Book Excerpt: Chinese Poetry as Soul Summoning
This study examines the role of the soul (hun) and the soul-summoning ritual in Chinese literature from ancient times up to the twentieth century. With five case studies from different dynasties, spanning ancient Chu and the Han, Tang, Song, and Ming-Qing transition periods, Chinese Poetry as Soul Summoning shows Chinese poets were inspired by the belief in a soul that could be transported away from the body. On one hand, this provided a model for literature, as a therapeutic means of summoning back wayward souls; on the other, it inspired the imaginative range and formal structures of literary works, which followed the soul’s journey from the individual person throughout the world and into the heavens.
EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK:
On December 27, 1920, Guo Moruo published a one-act verse drama entitled “Entangled in the Xiang River,” reimagining the life of Qu Yuan 屈原 (ca. 300 BC), a poet-martyr of antiquity whose works are preserved in the anthology Elegies of Chu (Chuci 楚辭). Over the next six decades, Guo’s prolific career became closely entwined with the fate of the Chinese Communist Party, but in 1920, he was an ambitious poet with a Romantic self-image, who found an inspiration for lyrical fantasy in legends from the ancient state of Chu 楚. Most of “Entangled in the Xiang River” consists of dialogue between Qu Yuan and his sister Nüxu 女嬃,[i] and Guo adds another feminine voice through the chorus with songs by ladies drowned in Lake Dongting. This infuses the drama with a touch of European Romanticism and seems to recall the verse dramas of Goethe or Shelley.[ii] Qu Yuan himself appears as a Romantic hero filled with an irrepressible longing, who cries, “I have blood that surely must flow, I have a fire that must burst forth.”[iii]
Yet all these Romantic elements are not inconsistent with Chinese myth and religion either.[iv] Qu Yuan himself belongs to ancient cultural lore and is celebrated even today in the Dragon Boat Festival (Duanwu jie 端午節) on the Fifth Day of the Fifth Month of every year. Here Guo writes in the voice of drowned souls calling for Qu Yuan, just as during the Dragon Boat festival today, one eats rice dumplings representing offerings to Qu Yuan’s own drowned soul. The goddesses’[CP1] [NW2] song is specifically identified as a soul-summoning (zhao hun 招魂), the popular ritual used both to heal the gravely ill and to mourn the departed. Even two thousand years ago, though, this dialogue between poet and souls was one of the main literary tropes in the Elegies of Chu anthology itself. Guo is also borrowing another trope originating in the Elegies of Chu and particularly in thepoetry of Qu Yuan’s putative follower Song Yu 宋玉: the encounter and dialogue with the goddess, who alternately inspires and deflects the poet’s attention. Though Guo may imbue these Chinese cultural forms with a Romantic emphasis on the poet-hero, this is only a shift in emphasis that does not depart from the Chinese poetic tradition.
“Entangled in the Xiang River” was part of Guo Moruo’s great burst of productivity after discovering Rabindranath Tagore, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Walt Whitman, while he was still under the strong influence of a pantheist conception of the universe but before he adopted Communism wholesale in 1924.[v] In this early period of youthful creativity, Guo focused his attention on the literary and spiritual dimensions of the Elegies of Chu, which he found to be based in the free and democratic culture of early China. In 1942, Guo would write a much longer verse drama entitled Qu Yuan 屈原, recasting the eponymous hero as a precocious politician, but in “Entangled in the Xiang River,” Guo Moruo was more interested in adapting the positive elements of ancient Chinese culture to modern vernacular literature, and it was in service of this project that he revived the lost souls of the Elegies of Chu.[vi] That is, these lost souls are not a borrowing from European literature but instead represent Guo’s sincere attempt to link his own poetic genius to the spiritual and religious roots of Chinese culture.[vii]
[i] This is the original identification in the Han commentary, but she has also been identified as a goddess or simply as a shamaness. In my view this is merely a term for shamaness, as one can see from the mention of the shamaness Li Nüxu 李女須 in Ban Gu’s 班固 Han shu 漢書, 63.2760.
[ii] A reader of English verse might also think naturally of the long tradition of dialogues from Marvell’s “Dialogue between the Soul and Body” to Yeats’s “Dialogue of Self and Soul.” China even has its own tradition of soul-body dialogues, beginning with Tao Yuanming’s 陶淵明 (465–527?) set of three poems spoken by body, shadow, and spirit. See “Xing ying shen” 形影神, in Tao Yuanming ji jianzhu, 2.59–71.
