Words Well Put
Page 11
be the king’s throat and tongue;
promulgate the government abroad;
in the states of the four quarters it will then be set
in function.”
Solemn is the king’s charge,
Zhong Shanfu handles it;
whether the states are obedient or not,
Zhong Shanfu brightly discerns it;
he is enlightened and wise,
and so he protects his person;
morning and evening he does not slacken,
in the service of the One Man.
The people have a saying:
“If soft, then eat it,
if hard, then spit it out”;
but Zhong Shanfu
neither eats the soft,
nor spits out the hard;
he does not oppress the solitary and the widows,
he does not fear the strong and the refractory.
The people have a saying:
“Virtue is light as a hair,
but among the people few can lift it”;
we only estimate and consider it,
but Zhong Shanfu alone can lift it;
we love him, but nobody can help him;
when the embroidered fabric of the royal robe has a hole,
Zhong Shanfu alone can mend it.
Zhong Shanfu went out and sacrificed to the Spirit of
the Road;
the four stallions were robust;
the soldiers were brisk,
each of them afraid of lagging behind;
the four stallions went bang-bang
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Performing the Tradition
65
the eight bit-bells tinkled;
the king charged Zhong Shanfu to fortify that
eastern region.
The four stallions were strong;
the eight bit-bells tinkled in unison;
Zhong Shanfu marched to Qi,
and quick was his returning home;
Jifu has made this song,
stately is the pure-sounding air;
Zhong Shanfu has constant anxieties;
by this song I comfort his heart. 54
In his citation, Shi Ji evokes an ancient and extremely powerful
model of the proper relationship between the ruler—the Son of
Heaven—and his officials. The officials serve to protect the ruler, to
stand as examples of proper deportment for him, to promulgate his
decrees, to remonstrate with him fearlessly, to deal with his people
fairly, and to lead his military forces in ensuring the security of his
state. In practice, of course, these various duties are distributed
among a large group of officials, but they are concentrated here in
the figure of one über-official. With his citation, Shi Ji is “seizing
upon a meaning” among all of the various duties listed in the entire
poem, namely the official’s difficult and lonely duty to remonstrate
with his superior in an attempt to repair any damage that the mantle
of leadership may have suffered through the ruler’s misbehavior. In
making this poetic citation, Shi Ji engages in the very activity—
remonstration—called for in the citation, thereby casting himself in
the role of the ideal official, Zhong Shanfu. This rhetorical move
implicates Duke Ling in the role of Son of Heaven, the poem’s King
Xuan 宣 (r. 827–782 b.c.e.) of the Western Zhou. If King Xuan re-
quired and heeded remonstration from his official, then surely Duke
Ling must do the same if he wishes to be a true ruler. Shi Ji’s poetic
citation from the Tradition casts a template over the present, stak-
ing out a place for himself and for Duke Ling. Shi Ji is already oc-
cupying his assigned position; it is time for Duke Ling to move into
his. “So one is able to amend faults,” says Shi Ji, holding out the
possibility for Duke Ling’s redemption. If the duke is willing to
—————
54. Mao #260. After Karlgren, Book of Odes, pp. 228–30.
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66
Performing the Tradition
accept Shi Ji’s help in mending his faults, “then the royal robe need
not be thrown away.” This is a brazen statement for someone in Shi
Ji’s position to be making. It is tantamount to saying, “Listen to me
or you will lose your throne.” He is motivated to make it because of
the extremity of Duke Ling’s offenses. He is able to make it because
he has the force of Tradition behind him.
Duke Ling is too obtuse or too refractory (or both) to heed Shi
Ji, who suddenly drops from view in the narrative, never to reap-
pear. He is immediately replaced by Zhao Dun. The narrative re-
alizes in its form what Shi Ji proposed at the outset: “if he does not
accept what I say, then you may carry on after me.” The duke soon
grows tired of Zhao Dun’s remonstrations and tries to have him
killed, which the reader presumes was also the fate of the absent Shi
Ji. When the man sent to kill Zhao Dun witnesses the noble de-
portment of his target, he has a crisis of conscience and commits
suicide rather than carrying out his mission. The assassin, Chu Mei,
is placed in an impossible position. According to Tradition, he is
supposed to be loyal to his ruler. But what if one’s ruler is not living up to the role prescribed to him by Tradition, and one’s potential
victim is? Chu Mei is unable to choose between what he is supposed
to do, according to the pragmatic considerations of the here-and-
now, and what he should do, according to the precepts of a Tradition that precedes the present and will outlast it. His solution is to remove himself from the here-and-now, and in doing so he becomes
another victim of the rapacious Duke Ling even as his death serves
to affirm the Tradition.
