202 chapter five
nates a palpable joy of language, as does «Salute». Also, an image
doesn’t have to mean the same thing through out an oeuvre, perhaps
not even throughout a poem as long as «Salute», whose component
parts can be read by themselves. In the rest of this section and the
beginning of the next, I give in to the urge to interpret. I then comple-
ment this approach by returning to the surface of Xi Chuan’s poetry,
which turns out to be an important motive of the interpretive energy
that his work releases in the reader—and that it frustrates at the same
time.
Diction in «Salute» is generally at a far remove from the colloquial.
Xi Chuan’s language is highly aestheticized, often literary and ornate,
using arcane and archaic expressions. At the same time—and here,
again, there is an appreciable difference with his early work—this lit-
erariness is interspersed with samples from other linguistic registers,
such as the language of Communist Party bureaucracy and everyday
speech. Thus, irony undermines seriousness and solemnity, though
not to the point of making the stylistic structure collapse altogether. It
will become clear that as such, Xi Chuan’s language is frequently an
icon for his subject matter.
Large parts of «Salute» take place in a dreamlike atmosphere, far
from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, evoking an Old World of
myth and fairytale. Terrible and wonderful things happen there, but
as a whole the series doesn’t demand strong emotional involvement on
the part of the reader. This aspect of Xi Chuan’s work has led some
critics to work from binary oppositions of mind versus heart, and of
rational and moral contemplation versus mad passion.^18 In the case of
«Salute», perhaps this is so because the text is not laid out as a press-
ing reality, but as an expertly performed show of make-believe. The
speaker drifts in and out of the poem’s stories, shifting back and forth
between being a protagonist and an omniscient narrator. When the
speaker is also a (male) protagon ist—the only one that is constant ly
present—he comes across as an outsider who scarcely interferes with
his surround ings and delivers surprised reports on his own and others’
adven tures. All sorts of things are done to him but he is not victimized.
He is naive, not pretentious or ambitious, but he has a clever and in-
dependent mind. In the face of adversity he shows dignity, resilience,
and humor. Explicitly conscious of the literary text in its capacity as
(^18) Yang Changzheng 1994: 47, Liu Na 1994: 82.