Tonal prosody in Chinese parallel prose.

• Author: Branner, David Prager

"From Rusticus ... I learned ... to abstain from rhetoric, and poetry, and fine writing; and not to walk about in the house in my outdoor dress, nor to do other things of the kind ...". --Marcus Aurelius, Meditations I (George Long, tr.)

Parallelism in Chinese has a long history, and is found in some of the earliest written texts as well as official speeches. By late Six Dynasties times, there were three separate styles of parallelistic composition: plain, rhyming, and tonally alternating. The plain style seems to have been the most ancient, and in the Six Dynasties remained common in formal settings, including letters and memorials. Rhyming was common in fine literature such as fuh [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and admonitory genres including tzann [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], ming [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], and beiwen [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. The tonally alternating style of composition was associated with lesser forms, such as prefaces and the short formal letter known as chii [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].

In the Tarng, this last "preface style" grew to be the dominant style of composition in "parallel prose" (pyanwen [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) proper, and it continued to be used in official memorials and elsewhere through modern times. In conception it is absolutely distinct from the rhyming style, because the second and fourth lines of a stanza, which rhyme in rhyming style, must be of opposite tones in preface style and therefore cannot possibly rhyme.

The preface style is later than the others, and must have postdated the movement for tonal prosody in poetry. However, it is in the preface style of parallel prose that the prosodic opposition of pyng and tzeh tones is first attested, predating its appearance in poetry. We shall also find that the very idea of a unified pyng tone category has been a literary fiction since perhaps the eighth or ninth century.

1. TONAL PARALLELISM IN MODERN TIMES

   Rigorous tonal contrasts are familiar to us in Chinese society today from the antithetical couplets seen posted on door-jambs and temple columns, and used in congratulatory or condolatory messages. It is not uncommon to see couplets in which every syllable exhibits a tonal contrast with respect to the corresponding syllable of the other line of the couplet. These through-composed couplets resemble the epigrams of the ancient West, and their likeness to the carefully crafted couplets of the jyuejiuh [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], perhaps China's best known poetic form, makes the style seem very widespread.

   By way of example, here is a grave inscription from a modern tomb in Taiwan (Hwang [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] family reburial; cemetery at Wuujye [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], in Ilan [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] county).

   [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Yellow gold--it cannot compare to the virtue of those who have gone before; the family residence--it should strive for sageliness in future generations. In order to indicate the tonal value of each syllable, I have borrowed the symbols [??] (for pyng [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), [??] (tzeh, that is to say any of the three non-pyng tones shaang [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], chiuh [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], or ruh [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), and [??] (ambiguously either pyng or tzeh) used in traditional Chinese tsyrpuu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. The symbol [??] (used below) is my own contrivance, to indicate prosodically irrelevant syllables.

   Notice that in the grave inscription, every syllable has a pyng or tzeh value opposite to the corresponding syllable in the other line. The first syllable of the first line is pyng; the first syllable of the second line is therefore tzeh, and so on. The whole couplet is ordered in this way. The two lines begin respectively with Hwang [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "yellow" and fuu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "residence," forming a simple acronym for "the Hwang residence." Grave inscriptions of this kind are rarely original; they are supplied in great quantity in the handbooks used by traditional kanyushy [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (geomancers) and gravediggers.

   As another example, consider the woanlian [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (mourning couplets) composed by Yuen Ren Chao (1892-1982), for his librettist, Liou Bannnong [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1891-1934; cited in Chang 1986: 682):

   [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Ten years--joined as double reed; (1) without words, henceforth it will be hard to make music. Our "Few Men" (2) are lessened by one; "O tell me how not to think of him!" (3) In Chao's composition, not every syllable is subject to tonal parallelism. The final syllables of the longer lines are parallel, and before them only every other syllable is parallel. The prosody in Chao's quatrain is not arranged as precisely as in the grave inscription. Although both types are widespread, in general, parallelistic composition in belles-lettres over the centuries has favored Chao's style. Only in simple couplets is perfect parallelism considered de rigueur, as longer compositions tend to skip some of the syllables (in specific, alternating positions within the line), except when a show of skill is intended.

