Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies, No. 1 July 1999, pp.69-102 College of Humanities and Social Sciences National Dong Hwa University

An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica

Chen-chen Tseng Department of English National Dong Hwa University

Abstract

This paper argues that "Ju song" allows us to read it as a monad—an allegory on allegory. Like other allegories, it teaches and delights. It contains in its first sixteen lines a symmetrical bipartite structure of an enclosed circle; the closure, once completed, reopens itself. This structural device, together with the repeated epithets, directs the reader to turn his linear course of reading into a spiral one. It proves that poetry is to be found not in a static product but in the on-going process, with the reader joining the poet in the quest, which, in this case, is simultaneously ethic and aesthetic. At the core of its fruit image hides Qu Yuan’s gender poetics. Concerning the poet’s interaction with reality, to achieve a complete mimesis, i.e., to represent discordia concors-- to yolk together unity and diversity, antithetical contrariety is locally staged in this allegorical poem through syntactical juxtaposition of opposites. Consequently, “Ju song” turns out to be an allegory on correspondence as well as disparity between Nature and culture with its last four lines specifically dealing with the different effect of decay and death on vegetation and humanity. When read as writing attempted at the periphery to emulate and challenge the center, “Ju song” is not only Qu Yuan’s ars poetica but also a political manifesto.

Keywords: allegory, reopening of closure, antithetical contrariety, gender poetics, writing from the periphery

69 Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies

An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica

The All-Encompassing

The Great Application mutates the form, While the Real Substance fills the content. From the Void to the Identity, Imagination churns to create a magnificent whole. It embodies myriad things, And encompasses the Universe. Immensely elusive like the rising clouds, It is as far-reaching as the mighty wind. Transported out of physical phenomena, It conceives the aureole of immanent truth. If not hold ineluctable with strenuous will, Coming into being will be the Infinity.

雄渾 大用外腓，真體內充。反虛入渾，積健為雄。 具備萬物，橫絕太空。荒荒油雲，寥寥長風。 超以象外，得其環中。持之非強，來之無窮。

-- Sikong Tu 司空圖 (837-908), Kinds of Poetry 詩品.

1. Introduction

"Ju song" 橘頌 (Ode on the Orange Tree) can be regarded as the prelude to "Li sao." It is commonly accepted as the earliest piece among the twenty-five extant poems traditionally attributed to Qu Yuan.1 As a short parable or allegory,

1 Three verse styles are found in Qu Yuan's poetry. They are distinguished by the location of the 70 An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica it distinguishes itself among Qu Yuan's oeuvre for looking like a manifesto written by the poet in his youth to pronounce his life-long commitment: heavenly mandated to serve his country, he would exert himself to carry out this destiny in the most compassionate and disinterested spirit. This virtue later becomes the tragic core of "Li sao." However, "Ju song" foreshadows "Li sao" not only in moral but also in form. The allegorical device it employs is later expanded into a grand scale in "Li sao." More significantly, its symmetrical bipartite structure is the prototype of the literary universe Qu Yuan was to construct in "Li sao."2 And, the fruited orange tree, when read as an emblem of allegory, stands out as a concrete image representing to the world the poetics of the first author in the Chinese literary history who wrote extensively to achieve a distinct lyric voice. Projected into "Ju song" is Qu Yuan's heartfelt admiration for the unique culture of his homeland, the state of Chu in the South. His poetic genius was nourished by it and in return helped refine its distinction from the Zhou culture that had occupied the center stage of Chinese civilization for hundreds of years. Thus from a peripheral corner of the civilized world, amid all kinds of political turmoil, Qu Yuan unremittingly sought to create in his poetry a coherent vision that could integrate the mythical imagination of his native land with the institutionalized ethics of the central kingdom. Literary history proves that his works did later evolve into a new vortical center to attract and inspire major poets of the subsequent eras, and thus defined the primary countenance of Chinese poetry.

breathing particle xi 兮 in a line of two distiches: (1) the Jiu ge 九歌 style: xi is inserted amid each distich; (2) the Li sao 離騷 style: xi appears at the end of the first distich; (3) the Ju song 橘 頌 style, xi marks the end of a line. Of these three verse styles, the Ju Song style is the closest to that of the Shi Jing in having four syllables in a distich. This is taken as one of the evidences to argue that "Ju song" is the earliest work of Qu Yuan. Also, if we consider the young man in the poem to be Qu Yuan's self-portrait, this should be an intrinsic evidence convincing enough. Moreover, the unique absence of dejection in "Ju song" indicates that it must have been written before any political defeat afflicted the poet. For a brief survey of critics' views about the possible date of this poem, see Nei Shiqiao 聶石樵 Qu Yuan lungao 屈原論稿 (Beijing: Renmin, 1982), pp. 111-112. For whether "Ju song" was written by Qu Yuan, read Tang Bingzheng's 湯炳正 strong argument in favor of the positive judgment in "Guanyu 'Jiu zhang' hou si pian zhenwei de jige wenti" 關於九章後四篇真偽的幾個問題, Sichuan shiyuan xuebao 四川師院學報, 1977, no. 4. 2 See “Mythopoesis in ‘Li sao’: In Search of a Cosmic Form,” Chpater Three of my dissertation Mythopoesis Historicized: Qu Yuan’s Poetry and Its Legacy, Seattle: University of Washington, 1992, pp. 80-154. 71 Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies

2. An Allegory on Allegory

Indeed, reading "Ju song" with a close look at its allegorical device and figurative language, we cannot avoid feeling that the image of the orange tree is created in a way to celebrate not only the virtue it symbolizes but also the verbal art that creates a literary universe to project a "speaking picture" for this virtue. Wrought into this image are Qu Yuan's reflections upon (1)the coming into being of the poem - how the creative mind interacts with the given reality, including nature, history, and texts, to conceive an image; (2)the nature of the poem - behind the organic unity of content and form lurks the beauty of multifold diversity; and (3)the function of the poem -- its aesthetic and ethic effects are indivisible. In view of this, to say that "Ju song" is Qu Yuan's "Ars Poetica" is not far-fetched. From the very beginning, ever since he was impassioned to become the lyric expression of his home country, Qu Yuan had probed deeply into at least three aspects of this unique task as listed above. No wonder that he was later able to achieve so greatly as we all have witnessed from the magnificent corpus he left us. "Ju song" is exactly what is defined by Northrop Frye as a monad, a paradigm that fully fulfills the potentials of its genre and thus can serve as a synecdoche of the literary universe, "a microcosm of all literature, an individual manifestation of the total order of words."3 At the first glimpse, this short allegory is so terse and lucid that no further interpretation seems necessary. First, it sets up the fruited orange tree as a symbol; then, it proceeds to tell us in the plain language what virtue it symbolizes; at the end, it exhorts us to practice this virtue by following the human paradigm it sets up for us. It is so simple. But a more careful reading reveals that the poem is not merely about unswerving dedication to one's own destiny; intriguingly, it is also about writing as an allegorical art.4 Then, how does the poem itself direct

