Everybody reads the sao, yet not one man has ever read the sao.
莫不讀騷者，而卒未嘗有一人讀騷也。 Huang Wenhuan 黃文煥 (jinshi 1625)Footnote 1
Consciousness is not immediate, but mediate; it is not a source, but a task, the task of becoming more conscious. Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005)Footnote 2
Qu Yuan 屈原 was the man “entangled in the Xiang river” (Xiang lei 湘纍),Footnote 3 whose cares and frustrations were swept into oblivion by its currents. This retrospective comment hints at a trope that is already common in Chuci 楚辭 itself, and particularly in the “Jiu zhang” 九章 (Nine Avowals) poems,Footnote 4 which deal most directly with Qu Yuan's biography. The speaker in these poems frequently tells us how his mind is tangled up in worry, how he is encumbered by loyalties to his prince, how his journey of exile has left him running in circles. His mental state is repeatedly depicted throughout the “Nine Avowals” in terms of these tropes of entanglement, suggested by the very title of the fourth poem: “Chou si” 抽思 (Unravelled yearnings).Footnote 5
These poetic tropes – deformations of language that call attention to their own literariness – are replicated at a structural level as well. For his words themselves begin to repeat themselves, and the poems adopt recursive structures: Qu Yuan first tells us that he is going to make a plaint to his prince, then sings of his frustration, then tells us again how he will make another plaint – but is not the very poem we were reading already the plaint we are expecting? The first poem in the “Nine Avowals” concludes with the line, “I would like to multiply my yearnings and estrange myself” 願曾思而遠身.Footnote 6 The poet's exile from his own kingdom forces him into bounteous composition, in a poetic form that is no longer simply a linear narrative of his story, but instead seeks to “multiply yearnings”, with each expression of feeling repeated in self-reflexive ways.
The poems frequently adopt recursive forms that turn back upon themselves, suggesting the protagonist's self-conscious reflections on his state. This kind of structure bears some resemblance to what Douglas Hofstadter has called a “strange loop” (or a “paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop”).Footnote 7 Computer programs operate by recursion, repeating small modules over and over again with incremental variation, and Hofstadter suggests that human minds also involve similar kinds of feedback loops, possessing this special property of being “paradoxical” and “level-crossing”. That is, in the process of repeating the loop, the mind has the ability to move up to a higher level of generality before returning to its initial state. Since Hofstadter finds some of his most compelling examples in the oeuvre of Johann Sebastian Bach, it is not surprising that literary works should exemplify the concept also.Footnote 8 Indeed, Wolfgang Iser has shown how Hofstadter's notion of the recursive nature of consciousness has direct relevance to the general problem of textual interpretation.Footnote 9 It might be seen as a generalization of the hermeneutic circle: the reflexive quality of reading texts, for which there can be no independent and stable starting point outside of the reading process, is just a special case of the recursive nature of consciousness itself.
There is a very simple but effective example of a strange loop in the later Chinese textual tradition:Footnote 10 Ouyang Xiu's 歐陽修 (1007–72) “Biography of a recluse with six unique possessions” 六一居士傳,Footnote 11 actually a dialogue between the recluse and a guest.Footnote 12 The six unique possessions, the recluse says, are his collection of books in ten thousand fascicles; his collection of rubbings from ancient inscriptions in one thousand fascicles; his qin; his chess set; and his bottle of wine, always available. But then, the guest points out, the recluse has only named five possessions: what is the sixth? The sixth possession is the recluse himself, uniquely human. In a literary epiphany we are transported from the level of physical possession to that of human individuality, yet the individual is counted within the number of possessions, thus returning us to the initial level at the same time.
The essay satisfies Hofstadter's definition of “strange loop”. To begin with, it amounts to a paradox of enumeration: counting the numerous books and inscriptions as single things, when they can also be subdivided, means that the total “six” is equivalent to one thousand, ten thousand, etc. This is not unlike Zeno's paradox of dichotomy, in which a single span of distance can be subdivided in halves an infinite number of times. Paradox is a defining characteristic of a strange loop because it contains contradictory strata. This paradox also implies a kind of recursion: if the five objects are possessed by the recluse, they could also be counted along with the recluse; depending on how one counts the objects and divides the book, one could continue adding up possessions indefinitely. In this sense we get a hint of a recursive feedback loop, and the account is also a level-crossing, because it crosses the boundaries between planes of referentiality, counting the possessor among the objects possessed. Thus it is a miniature example of a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop, the “strange loop” that Hofstadter illustrates with M.C. Escher's print of “Drawing Hands”, Bach's “Crab Canon”, and Gödel's incompleteness theorem, inter alia. In each case, the feedback loops help to elucidate the self-referential quality of human consciousness: “… recursive looping makes accessible what is otherwise hidden from view; it provides insight into the inner workings of systems that cannot be seen”.Footnote 13
The strange loops in the “Nine Avowals”, while lacking the economy of Ouyang Xiu's essay, share some of its formal structure, and it is only by considering this formal structure that we can appreciate the poems properly. The results of this investigation may have some bearing on the perennial question of authorship for the poems attributed to Qu Yuan. As both Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) and James R. Hightower (1915–2006) pointed out in different ways, too much ink has been spilt on questions of Qu Yuan's biography and too little on the artistry of his poems.Footnote 14 To redirect attention towards formal features of the poems is by no means to reject traditional scholarship on the Chuci in the manner of Hu Shi's polemic, however. Traditional accounts of Qu Yuan's authorship sometimes show greater sophistication than the twentieth-century debunkers. Even Wang Yi's 王逸 (c. 89–c. 158) introduction to the “Nine Avowals”, which begins with a seemingly straightforward affirmation that the poems were “composed by Qu Yuan” 屈原之所作也, concludes by discussing their reception. After Qu Yuan's death, says Wang Yi, “the people of Chu felt chagrin and lamented him, and all the world discussed his words, thereby passing them on” 楚人惜而哀之，世論其詞，以相傳焉.Footnote 15 For Wang Yi, Qu Yuan's composition marks the beginning of a process in which the people of Chu and indeed later transmitters, presumably including Wang Yi himself, were all involved.