   In this essay I discuss the practice of tonal prosody in one specific form, parallel prose composition (pyanwen [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). I then turn to consider the larger meaning of the pyng-tzeh distinction and its use in poetry.

2. RULES OF TONAL PARALLELISM

   In earlier times, however, tonal parallelism in prose was not necessarily applied with such rigor as we might imagine. The subject itself has been poorly studied. The main native discussions of tonal prosody in the past were of poetry. The seminal Bunkyo- hifuron [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], for instance, from the early ninth century, cites all of its examples from poetry. Anthologies and other studies of parallel prose, which flourished from Sonq times onward, have stressed the mechanics of parallelism in syntax and diction, and that is understandable because syntax and diction find their way into the content of the text, whereas tones do not. Primers of tonal prosody, such as the Shengliuh chiimeng [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of Che Wannyuh [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (jinnshyh 1664) and the Lihueng dueyyunn [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of Lii Yu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1611-1680), appear relatively late, but always make their presentations in verse, evidently as a matter of pedagogical convenience.

   I have found two sources on the prosody of parallel prose. The first is that of James Hightower (1965: 66-67) citing research by David Farquhar. Hightower takes as his examples the "Beeishan yiwen" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of Koong Jyhguei [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (447-501) and the "Yuhtair shinyeong shiuh" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of Shyu Ling [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (507-583). Hightower writes,

   "[Farquhar] noticed two types of pattern: the sequence of tones in one line could be simply repeated in the next [...] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] or, more commonly, the tones would be in inverted order in the second half of a couplet, the sort of mirror-image relationship found in [liuhshy [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ...] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] (!) [...] To accord better with his data Mr. Farquhar suggested a looser definition of tonal parallelism: Type I: One member of a parallel pair is the mirror image of its mate, with one exception. Type II: One member of a parallel pair is the identical with its mate, with one exception. [...] It is apparent that while the tonal symmetry is not absolute, tonal parallelism has been deliberately exploited as a prosodic element in the composition of these pieces. I am not sure what to make of the description of "mirror image" lines. Prosodic "mirroring" in both poetry and prose is, in my observation, always parallelistic (e.g., the first couplet in the present essay) and never palindromic as described by Hightower and Farquhar. I believe Hightower's statement must have been the result of some kind of error in the production of his essay, but in any case the correction is worth making here.

   The second description of pyanwen prosody is that of Chang Jen-ching [Jang Renching] [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1984: 4-5; 1986: 237-38), part of his extensive life-long work on parallelism in general. Chang does not actually spell out the rules of tonal prosody, but he marks the tonal values of the syllables in a way that allows us to extrapolate general principles. I cite here an example by Horng Lianqjyi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1746-1809), "Dongchingshuh yuehfuu shiuh" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]:

   Chang's notation:

   [ILLLUSTRATION OMITTED]

   notation used in the present paper:

   [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

   We can see that lines 1 and 3 are parallel, and that lines 2 and 4 are also parallel. This quatrain, like the woanlian of Y. R. Chao, above, is a so-called gerjiuh duey [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], a quatrain consisting of a pair of interlarded "couplets with alternating lines." Chang's notation, though not explicit, implies the following four rules of prosodic order:

   (1) The smallest prosodic unit is the couplet, although writers most often use quatrains, sometimes formed of gerjiuh duey.

   (2) The tones of most syllables in any given line are irrelevant to prosodic order. Those that are important prosodically are the ones immediately preceding the caesura and the end of the line. That is, in four-syllable lines, syllables 2 and 4 are prosodically important (caesura is marked by [parallel]):

   [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED

   In lines with a "key" word, (4) the final syllable and the syllable preceding the key word are prosodically important, and (if there are seven or more syllables in a line) also the second syllable of the line:

   [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED

   (3) The prosodically...