lit: mirror of Allen's article

MACROPOETIC STRUCTURES: THE CHINESE SOLUTION

CHINESE POETRY rises out of the clusters of relatively
short poems found in the early anthologies,
the Book of Songs (Shi jing) and the Songs of the South
(Chu ci).[1] This distinguishes the literary tradition
of China from the contemporaneous Greco-Roman one with its grounding in epic and drama, and aligns it more with the later Japanese tradition, which begins with the Man'yoshu and subsequent imperial anthologies.[2] In China that macropoetic environment, where a poem is read both as an independent unit and as part of a larger structure, is repeatedly reconfigured in the following centuries. In this essay I consider how the poetic cluster functioned within the Chinese literary system, especially how it opened avenues of expression otherwise unavailable to the poet. My arguments are illustrated with comparisons from studies of the poetic sequence in Japan and the West; these comparisons allow us to isolate the characteristics special to the Chinese macropoetic form.

Among the poetic clusters scattered through Chinese literary history are some of China's finest poems. These clusters may be as broad as the "Airs of the States" ("Guo feng"), where 160 poems are loosely gathered together, or as delimited as the "Nine Laments" ("Jiu tan"), in which nine poems occur in an author-intended sequence.[3] Some of the most celebrated examples in classical Chinese include:

"Nine Songs" and other "nines" of the Songs of the South,
the "Nineteen Old Poems,"
Tao Qian's 20 "Drinking Poems,"
Bao Zhao's 18 (or 19) "Weary Road" poems,
Wang Wei's "Wang River Collection,"
Du Fu's "Autumn Meditations,"
Fan Chengda's "Poems on the Seasons,"
Yang Weizhen's "Twenty Cosmetic Case Poems,"
Zhao Mengfu's "Twenty-eight Poems Inscribed on Tianguan Mountain,"
Tang Yin's "A Rainstorm Has Dragged On for Ten Days Now, and There
Is No Fire in the Kitchen. Moistening My Inkstone and Chewing
on My Brush, I've Lived in Isolation Like a Monk--and Completed
Eight Quatrains to
Express My Feelings,"
Yuan Mei's "Five Poems on Returning to Hangchou,"
and Wu Wen's 12 "Poems on Yi Garden."

In the modern era we have:

Li Jinfa's "Expressions of Time,"
Feng Zhi's 27-poem sonnet cycle,
Yang Mu's "Zodiac Etudes,"
Lo Ch'ing's "Six Ways to Eat a Watermelon" (which has five
poems),
and Bei Dao's "Notes from the City of the Sun."[4]

No one would claim that each of these poetic sets must be read in its entirety; in fact, many of them have been excerpted in anthologies and for comment in both Chinese and Western sources. One could argue, however, that a poem's identification with the group, whether the group is present or not, invites us to understand the poem as part of that special environment, what Neil Fraistat calls its "contextural poetics"(4f.).[5] And when so considered, the poem takes on a depth and range of meaning not otherwise available to it.

In the most loosely defined of these macropoetic structures, such as the clusters of "Airs" in the Book of Songs, any one poem can easily be read alone. Its meaning does not require looking outside the borders of the poem itself--not to the collection as a whole, or to the set of "Airs," or even to the subset of poems from a given feudal kingdom. Yet the gathering of these poems together, which is already testimony to their affinity, often induces us to glance beyond the poem to see what the neighboring texts can tell us. That glance can result in a simple noting of the "Guofeng-ness" of the example (Marcel Granet), a disparaging remark about the "Airs of Zheng" (Confucius), or a detailed application of the Parry-Lord theory of oral formulation (C.H. Wang).[6] Each time we lift our eyes, even momentarily, from the circumscribed poem to its closest intertextual setting, that is, each time we acknowledge the possibility of its contextural poetics, we allow it a wider range of reference.

There are, of course, other sets of poems in the Chinese tradition that are much more inviolable, and these may be especially susceptible to macropoetic analysis. The number, if not the order, of the various "nines" in the Songs of the South, for example, is not subject to expansion or subtraction. That order and number induced Chert Shih-hsiang to read the "Nine Songs" set as a dramatic progression, what he called a "theatrical program" derived from shamanistic performances of the southern Chu area (7).[7] Moreover, almost no one would ask us to read anything less than all of the poems in a sequence such as Du Fu's "Autumn Meditations," and certainly never in a different order--Mei Tsu-lin and Kao Yu-Kung's elaborate analysis of Du Fu's sequence comes in a long tradition of thoughts on the unity, of that set.[8] The numerous sets of poems in the Chinese tradition arranged programatically, according to such rubrics as the months or seasons, indicate even more strongly that we should consider them structures of a higher order than mere clusters--what Dore Levy calls the Chinese poetic "sequence" (which she distinguishes from the "series," 108), and what Earl Miner calls the "integrated collection" ("Some Issues" 18).

Finally we might note that in modern Chinese literature these macropoetic structures, usually manifested as true sequences, have become increasingly strong. This appears to be due primarily to the modern poet's self-conscious use of the sequence as a structuring mechanism. That self-consciousness lies less in the poet's active engagement of his own classical tradition than in his exposure to non-native, especially American and European, literature. M.L. Rosenthal and Sally Gall have argued that the poetic sequence is the primary. macropoetic form of Western modernism, and many of their examples were no doubt models for modern Chinese poets, especially since 1950. I would suggest, however, that the influence of the traditional poetic cluster on the work of modern Chinese poets, while largely unstudied, is important. In contrast to Rosenthal and Gall's arguments for the West, the strength of the modern Chinese poetic sequence results largely from the quiet legacy of the lyric sequence in Chinese classical literature, a legacy that casts a long but subtle shadow.

One wonders why the poetic cluster, set, and sequence have so permeated the Chinese lyric tradition over the centuries and across a spectrum of poets. What do these macropoetic forms offer the Chinese poet and his poetics? This question is particularly intriguing since the structure, in any of its particular forms, was never a recognized genre in premodern times.[9] The Chinese poets apparently wrote unconsciously and naturally in what appears in retrospect to be a major literary form. Thus the power of that genre is interwoven with its apparent invisibility to those who used it.

