Introduction

Signs incised upon the shells of tortoises, upon the bones of oxen. Signs borne upon bronze vessels, sacred and mundane.¹ Divinatory or utilitarian, these signs are manifest first of all as tracings, emblems, fixed attitudes, visualized rhythms. Each sign, independent of sound and invariable, forms a unity of itself, maintaining the potential of its own sovereignty and thus the potential to endure. From its beginning the Chinese writing system has refused to be simply a support for the spoken language: its development has been characterized by a constant struggle to assure for itself both autonomy and freedom of combination. Apparent from its very origin is a contradictory, a dialectical, relationship between represented sounds and a physical presence that extends toward gestural movement, between the requirement of linearity and the desire for a spatial evasion. Is it appropriate to speak of a “senseless defiance” on the part of the Chinese for thus maintaining (and, at that, for nearly forty centuries) this “contradiction”? Whether or not, it is a matter of a most astonishing risk: one may say that through the maintenance of this writing system, the Chinese have made a most singular wager, the great beneficiary of which has been the poet.

It is but by the grace of this wager, this system of writing, that a song, uninterrupted for three thousand years, has been passed down to us.² This song, at its inception intimately linked both to sacred dance and to simple field work, has known, through the years, many metamorphoses. At the source of these metamorphoses there lies, as a determining element, just that system of writing, a system that has engendered a profoundly original poetic language. All of the poetry of the Tang, surely the Golden Age of Chinese poetry, is a written song, as much as a sung writing. Through these signs, obeying a primordial rhythm, the spoken word may burst forth, and in every area go beyond its act of signifying. To define and delimit the reality of these signs, to demonstrate the specific nature of the Chinese ideograms, and to clarify their connections with other signifying practices (such are the subjects of this Introduction) is already to reveal essential traits of Chinese poetry.

It is customary, when one discusses Chinese characters, to call to mind their imagistic aspect. Those who are unfamiliar with the writing system are likely to imagine that it is no more than a heap of “little pictures.” It is true that in its oldest known state a large number of pictograms may be perceived, such as for the sun (, eventually stylized as ), the moon (, stylized as ), and man (, stylized as ). Yet, scattered among these in even the earliest periods there appear some more abstract characters, which may already properly be called simple ideograms, such as those for king ( which relates heaven, earth, and man), middle (, a space cut through the middle by a line), and to return (, stylized , a hand making a gesture of returning upon itself).

Beyond these simple characters, there developed, at a later stage, more complex forms; indeed, these constitute the majority of the characters in use today. A complex character is obtained by the combination of two simple characters, as in the character (“brightness”), combining the character (“sun”) and the character (“moon”). More commonly, however, the complex characters are of the type “radical plus phonetic sign,” that is, they are formed by the combination of a radical or root element, formed from a simple character (often stylized for sake of concision in combination), and another part, also consisting of a simple character, which serves as a phonetic sign. The pronunciation of this second element marks the pronunciation of the “new” character (that is, the pronunciation of the simple character which serves as the phonetic sign and that of the complex character of which it is a part are the same). For example, the complex character (“companion”) is formed of a root element, , the radical for man, and another simple character, , which is pronounced, in isolation, ban, and which indicates that the complex character is also pronounced ban. It should be understood that the choice of the simple character as phonetic element, though its primary function is merely that of phonetic sign, is not always gratuitous. In the example just cited, the simple character ban means “half“; combined with the root element for man, it evokes the idea of “the other half,” or of “the man who shares,” contributing thus to the precise sense of the complex character , “companion.” This example may raise an important issue. The simple characters, which seek to “signify of themselves,” strike us with their gestural and emblematic aspect; and even here, when it is, or should be, simply a matter of a purely phonic element, we try nonetheless to perceive a connection with meaning. To suppress the gratuitous and arbitrary at all levels of the system, a semiotic system founded upon an intimate relationship with the real, so that there is no rupture between signs and the world, and hence none between man and the universe: such would seem to be the constant direction of the Chinese. On the basis of this formulation we may go further with our reflection upon the specific nature of the ideogram.

Ideograms are composed of strokes. Very limited in number, these strokes nonetheless offer the possibility of extremely varied combinations, and the whole set of ideograms may be seen as a combinatory (or a transformation), going beyond the strokes, which, though they are very simple, are already significant in themselves. Of the following six characters (all but the last of which are simple characters), the first is composed of a single stroke, and the last of eight.³

The first ideogram consists of a single horizontal stroke. This one, undoubtedly the most important among the basic strokes, can be considered the “initial stroke” of Chinese writing (the Chinese writing system). Its drawing is, according to traditional interpretation, an act that separates (and simultaneously unites) heaven and earth. In addition, the character means at the same time “one” and “original unity.” By combining the basic strokes, depending in many cases upon the “ideas” that underlie these strokes, one obtains other ideograms. Thus, by combining “one” and “Man” (homo), one obtains “big,” just as one obtains “sky” (heaven) by adding a stroke at the top of “big.” By making the vertical stroke of “Man” (homo) surpass the upper horizontal of “sky” (heaven), “man” (a man) is born. The last character, , a complex character, is a combination of “man” (as a phonetic sign) and the root element for grass, or herbage (). Strokes intertwined with other strokes, meanings implicated with other meanings. The codified meaning of each sign never succeeds in completely repressing other, deeper meanings ever present within the sign. These are always ready to burst forth; and the full ensemble of the signs, formed according to the demands of equilibrium and rhythm, reveals the many possibilities of these clusters of significant strokes: attitudes, movements, intentional (sought) contradictions, the harmony of opposites, and, finally, a whole manner of being.

