Crevel

More poems and contributor notes in Chinesefeature

Matter over Mind—On Xi Chuan’s Poetry

By Maghiel van Crevel

Shall we not read the map? At sorrow lies the first crossroads, witha road to song and a road to bewilderment; at bewilderment the secondcrossroads, with a road to pleasure and a road to nothingness; atnothingness the third crossroads, with a road to death and a road toinsight; at insight the fourth crossroads, with a road to madness and aroad to silence.

         The abovepassage, stanza 25 of Xi Chuan’s WHAT THE EAGLE SAYS, comes from theclosing years of an astonishingly turbulent century in the history ofChinese poetry. In the years following the 1911 collapse of the lastimperial dynasty, champions of “literary revolution”forcefullyargued for literary expression in the vernacular. A New Poetry was toreplace age-old classical forms whose rigidity and elitism were felt tothwart the development of a modern literature, and by implication of amodern society. Over several thousand years of recorded history, it wasneither the first time nor the last that the marriage of Chineseliterature and politics was uneasy—in the public sphere, however,its fundamental validity was rarely questioned. The 1920s and 30s sawforeign-influenced experiment and heated debate on the New Poetry, butits practitioners could hardly stand aloof from the ugly realities oftheir surroundings: colonial aggression, crippling social problems and acivil war.
         As didChinese leaders through the ages, Mao Zedong set great store by thepolitical potential of literature and art. In 1942 he laid down the lawfor writers and artists in Communist-controlled areas, subordinatingtheir work to politics in so many words. This meant a ban on many typesof literature—including that of the “individualist”kind—as well as the encouragement and commission of politicallycorrect works to advance the war effort. In 1949 the war came to an end,but wartime rules for literature and art remained in force in the newlyestablished People’s Republic of China (Hong Kong and Taiwan were, ofcourse, worlds apart from the Chinese mainland). Many writers abandonedtheir craft for safer occupations. Those who continued to write butfailed to toe the line suffered terrible punishment. This ranged fromsimple harassment in one’s private or professional life to domesticexile, house arrest, incarceration and mental and physical violence,especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). For the famednovelist and short-story writer Lao She, it led to his allegedsuicide—or, effectively, his murder by Red Guards. In the 1950s andthe early 1960s, there had still been a regular production of literarytexts, albeit monotonous and predictable, with much heroic battling ofsinister landlords, banner-waving and harvesting of bumper crops. But bythe late 1960s, literature in China came to a virtual standstill. Inwhat little poetry was left, one might have happened upon a crossroads,and perhaps sorrow, song and death, as long as theywere of the politically correct kind—but definitely not onbewilderment, pleasure, nothingness, insight, madness orsilence.
        Ideological repression was now at a fever pitch. China’s schools anduniversities were closed, and urban youth were sent away to learn frompoor peasants and factory workers instead. At that very time, in a quirkof history, Red Guard razzia’s of private “bourgeois”librariesinadvertently exposed many of these “young intellectuals”toforeign literature in translation, ranging from Baudelaire to Kafka,Kerouac, Salinger, Solzhenitsyn and more. Disillusioned with theorthodoxy of Socialist Realism, they began to meet in underground salonsfor reading and writing that were to become the breeding places of theChinese poetry we know today. Their members included Bei Dao, Mang Ke,Gu Cheng, Duoduo and Yang Lian, to name the best-known poets of thefirst generation that ventured beyond the Maoist pale. When the madnessof the Cultural Revolution had passed, they took underground poetryabove ground, and in the early 1980s drew domestic and internationalattention to their art. Their nom de guerre was one of“Obscurity”, a critical label inspired by a type of imagerythat was considered incomprehensible under the circumstances؏thecircumstances being, of course, a painful dearth of non-propagandesquepoetry that would allow for things like original metaphor.
        Now, twenty years on, the Obscure Poetry once attacked by theestablishment for wanting to be non-political is dismissed by youngerauthors for being too political. In the mid-1980s, the Chineseavant-garde in literature, rock-n-roll and the visual arts exploded intopluriformity and abundance. Literary associations mushroomed and for afew years, every other journal in official and samizdat circuits wouldfeature a new manifesto announcing the latest Ism and its bearing on henature of Art. Then came the bloody suppression of the 1989 ProtestMovement around the Square of Heavenly Peace, and its initial,paralyzing effect on the life of the mind in the People’s Republic. Inthe 1990s, poetry was “marginalized”by media like TV and theInternet, by the rise of popular culture and consumerism and, moregenerally, by the rapid and all-pervading commercialization of Chineselife. Marginalization, however, has arguably benefited the avant-garde.Poetry recitals no longer draw the crowds of starved readers that cameto listen in 1979 or 1980—but by and large, poetry is being leftalone by political authorities, too. It is in that atmosphere that new,intensely personal voices have matured and made themselves heard: YuJian, Wang Jiaxin, Zhai Yongming, Xi Chuan, Ouyang Jianghe, Tang Yaping,Sun Wenbo, Shen Haobo and many others.
        Xi Chuan (pseudonym of Liu Jun, 1963) graduated from university with athesis on Ezra Pound’s encounters with classical Chinese literature,with some attention to fruitful mis-understanding in that famousinstance of cross-cultural production. He now teaches foreign andChinese literature at the Central Institute of Fine Arts in Beijing.Since 1985, he has published widely—mostly poetry, but also essaysand translations (Borges, Pound and others)—and become a majorpresence in contemporary Chinese poetry. In 1995, he made his first ofseveral trips abroad to read at the Rotterdam Poetry Internationalfestival, and in 2002 he participated in the University of Iowa’sInternational Writing Program; Dutch, English, French, Japanese andSpanish translations of his work have appeared.
         WHAT THE EAGLE SAYS(1999), or THE EAGLE for short, is the latest in a series of long prosepoems that became Xi Chuan’s trademark in the early 1990s. Like itspredecessors SALUTE (1992) and MISFORTUNE (1996), it is an enigmatictext that invites and yet resists interpretation. It strikes somethingof an expository pose, in eight separately entitled sections and 99stanzas that unfold in eminently civilized, sometimes archaic syntax.Its deliberate, aestheticized repetition of certain sentence patterns isreminiscent of ancient philosophical-literary texts from East and West,such as Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) and Heraclitus—suitable for analogyand contrast, mirror image and opposition. And true enough, THE EAGLEhas thought-provoking, serious things to say about identity, languageand the human condition. But crucially, upon closer inspection XiChuan’s words often turn out to flout the rules of narrative and otherlogic, to celebrate ambiguity, paradox and downright contradiction, tobe pseudo-philosophy: irreverent, playful, down-to-earth andgenerated by its own musicality as much as anything else. As theinsistence of the text’s syntactic patterns can be reproduced in anylanguage, its translation may hope to retain the primacy of the poem’sactual texture, the materiality of its language: matter overmind, as it were. In THE EAGLE, images must capture words, just as muchas the other way around.
        Of course, thatdistinction—call it one of form and content—is anything butabsolute. Content-wise, THE EAGLE treats of a wealth of subject matter,and its imagery draws on sophisticated literary mechanisms. One is thatof metamorphosis:

