Words Well Put

by Graham Sanders

  Liu Bang was more comfortable seeking advantage on the open

  battlefield, where one’s enemies can be clearly seen, rather than in

  the shadowy court, where cunning counts for more than military

  prowess.

  This difference in setting between battlefield and court is what

  complicates the idea of “spontaneity” that is at the core of the

  outburst song. In a sense, the battlefield is the perfect ground for

  spontaneity: there is a time and place for premeditated strategy, but

  in the heat of hand-to-hand combat between individuals one must

  act immediately and produce immediate results. The battlefield set-

  ting for Xiang Yu’s “Song of Gaixia” contributes in large part to its

  sense of immediacy. The idea of sitting down to compose a poem

  —————

  way into the Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms 三國志 (Suzuki, Kan Gi shi no kenkyū, p. 12).

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  for performance does not agree with the picture of Xiang Yu as an

  impulsive man of action and is at odds with the urgency of the bat-

  tlefield. The sense of drama produced in the scene comes from its

  narration, not the premeditated actions of Xiang Yu himself, who is

  simply doing what occurs to him at the moment.

  However, when Liu Bang sings “The Great Wind” in the Pei

  Palace, or sings “The Wild Swan” to accompany Lady Qi’s dance, he

  is the stage director. He had the time to assemble a choir, to play the

  music, and to train the singers or request a dance before he “took

  the stage” to perform his song. Premeditated military strategy for

  the battlefield is converted into premeditated self-presentation be-

  fore an audience in court. Simply put, Xiang Yu is too busy on the

  battlefield to worry about how his song might be received by an

  audience (during the singing of his song he may well have been

  formulating his escape); Liu Bang, on the other hand, must worry

  about how he strategizes his performance; he is thinking about his audience. The question of spontaneity becomes vexed under these

  circumstances.

  Many Chinese critics refer to Liu Bang’s songs as “spontaneous”

  即興 compositions, but it is hard to see how this is tenable given

  their narrative frames. The actual words for the song (the “poem”)

  may have been spontaneously produced. Perhaps Liu Bang had no

  idea what he was going to say until he said it, although this possi-

  bility seems remote given his foreknowledge of the subject of his

  songs in both cases. What is not spontaneous is the song perfor-

  mance itself—he trains a choir for “The Great Wind” and provides

  stage directions for his performance of “The Wild Swan.” The lack

  of spontaneity in performance leaves its traces in the content of the

  songs; both of them employ figurative language, which suggests

  some measure of reflection went into choosing apposite figures (the

  wind for Liu Bang’s military might and the swan for the ascending

  heir apparent). The occasion for Xiang Yu’s performance, by con-

  trast, takes him completely by surprise (the narrator says that he

  was “astonished”), and his impromptu performance seems to result

  directly from his “passionate feeling.” The content of his song cen-

  ters on the concrete images of his favorite horse and concubine, the

  immediate objects of his cares.

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  Baring the Soul

  Strategy is also a matter of when, where, how, and by whom a

  song is performed, in addition to what is actually said through it.

  Formulation of strategy in performance requires time: Xiang Yu

  had little on the battlefield, while Liu Bang had much at court. If the

  effort that goes into staging the variables of song performance is a

  form of strategy, then the natural question is “what is to be gained

  by that strategy?” In “The Great Wind,” Liu Bang specifically asks,

  “Where will I find brave warriors to keep this vast land?” He won

  the empire against great odds with the help of advisors who died

  soon afterward, and worries that his “kind but weak” son will be

  unable to maintain it without sound military advice. Liu Bang does

  not seriously ask his question of the old men and children gathered

  in Pei to hear his performance (he bestows upon them the honor of

  maintaining his “bath town” and exempts them from taxes). The

  question is a rhetorical one, posed to give an indication of the wor-

  ries that come to his mind now that he has achieved his goals and

  returned to the place from which he started. The strategy here is not

  so much to achieve a concrete goal but simply to give public ex-

  pression to his private concerns, to vent his feelings.

  Who exactly is employing this venting strategy? Perhaps a com-

  bination of lore and precedent led Liu Bang to believe that the

  performance of an outburst song was simply what one was expected

  to do in these circumstances and thus he staged it for maximum ef-

  fect. Or, it could be the historian who felt that such a performance

  appropriately provided a glimpse of Liu Bang’s state of mind at this

  crucial point in the narrative. Both narrator and narratee are con-

  ditioned by canonical principles and precedent—it is impossible at

  this remove in time and place to extricate one from the other. This

  story—stretched as it is between the poles of fact and fiction, be-

  tween principle and practice—in turn persists as a model for later

  protagonists who find themselves in similar situations.