It is well to remember that tradition establishes a link between this system of writing and the divinatory system called ba-gua (the “Eight Trigrams”). This system has played an important role, throughout the history of Chinese civilization, as much in the philosophical domain (where it provides the basis of later treatments of the idea of mutation) as in daily life (where it is used in astrology, geomancy, and other divinatory practices). According to tradition, the system was invented by Fu-xi, the legendary king, and perfected by the first Zhou dynasty king, Wen Wang, before 1000 B.C. The system centers around a set of figures whose internal relationship is ruled by laws of transformation according to the principles of the alternation of yin and yang. Each base figure is composed of three superposed strokes, with full strokes representing yang, and broken strokes yin. Thus the idea of heaven (or sky) is represented by three full strokes , and that of earth by three broken ones ; the figure symbolizes water, while the figure represents fire, and so on. The ideograms are similarly composed of strokes (the numerals up to three are represented by a corresponding number of strokes), and the most ancient character for shui (“water”) was written . Some think to discern, on the basis of these similarities, a link of parentage between the two systems. In considering this possible linkage, it is worth noting, in any case, that the ideographic signs do indeed attempt less to copy the exterior appearance of things than to represent them with essential strokes, the combinations of which may reveal their essence, as well as the hidden ties which unite them. By the balanced structure which of necessity characterizes each of them (they are all, regardless of the number of their strokes, the same size, with each possessing its own constant and harmonious architecture), the ideograms appear not as arbitrarily imposed marks, but as so many beings, endowed with will and with internal unity. The Chinese perception of the signs as living unities is reinforced by the fact that each ideogram is monosyllabic and invariable. This confers upon each an autonomy, and at the same time a great mobility in terms of the possibility of combination with other ideograms. Within the Chinese poetic tradition, the poet often compares the twenty characters that make up a pentasyllabic quatrain to twenty “sages.” The interrelation of these individual personalities transforms the poem into a ritual act or scene, where gestures and symbols provoke constantly renewed “meanings.”

Such a system of writing, and the conception of sign that underlies it, conditioned in China an ensemble of signifying practices that includes, in addition to poetry, calligraphy, painting, and myth.

The influence of a language conceived no longer as a denotative system that “describes” the world, but as a representation that organizes the connections and provokes the acts of signifying, is decisive here.⁴ It is not simply that the writing serves as a vehicle for all of these practices; it is, even more, the single model active in the process of their constitution as systems. Inspired by the ideographic writing and determined by it, poetry, calligraphy, painting, and myth form a semiotic network both complex and unified; all share in the same process of symbolization, and obey certain fundamental rules of opposition. The language cannot be disengaged from the consideration of any one of these without reference to its connections with the others, and, through these, to a generalized aesthetic. In China, the arts are not compartmentalized; an artist devotes himself to the tripartite practice of poetry—calligraphy—painting as to a complete art, one within which all the spiritual dimensions of his being are exploited: linear song and spatial system, incantatory gesture and visualized words. I will outline, in the following pages, the manner in which the writing system is bound together with calligraphy, painting, myth, and music, and, at the same time, where appropriate, that which poets drew from this relationship in their efforts to forge a language for their special purposes.

Calligraphy

It is no accident that calligraphy, which exalts the visual beauty of the ideograms, became a major art. In the practice of this art, the calligrapher seeks to rediscover the rhythm of his deepest being, and to enter into communion with the elements. Through the signifying strokes, he may completely surrender himself. Their thickness and their slenderness, their contrasting and balancing relationships, permit him to express the multiple aspects of his own sensibility: forcefulness and tenderness, abandon and quietude, tension and harmony. In the accomplishment of the unity of each character and in the balance among them, the calligrapher, even in the act of expressing things, achieves his own unity. These immemorial and always restrained gestures provide the cadence, instantaneously achieved with the strokes, which, as in a sword dance, thrusts and crosses, soars and plunges, holding a meaning of its own, and adding another to that one, codified, of the word. It is appropriate, when we speak of calligraphy, to speak of meaning; its gestural and rhythmic nature must not make us forget that it works on signs. In the course of execution, the signified of the text is never completely absent from the mind and spirit of the calligrapher, nor is the choice of the text either gratuitous or a matter of indifference.

The calligrapher’s preferred texts are poetic texts, poems and poetic prose. When a calligrapher begins a poem, he does not limit himself to a simple act of copying. Through his calligraphy, he attempts to revive the entire gestural movement and imaginative power of the signs. This is his manner of penetrating the profound reality of each of the signs, of marrying them within the uniquely physical cadence of the poem, and, finally, of re-creating the poem itself. Another type of text, the sacred and no less incantatory texts of Taoism (and Buddhism), is equally attractive to the calligrapher. Here calligraphic art is seen as restoring to the signs their original magical and sacred functions. Taoist monks gauge the efficacy of a talisman (or charm) that they draw in terms of the quality of their calligraphy, as it is that quality which assures good communication with the beyond. The Buddhist faithful believe that they may gain merit by copying canonical texts; and here too the efficacy of the result is in direct relation to the quality of the calligraphy.

