Songs of a hidden orchid: Yuefu and Gexing by Li He (791-817)
Ukai, K.
Citation
Ukai, K. (2008, June 24). Songs of a hidden orchid: Yuefu and Gexing by Li He (791-817).
Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/13002
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1 Stellingen
1. Interpreting a poem is like writing a yuefu. Both activities, by elaborating words, strive to reach an original moment. Writing a good yuefu and producing a good interpretation are equally difficult. If the interpretation / yuefu is too faithful a representation of the presumed original moment it is uninteresting, but if it is too creative it is not an interpretation / yuefu anymore.
2. When in the Mid-Tang the signifiers began to float away from their signifieds, the same distancing also occurred in the relation between the two selves in poetry: the empirical self and the ironical self. One of the typical features of Mid-Tang poetry, namely the presence of an ironical mode, had this change in the semiotic system as its background.
3. Some Mid-Tang poets began to put decorum aside and started to show more all- too-human aspects of the self in their poetry. Nevertheless, they were too shy to do so in an atmosphere of seriousness; they therefore often presented them under the cover of laughter.
4. As the fixed value system began to destabilize, the Mid-Tang poets lost their confidence in the conventional belief that a small number of well-selected words could give direct access to the essence of the subject about which they wrote.
This is one of the reasons why many Mid-Tang poets began to concentrate on the manipulation of language. Some had a great belief in their own ability as manipulators of language and, in their view, if one could manipulate language well, one was capable of creating even a cosmos of one’s own.
5. To the poets of the Mid-Tang, who were living in a world of great fluidity, the world of yuefu - a genre with as its core a presumed original that entails a fixed matrix and requisite components - seemed to be one of certainty. Some of them participated in the still medieval commemorative activity of writing yuefu with a sense of pleasant nostalgia. Other, however, found in it an interesting challenge to try out their ability as manipulators of language and to discreetly subvert its familiar world in order to create a universe of their own.
6. Because of its loose generic constraints and large scope for prosodic freedom, the genre gexing was chosen as the most suitable medium by many Mid-Tang experimental poets. Or, so one may perhaps argue, the order of events was the reverse: many experimental poems written by poets with a strong centrifugal tendency just happened to have those characteristics that later appeared to coincide with the generic properties of the gexing.
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7. Prominent characteristics of Mid-Tang poetry were an ironical mode, a certain shyness about manifesting “sincerity,” a disbelief in the ability of language by itself to give access to the essence of things and a confidence in the poet’s ability to manipulate language. Exposed to these characteristics the young and sensitive genius of Li He found his most suitable field of creativity in fictitious genres, namely in yuefu and gexing.
8. Rhythm is one of the primordial senses of beings. If one is able to support the semantic rhythm of the words one produces by a good use of the physical rhythm that is entailed by the number of syllables and the position of caesuras, one can make one’s text sound extremely moving. A small number of poets of the Mid-Tang has made good use of this character of rhythm. Li He was par excellence a poets of this type, especially in his yuefu and gexing.
9. In Li He’s poems the words are often incredibly prolific. They interact with each other and with their intertexts, and thus generate rich layers of meanings. In the case of Li He’s yuefu they often work in a destructively constructive (or should one say: constructively destructive?) way: the marvelous play of his words often enthralls the reader, obstructing her/his access to the presumed original moment;
and, overflowing the yuefu’s constraints, these words often create a world of their own, different from the prescribed one.
10. In the Mid-Tang, at a time when excessive personal references made by the poets in their gexing and intellectualism were threatening the genre’s identity, it was Li He who wrote the purest gexing. He has left us a number of gexing that are true jewels of compactness and intensity, poems that sound wonderfully rhythmical and musical, and offer us a perfectly fictitious world.
11. Li He’s poetry separates the beautiful from the sentiment of endearment in the most rigorous way. Thus in his poetic universe, for instance, death, a grudge, ruin, destruction, are often presented by means of an extremely beautiful imagery, although they are not directly longed for by the poem’s speaker.
Paradoxically, however, because of their extraordinary beauty they provoke a sense of longing for them in the reader. It is often said that Li He was obsessed by death. This statement is largely misunderstood: it is the reader who feels the irresistible attraction of death in Li He’s poems.
12. In its intensity, economy, solidity, profundity and grandeur Beethoven’s music can be compared to Du Fu’s poetry. Han Yu’s megalomaniac and unconstrained imagination and Bai Juyi’s most beautiful lyricism together form something comparable to Mahler’s music. To whose music can one compare Li He’s poetry? Its compact, almost painful, intensity, and its beautifully coloured otherworldliness, remind me of the Scherzo of Schnittke’s Piano Quartet in A minor.
