抒情文化《诗经》文学外文文献

文献出处：Pollard, S.. Lyrical culture: Rethinking western literature after reading the book of songs. College Literature, 2013,26(2), 151-164Lyrical culture: Rethinking Western literature after reading The Book of SongsAbstract: Pollard notes that after reading "The Book of Songs," he could not find in it an untroubled voice, faithful to a coherent set of cultural norms, for the Confucian exegesis seem to coexist uneasily with the songs they mean to exemplify.全文文献: I was trained in west-west comparative literature (Latin American/United States), so that when I initially taught the first semester of a sophomore-level world literature survey-even though I specialized in twentiethcentury literatures-I felt immediately at ease with Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Oresteia, The Aeniad and Metamorphoses, because I was finally able to teach the knowledge about western civilization that had been taught to me throughout my college career. The enormous canvases of these texts were familiar, and there seemed to be a transparent, unifying analogical bond between the texts and the cultures portrayed. Thus, these texts served as convenient and efficient pedagogical tools, for from them I could make broad, sweeping generalizations, reveal the fundamental outlines of entire cultures, as well as speak to the origins of cultural formation and the development of western civilization.I came out of graduate school armed with an array of critical theories which could question, deconstruct and reconstruct the western canon, as well as force me to grapple with the very notion of canon formation. Yet, faced with The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Volume 1 (sixth edition), I acceded to its conventional construction of the western canon. In The Challenge of Comparative Literature, Claudio Guillen offers a model that explains the epistemological organization of this view of "world" literature: "When phenomena or processes that are genetically independent, or belong to different civilizations, are collected and brought together for study, such an examination can be justified and carried out to the extent that common sociohistorical conditions are implied" (1993, 70). Under the umbrella of western literature-and thus, unified through common historical conditions-the texts I taught become signs for a homogeneous tradition. Although I was aware of theories, like post-colonialism, which could challenge this homogeneity through the posing of antithetical cultural constructions, my knowledge of literature up to this point was fundamentally western and canonical. I did not yet have within my grasp a non-western literary material that could fuel a critical challenge, one that might raise questions about the nature of the western canon or canon formation. And because I lacked a broader experience-a solid grounding in another literature-I felt that I could not act on my theoretical knowledge with any degree of assurance. Thus, I returned to what I knew and taught what I was taught as an undergraduate, an Anglo-Americancentered interpretation of the development of western civilization. Through a finite set of discrete yet contiguous cultural and literary products, I was taught how western civilization spread from the Fertile Crescent north and west through the Mediterranean, north into Europe, and west to the Americas.1 The ancient texts that sit at the core of this set are primarily epics and tragedies, which can be charted on a continuum between barbarity and civilization, divine pretension and humble humanity, irrational justice and rational law. Between Dionysus's insistence in The Bacchae that mankind pay proper homage to the irrational and Athena's creation of a human system of justice in The Eumenides, between Achilles's rage and Aeneas's cool obedience, or, most succinctly, between the beginning and end of Gilgamesh, humankind somehow discovers its humanity, the never precise balance between emotion and intellect. This kind of broad-based,humanistic discourse is seductive, for it is a master narrative that has the power to transform initially independent works into a coherent canon, because the continuum I describe becomes a measuring stick against which all other works can seemingly be judged.I was hired into a small English Department as a globalist, responsible, as I have said only half-jokingly to colleagues and students, for all literature outside the borders of the United States and Great Britain. I have taught texts from Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, India, China and Japan. Yet initially I did not see any of my choices as challenging the cultural allegory sketched above. Although Latin American literature has its non-western elements-for example, the Nahuatl literature of Mesoamerica-it has been fundamentally constructed as an outgrowth of the western. An author like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, along with others from the prolific "Boom" period of the 1960s, traces his literary influences back to US and European modernists like Faulkner, Joyce and Proust. Under the influence of the negritude movement, the poet Leopold Senghor and his journal, African Presence, African literature of the second half of the twentieth century was produced primarily for a European and US audience (for example, the tragic form of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart). A "Third World cosmopolitan"2 writer like Salman Rushdie may provide a bridge to another culture, but in novels like Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses he adopts an epic scope and postmodern narrative techniques that are immediately familiar to a western reader. And Mo Yan, the contemporary Chinese writer who has, perhaps, most successfully crossed over into international recognition, may have