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  • Jueju
  • Haun Saussy (bio)

Short forms are synecdochic: they suggest and imply more than they say. Not that one would wish them longer. Franz Kafka's parables in two or three sentences are perfect as they are and would gain nothing from the Hollywood treatment. Brevity can convey a rejection of long forms as boring (Callimachus: "I hate your Epic Cycle") or despotic (the family tree of concepts of organic form includes totalitarian as well as holistic thinking).1 To "see the world in a grain of sand" is miraculous; to see a grain of sand in the world is flat and obvious unless done with Laplacean precision. By their name, jueju 絕句 ("cut-off lines") in the Chinese poetic tradition claim a status as complete parts of a missing whole.

What is the outline of the missing whole? From what is a jueju quatrain "cut off"? Two verse genres have been proposed as the answer to these questions, albeit for different reasons and with different implications.

The first genre is "regulated verse" (lüshi 律詩). This poetic form, dominant in the Tang dynasty (eighth to tenth centuries CE; considered the golden age of Chinese lyric poetry), imposed tight constraints on rhyme, syllabic tone patterns, and semantic parallelism. The writer of a regulated-verse poem had to combine the skills of a painter with those of a chess master. Of its eight lines (four couplets), couplets two and three must be parallel, with the syntax and meaning of each word in the first line matching those of the corresponding word in the second line. On top of these formal requirements, taste demanded freshness, individuality, and depth.

Structurally, four-line jueju correspond to different segments of an eight-line lüshi: the first half, the second half, or the middle two couplets. Yet it seems clear that the mapping of jueju on segments of lüshi created an artificial origin story based on reader experience, turning resemblance into causation.2 No one ever tried to restore the "missing" lines or to expand a jueju into a lüshi; jueju were prized for their completeness. Jueju that too closely resembled a truncated lüshi were derided as inept (CS 91–92). Anthologies of Tang poetry consisted largely of lüshi and jueju, and this salience perhaps accounts for the persistent legend that jueju originated as abbreviated lüshi. [End Page 453]

The second possible origin genre is "linked verse" (lianju 聯句 or 連句; the Japanese renga 連歌 is cognate). Several centuries before the Tang dynasty, it become customary to compose poem-sequences at social gatherings. In such cycles, each participant would add a quatrain in series, modifying or redefining the theme. Many of the most famous jueju arose in poetic exchanges: Wang Wei's 王維 "Deer Enclosure" ("Lu zhai" 鹿寨), for instance, was part of a series written in dialogue with Pei Di 裴迪.3 If a jueju is a move in a poetic contest, when anthologized as a single piece it is "cut off" from the rest of the conversation that gave rise to it. But its isolation is proof of victory, as if to acknowledge that with the stand-alone stanza, so-and-so achieved the last word.

The origins of jueju are unverifiable, but the two scenarios handed down by the tradition reflect the genre's paradoxical aesthetic of synecdoche and definitiveness. Jueju present themselves as if taken from a longer whole, but they never depend on it. They are moments of arrested movement or thought. In order to make them, someone must "cut off" a prior continuity and hem it. The "sense of an ending" is part of their effect.4 And their content often involves boundaries, limits, endings, immobilization. I cite a few canonical examples of the form, retranslating them slightly from the versions in Charles Egan's critical study of jueju poetry:

打起黃鶯兒         Whack those yellow orioles!莫教枝上啼         Don't let them chirp on the branches!幾回驚妾夢         How many times have they interrupted my dreams不得到遼西         And kept me from going to Liaoxi!

(Jin Changxu 金昌緒 [fl. 713–742], attr.; qtd. in CS 97)

The speaker, the wife of a man taken away to guard the remote border region of Liaoxi, is disturbed that the birds keep breaking...

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