苦吟的身體語言：中唐三家詩人研究

Abstract

本文的研究對象為三位中唐苦吟詩人──孟郊、李賀、賈島，全文從「身體語言」切入中唐「苦吟」議題之研究，探索苦吟詩人「在語言表達中的身體」以及「關於身體的語言表達」，並輔以梅洛–龐帝的知覺現象學、現代開展的詩歌語言分析，作為本文的視角和方法。 本文首要論述的是，三位詩人各自在中唐社會面臨的問題。究竟是什麼懸而未解的困頓造成「憂人成苦吟」？三位詩人各自的人生難題，化作苦吟為詩的原動力，那是不斷凝視深淵而又得以在深處清醒的自我救贖。 其次，從感知主體的角度切入「苦」的身體感，探討苦吟詩歌中身體圖式之存在方式。孟、李二人的生理體現出較為刻鑿的書寫力度，賈島則因雲水釋心沖淡這方面的琢磨。又，詩人的身體必然處在鮮明的知覺場中，時時走向外界，形成一個與自身知覺連動的處境性空間，薰染出介於身體與物象的在場氛圍，主客彼此交融無間，造就了身體與空間、感官與物體渾融的統一。 再次，本文深入意象所創造的詩歌世界。詩人起初通過擇取物象，運用光和色打造知覺最先體會的畫面底蘊，並從水和境反映觀看視角或內心情感，這已初步勾勒出三位詩人各自不同的詩歌意境。至此，郊、島和李賀徹底分道揚鑣，前二者相似的苦寒之境規定了苦吟詩風的整體印象。繼而，本文從句間之用字遣詞、篇章之結構巧思等組織方式，強化三位詩人奇險、奇詭、奇僻的異同風格。 最後，從創作過程的身體主體來談「吟」，我們認為詩歌的表現形式並非隨機的載體，詩歌的形式語言在吟詠吐納間體現身心獨特的律動、誦詠的複沓、句式的創舉、格律的翻新等，一步步運用「時與力」，捕捉創作的片刻。古體可以貼近詩人的性情和身心節律，近體則因句聯的吟對趨近空間化，其間演變，呈明一條自孟郊到賈島的苦吟內蘊，歷經個人化、典範化、理論化的路徑。

The subject of this paper’s research is three Tang dynasty “bitter chanting” (kuyin) poets: Meng Jiao, Li He, and Jia Dao. This paper approaches research into high Tang bitter chanting poetry through “body language,” in order to explore the ways in which bitter chanting poets “expressed the body through language,” as well as how they “expressed the language of the body.” This paper also draws upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and poetic linguistic analysis——a theory developed in modern times——in order to establish its basic viewpoint and methodology. This paper’s primary narrative lies in the challenges these three poets faced while living in the mid-Tang dynasty. It asks, precisely what was the unremitting malaise that led these “anxious individuals to chant of bitterness?” The difficulties in the lives of all three poets transmuted to become the motive force behind their writing bitter chanting poems. They stared into the abyss and, in its depths, lucidly sought personal salvation. Additionally, this paper approaches the physical sensations of “bitterness” (suffering) through the subject of perception, exploring the modes through which bodily schema manifest in bitter chanting poetry. Meng Jiao and Li He’s physiology appears in fairly hard-chiseled writing, while Jia Dao has more a free-flowing, polished, and diluted form of expression. Moreover, the poets’ bodies are by necessity located in distinct realms of consciousness, constantly moving towards the external world, and creating a sense of situational space that is dynamically linked with their self-awareness. This approach nurtures a situational ambience mediated by the body and the objects and phenomena it encounters, wherein subject and object blend together seamlessly, and where the human body, space, the senses, and matter all merge as one. Subsequently, this paper delves into the poetic world created through imagery. The poets began by selecting objects and phenomena, using light and color to lay out the details of the very first pictorial impressions encountered by consciousness. Then, using water and place, they rendered visual perspective and personal sentiments. Here, the paper preliminarily sketches the three poets’ different poetic realms. From this point onwards, all three poets embark on distinct paths. The similarly straitened circumstances Meng Jiao and Jia Dao faced determined the two poets’ bitter chanting poetic style and the general impression left by reading their works. Next, the paper looks at the conceptualization that went into the poems’ wording, intention, stanza structuring, and other modes of organization, so as to highlight the similarities and differences in the uniqueness, oddness, and eccentricity of the three poets’ styles. Finally, this paper discusses how “chanting” relates to the physical body’s role in the creative process, arguing that poetry was not a form of expression chosen by these three men at random. Rather, they chose this form of writing because the chanted language of poetry is capable of expressing and manifesting the body and mind’s unique rhythms and movements through innovations in refrains, sentence structures, tonal structures, rhyme schemes, and so forth. One step at a time, the poets made use of “timing and strength” to capture moments of creativity. There was proximity to pre-Tang poetic forms in the poets’ sentiments and psychophysiological rhythms. Yet, because the chanted lines in then-contemporary poetic forms were moving in the direction of spatialization, within poetry’s evolution in this era there appeared a literary vein that can be traced from the bitter chanting of Meng Jiao to that of Jia Dao. The evolutionary thread running through these poets’ work is interwoven with a process of individualization, standardization, and theoretization.