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The Protean World of Sanqu Songs

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The Protean World of Sanqu Songs The Protean World of Sanqu Songs PATRICIA SIEBER Arguably, sanqu 散曲 songs may be the most misunderstood lyrical genre in the Chinese literary corpus. Sanqu is often thought of as aYuan dynasty genre given 1 to a witty world-weariness (bishi wanshi 避世玩世), written by “frustrated 2 souls” (shiyizhe de ge 失意者的歌) who, alienated from the centers of power, wrote sanqu as thinly veiled critiques of contemporary affairs. Partly, such an emphasis on sanqu as a Yuan form is a legacy of how sanqu was incorporated into the literary mainstream in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Late Qing and early Republican critics and practicing songwriters—notably, Wu Mei 吳梅 (1884–1939), Ren Ne 任訥 (1894–1991), and Lu Qian 盧前 (1905– 1951)—sought to wrest the genre from near oblivion through the creation of 3 anthologies and monographs. While Ren Ne highlighted the songs of Yuan playwrights, Lu Qian insisted on the importance of song suites from both the 4 Yuan and Ming periods. Meanwhile, May Fourth critics such as Xie Wuliang 謝 無量 (1884–1964) and Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸 (1898–1958), preoccupied with breaking free from the yoke of foreign imperialism and with creating a literary genealogy for the modern vernacular, defined sanqu as aYuan dynasty genre, the 5 rich corpus of Ming sanqu notwithstanding. Whatever limitations such pio- neering scholarship had, it nevertheless laid a philological foundation for further studies in the Chinese-speaking world and, to a lesser degree, in Japan and the West, while privileging a small corpus of both single stanza songs (xiaoling 小令) and song suites (santao 散套) as literary masterpieces and textbook classics destined for modern consumption. Thus, in contrast to many other orally connected genres of middle and late imperial times, sanqu succeeded in moving, The Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture • 8:1 • April 2021 DOI 10.1215/23290048-8898583 • Ó 2021 by Duke University Press 1 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jclc/article-pdf/8/1/1/923116/1sieber.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 2 JOURNAL of CHINESE LITERATURE and CULTURE albeit in historiographically overdetermined ways, into the modern canon of traditional Chinese literature. In North American sinology, James I. Crump and Wayne Schlepp, through studies and translations, began to draw the genre into the ambit of scholarly inquiry and, in the case of Crump, to train a new generation of scholars with interests in what we might call “mixed-register” forms of literature. In the Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, Stephen H. West, one of these erst- while students and now a doyen of middle imperial literature in his own right, authoritatively laid out some of the paradoxical attributes of sanqu songs. Calling sanqu “a new form of hybrid poetry,” West noted that as early as the Song dynasty, a writer observed the permeability of socioliterary boundaries when it came to songs: “My father once said that he was a visitor in the capital during the last days of the Northern Song, and the vulgar in the streets and alleyways often sang foreign songs. The language was extremely coarse but all of the men of 6 worth sang them.” As West observed, sanqu songs, their rapid social ascent during the late Jin and Yuan notwithstanding, typically retained their colloquial features—binomial expressions, long three- and four-syllable onomatopoeic phrases, and extrametrical phrases, to name a few—no matter who wrote them. In West’s view, this ability to “reach across many social boundaries” gave the songs “broad appeal to a wide literate audience both inside and outside elite 7 circles.” It is in this spirit that this special issue aims to showcase a body of original research to expand our understanding of how sanqu traversed social, literary, religious, political, and historiographical terrains to bring the genre within the scholarly mainstream of Chinese literary studies. In the inaugural issue of the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture,I put forth the idea that sanqu songs were, pace Yuan critic Zhou Deqing 周德清 8 (1277–1365), “everybody’s song.” The articles gathered here do much to flesh out the many “everybodies” that accounted for the genre’sefflorescence in the Yuan and Ming periods. Furthermore, as many of these articles demonstrate, the genre not only reached many kinds of audiences but also, in the process, developed new functionalities. As the articles demonstrate, in doing so the genre often broke down boundaries between popular, ritual, court, and literati realms; between indigenous and foreign practitioners; between musical, literary, and communicative uses; and between different literary genres. To be sure, not every Yuan critic was equally sanguine about the intermixing of different kinds of sanqu and other literary forms, and some sought to delineate, as Shi-peWang has noted, divergent standards and different genre groupings for the most common 9 Yuan term to reference sanqu, that is, the so-called yuefu 樂府. Importantly, no definitive agreement was reached, and as a result, as Ye Ye has observed, in the Ming dynasty sanqu songs continued to encroach on literary terrain previously Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jclc/article-pdf/8/1/1/923116/1sieber.