3 See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Priceton: Princeton University Press,1957), p. 121. Following is a fuller quotation to prove that in Frye's view a short poem can also function as a monad: “But the anagogic perspective is not to be confined only to works that seem to take in everything, for the principle of anagogy is not simply that everything is the subject of a poem. The sense of the infinitely varied unity of poetry may come, not only explicitly from an apocalyptic epic, but implicitly from any poem.… Thus the center of the literary universe is whatever poem we happen to be reading. One step further, and the poem appears as a microcosm of all literature, an individual manifestation of the total order of words. Anagogically, then, the symbol is a monad, all symbols being united in a single infinite and eternal verbal symbol which is, as dianoia, the Logos, and as mythos, total creative act.” 4 In the Western tradition during the Romantic period allegory was once a derogatory term used 72 An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica the reader to read it as an allegory on allegory? To make the illustration possible, we shall begin with the simplest definition of allegory. Allegory is a symbolic way of expression which seeks to represent spiritual, psychological or abstract intellectual concepts in terms of the material or the concrete. 5 We may follow I. A. Richards to call the concrete image "vehicle," and the conveyed concept "tenor."6 Although allegory can be "dark conceit"7 intended to "say one thing and means another," all the disguises it uses, however, are actually guides to help the selected readers construe its secret messages. Therefore, more than other symbolic forms, allegory is contrived to dictate the reader's response. Since its ultimate goal is always to effect a vivid understanding, quite often, in order to avoid misreading, it would bring the implied meaning to the surface by providing commentary in the text. "Ju song" is this type of poem. It contains eighteen lines. Each line is composed of two tetrasyllabic distiches and concludes with the meaningless “carrier sound” xi. In the first eight lines, the allegorical nature of the orange tree as a symbol has already been fully developed:

by poets, such as Coleridge and Goethe, to make distinguished the unique merits of symbol. Hazard Adams sums up this view for us: "for Coleridge, allegory is a man-made thing - a verbal or representational image. Literary or other artistic symbols, on the other hand, seem to be direct representatives of specific instances of the intercourse of mind with phenomena." See his Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic (Tallahasse: University press of Florida, 1983), p. 75. In our post-modern era, the epoch-breaking awareness of the mediate function of language has led to a new critical theory that demythifies the potential intercourse between mind and phenomena zealously applauded by the Romanticists. All literary creations now become allegorical: a pursuit of signs. The discourse that sets forth this change of climate is Paul De Man's "The Rhetoric of Temporality" in Charles S. Singleton ed., Interpretation: Theory and Practice (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1969). In the Chinese tradition, the same bias in favour of symbol also occurred in the critical theories that upheld the unity of qing 情 (feeling) and jing 景 (natural scene) as the quintessence of poetry. For the latest study of the historical development of theories in this strain, see Xiao Chi 肖馳 , Zhongguo shige meixue 中國詩歌美學 (Beijing: Beijing Daxue, 1986), and Cai Yingjun 蔡英俊 , Bixing wuse yu qingjing jiaorong 比興物色與 情景交融 (Taipei: Daan, 1986). The term "allegory" in my study carries the post-modern concept: it is almost a synonym of "literature." The performance of a poem is reviewed not only from the perspective of the author -- how the creative mind interacts with phenomena, but also from the perspective of the reader -- how the poem means to a reading public in a specific cultural context. 5 For a definition as universal as possible, I resort to The New Encyclopaedia Britanica Vol. 1 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britanica, 1987), p. 277. 6 See I. A. Richards, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1936, Chapters 5-6. 7 A term taken from the title of Edwin Honig's excellent study on the allegorical genre: Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (Providence: Brown University Press, 1959). 73 Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies

Fairest of all the august earth and the divine heaven's trees, the orange came and settled here, Commanded by the Heaven not to move, but grow only in the South. Deep-rooted, firm and hard to shift: showing in this its singleness of purpose; Its leaves of green and pure white blossoms, so profuse, delight the eye of the beholder, And the multi-layered branches covered by spines so sharp, and the fine round fruits - Green with yellow intermingled to make a pattern of gleaming brightness; Gorgeous without, but pure white within, it is of the kind that can bear to accomplish its job! Rich and beautiful, its loveliness is not impaired by any blemish.8

后皇嘉樹，橘徠服兮。 受命不遷，生南國兮。 深固難徙，更壹志兮。 綠葉素榮，紛其可喜兮。 曾枝剡棘，圓果摶兮。 青黃雜糅，文章爛兮。 精色內白，類可任兮。 紛縕宜修，姱而不醜兮。

In these lines, both the vehicle (the literal, i. e., the text) and the tenor (the metaphorical, i. e., the commentary) are presented. The vehicle is composed of the lines that describe and eulogize the fruited tree. The tenor is made up with the rest of the lines that anthropomorphize the tree, such as "Commanded by the Heaven not to move" 受命不遷, "showing in this his singleness of purpose" 更 壹志兮 , and "it is of the kind that can bear to do its job " 類可任兮. In other words, wrought in these eight lines is a complete allegory already. The poem

8 I adopt David Hawkes' translation of "Ju song" in this study. However, I modify it in some places to accommodate my own reading of the poem. Hawkes' translation is by far the best in English language. See his Ch'u Tz'u: the Songs of the South, pp. 76-77.

74 An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica could have stopped here, if it wants. But it continues. It seems that it has more to accomplish. It feels the need to explain further what the tenor is all about -- i. e., it wants to show us how to read it as an allegory. In the next six lines, in order to spell out the virtue symbolized, it stays away entirely from figurative language. Instead, it resorts to the plain language of moral discourse:

Oh, your young resolution has something different from the rest. Alone and unmoving you stand. How can one not admire you! Deep-rooted, hard to shift: from there you reach out seeking but not for gain. Awake to this world's ways, alone you stand, unyielding against the vulgar tide. You have sealed your heart; you guard yourself with care; have never fallen into error. Holding a nature free from selfishness, you are the peer of heaven and earth.

嗟爾幼志，有以異兮： 獨立不遷，豈不可喜兮。 深固難徙，廓其無求兮。 蘇世獨立，橫而不流兮。 閉心自慎，不終失過兮。 秉德無私，參天地兮 。

To bring the tenor to the fore, the poem directly repeats the key phrases that function as tenor in the previous section, such as "unmoving" 不遷 "delightful" or "admirable" 可喜, and "deep-rooted, hard to shift" 深固難徙. It is as if the poem is telling us, "Virtue is the flesh of my symbol. Don't miss it! To make me work, you have to peel off the vehicle to get to the juicy part of the tenor. This is what I am all about. Here it is! Dig in it. Don't ever deviate." With this advice taken, does it mean that once the tenor is reached, the vehicle can be disposed? Certainly not! Literature is against such a split and has a way to overcome it, although reading in a linear course cannot avoid producing this split. Qu Yuan was aware of this deficiency, but he knew that

75 Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies literary language itself was the remedy, and as a poet it was his job to induce an adequate reading out of his reader. The repetition used to highlight the tenor was itself the solution. It creates a mirroring effect. As a result, the reader experiences from this device a mutual illumination between vehicle and tenor. His linear reading is arrested at the end of this section. It then coils back and becomes circular and serpent-like with his attention moving back and forth between vehicle and tenor in search of the possible analogies between them, to the extent that they become commingling in his perception.9 They are united by multiple correspondences into an organic whole,10 exactly as the image of the orange fruit portrays:

. . . and the fine round fruits-- Green with yellow intermingled to make a pattern of gleaming brightness; Gorgeous without, but pure white within, it is of the kind that can bear to accomplish its job! Rich and beautiful, its loveliness is not impaired by any blemish.