Nor does the poet remain insensitive to the sacred function of the drawn signs. Like the calligrapher who, in his dynamic art, perceives himself as reconnecting the signs to the original world, as unleashing a movement of harmonious or contrary force, the poet has no doubt that in combining the signs he reveals some secret of the spirits of the universe, as this line by Du Fu demonstrates:

The poem completed, gods and demons stupefied!⁵

From this conviction as to the sacred and magical power of the signs there arises, in the moment of the composition of a poem, the quasi-mystical pursuit of zi-yan, “word eye,”⁶ the one key word that illuminates the entire poem at once, delivering thereby the mystery of a hidden world. Innumerable anecdotes describe one poet prostrating himself before another and venerating him as his Yi-zi-shi, his or “teacher of one word,” because the latter has “revealed” the necessary, the absolutely perfect word that has permitted the former to finish a poem, and to “perfect creation.”⁷

Neither does the poet deny himself the evocative power of the imagistic aspect of the characters that is constantly made available and magnified by a calligraphic art whose execution allows multiple meanings to emerge from the multiple graphic strata of the signs. Wang Wei, an adept of Chan (Zen) spirituality, describes, in the following line from a quatrain, a magnolia on the point of flowing.⁸ The poet seeks to suggest that he is able through his contemplation of the tree to become of “one body” with the tree and to perceive from the “interior” of the tree the experience of its blossoming. Rather than using a denotative language to explain this experience, he contents himself, in the first line of the quatrain, with aligning five characters.

The line is translated “At the end of the branches, the magnolia flowers.” Even the reader who does not know Chinese can easily become sensitive to the visual aspect of these characters: the succession of the characters taken purely from the point of view of their visual aspect is completely in accord with the lexical meanings of the characters, and finally of the line itself. Viewing these characters in order gives the visual impression of the process of a tree blossoming into flower (first character: a bare tree; second character: something is born at the end of the branches; third character: a bud breaks out, being the radical of grass or flower; fourth character: the bursting open of the bud; fifth character: a flower in its fullness). But behind what is shown (the visual aspect) and what is denoted (the normal codified meaning of the characters), a reader who is familiar with the language will not fail to note in addition, through the ideograms, a subtly hidden idea, that of the man who enters the tree in spirit and who therefore participates in its metamorphosis. The third character () contains the element “man,” which itself contains the element “Man” (homo); thus, the tree presented by the first two characters is from this point onward inhabited by the presence of the man. The fourth character () contains “face” (the bud breaks out into a face), which contains the element “mouth” (this speaks). And finally, the fifth character contains the element “transformation” (man participating in the universal transformation). By an economy of means, and without recourse to external commentary, the poet re-creates, before our eyes, in its successive states, a mystical experience.

In the preceding example the process of development from the simple to the complex, evoked through the successive stages of blossoming, is graphically represented. In the following example it is in a sense the inverse process, a process of “stripping away,” of moving from the complex toward the simple, that is related. The theme of the poem⁹ is a visit made by the poet, Liu Chang-qing, to a recluse. While walking on the winding mountain path, the poet perceives from a distance the hermit’s dwelling, the door of which, with an air of peaceful leisure, is blocked by wild plants. The closer he comes to the dwelling, the more he feels won over by the spirit of “stripping away,” and the door appears as a reflection of the hermit’s adherence to this spirit. The fourth line of the poem goes as follows:

This can be read on three levels. According to the “normal” reading, the line means “The perfumed plants bar the idle door.” The purely visual aspect of the characters presents more clearly the development of the process of simplification, the “stripping away” that is discussed above. The first two characters () both have the plant radical (); they mark quite well the idea of luxuriant flora. The next three characters () contain the door radical () Their succession suggests the increasingly coherent, the increasingly clear, vision of the poet as he approaches the dwelling of the recluse. The line culminates in the final image, a bare door, bare as if at last stripped of all that is superfluous. This idea of successive stages of “stripping away” is reinforced on a deeper level by the meanings implied in the third and fourth characters in the line: contains the element “talent,” “merit,” and contains the element “plant,” “ornament”; they seem to signify that to arrive at true spirituality, one must first free oneself from all worldly care for exterior merit and ornament.

A third example shows the poet Du Fu using, in two lines of verse,¹⁰ a procedure very dear to the Taoist priests in their magical uses of the characters. This procedure consists of clustering together words (with the Taoists, sometimes invented words) that have the same radical or root element, as if in an attempt to accumulate the type of energy suggested by the radical. For Du Fu, the attempt is not without irony, as the lines in question describe the poet’s anguished and finally disappointed anticipation of rain in a time of torrid heat (the magic formula has, then, had no positive effect). The poet employs a series of words all having the rain radical (): “thunder,” “lightning”; “crash of thunder”; “cloud.” Finally he allows the word “rain” itself to appear, a word contained in and promised by all the words that precede it. It is a vain promise, however; this word, but barely appeared, is followed by the word nothing(ness)” (), which finishes the line. Moreover, the word has as its radical” “fire,” Thus the aborted rain is absorbed by the air, set aflame.

The two lines, accompanied by a literal translation, appear thus:

Lightning, thunder, in vain lightning thundering

Cloud, rain, at last illusory, nothing

The ensemble of these words creates, through its progression and the contrast they provoke (the clouds that amass, the thunder that announces the rain, the rain absorbed by the fire), a visual image that is striking indeed.

