| The groundbreaking research of the late Ren Bantang in the field of Tang dynasty performance culture represents one of the most important developments in modern scholarship on the literature and culture of the period--one whose full implications have yet to be fully worked out. His proposal of "sung poems" (sheng shi) as a separate generic category within Tang shi poetry, in particular, has important implications for the way we conceive of Tang lyric in general. For regardless of how far we accept the rigorous distinction between "sung poems" and "poems without music" (tu shi) proposed by Ren Bantang, the voluminous primary source material on Tang lyric performance which he amasses forces us to a realization that Tang lyric texts are not products of a single type of "authorship," but are rather artifacts of a wide range of performance practices, and that to fully understand them we must take into account the ways in which they are imbedded in those practices.; One question suggested by this new perspective on Tang lyric has remained relatively unexplored: that is, how did Tang writers themselves reflect on the relation between literary composition and performance? Taking this question as its point of departure, the present study argues that a wide range of literary texts from the early to mid-ninth century reflect a preoccupation with a certain notion of lyric as performance. Whereas traditional hermeneutic approaches tended to "naturalize" lyric texts as utterances by historically determinate authors in response to determinate lived experiences, this characteristically "ninth-century" preoccupation involved the idea of lyric as a type of experience sharply distinct from the poet' s historical self, a mode of access to other times, other identities, or other realms of existence. Examining historiographic and early prose fiction texts as well as lyric texts per se, the present study attempts to show how even such disparate texts attest to a distinctive sensibility towards lyric--and more generally musical--performance that is an important part of the makeup of the distinctive literary culture of the era. |