It is hard not to detect from this image a generic description of the allegory

9 As Coleridge described it, the proper course of reading should be like the motion of a serpent: at every step the reader "pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward." See Biographia Literaria, Chapter 14 in Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge , ed. Donald A. Stauffer (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 268. 10 I am aware that the post-modern critique, due to the influence of Deconstructionism, does not favor to discuss literature in this terms. The Derridaic concept of differance makes it impossible for the critics to go on believing in the autonomous unity of a poem, especially in the structural sense. My approach is not necessarily against this view. For me, to say a poem is an organic whole is different from saying the poet intends to create in his poem an organic whole. Like the post-modern critics, I no longer believe in the organic unity of a poem, but undeniably, such a belief used to be a major concept of the Aristotilian poetics, and also of the Chines Classical poetics. A structural analysis of a poem from the classical period therefore would be insufficient without looking at the poet's strong impulse to create totality in his poem. Once this is done, then we can proceed to examine how writing itself may have directed the poet to reopen the closure with or without his being aware. Murray Krieger's discourse on this aspect of poetics has inspired many of my thoughts in this study. See his A Reopening of Closure: Organicism Against Itself (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Out of my reading of Qu Yuan's poetry, I reach a conclusion: "Ju song" represents Qu Yuan's primary stage of seeking to create an autonomous universe in his poem, while "Li sao" represents the secondary. In the secondary stage, although the same structural endeavour was continued, it nevertheless underwent an extensive revision. "Li sao" is a poem of double efforts. In this masterpiece, Qu Yuan sought to construct and deconstruct at the same time. He made constant revision to make his quest forever revolve in progress. 76 An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica itself. Even before Qu Yuan's time, the epithet wenzhang 文章 (varigated pattern) had already acquired a literary connotation of "verbal skills" or "eloquence,"11 although it is used literally here to describe the motley pattern of the tree bedecked with fruits of green and golden colors.12 So, all together these fourteen lines form a complete closure - a coming into being of an allegory with vehicle and tenor commingling with each other to form an organic whole. This observation can be further verified by an echoing device that creates an envelop structure for these lines: tiandi 天地 (heaven and earth) concludes the fourteenth line by recapitulating houhuang 后皇 (the august earth and the divine heaven) of the beginning line.13 Thus, the main body of the poem proves itself to contain a symmetrical bipartite structure in the shape of an enclosed circle, in a way an imitation of the orange. Line 14 that brings this allegory to completion also sums up the autonomous unity achieved in this poem : "not less than a peer of heaven and earth" 參天地兮 -- i. e., a microcosm.

3. Allegory Delights and Teaches: From the Reader’s Perspective

The nature of allegory determines the way it affects the reader. That is to say, the unity of vehicle and tenor, form and content, results in a unity of effects -- the allegory, "the speaking picture of virtue," delights and teaches at the same time. In fact, reading "Ju song" as an allegory on allegory, we find that the last four lines of the poem are written in a way to deal with the unity of aesthetic and ethic effects that the poem itself wishes to achieve:

11 An example can be found in "Gongye Chang pian" 公冶長篇, Lun yu 論語 (The Analects) : "Futze zhi wenzhang ke de er wen ye" 夫子之文章可得而聞也 (Your Master's eloquence has manifested itself). See Lun yu (Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1936), 5.4a. For an etymological survey to retrieve the semantic history of wen 文 and other related terms, see Chow Tse-tsung, "Ancient Chinese Views on Literature, the Tao and Their Relationship," Chinese Literature Essays Articles Reviews, 1:1 (Jan. 1979), pp. 3-29. 12 To me, line 6 can have a double meaning. It can describe (1) the orange fruits of green and golden colors cluster on the same branch or all over the tree, and (2) green and golden colors both appear on the same fruit. Most critics only give the first reading. Cf. Jiang Liangfu 姜亮夫 Qu Yuan fu jiaozhu 屈原賦校注 (Beijing: Renmin, 1957), p. 494. 13 "Hou, the august earth; huang, the divine heaven" 后，后土也。皇，皇天也。 This is the Han scholar Wang Yi's annotation. See his "Jiu zhang zhangju" 九章章句 in Ccbz, 4.29a. For a discussion of various terminal features in the English poetic tradition, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1968), pp. 151-195. 77 Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies

I would fade as you fade with the passing years, and ever be your friend. Fair and luxuriant, but never over-reaching, you stand upright in your well-ordered form. Though young in years, fit to be a teacher of men; In your acts like Po Yi: I set you up as my model.

願歲并謝，與長友兮。 淑離不淫，梗其有理兮。 年歲雖少，可師長兮。 行比伯夷，置以為像兮。

Apparently, the first two lines refer back to the fruited orange tree, the vehicle of the allegory; while the last two recall the young man of the tenor section.14 The poem returns to the tree image to reiterate the virtue it symbolizes: the young man's life-long dedication to his destiny. To him, this dedication feels like an endearing friendship that can delight and refine his soul as his love of Nature can. So is the effect of allegory on "its" reader. As an image, the literary form of the allegory, like the fair shape of the orange tree, "delights" our eye. I ought to replace the neutral "its" of the previous sentence with "her," since the phrase shuli buyin 淑離不淫 is usually used to describe the female, and I believe that Qu Yuan did want his reader to sense the analogy between the beauty of a poem and that of a woman. W. B. Yeats once remarked, "You cannot give a body to something that moves beyond the senses, unless your words are as subtle, as complex, as full of mysterious life, as the body of a flower or of a woman." 15 As great a myth-maker as Qu Yuan, Yeats said it all for his predecessor in the Chinese tradition. Not to our surprise, a female body is indeed implied in line 7 of "Ju song." Let us try to explain this by solving a crux.16 Ren 任 as a word picked

14 So far as I know, Sadao Takeji 竹治貞夫 is the only other scholar to notice that this envoi-like section repeats the same bipartitie structure of the main body of the poem. See his Soji kenkyu 楚辭研究 (Tokyo: Kazama, 1978), pp. 776-777. 15 Ideas of Good and Evil (1900), p. 164. 16 For the function of the crux in bringing out the significance of a poem, see Michael Riffaterre, 78 An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica by Qu Yuan to depict the virtue symbolized by the interior of the orange fruit is somewhat peculiar that critics cannot come up with a satisfactory interpretation, although most of them agree that the word may mean "to be entrusted with a worthy task."17 Of course, it may, but the uneasiness of this interpretation invites us to ponder over a possibility: ren 任 was specifically picked because it could evoke "ren" 妊 (to conceive a child) as an associative connotation. Indeed, such a reading is highly possible. If the previous lines describe the cyclical growth of the orange tree from the moment it took root, to the seasons it blooms and bears fruits, then when line 7 comes up, its turn should be to describe the pips. In view of this, the "whiteness" that describes the inside of the orange fruit is meant to describe the seeds. If so, then this line has a double function. Allegorically, it praises the male virtue -- trustworthiness. Literally, it describes the reproductive power concealed in the seeds. The female virtue -- to bear child to perpetuate the species -- is simultaneously praised, although subtly yields its prominence to that of the male virtue. Once this association is evoked, we cannot resist detecting an implication of sexual act in line 8. Fenyun 紛縕 is synonymous to yinyun 絪縕 which in Yi Jing 易經 (The Book of Change) means "coitus": "tiandi yinyun, wanwu huachun" 天地絪縕，萬物化醇 (Once Heaven and Earth copulated with each other, the myriad things came into being and proliferated on and on).18 The sexual implication in this line later reappears in "shuli buyin " 淑離不淫 of line 16. All these subtle echoes testify to my argument that to Qu Yuan, a poem is like a woman, and to read a poem is analogous to know a woman. A scholar in Mainland China who has discerned a sexual connotation in lines 7-8 through an anthropological approach would side with my argument. With many contextual evidences, he tries to establish "Ju song" as a ritual song in praise of the orange tree offered in the communal "lei"

Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). According to Riffaterre, it requires only ordinary linguistic competence to understand the poem's "meaning," but the reader requires "literary competence" to deal with the frequent "ungrammaticalities" encountered in reading a poem. Faced with the stumbling-block of ungrammaticalness, the reader is forced, during the process of reading, to uncover a second (higher) level of significance which will explain the ungrammatical features of the text. Cf. Raman Selden, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (Lexington: Kentucky, 1989), p.127. 17 Cf. Wang Yi's commentary in Ccbz, 4.29b-30a, and Wang Fuzhi’s 王夫之 (1619-1692) in Chu ci tongshi 楚辭通釋 (Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1959), p.92. 18 "Xi ci" 繫辭, Zhou Yi zhengyi 周易正義 (Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1936), 8.8b. 79 Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies

