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 hav
e 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
Chinese Poetic Writing Page 3