done so because his novels, Red Sorghum and The Garlic Ballads, are distinctly reminiscent of William Faulkner and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The contemporary "world" literature that I chose to read and teach only reinforced the western cultural and literary forms to which I was accustomed. And because I was able to link these works analogically through western cultural values-values which can be construed as the touchstone for a powerful, if biased, universalizing vision-I was able to create the illusion of a homogeneous "world" tradition that negated the diverse sociocultural circumstances that initially produced these, now translated, texts.Theoretical sophistication did not prompt me to a thorough questioning of the epistemological grounding of all this received knowledge. It was not until Norton published its expanded edition of the Anthology of World Masterpieces, and I decided to teach a unit of Chinese Literature in the sophomore survey course, that I found my most basic assumptions about the nature of "world literature" drawn into question. For Chinese culture did not begin with an epic, but with an anthology of lyric poetry: The Book of Songs. The material of this anthology was part of an oral tradition and had been bubbling around the population for centuries, like the stories that make up The Iliad and The Odyssey. The origins of its compilation, however, are not mysterious, for it was called into being by imperial edict and edited by Confucius, according to the great Chinese historian, Si-ma Qian. Although the poems were "songs from the village lane," the text of The Book of Songs was not merely a collection of oral compositions. Rather, according to C.H. Wang, it came out of "a transitional period from an oral to a textural culture,"3 where initially fluid oral compositions become fixed in textual form and are even composed to be written down. Moreover, the poems were collected for a blatantly political purpose, so that the emperor could test the pulse of the body politic. And, finally, for centuries after they first appeared, exegetical commentaries were appended to the Book. Beginning with the Mao Commentary as well as the Great Preface and Small Preface, scholars endeavored to place the poems within the ideological realm of Confucian morality, transforming them into useful exemplars of applied Confucian thinking. The Book of Songs has not come down to us as a naive, organic expression of a culture's core values but as a highly self-consciously realized artifact of a culture defining and redefining itself: "Scholarship on the Shi [the poems collected for The Book of Songs mirrored the political landscape; a unified political hegemony required a similar exegesis of the most importantConfucian classics" (Allen 1996, 341, 337, 351).The collection is neither epic nor tragedy nor simple lyric verse: perhaps the most obvious East-West comparison would be The Book of Songs and The Aeniad, for both are blatantly political texts. The latter, as the work of a single author, Virgil, in search of the patronage of Augustan Rome, I could understand, because it represents the clear, developmental lines of a familiar literary history: a discrete work, a late epic, that symbolizes the incipient rise of the self-conscious imagination, an event presaging the rise of the romance and novel traditions. But the history of The Book of Songs left me baffled, because from its very beginning it is such a mixed bag of oppositions (naive sentiment and artful contrivance) that I could not easily identify as a particular kind of cultural product. Nor could I find in it an untroubled voice, faithful to a coherent set of cultural norms, for the Confucian exegesis seem to coexist uneasily with the songs they mean to exemplify.The Book of Songs is not an easy work out of which to distill a singular, allegorical vision of civilization, especially if one's primary assumption is that such a vision ought to reside in an epic. The collection does not feature the biggest, best and brightest-the warriors, kings and princes-but holds within its pages a lyrical multitude of voices and experiences, an entire "human landscape" (as one of my students put it) speaking for itself, and from which it is difficult to streamline a set of consistent cultural norms. In "East-West Comparative Literature: An Inquiry into Possibilities," Heh-hsiang Yuan complains of a tendency,fostered by western or westernized (eastern) comparatists who treat the study of comparative literature East-West as largely an affinity study, by imposing already established western models on eastern literatures, or by finding in eastern literatures types of expression that superficially resemble those of the West (Yuan 1980, 1).Before reading The Book of Songs, I would have followed this interpretive model, but in my first, superficial pass through the poems I could find no EastWest affinity, because I could not make these simple, beautiful, sometimes bawdy, sometimes sorrowful lyrics into an epic, or even a tragedy. Thus, I could not fit what I read into a western-style allegory of cultural formation and could not easily speak to the shape and trajectory of Chinese culture through a literary signifier. I had to dig deeper, but as I did I only came up with more questions and no affinities.For example, early works of the western tradition speak much of battle and often portray it in all of its bloody detail. For the Greeks and Romans, war is central to the culture, and the literature directly reflects such a history. But in The Book of Songs, war is only a subsidiary topic. It is not portrayed directly; rather, it is refracted, after the fact, through the lyrical filter of the poem. We read about an emotional reaction to war, not war itself. We see war through the concerned eyes of the