mind over matter, matter over mind 197and aesthetically, especially in the more cultish quarters of the poetry
scene, even if it harbored little dramatic tension. From 1989 on, how-
ever, the deaths around Xi Chuan, both public and private, made him
feel that life didn’t work in unequivocal, logical and lofty ways. Purity
became an increasingly hollow, deceptive concept to him, harmful to
the authenticity and the vitality of literary works. Unwavering in his
dedication to literature, he became less sure of what poetry was or
should be, other than that it was imperative for his writing to establish
some relationship with a “reality” on which pure poetry would turn its
back.
Whatever the cause of the changes in Xi Chuan’s writing at the turn
of the decade, «Salute» and his later prose poems of the 1990s make it
impossible to characterize his voice as unequivocally dignified, coura-
geous, serious, determined, normative and so on, to use some of the
vocabulary employed by the critics cited above—or, as unequivocally
Elevated. Similarly, it becomes difficult to represent his poethood as
an emblem of reliability any longer, as a familiar stronghold in times
of norms and values changing in unsettling fashion and at unsettling
speed. Such representations sociopoliticize his art to an unwarranted
degree, as regards both its presumed intent and its presumed effect. In
addition to the continuing influence of premodern and modern Chi-
nese literary orthodoxies, they reflect the critics’ own uneasiness vis-à-
vis contemporary social trends as much as anything else.
In fact, to stick with the metaphors used by Lan, Cui and Yang,
starting in the early 1990s the beacon may mark a dangerous reef
instead of a safe haven and cracks cut through the walls of the fortress
as a part of its very design. From this point onward Xi Chuan’s writ-
ing derives much of its power from the alternation and the coexistence
of opposites, and it displays a capacity for dilemma, contradiction,
paradox and indeed impossibility that is hard to reconcile with Cui’s
observation of harmony and the absence of confusion in his work.^13
This doesn’t hinge on either “transparent” or “obscure” imagery but
emerges as a general mood that subverts clarity, certainty and straight-
forward direction in most if not all of the text’s dimensions. I refer to
this mood as the quality of indeterminacy, and will connect this to
Perloff’s use of that concept toward the end of this chapter.
(^13) Cf Wang Guangming 1999 and 2003: 626-628.