Reformulating Jiang Kui's Lyric Oeuvre: The Canonization of Southern Song Dynasty Song Lyrics (ci) in the Qing Dynasty.

• Author: Yang, Yuanzheng
• Position: Critical essay

When talking about song lyrics, the pieces composed during the Northern Song have always attracted praise. However, it was not until the Southern Song that the song lyric reached the apex of its refinement, and only towards the end of the Song did it reach its apex of variation. Jiang Yaozhang is the most outstanding [exponent of the genre]. What a pity that of Whitestone's Music Bureau Songs, his [lyric oeuvre] in five fascicles, only twenty-odd pieces are surviving today. (1)

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This lament about the unfortunate loss of a large proportion of Jiang Kui's ilH (ca. 1155-ca. 1221) lyric oeuvre by Zhu Yizun (1629-1709), the main propagator of the renaissance of the song lyric (ci), is an extraordinary statement, taken from the introduction to Zhu's Ci, a definitive anthology of the song form published in 1678 (table 1, no. 4). For the first time in literary history, the reputation of the song lyric of the Southern Song (1127-1279) was elevated to a level superior to those of the Northern Song (960-1127). Similar to the now-familiar phrase "Tang poetry and Song song lyric," which also took centuries before it acquired currency, Zhu's contention that song lyrics of the Southern Song were superior to those of the Northern Song was at first not widely acknowledged. The lyrics of the delicate Southern Song vocal pieces, as exemplified by the works of Jiang Kui--also known by his courtesy name Yaozhang or his sobriquet Baishi ("Whitestone")--attracted little attention, and none of his works was included in Caotang shiyu, the most widely circulated anthology of the ci genre published in the Southern Song dynasty. (2) Following this precedent, subsequent anthologies also failed to include pieces by Jiang, for instance Cilin wanxuan (1543), compiled by the famous literary critic Yang Shen (1488-1559) in the late Ming.

In the first two decades of the eighteenth century, however, Jiang's song lyrics suddenly became popular, "best-sellers" in fact. They became favorites of anthology compilers and were published in numerous editions (table 1, nos. 6-8). As Lin Shuen-fu aptly remarked: "The fact that there are more than thirty different editions of Chiang's collected tz'u from the Ch'ing dynasty, more than there are of the collected works of any other tz'u poet, attests to the popularity and achievement of Ch'iang K'uei." (3) In other words, by the eighteenth century the works of this Southern Song poet-musician had become essential to the canon of song lyrics.

The history of song lyrics thus emerges as a record of the vagaries of their reception by literati readers. In the mid-seventeenth century Jiang and his Southern Song followers were still largely neglected. That they were elevated, within a few decades, from the dust of oblivion to a position of importance indicates that a dramatic shift in the canon selection process occurred during the eighteenth century. This paper aims to shed light on this history through tracing how the authoritative list of Jiang's song lyrics was socially and historically reconstructed through collation, editorial selection, and publication. By means of manuscript study and bibliographical exploration, I shall demonstrate how the two most influential Qing dynasty advocators of Southern Song song lyric, namely Zhu Yizun and Li E (1692-1752), consciously participated in the reformulation and consequent re-circulation of Jiang's lyric oeuvre. I will argue that their efforts enhanced the status and accessibility of Jiang's works and eventually recast the canon of song lyric as centered on the Southern Song. (4)

When writers, as in the case of Zhu Yizun and Li E, intentionally recast an accepted canon, this may well be to advance their own artistic convictions and pursuits in response to changing historical and cultural situations, whose backgrounds need to be recounted. What constitutes a "canon" of ci has to be historicized as well. The fate of Southern Song song lyrics is not determined by intrinsic "absolute values" but through constant interaction between the work itself and the various interpretive theories its readers and performers adopt. Although it is therefore impossible to establish an unchanging, authoritative canon of song lyric, it is productive to focus on issues such as why particular groups of song lyrics have become canonical and by what means.