類 sacrifice to pray for the perpetual well-being of the people.19 With the poem as delightful as a woman's body, we could have been enticed to lust after her, were it not for the refining power of her chaste beauty (i. e., a well-ordered form with a content meant to teach virtue). Consequently, our delight remains decorous. Instead of lusting after the form and losing sight of the content, we "make friends with" the complete image. In other words, keeping a close eye on its moral (li 理 , the "poetic logic"), we enter the physical world it depicts with all our senses open for intimate contact. "To fade as you fade" -- that is, immersed in a total communion with Nature, our mind has enjoyed aesthetic pleasure to the utmost. To read a poem therefore is not too much different from to enjoy nature or to know a woman.20 (Do not lines 15-16 read almost like a lover's discourse?) We come back refined by pleasure. Hegel's statement on the central notion of classical idealistic aesthetics of the Western tradition can be cited here to paraphrase Qu Yuan's notion, regardless the possible ontological dichotomy between the two traditions:

. . . thought is materialized, and matter is not extraneously determined by thought but is itself free in so far as the natural, sensuous, affectional possess their measure, purpose, and harmony in themselves. While perception and feeling are raised to the university of the spirit, thought not only renounces its hostility against nature but enjoys itself in nature. Feeling, joy, and pleasure are sanctioned and justified so that nature and freedom, sensuousness and reason, find in their unity their right and their gratification.21

While the vehicle delights, the tenor teaches. How can the tenor teach? By setting up a "picture" (xiang 像 ); in this case, a picture of the young man who, acting like the great ancient sage Po Yi 伯夷, is himself the very incarnation of virtue. "Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of

19 Yao Xingyuan 姚興元 "Ju song xinquan" 橘頌新詮,Wenxue ican 文學遺產, 1972, no. 2. 20 Susan Sontag argued, some years ago, that "Beyond formalism, we need an erotics of art." See her Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966), p. 14. 21Georg W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F. P. B. Osmaton (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920), I, p. 83. 80 An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica greatness," Whitehead once said.22 Poetry, with its power to figure forth the habitual vision of greatness, makes moral education possible. In Longinus’ words, "For those personages, presenting themselves to us and inflaming our ardor and as it were illuminating our path, will carry our minds in a mysterious way to the high standards of sublimity which are imaged with us."23 As for this function of poetry, Qu Yuan's idea revealed in "Ju song" is in accordance with the following statement of Sir Philip Sidney's:

Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth -- to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture; with this end, to teach and delight.24

When "Ju song" concludes, a "speaking picture" is implanted in the reader's mind to give him the habitual vision of greatness. In fact, the poem itself is a speaking picture on speaking picture, an allegory on allegory.

4. Ethic Quest and Aesthetic Quest Coincide: From the Poet’s Perspective

Up to now, in the process of illustrating "Ju song" as an allegory on allegory, we have discussed, all from the reader's perspective, the form and function of allegory as this short piece discloses. As for the coming into being of allegory, i. e., the interaction between the creative mind and the given reality, as well as the poet's maneuvering of language to make this happen, does this poem provide us with some clues? Of course, it does, and with profound insight. Once we start

22 Quoted by W. Jackson Bate in The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, p. 128. 23 Longinus, On the Sublime trans. W. R. Roberts, in Hazard Adams ed., Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), p. 86. 24 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, in op. cit., p. 158. Like Qu Yuan, Sidney was also aware that poetry's appeal is alluring, nearly, in fact, erotic. He said in the same essay: "For as the image of each action stirreth and instructeth the mind, so the lofty image of such worthies most inflameth the mind with desire." As a Renaissance Christian Humanist, Sidney placed poetry above philosophy because it is more "moving," or more persuasive. He also placed it above history because it imitates a more golden goodness than mere fact. To him, the ultimate value of poetry lays in its superior rhetorical power to move people to take that goodness in hand which without delight they might not merely overlook, but actively fear." See Maureen Quilligan, Milton's Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 33-34. 81 Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies to unravel this, we are approaching the ontological core of Qu Yuan's poetics. We can have a glimpse of Qu Yuan's creative process by inferring how virtue is realized in the human realm according to "Ju song," for in this poem ethic quest and aesthetic quest coincide.25 Not unusual for a mind saturated with religious piety, to the young Qu Yuan, it is almost irrefutable that virtue means carrying out the destiny assigned to one by Heaven. But, there is a prerequisite: one has to find out what one's destiny is. The process of discovering this destiny is centripetal. It starts with opening up one's whole being to meet the universe and eternity; then, through circumspect reflection upon one's position at a specific time and place, one discovers one's own unique destiny in a concrete historical situation. As soon as this unique destiny is perceived, the life-long commitment begins. With the temptations of the world encroaching from all around, to carry out this destiny, one has to be as disinterested and compassionate as possible. This process of aligning one's heart with the heart of the universe is centrifugal. From centripetal back to centrifugal, "Ju song" develops in accordance with this process. In terms of space, the poem begins from circumference. "The Queenly Earth and the Kingly Heaven" evokes the whole universe to our mind's eye. It is followed by the South, the poet's home land, and then gradually closes up to an orange tree growing in this limited realm with our attention finally focusing on an orange fruit. The same centripetal process is repeated in the tenor section that describes the young man's moral quest: from "you reach out seeking but not for gain," to "alone, you stand, unyielding against the vulgar tide" and finally to "You have sealed your heart; you guard yourself with care." The sealed heart, like the orange fruit, becomes the center of our attention. It is a concrete image of a soul totally dedicated to the divine call exactly like an Arcadian counterpart in "Song of Songs": "a garden enclosed, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed,"26 a pastoral image of devoted love. If as we have indicated,

25 Cf. the comment Ernst Robert Curtius made on Proust. In his opinion, the artist morality is related to his manner of perceiving: "For such an artist, his life signifies nothing else than the indispensable organ of perception: precisely what the experimental apparatus is to the research scientist. It is this sacrifice of one's life in the service of perception and formation that constitutes the morality of the artist." See Lothar Helbing and Claus Victor Bock eds., Friedrich Gundolf-Briefwechsel mit Herbert Steiner und Ernst Robert Curtius, Amsterdam, 1963, p. 279f. English translation is from Alexander Gelley, "Ernst Robert Curtius: Topology and Critical Method," Velocities of Change, ed. Richard Macksey (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 274. 26 Sg. 4:12. 82 An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica sexual consummation is implied in the image of the orange fruit, we should expect that certain eroticism be carried over by this parallel to the image of the sealed heart. This image of the pent-up passion, like those metaphysical conceits of English seventeenth century poetry, is full of pulsing energy. In view of this, the following comment by two critics on Milton's moral vision seems also applicable to Qu Yuan's:

His sexual imagination was of a piece with his moral vision -- patient resistance in the service of ideal consummation. In the rhythm of paradisal eroticism, as in the rhythm of sacred history, all is "ever best found in the close."27

Once the center is reached, the circle turns inside out toward the circumference. The centrifugal movement begins. The minute details of the orange fruit fully display themselves. With our attention moving from the variegation of colors on its skin to the succulent pulps innumerable inside, and finally to the tiny little seeds with power to reproduce more fruits, we experience how particularity can expand into infinitude.28 We see that the mythic center is actually a container of all the possibilities implicit in the totality. The circle turns inside out in the way exactly as Frye described it : "center" of literality merges with circumferential anagogy in any particular work.29 This is the mythic identification of microcosm with macrocosm, the so-called Blakean synecdochic unity. 30 Qu Yuan convinces us: engaged in moral quest, a sealed heart,