Other premodern scholars also focused on the poetic craft of the “Nine Avowals”, not just their historical context. Fang Renjie 方人傑 (Qing dynasty) commented on “Regretting Past Days” 惜往日: “There is fictional representation within the truthful narrative; there is circuitous representation within the forthright words” 實敘中有虛致，直言中有婉致.Footnote 16 Even more strikingly, in making sense of “Grieving at the Whirlwind” 悲回風, Chen Benli 陳本禮 (1739–1818) argues that the main body of the poem describes the journey of Qu Yuan's soul after death (and hence that previous commentators’ attempts to tie it to real events were futile).Footnote 17 While premodern readers relied on assumptions of Qu Yuan's authorship in their interpretations of the poems, they were also willing to set these aside to recognize the artistry of the poems when appropriate. In focusing our attention on the rhetoric and structure of the “Nine Avowals”, then, we can build on traditional scholarship while also offering new interpretations.
The “Nine Avowals” are the least homogeneous of all the poems in the Chuci. Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) already recognized that they were composed at different times, and modern Chinese scholars have speculated that several were not composed by Qu Yuan at all.Footnote 18 One of the most original solutions was offered by Okamura Shigeru 岡村繁 (1922–2014).Footnote 19 By tabulating textual parallels and rigorously comparing the structures of the works, Okamura has confirmed the insight of earlier Chinese scholars that the “Nine Avowals” are at least somewhat heterogeneous in origin. At the same time, Okamura's conclusions about which poems are earliest in the corpus, or which could not have been composed by Qu Yuan, do not quite satisfy the demands of logical rigour to which he aspires.Footnote 20 Although shared lines are important, appreciating their implications requires careful thought and consideration, and they are never a direct indicator of copying or allusion.Footnote 21 Thus, rather than rejecting the traditional attributions of Chuci poems wholesale, we would do best to harmonize them, as much as possible, with our knowledge of the internal functioning of the poems. There is much evidence of a set of shared phrases and poetic devices not unlike those of oral poetry, regardless of how the texts were composed, and we should read each poem with attention to the formal devices of Chuci poetry as a productive system, leaving in abeyance questions of historical authorship.Footnote 22 Tropes of entanglement and strange loops are two formal devices that lend themselves to analysis, and may also be useful for future ventures in comparative poetics.
Tropes of entanglement
Tropes of entanglement are a signal feature of the poetic language of the “Nine Avowals”.Footnote 23 They consist of poetic imagery or euphonious binomes, frequently arranged in parallel or chiastic configurations, conveying the sense of entrapment and entanglement faced by the poet. The poems of the “Nine Avowals” address the situation of Qu Yuan, the courtier exiled on the basis of slander, whose counsel has been rejected by his king, and these tropes are used to depict both his political predicament and emotional state, as we see in the opening passage:Footnote 24
惜誦以致愍兮 Rueful remonstrance has resulted in my misery – Footnote 25
發憤以抒情 Now I vent this frustration by expressing my feelings.
所作忠而言之兮 Whether my actions have been loyal, I will speak of them – Footnote 26
指蒼天以為正 Let Azure Heaven be my judge!
This is the definitive statement of the purport of these poems. Where remonstrance has failed, only poetry holds out the possibility of vindication. The work of poetry is to fa 發 (“vent”, “emit”) and to shu 抒 (“express”) pent-up emotion. The nine poems of the “Jiu zhang” present different renderings of these emotions, originating in different places. Although they were probably written separately and then compiled, for the most part they form a coherent set, devoted to Qu Yuan's self-presentation or zhang 章 (which can also, of course, be understood simply as an individual “piece”).
