http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr92-3/lovell.htm Misty in Roots Chinese Poetry after Mao julia lovell ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ISSUE 92-3 BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS although a keen amateur poet himself, Mao Zedong shared with Plato a deep suspicion of what other poets might get up to in his Republic. In 1942, Mao demanded that "workers in literature and art should . . . be 'oxen' for the proletariat and the masses". "There is", he pronounced, "no such thing as art for art's sake . . . art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature, and art . . . are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine." Indeed, after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao attempted to abolish poets altogether, launching mass poetry movements in which the peasants, workers, and soldiers were exhorted to start doing it for themselves. The Westernised style of new poetry introduced during China's modern literary revolution of the 1910s-1920s was shunned in favour of proletarian Folk Song forms. This 1958 specimen showcases the literary fruits of Mao's campaign: "Big character posters / Big character posters / They're like stars / As well as cannon". Maoist strictures reached their height in the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), during which openly reading or writing almost anything at all was seen as a sign of dangerous ideological subversion. After Mao's death in 1976, however, it was underground poetry that led the rebellion against the Maoist deadlock on literature. In 1968, Mao displaced millions of urban intellectuals, many of them high school students, to the countryside to be "reformed" by labouring with the peasants. The social chaos that resulted provided many of the "sent-down youth" with an unintended degree of intellectual freedom. Translations of forbidden foreign writers - T. S. Eliot, the French Symbolists, Beckett - were secretly passed between young poets who would later spearhead literary innovation in the post-Mao thaw, such as Bei Dao (b. 1949), Mang Ke (b. 1950) and Gu Cheng (1956-93). If the Cultural Revolution provided the context in which these poets' literary sensibilities were stimulated, the political bankruptcy of Cultural Revolution Maoism triggered a crisis of faith in Communist authority that would deeply colour their poetry. Bei Dao's 1972 poem "The Answer" clearly demonstrates the defiance felt by him and his peers towards the political power of the state: Let me tell you world, I - do - not - believe! If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet, Count me as number one thousand and one. Already in contact with each other during the Cultural Revolution, Bei Dao and his fellow underground poets gathered into a more formal grouping following their permanent return to Beijing after 1976. Taking advantage of the political relaxation that made possible the Democracy Wall Movement of 1978-79, Bei Dao and Mang Ke set up an unofficial but highly influential magazine for literature and art: Jintian (Today). Proclaiming itself to be a non-political, literary publication - a deeply subversive act in 1970s China - Jintian carried for the first time works by experimental poets (Bei Dao, Mang Ke and others) that have since been canonised as emblematic works of the post-Mao literary breakthrough. By late 1979, however, the end of the first post-Mao political thaw terminated the Mainland publishing run of Jintian. Closed down in December, the magazine would not be restarted until Bei Dao and many of his original contributors went into Western exile after June 1989. But the underground poetry published in Jintian continued to be seen and heard, thanks to its controversial labelling within official literary circles as "Misty" (or obscure) poetry. This new, experimental poetry represented an obvious challenge to the orthodox Communist model, thanks to the poets' open acknowledgement of Western influences, and emphasis on the personal, private, and individual over the political, public, and collective. Theirs was a strongly imagistic poetry, often broken up into short, elliptical stanzas devoid of didactic certainty or kitsch socialist optimism. Take, for example, Gu Cheng's "Feeling": The sky is grey The road is grey The building is grey The rain is grey In this dead expanse of grey Two children walk by One bright red One pale green Such poetic intimations that life under socialism was at best monochrome and certainly not glorious technicolour provoked outrage from orthodox critics. Following thirty Maoist years in which absolute clarity of meaning had been essential to political survival, ambiguity was the greatest imaginable heterodoxy. The old guard lambasted the new poetry for being "weird" and "opaque", for its rebellion against the rigid idea of the writer serving the socialist collective of the Chinese people (whoever they might be). "Poetry that cannot be understood, accepted and appreciated by the masses", fumed one orthodox critic, "is either bad poetry or not poetry at all." Opposition to Misty Poetry climaxed during the 1983 Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, which seemed to spell a chilling return to the mass movements