[iii] 我有血總要流，有火總要噴. Guo Moruo quanji, 1:23.
[iv] A prominent example is Maiden Cao, who drowned herself to recover the drowned body of her father. See Timothy W. K. Chan, “A New Reading of an Early Medieval Riddle,” 57ff.
[v] On Guo’s intellectual development in this period, see Roy, Kuo Mo-jo: The Early Years, esp. 72–108. On the polyglot influences that formed Goddesses, see Akiyoshi Kukio 秋吉九紀夫, “Kaku Matsujaku shishū Megami no seiritsu katei” 郭沫若詩集「女神」の成立過程.
[vi] On the influential play, see Schneider, A Madman of Ch’u, 117–120 and Pu Wang, Translatability of Revolution, 205–209. One of the remarkable products of this period in his life is his essay “The Pompeii of Chinese Intellectual History,” published on May 30, 1921, which argues that the prehistorical China (before even the Xia dynasty) was a democratic society with free, rational thought. See Roy, Kuo Mo-jo, 102. The essay’s Chinese title is “Woguo sixiangshi shang zhi Pengpai cheng” 我國思想史上之澎湃城. Qu Yuan was something of a Rorschach test for May Fourth intellectuals; Lu Xun 魯迅 and Hu Shi were attracted to the poetry while being dubious of its political mythology. See the overview in Yamada Keizō 山田敬三, Ro Jin no sekai 魯迅の世界, 186–191.
[vii] Guo’s continued devotion to the Chuci would also bear the fruit of his translations into modern Chinese verse (see discussion in Pu Wang, Translatability of Revolution, 251–260). As with the play Qu Yuan, though, Guo increasingly emphasized the political and social dimensions over the spiritual and erotic inspiration of souls and goddesses that he had earlier discovered in the ancient poems.
Chinese Poetry as Soul Summoning: Shamanistic Religious Influences on Chinese Literary Tradition by Nicholas Morrow Williams is part of the Cambria Sinophone World Series (General Editor: Victor H. Mair).
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
“This is a masterful study of the Elegies of Chu (Chuci), particularly of the foregrounding that ancient collection of Chinese songs and shamanistic incantations gives to the function of the human ‘soul’ in life and the afterlife, and the many ways the hauntingly beautiful and, at the same time, vexingly indeterminate Elegies has been appropriated and re-created through some two thousand years of later Chinese poetry. To treat in one book such a range of chronological periods and literary genres as these texts represent is a tour de force. Very few scholars working in premodern Chinese literature would dare to undertake such a study; and it is hard to think of anyone else who could do it so well.” —Ronald Egan, Stanford University
“Soul summoning was an ancient Chinese ritual that served as a subject of early poetry and evolved into an enduring poetic motif. In his monograph Chinese Poetry as Soul Summoning, Nicholas Williams starts his investigation with the soul of Qu Yuan in the Elegies of Chu (Chuci), and traces the summoning of souls in the ensuing literary tradition of the fu (rhapsodies) of Liu Xiang, Liu Zongyuan’s imitations of the Chuci style, Wu Wenying’s ci-lyrics, Tang Xianzu’s drama scripts, and You Tong’s shi poems. This is a fine example of religio-literary scholarship in the vein of Arthur Waley, David Hawkes, and Paul W. Kroll.” —Timothy Wai Keung Chan, Hong Kong Baptist University
“A splendid panorama of Chinese ‘soul searching’ across the dynasties, from Qu Yuan (d. 278 BCE) to Yang Lian (b. 1955), this book provides fine translations of Classical poetry and new insights into literary, religious and philosophical topics, often uncharted by Western sinology so far. A learned, densely referenced yet always engaging and eminently readable study of the changing concepts of the two Chinese souls, Chinese Poetry as Soul Summoning is an excellent contribution to the fields of Chinese literary and religious histories.” —Wolfgang Behr, University of Zurich
About the author:
Nicholas Morrow Williams is Associate Professor of Chinese literature at Arizona State University. He taught in Hong Kong for a decade after earning his PhD from the University of Washington. His previous books include Imitations of the Self: Jiang Yan and Chinese Poetics, The Residue of Dreams: Selected Poems of Jao Tsung-I, and a complete translation of Elegies of Chu (Oxford World’s Classics).