average citizen or soldier, not through an omnipotent gaze that focuses on the leaders:How can you plead that you have no wraps?I will share my rug with you.The king is raising an army;I have made ready both axe and spear;You shall share them with me as my comrade.How can you plead that you have no wraps?I will share my under-robe with you.The king is raising an army,I have made ready both spear and halberd;You shall share them with me when we start.How can you plead that you have no wraps?I will share my skirt with you.The king is raising an army,I have made ready both armour and arms;You shall have them with me on the march. (Mack 1995, 782)To label this as a poem about fellowship is to take the moral high ground and ignore the details. Covering/clothing begins each stanza before the poem then focuses on the upcoming war. Before battle, a more immediate and fundamental need, warmth, must be resolved. In The Iliad, clothing is subsidiary to shields and armor and is most often a corollary to battle, as when Priam collects gifts for his meeting with Achilles: "twelve robes, handsome rich brocades, twelve cloaks, unlined and light, as many blankets, as many big white capes and shirts to go with them" (Mack 205). Here, clothing is finery, a representation of power and status meant to establish a tenuous detante between enemy leaders, whereas in the poem from The Book of Songs the functionality of the clothing represents a much more intimate bond, the fellowship between the two soldiers. In another poem, after a battle, there is no glory but only mud:Why do we not go back?How few of us are left, how few!Were it not for our prince and his concernsWhat should we be doing here in the dew?How few of us are left, how few!Why do we not go back?Were it not for our prince's own concerns,What should we be doing here in the mud? (Mack 1996, 780-81)War and those who would wage war are tangential subjects at best: the occasion, impetus and inspiration for the poems, but not their primary focus. In these two poems, the glory of war is not the proper subject for poetry; rather, it is the soldier/speaker as he navigates war and its effects. So, the few poems in the anthology that deal with war do not take in the big picture: that is, from them, we cannot trace the larger outlines of Chinese history. The poems of The Book of Songs date from 1000-600 B.C., a period when the Zhou Dynasty asserted its hegemony and formed the Chinese nation. The Zhou worked through acculturation to expand its sphere of influence, but before it found itself in the position to acculturate others it had to defeat the Shang dynasty to the east, as well as mount campaigns to the south and against the nomadic peoples of the northwest (Fairbank 1992, 39). Here was material for an epic that was never used, for there is no work-from the periodthat describes the rise of Zhou civilization. Correlatively, Confucius, the work's final editor, lived during another violent period of Chinese history, the Warring States (403-221 B.C.), when, ironically, the five fundamental texts of Chinese culture were produced (The Book of Songs, I-Ching, Spring and Autumn Annals, The Classic of Documents,The Zuo Tradition): texts which give little inkling of the barbarity that came before them.To further this sense of disjunction between history and literature, given the importance of the idea of the unified nation in the early history of China, it is ironic-from a western point of view-that The Book of Songs came to be at the center of the policy of Imperial Confucianism promulgated by the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.). This text, along with the other four just mentioned, made up the canon of an Imperial education system meant to train bureaucrats, whose job was to maintain Imperial power and spread a unified, as well as unifying, Chinese culture. From a western perspective, it is odd that China did not produce the kind of large scale, ideological work that we see at the beginnings of western civilization. Certainly, Chinese imperial power could have used a literary work like The Aeniad to further its policies. Instead, Confucian philosophy-with its emphases on hierarchy, right behavior, rules of propriety, and the naturally moral man as leader-made use of the material at hand to produce a unified interpretation of The Book of Songs.In a contemporary western university, these Confucian interpretations more often seem to strait jacket rather than to explicate the poems. Or, more precisely, the interpretations seem to have very little to do with the poems, which are specific and personal, and which may seem unrelated to Confucianism or the larger aims of Imperial policy. Let me take, as an example, the first poem in the anthology, "Fishhawk":The fishhawks sing gwan gwanon sandbars of the stream.Gentle maiden, pure and fair,fit pair for a prince.Watercress grows here and there,right and left we gather it.Gentle maiden, pure and fair,wanted waking and asleep.Wanting, sought her, had her not,waking, sleeping, thought of her,on and on thought of her,he tossed from one side to another.Watercress grows here and there,right and left we pull it.Gentle maiden, pure and fair,with harps we bring her company.Watercress grows here and there,right and left we pick it out.Gentle maiden, pure and fair,with bells and drums do her delight. (Owen 1996, 30-31)If we read the poem without its commentary, it seems like a straightforward pastoral: in a romanticized setting of cultivated nature, a high-born prince is attracted to a humble, beautiful maiden, whom he woos with harps, bells and drums. As teacher, trying to effect the move from the known to the unknown, I initially wanted to use Christopher Marlowe's "A Passionate Shepherd to his Mistress" to approach "Fishhawk." The pastoral lyric-an ancient but lesser genre in