Pei He (New York University)
Affect scholars, such as Sedgewick (2003) and Brinkema (2014), suggest reading a text for moments of intensity. Lyric poetry thus provides fertile ground for such study of affect, given its snapshots of transient moments and lack of action. In this paper I examine affect evoked by aging, a universal motif of human existence, as expressed in both Archaic Greek Lyrics and Classical Chinese lyrics. In both traditions, feelings toward the aging process—or the aged self—are not only directly expressed in the lyric content but also indirectly conveyed through affective expressions. In Sappho and other Greek poets, feelings associated with aging are evoked by the loss of youth, beauty, and sexual attractiveness in the decaying body. However, in the Chinese Nineteen Old Poems, the body is completely absent. Instead, feelings about aging are often channeled through descriptions of plants and animals and the atmosphere created by the natural environment. These two different modes of evoked affect in ancient Greek and Chinese lyrics correspond to “feelings” and “moods,” two preliminary forms of affect as defined by Altieri (2003), with the former characterized by its engagement with the sensations and the latter by its diffuse, permeating atmosphere. For example, both Sappho’s Tithonus poem and Anacreon 395 list a sequence of bodily symptoms of aging before revealing their moan and groan toward old age. Whether it is the knees that no longer dance like fawns in the Tithonus poem, or the gray temple and white hair and decayed teeth in Anacreon 395, the Greek speakers in both poems situate the reader in a world juxtaposing present facts and past memories. The fleeting nature of flashbacks to delightful youth provoke a sense of fragility and evanescence, as the present connection to decayed body parts aggravate the pathos of old age before the speaker utters anything about such tragedy. This exemplifies a moment of preliminary affect—before recognition and naming of feelings—and this affective presence is evoked through the senses displayed in a disrupted temporal order, which itself is triggered by those senses. However, in No. 11 and No. 13 of Nineteen Old Poems, readers are first exposed and immersed in a continuous scene with seamless descriptions of the surroundings. Both poems begin with a scene on a carriage and the speaker/traveler gazing at either a grave to the north (No.13) or a long road far away (No.11). Following the traveler’s gaze is a white poplar, pines, a cypress tree, the wind, and grasses. The bleak (No.13) or shaky (No.11) appearance of those plants shades the scene in a hue of gray, darkening the overall atmosphere of the poem. Similar to Sappho’s Tithonus poem and Anacreon 395, the speaker starts talking about the aging process and the transience of life after the initial establishment of a presence. But unlike the sensual display of the bodily symptoms in the Greek lyrics, these two Chinese poems evoke a preliminary affect of old age by constructing a gloomy atmosphere through the portrait of the natural environment.