<i>Yufa yu shijing—hanshi yishu zhi poxi</i> 語法与詩境—漢詩藝術之破析 (Grammar and Poetic Vision: Deciphering the Art of Classical Chinese Poetry)

In the voluminous traditional commentaries on classical Chinese poetry, one can hardly avoid running into witticisms in imagistic language, often high-sounding, sometimes thought-provoking, and always metaphorical. For example, when asked about the verse structure of the “Nineteen Old Poems,” the Qing critic Wang Shizhen 王士禎 (1634–1711) sighed that the versification of the oeuvre “is as seamless as a heavenly garment, impossible for one to learn to make” 如天衣無縫，不可學已.1Unsatisfied with Wang's nebulous insight, Fang Dongshu 方東樹 (1772–1851) tries to examine this “heavenly garment” by touching on its texture: When ancients did calligraphy, every forward movement of their brush must be followed by a backward withdrawal, and there is no downward movement that is not encountered by an upward retraction. Every brush stroke is brisk like a startled wild goose or resilient like a dragon. If you use calligraphy as an analogy to search for the art of composition and seek for the messages [of the “Nineteen Old Poems”], then you will see what a seamless heavenly garment means.古人作書，有往必收，無垂不縮，翩若驚鴻，矯若遊龍。以此求其文法，即以此通其詞意，然後知所謂如無縫天衣者如是。2Credit should go to Fang for his intuitive sense of the kinesthetic movements in the organization of the “Nineteen Old Poems.” Unable to describe concretely the intangible interactions between two sets of forces, however, he has to resort to analogy. In a state of excitement aroused by intense reading, his tactile memory of the barely visible sensuous movement of a calligrapher's brush, which has been lying dormant in his psyche, is suddenly woken up to bear down upon his subtle feeling about the pulsating movements that enliven the nineteen poems. Still, the exact shape of that feeling is too elusive to pin down in plain words. So just like numerous commentators before and after him, Fang cannot but rely on the somewhat hackneyed images of a startled wild goose and a swirling dragon to epitomize his impressionistic understanding of an unlearnable poetic art, leaving to his reader's imagination the secret behind the unexplained beauty.Yet “unexplained beauty arouses an irritation in me.”3 We share this typical New Criticism complaint from William Empson, and we would like to have that unexplained beauty explained. It is for this reason that we are badly in need of a book like Yufa yu shijing—hanshi yishu zhi poxi 語法與詩境—漢詩藝術之破析 (Grammar and Poetic Vision: Deciphering the Art of Classical Chinese Poetry) by Zong-qi Cai.Cai's feat in his investigation of Chinese poetic art is well demonstrated in his unraveling of the fabric of the “heavenly garment” mentioned above. Testing traditional commentators’ insights with his own analytical close reading, Cai discovers that, by the interaction between the “forward movement” and the “backward withdrawal,” Fang Dongshu means the horizontal intraline and interline concatenation created by rhetorical questions, linking couplets, and other cohesive devices such as anadiplosis frequently seen in the “Nineteen Old Poems.” In a similar way, the “downward movement” encountered by an “upward retraction” refers to the kind of vertical interaction between the inner activity and the outer stimuli produced by a “verse eye” (shiyan 詩眼) or by—in Cai's coinage—the “metaphorical resonance,”4 the kind of boomerang interaction between representation and lyricism achieved by the exploitation of the overtones of poetic imagery. In the light of Cai's explication of these two movements, the startled wild goose and the swirling dragon, which appear languid in Fang's clichéd metaphor, suddenly come to life. The overused old saw becomes illustratively relevant.The mainstay of Cai's study is the revelation of the mechanism underlying the two constructional modes in the versification of classical poetry, that is, the scheme of horizonal configuration that generates temporal association and the vertical resonance that conjures spatial imagination. The approach that makes this revelation possible is Cai's deciphering (poxi 破析, as the book title declares) of what can be defined as the genetic code in the “thinking habit” of Chinese poetry, which results from the unique features of the Chinese language. Everything starts, of course, from the Book of Poetry, from the productive interplay between the subject + predicate and the topic + comment principles evidenced by the poetic acts in the first anthology of Chinese poetry.Cai is not the first one to discover the rich potential of the topic + comment structure, but he is the first one to apply the principle of this originally syntactic construction to a holistic structural study of the aesthetics of Chinese poetry. In Cai's investigation, this construction mode does not only serve as an effective tool but functions as the framework of a self-contained critical approach, or, so to speak, becomes the “structure” of his critical vision.The most salient feature of this all-important topic + comment structure that catches Cai's attention is the absence of grammatical/logical connection between the topic and the comment. Take the example of tao zhi yaoyao 桃之夭夭 (tender but sturdy, the peach tree). The topic “peach tree” (outward scene) is juxtaposed with an emotional comment in a reduplicative word (lianmianzi 連綿字) yaoyao, the meaning of which, if necessary at all, is