Just a Song: Chinese Lyrics from the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries. By Stephen Owen

Just a Song: Chinese Lyrics from the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries. By Stephen Owen

At one point the ci lyric was“just a song.”Few scholars could–or would–dispute the designation“song,”but the indefinite article“a”is a little disorienting,as it unmoors the song from its determinate interpretative context (the specificautobiographical and historical frames of reference duly assigned in the long courseof its reception) and sets it adrift, undifferentiated from others in the song family–notjust the ones that somehow survived, but also the large number that we know fromextant sources to have existed but are now lost to the processes of historical selection.The diminutive“just”finishes the job, canceling what special consequence the songmay have acquired with its place in the literary canon, and reminds us of the originalpurpose for which it was created–only a song that one pauses just long enough toenjoy before moving on (perhaps back to the busy scheduled life, perhaps to othersongs).