Chinese poetry in times of mind, mayhem and money

537 Pages·2008·3.423 MB·English

by  Crevel, Maghiel van

Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind,
Mayhem and Money
Sinica Leidensia
Edited by
Barend J. ter Haar
In co-operation with
P.K. Bol, W.L. Idema, D.R. Knechtges, E.S. Rawski,
E. Zürcher†, H.T. Zurndorfer
VOLUME 86
Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind,
Mayhem and Money
By
Maghiel van Crevel
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2008
Cover illustration: calligraphy by Che Qianzi (photograph by Jeroen Wiedenhof)
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crevel, Maghiel van.
Chinese poetry in times of mind, mayhem and money / By Maghiel van Crevel.
p. cm. — (Sinica leidensia ; 86)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-16382-9 (alk. paper)
1. Chinese poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Experimental poetry,
Chinese—History and criticism. 3. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—China. I. Title. II. Series.
PL2333.C87 2008
895.1’15209—dc22
2008031294
ISSN: 0169-9563
ISBN: 978 90 04 16382 9
Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
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printed in the netherlands
contents v
CONTENTS
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii
Chapter One
Avant-Garde Poetry from China: Text, Context and Metatext 1
1. What Went Before . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2. The Unofficial Poetry Scene and the Avant-Garde . . . . 5
3. Context: Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money . . . . . . . 13
4. Text: From Elevated to Earthly and from What to How 23
5. Metatext: Images of Poetry and Poethood . . . . . . . . . . . 30
6. The Case Studies, and What This Book Wants to Do 50
Chapter Two
True Disbelief: Han Dong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
1. The Rejection of Obscure Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
2. An Original Poetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Chapter Three
Thanatography and the Poetic Voice: Haizi . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
1. Thanatography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
2. The Poetic Voice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Chapter Four
Exile: Yang Lian, Wang Jiaxin and Bei Dao . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
1. Poets in Exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
2. Exile in Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Chapter Five
Mind over Matter, Matter over Mind: Xi Chuan . . . . . . . . 187
1. Spirituality versus Materialism and the Barbarians . . . 189
2. A Different Voice: Poetry Rising, Poets Falling . . . . . . 194
3. Words Capturing Images, Images Capturing Words . . . 215
vi contents
Chapter Six
Fringe Poetry, But Not Prose: Xi Chuan and Yu Jian . . . . . 223
1. A Wonderful Inadequacy of Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
2. «Salute» and «File 0»: Poetry or Prose? . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
3. Fringe Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
Chapter Seven
Objectification and the Long-Short Line: Yu Jian . . . . . . . . 247
1. Objectification and Subjectification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
2. Long Lines and Blanks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
Chapter Eight
Narrative Rhythm, Sound and Sense: Sun Wenbo . . . . . . . . 281
1. Content Bias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
2. «The Program»: Content and Plot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288
3. «The Program»: Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294
4. Narrativity and Its Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
Chapter Nine
The Lower Body: Yin Lichuan and Shen Haobo . . . . . . . . . 305
1. Lower Body Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
2. A Poetic Lineage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338
Chapter Ten
Not at Face Value: Xi Chuan’s Explicit Poetics . . . . . . . . . . 345
1. Explanations, Issues and Alchemy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
2. A Bigger Picture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360
Chapter Eleven
Desecrations? Han Dong’s and Yu Jian’s Explicit Poetics . . . 365
1. Poethood According to Han Dong and Yu Jian . . . . . . 366
2. Metatextual Styles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392
Chapter Twelve
What Was All the Fuss About? The Popular-Intellectual Polemic 399
1. What Were the Issues? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 400
2. What Was at Stake? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441
Appendix: A Chronological Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451
contents vii
Chapter Thirteen
More Than Writing, As We Speak: Yan Jun . . . . . . . . . . . . 459
1. Three-Dimensional Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461
2. Writing, Event Culture and Poetry Opening Up . . . . . 471
Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475
Index and Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 505
viii contents
preface ix
PREFACE
One of my hang-ups is what it means to call something marginal,
or more precisely, what it means to call avant-garde poetry from
China so. I’ll save this issue for a subsection of chapter One and the
occasional relapse later on. Here I will only say that it is to do with
a questionable mechanism that makes numbers the measure of all
things, that this mechanism has sometimes been applied to not just
poetry but also scholarship on poetry, and that on both levels it is
often unwarranted and potentially deceptive. While I am aware that
the poetry crowd in Chinese Studies and Literary Studies is smaller
than the politics crowd or the fiction crowd, I’m not sure that this
makes it marginal in any sense other than the quantitative, or that
quantitative marginality is a bad thing. What’s more, just like poet-
ry’s notorious undefinability and diatribes against its uselessness have
never endangered its acknowledged right to exist—or rather the fact
of its existence as an essential expression of humanity—so the schol-
arly study of poetry somehow always manages to hang on, regardless
of the number of people involved. It appears, quite simply, to be
worth it. On that note, and specifically in light of the dynamic mod-
ern manifestations of a civilization with a massive cultural tradition,
it is good to see that the Chinese poetry crowd continues to attract
new faces in China and elsewhere, and that the object of their fas-
cination continues to generate new research. And it makes perfect
sense, for there are many more things about the Chinese avant-garde
to get hung up on than its marginality, as I hope this book will
show.
The documented history of the avant-garde is roughly a hundred
times shorter than that of Chinese poetry as a whole. Still, the
amount of material that has become available since the late 1970s
can feel overwhelming to the individual researcher—and yet it isn’t
always easy to find, especially if one is based elsewhere in the world.
To facilitate research, teaching and translation, I present this study
in conjunction with three online re search bibliographies published
by the Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center:
“Unofficial Poetry Journals from the People’s Republic of China:
A Research Note and an Annotated Bibliography” (2007, see Works