Chinese poetry, for all its history and volume, is homogeneous. Any collection or anthology of shi poetry will appear to be composed of relatively uniform texts, both within the work itself, and in comparison to works of its kind. Moreover, shi poetry tends to describe familiar territory; there are numerous themes and personae within which to write, but over the centuries there seldom are radical departures from an expected range. Part of that familiarity is found in the poetry's "modesty," that is, in its lack of grandeur.[10] This modesty is to some extent a function of the actual size of the Chinese poem, which tends to run its prosodic course in a few end-rhymes (often in couplets) and breath stops. Even in precursors to "regulated verse" (lu shi), or in the belated "old style poetry" (gu shi), Chinese poetry tended to be brief. And longer verse forms, such as the narrative yuefu and gu shi, or the extended regulated verse, chang lu, have always remained peripheral to the mainstream poetic tradition. The restrictive prosodies formulated in the Tang dynasty (618-906A.D.) made this penchant for brevity a generic convention, thereby reinforcing the physical slightness of the poetry.

More important to this modesty is, however, the poetry's air of immanence. It is modest not only in size, but also in vision and intention: modest in its perspicuity, and modest in its occasional settings. Most Chinese poetry was written with a reader in mind who was present and ready to respond in kind, and this occasionality is interwoven with the poetry's pervasive nonFICTIONal, non-metaphoric nature.[11] Stephen Owen has argued that the lack of metaphor is a basic assumption in the act of reading in the Chinese tradition, which he explicitly contrasts with reading assumptions in the West, where more often "truth is a metaphorical rather than historical truth." Of Chinese poetry, he says:

The tendency to avoid metaphoric reading... is linked to the traditional Chinese reader's presumption that most shih [shi] subgenres were nonFICTIONal. Poems were read as describing historical moments and scenes actually present to the historical poet. In contrast, "Ode to the West Wind" may have been occasioned by an actual experience of Shelley's, but the particularity of that historical experience is not essentially relevant in modern Western modes of literary reading...

The traditional Chinese reader had faith that poems were authentic presentations of historical experience. Poets wrote, as readers read, under those assumptions. (Traditional Chinese Poetry 57)

Such assumptions encouraged a poetry that did not expand metaphorically or even symbolically from the specificity of the biographical moment, but rather reached beyond these limits by a type of synecdochic association, where the text was restored to a fullness of its own kind, not to the "otherness" of metaphor.[12] This expansion followed paradigmatic (i.e., vertical-axis) patterns of association that were natural to the literary milieu, patterns that define the very nature of the Chinese cosmos. Again Owen argues for this special quality of the Chinese literary world:

The natural cosmos, of which the historical empire was the institutional reflection, was a system of processes, things, and relations. Between systems, correlations were made by a principle which might be called analogy, if analogy did not presume some fundamental difference. The most apposite term in Chinese is lei, "natural category": these correlations of pattern were not made by willful act of analogy but rather occurred because their elements were, in essential ways, "of the same kind." (Traditional Chinese Poetry 18)

In this way the poem remains of the same kind, even as it reaches beyond the borders of its specific moment. Regardless of how patterns of association might allow the poem to expand, its essential reading remains the occasional, nonFICTIONal one. To read any other way is to negate the basis for synecdochic reading.

Certainly the essential modesty of Chinese poetry is one of its most powerful traits; yet we can also see how there might be an urge to break through the conventions of modesty, to leave behind the specifics of one's limited circumstances and soar into "other worlds," into FICTIONality. The Chinese literary tradition has provided certain literary forms for that release, the epideictic fu and the FICTIONal yuefu (and its related yongwu poetry) being the most obvious poetic forms. I would argue, however, that the poetic clusters, sets, and sequences were more subtle and successful vehicles for going beyond the limits of the poetry's inherent modesty.

The poetic cluster achieves its release from modesty in several essential ways. First and most simply, it provides the poets with a larger arena in which to explore and expand their ideas. The poetic cluster rises like high ground above the flat terrain of the volumes of shi poetry. This alone assures it a privileged position in the poet's repertoire. The cluster compromises the poetry's assumed modesty by allowing a multiplicity of views and articulations within its larger structure. Moreover, the nonlinear structure found in most Chinese poetic clusters (of which I will speak in a moment) increases this sense of variation by allowing wider swings between the individual poems. Such multiplicity is inherently immodest because it allows different points of view within a supposed unity; it allows a complexity of moments that defies occasionality; it allows the poet many voices instead of one.

More importantly, the poetic cluster achieves release from modesty while remaining essentially "of the same kind" as the modest poems from which it is formed. We assume that a whole set of poems can be read within the conventions with which we read the single poem. That is to say, we can read each poem in its separate "modesty," leading to a cumulative, but not qualitatively different, "modesty" for the set as a whole. This assumed modesty of the entire cluster is reinforced by the independent identity of the cluster's individual poems as they are excerpted and quoted. Thus, this way of reading the cluster mimics on a macropoetic level the synecdochic, or analogical, reading that Owen suggests for the single poem. Yet at the same time the presence of the macropoetic structure complicates that "modest" reading; the structure is a constant reminder of the possibility of a larger vision, which leads to the reader's sense of, and the critic's speculations on, the unity of the poetic set. The tension that exists between these two readings, where modesty is both assumed and put into doubt, distinguishes the poetic cluster both from other Chinese poetic forms such as the epideictic fu, which can never be read within the conventions of modesty, and from the "immodest" poetic forms of the Western tradition such as epic and metaphysical verse.

On a more profound level the Chinese poetic cluster challenges the conventions of modesty by moving the contextual referent of the set, and therefore each poem of the set, beyond mere occasion. The poems of the cluster not only ground themselves in the external world that might have occasioned them, but also take their bearings from one another. In its most intense forms (such as sequences that follow a conventional program), the macropoetic structure rests firmly on a foundation of an intensified intertextuality (Fraistat's "contexturality"), where meaning reverberates between the poems of the set, not between the poem and a supposed extratextual referent. This conflict between the occasionality and intertextuality of the poetic cluster joins with the tensions that exist in the dual presentation of the poems as both discrete units and elements of a larger, immodest whole to create a more complex reading.

