View/Open - University of Victoria

integrate into his own previous experiences. 250 This overarching angle of contrast is turned inside-out in
“Heptasyllabic Old Style Poem For Dugu Jian on Our Parting”, a poem whose frontier “other” does not
speak in a strange, different language but instead speaks in the language of the poet-narrator, and in
doing so sends a quake throughout the whole descriptive matrix utilized in realizing the “local people
and customs” theme of the frontier subgenre. Contrast, the poet-narrator shows, need not be the sole
pattern for presenting non-Chinese; examples of integration and gradual blurring of absolute otherness
are also available for describing the peoples of the frontier.
With an attitude that was “more of an explorer or admirer than a suffering or intimidated
traveller”, 251 the poet-narrator of Cen Shen's frontier poems could set aside static tropes of desolation
and despair while still satisfying certain thematic requirements of frontier poetry. Unencumbered by
accustomed ways of perceiving the periphery of China proper, the geographic and social reality
conveyed by the poet-narrator in Cen Shen's frontier works invigorated the subgenre with hitherto
unseen sights and sounds. These aspects of the frontier were presented in a particular manner that at
times had become released from common paradigms of calculated difference between the familiar
central China world and its peripheral regions as well as intentional negation of the familiar in an
unfamiliar setting. This technique created a poetic story replete with unique, memorable singularities
existing from the heights of burning mountain slopes to the convivial gatherings held within tents and
halls temporarily purged of martial associations, an aesthetic space colonized by both convention and
independent vision.
250
That is unless empathy, as in Li Qi's “In the Army” (“Congjunxing” 从 军 行 ), is the angle from which frontier peoples
are viewed since the nature of empathy forbids the maintenance of contradistinction between perceiver and perceived.
251
Robert Shanmu Chen, “A Study of Bao Zhao and His Poetry”, p. 195. Although it skirts dangerously near the ugly maw
of biographical fallacy, one might argue that the sheer amount of cumulative time Cen Shen spent in the northwestern
region, the travelling between places such as Anxi and Beiting on official business, and the various official positions he
held (such as Investigating Censor ( 监 察 御 使 ), a post whose holder was “generally empowered to gather complaints
from the people, to review the handling of prisoners [and] to impeach any official for misconduct” (Charles O. Hucker,
A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China, p. 146) allowed for an intimacy with and awareness of the frontier
beyond the grasp of most poets. This thesis did not, and will not, discuss Cen Shen's, or any other writers', frontier
poetry from an angle of authorial intent, a perspective impossible to ascertain without first conducting a seance. While
certainly an influence, Cen Shen's life experiences, events which are now only texts themselves, will remain outside the
analytical toolbox opened to explore in the second half of this thesis how the poet-narrator, who is wholly present in the
text, perceives the frontier landscape.
103