western literature-seemed to be an obvious analog, a means of making the eastern Other more comprehensible to my students as well as myself. But according to the Mao Commentary, "the poem represents the `virtuous attainment' of the Queen Consort of King Wen of Zhou, who delighted that pure and fair maidens had been found to be mated with the prince [i.e., King Wen]." Stephen Owen supplements this commentary, noting that the poem, "Has been read as a poem expressing an absence of jealousy, which in turn showed the perfect harmony of the royal household. In this way the poem was supposed to initiate King Wen's process of civilizing the land, beginning with the most intimate and close of relationships, then gradually extending his influence outward (1996, 31)." The Confucian policing of these poems seems irrelevant and anachronistic to a western view, because we are not ensconced within a Confucian milieu: that is, we are not the avatars of a unified, Confucian culture. We don't see the allegory. At least, I didn't. So I set my dilemma before my students. I brought to class "Fishhawk," Marlowe's "A Passionate Shepherd to his Mistress," the above excerpt of the Mao Commentary, as well as Stephen Owen's commentary. I then explained my dilemma: should I present "Fishhawk" within the context of Confucianism, the western pastoral tradition, both or neither? Initially, I thought that this strategy was pedagogically astute, because it attempted to bridge east and west as well as open a critical discussion amongst my students. But then I realized that I was begging the question, for the Mao Commentary, with its patriarchal bias, was not a viable choice for my students. They invariably rejected it and colonized the poem for the sake of a more romantic, comprehensible genre. The Confucian master narrative was difficult to understand and apply, while, to my view, the category of the pastoral seemed of dubious use because it uprooted the poem from its historic context to reroot it within a western aesthetic.Still confused by how to approach these poems, particularly since research did not provide me with an easy analogue to my understanding of "ancient" literature, I realized the inadequacy of the western cultural allegory that I had inherited, not only to make sense of The Book of Songs but also of "world literature" as some kind of coherent, universal entity. Moreover, I realized that my own ignorance had split the poems of The Book of Songs from their proper cultural allegory. But once I had separated the poems from their Confucian interpretation, I was able to isolate and understand the theoretical mechanism that was the engine for the construction of a Chinese culture. After this, I could finally see the obvious affinity between East and West that I had so far missed, that the construction of both western and eastern cultures is theoretically bound. This is not a profound insight and perhaps even a nobrainer, given my training in critical theory. It was not until I was working, in near complete ignorance, in the terrain of an unfamiliar literature and culture, where the answers to no questions are obvious, that I was finally able to grapple with the fundamentals of canon formation, because I could not depend on old assumptions, gloss familiar interpretations, or have recourse to a long naturalized knowledge about literature. Instead, I was forced to do the close, detailed analyses that gave me a deeper understanding of the nature of canonicity, not only concerning Chinese literature but western literature as well. This recursive process of discovery was predicted by the editors of the expanded edition of the Norton: "we grow chiefly by encounters with what is Other than ourselves, the unfamiliar experience, event, or thought that unsettles our securities and cliches; but also-and it is a `but also' of large significance-. . .we best assimilate the unfamiliar by way of the familiar" (Mack 1996, xxx).In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche divides western civilization along the border of the Dionysian and Apollonian,lamenting the loss of the epic and Dionysian in the ascent of tragedy and Apollonian distance. Nietzsche speaks of a post-lapsarian, philosophical world, dominated by the "theoretical man" who cannot repress the Dionysian manifestations in his world and thereby pays dearly (thus, tragedy). Analogous to Nietzsche, in The Theory of the Novel George Lukacs speaks of an epic universe where everything is always/already interconnected and part of the same weave, which is then displaced by philosophy and the rise of the daemonic man, who rises above the world to ask questions about it: that is, he would know the world, but not be in it. Gilgamesh fully enters human civilization only once he questions his mortality and accepts his limitations. Throughout most of The Iliad, Achilles rails at his fate, but in the end, in the presence of Priam, he dominates his temper and demonstrates a capacity for greater civility through tempered self-reflection (he is proto-daemonic). In The Oresteia, Apollo raises doubts about the pre-rational justice of the furies, and Athena establishes a jury-based justice system to test it. The epic world is violent, and what comes after it would ground itself in a well-considered wisdom, even as it pays homage to its violent past. Whether we work with original texts or later interpreters, we can always locate the inception of theory, philosophy or civilization: that is, we can observe the construction of a theoretical, philosophical, rational man, the one for whom wisdom is primary, just as in Confucian thought.In the West, though, our foundational narratives inevitably recognize this development, the transition from barbarity to civilization, violence to wisdom, without ever denying the first term of the