The nine titles of the “Nine Avowals” suggest different points of a spectrum between “remonstrance” against the sovereign and “frustration” of the courtier himself:
1. “Xi song” 惜誦 Rueful Remonstrance
2. “She jiang” 涉江 Crossing the River
3. “Ai Ying” 哀郢 Lamenting Ying
4. “Chou si” 抽思 Unravelled Yearnings
5. “Huai sha” 懷沙 Embracing the Sand
6. “Si meiren” 思美人 Longing for the Fair One
7. “Xi wangri” 惜往日 Regretting Past Days
8. “Ju song” 橘頌 Encomium to the Tangerine
9. “Bei hui feng” 悲回風 Grieving at the Whirlwind
Though the poems do frequently address political matters in the elliptical manner of the “Li sao”, they tend to concern themselves primarily with the poet's own feelings. But it would be overly simplistic to say that the state of those feelings is simply sad, or melancholy, or any other single adjective. Rather his heart has taken on a configuration the poet can describe with some precision (in “Lamenting Ying”):Footnote 27
心嬋媛而傷懷兮 My heart lingers in longing and wounded reminiscence –
眇不知其所蹠 Half-blinded I cannot tell where I have trod.Footnote 28
Qu Yuan's heart (or mind, or heart-mind) finds itself attached to the target of longing from which it is displaced, causing a sense of trauma. This spiritual displacement is mirrored in the befuddlement of senses, the kind of correlation so effectively conveyed by the Chinese poetic couplet.Footnote 29 Qu Yuan is blinded and bewildered, continuing his journey but without any particular aim.
“Lingers in longing” emulates the alliteration of chanyuan 嬋媛 (*dran-wan).Footnote 30 Many of the tropes of entanglement in the “Nine Avowals” take the form of descriptive binomes, often possessing phonetic patterning in the form of assonance or consonance. Though descriptive binomes also played a large role in the epideictic rhetoric of the Han fu, this should properly be seen as just one of their functions in early Chinese poetry.Footnote 31 These binomes do not necessarily belong to some pre-determined langue of their period, but may be used in creative ways according to the demands of the parole of their particular text.Footnote 32 George A. Kennedy analysed the use of binomes in the Shijing and hypothesized that they were “in most cases invented to suit a particular requirement in an Ode”.Footnote 33 The particular usage of chanyuan here can thus be seen as a trope, a poetic deformation of language, as suggested in Wang Yi's awkward elaboration: “His heart is tugged and drawn until it hurts” 心中牽引而痛. We can sense the physical “tugging” here in another occurrence of the same phrase, in “Grieving at the Whirlwind”:Footnote 34
依風穴以自息兮 I lodge in a cavern from the storm to rest myself –
忽傾寤以嬋媛 But I turn over awoken by lingering longings.
Apart from the pull of desire, chanyuan might also be related to chan 纏 (*dran), “to bind”, which is homophonous with the first element of the binome. The sensation is not of being pulled in a particular direction, but of being pushed alternately this way and that, in different directions that conflict and oppose one another. The poet's sensations and thoughts are knotted and twisted around themselves.
Throughout the poems Qu Yuan cannot decide where to go next; he is torn between longing to go back, and his will to move forward. His emotional confusion has left him totally indecisive, both psychologically and geographically entangled. For instance, in “Rueful Remonstrance” he exclaims:Footnote 35
欲橫奔而失路兮 I'd like to race across but have lost the path –
堅志而不忍 Firm in my ambition though I cannot bear it.
背膺牉以交痛兮 My spine and chest are divided, but share in the pain –
心鬱結而紆軫 My heart is knotted in woe and sorrow-tangled.
Qu Yuan's confusion does not mean that he feels weak or loses his fundamental sense of purpose. His will remains firm and he continues on his journey, even though he is not continuing in any particular direction but in an endless loop. Meanwhile his whole body is consumed by contradiction, split into complexes incompatible with one another.
The final line in this passage modifies its topic “heart” with a striking chiasmus: yujie 鬱結 (*Ɂut-kît) – yuzhen 紆軫 (*Ɂwa-tenɁ). Jie 結 and yu 紆denote different forms of entangling, their semantic range signified by the silk classifier.Footnote 36 Though yu 鬱 has various meanings in early poetry, in this compound it means “woe” and hence is synonymous with zhen 軫. Thus these four words construct the chiasmic pattern sorrow-entangle-entangle-sorrow, itself a formal entangling of the two concepts. The presence of phrases, lines, and stanzas with this kind of elaborate structure, that elevate the material of the “Nine Avowals” from the simple plaint of an abused courtier to a literary construct whose purport, extends beyond its original circumstances.
The collocation of yujie and yuzhen recurs in “Embracing the Sand”, though imbued with new significance by the succeeding lines:Footnote 37
鬱結紆軫兮 Knotted in woe and sorrow-tangled –
離愍而長鞠 I meet with disaster and am ever frustrated.
撫情效志兮 Consoling my passions I examine my will – Footnote 38
冤屈而自抑 I am wronged and abused, and must restrain myself.
刓方以為圜兮 Whittling the square to make it round –
常度未替 The enduring measure still has not changed.
易初本迪兮 To change from the beginning, to betray the source – Footnote 39
君子所鄙 Is what the gentleman disdains.
The poet starts in the state of confusion, finding himself trapped and frustrated, but then asserts his determination and resistance to any compromise or change in direction.
Another passage from “Lamenting Ying” also elaborates on the emotive configuration of the poet with reference to the directionless journey:Footnote 40
順風波以從流兮 Riding wind and waves, I follow in the current –
焉洋洋而為客 As if a traveller who drifts without direction.
淩陽侯之氾濫兮 Crossing the wild tumult of Lord Yang –
忽翱翔之焉薄 Suddenly set to drift without direction, where will I end up?