Let us cite one final example of the use of the graphic elements of the characters by poets. This example is drawn from the first strophe of along poem by Zhang Ruo-xu,¹¹ in which the poet introduces immediately the theme of dualism between two symbolic figures: the river (symbolizing space-time, and permanence) and the moon (life force, vicissitude):

Without explicitly stating the theme, the poet opposes a series of words containing the water radical (): “river,” “water,” “sea,” “scintillation,” “wave,” with another series of words containing the radical “moon” (): “moon,” “clarity,” “light,” “brilliance,” “to follow.” Among these characters with opposing radicals there appears twice the word “tide,” which contains both the water element and the moon element. If the words of the water group are represented by the sign , the words of the moon group by the sign , and the word “tide,” which participates in both, by , their occurrences in the four lines can be represented as follows:

The simultaneous relation of opposition and correlation of the two figures is graphically suggested in an extremely efficacious manner.

Painting

If the connection between calligraphy and poetic writing seems direct and natural, that which unites the latter with painting is no less so in the eyes of the Chinese. In the Chinese tradition, where painting is often referred to as wu-sheng-shi (silent poetry), the two arts clearly belong to the same order. Numerous poets also devoted themselves to painting, while every painter owed it to himself to be a poet. Without doubt the most famous example is Wang Wei of the Tang. Inventor of monochrome technique and precursor of the style of painting called “spiritual,” he was equally celebrated for his poetry. His experience as a painter greatly influenced his manner of organizing the signs in poetry, to such an extent, in fact, that Su Dong-po, the famous Sung dynasty poet, could say of him that “his pictures are poems, and his poems, pictures.” The primary link between poetry and painting is, put simply, calligraphy. The most notable manifestation of this trinitarian relationship, a relationship that forms the base of a complete art, is the tradition of presenting a poem in fine calligraphy in the blank space of a picture. Before defining precisely the significance of this practice, it is necessary to underline the fact that calligraphy and painting are arts of the stroke: it is this fact which makes possible their cohabitation.

The art of calligraphy, aimed as it is at restoring the primordial rhythm and the living gestures implied by the strokes of the characters, liberated the Chinese artist from the need to describe faithfully the exterior aspect of the physical world, and gave rise, very early, to a “spiritual” painting that, rather than pursuing resemblance and calculating geometrical proportions, sought to imitate “the act of the Creator,” catching the essential lines, forms, and movements of nature. Seeking the same sovereign liberty as the calligrapher, the painter uses the same brush in the execution of his work. It is only after a long period of learning to draw a variety of elements from nature and the human world that he begins to execute what may be called in the strictest sense works of art. The ensemble of elements that he must first master have themselves been the object of a slow process of symbolization. Having become signifying unities, they offer the accomplished artist the possibility of organizing them according to certain fundamental aesthetic laws; in mastering these elements it is as if the artist had learned the visible universe “by heart.” The execution of a work is done without, and beyond, any model (for the work must be an interior projection); it unrolls exactly as does calligraphy, rhythmically, as if the artist were carried by an irresisble current. This is made possible only by the fact that all pictorial elements are drawn with the stroke. Through their continuous rhythm, the strokes permit the artist to follow the movement inaugurated by the first stroke.¹² The real world arises beneath his brush, its “vital breath”¹³ never interrupted. In the eyes of the Chinese painter, the strokes express both the form of things and, at the same time, the thrusts of dream; they are not simple outlines; through the contrast of the full and the light strokes, by the white that they surround, by the space that they suggest, they already imply volume (never fixed) and light (ever changing). The painter creates his work by abiding by the strokes, strokes that draw themselves together or oppose each other, strokes that embody themselves in figures conceived and mastered in advance; thus he is not copying or describing the world, but engendering figures of the real in an instantaneous and direct fashion, without later additions or retouching, in the manner of the Tao itself.

Returning to the inscription of a poem upon a picture, we see that there is no discontinuity between the written and the painted elements, both of which are composed of strokes, and drawn with the same brush. These inscribed ideograms are an integral part of the picture; they are not perceived as a simple ornament or a commentary projected from without. Participating in the ordering of the whole, the lines of the poems truly “open” the blank space, while introducing a new dimension. This dimension we may qualify as the temporal, to the extent to which the lines, according to a linear reading, reveal beyond the spatial image the painter’s memory of his inspiration, his successive perceptions of a dynamic landscape. Their rhythmic incantation, unrolling itself in time, carries a contradiction to the name “silent poetry” for the painting. They open the space, open it to a lived time, a time ceaselessly renewed. By harmonizing poetry and painting, the Chinese poet-painter succeeds in creating a complete and organic universe in four dimensions.

From this symbiosis of the two arts flows important consequences for both. The interpenetration of spatiality and temporality exerts a decisive influence on the manner in which a poet perceives his poem. This influence is most notable in the idea that the poem inhabits not only a time but a space as well. This space is not an abstracted, limited, or confined space, but rather a place where human signs and signified things are taken in a continuous multidirectional play. Just as with the “cavalier perspective” of a Chinese painting, where no fixed or privileged point of view is offered and the spectator is constantly invited to penetrate for himself both the presented and the hidden places, the signs of a poem are not content to be simple intermediaries. By their spatial organization, they constitute a world of presences where it is good to dwell, and through which one may travel, encounter, and discover. On the other hand, the interpenetration of spatiality and temporality exerts a decisive influence upon the manner in which the painter disposes the pictorial unities in his painting (systematic symbolization of the elements of nature, elements transformed into significant unities; structuring of these unities on the double axis of opposition and correlation, etc.). It is clear that the two arts are ruled by the same fundamental laws of the Chinese aesthetic as is calligraphy. It is necessary to emphasize the importance here of two primordial notions, that of the rhythmic breath (qi or qi-yun) and that of the opposition of full and empty (xu/shi). The expression “rhythmic breath” figures in the majority of works of literary criticism and treatises on painting.¹⁴

