Poetic Memory: Recalling the Cultural Revolution in the Poems of Yu Jian and Sun Wenbo

Abstract

Certainly the most controversial period in recent Chinese historical memory has been the Cultural Revolution, and the prevailing artistic modes of remembering those “ten years of turmoil” have been the written and cinematic narrative. From the literature and film of “the wounded” in the late 1970s and early 1980s on through to the “seeking roots” and “avant-garde” writing, the Red Guard memoir, and the 1990s’ films of Cultural Revolution childhood, those who came of age during that tumultuous era have used one or another mode of storytelling to comprehend in retrospect the forces that dominated and often traumatized the lives of themselves, their families, and an entire society. In these stories’ wake has come an abundance of humanistic studies analyzing this ever-growing corpus of fiction, memoir, and film. The most incisive among these perform the following: identify a hegemonic narrative pattern, then discuss a particular narrative text’s complicity with or subversion of the hegemonic status quo. In the case of the more sophisticated narratives, complicity and subversion may, of course, be difficult to separate.