of political persecution characteristic of the Cultural Revolution. But with the abrupt cessation of the campaign in 1984, experimental, non-official poetry, along with its commitment to artistic freedom of expression, gained wider acceptance in official literary circles. Although the Communist literary establishment and the poetic avant-garde would never merge amicably, a greater degree of tolerance between the two now became possible, resulting in increased publishing opportunities for experimental poets. By 1984, new poetry magazines and collections were burgeoning, heralding the emergence of "New Generation" or "Post-Misty" schools of poetry. While most members of this poetic generation (born principally in the mid-1950s to 1960s) would acknowledge a debt to their Misty predecessors in having forged a creative, intellectual space for experimental poetry, deference to the Misties went little further. Indeed, many of the newer poets placed themselves in conscious opposition to the high-blown, socio- political ideals of the Jintian poets, rallying under the slogan "Down with Bei Dao!" Although hostile to the politics of Maoist orthodoxy, Misty Poetry itself harboured unmistakably political, even patriotic overtones. Its individualistic voice often expressed a collective sadness at the wounds wrought on China by the Cultural Revolution and a desire for the country to find its way again, as conveyed by Liang Xiaobin's lament to the motherland: "China, my key is lost // Oh my key, / Where are you? // I am determined to search / Hoping to recover you". Underneath the rebellious nihilism of Bei Dao's "The Answer" lay faith in a heroic, poetic voice capable both of exposing ideological bankruptcy and of forging a powerful aesthetic alternative that was political by implication. No such faith survived in younger poets, who veered either towards greater opacity and language games that betrayed a deep scepticism in poetry's potential for expressing collective meaning, or towards an anti- heroic, prosaic language aimed at mirroring the imperfections of ordinary life and undermining the lofty ideals of Misty Poetry. Han Dong's (b. 1961) use of a free, colloquial style and dismissal of poetic heroics are well illustrated in "Of Wild Goose Pagoda", a poem ridiculing attempts by modern Chinese poets to emulate their pre-modern predecessors' custom of climbing ivory towers to compose grandiose, elitist poetry: What can we now know Of Wild Goose Pagoda Which many hurry to, from afar To climb To be heroes . . . Then they descend Enter the street down below Are gone in an instant . . . What can we now know Of Wild Goose Pagoda Up we climb Look all around us Then come down again A more intricate, unconcernedly elitist style was sought by poets such as Xi Chuan (b. 1963) who, in works such as "Darkness", was happy to give free play to his intellectual narrative voice without worrying excessively about its ability to cast light on life's mysteries: Distant darkness is a legend, lengthy darkness sleeplessness Hold up your torch, what do you see - Darkness, infinite darkness . . . But when you raise the torch there is only infinite darkness Only you are left, to listen to the drip of water Dew drops are at the window Since the Tiananmen Uprising of 1989, when many of the Jintian grouping of Misty Poets went into Western exile, geographical as much as generational and stylistic factors have divided contemporary Chinese poetry. This fact of exile has led to a sometimes undue politicisation of contemporary Chinese poetry within the West. Despite attempts by Bei Dao, probably the best known exile poet and for years the front-running Chinese candidate for a Nobel Prize, to seek "Forms of Distance" (the title of a 1994 collection) from his political persona, and despite the increasingly inward turn of his poetry by the mid- 1990s, he has often been read as a poet of exile, defined by his associations with the 1989 demonstrations. Exile poets have found themselves both helped and constrained by their politicised status in the West, which on the one hand increases their marketability and translation opportunities, but on the other gives them a limited artistic shelf-life, as readers search their writing above all for references to Tiananmen and the Cultural Revolution. The West's tendency to adopt the exile poets as international representatives of China has, moreover, fostered resentment amongst poets remaining in the Mainland, who accuse the exiles of pandering to Western fantasies about a repressive China and of neglecting questions of deeper artistic value. Interference from politics, however, was not the only problem faced by Mainland poets in the 1990s. In the 1980s, poetry had played a central role in breaking China and its literature out of the intellectual stranglehold of Maoism. The advance of the Chinese market economy after 1989, however, sidelined all forms of "pure" literature, and no genre suffered more dramatic a demotion than poetry. While the government dismantled the "iron rice-bowl" (the Communist promise of a salary for life to its state- contracted writers), publishing houses looked to their profit margins, away from avant-garde poetry. As novelists and poets alike abandoned "high art" for television