According to tradition, an authentic work, literary or artistic, should reestablish man in the vital current of the universe. This current should circulate through the work and animate everything, whence the importance accorded to rhythm, which sometimes goes so far as to replace syntax in the literary work. As to the opposition of fullness and emptiness, it is a fundamental notion of Chinese philosophy.¹⁵ In painting, it is marked by opposition in a painting not only between the inhabited, or full, and the uninhabited, or empty, parts, but within the painted part itself, where elements drawn with full strokes alternate with elements having thin or broken strokes. In the eyes of a Chinese artist, to execute a work (pictorial or calligraphic) is a spiritual exercise; it is for him an occasion for dialogue between the visible and the invisible, the active and the passive. It is the surging up of an interior world, the unending enlargement of the exterior world, all of it ruled by the dynamic law of transformation. In a picture, the “empty” introduces the infinite and the “rhythmic breath” by which the universe is animated. Breaking the connections or the artificial oppositions, and thereby the rigid “logic” of development, the empty revives the circular movement, which plunges things back into the process of reciprocal becoming: mountain ↔ water, tree ↔ cloud, man ↔ rock, etc. Through the presence of the void, a sort of fifth dimension, the painter seeks to unify time and space, the within and the without, and, finally, the subject (from whom, by the way, proceeds the true void) and the world. The poets of the Tang introduced this notion of fullness and emptiness to poetry (cf. chapter 1). The concept is most evident in the manner in which they make use of “full words” (verbs and substantives) and “empty words” (such as personal pronouns, prepositions, comparatives, grammatical particals, etc.).¹⁶ By the omission of personal pronouns and other empty words, and by the reuse of certain empty words as full words, the poet puts into motion an internal opposition within the language, and a de-ruling of the nature of the signs. In addition, grammatical parallelism and the juxtaposition of images also take part in the process of introducing the void into the language. The result is a language purified but free, denatured but sovereign, which the poet may manipulate to his own purposes.

Mythic Elements

The mythic domain is, in China, vast and extremely complex. It will be sufficient for us, here, to indicate the types of relationships that can exist between myths and poetry. What ties them together is again, above all, the writing system. It is from this point that we will begin our observation.

The writing system plays an active role in myth, just as it does in poetry. By virtue of its graphic and phonic specificity, its concrete and imagistic nature, its combinatory capabilities, the writing system contributes to the engendering of images and figures that enrich the myths. We have seen, in our examination of calligraphy, that the writing system inspires certain religious practices that involve the drawing of talismans and other magic formulas, which are often graphic derivations from existing characters. Similarly, certain mythic personages (such as Wen-kui-xing) are represented by a conglomeration of characters pressed together in a human shape. All these uses, direct or indirect, indicate on the part of the practitioners a profound belief in the magic power of the characters. For them, certain steles bearing the inscriptions of consecrated characters actually conjure against evil spirits. On the other hand, in many temples the object venerated on the altar is neither a figure nor an icon, but a tablet bearing characters, most notably in the Confucian temple, where the votive tablet carries a succession of five characters: “heaven, earth, king, parents, master.” In the eyes of the devotees not only is each character a living presence in itself; the alignment of the characters truly establishes the filial bond that ties the devotee to the original universe. On this level, certain ideograms are, as living unities, constituting elements of myths, for the same reason as are other mythic figures or personages.

The exploitation of the writing system by myths is not, however, limited to the graphic area. Phonic play also contributes to the creation of objects and figures with a magical power. Since the pronunciation of the characters is monosyllabic, and the number of syllables in Chinese is quite limited, the occurrence of homophony, insofar as we are dealing with simple characters, is frequent. In the popular religions, the drawing of a correspondence between abstract words and words designating concrete objects is quite common, especially when the two words have the same pronunciation. Thus, for example, the deer, lu, becomes the symbol of prosperity, and the bat, fu, that of happiness, from the simple fact that the words “prosperity” and “happiness” are pronounced respectively lu and fu. Occasionally actual objects are even arranged or combined so as to suggest a link with existing expressions. Thus, during a certain festival a musical instrument called sheng is set side by side with a pile of jujubes, called zao-zi, to signify the vow to have “a very numerous progeny,” which is pronounced zao-sheng-zi in Chinese. A multitude of objects and animals, endowed in this manner with a magical power, have come to populate the imaginary universe, and to nourish popular storytelling. This procedure (a sort of charades founded on the pun) is equally applied to mythic personages.

Let us cite here the example of the thunder-god: Wen-tai-shi (), “the grand master who hears.” The first character of his name, wen (“to hear”), is sometimes written with a variant character, (“stroke,” “written”), which is also pronounced wen. In making the two wens correspond, in what is at first apparently a completely arbitrary fashion, the faithful have in fact added another attribute to the thunder-god: he becomes not only the one who hears, but at the same time he who makes the strokes, who writes—an eye that hears or an ear that sees.