The halo of authority that surrounds Zhao Dun as he dozes—the
aura that protects him from the assassin’s blade—is derived from his
communion with Tradition. He knows his proper place and he oc-
cupies it to the best of his ability. And it is the place that is permanent. This is why Duke Ling is unable to stop the remonstrations by
killing the remonstrators. He can kill as many corporeal beings as he
likes, but he cannot destroy the place that is defined for them. 55 If he only had the virtue to occupy the place that has been defined for
—————
55. Another moral reprobate, an official who assassinated his own ruler, finds this out when he kills the historian who dared to record his crime, only to find a succession of four brothers taking his place (Xiang 25).
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Performing the Tradition
67
him, he could come to a “normal end.” But—as the reader knew all
along—Duke Ling “did not live up to the role of ruler,” and he ends
up being murdered in his peach garden. In the final analysis, he oc-
cupies the only place Tradition holds ever ready for those who
would dare to ignore its precepts: the minatory example.
What of poetic competence in this case? If Shi Ji truly were, as he
certainly seemed to be, a wise offi
cial in command of his traditional
bodies of knowledge, then why did his poetic citations fail to
achieve their intended effect? This apparent failure of the Tradition
to reassert itself through the efforts of a competent official is why
the Zuo Tradition must narrate the eventual violent demise of Duke Ling. The failure was not in the citation, nor in the one who made
it, but in the one who received it; poetic competence applies to re-
ception as well as utterance. In essence, the Zuo Tradition is implying that being a bad listener can be fatal, thus underscoring the
importance of a class of advisors who are not only adept in citing
traditional knowledge but also in appreciating the full import of
such citations. Shi Ji made every attempt to render the import of his
poetic citations clear to Duke Ling, but to the duke they remained
just some “old poems” with no immediate bearing upon him. He
may have understood what was being said, but he failed to under-
stand who was saying it. When Shi Ji stepped forward and employed his cultural competence to pitch the right poetic citations in the
right place at the right time, he ceased to speak with the voice of a
lone man and began to speak with the voice of an entire Golden Age.
The voice of a single man may be ignored with little consequence;
the voice of a legion of ghosts is ignored at one’s peril.
Ghosts may speak, but they may not live again. The practice of
offering selections from the Poems is an attempt to emulate the
ghosts. When the occasion is routine (such as welcoming a guest to a
banquet), or when the poem is sufficiently general in its referents
(such as in Mao #161, 175, 182, 278, or 284), the emulation can be
transparent and complete. When there is more at stake (such as a
military pact), or when the poem is marked by previous usage (re-
ferring to specific names, places, or events of the past), the emula-
tion becomes clouded by motive and fractured by separation. Cul-
tural competence is required to apply and interpret the poem, to
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68
Performing the Tradition
clarify the motive, to bridge the separation between past and pres-
ent. With poetic citation, the motive and separation are brought to
the surface and dealt with in the surrounding speech. The ghosts are
no longer emulated in action, but their voices are invoked in a
highly controlled form. This is the move from words for ritual re-
enactment to words as a rhetorical resource. In either case, the
need for poetic competence arises out of the possibility (often prob-
ability) of misapprehension by one’s audience. The inevitable
paradox is that while the words of the Poems derive their authority from their antiquity, their mode of preservation and transmission is
contingent upon their continuing application to a present that al-
ways falls short of the precepts encoded within them.
It is as though the Zhou dynasty begins as a wonderful play—in
the West End of course. All of the players inhabit their roles com-
pletely (heroes, villains, and bit parts alike), deliver their lines ex-
quisitely, and hit their marks flawlessly. The critics love it and the
play receives rave reviews for its fine performances and uplifting
moral message. Then the play is moved to a venue in the east, actors
come and go, and things begin to go awry. The players start missing
their cues, overstepping their marks, fumbling over their lines. The
worst among them appear on stage in the wrong costume or even
speak someone else’s part. The critics are appalled and begin shout-
ing at the players from their seats. Eventually they get up on the
stage themselves. They show the players how to deliver their lines
and even resort to explaining the meaning of the play to them.