Thereupon I shun my flesh, and turn intoa drop of perfume, actually drowning an ant. Thereupon I turn into anant, drilling my way into an elephant’s brain, upsetting it so that itstamps all four of its legs. Thereupon I turn into an elephant, myentire body exuding a great stench. Thereupon I turn into a greatstench, and those who cover their noses when they smell me are men.Thereupon I turn into a man, and a plaything of fate.

But metamorphosis does not quite cover what is going on here.“I”appears to be a mental-linguistic agency, autonomous butwithout a home of its own. Roaming from one body to another, be it manor beast or thing or god, “I”can occupy divergent points ofview:

Thereupon I turn into my posterity and let the raintest if I am waterproof. Thereupon I turn into rain, and splash upon thebald head of an intellectual. Thereupon I turn into that intellectual,detesting the world and its ways, pick up a stone from the ground andhurl it at the oppressor. Thereupon I turn into stone and oppressor atthe same time: when I am hit by me, that sets both of my brains roaring.

In addition to metamorphosis, then, we may speak ofmetaphor, in its literal sense of ‘transfer’. Apparently, others can dothat as well as “I”:

I need but feign to be aneagle, and a man will feign to be me.

In its closingstanza, the poem intimates that the chain—or the poeticspell—of metamorphosis and metaphor can be broken:

Soplease allow me to stay in your house for an hour, because an eagleplans to reside in a chamber of my heart for a week. If you accept me, Iwill gladly turn into the image you hope for, but not for too long, ormy true features will be thoroughly laid bare.