The ingenious use of the graphic and phonic resources of the writing system that is to be seen in these religious practices may be observed in poetry as well. The poet, too, exploits these possibilities, creating images, often strange and powerful, as a result of a graphic or a phonic parallel. But the connection between myth and poetry does not end here. We will see (in chapter 3) that, following the model of the writing system, Chinese poetry tends toward a systematic symbolization of nature in order to engender a complex play in the realm of metaphormetonymy. This generalized symbolization is seen equally in Taoism and in the popular religions. An impressive number of elements of the cosmos, of nature, and of the human world are bearers of symbolic meanings; they weave a vast mythic network that permits the human spirit to unite itself, without barrier, to the whole of the objective world. Poetic symbolization and mythic symbolization are not, however, two parallel, non-intersecting paths; on the contrary, sharing the same source, they lean together, they interpenetrate and end by joining, two branches of the same stream. Poetry, while it borrows liberally from collective myth, also enriches that myth with the new figures that it creates over the course of the ages. In addition, poetry and myth both make use of the same system of correspondences numbers, elements, colors, sounds, etc.) that was codified by the Han Confucianists and carried down by tradition. The relationship is indeed so intimate that the long development of Chinese poetry itself may be regarded as a slow building up of a collective mythology.

Music

Poetry was united to music in a particularly durable fashion in China. It should be recalled that the first two collections of poetry in Chinese literature, the Shi Jing (“Classic of Poetry”) and the Chu Ci (“Songs of Chu”), were both collections of songs, the one of songs of secular inspiration and the other of sacred. From the Han dynasty on, even when poetry acquired an autonomous status, the tradition of popular song, the yue-fu, was never interrupted, while on the other hand, all poems composed by poets, in whatever form or style, were chanted aloud. Toward the end of the Tang, around the ninth century, the flourishing of the ci (sung lyric poetry) genre made concrete once again the symbiosis of poetry and music. This genre has remained in vogue into our own time.

The deep relationship between poetry and music influenced the very vision of the world by which each of the two arts was inspired. Poets tended toward a musical vision of the universe, and musicians in turn sought to produce a poetic vision. The importance of music in the education of the traditional man of letters is well known; a musical instrument was an indispensable element of such a person’s property. Numerous poets, among them Wang Wei and Wen Ting-yun of the Tang and Li Qing-zhao and Jiang Kui of the Song, were refined musicians; others among the greatest poets, including Li Bai, Du Fu, Han Yu, Bai Ju-yi, Li He, and Su Dong-po, wrote famous poems to extol the playing of a musician, or to preserve the resonances created within themselves by a memorable concert. On the musicians’ side, many musical pieces were based on, and took their titles from, existing poems.

In addition to the general relationship between music and poetry, the musicality of the language itself, as a vehicle of poetry, should also be emphasized. The Chinese language, from a phonic point of view, is essentially monosyllabic, in the sense that each minimal word, or moneme, is composed of one syllable. Monosyllabism was favored, after a fashion, by the writing system itself, where ideograms, with identical and invariable dimensions, tend to have a minimal sound as well. The very fact that each syllable constitutes a living unity, a unity of sound and meaning, engenders specific phonic effects. In addition, in Chinese the number of differentiated syllables is limited (for example, in modern Chinese there are only four differentiated syllables), and therefore each syllable has a unique value. Each sound then has an autonomy and a resonance weighted with deep significance. This autonomy in turn permits an extremely dense rhythm (for example, the pentasyllabic line) within which a contrastive play of the Essential Numbers (two and three, representing yin and yang) is established. Finally, each sound in Chinese may be marked by different tones, and the tonal system, which existed to help remove some of the ambiguity produced by homophony, was fully exploited in poetry in the form of tonal counterpoint.

The ensemble of phonic traits inherent in the language thus created a very original musicality. This musicality will be analyzed in greater detail in chapter 2; here it should be sufficient to point out that it did have some influence on the conception of sound in music per se, and did have some bearing on musical interpretation.

Thus, poetry is an integral part of an organic ensemble of semiotic systems. Profiting from ideographic writing (which permitted the birth of a written prose called wen-yan, which is very far removed from the spoken language), poetry soon developed its own specific language, one that was to both influence and be influenced by the “languages” of calligraphy, painting, music, and myths. The interaction among these different languages was to be a source of enrichment for each of them. It was to provide for each the possibility of inspiration by the others, the possibility of liberation by their influence from its own specific constraints. Let us summarize once more the characteristic traits common to these languages: systematic symbolization of the elements of nature and the human world; constitution of symbolic figures and signifying unities; structuring of these unities according to certain fundamental laws, which are themselves foreign to linear and irreversible logic; engendering of a semiotic universe ruled by a circular movement within which man and the world constantly intermix and prolong themselves.

Taking into account what we have just developed, we should be ready to approach poetic language itself. Nonetheless, it seems indispensable to first examine Chinese cosmology to the extent that, as with the other arts, it informs poetry with its full signification. Above all, the cosmology gives poetry its basic structure as far as language is concerned. In effect, on different levels of its structure, the poetic language in question draws on concepts and procedures—Primordial Breath, Void-Full, Yin-Yang, Heaven-Earth-Man, Five Elements, etc.—which refer directly to the cosmology. There is nothing surprising about this when one takes into account the sacred role accorded poetry: that of revealing the hidden mysteries of Creation.

Traditional cosmology experienced a long development, but its essence was contained in germ form in the initial work: the Yi Jing (“Book of Changes”). In the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States period, from around the sixth to fourth centuries “Before the Common Era,” the two principal streams of thought, Confucianism and Taoism, referred to it to elaborate their conception of the universe. In addition, the Yin-Yang school and the school of the Phases (l’école des Mélanges), each brought in its own way a contribution to the creation of a system that, consolidated during the Han dynasty (2nd c. B.C.–2nd c. A.D.), finished by being imposed on everyone. After that, there were two important epochs where philosophers tried to rethink the system through adding complements and readjustments: that of the Wei and Jin (3rd–4th c.), dominated by the Neo-Taoists, and that of the Song (11th–13th c.), that, in its turn, was dominated by Neo-Confucians.