27 See William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, "Lust Captured: Paradise Lost and Renaissance Love Poetry" in The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 205. 28 The same centrifugal movement from the seed to the wood is also depicted in a prose poem on the orange by Francis Ponge. The last stanza of Ponge's "The Orange" reads: "At the end of too brief a study, conducted as roundly as possible, one has to get down to the pip. This seed, shaped like a miniature lemon, is the color of the lemon tree's whitewood outside, and inside is the green of a pea or tender sprout. It is within this seed that one finds--after the sensational explosion of the Chinese lantern of flavours, colors and perfumes which is the fruited ball itself--the relative hardness and greenness (not entirely tasteless, by the way) of the wood, the branch, the leaf; in short, the puny albeit prime purpose of the fruit." See Francis Ponge, The Voice of Things, trans. Beth Archer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 37. 29 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 121. 30 As embodied in his poem "Auguries of Innocence": To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 83 Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies disinterested, can be as magnanimous as heaven and earth. In Coleridge's words, it is "a repetition in the finite mind of the act of creation the infinite I AM."31 The poem thus achieves a chiasmic structure, an analogue of what a critic calls "the central poem of the absolute unity engulfing and giving meaning to the contingent fragment."32 A lucid account by Lu Ji 陸機, one of Qu Yuan's ephebes in the Six Dynasties, can sum up very well what we have discerned from "Ju song" Qu Yuan's idea of how imagination interacts with the phenomenal world to create its own literary universe:

In the beginning, All external vision and sound are suspended, Perpetual thought itself gropes in time and space; Then, the spirit at full gallop reaches the eight limits of the cosmos, And the mind, self-buoyant, will ever soar to new insurmountable heights. Feeling, at first but a glimmer, will gradually gather into full luminosity, When all objects thus lit up glow as if each the other's reflect. . . . Eternity he sees in a twinkling, And the whole world he views in one glance.33

Hold Infinity in the palm of your Hand And Eternity in an hour See David V. Erdman ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 490. "Synecdochic unity" is a term coined by Hazard Adams to describe the Blakean concept of the perfect unity in a poem. See his Antithetical essays in Literary Criticism and Liberal Education (Tallahassee: The Florida State University Press, 1990), p. 54. 31 Biographia Literaria, chapter 13, in Stauffer ed., op. cit., p. 263. 32 Justus George Lawler's formulation of a major structural pattern found in the poetry of the West. See his Celestial Pantomime: Poetic Structure of Transcendence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 33. 33 From "Wen fu." The English translation is by Chen Shih-hsiang. See Cyril Birch ed., Anthology of Chinese Literature (New York: Grove Press, 1972), pp. 205-206. Since "Wen fu" was composed basically out of Lu Ji's critical reading of the fu 賦 genre (prose rhapsody) inspired by Qu Yuan's poetry, it is not incongruous at all that we use his account to illustrate Qu Yuan's poetics. Even the metaphysical strain in Lu Ji's thought shares the same origin as the Taoism in Qu Yuan. For a comprehensive study on "Wen fu," see Wang Ching-hsien 王靖獻 Lu Ji "Wen fu" jiaoshi 陸機文賦校釋 (Taipei: Hongfan, 1985). 84 An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica 其始也，皆收視反聽，耽思旁訊，精騖八極，心遊萬仞。 其致也，情曈曨而彌鮮，物昭晰而互進，.… 觀古今於須臾，撫四海於一瞬。

Recaptured in this account is exactly the process from centripetal back to centrifugal in which Qu Yuan's mind worked to conceive the organic whole , the "aureole of the immanent truth," according to Sikong Tu 司空圖 in his depiction of “the all-encompassing,” the most sublime kind of literature, cited as an epigraph to this essay. It may look like a purely aesthetic quest; but as soon as we consider that a strong poet from a peripheral culture must have an urgent need to create an integral center to ground his voice, this aesthetic quest immediately gains some historical weight. Behind each mythopoeic act, there is always a political intent, no matter how oblique it is.34 To this point I shall come back later. For the time being , let me keep our inquiry within the aesthetic line.

5. An Allegory on Correspondence and Disparity between Nature and Culture

As a monad, "Ju song" not only discloses to us the chiasmic act of the creative mind in perfect communion with Nature; in its attempt to create a total representation, it also takes care to project diversity all over the poem to give the above unity a subtle disruption. Specifically brought to the fore is the inherent disparity between Nature and culture of the human realm. This is achieved mainly by allowing the allegorical language to demonstrate its power of correlating antithetical things. A while ago I indicated, repetition of key phrases is the verbal device used to produce a mirroring effect of mutual illumination.

34 Cf. Harold Bloom's observation of American poets' urgent need to create a coherent whole due to their sense of belatedness: " Sometimes I can believe that Freud (to his dismay) received his largest response from the United States, because Americans recognized in him a formulator of a normative psychology by which they always had been afflicted anyway. I think we can term this a psychology of belatedness, and we can search for its evidences most usefully in our poets, from our origins as a nation until this moment. American poets, rather more than other Western poets, at least since the Enlightenment, are astonishing in their ambitions. Each wants to be the universe, to be the whole of which all other poets are only parts. American psycho-poetics are dominated by an American difference from European patterns of the imagination's struggle with its own origins. Our poets' characteristic anxiety is not so much an expectation of being flooded by poetic ancestors, as already having been flooded before one could even begin." See his A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 52. In the light of Bloom's argument, behind Qu Yuan's and Whitman's myth-making, there seems to exist an analogy worth further inquiry. 85 Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies

Our attention is thus led to focus on the unity between vehicle and tenor, or the correspondence between Nature and the human realm. It seems that it is from this correspondence that the allegory generates itself. However, a salient syntactic feature of "Ju song" invites us to see beyond this correspondence a subversive disparity that is equally responsible for making the allegory work. Before we elaborate on this point, let us first take a close look at the syntactic feature of "Ju song." Out of eighteen lines in total, nine lines of "Ju Sung" contain negative components:

line 2: shouming bu qian 受命不遷 3: shengu nan xi 深固難徙 8: kua er bu chou 姱而不醜 10: duli bu qian 獨立不遷 qi bu kexi 豈不可喜 11: shengu nan xi 深固難徙 kuo qi wu qiu 廓其無求 12: heng er bu liu 橫而不流 13: bu zhong shi guo 不終失過 14: bingde wu si 秉德無私 16: shuli bu yin 淑離不淫

The high density of the negative in the tenor section (lines 9-14) that portrays a human counterpart of the orange tree is too prominent to escape our notice. With the negative inserted between two opposites, a series of antithetical contrariety are deployed in front of us. How should we explain this antithetical feature found in the moral realm of humanity? Does this feature also reflect the very nature of allegorical language? An analogue in the Hebraic Psalms may give us some insight. The negative also permeates the first psalm that serves as the preface to this collection of psalms:

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. . .

"Not" taking the devious actions, the righteous man stands still. His

86 An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica righteousness depends on his ability to stand still and reflect upon true things.35 Behind all these "nots" lie his vigorous efforts to discern good from evil. He does this by constantly studying the Torah and basing on the Torah to judge his mundane encountering. This reflects a fact: knowledge of good and evil is considered indispensable for the post-lapsarian culture; therefore, to divide, discern and discriminate is the inevitable task creative language must perform to break up the chaos hovering over silence; however, its can not stop at denying or negating. Instead, it must move forward to set up genuine contrariety that can include opposites. Otherwise, the pre-lapsarian state of being cannot be recovered. But if this is achieved, the tree of life, replacing the tree of knowledge, will no longer be a mythic past beyond human knowledge but will become as true as eternal now. The tree image that occupies the center of this psalm aptly projects such a redeemed state to be the ultimate goal of all the discriminative acts:

A tree planted by the rivers of water, bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither.36

To say it plainly, underlying this Judeo-Christian myth is a universal idea that things are defined by contraries, therefore, truth can only be perceived obliquely. Out of this tradition flourishes an allegorical mode that -- "seeks to approach the truth by diverging from it, to explain one thing by pointing what it is not, as if the darker the allegory, the brighter the illumination. The claim for such an inverse relationship recurs throughout the history of allegorical interpretation and composition." -- a critic comments after having read the Medieval allegory from the Cosmographia to the Divine Comedy.37 One of the best examples from the Western literature to show the oblique way of allegory is the dragon image in Book One of The Faerie Queene. Edmund Spenser contrived it to portray the allegorical figures of grace and faith represented by Arthur and Fidelia. To demonstrate that in the redeemed state of grace, the

