The wild and arrogant: Expression of self in Xin Qiji's song lyrics.

Abstract

In the Twentieth Century, Xin Qiji's XXX (1140-1207) fame as a great patriot and a master of ci XX, or the song lyric, reached its zenith. Critics used the somewhat embellished biography of the poet to systematize and edit his works, to mend the fissures in them and to explain away their contradictions so as to produce from them an ideal, coherent text. Dissatisfied with this approach, I attempt to interpret Xin Qiji's poetic works by treating them as they are. There is no way to reconstruct with certainty the inner state of the historical figure who created these works, but there are signs in them signifying various aspects of a psychic entity that cannot, and indeed, should not, be summed up with the name Xin Qiji. Looking closely at these signs, I do not only see what they try to express, but also what they try to suppress; and I notice some of them occur and recur, aggressively engaging the reader's attention. In this way I get to the core around which the complexity of Xin's works is knit: the narcissistic self-expression of a restless, wild and arrogant personality. My study consists of five parts. After surveying briefly in the introduction the situation of the study of Xin Qiji and pointing out problems such a study faces, I proceed to bring out in the first chapter the most important issue in the study of Xin that has hitherto either been misunderstood or simply ignored. Through an analytical definition of the idiosyncratic features of Xin's works that would unmistakably distinguish him from others, I find that, instead of being an expression of the poet's patriotic sentiment, the central issue of Xin's song lyrics is the eccentrically fascinating personality of the poetic protagonist, especially those self expressive and self promoting traits that contrast with the Confusion value of yielding. In the two chapters that follow, by examining closely internal evidence in Xin's works, I try to demonstrate how this fascinating personality expresses itself in a series of wild/arrogant self-images and through an untrammeled masculine voice. In the concluding chapter, by placing Xin Qiji in the context of the development of the Chinese poetic tradition, which is heavily informed by Confucian moral didacticism, I elicit--for the first time, I believe, in the study of this subject--the special significance of Xin's poetic creation: What is projected in Xin's song lyrics is an unruly spirit in the Ruist tradition who dares to test the limits of the concept of self--a passionate and acutely self-conscious individual who aggressively desires to magnify his human potential, who exults in celebrating his individualistic traits, and who takes great delight in expressing what he truly feels, paying little attention to the time-honored ethical-aesthetic principle of being mild and gentle (wen rou dun hou XXXX).