Finally, I would argue that the Chinese poetic cluster contributes to a type of FICTIONality that sets it apart from the predominantly nonFICTIONal shi poetry of which the cluster is nominally composed. This FICTIONality is interwoven with the cluster's inherent "size" and its challenge to modesty.[13] The contextural references of the poetic cluster call into question the assumed occasionality of the poetry, thus releasing it from a fixed biographical perspective and inviting a FICTIONal reading. This is especially true with the highly programmatic clusters where the structuring rationale is imposed from outside-seasons, months, magic numbers, etc.--in such a way that the author and the specific occasion of the set's composition are secondary to its shape. These rationales can, of course, lead to prescribed conventions that have a special monotony of their own--one thinks of the poems to the seasons popular during the Six Dynasties and later. But certainly in the best of these programmatic clusters the prescribed conventions are interlaced with marks of specificity, thereby creating a tension between the program and its instantiation.

Thus the poetic cluster, set, and sequence are important to the Chinese literary tradition because these macropoetic forms offered escape from the severe limits of "size" and vision that were assumed for shi poetry, the mainstay of traditional Chinese poetry. Moreover, for the Chinese poet, the cluster of shi poems served as a natural vehicle for going beyond the restrictions of the poetry while still basking in its rays, for becoming something more than a lone, modest voice, while maintaining contact with that occasional, nonFICTIONal poetry.[14] Like the cluster itself, the poet's voice within the cluster is always caught in the tension between the modest and the immodest. Since the cluster creates its immodesty by synecdochic increases, it becomes more than itself, but never something other than itself. It is within that dynamic tension that the Chinese poetic cluster grows, building its immodest structure on the shoulders of the modest poem.

Faced with the thematic, structural, and linguistic diversity of the Chinese poetic cluster and its related forms, one wonders if there could be a single way to describe and analyze that poetic range, from the "Airs" of the Book of Songs to the postmodern sequences of Lo Ch'ing. Could there be a "unified theory" of Chinese macropoetics? Models for such a rationale are provided by studies of similar structures in other literary traditions. Studies dealing with different types of sequencing in Japanese literature, as investigated by Konishi Jin'ichi, Earl Miner, Makoto Ueda, and Steven D. Carter are especially important because of the coincidental cultural contact, including literary forms, between China and Japan, which allows the essential qualities of the two literary systems to stand in relief. That contact and contrast are highlighted in Helen McCullough's study of the Kokinwakashu, for example. In the West, studies of sonnet sequences are the most obvious models; Carol Thomas Neely's essay on the English Renaissance sonnet sequence is particularly useful since it discusses the structure of a number of examples. The modern poetic sequence is covered in Rosenthal and Gall's study of the genre in English, beginning with Whitman and ranging widely through the various modernists, including a variety of contemporary poets. Our primary model, however, must be Roland Greene's study of the vernacular lyric sequence in the West, wherein he describes the underlying rationale for a wide range of sequences from Petrarch to Neruda.

What can these studies of Japanese and Western poetic sequencing offer to our considerations of Chinese macropoetic structure? Sequential structures in Japanese literature are dominated by the renga mentality that Miner and Carter have described in detail. While in its earliest, fushimono form, the renga sequence entertained a "sense of unity and coherence" (Carter 12), the mature renga sequence (especially the hundred-verse hyakuin) is built of elaborate linkages operating on several rhetorical levels and connecting any one poem in the chain to the poems on either side of it, but only to those poems.[15] This structure, which is accompanied by an elaborate set of prosodic rules, is what Miner calls a "plotless narrative, or narrative with many constantly shifting mini-plots" (Linked Verse 5). In the mature renga, the movement is inexorably forward, with almost no glancing back and no future design--the lack of design is particularly obvious since the text is formed while it is performed. Renga is what one might call a performative poetic sequence with a short-term memory loss; it forgets what it said soon after it says it. In this way its analogue in the visual arts is the handscroll, which reads as moments linked only to the contiguous sections of the scroll as it is unrolled/rolled.[16]

Renga shares some basic structural principles with the other Japanese sequencing techniques described by Konishi and Ueda. Foremost among them is linearity (often described in terms of a "progression"), which is maintained by several types of linkages, usually more associative than causal. Ueda is especially clear about the relatively minor role of plot in all Japanese sequential structures. Yet, while the Japanese structures may not move toward a plot-driven climax or resolution, they do move forward, always drawn on by the possibility of the next link.[17] That forward linking leads to a nearly self-generating structure, terminated only by arbitrary interruption, for example, after 36, 50, and especially 100 verses.

Linked verse (lianju) existed in China for centuries, but it never attained a significant position in the literary canon, remaining for the most part merely a game of the literary salon. As David Pollack comments, "... in China linked-verse poetry was usually thought of-if it were thought of at all--as a game rather lacking in that element of high seriousness which was supposed to distinguish good poetry from mere playing at words for its own sake" (viii).[18] "High seriousness" was, of course, the claim of shi poetry, including the shi poetic cluster. Owen has described Chinese linked verse as "an ill-defined genre, having no limitations other than being a poem in which two or more poets take part" (Han Yu 116). In any event, the interpersonal or inter-personae linked verse, which was so important in the Japanese tradition, never appealed to the mainstream Chinese poet.[19] This may have resulted from historical circumstances--the earliest forms of the Chinese genre were associated with the much disparaged court poetry--or there may be a more inherent reason: the Chinese emphasis on the autobiographical nonFICTIONality of poetry may have discouraged the poet from participating in a poetry that asked him to sacrifice his personal voice to the composite persona that emerges in linked verse (at least in the Japanese form).

The central principles of Chinese macropoetic structures differ in several other ways from the Japanese ones. First, there is rarely a sense of amnesia in the Chinese sequence; the Chinese poet is always willing to link distant elements in the cluster. Moreover, while there is linearity in some Chinese macropoetic structures, their primary driving force does not seem as unidirectional as that of the Japanese renga, or even that of the associative progressions of the imperial anthologies described by Konishi. The Chinese macropoetic structure is more likely to expand two-dimensionally, to explore complementary regions of association, and to cycle ceaselessly between nodes of emphasis. Thus, closure often eludes the Chinese poetic sequence, as it does the Japanese; this is not because of the ceaseless pull of ward linking seen in the renga and haikai sequences, but rather because there often is no sense of forward movement to bring to an end. There is, instead, a sense of constant, agentless flux that keeps the structure reproducing itself.