心絓結而不解兮 My heart is tied up in knots that cannot be unwoven –
思蹇產而不釋 My yearnings, gnarled and snarled, cannot be enodated.
Again the poem proposes implicit parallels between the poet's outer and inner states. Outwardly, the world around him is in a state of utter confusion, without any sense of the proper direction to go. Inside, his emotions are embroiled and entangled, as described in two evocative binomes: guajie 絓結 (*kwreh-kreɁ) and jianchan 蹇產 (*krian-sranɁ).Footnote 41 Indeed, “Lamenting Ying” contains even more imagery along these lines:Footnote 42
慘鬱鬱而不通兮 Misery pent-up inside, it cannot be expressed –
蹇侘傺而含慼 Hobbled by bewildering despair, I repress my melancholy.
Again the accumulation of binomes deepens the effect: “pent-up inside” yuyu 鬱鬱 (*Ɂut- Ɂut) parallel with chachi 侘傺 (*drak-tshrat). The hero's feeling cannot be disclosed or released (bu tong 不通) but persists in this state of knotted perplexity.
Binomes are used throughout the “Nine Avowals” primarily to evoke mental states, to achieve deeper levels of interiority. The near impossibility of translating them should not distract us from their true significance, which is precisely to lead us further into the tangles of the mind. The opening of “Unravelled Yearnings”, for instance, uses binomes immediately after the words “heart” and “thought” (here rendered “yearning” for consistency within the poem).Footnote 43
心鬱鬱之憂思兮 My heart is shadowed and shrouded by anxious yearning –
獨永歎乎增傷 Alone, my unending sighs deepen the hurt.
思蹇產之不釋兮 Yearnings, gnarled and snarled, cannot be enodated – Footnote 44
曼遭夜之方長 But ever meet the night that is without end.
This parallelism in the unrhymed lines between “heart [binome]” 心鬱鬱 and “yearnings [binome]” 思蹇產 is so exact as almost to fulfil the function of a rhyme complementary to the phonologically rhyming lines. Feelings and thoughts are not declarative statements or logical propositions, but correlations between external and internal experiences, best expressed by means of binomes that are flexible in meaning. These four lines combine the binomes we have seen above, yuyu and jianchan, with an additional negative, bu shi 不釋 “cannot be enodated”. The tangling and knotting metaphors are thus consistently associated with darkness as well as dark emotions. The mental knots of the hero replicate themselves outside in a state of confusion without end.Footnote 45
The poem “Grieving at the Whirlwind” also uses a number of tropes of entanglement:Footnote 46
愁鬱鬱之無快兮 Pent-up despondency leaves me no relief –
居戚戚而不可解 Abiding in bitter melancholy which cannot be removed.Footnote 47
心鞿羈而不形兮 My heart is curbed and bridled, and cannot take on form –
氣繚轉而自締 My energies are entangled and knot themselves up.
And just a few lines later:Footnote 48
藐蔓蔓之不可量兮 Spreading out so far off that it cannot be measured –
縹綿綿之不可紆 Out in the vastness of space where it cannot be entangled:
愁悄悄之常悲兮 My sorrow silently screams in its endless melancholy –
翩冥冥之不可娛 Soaring the profound void, I am still not pleased.
These lines reverse the trope of entanglement with a series of negatives. The subject of the first couplet appears to be the poet's sorrow itself.Footnote 49 Indeed, in the “Grieving at the Whirlwind” in particular, the topic of the poem seems to shift from Qu Yuan himself towards Qu Yuan's psychological state.
By the final couplet of “Grieving at the Whirlwind”, the last poem in the “Nine Avowals”, though, the terms used to describe the poet's mindset remain constant, employing terms identical to those quoted from “Lamenting Ying” above:Footnote 50
心絓結而不解兮 My heart is tied up in knots that cannot be unwoven –
思蹇產而不釋 My yearnings, gnarled and snarled, cannot be enodated.
That the state of the poet's mind should be the same at the conclusion of the series suggests a lack of dramatic event in the “Nine Avowals”, although this is actually unfair to the set as a whole. “Crossing the River”, “Lamenting Ying”, “Chou si”, and “Embracing the Sand” each have “Luan” 亂 codas that mark definite and dramatic endpoints to the composition.Footnote 51 “Grieving at the Whirlwind”, by contrast, is steeped in a kind of self-regarding melancholy that fails to advance in any particular direction. This is one of the features that has been used to suggest it was composed later than the earlier group of poems.Footnote 52
The title of “Grieving at the Whirlwind” itself speaks of the “whirlwind” (huifeng 回風), the gale that turns back upon itself in a centripetal vortex.Footnote 53 Wang Yi identifies huifeng with piaofeng 飄風, with its symbolic referent the “petty men” who slander Qu Yuan. But not all the allegorical meaning of the Chuci works according to Wang Yi's scheme. An occurrence of the whirlwind in the “Li sao” itself is ambiguous, but other references in the Chuci are positive or even triumphant.Footnote 54 Thus the whirlwind is an ambiguous symbol of power and force, not the simple token of Wang Yi's reductive scheme.
