And the flowers, heavy with rain, weigh down
the town of Mandarin-in-brocaded-robe
Through this proper name, the poet evokes an image which, on the one hand, extends the image of the flowers, and, on the other, suggests his joy (as an exiled mandarin) to participate in this festivity of spring flowers.
In another poem, “Moonlit Night,”5 of which we have already cited two lines above, Du Fu, captive in a Chang-an ravaged by war, thinks of his children who are refugees elsewhere, and asks himself whether, given their young age, they can still remember the city of Chang-an. Then again, “Chang-an” also means “long peace” in Chinese; and the lines seem to underscore, not without bitter irony, that these children who have grown up in war do not even know what peace is. But when the war is at last over, and Du Fu finds himself in the province of Si-chuan, near the town of Jian-ge, whose name means “Sword Gate”; he does not hesitate to use this name to enrich the poem where he sings his joy:
Over there arrive new swords of deliverance6
Up to this point, we have limited our observations to the work of Du Fu. To confirm our statements, we are going to look through examples from other poets. Concerning the use of a place name as a symbolic figure, let us cite an example drawn from the “Song of Eternal Regret” by Bai Ju-yi.7 In a line that tells of the murder (by strangulation) of Gui-fei, the favorite of Emperor Xuan-zong, while fleeing (during the An Lu-shan Rebellion), the poet by design uses the conventional metaphor “mothwing eyebrows,” which symbolizes feminine beauty, to designate the emperor’s favorite in the scene of her murder:
In front of the horses strangled | graceful mothwing eyebrows
And further on, the poet uses, a second time, the same expression, which is found also to be the name of a mountain in the province of Si-chuan, where justly the emperor, inconsolable, has gone to seek refuge:
Beneath Mothwing Eyebrows Mountain people pass rarely
This second image, which echoes the first, accentuates the tragic feeling of the Emperor, whose imagination is haunted by her death.
As for the use of conventional metaphors by other poets, we will first cite the following lines by Wang Wei:
On the lake an instant to return
Green Mountain surrounded (by) white cloud
These two lines are part of the quatrain “Lake Yi,”8 which evokes the scene where a woman accompanies her husband as he travels to a lake shore. When the husband is rowing away in the small boat, the wife stays on shore. The first line apparently describes the voyager, who at one moment turns to face the middle of the lake, although the absence of a personal pronoun permits one to suppose that he is referring to the woman, who, waiting on the shore, directs his gaze once more to the center of the lake. In any case, this line is marked by reciprocity: the two subjects in question are united by the same thought, and above all, by the same gaze. No longer seeing each other, they “see” each other again, through the images of the second line that are exposed to their view, two images reunited, also, by the lake they are reflected in: the green mountain and the white cloud. Starting from this point, the couple “lost to view” will allow what is in their hearts through these two metaphors that are held by links greater than contiguity, of an indeflectible connivance. The cloud in its original state no other than the mist born from the entrails of the mountain and which never stops returning there. What, then, do these metaphors represent? What do they signify? First of all, the identifications that they propose seem capable of being made, so to speak, naturally. The green mountain is identified with the woman who remains, while the white cloud, image of wandering, visibly designates the man. One can hear the woman murmur: “I will be as faithful, waiting, as that mountain” and the man respond: “I will travel the world, but I will not forget my place of origin and my true refuge.” Nonetheless it is appropriate to point out that, according to the Chinese imagination, the mountain pertains to the Yang and the cloud to the Yin, in which case the mountain would designate the man and the cloud, the woman. The interior voices emanating from them would be, this time, respectively: “I am traveling, but like that mountain, I will stay with you” and, “I am here, but, like that cloud, my thought travels.” The only case in identification, if it is legitimate here, would not be able to exhaust the significant richness of the two figures face to face. How could one avoid gaining access to all that is implied by the subtle relation between them, a relation that is living, carnal, always renewed. The verb juan that ties them together does not have a unilateral sense; it is translated as “to surround” or “to be surrounded by.” Its place at the heart of the line arouses, actualizes the gestures of affection, of enlacement that indefinitely exchange mountain and cloud, which is to say, man and woman.