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Sieber • The Protean World of Sanqu Songs 3 occupied by relatively more respected forms, such ci song-lyrics or ritual hymns 10 (yuezhang 樂章). The articles in this issue are less interested in pursuing traditionalist questions of stylistics or Marxist approaches of social critique; instead, they seek to contextualize the prodigious uses of the form across many kinds of settings: the court, the circles of professional performers, the realm of scholar-officials and literati, the world of publishing venues, and religious institutions, to name some of the most salient. In the first part of this special issue, the articles attend to one of the distinctive features of sanqu songs: their close relationship with the literary techniques of the theater, the contemporaneous corpus of plays, and the lives and afterlives of theater professionals and playwrights. All three articles in this section demonstrate that Yuan sanqu laid a foundation for approaches to the- atrical narration, audience participation, and modalities of authorship that resonated through the late imperial period and beyond. Certain Yuan and early Ming sanqu songs became a platform for reflections on the newly constituted medium of mature zaju 雜劇 theater. Strikingly, such ruminations did not take the form of an evaluative ranking of the sort Li Qingzhao 李清照 (1084–1150s) created for ci song-lyrics; instead, such appraisals were refracted through the prism of other literary genres thoroughly reworked and embedded within the songs themselves. Such modalities ranged from historical assessments (zan 11 讚) and descriptive odes (yongwu 詠物) to parodical skits (zaban 雜扮), attesting to the protean nature of the sanqu song tradition and to its ability to assimilate genres high and low. Wilt L. Idema’s article in this issue shows that modern scholarly attention to the dramatic aspect of the sanqu songs owed much to Tanaka Kenji 田中謙二 (1912–2002), one of the towering figures of Japanese sinology in the realm of mixed-register literature. To highlight Tanaka’s contribution, Idema’s article focuses on an exceptionally long song suite, “The Complaint of the Ox” 牛訴冤 (Niu suyuan) by Yao Shouzhong 姚守中 (fl. ca. 1260/70–ca. 1320/30), a play- wright, songwriter, and nephew of Yao Sui 姚燧 (1238–1313), one of the most prominent Yuan dynasty officials and a sanqu writer himself. In contrast to Chinese scholarship that had looked askance at this wordy oddity, Tanaka called it the “ultimate sanqu song.” For one, Tanaka identified the “vernacular” and its associations with “the irreverent, the ironic, the vulgar, and the bawdy,” on the one hand, and the use of impersonation of humble characters, on the other, as hallmarks of the form. Accordingly, Tanaka laid the foundation for us to rec- ognize, in Idema’s formulation, that “the liberty to assume any voice, female or male, high or low,...enabled the authors of sanqu to expand the thematic repertoire of sanqu far beyond that of ci and to explore linguistic registers that had been inaccessible to earlier poets.” For another, in contrast to earlier yongwu Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jclc/article-pdf/8/1/1/923116/1sieber.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 4 JOURNAL of CHINESE LITERATURE and CULTURE 詠物 poetry,Tanaka also noted that sanqu not only bring the unpleasant aspects of life to the fore but also express them in the first person. Thus, in contrast to Tang shi poems that use the poet’s voice to relay the plight of abused oxen in what was typically read as an allegory for the literatus’s own predicament or in contradistinction to religious tales about oxen laying plaint before the Judge of the Underworld, “Niu suyuan” speaks directly in the oxen’s voice throughout, a feature underlined, as Idema points out, by a rhyming category that evokes the mooing of cows. In its witty adoption of earlier forms of lament, such a song blurred the boundaries between allegory and morality tale. Karin Myhre’s article on one of the iconic song suites, Sui Jingchen’s 睢 景臣 (ca. 1257–ca. 1320) “Han Gaozu Returns to His Home Village” (Gaozu huanxiang 高祖還鄉), takes up the issue of impersonation and its epistemo- logical consequences in detail. Myhre notes that, on account of its originality (xinqi 新奇), Sui’s piece won a songwriting competition on the title theme. Resisting the dominant scholarly mode of treating the village narrator as a coherent, historically localizable voice, Myhre argues that the narration is subtly cued as that of an actor onstage.
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