35 Cf. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985), pp. 114-118. 36 Ps. 1:3. 37 Jon Whitman, "From the Cosmographia to the Divine Comedy: An Allegorical Dilemma," in Morton W. Bloomfield ed., Allegory, Myth, and Symbol (Cambrige: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 64. 87 Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies conventional distinction of good and evil no longer operates, Spenser emphatically used dragon, the symbol of evil, to decorate Arthur's helmet:

His haughtie helmet, horrid all with gold, Both glorious brightness, and great terror bred; For all the crest a Dragon did enfold With greedie pawes, and ouer all did spread His golden wings: his dreadful hideous hed Close couched on the beuer, seem'd to throw From flaming mouth bright sparkles fierie red, That suddeine horror to faint harts did show; And scaly tayle was stretcht adowne his backe full low. (Canto VII, stanza 31)

The horrifying look of the dragon is still retained, but having been transformed into an aesthetic symbol, its horror only enhances Arthur's magnificence, like the once deadly tail that now betokens his valor. If the reader follows Spenser's clue and changes his habitual way of construing the dragon symbol, he will experience what life feels like if one lives in grace. The same symbol is repeated in the depiction of Fedelia, the personification of faith:

She was araised all in lily white, And in her right hand bore a cup of gold, With wine and water fild vp to the hight, In which a Serpent did himselfe enfold, That horrur made to all, that did behold; But she no whit did chaunge her constant mood: And in her other hand she fast did hold A book, that was both signed and sealed with blood, Wherein darke things were writ, hard to be vnderstood. (Canto X, stanza 13)

The last two lines of the stanza sum up the oblique nature of the dragon symbol. The dark conceit was designed in such a way that by unraveling it the reader could get to know the truth. The same concept was upheld by Milton to

88 An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica protest against unwarranted censorship in Areopagitica :

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned; that those confused seeds which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasure, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian.38

The Judeo-Christian concept of Fall did not occur in Chinese culture, but the problem of the binary thought also occupied a prominent spot in the Taoist critique. Both Laozi 老子 (fl. the 5th century BC) and Zhuangzi 莊子 (ca. 369-286 BC)39 recognized that in the finite realm of knowledge, things are defined by contraries. Even antithetical contrariety is the operating principle of the Primordial Harmony, the source of life, the "Tao." Thus Laozi "styled" the Way:

There is a thing confusedly formed, Born before heaven and earth. Silent and void It stands alone and does not change,

38 Merritt Y. Hughes ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (Indiapolis: The Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 728. 39 Little are known about their lives. Today, when they are mentioned, usually it is respectively Tao De Jing and the inner chapters of Zhuangzi that are referred to. Both texts are from the Warring State period, a little earlier than Qu Yuan's time. Scholars believe that Tao De Jing is not directly from Laozi's hand, but is an elaborate reconstruction of his thought by a group of Taoists. The inner chapters of Zhuangzi are basically the historical Zguangzi's own works. 89 Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies

Goes round and does not weary. It is capable of being the mother of the world. I know not its name So I style it "the way."40

有物混成，先天地生。 寂兮寞兮，獨立不改。 周行而不殆，可以為天下母。 吾不知其名，字之曰道。

The Way stands alone and meanwhile goes around. With this Laozi tried to express the coincidence of Being and Becoming, the unity of One and Many, the mutual inclusiveness of opposites. Zhuangzi spelt out the simultaneous interchangeability of opposites even more plainly:

Simultaneously with being alive one dies, and simultaneously with dying one is alive; simultaneously with being allowable something becomes unallowable and simultaneously with being unallowable it becomes allowable; If going by circumstance that's it then going by circumstance that's not, if going by circumstance that's not then going by circumstance that's it.41

方生方死，方死方生。方可方不可，方不可方可。因是因非，因非因 是。

Since the Way is constantly in flux and its myriad manifestations is beyond the power of language to fully represent, Taoists do not hesitate to express their doubt about whether language is capable of reflecting the Way as it is:

40 The Chinese text is cited from Laozi Wang Bi zhu 老子王弼注 (Taipei: Holuo, 1974), p. 33. The English translation is by D. C. Lau, Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 82. For the variation of the Chinese text, cf. Xu Kangsheng 許抗生, Boshu Laozi zhuyi yu yanjiu 帛書老子注譯與研究 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin, 1985), p.113. 41 Zhuangzi 莊子 "Qiwu Lun" 齊物論 (The Sorting Which Even Things Out). The Chinese text is from Zhuangzi Jishi 莊子集釋 (Taipei: Shijie, 1970), p. 32. English translation is from A C. Graham trans., Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters (Boston: Unwin Paperbacks, 1989), p. 52. 90 An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica The way that can be spoken of is not the constant way; the name that can be named is not the constant name.42

道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名。

What Laozi and Zhuangzi were against the most is the fixed discrimination language imposes on men in their perception of the Way. Men are forced by their finite language to be constantly caught in the middle of contraries without means to reconcile them. This disparity is especially intolerable, if its root is traced back to the institution authorized by the established canons. In this circumstance, to regain one's freedom, i. e., to restore one's free communion with the Way, one has to deconstruct this totalitarian language by exposing how arbitrary its naming system is. This can be achieved by turning adrift the fixed meaning of a name; actually, its indeterminate nature is there ready to be brought to the light. Following is an example given by Zhuangzi to show the effective way of turning adrift the signified:

Rather than use the meaning to show that “The meaning is not the meaning,” use what is not the meaning. Rather than use a horse to show that “A horse is not a horse,” use what is not a horse. (For example, you may say) “Heaven and earth are the one meaning, the myriad things are the one horse.”43

以指喻指之非指，不若以非指喻指之非指也。以馬喻馬之非馬， 不若以非馬喻馬之非馬也。天地一指也，萬物一馬也。

Once the fixed discrimination imposed by the totalitarian language is broken up, the order of value advocated by the institution will be radically inverted. Then it will become explicit that against the Great Identity which is the Way, each individual's particularity is infinite, as infinite as the Way itself, for each

42 The first sentence to start the De 德 chapter of Tao De Jing. See Laozi Wang Bi zhu, p. 1; the English translation is from D. C. Lau trans., op. cit. , p. 57. 43 Zhuangzi, "Qiwu lun," Zhuangzi jishi, p. 33 and Chuang-Tzu, trans. A. C. Graham, p. 53. 91 Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies individual as a fragment of the Way partakes whatever is in the Way. To assert diversity in this way is the opposite of promoting rigid discrimination. The former sets each individual free to romp with the infinite, while the latter subjects him to serve the social hierarchy.44 Growing up familiar with this strain of the Taoist thought45 and meanwhile intrigued by the Confucian agenda of good government,46 the young man Qu Yuan, gifted with a syncretic mind, thought that he knew what was best for his country: order and freedom should be, and can be, united in the human realm.47 He felt that he was born at the right time and at the right place to envisage this. The fruited orange tree that grew all over his beloved "state of the South" seemed a divine manifestation of this cultural vision. Yes, with order and freedom united, the Chu culture will come into being and grow like a fruited orange tree betokening to the world that truth is beauty and beauty truth. Poetry can make