Let us also cite Li Bai:
Emperor Xiang cloud-rain | now where to find?
River waters flow west | monkey cries at night9
The first line evokes the legend that relates the amorous games (in Chinese “cloud-rain”) of Emperor Xiang with the goddess of Mountain Wu (“Witch Mountain”). The second line locates the place of their encounter: the region of the gorges of the Yang-tze, famous for the tumultuous nature of the river at that spot and the cries of monkeys on the rocky cliffs. The linking of the images: Witch Mountain → cloud → rain → loud water → monkeys’ cries, evokes a cosmic sexual act and gives the lines their whole evocative power.
Let us cite, at last, two distichs drawn from the poetry of Du Mu:
Shadowed soul river-lake | carrying wine stroll
Waist Chus entrails broken | body light in the palm10
These two lines, made of a string of metaphors and allusions, are part of a poem where the poet evokes, in a disillusioned tone, the dissipated but happy life that he had led south of the river. Here is the denotative sense of the metaphors: “Shadowed soul”=leading a ne’er-do-well’s existence; “river-lake” = wandering without direction; “waist Chu” = women of Chu famous for their wasp waists; “entrails broken” = broken heart, affliction; “body light in the palm” = Zao Fei-yan, the favorite concubine of the Han emperor, whose body was so light she could dance on a jade platter that a man was holding. The lines can therefore be interpreted thus: “Ceaselessly wandering and devoting myself to wine, I led a disorderly life south of the river. I have held the fine waist of many women who have suffered much because of me.” This denotative language, of course, lacks the power of the sequential images: shadowed soul → river-lake → wine → light body → held waist → broken guts.
By whom distracted | flight of wild geese?
cross-hatching the clouds | crossing the river11
These lines are taken from a poem arising from a particular event: the poet one day climbed half-drunk to a pavilion on a height overlooking the Yellow River; he roused himself from his drunkenness, startled by a flock of wild geese passing. Having seized this scene “on the wing,” the poet imbues it with a rich connotation: “clouds on the river” = exile, wandering; “flight of wild geese” = separation, late season, nostalgia for the return. The poet understands, in the face of these images, that his aimlessness has lasted too long. Here, one asks whether it is the poet who “uses” the metaphors, quite conventional, to express his disorientation and nostalgia or whether it is the images themselves that, already charged with signification, provoke the poet and lead him back to reality.
One observes a functioning of images of the same order in the quatrain “Lament from the Palace”12 by Wang Chang-ling, where the young woman, seeing, on a spring day, the color of the willows, regrets having let her husband go far away to seek Mandarin honors. This would be, then, the willows, symbols both of love and of separation, that would have “revealed” to the woman her buried desire.
In the preceding discussion, we have tried to show that the conventional metaphors with which the Chinese language was packed, when they did not descend into cliché, had engendered a structured language. This language obeyed an internal necessity, crea
ting a properly metonymic logic, one which allowed the poet to bypass discourse-commentary and to write, quite simply and directly, the subjective consciousness and the elements of the objective world. The examples we just studied were drawn from those which had been made the object of conscious exploitation on the part of their authors, and which best leant themselves to this analysis. But one easily imagines what unexpected and forceful associations can arouse other types of play, founded on graphic and phonic ties and on systems of correspondence (numbers, elements, etc.). These types of play reveal a whole realm of the collective or individual unconscious.
