英文摘要 |
In this article it is understood that in the construction of a “literary tradition,” in the background, a large system of significance is implied, that is, a method for assigning significance in different periods, a correlative mode that must pass through a process of repeated use and familiarity; only then is a link able to be forged between actuality and significance. In other words, the Chinese literary “tradition” on a fundamental level lies in a mode of potentially ever-changing significance that produces a sort of malleable or suggestive “history of literary subscription.” The existing discussions on the so called “lyric tradition” take as their basis the Wei-Jin expression “lamenting the departed and reacting to external things,” which has subsequently become the dominant interpretive view for the whole of Chinese literature; however, clearly it is difficult to deploy these constructs to cover texts that already existed in the pre-Qin and Han periods, therefore in examining this “tradition” it is perhaps in these earlier periods that the very first formative steps were taken in establishing the whole of the Chinese literary tradition. As we shall explore in this article, in tracing the origins and use of the term ganwu 感物 (reacting to external things) we find that it does not originate with the people of the Wei-Jin period, but rather is the most fundamental method of substitution in the poetic dialectic mode termed ganwu zaoduan 感物造端 (reacting to external things, one broaches a topic). After Ban Gu 班固 deployed this term to criticize the genres of ci 辭 and fu 賦, Wang Yi 王逸 then took the step of focusing on the interchangeability of language and the exchangeability of imagery in his analysis of the Chuci 楚辭 and sao 騷 style, and Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 made his far reaching jianzhu 箋注 to the Shijing 詩經, which he based on an even more intense focus on the exchangeability of imagery, laying the foundation for the subsequent qing-wu 情─物 theory of correspondences. More importantly, apart from focusing on the relationship between dualities (whether between two language features or language and an object), we also find that in the discourse surrounding fu or song 誦, poetry was originally paired with music or rhythmic recitation. And while recitation is based on delivered content extemporized by musicians in order to produce greater clarity, at the same time song often appeared in the context of the emperor overseeing administrative matters in the form of remonstrations filled with allusions to state and clan history. In other words, we should not subsume song within the development of the tradition of substitution and bixing 比興 and overlook the continued role that song played, as well as the fact that this process of unfolding convergence is in no way the same as its bixing counterpart, and that by passing through a converging axis point this discourse responded to an even larger cosmological world. If we are now to look back to the ancient world and attempt to describe the original territory of the so-called “lyric tradition” or “literary tradition,” it is clear that the accumulative imagery or groups of images derived from the modes of “substitution” and “convergence” as well as the ever sought for perceptual experience and worldly associations are in fact the most important step in China’s “history of literary subscription.” |