formula. Thus, the Dionysian, the Unconscious, the Other always bubble up to taint even the purest of our cultural products. Conversely, Ancient Chinese texts are fundamentally philosophical: that is, the texts are the product of a milieu with a philosophical establishment already developed, institutionalized and asserting a hegemonic influence over the culture. In the self-conscious, Confucian construction of Chinese culture, transition-that is, barbarity-has been suppressed. In "Towards Defining a Chinese Heroism," C.H. Wang claims that Chinese literature has no epics because of the cultural predilection for Wen (wisdom). Throughout its history, Chinese culture consistently denigrated barbarity, barbarians, or Wu (violence). The Great Wall of China was built by the Ming Dynasty in the sixteenth century to keep out the non-Chinese nomads to the north, and thus keep Chinese culture pure. Notwithstanding that this ploy failed because the Ming could not "decide on any better course" (Fairbank 1992, 57), the fundamental impetus toward Wen remained: Wu was not to be a legitimate, or legitimated, element of Chinese culture. Heh-hsiang Yuan criticizes Wang, basically, for continuing that suppression of Wu-that is, the violent, barbaric origins of the Chinese people. Yuan offers an antidote, asserting that,a comparative study can be made of the "Iliad" and the "Weniad" according to the stages of the development of the respective societies. We could say that in the "Iliad" the social stage is one in which human beings were still locked in the battle between the intellect and the emotion, with the latter playing a dominant role; thus the savagery of kitt;ng and dragging an enemy's body outside the city walls was not considered inhuman but demonstrative of the warrior's prowess; while in the other, the intellect has already won the battle, and the civil treatment of man was deemed a vital sign of a cultivated society. (Yuan 1980, 11-12)Wang remains embedded in his own culture, does not step outside of it, and thus acts as an apologist and seemingly resigns himself to an inexorable break between East and West. Yuan, on the other hand, offers the key to an indissoluble link between the two: the movement from barbarity to civilization is the same; only its representation (or its lack thereof) differs. Here, I once again found recourse to one of my fundamental assumptions about literature.In his preface to The Chinese Text: Studies in Comparative Literature, Harry Levin states that "Literature, in order to convince us, must show us things we recognize through our experience. In order to enlarge our awareness, it must show us what seems novel and strange and perhaps exotic" (Chao 1986, viii). I could teach the "Weniad" to my students. I could offer them an intense primer on Confucian thought, give them the collected commentaries for a selection of poems from The Book of Song, and tell them that these commentaries are the correct interpretations of the poems. In the process, I would sketch out the processes by which Ancient Chinese culture was constructed, so my students would have a taste of the "exotic." But they would also be perplexed as well as a bit alienated, because to present this "Weniad," I would have to severely limit the poems' rich possibilities of meaning. From a naive, twentieth-century perspective, I would have suppressed the multivocal, heterogeneous nature of this poetry, suppressed its very lyricism. Take, for example, "Lift Your Kilts":If you love me dearly,lift your kilts and cross the Zhen.And if you do not love me,there are other men,O rashest of all rash young men.And if you love me dearly,lift your kilts and cross the Wei.And if you do not love me,there are other squires,O rashest of all rash young men. (Owen 1996, 57)How could I fit this poem into a Confucian interpretation? Ignore the irrepressible female voice? Its bawdiness? How could I justify to my students a patriarchal rendering of the poem, like the Mao Commentary exegesis of "Fishhawk"? My students would laugh at me, wonder why I was ignoring the obvious, easily-identifiable emotions of the poem. With them, I think that I would have a difficult time moving into the exotic realm of the "Weniad," rather than speaking, within the context of late twentieth-century feminism, about a woman who liberates herself from the passive, subordinate role women conventionally took in ancient Chinese society to become the sexual aggressor in a negotiation outside the marriage contract. I know that after reading ideologically loaded texts like Gilgamesh, The Iliad, and The Oresteia, my students had been happy to move into the realm of the poems of The Book of Songs, which were easier to identify with, because the poems seemed to be more immediate and fairly free of ideological baggage: that is, they seemed more accessible, open to the students' interpretive efforts. Or, more precisely, in a poem like "Lift Your Kilts," my students, the vast majority of whom are women, discovered a text that easily resonated with their own feminist belief in the figure of a strong, assertive woman. They assimilated the "exotic" to bolster their own sense of self-worth as women in the late twentieth century. They did not strip the poem of its historical and interpretive origins, but they discovered for themselves an initial opening that led to further study (for example, I received papers which pursued comparative analyses of the roles of women in the East and West), resulting in a sharper understanding of self as well as Other. My students' recursive process was, perhaps, similar to my own, for it was only once I initiated a dialectical relationship between my familiarity with the origins of western literature and what seemed to be the unusual origins of Chinese literature that I came to a better grasp of both traditions,。