The title of the poem is taken from the opening couplet:Footnote 55
悲回風之搖蕙兮 I grieve at the whirlwind that wastes the melilotus –
心冤結而內傷 My heart is knotted up in anger, myself wounded within.
The entangled sorrows inside the poet's mind seem to mirror the external world, depicted here in the unusually violent image of the whirlwind devastating one of the poet's floral emblems. In the same poem we have another variant of the entanglement trope, in which it is the poet himself who weaves his anguish into art:Footnote 56
糾思心以為纕兮 Braiding heart's yearnings to make a bracelet –
編愁苦以為膺 I weave my bitter woes to make a baldric.
折若木以蔽光兮 I snap a branch of the Ruomu tree to block out the light –
隨飄風之所仍 Follow the whirlwind wherever it may drift.
Here the entanglement is not an aspect of Qu Yuan's mortifications, but is the conscious transfiguration of them into art. The next couplet parallels this aesthetic production with the poet's cosmic journey, first snapping off a branch from the Ruomu tree at the western extremity of the universe, then following the whirlwind in its celestial roaming.Footnote 57
In a number of passages Qu Yuan describes his primary ambition as the weaving together of words to make a statement to his sovereign. A number of passages in the “Nine Avowals” link entanglement and composition, showing that entanglement is not incidental to the poems as coherent entities. In the opening of “Longing for the Fair One” the poet regrets his inability to weave together his message:Footnote 58
思美人兮 Yearning for the Beautiful One –
攬涕而佇眙 I wipe away my tears, standing still and agape.
媒絕路阻兮 My matchmaker is thwarted and my path blocked –
言不可結而詒 I cannot weave my words together to be conveyed.Footnote 59
蹇蹇之煩冤兮 All my honest counsel incurs only trouble and abuse –
陷滯而不發 Tripped up and trapped in, I cannot even transmit it;Footnote 60
申旦以舒中情兮 Awake until the dawn, releasing my inner feelings –
志沈菀而莫達 My will is inundated and entangled, and attains nothing.
Or from “Rueful Remonstrance”:Footnote 61
心鬱邑余侘傺兮 My heart is steeped in sadness, myself dejected and despairing –
又莫察余之善惡 There is none to perceive the good and ill inside me.Footnote 62
固煩言不可結詒兮 Indeed my tumultuous words cannot be intertwined to transmit –
願陳志而無路 I wish I could relate my will but there is no way hence.
The following passage from “Regretting Past Days” presents another version of the same trope. The feelings of the poet, if only they could be set forth plainly in the light of day, would then shine as brightly as the stars laid out in the sky:Footnote 63
願陳情以白行兮 I would like to relate my feelings and to clarify my acts –
得罪過之不意 Suffering this punishment was not what I expected;
情冤見之日明兮 That my feelings and my wrong would be visible as daylight –
如列宿之錯置 To be arrayed in order like the various constellations.
This is the inverse of the customary trope of entanglement used to make the same point: the same sense of space-filling complexity, but suddenly filtered and arranged so as to avoid any overlapping or entanglement at all, presenting simply the stars of heaven arrayed in their distinct points of brilliance.
Throughout the “Nine Avowals”, the poet-speaker describes his psychological states using a number of verbs and symbols that relate to the theme of entanglement. Used systematically in this way, the device becomes a trope, consistently relating the emotive and expressive faculties of the poet to threads that are knotted together, entangled so that they cannot easily be untied and shown in their original nature. Thus tangled emotions are a paradoxical consequence of the straightforward loyalty the poet states as his ideal, and the combination of the two forms his identity as a poetic speaker and also inspires the tension that of the poetic narrative. We should not be surprised to find that the poems simulate this tangled structure at higher levels of organization as well. For “poems trope their own schemes, allegorize their own arrangements”;Footnote 64 the trope of entanglement is one kind of rhetorical statement about mind and experience, and the strange loop of poetic complexes yet another.
Strange loops
The works in the Chuci in general, but especially the “Li sao”, “Nine Avowals”, and “Nine Suasions” poems, contain a great deal of repetition and internal cross-reference. This phenomenon is often interpreted as a sign of multiple authorship, each reiteration understood as a borrowing or theft from a previous author, or even as the unconscious effect of oral tradition. Without confining our interpretations to any single theory of the genesis of the Chuci poems, though, we still ought to consider the cumulative effect of these literary devices. However they originated, they have supplied their meaning to countless interpreters, and still convey meaning to readers today. Again, premodern Chuci commentators were not oblivious to these problems. As Qu Fu 屈復 (b. 1668) wrote in the editorial principles for his commentary to the Chuci, with particular reference to the “Li sao”: “There are some identical lines, but the meaning in each case varies, and this is decidedly not repetition” 句有同者，意自各別，並非重複.Footnote 65 Qu Fu wisely recognizes that each repetition is also variation.Footnote 66
To suggest a kind of conceptual translation of these structures into a modern idiom, we might think of Hofstadter's “strange loop”, a reflexive pattern in which “by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started”.Footnote 67 The strange loop is not just a logical paradox, in Hofstadter's view, but significant as a model for the way that human consciousness itself is structured out of self-mirroring feedback loops. Taking into consideration the existence of these strange loops, we can appreciate that one of the literary dimensions of the Chuci – its repetition and self-reference – is not necessarily a defect created by errors in transmission, but may in fact be a virtue, because of the way that it captures some elements of normal human thought processes.