For our purpose, we will content ourselves by citing Lao-zi, the founder of Taoism, who, in chapter 42 of the Dao-de-jing formulated the essence of the cosmology in a brief but decisive way:

The Tao of Origin gives birth to the One

The One gives birth to the Two

The Two gives birth to the Three

The Three produces the Ten Thousand Things

The Ten Thousand Things carry the Yin on their back

And hold the Yang to their breast:

Harmony is born on the Breath of the Median Void.

Simplifying greatly: the Tao of Origin is conceived as the Supreme Void from which the One emanates, which is none other than the Primordial Breath. This in turn engenders the Two, embodied by the two vital breaths that are the Yin and the Yang, which in turn through their interaction rule and animate the Ten Thousand Things. Nonetheless, between the Two and the Ten Thousand Things occurs the Three, which has known two interpretations, which are not divergent but complementary.

From the Taoist point of view, the Three represents the combination of the Vital Breaths of Yin and Yang and of the median Void (or median Breath). This Median Void that comes out of the Supreme Void, from which it draws all its power, is necessary for the harmonious functioning of the Yin-Yang couple; it is that which draws and directs the two vital Breaths in the process of becoming reciprocal; without it, the Yin and Yang would remain static substances, and quasi-amorphous. It is that ternary relationship (Chinese thought is not dual but ternary; in the heart of each couple, the median Void constitutes the third term) that gives birth and serves as model for the Ten Thousand Things. For the median Void that resides in the heart of the Yin-Yang couple also resides at the heart of all things; breathing in breaths and life, it maintains all things in relation to the supreme Void, allowing them access to transformation and unity.¹⁷ Chinese thought thus finds itself dominated by a crossed double movement which one can represent as two axes: a vertical axis that represents the free exchange between the Empty and the Full (the Full emerges from the Empty; the Empty continues to act in the Full), and a horizontal axis that represents the interaction, in the heart of the Full, of the two complementary poles that the Yin and Yang are and from which all things are produced, including, of course, Man, a microcosm par excellence.

It is precisely the place of Man that characterizes the second interpretation of number Three. According to this other point of view, coming more from the Confucian conception, but taken up again by the Taoists, the Three, derived from the Two, would designate Heaven (Yang), Earth (Yin), and Man (who possesses in spirit the virtues of Heaven and Earth, and in his heart the Void). This time, it is thus the privileged relation among the three entities Heaven-Earth-Man that serves as a model for the Ten Thousand Things.¹⁸ Man is raised to a position of exceptional dignity, since he participates as one of the three forces of Creation. His role is in no way passive. If Heaven and Earth are endowed with will and acting power, Man, through his feelings and desires, and his rapport with the two other entities as well as with the Ten Thousand Things, will contribute to the process of universal becoming that never stops reaching for the shen (divine essence) of which the supreme Void is like the guarantor, or the depositor.

Void-Full, Yin-Yang, and Heaven-Earth-Man thus constitute the three relational and hierarchical axes about which a cosmological system has been organized, and this system, founded on the notion of the breath, holds that nonbeing is a vital dimension of being, that what goes on among living entities is just as important as the entities themselves, that it is the breath of the median Void that permits the adequate functioning of the two fundamental entities the Yin and Yang, and consequently the human spirit’s accomplishment in its ternary relationship with Earth and Heaven. The poetic language, exploring the mystery of the written signs, has not failed to structure itself, on its different levels, according to these three axes. So it is that on the lexical and syntactic level, which we analyzed in chapter 1, the subtle game between empty words and full words plays out; on the prosodic level, which we analyzed in chapter 2, notably with tonal counterpoint and parallel lines, which are the essential components of the lü-shi (“regular poetry”), the dialectic of Yin and Yang is installed; and at last on the symbolic level, which was the subject of chapter 3, the metaphoric images replenished by nature, through the transfer of meaning and the back-and-forth movement between subject and object that they imply, fully exploit the ternary relation of Man-Earth-Heaven. One finds here another proof that the poetic language, having taken charge of the basic mechanism of Chinese thought, represented the semiotic order par excellence.

The corpus that we have used is the poetry of the Tang (7th–9th c.), which constitutes, both by its fecundity and variety and by its formal experimentation, the summit of classical poetry. This poetry is at the same time the end point of an already long exploration. Here we try to trace the broad outlines of this journey in a more than summary fashion. The initial epoch is marked by two collections of lyrics representing two different styles: the Shi Jing (“Book of Poetry”) and the Chu Ci (“Songs of the Land of Chu”). The Shi Jing, which dates from the beginning to the middle of the Zhou dynasty, during the first half of the first millennium before our era, is composed of ritual songs and popular lyrics coming from a number of areas located for the most part in the Northern plain of China crossed by the Yellow River. These songs, born from the womb of agricultural society and of which the constant themes are field work, the pains and joys of love, the seasonal festivals and sacrificial rites, are striking because of their sober and regular rhythms, the verses being dominated by the quaternary meter. As to the Chu Ci, it appears later, in the epoch of the Warring Kingdoms, around the 4th c. B.C., in the Yang-tze River basin, in South Central China. This poetry contrasts with that of the Shi Jing as much by the content as by the form. Of shamanic inspiration and with an incantatory style, with an overflow of vegetal and floral symbolism with magical and erotic implications, the lines are of unequal lengths: generally two lines of six feet tied together with a syllable of xi meter. It is above all from this genre that subsequent poets will draw their inspiration to express the phantasms aroused by their imagination.