Concerning instances of graphic play, we have already seen how ideograms are packed with ideas and images and how they “signify” in certain verses. Let us cite once more here the example of an ideogram which, through its constituent graphic parts, gave rise to a poetic image. In China, one designates a young girl’s sixteenth birthday (the age when a girl becomes desirable and eligible for marriage) with the expression po-gua “broken melon.” The character, melon, gua, is composed of the element ba “eight,” doubled. Thus, in dividing “melon,” one gets twice “eight,” sixteen. Starting with the expression “broken melon,” born from a purely graphic play, many poets have composed lines that evoke the erotic idea of the tender and fresh flesh, as of a melon, of biting into the flesh, etc.
As for phonic play, we have also indicated the richness of homophony in this monosyllabic language which is Chinese. Let us specify only that, during the Six Dynasties (4th–6th c.), a tradition of popular song systematically exploited, often with audacity and humor, the homophonic possibilities, a trait exploited little after the poets of the Tang. What is remarkable in this tradition is that the phonic play is rarely gratuitous or fortuitous: beyond a phonic rapprochement, the poet seeks to push as far as possible the metonymic implications; doing this, he often overflows the phonic framework to arrive at a profound signification, which permits him to rejoin the initial image.
It is thus that, in a little love poem, starting with the expression can-mian “ties of love, love-pats” the author of the song, a woman, builds on the image of a silkworm, which is also pronounced can. This image, while at first appearing incongruous, nevertheless permits the poet to build on the image of the thread (the silkworm spitting out threads). The word “thread,” pronounced si, is a homophone of the word “thought” (or “desire”); thanks to this word—“thread,” “thought”—the woman is able to transform the metaphor “silkworm” without leaving the theme of love. For, from the image of inextricable threads (which also signify “obsessive thoughts”) forming a cocoon, is derived the concept of the silkworm that sacrifices itself for its work: through this, the woman suggests that she would like to be possessed totally by her love, even if it should cost her her life. This last theme, which continues to deepen the initial idea, justifies, through experience, in a way, the insertion of the image of the silkworm, initially used as part of a play on word sounds.
Another poem has the theme of lovers’ reunions after a long absence of the man: in the heat of intimacy, the man recounts how hard the voyage was and the woman listening to him tries to imagine his trouble. Very ingeniously, the poet immediately plays on the homophony of the two words “recount” and “route,” both being pronounced dao. The poem progresses on this ambiguity: on the one hand, the man who recounts, on the other, the woman who imagines the route that he took. Soon, the image of the route evokes that of the trees that line the road and circle the way stations. These trees, called nian, have bitter fruit. The combination of the two images, route + bitter fruits, gives rise to the expression dao-ku, which means both “the route is hard” and “to complain” (word for word: to recount bitterness). Through this expression with two meanings, the woman’s imagination joins the man’s narration, in which he continues to recount his troubles and to evoke her attentive care.
Analysis of Poems
We have just shown, through several examples, the way in which Chinese poets drew from a metaphoric language, made up of the stock array of symbolic figures. These figures crystallized the imagination and the desires of a people over long centuries. In endowing things with human significations, these figures create another connection between signs and things on the one hand and, on the other, links among the signs themselves, due to the natural links that unify things.
It seems to us necessary not to restrict ourselves to examples from isolated lines but to analyze some poems in their entirety, so as to observe this particular language at work. In the course of this analysis, we will use the rhetorical notions of metaphor and metonymy, in the particular sense proposed by Roman Jakobson. If the metaphoric process is founded on similarity and the metonymic process on contiguity, it is on the axis of selection of the discourse that we envisage the first and on that of combination the second. From this fact, metonymy, treating essentially the relation (of contiguity) among the figures, here takes a general sense.13 Let us recall, at the risk of repeating ourselves, that above all we seek to render an account of the mechanism of a language which proceeds by “internal engendering”: one figure provokes another one. This process occurs not according to the logic of discourse, but following the affinities or contradictions that exist between them (cloud chignon—perfumed mist; jade arm—light of the moon; red door—meat dripping with blood, etc.). The metaphorical figures, representing natural things, are richer in “metonymic virtualities” than ordinary signs (cloud chignon → hair; red door → house of the wealthy), as well as more economical (“red door” instead of “inside the houses of the rich,” “jade porch” instead of “before a woman’s dwelling”). More than an element in a rigid sequence, each figure is a free unity that, through its multiple components (sound, written form, normal sense, symbolic image, virtual content in systems of correspondence, etc.) radiates in all directions. And the ensemble of the figures, having among them organic and necessary ties, weaves a veritable network with multiple channels of communication. Thanks to an exploded structure, where syntactic “hobbles” are reduced to a minimum, the images, in a poem, beyond linearity, form constellations, which through their crossed lights, create a vast field of significations.