vague and indefinite. Without a predicative verb to connect them, the relationship between the external scene and the inner feeling it touches off in the heart/mind of the tree observer is noncontiguous and noncausal, nontemporal and nonsyntagmatic. Yet intriguingly, this void between the representational topic and the lyrical comment, like the “emptiness” Laozi advocates in chapter 5 of his Dao-de-jing, turns out to be productive. The analogical-associational framework invites poetic imagination.An even more illuminating discovery by Cai is the projection of the topic (scene) + comment (feeling) structure from the intraline level to the interline level (e.g., a topic line being juxtaposed with a comment line) and to the stanza formation and the overall organization of a poem (e.g., a topic in stanzaic form being juxtaposed with a comment in stanzaic form). This fertile structure is not just a unique formal feature of Chinese poetry. It is a mode of poetic thinking that accounts for the effectiveness of the binary structure of scene/feeling, external/internal, descriptive/expressive, and representation/lyricism. Cai traces in meticulous detail how this structure burgeoned in the Book of Poetry, extended to the Songs of Chu, grew into the dominant organizational scaffold in pentasyllabic poetry during the Han and the Six Dynasties and, eventually, was codified in Recent Style poetry. As Cai sums up, the basic organizational structures of classical Chinese poetry, with numerous variations in different genres during different periods, are but the reflection of the interaction between the spatiotemporal-logical and the analogical-associational principles, whose origin traces back to their archetypes in the Book of Poetry.This understanding of the active interaction between the two structural principles lends Cai a new perspective in his observation of the development and evolution of poetic genres. As the oral poetic act typically takes the form of singing and performing, it depends heavily on the rhythmic flow of sound along the linear, therefore causality-conscious, and syntagmatic temporal axis. Therefore, the aesthetics of oral poetry conform to the temporal-logical principle characteristic of the subject + predicate framework. On the other hand, a literacy-based poem is positioned in a spatial material structure of written ideographs. It therefore embraces the topic + comment principle of juxtaposition that encourages imaginative association along a paradigmatic axis (which Cai fondly terms as the “interfacing process” [197]). What we perceive in the development from the Han yuefu 樂府 to the Tang regulated verse (gelüshi 格律詩), Cai observes, is actually an intrageneric transformation from orality to literacy. The poetic art Fang Dongshu extolled as the “seamless heavenly garment,” discussed earlier, serves as a good example to illustrate this. Since the “Nineteen Old Poems” appeared at a historical juncture when literati poets learned from and appropriated the art of the yuefu songs, their works manifested a harmonious coexistence of both the aesthetics of the temporal subject + predicate and that of the spatial topic + comment. Also noteworthy, then, is the fact that literary history kept repeating itself, sometimes in a reverse fashion. For example, when the dominance of the sophisticated form of the regulated verse was challenged by the competition from the song lyric (ci 詞), one sees yet another shibian 詩變 (the change of poetic form) in the Chinese poetic tradition.In this way, Cai develops an internally consistent theory for his investigation. Equipped with this theory, he subjects to scrutiny a series of major issues in the study of classical Chinese poetry: the role played by linguistic factors in the evolution of Chinese poetry, the distinctive generic features in the structure of each poetic genre, the interconnection between the structures of different genres, the transformation in structure within various subgenres, and, on top of all this, the poetic vision (shijing 詩境) achieved by the grammar (yufa 語法) of poetic language. Along the way of his investigation, he picks up quite a few household topics for special treatment, including—to name just a few in a wide range—the rethinking and redefinition of the “analogical-associative mode” (bi-xing 比興) in the art of Book of Poetry (66–80, 116–27); the elucidation of the aesthetic principle of “moving in a circle, going and returning” (xunhuan wangfu 循環往復) as a golden rule for writing and reading Chinese poetry (208–11); the aesthetic ideal of “being round and mellow, ever flowing and turning” (yuanmei liuzhuan 圓美流轉) promoted by the Six Dynasty poets and consummated in the hands of the Tang masters (218–20, 265–71, 341–46); the down-to-earth reading in defense of the incantation of “the imagistic vision beyond images” (xiangwai zhi jing 象外之境), the supreme poetic vision achieved by Tang poetry (341–48); and the reassessment of the value of the “lead word” (lingzi 領字) in what Cai calls “the interlocking aggregate structure” (lianhuan shi diejia jiegou 連環式疊加結構) demonstrated in the exemplary form of the long song lyric (manci 慢詞) (593–604).Readers will notice that most of the topics mentioned above, and a considerable number of those not listed here, are perennial issues of endless talks and debates, many of which are in the form of overused jargon shrouded in the mist of metaphorical language. Yet instead of