  If Liu Bang is venting publicly at Pei, then what is Liu Bang doing

  at court in “The Wild Swan”? He tells Lady Qi in plain language

  that the heir apparent’s position is unassailable and that she had best

  resign herself to Empress Lü’s superior position. So why the song

  and dance? When Liu Bang says to his weeping concubine, “Perform

  a Chu dance for me and I will perform a Chu song for you,” he is

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  87

  proposing a form of shared venting. His song and her dance work

  together to articulate the frustration that they both feel. In per-

  forming it several times through, they have a chance to savor their

  pain, which reduces the concubine to pathetic sobs. When the

  performance is done, the emperor rises and departs, drawing the

  curtain on their defeat and providing them with some sense of

  closure. The inclusion of the song at this point in the narrative al-

  lows the narrator to show that Liu Bang is sympathetic to Lady Qi

  even if he is powerless to help her. If there is any strategy employed

  by Liu Bang here beyond venting, it may reside in the knowledge

  that Empress Lü will hear of this performance, although it is hard to

>   see how she could be anything but encouraged by its tone of resig-

  nation.

  And encouraged she was. When Liu Bang died later that year

  (195 b.c.e.), Empress Lü saw her own son take the throne as Em-

  peror Hui 惠帝 and moved swiftly to consolidate her power as the

  empress dowager. One of her first acts was to have Lady Qi im-

  prisoned. Lady Qi made the mistake of complaining through song,

  leading to dire consequences for her son and herself.

  When Gaozu died, Emperor Hui took the throne and Empress Lü became

  the empress dowager. Thereupon, she ordered the palace discipline service to imprison Lady Qi, shave her head, chain her neck, dress her in the

  scarlet robes of a convict, and have her pound rice husks. Lady Qi pounded while she sang:

  The son is a prince,

  the mother a prisoner.

  All day I pound until dusk,

  I serve as a constant companion of death. 22

  Separated by three thousand li,

  whom shall I send to tell you?

  —————

  22. Yan Shigu interprets this line to mean that she is the companion of criminals sentenced to death (see his commentary interpolated in Ban, Han shu). Yang Shuda disagrees, saying it means she could die at any time and that this usage of the character si 死 is closer to the abstract idea of a “spirit of death” ( Han shu kuiguan, juan 2, p. 767). Yang’s reading seems preferable because there are no parallel usages of si by itself referring to criminals that have been sentenced to death.

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  Baring the Soul

  The empress dowager heard of this and was greatly enraged, saying, “So,

  you still look to your son, do you?” She then summoned the son, the

  Prince of Zhao, in order to execute him. The envoys made three trips, but the administrator of Zhao, Zhou Chang, refused to dispatch him. The

  empress dowager then summoned the administrator of Zhao himself, who

  arrived in Chang’an in compliance with the summons. Then she sent

  people to summon the prince once again and he came.

  Emperor Hui was a kind and gentle person who knew that the empress

  dowager was furious, so he went personally to greet the Prince of Zhao at Bashang23 and brought him into his own palace where he accompanied him in waking and sleeping, drinking and eating. A few months later, Emperor Hui went out one morning to hunt, but the Prince of Zhao was unable to

  get up that early. The empress dowager was secretly informed that he was at home alone and sent someone with poisoned wine for him to drink.

  When Emperor Hui returned, the Prince of Zhao was dead.

  The empress dowager proceeded to cut off Lady Qi’s hands and feet,

  gouge out her eyes, cauterize her ears, render her mute with poison, and have her placed in a cellar, calling her the “human swine.” After she had been there for a few months, the empress dowager summoned Emperor

  Hui to see the “human swine.” He looked at her and had to ask before he

  realized that it was Lady Qi, whereupon he cried out bitterly, fell ill as a result, and was unable to rise from his bed for more than a year. He sent someone to beg leave from the empress dowager, saying, “This was not the act of a human being. As I am the son of the empress dowager, I shall never be fit to rule the empire again!” And so he took to drinking everyday and indulged in wanton pleasures, refusing to listen to administrative affairs.