writing and business, Zhou Lunyou described in 1993 the demoralising effects of the market economy on creative writing: "The blows of commodities are more gentle, more direct than violence, / More cruel too, pushing the spirit toward total collapse". This sense of marginality fostered a romantic siege mentality within some poets, provoking a vehement rejection of contemporary Chinese materialism. In certain circles, poetry in the 1990s evolved into a pure, quasi-religious undertaking, loftily detached from the money-grubbing reality of Chinese capitalism. Poets such as Chen Dongdong (b. 1961) expressed this sense of sacred mission in the language of martyrdom: "In order to light the fire of the soul in the realm of the divine, the poet has no choice but to set himself on fire." The image of the poet as a tragic romantic genius doomed to self-sacrifice at the altar of art has been reinforced by the actual suicide of several poets in the past thirteen years, such as the promising young poet Haizi (b. 1964) in 1989 and the exile poet Gu Cheng in 1993. In many of the survivors of the cult of poetry, however, aversion to these two post-1989 constraints - the Western enthusiasm for political exotica, on the one hand, and the pressures of a commodity economy, on the other - has given rise to a poetry of increased obscurity and opaqueness. Whether written in the Mainland or in exile, Chinese poetry became generally "harder" during the 1990s, glorifying the autonomous, independent voice of the poet. The work of the exile poet Yang Lian (b. 1955) typifies this tendency, flinging together objects and images, and confronting the reader with an abstruse authorial perspective that leaps non-sequentially between disjointed images and mutating forms. open mouths poking from chests to eat meat winds blow huge ear-rings of straw sharks with sinister intent climb trees behind your back climb on the bench of the ocean A similar indeterminacy and surreal juxtaposition of images feature in the 1992 prose-poem, "Salute", by the Mainland-based poet Xi Chuan: The spider intercepts an imperial edict, thus going against the wish of the road. In hemp fields, lamps have no rights of residence. Someone is about to arrive and knock on the door, sheep are about to appear and roam in the meadow . . . Given this widespread shift towards opacity, it is perhaps unsurprising that by the start of the new millennium, writers of Chinese poetry were thought to outnumber readers. In the two decades since 1979, the aims of the Misty Poets have been largely achieved: to create a space for poetic experimentation within a political culture of literary utilitarianism. In this process, however, poetry has been transformed from the popular frontline of thought liberation, into an isolated, self-enclosed vanguard. In 1979, the inflammatory intellectual impact of an underground poetry magazine such as Jintian provoked an official ban. By 2002, although China remains very much a one-party dictatorship, the decline in the public profile of poetry led one avant-garde poet to comment: "Underground poetry barely exists in China any more. Poets can mostly find a way to publish what they want, as long as they pay for the print run themselves". While the government focuses its censorial energies on the Internet and mass media, it remains to be seen what use Chinese poets will come to make of the relative freedom that their efforts have won. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Suggested further reading: Criticism Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie, The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century, Hurst and Company, 1997. Maghiel van Crevel, Language Shattered: Contemporary Chinese poetry and Duoduo, Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1996. Michelle Yeh, Modern Chinese Poetry: Theory and practice since 1917, Yale University Press, 1991. Poetry Collections Bei Dao: several collections available in translation, for example The August Sleepwalker tr. Bonnie S. McDougall, Anvil Press, 1988. Gu Cheng, Selected Poems ed. and tr. by Sean Golden and Chu Chiyu et al., Hong Kong, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1990. Yang Lian: several collections available in translation, for example Where the Sea Stands Still tr. Brian Holton, Bloodaxe, 1999. See also Renditions (a Chinese-English translation magazine) no. 37 Spring 1992 for selected "New Generation" poets. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Julia Lovell's translation of A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong will be published next year. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ BACK TO POETRY REVIEW HOME PAGE <../review.htm> BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright Notice and Terms of Use: This site contains copyrighted materials, including but not limited to text, photos and graphics. you may not use, copy, publish, upload, download, post to a bulletin board or otherwise transmit, distribute or modify any contents of the site in any way, except that you may download one copy of such contents on any single computer for your own personal non-commercial use, provided you do not alter or remove any copyright, author attribution, or other proprietary notices.