Dissolute Libertine or Venerable Confucian?

Abstract

Abstract This work aims to explore the moral conflict that many Northern Song (960–1127) scholar-officials (shidaifu 士大夫) experienced as a result of their involvement in the ci 詞 song lyric, by focusing on Ouyang Xiu’s 歐陽修 (1007–1072) collection. The song lyric was held in low regard by many exponents of high culture for several reasons, but primarily due to the fact that it exposed the literati’s relationships with courtesans. A lyricist who belonged to the Confucian elite thus found himself in a complicated position: he had to publicly advocate a moral system that was particularly conservative on matters such as sex, when he in fact privately wrote songs that would be seen as “lascivious” (yin 淫) by the very moral standards that he preached. Firstly, I will approach the problem by exploring the conflict between the Confucian ideal of sexual moderation and the diverging tendencies to sexual freedom that emerged from the practice and the poetics of the eleventh-century song lyric. I will then discuss the long critical tradition aimed at denying Ouyang Xiu’s authorship of the erotic songs attributed to him by some sources. My goal is to try to understand why so many critics espoused this view, regardless of the fact that other literati were also known to have composed rather explicit lyrics. In doing so, I shall seek to demonstrate that the attempts to dissociate Ouyang Xiu from the authorship of the “contested” erotic songs in his collection were mainly motivated by a moralistic need to preserve his reputation as a great master of the literati culture.