44 On Laozi's critique of the fixed discrimination, see D. C. Lau, "The Treatment of Opposites in Lao-tzu," Bulletin of the Society for Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 21 (1958), pp. 344-360. For a comparative approach to Taoism, see Chapter 6 "The Ways of Taoism" in Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 186-254. 45 Both Laozi and Zhuangzi flourished in the state of Chen 陳 which ever since the sixth century BC had been under the control of Chu. It was mentioned in the chapter of "Autumn Floods" 秋 水 that Zhuangzi had once turned down the post of prime minister offered to him by the king of Chu. See Zhuangzi jishi, pp. 266-267. Both philosophers being Southerners was confirmed by Wang Guowei 王國維. See the note on Taoists in his "Guochao Hanxuepai Dai Ruan erjia zhi zhexueshuo" 國朝漢學派戴阮二家之哲學說 collected in Jingan wenji 靜安文集, Vol. 5 of Wang Guantang xiansheng quanji. 王觀堂先生全集 (Taipei: Wenhua, 1968), p. 1707. Later to attain metaphysical consolation out of dejection, Qu Yuan wrote "Yuan you" 遠遊, a long poem on celestial journey, in which he demonstrated a very extensive knowledge of the Taoist strain of thought and their methods of exalting the spirit out of body to roam with the infinite. 46 Qu Yuan's political agenda, according to Jiang Liangfu, was adopted from Confucianism, especially in line with a strain of democratic thought documented in Shang Shu 尚書:"Heaven hear What we people hear, and see what we see." 天聽自我民聽，天視自我民視。 From his poetry we can find many intrinsic evidences to prove that he cared more for people's well-being than the interest of the ruling clans to which he himself belonged. Against all the political odds, he repetitively presented people's need to the king's audience and thus lost the king's favor. For Jiang Liangfu's comment on this point, see his Chu Ci xue lunwenji 楚辭學論文集 (Shanghai: Guji, 1984), p. 9. 47 Facing the need of the human realm, Qu Yuan was more a Confucian Humanist than a Taoist dissent. He assiduously equipped himself with all the skills needed for public service. The Great historian Sima Qian 司馬遷 portrayed Qu Yuan's humanist stature in the following phrases: "He had encyclopaedic knowledge and phenomenal memory. He was highly perceptive of the ways to perpetuate order and prevent disturbance. To persuade, he had courtly eloquence at his easy disposal" 博學彊志，明於治亂，嫻於辭令。 See "Qu Yuan Jia sheng liezhuan" in op. cit., p. 2481. 92 An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica this happen. As imagination romps across the universe to settle on a little tiny seed and meanwhile surges with the tides of history, language defines and elaborates, explores and guards against, unites and diversifies -- it "branches out multiplying with spines so sharp" (cengzhi yenci 曾枝剡棘). As a matter of fact, acting like a peer of the Way, it manifests the Way, although it is not very clear whether the Way gives language its power or language formulates, "styles," the Way as it is. But it is certain that both have prolific life of their own,48 and that they illuminate each other. It does not matter whether Master Zhuangzi dreamed of the butterfly or the butterfly dreamed of Master Zhuangzi, as long as they dreamed of each other, or dreamed that they had dreamed of each other. Following is a list of antitheses in "Ju song" to give a vivid idea how extensively Qu Yuan made good use of the dialectical nature of language to present his vision of "discordia concors":49

heavenly 受 move by choice 遷 assigned 命 one 壹 profuse 紛 branch, 枝 fruit, round 果 thorn ， ， 棘 圓 green 綠 yellow 黃 golden 精 white 白 outer 色 inner content 內 look

48 The following quotation from Zhuangzi "Qiwu lun" can serve as an textual evidence for this open-minded agnosticism: "Rage and delight, sorrow and joy, anxieties, misgivings, moments of inconstant wavering and moments of rigidity, frivolity, and recklessness, openness and posturing--all are music from the empty spaces, mushrooms forming in ground mist. Day and night each one of these follows upon another, but no one knows from where they sprout. That's all there is! They come upon us from down to dusk, but how they came to be -- who knows? Without them there is no me, and without me they have nothing to hold on to. That's all there is. But I don't understand how they are set in operation. It may be that there is someone genuinely in control of them, but he leaves no trace for me to find. No doubt that he can act, but I don't see his form; he is there in the circumstance but has no form." Cited is Stephen Owen's translation printed on the preface page of his Mi-lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 49 A phrase used by Dr. Samuel Johnson to define "wit," the eighteenth century equivalent of imagination. 93 Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies

beautiful 姱 ugly 醜 deep-root 深 broad, 廓 ed 固 encompassing ， 橫 stand still 獨 move around 遷 alone 立 sustain 橫 drift 流 prudence 慎 transgression 過 virtue 德 selfishness 私 fair and 淑 licentious 淫 pure 離

Indeed, contrast co-exists with correspondence everywhere in "Ju song" to remind us that the organic unity in this poem is achieved by giving room for diversity to display itself, a diversity well-charted into a spectrum of differences, opposite to the indifferent chaos. As soon as we notice this, this allegory appears to be not only about the correspondence between Nature and the human realm as the first reading may suggest, but also about their differences. We start to realize: in contrast with the innate energy given by Nature to the orange tree to make it grow and procreate, the moral integrity upheld by the young man against the vulgar world is self-cultivated. It is a "zhi" 志 (intent) voluntarily chosen by a person as opposed to a "ming" 命 (mandate) assigned by Heaven. The contrast makes the same epithet carry different connotations when it is applied to different orders. "Shenggu nanxi" 深固難徙 (deep-rooted and hard to move), when applied to the orange tree, connotes the exuberant life force of Nature that can be as voracious as human hubris but is beyond the latter to disturb or meddle with; when applied to the young man, it connotes the moral strength that man must cultivate with relentless self-restraint. The former connotes energy set free, the latter energy well-guarded. Behind this contrast is the different life dramas unfolded by time to the tree and the man. The tree grows in its season. Time makes it bloom and bear fruits; time is a life-cycle endlessly repeating itself. On the contrary, man lives in history. Time now and then presents a critical moment for him to make moral choice and his choice always brings about irreversible consequence. No matter how hard he tries not to, he cannot escape making choices. To be indecisive is to

94 An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica give up being human. In contrast with the will-free existence of the vegetable, humanity requires man to live up to his destiny -- i. e., asserting his will-power to carry out his moral obligation. As in good contrast as their life dramas are, so is the significance death may have for either. If critics had been aware that antithetical contrariety operates as a structural principle in "Ju song," they should have detected that the last four lines deal with death as opposed to life in the previous lines.50 Will-lessly, the orange tree fades as the year fades, while the young man offering his life to serve virtue may have an eternal life after death. Making sound moral choices will eventually create an immortal status for him in history exactly as it has done for the sage Po Yi whom the ancient text has made into a paradigm of virtue for all ages to come.51 The above list of contrasts, like the Pandora's box, once uncovered, will go on and on. So, there are actually two allegories in "Ju song": an allegory of correspondence and an allegory of contrast.52 It is both an allegory of organic unity and an allegory of antithetical contrariety. Then, is the orange tree a moral emblem given by Heaven to reveal to the young poet his destiny, or merely a