“They used to do this so well in the West End!” they cry. “Why
can’t you be like that?” In desperation, they begin rewriting the play
themselves, weaving in what they can salvage from the original
production, always hampered by the knowledge that the principal
actors are just not up to their roles anymore. The audience and the
players soon realize that the critics have now become the authors
and supporting cast of the play and are threatening to steal the show.
One of the more ambitious actors, playing the role of the King of
Qin, decides to draw the curtain on the shambles of this once great
play and to open his own one-man show as Emperor of Qin. He
burns the old script and buries its authors. His show promises to be
a grand spectacle, but the critics are not invited.
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Performing the Tradition
69
V
Over the course of the many narratives contained within the Zuo
Tradition, it becomes clear that the Poems are never uttered or received apart from a moment of application (and its attendant in-
terpretation), which requires competence in order to be handled
effectively. Even the few mentions of moments of composition
rather than quotation show that poems are produced in order to be
applied to a situation at hand. 56 When the Poems are performed as a musical repertoire, it is as a form of display—the concert given for
Jizha being the most extensive example (Xiang 29.13)—and they are
invariably subject to moral interpretation. In the world described
by the Zuo Tradition narratives, an original matrix of meanings may be posited as the source of the Poems’ authority, but it is beyond recuperation. The Poems are not so much knowledge of the past in the present, as they are past knowledge for the present. This sort of knowledge is not an object of knowing, but a means of performing.
It is a repertoire of possibilities. Conceived as such, the Poems
cannot be tied to particular authors in particular circumstances. In
the words of Lao Xiaoyu, “People have no stable poems and the
poems have no stable referents” 人無定詩。詩無定指. 57 They can be used by anyone who knows them in any situation for which they
are appropriate. And, as with any tool, some people are better at
using them than others.
If the “original” meanings of the Poems are lost with their original circumstances, then what do they mean? Rather than a stable
meaning, each has a history of moments of application, some earlier
and some later, in different contexts governed by different motives
and practices. To look for the “original” meaning is really just an-
—————
56. See Min 2, Yin 3, and Wen 6. The one instance of poetic production that does not seem to have an immediate application is the strange pair of couplets exchanged by Duke Zhuang of Zheng and his mother upon their being reunited (Yin 1). While these lines do not appear in the Poems and do not constitute entire poems in and of themselves, their impromptu production under the stress of deep emotion prefigures the theory of literary production as a spontaneous outburst, which became dominant in the Han dynasty.
57. Remarks on Poetry of the Spring and Autumn Era 春秋詩話. Cited in Tam,
“Use o
f Poetry in Tso Chuan,” p. 33.
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other application and interpretation in this long history. It is an
attempt to find stable ground on which to base judgments of all
other applications and interpretations by the degree to which they
diverge from a contrived “original” meaning.
What, then, does shi yan zhi 詩言志 mean in the context of
Zuo Tradition narratives? The locus classicus for the phrase is found in the following passage from the “Canon of Shun” 舜典 in the
Documents 書:
Emperor Shun said, “Kui, I command you to regularize the music to in-
struct my sons. It should be upright yet mild, magnanimous but stern,
tough but not injurious, concise but not supercilious. The poems should
articulate intent, singing should intone the words, notes should correspond with the intonement, and modes should harmonize the notes. The sounds
of the eight instruments should be in concert and not clash with one an-
other. Then the spirits and people will thereby achieve harmony.” Kui
said, “Yea! I will strike my stone chimes and I will tap my stone chimes.
And the many beasts will be led to dance.”
帝曰。夔。命汝典樂。教冑子。直而溫。寬而栗。剛而無虐。簡而無傲。
詩言志。歌永言。聲依永。律和聲。八音克諧。無相奪倫。神人以和。
夔曰。於。予擊石拊石。百獸率舞。58
Emperor Shun commands Kui to produce a canon of exemplary
music with which to inculcate a proper sense of morals and deco-
rum in his sons. The emphasis throughout the passage is on the
performance of the music. It consists of words that will articulate the mind’s intent, a style of singing to intone these words, musical notes
corresponding to the intonement, and tonal modes that will or-
ganize the notes into a harmonious melody that can then be played
on instruments to bring human beings and spirits into a state of
concord. Kui responds to this charge by claiming that his musical
performance is so powerfully suasive that it induces the very beasts
to dance in response. 59 There is no explicit mention of where the words and their accompanying music come from or whose intent