Zhu Yizun deeply admired Jiang Kui's literary achievement, but behind this, in addition to artistic and aesthetic concerns, were pressing political considerations. The Ming dynasty had just fallen and was being replaced by the oppressive, aggressive, and culturally alien Qing bureaucracy, and Zhu's advocacy of Whitestone's ci poetry represents, to some extent at least, a pained response to this dynastic change and its resultant social turmoil. Similar to Zhu Yizun's own experience, Jiang Kui never achieved an official position and the social status it entails, and instead had to rely on the capricious patronage of the ruling elite for support and sustenance. More importantly, because of the pressure on the Southern Song from the Jurchen dynasty in the north and the resultant political instability, ci poets, guided and motivated by pain and sorrow at an ailing body politic, used every method at their disposal to encapsulate their feelings in their song lyrics, employing the genre to give cathartic expression to emotions that were difficult to articulate yet had to be poured out in some form or other. The result was an artistic expression that was socially and politically inappropriate, but had to be made public. Jiang Kui experienced the vagaries of living under four different emperors: Gaozong (r. 1127-62), Xiaozong (1163-89), Guangzong (1190-94), and Ningzong (1195-1224), as well as an Imperial court and political system close to collapse under military pressure from the Jurchens, and these combined left unmistakable traces in his song lyrics. Their subtle depths and flowing metaphors combine to reach an artistic plane that inextricably mixes a desire to express oneself with the impossibility of realizing that ambition and demonstrates a craftsmanship in the use of the rhetorical devices of simile and allegory which achieves its effects indirectly. Unsurprisingly, these techniques were perfectly suited to express the complexities of emotional discourse of early Qing Chinese literati, whose political and social foundation had just been undermined by a vigorous and powerful, yet ethnically and culturally foreign Manchu military dictatorship. Zhu Yizun abandoned the vibrant and vigorous northern Song ci and instead turned to advocacy of the more multi-layered, subtle, and hidden meanings of Southern Song ci, with Jiang Kui as the leading exponent. This turn is a manifestation of Zhu Yizun's hidden social and political agenda: not only was it an attempt to engage with the conflicts and contradictions of society around him, but, in the sensitive political climate in which he found himself, it was also a means to articulate a Zeitgeist which he dared not and could not express publicly. The elegance and artistry of Jiang Kui's poetry--its flowing images of solitary clouds, its ebbs and flows, its blemishless delicacy--became a manifesto for the tribulations of literati shackled by dynastic change.

In order to support his audacious challenge to contemporary canonicity, Zhu published the twenty-six fascicle anthology Ci zong, a text that consists of some 2,250 pieces selected from the Tang dynasty through to the Yuan dynasty, and in it urges a return to the "refined elegance" of the form as exemplified by the works of Jiang and other Southern Song lyricists (table 1, no. 4). Despite Zhu's bold declaration that Jiang was the foremost poet-musician of the genre, he included only twenty-three pieces by Jiang in his anthology (one percent of the total number of song lyrics in this collection), simply because, by the seventeenth century, knowledge of Jiang's lyric oeuvre was confined to his thirty-four pieces preserved in Hua'an cixuan, a much earlier song lyric anthology compiled by Huang Sheng in 1249 (table 1, no. 1). (5) With a limited reservoir of only thirty-four from which to select, Zhu's options were already circumscribed; moreover, of these thirty-four, eleven belong to the sub-genre ling, i.e., "short" verses. As elucidated in his two prefaces to contemporaries' collections of song lyrics, while Zhu preferred long verses to short verses when dealing with the song lyrics of Southern Song, by contrast, he preferred short verses to long verses when discussing the song lyrics of the Northern Song and preceding dynasties. (6) Therefore Zhu only included one of the eleven ling pieces, that to the tune of Dianjiangchun, whereas of the twenty-three longer verses, he selected all but one, that to the tune Qiuxiaoyin. In fact, Zhu did not learn of the existence of Jiang's lyric oeuvre "in five fascicles" mentioned in the quotation above from anyone who had actually seen the text, but from a bibliographic account written by the fourteenth-century compiler of encyclopedias, Ma Duanlin (1254-1323). (7)

Zhu was aware that the thirty-four pieces preserved in Huang's anthology only constituted a small portion of Jiang's complete works, and that the twenty-three pieces he had chosen for his Ci zong were an even smaller portion, but instead of postponing publication so as to allow himself more time to search for other song lyrics by Jiang, he still insisted on publishing the anthology in 1678. A reasonable explanation for settling with such an imperfect selection might be the fact that in the same year he was nominated as a candidate for the 1679 examination to attain the status "erudite literatus" (boxue hongci. (8) The literary fame gained by a timely publication (the compilation of which had already largely been completed in 1670) would probably have facilitated his success in this examination. This does not...