10 - The Great Man

Summary

The ‘Essay on music’ showed Juan Chi attempting to describe a world united in musically inspired virtue; his ‘Understanding the I ching’ attempted to describe the psychological and metaphysical origin of that, mainly Confucian, virtue. But his other works, his fu and his poems, for the most part, show us only a world deprived of virtue of any kind – of love, of truth, of lasting joy – and a world deprived of its legitimate sovereign, without whom it was impossible for orthodox Confucianists to imagine any kind of orderly society. We have seen how Juan Chi turned inwards in his poetry; how, having described the political and social iniquity he saw in the world, he turned toward the search for some kind of permanence or absolute value within the world or outside it. The search included, as we have just seen, mysticism and the search for the immortals, but does not seem to have been successful. In this next section of poems I have included those concerned with the great hero and his problems. Juan Chi seems to have centered his anguish and his desires around a great mythical giant, a figure who comes directly from the works of Chuang-tzu, and whose absolute freedom and absolute greatness intoxicated him.

Just how we are to interpret the Great Man and define the role he actually plays in Juan Chi's works, remain problems. He seems to be a purely imaginary hero, a kind of hero of mystical escape.