For the present, we are going to analyze four poems the authors of which number among the greatest Tang poets: Li He, Li Bai, and Li Shang-yin. It is a coincidence that all three have the same family name, Li, unless one wishes to see there a mysterious metonymic link that connects some genius of Chinese poetry!
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The first poem we will study is by Li He. Dead at the age of twenty-six, he left a body of work striking in its strangeness, as well as by its rebellious accents. Through an incantatory style filled with lavish images, he unveils phantasms as no previous Chinese poet had. In his poetry, of shamanic and Taoist inspiration, collective and personal myths are side by side. To present his vision of the universe, often lugubrious and tragic, he invents an entire personal bestiary: dragons of all types, century-old owls, enormous lizards with dazzling tails, wood demons that emerged from fire, a black lynx that shrieks blood, a sobbing bronze dromedary, a fox that dies shivering, a raptor that eats its own mother, a nine-headed serpent that devours the soul, etc. To indicate the secret correspondences among things, he combines images of different natures: visual and auditory, animate and inanimate, concrete and abstract, etc. Thus, he speaks of a shouting sword, of flowers that shed tears of blood, of a wind with laughing eyes, of the color of a tender sob, of the old red that gets drunk, of late violet, of lazy greens, of green decadence, of the greening solitude, wings of smoke, of the arms of clouds, the paws of the dew, of the sun that sounds like breaking glasses, of the musical moon with the sound of stone, of emptiness that lets us hear its voice and laughter….In this universe where the marvelous mixes with sad or grotesque elements, the poet regulates the rites of communion through blood: “Before my soul and my blood freeze, to whom should I speak?” “I pierce the leopard’s skin so its blood flows in my silver cup.” “The
blood that the cuckoo spits is old man’s tears.” “My angry blood under ground in a thousand years will be green jade.” But more than the idea of communion, what is striking is the defiance hurled by the poet at a supernatural order and, through this defiance, his drives burst forth.
One image returns repeatedly, like a leitmotif, that of the sword. The poet uses it not in a simple chivalric spirit, but to plumb the depths of the secret of the myths attached to the image. He laughs at those who “can draw the sword against others, but don’t know how to see themselves in it.” Under his brush, the sword takes on many meanings: phallic symbol (following Taoist tradition), symbol of death (also from Taoist tradition: the sword replaces the corpse in rigor mortis), symbol of defiance to a supernatural order (to kill the dragon), and symbol of metamorphosis (the sword itself is transformed into a dragon). The poet intervenes as he who decodes and organizes the many myths and metaphors accumulated over the ages. Through this decoding, he discovers within himself the secret drives that live in him. It is from this perspective that we will beginds one of his poems:
Li He: “Ballad of Kong-hou”
Silk of Wu plane tree of Shu | raise autumn high
Sky empty clouds still| falling not floating
River goddess cry bamboo | White Daughters are afflicted
Li Ping mid-country | play Kong-hou
Mount Kun-lun break jade | phoenix couple call each other
Lotus flowers weep dew | perfumed orchids laugh
Twelve porticos in front | melt cold lights
23 silk strings | move Purple Emperor
Nü-wa refine stones | repair celestial vault
Broken stones burst sky | gather autumn rain
Dream penetrate sacred mount | initiate the shaman
Old fish rise waves | thin dragons dance
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