The Western premodern poetic sequence occurs in a multitude of forms, although none with a clear set of renga-like conventions. Among those many forms, the sonnet sequence is primary, and amatory progression is its abiding rationale. We might even argue that courtship is the heuristic model for all these sequences, whether "consummated" or not, or whether they even involve romantic pursuits. Carol Neely's description of the English sonnet argues that the "opening sonnets present the narrative beginning of a love experience and look ahead to its happy conclusions," and "poetry is a substitute for the breeding which is the real goal" (363,366). The problem of closure for the sonneteer can thus be seen in terms of the desire, even the need, to bring the amatory progression to a (happy) conclusion. In this sense the sonnet sequence is also a linear progression, but one whose conclusion is presupposed, and thus closure is a "problem" because the rationale naturally needs it. This means the dynamics of closure of the sonnet sequence are fundamentally different from the Japanese and Chinese self-generating sequential systems. The Western sonnet sequence desperately seeks its own end, whereas the renga always hopes to go on just one more link, and the Chinese poetic cluster enjoys the suspension of ending.

The Western sequence is a pilgrimage, the Japanese an
open-ended journey, and the Chinese a RITUAL circuit.

Roland Greene's study ranges far beyond the sonnet sequence
and its amatory progression, but he does believe that "the
Western lyric sequence from Petrarch to the present day
is a single form with a more or less constant set of principles" (4).

For Greene those principles are not found in simple prosodic,
stylistic, or structural conventions; rather, they are encased
in the sequence's phenomenological modes, located in the interplay
between what he calls the RITUAL and FICTIONal modes of apprehension.

The RITUAL mode, which is aligned with performative and liturgical
language, allows readers to possess the text in their "performance"
of it; it is what allows us to quote lines of poetry as if they
were our own. The RITUAL mode is open, public, and transportable
from reader to reader; it joins a community of readers together.
Its power lies primarily in language as an infinitely repeatable act.
The FICTIONal mode, on the contrary, offers a world apart, a world
into which a reader can enter, not as a participant but as an observer
of something closed off from her. The FICTIONal mode depicts "a reality
of another world"; the RITUAL mode is "another reality of the world"
(Greene, 7, quoting Victor Zuckerland). While both are ever present
in the lyric sequence, Greene argues that the FICTIONal mode, with
its represented "unities of process and person" (1), dominates the
Western lyric sequence from Petrarch up to the modernist poets of
the early twentieth century. The modernist lyric sequence, on the
other hand, calls into question the unitary selfhood and the
individual psyche that lie behind the humanist FICTIONality of
the premodern sequence. It does this by enlisting multiple voices
and heterogeneous fragments in the creation of a composite whose
unity is located only in its own artifactuality, in its own making.

In this way it re-engages the RITUAL side of lyric's dialectic.

Greene's description of this dialectical relationship of RITUAL
and FICTION seems inappropriate for a discussion of the mature
Japanese renga, simply because it is not motivated by a drive
for unity.[20] But one might use it more fruitfully as a
methodological model to explain the Chinese macropoetic
structures, which are more involved in the creation of
"wholes."

First we should note that the Western poetic sequence, at least
in its premodern form, does share with the renga a forward,
largely unilinear movement, but that movement is characterized
by progression and memory throughout its construction. Moreover,
that progression moves (or wants to move) naturally toward
resolution and closure, as seen most obviously in the amatory
progressions of the sonnet sequence. The Chinese macropoetic
structure also suggests a unity, but that unity is less
likely to be linear or progressive; it is more likely to fold
out of and in upon itself. It is less likely to construct a
world for the reader to enter and observe, and more likely to
present the reader with a text for re-utterance. In this sense,
the Chinese macropoetic structures appear to be more infiltrated
by Greene's RITUAL mode of apprehension.

I would suggest that this "RITUAL" quality of Chinese macropoetic
structure reflects a basic bias of the Chinese aesthetic,just as
the "FICTIONal" quality of the premodern Western lyric sequence
assumes a privileged type of thought.

In his discussion of the classical Chinese novel Dream of
the Red Chamber (Hong lou meng), Andrew Plaks has outlined a
useful distinction between the Chinese and Western mythic
structures. Arguing for the essentially narrative character
of the Western archetypes, Plaks suggests that one might
explain that narrativity "as a reflection of the centrality
of syntactic logic, and hence dialectical progression,
to many of the most abiding forms of Western civilization" (23).

He contrasts this with the "spatialized" nature of Chinese
archetypal patterns, which he sees as essentially detemporalized
forms of vision that, with their "apparent lack of logical
development or dialectical progression must be reinterpreted
with reference to an aesthetic system within which the poles
of temporal opposition are contained as complementary possibilities
rather than antithetical forces" (25-26,emphasis mine).

This vision, Plaks argues, accounts for the fact that
"Chinese literary civilization has tended to draw upon formal
patterns that we naturally associate with RITUAL--balanced forces,
periodic rhythms, and cyclic sequences--as structural principles
for artistic creation" (22).

Of course, Plaks is not arguing that the West has none of these
spatialized, RITUAL forms, or that the Chinese have none of the
temporalized, narrative ones; rather, he sees these as the
"preferred forms of the two traditions" (26).

In Western literature, narrative seems natural. Faced with a
fragmentary text, our primary interpretive strategy is to provide
a narrative overlay for that text, to eke out the "story line" with
its causality and followability. Robert Harbison clearly embraces
this assumed primacy of narrative when he writes:

RITUALs are rarely as complete as stories, as if they were only
part of a lost perfection, were misreported stories. We meet them
damaged by use, like furniture carried through doorways until
excrescent bits are knocked off. They wake one, though, to powers
dormant in FICTION because they coerce the participant in a
different way. So they challenge the onlooker at narrative to work
out the consequences for thought in general of the oddities of the tale. (2)

In that vein, we should recognize that behind Roland Greene's discussion
of the Western lyric sequence lies the assumed primacy of narrative
thought, from which the lyric sequence always differs and against which
it is measured.[21]

The fragmentary text, especially one that enlists RITUAListic modes of
apprehension, resists that reading, but when the Western reader seeks
to align the "fragments" of the lyric sequence into a whole, he assumes
the whole is something akin to narrative, if not exactly a story.

