows cry, frost fills the sky, / River maples and fishing fires face the sorrow-laden sleeper” — where the vertical logical relation has broken and dissolved, where grammar no longer exists, and where there remain only seemingly independent, free words. And it is precisely because of the suspension of logic and grammar that the language gives poet and reader a free space, more strongly stirring their imagination and feeling, and so builds up a poetic realm of far-reaching savor. The vernacular poetry of the May Fourth period was different: the most urgent wish of the poets at that moment was to use literature for enlightenment, to use poetry to express new thought — which, in a historical situation of social change and rising new tides, was just what one would expect. In “On New Poetry,” Hu Shi wrote:

The bondage of form prevents the spirit from developing freely and prevents fine content from being fully expressed. If we want new content and new spirit, we cannot but first break those fetters that bind the spirit. So the new poetry movement of recent years in China may be called a “great liberation of the form of poetry.” It is because of this layer of formal liberation that abundant material, careful observation, deep ideals, and complex feeling have at last been able to run into poetry. [20]

To express the new thought and the new spirit precisely and through, and so to fulfill the aim of enlightenment, the stress fell on the normative and rigorous quality of language; the borrowing of Europeanized grammar was the only choice. Yet this very choice cost the language of vernacular poetry the poetic freedom that classical written language enjoyed, and the poetic quality was thereby strangled.

Hu Shi’s own new poem “Authority” reads:

Authority sits atop the mountain / and orders a band of slaves bound in iron chains to dig the mine for him. / He says: “Which of you is stubborn? / I will do with you whatever I please!” / The slaves toil for ten thousand years; / the iron chains on their necks are gradually worn through. / They say: “When the chains break, / we shall rise up!” / The slaves work together with one heart, / hoe by hoe digging down to the foot of the mountain. / The foot of the mountain is hollowed out, / Authority topples down and falls to his death!

Poetry uses discourse in which grammatical and logical relations have been intensified to express thought, and the price is the loss of poetic quality and poetic flavor. Shen Yinmo was very attentive to drawing on the realm and savor of classical poetry, yet even in his lines of scenic depiction and emotional outpouring — “The mountain peach is in bloom, / yet the leaves of the oleander are frozen badly. / The tender red sprout on the earth / is stiffer still and cannot put out” (Vital Force) — strengthened grammar and logic tie words and images tightly together and build up a neat linear order, repressing the multidirectional spreading of imagination. Compared with classical poetry and ci, the poetic quality is inferior.

Bakhtin observes: “Literature draws on spoken speech and on folk language. But this is not just a matter of taking up vocabulary, or syntax (a simpler syntax); it is first and foremost a matter of taking up its dialogicality, its conversationality itself — making it directly felt by the hearer and strengthening the factor of communication and exchange. Second, it means weakening the monologic element in speech and strengthening its dialogic element.” [11] The shift of literature from “orality” to “writing” is also the shift of language from “dialogue” to “monologue.” Writing pushes the face-to-face audience away into the future, sets it at a certain distance, and so necessarily weakens the “dialogicality” of language and strengthens its “monologicality.” But while the language of classical poetry weakened the dialogicality of oral poetry, it at the same time strengthened its own dialogue with history and with previous generations of writers; its works felt rich and substantial because they were filled with the “overtones” of history and the “symphony” of earlier poets’ work. Modern new poetry, on the other hand, with the changeover of language, both lost the rich “overtones” and “symphony” of classical poetic language and — because it was neither classical nor vernacular and neither Chinese nor Western — was unable to rebuild “dialogicality”: it failed to recover its own richness by drawing close to the folk and entering into a relation of intimate dialogue with its audience, and the poetic quality flowed away.

The failure of May Fourth vernacular poetry in the creation of poetic quality in language does not show that returning to the folk and learning from the oral is a wrong road; the reasons lie elsewhere. Only when the heat of expressing new thought had cooled was this defect squarely faced and corrected. Modern vernacular poetry carries an inborn disability with it, but it is precisely because of this thorough metamorphosis that writing and oral expression have been welded back together more soundly, and a broad horizon opened up for the development of poetic language.

Heidegger once enthusiastically named the poet Hebel “a friend of the house.” For Heidegger, Hebel could be the faithful guardian and friend of “the house” in a “time of dearth” precisely because most of his poems were written in dialect. Using his mother tongue and the sounds of his home country, he ran a “localization” against “technologization,” returning the “technologized” nature back into nature and the technologized “material” back into “the thing itself.” Here, nature and the thing itself are no longer abstracted concept and numerical model but things charged with all of life and the full force of feeling, things filled with worldly meaning — and so man comes to “dwell in a clearer nearness to language.” Dialect has the closest connection with the natural mode of human existence: it is brought forth and reared up directly by the earth. The roots of dialect run deep into the earth. Hebel knew well that hidden within dialect were his beloved native place, the great natural world, and the most unadorned, natural humanity — and that, in passing through dialect, one could approach “the house.” [21] “The native place is the source and root of the soul.” [22] The love of Heidegger and Hebel for dialect is also a love for the oral, a guardianship of the original state of life and the source of the soul. Yet this oral language is not the everyday chatter, for chatter has already pulled man up from the root of being; nor is it the technologized (grammaticized), genteel discourse, but a spoken language truly rooted in the folk, glistening with damp soil and shining with green-green life. So the return of poetic language to the oral is not merely the gathering of oral words; it is, on the spiritual plane, a return — close and tender — to the folk, to the earth, to the source of life. When language is forced into an exile from home, it seeks, through “the sound of home,” to draw near once more to being and to come back to “the house of the world.”

Even as writing keeps accumulating poetic quality for language, it cannot help wearing language away. And yet the “becoming-written” of language is a trend that cannot be reversed; it is an achievement of the development of human civilization. With the spread of print technology, language passed through one more transformation — from handwriting to print. This shift made the popularization of letters possible, and so it laid the technical conditions for the shift from classical-written poetry to vernacular poetry. As poetry moves toward its written existence, it can never forget the age of orality; in pressing forward without pause, it always looks back, and the poetic quality of poetic language is generated and transformed in just this back-and-forth.

Notes

① In classical-written poetry, allusion and source-citation were given great weight, and the writing of poetry often became a “book-bag-dropping” parade of erudition by the literati.

② Mountain songs and ballads are blunt, rough, and earthy in diction; Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs, for instance, contains a great many pieces that speak directly of sex — matters that in classical-written poetry were strongly taboo, and even when touched upon had to be written in the most veiled and oblique terms.

③ During the May Fourth period, Liu Bannong and other writers did go down into the folk to collect folk songs and ballads and to learn from them in their own work, but the effect was slight: at that time such learning still stopped at fragmentary language and form, rather than at a real “folk-ness,” a real spiritual communion with the living life of the folk.