Fate and heroism in ancient Chinese poetry

Literature, and poetry in particular, has been conceived as essentially autobiographical and "expressive", that is, as the manifestation of an individual author's personal ideas, emotions and intentions in response to particular experiences. While this is largely true, especially of poetry from the ^3rd century onwards, it does not apply to the odes of the pre-imperial period, starting with the 305 odes canonized in the Classic of Poetry (Shijing). Despite the efforts of commentators from the Han dynasty onwards to assign historical circumstances and specific authors to the composition of the Shijing odes, traces of authorship in this canonical anthology remain extremely rare, appearing in only a few of the 305 odes.

Curiously, the most explicit references to an author in these odes are not to be found in the "Country Airs"(guofeng), which speak in intense and often emotional terms of personal experience. For the most part, they are to be found in the "Great Court Hymns"(daya) that first appeared in the ritual institutions of the Zhou royal court. In particular, odes 259(Song gao) and 260(Zheng min) both conclude with the words "Jifu made a recitation" to influence a specifically named historical figure. Both odes are thought to be compositions by Yin Jifu ("Commander Jifu"), a high-ranking officer and military leader of the Western Zhou who lived around 900 BC and is also briefly mentioned in other sources. In each of these two odes, the final quatrain that mentions Jifu as the "reciter" is supposed to make the whole ode his personal expression. In addition, the next two odes, 261(Jiang Han) and 262(Han yi), have also been attributed to him. While the attribution of the latter two was controversial at the end of the imperial period, that of the first two remains undisputed.

A careful analysis of these four odes leads us to doubt that Jifu is the author of any of them. With regard to the first two, the following observations can be made:

In both odes, the final reference to Jifu is formally distinguished from the preceding text by obeying a different rhyme scheme.
In each of the odes, the final mention of Jifu as "reciter"(a fortiori as author) refers to nothing in the preceding poetic sources.
The odes have no coherent voice, but are composite structures of diverse voices and idioms, including direct royal speech, proverbs, language from administrative documents, poetic turns of phrase found elsewhere in the Shijing, and narrative prose.
While each of the odes is a composite blend of these different voices, the two odes are also very different from each other, and do not point to a common author.
There are parallels between the two odes, not least with the two that follow, which are even more obviously modeled on administrative documents.
Although quotations from these odes abound in early sources, they never include the last quatrains.
No early reference to these odes mentions Jifu as the author.
When Jifu is mentioned in other sources, it is always as a military leader, not as an author of texts.
The notion of a self-referential author is extremely rare in the Shijing, and in pre-imperial sources in general, which suggests that the figure of the author is not an integral part of this poetic genre.

Taken together, these observations argue strongly against Jifu as the author of the " Song gao " and " Zheng min " odes, not to mention the " Jiang Han " and " Han yi" odes. But what do they tell us about the purpose of the last quatrains of " Song gao " and " Zheng min "?

Firstly, it may be that the phrase "Jifu made a recitation" doesn't refer to an author at all, but to the simple recitation(song) of the text. Secondly, the last quatrains are very probably later additions (perhaps even from the early imperial era): far from designating an author, they merely relate exemplary, and eminently non-individual, court compositions to the voice of an exemplary high-ranking officer. As such, these last quatrains are constructions of retrospective memory and interpretation, revealing how a later audience imagined the staging of ritual communication at the royal court of the Western Zhou.

In his "Letter in reply to Ren Shaoqing" and in his autobiography, Sima Qian (c. 145 - c. 85 BC) places himself at the end of a genealogy of heroic authors: faced with the fateful choice of committing suicide or undergoing castration, he opts for the latter in order to complete his work.

However, other versions of Sima Qian's story show a different sequence of events: either he was punished for writing the Shiji, or he completed the Shiji as a result of - and in reaction to - his punishment. The same question applies to the two heroes of the past whom Sima Qian appropriates as his closest models: Confucius and Qu Yuan (c. 340 - c. 287? BC). For each of them, we have at least two contradictory accounts of the date of composition of the main texts on the temporal sequence of their tribulations. It is the work that leads to the author's physical suffering, and it is the author's own body and the punishment it undergoes that give rise to the work.

With Sima Qian, Qu Yuan and Confucius, we find the figure of the hero-author, who, with the First Empire, ended up replacing the cultural heroes of antiquity. Just as the ancient sages had "created"(zuo) civilization, it was now the authors' turn to "create" their texts. However, with the disappearance of the ancient sages, such creation was only possible in opposition to the state. What distinguishes Qu Yuan from both Sima Qian and Confucius is that his story is told in prose as well as poetry. Where the stories speak of Qu Yuan, the poems speak in his own voice. His biography of the Shiji, assembled from a variety of sources, records different accounts of his legend, while the poems attributed to him by Han exegetes reveal divergent poetic versions of his story.

However, the two figures of the poetic hero and the heroic poet do not coincide: where the hero of the story completes his destiny in noble solitude, the hero at the source of the song seeks to be heard, creating and staging the lyrical self from the self doomed to destiny, and autobiography from death. Thus, the tragic fate of his life is replaced by the heroic feat of his text. Qu Yuan's key poems - "Encounter with Sadness"(Li sao), "Kissing Sand"(Huai sha), and "Plaintive Recitation"(Xi song) - all contain linguistic markers that address an audience and are performative by nature. If Qu Yuan was alone when he drowned, he was not alone when he composed and recited "Kissing Sand" moments earlier.

None of the various versions of the Qu Yuan legend, whether poetic or narrative, is truer than the others; all must have been elaborated in an ongoing process of recitation and staging repeated over and over again in the context of the South's teeming literary imagination. The result is a dazzling firework display of religious, political, mythological and erotic imagery, a proliferation of meaning (cf. Foucault) that could only be toned down by Han exegetes, who reduced the text (or rather the multiplicity of texts within the text) to a single meaning and a single purpose. To achieve this, the Qu Yuan featured in performative poetry had to transform himself into the author of said poetry: becoming a poetic creator rather than a poetic creation.

The fusion of poetic hero and heroic poet has echoes in Chinese tradition. In Han historiography, historical protagonists on the verge of death are suddenly seen improvising a song. Centuries later, Du Fu (712-770), exiled from his homeland and civilization, contemplated the mythical landscape of the South and recreated the character of the author-hero. In one of his last poems, "Reflection of Light"(Fan zhao), he looks back to Qu Yuan, while integrating himself and his ancient model into a broader history of author-heroes. As he recalls Qu Yuan, he also recalls Wang Can (177-217), who, in the "Poem of Seven Sorrows"(Qi ai shi), had set himself amidst the disasters of his own time, and who, in turn, had recalled a poet even older than Qu Yuan, namely the anonymous author of an ode from the Poetry Classic(Shijing).

Du Fu thus recreates the history of injury as the history of literature, aligning the Chang'an of the Tang dynasty with the capitals of the Han and Zhou dynasties some one and two thousand years earlier, and continuing the poetic voices of the past. At the same time, this history of poetry is that of exiled and involuntary authors, in which Du Fu, Wang Can and Qu Yuan present themselves not as sovereign masters of their texts, but as voices of the inescapable: at the moment fixed by destiny, they can only speak as they speak. Their poetry is heroic because it is the only thing that remains for them and, ultimately, by them.