This assumption can be seen in Neely's discussion of the sonnet sequence,
and her emphasis on the strong beginning and ending, which surround
a less well-formed center. She says these structures are not
"straightforward narrative progression from sonnet to sonnet,"
but still there is "an overall formal, narrative, and thematic
development broad and loose enough to embrace digression, retreat,
and recapitulation" (362-63).

From this perspective we can argue that in the West it is the RITUAL
side of the lyric that maintains the sequence as a lyric sequence in
the face of the overwhelming tendency to narrativize. In the dialectic
of RITUAL and FICTION, the FICTIONal may dominate the premodern lyric
sequence in the West, but it is the presence of the RITUAL mode, with
its interjection of another way to organize thought, that ensures the
lyric sequence's existence. Without the RITUAL mode, we would return
to mere narrative.

In the Chinese equation of RITUAL and narrative, narrative is a much
weaker force; not until the twentieth century is it a dominant feature
in the dynamics of the Chinese macropoetic structures. For the Chinese
reader, the story is not the assumed unity from which the fragments
have fallen and are read as shards of a prior whole. The Chinese
premodern macropoetic structures are more artifactual in nature; the
separate integers build their wholes rather than represent parts of a
prior one. Moreover, I would argue that this artifactuality operates
in a distinctly Chinese way, one that parallels but differs essentially
from the dialectic method described by Greene.

The relevance of Plaks's thesis to our discussion is obvious. It not
only accounts for the distinctive RITUAL quality of the Chinese poetic
cluster, it also suggests the areas where one might find normative forms
for the specific artifactual shapes of those clusters, such as in the
cycle of the seasons and the alternation of the five elements. For his
purposes, the Chinese aesthetic system is based on four structural
principles:
(1) bipolarity,
(2) ceaseless alternation,
(3) presence within absence,
(4) infinite overlapping

--principles that are "equally basic to a major portion of the
Chinese literary tradition" (47).

I would agree with Plaks that the basic structuring principle of the
Chinese poetic cluster and its related forms is the bipolar interplay
of complementary elements. That is to say, the separate integers of
the Chinese poetic cluster, in comparison with the Western or
Japanese poetic sequence, are less likely to describe progressive
vectors toward and away from something; they are less likely
to answer and respond to each other in sequence; and they are
less likely to modify' each other by contrastive power. Rather,
the integers are held in a state of "play" where they share
space and time and maintain one another, like the constituent
parts of a molecule.

That spatialized, non-dialectic dualism not only identifies the poetic
cluster as part of the Chinese literary system, but also distinguishes
it from macropoetic shapes of other traditions. Because of the dynamic
interrelationship of its individual parts, the poetic cluster is a
particularly vital environment for this "preferred form" of the Chinese
tradition. A Chinese poem, standing alone and unattended, might also
exhibit a bipolar structure, but the sheer brevity of the poem does
not allow room for a full display of the ceaseless interweaving of
bipolarity. On the other hand, unlike the novel, which even in its
Chinese form must lead toward linearity, the separate integers that
form the poetic cluster allow a rapid and powerful interchange of
bipolar states. In this sense the Chinese macropoetic structure is
all about the shifts that these openings allow. Roland Greene has
said of his project:

If this book is often about unities (as any study of FICTION must be),
it is also about junctures, or the white spaces that separate poem from
poem, stanza from stanza, utterance from utterance in the body of Western
lyric sequences. Any reading of lyric as FICTION must accommodate
discontinuity as well as continuity, allow for the spatial dimension
of lyric temporality, and offer a means of getting into and over the
white gaps between the poems without brutally closing them. (20)

This is even truer for the Chinese poetic cluster, where the alternation
of poem and gap, text and white space is itself an embodiment of
complementary bipolarity. Within the frame of the poetic cluster, neither
texts nor the spaces between them can be considered without full
acknowledgement of the other. And in the Chinese macropoetic structure,
the interplay between the textual gap and its fulfillment does not seek
a dialectical resolution, but rather one of attentiveness.

The complementary elements, which are first manifested in the text
and gap but can include any number of other thematic or structural
pairs, remain in agitated suspension, allowing the other to exist,
implying the other's presence, and together creating a ceaseless
alternation that contains and is contained by RITUAL. In that sense,
the poetic cluster is the Chinese "preferred form" incarnate; any
narrative version of it would be "only part of a lost perfection."

If one were to come upon the following poem isolated and unattended
in an anthology of classical Chinese poetry,
it would strike a familiar chord:

These days are like the steep roads of Taihang Range
When I turn back, no one is there to care
Family and kin have died away
There's nothing left that gives pleasure
White bones litter the open wastes
Lonely ghosts scatter across the land
When glory and fame were with me
Spring flowers showed their faces
But we are not made of exotic jade
How can one expect to shine for long
My body fails, but if it could only last
And my portrait be hung in the Hall of the Unicorn

This lament of lost opportunity and passing time would fit well
into many poets' repertories, and if we knew that the poem was
by the great Tang poet Li Bai (701-762A.D.), it would be easily
placed among his many poems of travel and hardship. Much of the
imagery would be seen as conventional travel-poem fare, but
the lines, "When glory and fame were with me/ Spring flowers
showed their faces" could be understood as a direct reference
to Li's loss of imperial favor and banishment in 744.

But then again, if we were to find this poem embedded in its
original contextural environment, as the seventh poem in a
twelve-poem cluster entitled "Variations on the Old" ("Ni gu"),
our reading would necessarily change; we would not need to
abandon our initial reading; rather, we would merely allow
other readings to accrue around it.