Even one of the more isolated poems with relatively few textual parallels to other pieces in the Chuci, the “Ju song” (#8 in the “Nine Avowals”) or “Encomium to the Tangerine”, lends itself to an allegorical reading, as in Tseng Chen-chen's essay “An allegory on allegory: reading ‘Ju song’ as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica”.Footnote 68 Tseng argues that the poem “contains a symmetrical bipartite structure of an enclosed circle with the end coiled back to the beginning; the closure, once completed, reopens itself”.Footnote 69 The first half describes the fine aesthetic qualities of the tangerine tree; the second then describes the exquisite virtue of the poet. The poem as a whole thus forms an “allegory” of how a tangible symbol comes to represent conceptions of virtue. The second half of the poem leads the reader back to the first half, pointing back to the fruit itself and creating the circular effect.
As fruitful as such a reading may be, other poems in the “Nine Avowals” exhibit similar structural features on a larger scale. The most explicitly self-referential and cyclical structures are present in the “Unravelled Yearnings”, with its four distinctly labelled sections: Main Text (40 lines) – Lesser Song (4) – Aria (22) – Coda (20). Aside from the first section, each of these sections is given an explicit title. The first three sections are in the “Li sao” metre with a couplet divided by the character xi, while the Coda is in the “Ju song” metre, basically tetrasyllabic but with xi at the end of each couplet. This is a striking and unique organization. Okamura Shigeru has argued that “Unravelled Yearnings” is a composite of two original poems, dividing it after the Lesser Song.Footnote 70 He has shown, in particular, how the first half, according to his division, stands in close historical relationship to the “Li sao” and “Lamenting Ying”.
But his view does not do justice to the balanced and coherent structure of the entire “Unravelled Yearnings” in its present form, particularly how it is unified by self-referential and recursive tropes. The three section markers we have noted belong to this category, as does the line from which the title derives, but there are also at least seven explicit references to speech in the poem. Though the latter half indeed seems quite different in both form and content from the first half, it also concludes with a poignant expression of inability to communicate. Specifically, the hero asks who he will be able to find to listen to his speech. Having expressed his entire complaint, then, and relieved his own mind momentarily, he asks whether it has reached its audience, or whether he will have to repeat it all once again.
The three terms that identify different sections of “Unravelled Yearnings” seem to have musical significance. That is certainly true of “Lesser Song” and “Air”. Luan, “coda”, is more complicated. Guo Moruo argued that this was actually an error for ci 辭, which it graphically resembles.Footnote 71 That is an appealing solution, even if not conclusive, because the term ci plays such a large role throughout the Chuci: in the title of the anthology itself, and also in the text of “Unravelled Yearnings” and other poems, as when the hero refers to his principal activity as chen ci 陳辭. We may render this as “presenting my speech”, addressed to the king.
The title “Chou si” 抽思 is highly distinctive. Like the second, third, and eighth poems in the “Nine Pieces”, the title is not simply drawn from the first hemistich, and this creative selection bespeaks a certain artistry and self-awareness in the composition of the poem. Curiously, a closely related phrase does appear at the opening of the “Lesser Song” (line 41): “Though I unravel my resentments to the Fair One” 與美人抽怨兮. Zhu Xi's text, moreover, includes the variant chou si抽思 for chou yuan 抽怨 for this line, so it is possible that the title was drawn from this line, or alternatively that the original title of the poem was “Unravelled Resentments” 抽怨.Footnote 72 It is also possible that this “Lesser Song” was the kernel from which the poem emerged. All this shows that philological arguments can cut both ways, historically speaking. Though it is often assumed that the more coherent and better-crafted poems are authentic productions of Qu Yuan, an alternative hypothesis might be that it is the more elaborately reworked poems, that include structural elements like envois and titles independent of the main text, which are the later reworkings of rougher originals by Qu Yuan or his contemporaries.
For the purposes of this argument, however, I would prefer to remain agnostic on these questions of historical origins and instead focus on artistry, beginning with the memorable title “Chou si”. This phrase has the same structure as “Li sao” (in its most common interpretations as either “Encountering Sorrow” or “Departing Sorrow”), VO with a verb and a noun conveying melancholy. The sense of chou (OC * t-hliu) here is unusual, and Yang Xiong's Fa yan provides an interesting clue, glossing the word as du 讀 “to read”.Footnote 73 We could translate it as “unreeling”, in a sense similar to “reading out loud”, as if the poet is thinking out loud, simultaneously composing and also reading his own thoughts. The phrase refers specifically to making one's plea to the sovereign, which is what the poem is all about, so the “thoughts” to be conveyed are specifically the speaker's “yearnings”.
Below I present a complete translation of the “Unravelled Yearnings” to facilitate examination of the poem's structure. The poem is divided into stanzas according to rhyme, and into seven subsections A1, A2, A3, B, C1, C2, and D, based on content as well as well as the quadripartite structure mentioned above.