brushing them aside as idle clichés, Cai takes great empathetic (as opposed to sympathetic) effort to rationalize the intuitive impressions handed down to him. Even an almost nonsensical metaphor of “corals at the bottom of ocean” (haidi shanhu 海底珊瑚) can allow him to tease out a series of reasons accounting for the success of a Tang masterpiece undergirded by a highly developed topic + comment scheme (373–75, 647–49). Cai's sincere respect for the old exegetical tradition reminds one of Yukung Kao's attitudes toward traditional literary criticism. Kao acknowledges that there is a difference between “literary study” and “literary criticism.”5 On this, he seems to agree with Roman Jakobson, for his definition of “literary study” echoes that of Jakobson, who claims that “literary studies” is “the description of the intrinsic values of a literary work.”6 Unlike Jakobson, however, Kao does not espouse the idea that “literary criticism” is “subjective” and “censorious,” a product of “a critic's own tastes and opinions on creative literature.”7 According to Kao, traditional commentators and annotators like Fang Dongshu might belong more to the camp of “literary criticism” than that of “literary study.” The practice of their literary criticism is “creative” in nature.8 “Contemplative” as its approach might appear and too metaphorical its language might be, this tradition of “appreciative” criticism is endowed with a sharp intuitive insight and guided by a logic of its own and serves as a rich resource for the study of Chinese literature. To draw upon this resource, what one needs to do is “to analyze objectively the subjective critical experiences.”9 Cai does precisely that.Going over his research, one simply must marvel at the serious attention he pays to the “subjective” traditional criticism. However, in his negotiation with the wisdom of traditional critics, Cai is never satisfied with repeating or paraphrasing them, or simply translating their language from the classical into the vernacular, passing the ineffability of their intuitive ideas to his own readers. His dialogue with Fang seen above is but one of many good examples. Actually, his innovative interpretation of bixing, also mentioned earlier, is another product of an intense conversation with some of the best critical minds in Chinese literary history, such as Liu Xie 劉勰 (ca. 465–ca. 532), Zhong Rong 鍾嶸 (ca. 469–518), Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (574–648), and Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200). In this way, secrets hidden in the rich stock of traditional “literary criticism” yield themselves under his inquisitive gaze. His approach resembles that of the school of stylistic analysis. Yet, unlike the stylisticians, who are said to look more for things they assume to be than things as they actually are,10 Cai does not need to assume anything and is therefore spared of confirmation bias.Cai's innovative investigation of the topic + comment structure also provides him a new angle to examine the function played by its spatiotemporal-logical counterpart, the subject + predicate structure. He points out that, in the first place, a subject + predicate sentence in Chinese, which is noninflectional, is not as restrictive as that in European languages. Restrained by no syntactic rules regulating the word order in a sentence, a poet enjoys ample freedom to create ambiguities or special effects using rhetorical devices such as inversion, parallelism, and contrast, among others. Furthermore, the lack of clear grammatical connectors, though to a much lesser degree, can also be seen here and there in a subject + predicate sentence. Therefore, a subject + predicate sentence cannot always take for granted the certainty and stability of the message—so evident in its counterpart in European languages—it intends to convey. In the most extreme cases, it is not unthinkable for one to find it difficult to decide whether a sentence is truly spatiotemporal-logical in nature. On top of all of the factors mentioned above, one also needs to consider the fact that subject + predicate sentences are inevitably forced to live in a contentious harmony with the topic + comment sentences in a symbiotic environment. There is no question that it is always the principle of the topic + comment that takes the initiative to topple the balance so as to create ambiguity, the indispensable ingredients for poetry. Yet, as Cai points out, informed with its counterpart, a subject + predicate sentence/structure also has ways—for one, by “de-substantiating” (xuhua 虛化) its reference-certain and logic-inclined components—to become temporal-associational in some way.11 Indeed, some of the most engaging passages in Cai's volumes are found in his analysis of examples showing how a timeless and spaceless poetic vision emerges from amid an intense crisscrossing coordination of the two aesthetic movements, in which the outward and the inward merge and the descriptive and the expressive join force in a continuum, while the line between the subject + predicate and the topic + comment blurs.Cai's book is a belated response—particularly from the scholarship written in the Chinese language—to the call made five and a half zodiac cycles ago by Jakobson for linguists and literary critics to join together to collaborate in the study of literature.12 In this sense, and among other things, we have in front of us a game changer.