Under the Han (206 B.C.–219 A.D.), the continuation of the Shi Jing no longer being assured, most of the literate poets dedicated themselves to writing fu (“rhythmic prose”), while the popular songs were returned to honor by the yue-fu (“Office of Music”)—instituted by Emperor Wu around 120—charged with collecting them. These songs, with a more spontaneous lyricism and freer forms, in their turn influenced the poets. Also, from the late Han up to the Tang, there was a parallel development of a popular and a learned poetry, which were both dominated by a pentasyllabic meter. During the Three Kingdoms, the Jin (265–419) and the Dynasties of the North and the South (420–589) that followed the Han, besides an always flourishing popular poetry, several generations of poets—among which a Tao Yuan-ming, a Xie Ling-yun, a Bao Zhao, and a Jiang Yan stood out—produced works of great value, preparing the way for the arrival of Tang poetry. Over the course of this long period, new forms first flourished: quatrains, heptasyllabic poems, long narrative poems, etc.

From the beginning of the Tang, all of the genres and the poetic forms were collected and codified; they were to be kept unchanged up to the dawning of our era. It is in the poetry of the Tang that one observes the most conscious and fruitful experiments to explore the limits of the language. For three centuries, thanks to a convergence of favorable circumstances,¹⁹ poets devoted themselves to an intense creative activity. The Quan Tang-shi (“The Complete Poetry of the Tang”), a work compiled in the 18th century under the Qing dynasty, contains no less than 50,000 poems, written by some 2,000 poets.²⁰ As to what concerns us, we are restricting ourselves to the “best part,” which is to say, those recognized by tradition as the most representative, and also to those that present a clear formal interest.

Our work, which studies classical Chinese poetry as a specific language, thus permitting the reader to appreciate this poetry in depth, is divided into two parts: a theoretical part and an anthology. The first is composed, as we have specified, of three chapters that study, respectively, the three constituent levels of the poetic language. First, we will observe the relationship between ordinary language and poetic language, particularly the “distance” the latter achieves from the lexical and syntactic rules of the former, and the consequences that are entailed for poetic language (chapter 1, “The Passive Procedures”). Second, we will observe the specifically poetic forms, their structure and their signification (chapter 2, “The Active Procedures”). Finally, we will attempt to show how, by depending upon this specific language, and profiting from the structural economy it implies, the poet explores the range of his imagination (chapter 3, “The Images”). Pursuing a practical goal, that of initiating the reader to the reading of Chinese poetry, and taking into account the obstacles that the Chinese language itself presents, we will attempt to make this analysis the least “abstract” possible; it will be based at each step on concrete examples. Most of the examples are drawn from the second part of the study, an anthology of Tang poems classed according to genre. The purpose of the translations is, above all, to help the reader seize and sense certain hidden nuances of the poems.²¹ The word-for-word translations which appear in chapters 1, 2, and 3, though they may be useful for the reader, and though they are certainly indispensable to the requirements of our analysis, can give only the barest caricature of the original poems. Nothing is truly translated here, neither the cadence of the line, nor the syntactic implications of the words, nor, most importantly, the ambivalent nature of the ideograms and the emotional charge they contain. In a poem, the ideograms, freed from accessory elements, attain a more intense presence: the apparent or implicit relations that hold among them orient the meaning of the poem in multiple directions. What remains untranslatable is not only that which the writing system, like any writing system, is unable to transcribe, but also that which by its very special nature that writing system adds to the capabilities of the poetic language.

While affirming the value of research on the poets of the Tang, we are not unaware that the corpus treated here represents only one state of the language. A contradiction seems to arise: we seek to outline an apparently well-delimited reality. It is clear, however, that this reality itself is the result of a dynamic practice, one that contains the germ of all the potentialities of alteration and transformation. This contradiction was sensed, after a fashion, by the Tang poets themselves. We see proof of this awareness in the profound significance of the lü-shi, the most important form of Chinese classical poetry, a form that will be studied in chapter 2. The lü-shi is essentially concerned with a dialectical system of thought, founded in the alternation, or opposition, between parallel and nonparallel lines. We can, for the moment, simply affirm that the parallelism which does exist, by its internal spatial organization, introduces another order into the linear progression of the language: an autonomous order, turning upon itself, in which the signs respond to and justify each other, and are liberated from exterior constraints, to dwell beyond time. The codification of this parallelism in poetry at the beginning of the Tang reflects, beyond a dualist conception of life, the immense confidence that the Tang poets had in the signs. The poets believed themselves to be mediums in the creation of a universe in accord with their desires. Yet, this pretension was negated by the fact that in the lü-shi parallel lines must obligatorily be followed by nonparallel lines. These latter end the poem, seeming to introduce it again into the process of time, an open time, one that promises the metamorphosis of all. And changed it was to be indeed,²² as we may discern from the death of wen-yan (the classical language) around 1920, and its replacement in poetry by bai-hua (modem colloquial language).

But it is not the smallest paradox of Chinese poetic writing that despite its affirmation of a semiotic order which is in effect its own negation, the signs abide, permanent, invariable, and independent of phonetic change, as signs by which a poetry is brought down to us across the centuries, eternally “speaking,” charged with the evocative power and the vital force of its youth.