Making Sense of the Odes: Speeches as Poetic Commentary in the Guoyu.

• Author: Waring, Luke

INTRODUCTION

The Guoyu [phrase omitted] (Discourses of the states) is a neglected text from early China. Comprised of speeches and stories related to the royal court and seven of the regional states that coexisted during the Zhou [??] era (ca. 1046-256 BCE), all set between the tenth and mid-fifth centuries BCE, the text has long been dismissed as the poor relation of the Zuozhuan [phrase omitted] (Zuo tradition). Both are collections of the types of accounts that circulated widely (both orally and in writing) during the late Warring States (ca. 475-221 BCE) and Early Imperial (221 BCE-220 CE) eras, with the Guoyu compiled in the early Western Han dynasty (202 BCE-9 CE) at the latest. However, while dozens of studies have been dedicated to the Zuozhuan, the number of studies on the Guoyu pales in comparison, which is unfortunate as the Guoyu is a rich source of information about early poetic practices, especially rhetorical use of the Odes (Shi [??]). Indeed, the Guoyu is an excellent case study for understanding how the Odes were used in late Warring States historical writing, since not only does it contain a manageable corpus of citations of and references to various Odes poems, it is also one of only two early texts (Zuozhuan being the other) to include citations from the Odes (yinshi [phrase omitted]) and presentations from the Odes (fushi [phrase omitted]). Furthermore, the way in which the Odes are used in the Guoyu often differs from their usage in Zuozhuan, even as both texts confirm that the Odes (in Warring States-era representations of historical discourses, if not during the Spring and Autumn era itself (1)) represented a sort of coded language that could be used to communicate a person's meaning (yi [??]) or intentions (zhi [??]).

This ideal was a mainstay of poetic rhetoric at least by the late Warring States era and certainly by the Early Imperial era, appearing regularly in a number of transmitted and excavated texts, including the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu themselves. (2) Lurking behind statements like these, however, was a gnawing anxiety: if the individual poems did not yet have fixed meanings upon which everybody could agree, then how could the speaker's meaning or intentions be communicated through the poem? (3) It is the primary contention of this article that this anxiety was felt by the compilers of late Warring States texts like the Guoyu, and that these compilers used their texts, at least in part, as ways of inculcating poetic competency in their readers. (4) This is why the Guoyu, in particular, exhibits a pronounced concern with exegetical surrogacy, containing numerous passages designed not only to teach its readers how to understand the poems in context, but also the significance of specific lines and phrases, and even the meaning of individual words. In this way, the speeches functioned as commentaries on the Odes.

Though the Odes seem to have become largely fixed in phrasing (if not in orthography) by ca. 300 BCE, (5) the individual poems had not yet accrued authoritative commentaries locating each one in a specific historical context with a fixed meaning. That would come later, in the early empires, with the Mao commentary (Mao zhucm [phrase omitted]) and its associated major and minor prefaces (xu [??]), and later Zheng Xuan's [phrase omitted] (127-200 CE) commentary. Instead, in the late Warring States era, communicating with and through the Odes required deft manipulation of the entire range of associations attached to each poem, associations that were selectively activated in each particular act of poetic invocation. While the anecdotes and speeches of the Guoyu may predate comprehensive, systematic Odes commentaries by centuries, however, taken together they nevertheless serve a similar exegetical function, variously contextualizing, explaining, paraphrasing, glossing, and interpreting the poems (albeit often in piecemeal and unsystematic fashion) so as to make their use in rhetoric and speech understandable and thus usable to Warring States (and later) elites. (6)