  Seven years later, he died [in 188 b.c.e.]. 24

  高祖崩。惠帝立。呂后為皇太后。乃令永巷囚戚夫人。髡鉗衣赭衣。令

  舂。戚夫人舂且歌曰。

  子為王

  母為虜

  終日舂薄暮

  常與死為伍

  相離三千里

  當誰使告女

  —————

  23. An eastern suburb of Chang’an.

  24. Ban, Han shu, juan 97a, p. 3937–38.

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  Baring the Soul

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  太后聞之大怒。曰。乃欲倚女子邪。乃召趙王誅之。使者三反。趙相周

  昌不遣。太后召趙相。相徵至長安。使人復召趙王。王來。惠帝慈仁。

  知太后怒。自迎趙王霸上。入宮。挾與起居飲食。數月。帝晨出射。趙

  王不能蚤起。太后伺其獨居。使人持鴆飲之。遲帝還。趙王死。太后遂

  斷戚夫人手足。去眼熏耳。飲瘖藥。使居鞠域中。名曰。人彘。居數月。

  乃召惠帝視人彘。帝視而問知其戚夫人。乃大哭。因病。歲餘不能起。

  使人請太后曰。此非人所為。臣為太后子。終不能復治天下。以此日飲

  為淫樂。不聽政。七年而崩。

  This song certainly qualifies as an outburst song; Lady Qi vents her

  frustration at meeting with such precipitous injustice, but her

  closing line—“Whom shall I send to tell you?”—suggests that there is

  a measure of strategy at play in her performance. 25 The implication is that Lady Qi harbors some hope that her song will be a vehicle for

  making her mistreatment known to her son, Prince Ruyi of Zhao,

  who had been Liu Bang’s own choice for succession to the throne.

  Unfortunately for Lady Qi, the song makes its way to the ears of

  Empress Lü instead, who seizes on the final line of the song, saying,

  “So, you look to your son, do you?” and does away with the song’s

  intended audience by killing him. Her violent reaction to this song

  is easily the most severe “reader response” one is likely to encounter,

  and constitutes a deep perversion of the canonical model of poetic

  production and reception. The proper response to hearing a song is

  sympathy—usually expressed through tears or a matching song, as

  can be seen in other passages—not intense antipathy. This whole

  narrative has a gruesome circularity to it. It is Empress Lü who is

  the author of Lady Qi’s woes, prompting her to burst forth in song.

  She then becomes the audience for Lady Qi’s performance and in-

  scribes her own outraged response upon Lady Qi’s very body.

  Empress Lü literally strips away the external attributes—limbs,

  sensory organs, voice—that make Lady Qi a human being in an at-

  tempt to erase the interior revealed in her song. It is not enough

  simply to kill her, for that would allow memory of her as a human

  —————

  25. The text of Lady Qi’s song does not appear in the Historical Records; it seems to have been interpolated in the Han History’s account of the incident, suggesting that the song might have been composed by a third party in the interim between the compilation of the two histories.

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  Baring the Soul

  being to remain pristine; it is far more effective to convert her into a

  “human swine,” a base animal incapable of poetic expression.

  Ironically, it is the empress herself who is deemed inhuman by her

  own son, who says to her, “This was not the act of a human being.”

  It is the act of a savage animal, not a civilized person, to respond to a poetic text with such brute physicality.

  Over the subsequent course of the Han History, Empress Lü

  emerges as
a sort of monstrous muse, single-handedly creating the

  frustrating circumstances that lead her victims to vent their outrage

  through outburst songs. When Prince You 友王 is sent to rule over

  Zhao after Ruyi’s untimely demise, he too meets with the wrath of

  Empress Lü.

  “Captive” Prince You of Zhao was established as the prince of Huaiyang in 196 b.c.e. “Reclusive” Prince Ruyi of Zhao died, so during the first year of Emperor Hui’s reign (194 b.c.e.), You was transferred to rule over Zhao, where he held the throne for a total of fourteen years.

  You took a woman from the Lü clan to be his princess, but he did not

  love her, loving another concubine instead. The Lü woman left in a rage

  and slandered him to the empress dowager, claiming, “The prince said,

  ‘Why should the Lü clan get [Liu] princes? After the empress dowager dies, we will certainly strike them down.’” The empress dowager was furious

  and summoned the Prince of Zhao on a pretext. When he arrived, she had

  him placed under house arrest without even granting him an audience,

  posted guards around him, and did not permit him any food. When some

  of his officers managed to smuggle him some food, they were immediately

  arrested and sentenced. The Prince of Zhao was starving, so he sang the

  following song:

  The Lüs are in power,

  the Lius are feeble;

  They oppress the princes and marquises,

  and force a wife upon me.

  My wife was jealous and so

  she maligned me with malice;

  Slanderous women disrupt the kingdom,

  but the emperor never wakes up to it.

  I may be without my loyal ministers,

  but what reason is that to abandon my kingdom?

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  91

  If I had finished myself off in the wilds, 26

  gray heaven would have admitted my rectitude.

  Alas! I cannot regret it now,

  I should have killed myself early on.

  For a prince who starves to death,

  who shall feel pity?

  The Lüs transgress all principles,

  I trust in heaven to avenge me!

  Then, he died alone in captivity. He was accorded the funeral rites of a commoner and buried as such in Chang’an. 27