Among the many types of poetic clusters that might be generated
by poet, anthologist, or reader, sequences composed of a standard
number of poems written by strong, literati poets are perhaps
most likely to yield a productive tension between the programmatic
and the personal. Li Bai was interested in such sets, but he was
also self-interested enough to make sure those sequences
reverberated with his own voice. His "Variations on the Old"
is such a sequence:

1.
Out across the darkening sky
The stars shine like diamonds
The Herd Boy and his Weaver Girl
Seem close enough to touch
But there's no blackbird bridge
To bring him across that Starry, Stream
It's not yet time for their rendezvous
In her apartment, the lady dawdles over her silk
And the wanderer grows weary of the road
Ice in the jar tells of winter's cold
And frost chills the distant traveler
Blown about like autumn leaves
Flying here and there, no word of returning
Since he left, her sash is slack around her waist
And melancholy makes her dress hang loose about her
On moonbeams this evening's dream
Flies to him there in some border town

2.
Her tall chamber rises into the dark sky
And below lies his ivory colored hall
The silver moon looks as if about to fall
But clings to her window by threads of light
A beauty far off in that night
Gown damp with autumn frost
Softly on her lute she plays
The "Mulberry Song" of her thoughts
The strings vibrate with such intensity
The autumn wind moans through the rafters
Passersby slow their steps
From their roost birds fly round and round
The bitterness you hear is in my heart
Do not blame the lyrics of the song
All I want is one to share this life
So we can become birds paired by love

3.
No rope can hold the sun from its journey
Forever trapped together in this sadness
Even gold piled high to the Dipper
Cannot buy back our lost youth
The spark that flies from the flint
Like life in its fleeting instant
So our affairs pass by like dreams
And afterwards whose body will be mine
Raise your cups, don't worry about the cost
Call round the neighbors to share this wine
The business of immortals is too obscure for us
There's nothing to compare with the truth of drink

4.
The pristine city with its emerald trees
Sparkles like Jade Terrace in the spring
I gather flowers and fuss over their lovely blossoms
Sending them off to my divine immortal
The sweet wind will bring their violet buds
Straight to the ford of the rising sun
I'm sorry these are but mortal things
Yet, it's like a jewel of my heart's intent
Thinking of you, here's a smile
Something to express my feelings of desire

5.
Today the sun and wind are warm and mild
But what will they be like tomorrow
Spring's laughter is with us now
Why hide away consumed with sorrow
Play your flute, let the glorious phoenix dance
Pour sweet wine, prepare the fish divine
A thousand guilders will get you drunk
Be happy, put other cares aside
The pure of heart remain for the world to know
Thus at East Gate we have the famous Shus
Some guys are as stupid as stones
But the talented know when to act
With nothing to do, you sit bereft
A lonely fish in a shrinking puddle

6.
How fast the earth and sky seize up
The Tartar wind turns to blowing frost
Fields of grass die off, a winter moon
In western wastes his six dragons fall
And unlucky Venus rises in the east
Comets trail their rays of light
Mandarin ducks are not birds of Viet
Why would they want to soar southern skies
The vulture and dog of former times
Are now lord and king
And in the river, serpent and dragon
Fight for who will get the phoenix
The Dipper cannot pour us wine
The Basket Star winnows away in vain

7.
These days are like the steep roads of Taihang Range
Turn back and no one is there to care
Families and their kin have died away
There's nothing left that gives pleasure
White bones litter the open wastes
Lonely ghosts scatter across the land
When glory and fame were upon us
Spring flowers showed their faces
But we are not made of exotic jade
How can we expect to shine for long
The body fails, but if it could only last
Our portraits hung in the Hall of the Unicorn

8.
The cast of the moon cannot be brushed away
Nor can the traveler's sadness be described
Crystalline dew dresses the world in autumn hues
While fireflies dance over the fields
Both sun and moon are melting away
Heaven and earth dying off
In the pines a winter locust calls
But how can it know the age the tree obtains
Cinnabar and gold, the folly of common men
Such mysteries are impossible to comprehend
You will never live to be a thousand
Always distressed with an early death
Drink and escape into the jug
Hide away, treasuring what you have

9.
The living are just passing through
On the way back home to the dead
In a roadhouse between heaven and earth
Together we grovel through this dusty grief
Vainly the lunar hare grinds life's elixir
While the Fusang tree is turned to kindling
White bones silent, without a word
How can the pine know the spring
Then and now, forever sighing
Could empty glory be worth our time

10.
The immortal rode his glorious phoenix
Down Windy Ridge in the mysterious west
Thrice ocean shoals have stood in clear water
Peach Blossom Spring was once his quest
He left a cup made of emerald jade
And with it a purple lute of agate inlay
The cup is for the finest wine
While the lute can calm one's soul
These are not things of this mortal world
How can you compare them to pearls and gold
The lute plays the wind through the pines
And brings out the moon in the sky
The wind and moon have long been friends
But how swift is our life here on earth

11.
Crossing the river we play in the autumn waves
Delighting in the freshness of lotus blossoms
When we pick the flowers their pearls of water
Shatter into the ripples of the river
Layers of clouds catch the colors of evening's glow
I would send these to you there on sky's far side
I think of you, but there's no way to meet
Facing the cold wind, I keep my sad vigil

12.
You leave and leave, and leave again
And we say adieu, but I still long for you
The Hah River has stopped flowing on
The mountains of Chu are barriers that divide
Human life is difficult to abide
How will we ever stay together
The Viet swallow prefers the ocean sun
While the northern goose longs for Ordos clouds
These many years have robbed me of my looks
Even the finest foods do not appeal
The setting sun tells of day's end
And I dream, as always, of that far road
When I climb the mountain to watch for you
I am turned to stone never to return again
(1092-1101)

"Variations on the Old" tells the old story of blighted romance
so central to sonnet sequences in the West. The structure of
"Variations" is not built, however, on the amatory progression
of the sonnet sequence or the associational linkages of the
Japanese lovers' exchange. Rather, we have the bipolar play
of love and loneliness, of home and border land, of those
who are left behind and those who leave, of mundane pleasure
and unearthly quests, of the need to care and the need to forget,
the marked and the unmarked. In other words, we have the dynamism
of lei categories that stand in a bipolar relationship.

That is also true for the recontextualized (and retranslated) seventh
poem, whose insider-outsider, then-now bifurcation is seen as part
of a larger pattern. Each constituent element in the bipolar pairs
is an equal member of its category; each is a correlative of the
others and not a substitution for any one.