Surprisingly, citation practice in early China is a relatively understudied topic. Most studies of early Chinese quotation practices revolve around the Odes (and their use in the Zuozhuan, in particular), and typically the Guoyu is mentioned only in passing, if at all. (7) Only a handful of studies have been dedicated primarily to analyzing Odes usage in the Guoyu, (8) and though some seek to deal equally with both the Zuozhuan and the Guoyu, (9) usually the focus is still on the former at the expense of the latter. (10) The Guoyu is not only neglected in general, then; its use of the Odes represents a particular blind spot. The purpose of this article is thus twofold: to highlight some of the rhetorical and narrative strategies of an understudied text, and to analyze some of the mechanisms by which readers in Warring States and Early Imperial China were trained to understand the Odes through historical speeches. Rather than assuming that the Odes were uniformly and completely known by all educated elites during this period"--used simply to ornament or lend authority to a statement, speech, or argument--I instead seek to uncover the ways in which mastery of the Odes was imparted (rather than merely presumed) through texts like the Guoyu, texts that drew on the preexisting authority of culturally sanctioned verse even as they confirmed that authority in a filial act of transmission. (12) As we will see, incorporating the Odes into historical speeches in texts like the Guoyu was not just about illustrating and strengthening the force of moral arguments, it was also the means by which the meaning of the Odes themselves could be explored, articulated, and delimited. Citing the Odes not only made the speeches and stories in the Guoyu more authoritative as moral teachings, it also confirmed the Odes as texts worth knowing, and worth being made knowable.

Indeed, in Guoyu the Odes are almost never cited or invoked without some sort of rhetorical surrogacy, means by which speakers in the text explain the meaning of the poem or its connection to the situation at hand. (13) These explanatory statements, which are always attributed to historical figures within the text and never to an outside narrator, are not marked off from the speeches within which they are embedded; instead, they allow historical figures to incorporate Odes pedagogy into their persuasions, showing rather than telling the reader how to use the Odes effectively. In this essay, I will focus on the exegetical strategies that most closely resemble those used in Early Imperial commentaries: historical contextualization, explanations of the general sense of a particular line or poem, and paraphrases and glosses on the meaning and significance of individual words and phrases. In addition, I examine the ways Odes presentations in the Guoyu occasionally differ from those in the Zuozhuan to show that compilers sometimes approached the transmission of the same historical anecdotes (and their associated Odes references) very differently, and that these decisions were influenced by the compilers' desire to make the Odes understandable to their readers.

THE ODES IN THE GUOYU: AN OVERVIEW

A number of factors complicate attempts to calculate the precise number and type of references to the Odes in the Guoyu, as well as their distribution within the text, including the presence of unmarked (and sometimes loose) parallels, (14) multiple Odes references within the same narrative unit, citations of lines that appear in more than one poem in the Mao recension, (15) and references to what seem to be lost poems. (16) The process is greatly facilitated by the supposedly comprehensive concordance of early Odes citations published in 2004 by the Chinese University Press of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, though even this impressive work seems to be incomplete. (17) By my calculations, once loose parallels and citations that appear only in Wei Zhao's commentary to the Guoyu are excluded from the count provided in this concordance, we are left with a total of thirty-seven instances of Odes usage (18) (including some unmarked parallels and references to titles only) distributed between eighteen separate passages, spanning thirty-two different poems in all: (19) six references to six pieces from the "Airs of the States" (Guofeng [phrase omitted]), nine references to eight "Minor Court Hymns" (Xiaoya [phrase omitted]), fourteen references to ten "Major Court Hymns" (Daya [phrase omitted]), six references to six "Eulogies" (Song [phrase omitted]), and one reference each to two lost odes (see Table 1). This pattern is entirely consistent with the distribution of Odes citations in other pre-Imperial texts, which overwhelmingly favor the "Hymns" (and to a lesser extent the "Eulogies") over the more hermeneutically opaque "Airs of the States." (20)

In terms of geographical distribution, thirteen instances of Odes usage are to be found in the "Zhouyu" [phrase omitted] section of the Guoyu, nine in the "Luyu" [phrase omitted], none in the "Qiyu" [phrase omitted], twelve in the "Jinyu" [phrase omitted], none in the "Zhengyu" [phrase omitted] in, three in the "Chuyu" [phrase omitted], none in the "Wuyu" [phrase omitted], and one in the "Yueyu" [phrase omitted] (21) (see Table 1). While it might be tempting to see a meaningful pattern in this distribution, with the vast majority of the text's Odes usages gathered in the "old" territories of Zhou, Lu, and Jin (and almost entirely absent from the Southern and Southeastern states of Chu, Wu, and Yue), it should be noted that the "Qiyu," "Zhengyu," and "Wuyu" are all single-chapter sections. Furthermore, the different sections of the Guoyu are diverse in terms of content and narrative structure, and so the distribution of Odes references may simply reflect the different rhetorical strategies favored in each section of the text...