Abstract
Many Shijing 詩經 poems feature a lyric “I” - a first-person voice speaking about intense emotions. Yet, to whom those voices belong has never been clear. Two millennia of commentarial writings leave the modern reader with a variety of readings, each plausible on its own but none more reasoned than the others. This hermeneutic impasse, I argue, results from an interpretive practice that inscribes meaning to, rather than recovers the meaning of, the lyric “I”. And the inscription is made not through indisputable philological inquiries but free, sometimes idiosyncratic, imaginations of what constitutes a Shi poetics. Such poetic claims disguised as hermeneutic solutions have roots in the “I” as deictic-subject-position. Such positioning helps to generate a group of “type-voices” that were inhabited by readers and writers alike. In the broader history of Chinese lyric poetry, type-voices were what gave birth to lyric poets. But no lyric poet in this early phase, I also show, managed to escape the enthrallment of the common types.
Keywords
Shijing, Chuci, lyric poetry, first-person voice, type-voice, Qu Yuan, Liu Xiang, “Jiu tan”
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