50 Jiang Liangfu is one of the major scholars in Mainland China who has dedicated all his life to the study of Qu Yuan's poetry, both contextually and intertextually. An astute reader though he is, he fails to discern that death, the end of a life cycle, is the motif that governs the last section of "Ju Song." He suggests that bin 并 of line 15 be revised as bu 不. Such a revision would wrongly negates the poet's wish to live a natural course of life like the orange tree, although immediately in the next line he expresses an antithetical attitude toward man's life in history. Most cultural heroes that history commemorate did not die a natural death. 51 Po Yi and his younger brother Shu Qi were highly praised by Confucius for practicing co-humanity (ren 仁 ) at the cost of self-interest and even their lives. According to Shima Qian's account in Shi Ji the two brothers were princes of a small enffeofed state of the Shang kingdom. Shu Qi was appointed by their father to be his heir. Being a third son, he felt not at ease to pre-empt what should have been his oldest brother's right. He turned down his father's appointment and expected Po Yi to comply with his decision. However, Po Yi could not bear taking advantage of Shu Qi's kindness. To avoid the dilemma, the two brothers followed each other to leave the country. They both went to the Zhou state. It happened that upon their arrival, King Wen of Zhou had just died and his son, King Wu, postponing his father's funeral, was busy preparing for the campaign that eventually overthrew Shang. Having failed to dissuade King Wu from causing a massacre, when the news of King Wu's victory reached them, Po Yi and Shu Qi retired to the mountainside eating only ferns. They soon starved to death. See Shi Ji, pp. 2121-2129. With a profound grief and heart-felt respect, Sima Qian wrote about their story and put it in the most prominent spot of his liezhuan section -- the first biography to precede all the other biographies. Apparently, by doing so, Sima Qian aligned himself with this illustrious tradition of martyrdom which also includes Qu Yuan. It is they who defined the history rather than those who abused power to deprive them of the chance to serve. 52 According to J. Hillis Miller, this double intertwining of the two allegories has been present in any particular work of any historical epoch, and the oscillation between the two is a generic feature of the allegory. See his "The Two Allegories," Morton W. Bloomfield ed., pp. 361-362. 95 Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies natural form onto which the young poet projects the virtue he learned from a canon in order to claim for his moral choice a divine origin? "Ju song" allows both readings. By juxtaposing the orange tree and the young man respectively as the paradigm of the natural and the human orders, Qu Yuan affirmed both orders and gave neither precedence over the other. He recognized their identification and discerned their difference. As a poet, his task is to create a verbal space to show that each can illuminate the other; they are mutually supportive. Qu Yuan's Janus vision thus enabled him to compose in "Ju song" a poem of organic unity with closure reopening to the infinite. A remark Murray Krieger made on organicism against itself can best describe the achievement of “Ju song” in this aspect:

It gives us the chance both to grasp at the dream of identity -- the realm of archetypal characters in an absolutely integrated and transfixed action, a model of teleology -- and to be roused by the waking exposure to the ruthless, daylight language of the distinction-ridden business of our own living. Yet it is the co-presence of the demythifying act that permits us to entertain this dream, which is created only as it is exposed to the continuing threat of demystification.53

6. Writing from the Periphery

Before I conclude this study of "Ju song," I feel a need to elaborate on a point that I have briefly mentioned; that is, Qu Yuan's attempt to create a unity of order and freedom in a well-constructed literary microcosm, besides being an aesthetic endeavour, is also a political enterprise. Probably due to the blindness of a certain type of cultural imperialism, contemporary critics of the Chu ci poetry in Mainland China have not commented enough on Qu Yuan's achievement in this aspect.54 Most of them praise highly of Qu Yuan's patriotism but fail to

53 A Reopening of Closure, p. 53. 54 However, there are at least two exceptions: Jiang Liangfu and Zhao Hui 趙輝. In the preface to his encyclopedic Chu ci tonggu 楚辭通故 (Qingdao: QiLu, 1985), Jiang first elaborates on the prevalence of the Chu culture at the court of the Han empire. He then comments: "Among the texts which, like archives, have preserved the Chu culture, besides Zuo zhuan and Guo zu, none of the first-hand materials can compete with Qu Yuan's (and Song Yu's) poetry in terms of concretness and affectiveness. It reflects in amplitude the Chu institution, history, customs, and 96 An Allegory on Allegory: Reading "Ju song " as Qu Yuan's Ars Poetica appreciate the real content of his patriotism -- i. e., his heart-felt celebration of the unique "minorness" of the Chu culture at the historical moment when it was ardently surging up to challenge the declining culture of the northern China. Pioneer studies through comparative approach are much needed to help us know better what constitutes the genuine interaction between "provincialism" and "continentalism" (zhontu yishi 中土意識) to allow the genesis of a great literature from a culturally peripheral area.55 Archeological finds of this century from the ancient territory of the Chu state have unearthed a culture which in every stage of its development was distinctly marked by a unique synthesis of the best influences from all around, be it the humanist vision of the Zhou culture or the primitive mythology of the neighboring tribes.56 Ever since Qu Yuan was born, the state of Chu, geographically peripheral but economically prosperous, had been experiencing a cultural renaissance due to her continuous open-minded assimilation of all kinds of influence from other quarters of the world. Arts and technology advanced. Granaries were full and lakes teemed with fish. Goddesses haunted hills and streams to inspire mythic tales. The time was ripe for someone to capture all these newly-found confidence in the unique air of Chu. Against the competing cultures of the northern states, Qu Yuan aspired to write poetry to elevate the cultural status of his homeland. He discerned that the way toward making Chu a new cultural center is to emulate the splendor radiated from language. Like a divine dragon, it sheds its luminous light upon the nine realms, prancing and writhing without bound. Viewing his ailing country in pity and grief, with magnanimity as awesome as the sound of bell and drum, Qu Yuan absorbed the splendid culture of the Chu people, and regarded the history of his homeland with great compassion. Consequently, his language is earnest and not affected, his account, direct and not feigned. It provides us with the access to retrieve the culture of the south. Even just a synecdochial phrase is inspiring and illuminating enough." 然而楚文化之韞櫝而藏者，除<左傳>，<國語>外，其第一手材料，疑莫若屈宋詞 賦之具象而有活力。凡楚制，楚故，楚習，楚文，如靈龍萬點，光昭九宇，撣援千蟤，莫有 涯涘。蓋屈子以憫世憂國之思，大聲鏜鎝之氣，含咀楚民之英華，熱戀國家民族之歷史，故 其言真切而不飾，質直而不誣，足供吾人探頤南土文化者，雖半言只字，莫不如響斯應，光 芒萬丈。 To my knowledge, Zhao Hui's article "Jianlun Chi Ci tezhi de xingcheng yuanyin" 簡 論楚辭特質的形成原因 is the only study specifically dealing with the impacts which the peripherality of the Chu culture had made on Qu Yuan's poetry. See Zhong Nan minzhu xueyuan xuebao 中南民族學院學報 1990. no. 5, pp. 100-108. 55 Some post-modern critics have undertaken inquiry on this issue in their studies of post-colonial writing worldwide. Cf. Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 56 For the newest team-work study of the history of the Chu culture that has integrated the evidences available from the recent archaeological finds and ancient documents, see ed. Zhang Zhengming 張正明 Chu wenhua zhi 楚文化志(Hubei: Hubei Renmin, 1988). 97 Dong Hwa Journal of Humanistic Studies the glorious past of the Zhou court. With this purpose, to name a hymn designed to celebrate the Chu spirit, he adopted "song" 頌, the genre name of a group of poems composed to eulogize the virtue of the earlier kings of the Zhou in their endeavours to define a perpetual institution.57 This connection having been established, he then concentrated on portraying the unique virtue of the Chu spirit -- the unity of order and freedom. To enhance Chu's independent identity, he even subtly praised at the end of his hymn a cultural hero who had won his immortal name by starving himself in protest of the campaign that set up the Zhou regime. Qu Yuan's project came to a glorious fruition. Literary history recognizes "Ju song" as the origin of a grand lyric tradition which, some critics claim, even outshines the Shi Jing tradition and has brought into full display both Chu's unique culture and Qu Yuan's own inimitable genius.58 To sum up, "Ju song" allows us to read it as a monad. It contains a symmetrical bipartite structure of an enclosed circle with the end coiled back to the beginning; the closure, once completed, reopens itself. This, together with the repetition device, directs the reader to turn his linear course of reading into a spiral and a serpentine one. Poetry is therefore proved not to be found in a static product but in the on-going process, with the reader joining the poet in the quest, which is simultaneously ethic and aesthetic all the way through. To achieve a complete mimesis, antithetical contrariety is locally staged for the quest of unity to go on. All these literary devices, if kept in mind, can help us unravel the complex structure of "Li sao."

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