The title of "Variations on the Old" is itself closely linked
with the tradition of the poetic cluster. While the title might
designate any archaizing poem, by Li Bai's time it was commonly
used for poems written in imitation of the "Nineteen Old Poems."
These imitations occurred singly or in sets of various sizes.
For our purposes the first extant set is most significant:
the twelve "Variations" of Lu Ji (261-303).

Lu's poems are mostly close imitations of the first twelve of the
"Nineteen Old Poems," but his sequence is quite different: he
imitates "Old Poems" Nos. 1, 4, 6, 10, 2, 19, ?, 3, 12, 5, 9, and 7.[22]
Lu's intentional creation of the twelve-poem set out of the inadvertent
nineteen-poem cluster is a clear drive toward RITUALized forms. While
Li Bai's sequence also has twelve poems, most are not identifiable
imitations of specific "Old Poems"; there are exceptions, to which I will turn in a moment. His twelve are, however, clearly related to the original set in theme, structure, and language. Li may dwell most on the immortal quest theme that is present in the original cluster, but the other thematic concerns are also addressed--the abandoned wife, wandering man, and carpe diem urgings.

The first poem of Li's set does begin with a specific variation of the opening lines of "Old Poem," No. 7, and continues with a number of radical reformulations of that poem. Here Li clearly announces his model and his imitation of it. The importance of this beginning is not seen, however, until one reads further into the set. In the following poems there is no such marking, no specific model, yet this beginning induces us to keep looking for the marks of imitation--here we seize upon on a bird of Viet, and there a high chamber, and everywhere, it would seem, a silver moon.But our reading through the set is always tenuous. We keep wondering if we are making it all up--that is, until the last poem.

Just as the first poem is a marked beginning, the final poem is a marked ending. But it is not just a specific imitation, it is an imitation of the most famous of the "Old Poems," No. 1. In a typical Li Bai signature, the sequence ends with an imitation of the beginning poem of the model set. And what an imitation it is: the opening line of Li's poem reads like a parody of his model. The original xing xing chong xing xing (On and on, and on some more) becomes qu qu fu qu qu (You leave and leave, and leave again). Neely has noted that one finds the highest level of structure in the opening and closing of the sonnet sequences, while the center tends to be less well defined; Owen has suggested that Chinese poets were often able to frame a poetic sequence, but seldom developed an internal architecture for that sequence.[23] Li has certainly provided such a frame, but is there no internal structure? I would argue that this frame is not merely a container of the random chaos of the set, but rather part of its complex wholeness.

If we were to seek a specific pattern for reading Li's "Variations," the most obvious would be that of a woman's lament framing a man's anxiety and frustration: her pensive vigil acts as bookends for his wandering; her abandonment attests to his neglect; her daily grief complements, and is complemented by, his existential worries. One cannot draw a schema of these relationships; they exist in a complex, integrated, but non-linear whole. There are no vectors of plot, no synapses of associations to lead us through the series of poems. We wander through the set, buffeted among the many nodes of significance; each time we begin to feel a progression or a stasis, it is undone in the next moment and we are cut loose again.

Take, for example, the last poem. On one level its explicit intertextuality marks it as a framing closure for the sequence, but at the same time that intertextuality leads us to the beginning of the model cluster, and thus breaks the frame and opens up the sequence as a whole. A similar tension is seen at the thematic level. The loneliness of which the woman speaks in this poem is the same loneliness that possessed her in the very first poem (and throughout the model "Old Poems"); there has been no progress, no resolution, only the analogical recycling of signifiers of her problem. Moreover, the firm stasis that we see in the last line's image of petrification is illusory. The stone represents not the conclusion of this blighted romance, but its eternity. She takes up her vigil, which implies his endless wandering, which implies her constant vigil; so it goes, on and on, and on some more.[24]

Washington University

1 The Shijing, a text of several layers, is generally dated from 1000-600 B.C. The division of the text into four main sections, more or less related to the type of poetry included therein, and into subsections by locale for the "Airs of the States" ("Guo feng"), is found in the earliest references to the text. Those sections and subsections are preserved, but not marked, in Karlgren's Book of Odes; they are both preserved and marked in Pound's Confucian Odes. Arthur Waley's translation, The Book of Songs, has unfortunately rearranged the poems according to ad hoc themes, thus destroying this macrostructure for the text.

The Chu ci is also a multilayered, but more clearly structured, text. Most of its poems occur in sets of nine and are derived from a dual lineage of the early "Nine Songs" ("Jiu ge"), with their grounding in shamanistic RITUAL, and the poems associated with the Qu Yuan myth, especially his long, episodic "Encountering Sorrow" ("Li sao"). David Hawkes's translation and annotation preserves and comments on the original structure. There have been occasional studies of the macrostructure of some of these sets, most notably Chen Shih-hsiang on the dramatic structure of the "Nine Songs."

2 The Man'yoshu (ca. A.D. 600-759), an anthology of lyric and narrative poems, is divided into twenty books organized in a somewhat haphazard manner. Later imperial anthologies focus on themes and progression within those themes for their structure, eventually becoming interwoven with the renga aesthetic, which I discuss below. A succinct discussion of the Man'yoshu and the shared poetics of the Chinese and Japanese traditions can be found in Miner, Odagiri, and Morrell, pp. 192-93, et passim.
3 I divide Chinese macropoetic structures into increasingly delimited types, which I call (1) clusters, (2) sets, and (3) sequences. Clusters are nothing more than a group of poems that are identified together; sets assume a conscious and/or internal structure that is not prescribed; sequences exhibit an internally fixed structure that resists reordering and reduction. When I speak in general terms I use the terms "cluster" and "set" (even when some might be sequences).
For the "Guo feng," see note 1. Liu Xiang (ca. 79-6 B.C.) is accredited with compiling the Chu ci (also note 1), to which he appended his imitative "Jiu tan."