These aresome of the things we learn about the narrator. What of the eagleitself? The poem’s title suggests humanization, for the Chinese word for‘what. . .says’ is inseparably linked to human language, and cannot beused in phrases like The cat says miaow. Now the eagle does notsay a word, but in Chinese, as in English, what the eagle sayscan also mean ‘what the phenomenon / story of the eagle has to tell us’,or indeed ‘how one could speak of the eagle’. This ambiguity extendsinto the eagle as it appears in the body of the poem, reiteratingclichés only to subvert them. If the eagle is a sign that doesnot carry the weight of thinking—a curse befalling man insection One—that evokes an intuitive animal, determined of itselfand untroubled by any existential doubt. But immediately afterward, theeagle is called shy, a characteristic that, for all its unlikeliness,brings the animal closer to the human reader. As such, it is akin toMarvin, a robot suffering from depression in Douglas Adams’ The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and, closer to home, to a mysteriousMonster in Xi Chuan’s SALUTE, that is said to have no sense of humor andhate the narrator’s hairdo.
There is a regularalternation, then, of a sovereign, clichéd eagle, abstracted intoEaglehood, and an individual animal. The cliché flies on high,flying of itself, like its own shadow; it even becomes a point ofcalibration in the universe, for when it spreads its wings. . .it isthe earth begins to fly. Our shy eagle of flesh and blood, however,neglects to eat and is too weak to get off the ground. It dies—the cliché is of course immortal—and falls prey to maggots, andits feathers end up in the living room of a white-collaredbeauty. In the context of present-day China, that might well referto the New Rich, unimpressed by Eaglehood but happy to pay for an eaglehide as a piece of interior design. This dismantling of the lofty imageby vulgar, material reality once more takes us back to SALUTE, writtenat the onset of a decade with more time for money than for ideology:again, matter over mind. There, a poet falls to his death from ahigh-rise, unsaved by Heine’s wings of song, and we read that thedeath of others makes us guilty. In THE EAGLE, Xi Chuan expands thisobservation to include the animals:

not metaphysical deathbut death of the flesh: wounds festering, the body rigid. That is deathof the flesh, and we partake in it.

Subsequently, in apoetical statement—the naming of things in order to neutralizethem—we read that if I describe an eagle, it is in order to cutoff its head. The same stanza contemplates the possibility of theeagle’s biblical rebirth, and takes us back to the cliché. Anytemporary death of Eaglehood would of course be strictly metaphysical,and only have a use for festering wounds and so on as stage props.
But metaphysicslose. In the end, what weighs heaviest is feathers, festers, theidentification of man and beast and their trading of places. The poem’sfinal section, with a shockingly sombre, unadorned heading that readsOf My Meaningless Life, starts thus:

Among men thereare men who are not men, just like among eagles there are eagles thatare not eagles: there are eagles that are forced to pace up and down thealleyways, and there are men who are forced to fly through the air.

Some eagles are really men, and some men eagles. That must bewhy “I” earlier cautioned against putting eagle meat on themenu. That to be an eagle is not nearly as exciting as the clichéwould have it is another one of Xi Chuan’s inferences from the blurringof the boundaries between man and beast. For if man does not revel inhis walking, why would the eagle revel in its soaring?

* * *

For an English translation of “What the Eagle Says,” see Seneca Reviewvol xxxiii # 2 (2003). Part of the literary-historical summary in theabove essay first appeared in “Det poetiske rum mellem det ophöjede ogdet jordnære: ti kinesiske digtere I Danmark” [Textscapes between theElevated and the Earthly: Ten Chinese Poets in Denmark], in: SidseLaugesen & Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg (eds), Kineserne kommer!Dansk-Kinesisk poesifestival [The Chinese Are Coming! Danish-ChinesePoetry Festival], Aarhus: Östasiatisk afdeling, Aarhus Universitet,2004.

* * *

Maghiel van Crevel

Maghiel vanCrevel received his PhD (1996) in Chinese Literature from LeidenUniversity. He lectured at the University of Sydney until taking up dutyas Professor of Chinese language & literature at Leiden in 1999. Throughregular fieldwork, with the help of authors, critics, publishers andliterary activists, he has built an internationally unique collection ofmaterials on contemporary mainland-Chinese poetry: journals, individualcollections, multiple—author anthologies, correspondence, audio andvideo recordings and so on — with ample space for the undergroundand unofficial circuits that paved the way for todays avant-garde, andretain their importance to this day. Van Crevel has publishedextensively on mainland—Chinese texts (poems), contexts (theircultural and socio—political surroundings) and metatexts (discourseon poetry), in English, Dutch and Chinese. He has translated a number ofpoets in this issue.