Unravelled Yearnings 抽思
In the translation of the poem, self-referential lines referring to its composition or performance are given in italics. Apart from the emotional or political content of the poem, another thematic strand is concerned expressly with its own production. It is in this light that the third part, the “Air” (C), can be better seen not as an interpolation or accidental insertion, but a self-conscious display of poetic virtuosity in accord with the explicit theme of expression.
The torrent of words so distinctly represented in “Unravelled Yearnings” made an impression on Wang Yi, who says in his comment after the poem:Footnote 83
In this piece [Qu Yuan] explains that the cause of his many sorrows is that his lord trusts in flattery and regards himself as a sage; he is dazzled before reputation and reality, blind to service and reward. Though the author himself is loyal and honest, there is nowhere he may go to make his plaint. So he repeats his words over and over, that he may relieve his sadness and yearning.
此章言己所以多憂者，以君信諛而自聖，眩於名實，昧於施報，己雖忠直，無所赴愬，故反復其詞，以泄憂思也。
This technique of repetition and restatement, fan fu qi ci 反復其詞, is essential to the effect of “Unravelled Yearnings”. Already in the eleventh line of the poem the protagonist states: “I tie together my inner feelings to set forth in words (ci)”. The poem is a project of interlacing different speeches and different forms of expression into a multipartite whole.
Section I presents the distress of the speaker who longs to unravel the anguish that afflicts him. The trope of entanglement is set forth clearly in the first stanza, as we have already discussed above. The term Lord Iris (sun 蓀), whose precise meaning is not entirely clear, and may have had some religious significance prior to the composition of these poems, occurs only five times in the Chuci: once in the Nine Songs, three times in this poem alone, and in the “Li sao” once.Footnote 84 The “Unravelled Yearnings” is a comprehensive statement of the Qu Yuan story, as these figures suggest. In section A2, the hero begins to describe what he wants to say to Lord Iris, which seems to mark a second beginning for the poem, another opening statement. In section A3 he reiterates the honesty and value of the message he would like to send. Then, before anything has happened besides hearing about the message, or the dialogue that the hero would like to take place, we have the “Lesser Song”. The “Lesser Song” (B) repeats a line from A2 (ll. 17, 43): “He scorned me from his excellence and goodness” 憍吾以其美好兮. The “Lesser Song” as a whole thus recapitulates the sense of the poem up to this point, recursively pointing back to an early point in the sequence. Is this “Lesser Song” the message the hero is preparing for his lord? It is at least a partial summation of the plaint, concluding with a comment on its own failure: “He contemns my words and will not hear” (l. 44).
The next section is an abrupt transition: the “Air” begins with the image of the noble bird in exile.Footnote 85 Throughout the second half of the poem we do not see explicit linguistic parallels to the first half. On the other hand, the bird is an allegorical representative of Qu Yuan, and the second half of the “Air” (section C2) likewise presents an allegorical parallel of the earlier message, about the flight of the soul back to Ying, a flight in which the body and earth-bound soul of the hero cannot follow, so the whole “Air”, section C, does echo sections A and B. It is like a compressed version of a summons to the soul, the shamanistic ritual that forms the content of two other Chuci poems. The significance of the bird may not be coincidental, since there is evidence both elsewhere in the Chuci and in excavated materials for a potent religious symbolism surrounding the phoenix, particularly as a symbol for the soul's journey after death.Footnote 86
Finally the coda recapitulates this theme explicitly in the metre of the “Summons” poems, XXXX/XXXY, where Y is in this case the keyword xi 兮. Throughout this section the hero is wandering without a guide, roaming in a dark land without any go-between to help him find a master. The second half of “Unravelled Yearnings” thus elaborates on this theme of the lost soul (the poète maudit) in multiple interrelated forms. The poet represents himself as a bird, making a soul-journey like a shaman, his soul lost on the long road to Ying; and then again more explicitly in the “Summons” metre, describing the journey on which he “dithers and dallies, loiters and tarries” without direction. Then finally the voice of the poet himself reasserts itself, the maker of this song explaining its own purpose. Thus through the course of the poem we weave in and out, passing from different levels of concreteness, from the experience of the courtier, to literary symbols, to a spiritual journey of the soul, and back down again to the words themselves.
Even in these poems which are normally considered the more historical, autobiographical works of Qu Yuan, one cannot ignore the element of word-magic prevalent in the Chuci. Liu Xie 劉勰 (c. 465–c. 521) identifies the “Zhao hun” 招魂 (Summons to the soul) as a zhuci 祝辭 “invocation”, and the “Nine Songs” and several other pieces in the Chuci clearly are based on this kind of model – a mode of speech used for communication between humans and spirits.Footnote 87 With this background of religious ritual in mind, it becomes much easier to appreciate the repetition and restatement of the “Unravelled Yearnings” or “Li sao”, not as some accidental features of textual transmission or relics of oral tradition, but rather as intrinsic to their form. The point of prayer is not to communicate some particular message but to perform a ritual action, which can be repeated in the hope of greater effectiveness. The “Unravelled Yearnings” does not employ the motif of the spirit journey or as many mythological references as “Li sao”, but it does refer to the shaman-heroes Peng and Xian, and an extended section of the “Air” describes the hero's situation in terms of the flight of the soul. The Chuci language and form may be adapted to the political situation of the courtier, but they retain much of the purposive context of the “Chu prayer”.
