Abstract
Modernism and Post-Modernism are widely viewed as the mainstreams of the poetic scene in contemporary China. However, we can still find some Romantic poets of great importance, which illustrates the revival of Romanticism in contemporary China. Haizi, a talented poet who has been exerting great influence on contemporary and younger poets since his death, is a great example which profoundly suggests the opportunity Romanticism has and the dilemma it confronts in the cultural context of contemporary China. The intimacy between Haizi and Romanticism lies mainly in the self-positioning and self-fashioning. Haizi’s emphasis on ego, subjectivity and will, his claim of poets to be “kings,” is a quite unique phenomenon in the contemporary Chinese scene where poets are marginalized and their subjectivities are weakened by the society and even themselves. Therefore, Haizi’s poetry not only reveals its connection with Romanticism, but also the tension between the ideals of Romantic poetics and the reality of contemporary Chinese society.
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Notes
Su Manshu (1884–1918), for example, translated some works of Shelley and Byron before the movement.
Here I use the terms “European Romantics” and “European Romanticism” only to compare them to the Chinese Romantics/Romanticism, which doesn’t mean that I suppose a homogenous nature in the formers. On the other hand, I agree with René Wellek’s points that we can still speak of a unified European Romantic Movement which forms “a uinity of theories, philosophies, and style” and “a coherent group of ideas each of which implicates the other” (Wellek 1963, p. 129). To understand how the diverse Romanticisms in Europe took shape in various national contexts, see, for example: Porter and Teich (1988).
After Wang Ao published this article, a conference was held to discuss this issue, see: Wang et al. (2011).
A collection of essays was published in remembrance of Haizi in 1999; and most contributions of it have references to his death, see: Cui (1999).
Xi Chuan, “Huainian” [Reminisce], in Haizi (2009, p. 9).
Michelle Yeh discusses the marginalization of modern Chinese poetry and poets, see: Yeh (1992).
I realize that some Romantic themes and ideas, like passion, will and poet-hero, were absorbed by Revolutionary-Romanticism. I also agree with some schorlars’ points that the aesthetics of German Romanticism made great contributions to the rise of fascism (see, for example: McGovern 1941; Viereck 1941). However, I still maintain a basic difference between Revolutionary-Romanticism and classic Romanticism, between the totalitarian ideologies (including Nazism and Maoism) and Romantic poetics. Romanticism could only be accepted and absorbed by totalitarian ideologies when its basic orientations and assumptions changed, like: its aesthetic orientation replaced by a political one. This is what happened when Revolutionary Romanticism was accepted by Mao Zedong as the official doctrines. In fact, the emphases of the Romantics on individuality and imagination were rarely mentioned in the doctrines of Revolutionary-Romanticism in the 1950s and 1960s. So, strictly speaking, Revolutionary-Romanticism is a part of the totalitarian ideology with a few Romantic elements rather than a variant of Romanticism.
Luo Yihe’s poetics could illuminate Haizi’s works in some measure; but we will not discuss his poems here because of their less importance and typicality.
Unless otherwise explicated, all translations are mine.
According to Haizi, Great poetry or great poetic personality must combine and balance “The Maternal Power” (“Muben”) and “The Paternal Power” (“Fuben”), and they should be of a creative power dominated by “Paternal Subject.” “Romantic Princes,” however, still belong to writers who surround “The Maternal Power” (Haizi 2009, pp. 1043–1050).
This argument can be seen, for example, in Rui (2012, Chapter 3 and Chapter 5). Rui’s book shows a deep-going understanding of Haizi’s works and the cultural discourses in contemporary China; and it is surely one of the most important books on Haizi. But I don’t agree with Rui Kunze when she tries to relate Haizi’ works to Maoism in their prescription of a “sublime” poet-hero. Mao Zedong might implicitly take himself as a “sublime” poet-hero, which doesn’t necessarily lead to a deduction that one who also considers himself/herself as such is submitted to Maoism. In fact, the self image as the poet-hero is a well-known Romantic theme whose source can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Though Maoism and totalitarianism absorbs some themes and ideas of the Romantics, Romantic ideas should not be uncritically and readily identified with Maoism and totalitarianism. There is also a subtle problem when Rui tries to relate the “discourse of divinity” of Haizi’s poems to “Mao-style.” Rui seems to forget that Maoists still hold the faith of atheism and would never say the word “God” (“shen”) explicitly and positively. Thus, the words “gods” and “God” which frequently appear in Haizi’s poems rarely refer to Mao Zedong, but to Christianity and the pantheism of the European Romantics instead. In short, the discourse of divinity, the self image, and even the anti-modern tendency of Haizi’s works are actually more an issue of Romantic poetics than that of Maoism and totalitarianism. Considering Haizi as a supporter or an accomplice of nationalism, absolutism, and Maoism is indeed a reduction and simplification of a quite ambivalent and manifold phenomenon.
We can find an interesting connection between Haizi’s poem “Autumn to the Mother Country” which claims to “offer” itself to Mao Zedong and the poem “Autumn Recalls Spring’s Suffering and Recalls Lei Feng,” and “Jesus” which will be discussed later, which illustrates both the subjectivized occasionalism and historical nihilism of his writings.
This poetic line, like Surrealists’ linguistic experiments, can hardly be translated, and “sit in” is actually not a precise rendition of the original phrase “zuoman.” The line could be interpreted as “a lonely stone sits under the sky and fills in the latter to the full [like water fills to the full of a pit].”
Here I replace the phrase “these meager times” in line 6 of the translation with a more commonly used one “a desolate time.”
Xi Chuan, “Siwang Houji” [“Afterwords to Death”], in Haizi (2009, p. 1165).
Octavio Paz points out that “since its birth, modernity has been a critical passion, as much of Classical geometries as of Baroque labyrinths. A dizzy passion, for its culmination is the negation of itself; modernity is a sort of creative self-destruction. Since Romanticism the poetic imagination has been building monuments on ground undermined by criticism.” (Paz 1991, p. 3)
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer and the editor-in-chief of Neohelicon for their constructive comments and enlightening suggestions; and I also thank Professor Benjamin Ridgeway at Grinnell College, USA, for his careful revisions for this article.
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Li, Z. Haizi and contemporary Chinese romantic poetry. Neohelicon 43, 621–640 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-016-0342-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-016-0342-0