4 This list is extremely selective and subjective, but certainly represents some of the most important and well-known poems and poets in the tradition. In addition, at least some poems of each set cited (and often the whole set) have appeared in translation, sometimes under slightly different titles (see Works Cited). No one has, however, suggested that these sets might be examples of a single literary, form, or even related to each other. They have always been viewed in light of traditional generic parameters, e.g., sao poetics, ancient verse, regulated verse, modern poetry, etc. Wu Chuan-cheng's recent dissertation suggests a new understanding, but he limits his study to the strictly-defined sequences of Tu Fu. My intent here is to suggest that these various sets do form a genre, albeit one in which the poet worked unconsciously, and which was invisible to the traditional critic.
5 While Fraistat is especially concerned with the "book" as a whole, he suggests, "Such a poetics . . . would study a wide range of forms, including paired poems, sonnet and other types of sequences, poetic works published in parts .... individual collections--as well as clusters of poems within them, and the shape of the poet's canon."
6 Comments on the naivete and "feudalism" of the "Airs" abound in the critical literature, especially in the modern period; Granet's anthropological analysis of rural customs in the "Airs" is a more complex form of that thinking. Confucius, Analects 15.10, claims that "the tunes of Zheng are licentious." Wang analyzes the formulaic nature of a wide range of poems from the Book of Songs, and concludes that it is "conceivably oral and demonstrably formulaic" (6).
7 We should note, however, that in the case of the "Nine Songs," there appear to be eleven poems. This discrepancy has caused some concern in the critical literature. Two solutions have been offered: l) the poems are recounted, either by fusing poems together or arguing that the first and last poems form a prologue and coda for the central nine; or 2) the number "nine" is claimed as a symbolic (magical) one, a mere convention. All the subsequent sets of "nines" in the anthology do contain nine poems. The Wen xuan (ca. A.D. 530), the most important anthology of different genres in medieval China, excerpts six of the "Nine Songs," listing them under the sao genre in two chapters (32 and 33)--Nos. 1-4, and 6, 9, respectively. Modern anthologies, in both Chinese and Western languages, have continued this practice of selecting from the "Nine Songs."
8 In that analysis Mei and Kao speak of a bifurcated structure interpenetrated by lines of progression. The numerous traditional commentaries on the sequence that inform their comments are collected in Yeh Chia-ying's Du Fu Qiuxing bashou jishuo, wherein one commonly finds references to the stricture of the set. Wu Chuan-cheng also discusses the sequence as an "organic unity."
9 As far as I can determine the term zushi, which is now used to refer to the poetic cluster and its related forms. is a modern one derived from exposure to similar terms in Western literature.
10 A great deal of what I have to say regarding this modesty is derived from Stephen Owen's essay "A Modest Poetry," in his Traditional Chinese Poetry (231-36). I have, however, taken his thoughts far from their context and applied them to my own purposes.
11 We should note that modern Chinese poetry often does not fit the pattern of modesty seen in classical poetry. "Immodesty" is part of the modernism of Chinese poetry in the twentieth century, which has included experimentation in a number of macropoetic forms, not the least of which is the poetic sequence.
12 "Reading becomes a process of restoring fullness: the text is a synecdoche for the world (not as substitution, but as diminishment and loss). It leads not to the 'other' meaning of metaphorical reading and the FICTIONal text, but to the whole of which we see only a part in the text" (Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry 60).
13 Thus it differs from yuefu poetry, whose FICTIONality usually does not involve any modification of the Chinese poem's relatively small size. Yuefu poems vary in size from four lines to scores of lines, but they never exceed the size of the longer shi poems. There are sets of yuefu poems that function as poetic clusters, but they are coincidental to the genre.
14 Other traditions have created this greater scope in a variety of literary forms. In the West there are not only such sweeping forms as the epic, drama, and romance, with their accompanying unities of time and place, but also the large visions of devotional and metaphysical verse. While the Japanese also have large narrative forms, the poetic sequence, especially the renga (which I discuss below), is another example of this rise above modesty. The renga is meant to transcend the limitations of the two-verse, 31-syllable tanka by creating a continous poem out of multiple voices, voices that lost their individuality to the communal voice of the poem. In this way the renga resembles the Chinese macropoetic solution.
15 Carter's description of the evolution of the renga sequence, especially in relation to contemporaneous poetics, is very valuable. While his arguments are not focused on this point, the evolution of the form appears to be the story of a Japanization of something akin to the Chinese genre of lianju.
16 In his "Association and Progression" (106), Konishi argues that the handscroll was the structural model for the imperial anthology, which was not characterized by this renga-like amnesia. But I would argue that the scroll (especially as it is viewed for the first time) is more akin to the production of renga with its rolling performance. While the potential to move backward (by rewinding) in the scroll would seem to be unavailable to the renga artist, in fact, the maintainance of the sequential restrictions of the poetry (for example, there had to be eight moon stanzas and four flower stanzas spaced regularly throughout a 100-link renga) implied a constant awareness of, although no reference to, the preceding verses. In this is the essential contradiction of the genre: one is to think of only the forward link, but the rules imply that one keep the past links passively in mind.
17 Ueda does speak of a type of Japanese sequence "with no forward progression," but also says this "method can bore the reader" (65), and "become monotonous since it does not generate a sense of progression" (73).
18 Pollack's study is the only extended study of the genre in English. Owen's Meng Chiao and Hah Yu contains the best review of the use of the genre as literature of a more serious nature.
19 In the Japanese tradition of dokugin renga (one-person renga), the master poet adopts a set of personae that act as "participants" in the performance (such a sequence is the topic of Steven Carter's study). I know of no such lianju in Chinese, although some clusters might be seen as casual and coincidental examples of that form.
20 Greene's methodology might, however, be more applicable to the associational progressions of the early Japanese imperial anthologies, where wholes are created along FICTIONal (sometimes narrative) and RITUAL lines.
21 That is especially evident in Greene's lengthy clarification of what there is in narrative that the lyric sequence does not share; moreover, he says that "narrative is the principal object of contrast" (18).
22 Note that poem No. 19 is included, and that the model for the seventh poem in Lu's sequence is not identifiable.
23 An exception to this generalization, for Owen, is found in the sequences written by Du Fu (712-70), Li Bai's contemporary and companion poet (Great Age 218). As a poet of similar caliber, but of quite different temperament, Li might be another exception to this rule of thumb.
24 This paper was prepared during my year as a Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Humanities, Harvard University, 1989-90.
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By JOSEPH R. ALLEN

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Source: Comparative Literature, Fall93, Vol. 45 Issue 4, p305, 25p
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