It seems unlikely that the texts of any of the poems as we have them were actually performed in a ritual context, but this tradition certainly lies in the background of the Chuci. The “Unravelled Yearnings” is not just a single prayer repeated, but an arrangement of plaints and invocations that overlap and repeat certain themes, together giving a greater impression of amplitude than mere repetition could. The “Lesser Air”, in particular, reinterprets the initial situation of the protagonist both allegorically and spiritually, transposing the same experience onto different levels of abstraction. The ci are not simply words, but focused messages addressed to the lord, in the manner of an invocation or supplication.
The “Coda” does not really conclude or sum up anything, but reads more like the prayer that we have been waiting for throughout the earlier part of the poem. The prayer concludes, inevitably, with a self-referential summary of the composition of the poem. But although one goal of its composition, or performance, was to ease the anxieties of the author/performer, the conclusion reveals that there is no addressee. The poem is an invocation of a superior being who is absent: “For to whom may I tell these words of mine” (l. 86). The only tangible achievement of the poet's complaint is awareness of its own futility. The poem is a soliloquy that contains multitudes, a strange loop whose purpose lies in its own unfolding.
Untying the knot
The proposition that these poems are well-crafted simulations of self-expression that represent the recursive form of self-reflection is not discordant with the content of “Unravelled Yearnings”, in particular, with its self-referential repetitions of the phrase chen ci 陳辭, “set forth in words”. Here ci is rich in implication, as has been shown by Lu Jui-ching 魯瑞菁, who argues that the “Li sao” exemplifies traditional ci genres in several overlapping respects: as political plaint directed at the sovereign, as religious prayer towards ancestral gods, and as binding legal oath.Footnote 88 Yet Qu Yuan has adapted these traditions into an innovative lyrical form. The “Nine Avowals” frame political plaints within self-referential poetic forms that allow their audiences to participate in the original predicament of the Qu Yuan hero figure.
The layers of artifice that constitute the poems – think of the separate musical divisions of “Unravelled Yearnings”, the prosopopoeia of “Encomium to the Tangerine”, the extensive deployment of descriptive binomes throughout the sequence – make any attempt to tie their content closely to Qu Yuan's life a hazardous one. This is not so much because we do not know enough about the life (though we do not) as because the poems are telling us about more than one man's life, preferring archetype to experience; when has it ever not been the case that “The road is far and this place is dark, / And I have not even a go-between”? Thus the interpreter of Chuci needs to begin with the form and function of the text as it survives. Too much twentieth-century scholarship attempted to reconstruct the cultural prehistory of the text, finding the origins of the Chuci in shamanism, in the political sphere, in popular song, etc. This kind of scholarship treats the riddles of the texts like the Gordian knot, attempting to sever the majority of them and isolate one authentic kernel. The Chuci poems are compositely contrived from manifold materials, and the problem is not to sever their knots but to follow the internal logic of their hermeneutic spirals.
The pattern of the strange loop is by no means a conclusive reading even of the “Unravelled Yearnings”, but rather a suggestive interpretation that can open our eyes to the total effect of the poems. The hero of “Li sao” or “Far Roaming” only roams far in the physical universe, and cannot be said to have transcended physical being, but there is at least some kind of consolation in the description of one's own entanglement, and a satisfaction in the effective crafting of one's ci. The tangled poetic forms of the “Nine Avowals” have a cumulative effect which seems to be part of their intended function. The speaker repeats his thoughts, reflects on them, resumes consideration of his plight from different perspectives, employing various analogies. This layered kind of structure, in practice, is one reason that the authorship of Chuci poems poses so many problems. They so often enact a kind of conscious reconsideration of the basic Qu Yuan situation that it is very easy to imagine that the author is not Qu Yuan but another poet, imaginatively sharing the plaints of Qu Yuan.
Consider, for instance, these lines from the very end of “Grieving at the Whirlwind”, one of the pieces whose attribution to Qu Yuan seems particularly tenuous:Footnote 89
驟諫君而不聽兮 Repeatedly I counsel my sovereign but he does not hear –
重任石之何益 Again I shoulder a stone but for what good?
This concluding couplet is problematic because chong ren shi 重任石, “to shoulder a stone again”, can hardly be understood in the voice of Qu Yuan, since it would imply the improbable feat of drowning himself a second time. A variant reverses the order of the first two characters, which makes the phrase more easily placed in Qu Yuan's voice,Footnote 90 but here as so often, the lectio difficilior is more interesting: to drown along with a heavy stone again is indeed the question facing many of the poets who imitated Qu Yuan, but not Qu Yuan himself. Thus there is an easy transference, as simple as the transposition of two characters, between Qu Yuan and a later imitator.
If we take seriously the formal and semantic complexity of the poems, their multilayered structures, their loops and repetition and self-reference, then ultimately we can only conclude that their protagonist is not exactly Qu Yuan himself, but a simulation of Qu Yuan into which we can enter imaginatively by reading the poem. There is no way to free Qu Yuan from his entanglement with the world, but transmuting ethical and emotional bonds into formal and aesthetic ones is itself a kind of liberation.
