214 chapter five
social rebellion, or the power of fate. Cui Weiping has invoked the
monster to illustrate her observation that Xi Chuan’s later work no
longer claims to know how things will end and hints at forces that lie
beyond our grasp.^25 In this respect, the terms in which she comments
on Xi Chuan’s work are akin to the notion of indeterminacy, even if
the monster is a less indeterminate presence than the romantic poet
embodied by Haizi.
At first sight, then, a reading of «Salute» as poetry about poetry
yields a romantic opposi tion of poetry and everyday reality, reaffirm-
ing views of Xi Chuan’s poethood held by several critics. Poetry, in
close association with night and dreams, provides a prideful alterna tive
to daytime life. The value of emotion, imagination and spirituality is
set off against the limitations of rationality and despicable materialism.
Thus, the poem’s time and place of origin brings to mind social change
in China, specifically on the poetry scene and in the intellectual-
cultural climate at large, in the rapid transition from the Eighties to the
Nineties, with those two decades representing not just periods in time
but distinct, incompatible mindsets. But as we read on and reread, it
transpires that things are not as clear-cut as that. There is one aspect
of reality from which poetry offers no escape, manifest in the appear-
ances of Haizi and Luo Yihe: death, oblivious to any order of things
but its own. Death will invade the realm of poetry and kill poets, no
matter how immortal their poetry. In the words of Joseph Brodsky:^26
With neither grimace nor maliciousness
death chooses from its bulging catalogue
the poet, not his words, however strong,
but just—unfailingly—the poet’s self.«Salute» owes much of its charm to its speaker-cum-protagonist, apt at
putting both reality and poetry in perspec tive. While recognizing the
compulsory, universal truth of death, he reserves the right to create an
optional, personal truth in art. He is better at questioning answers than
at answering questions. Especially in his indeterminate portrayal of
poethood and related matters, this character is a worthy companion to
tragic heroes, low-key demystifiers, loud taboo-slayers and vulgarizers
and other voices that operate in the avant-garde’s texts. The poem’s
(^25) Xi Chuan 1995: 66, Cui 1992: 122-123.
(^26) Brodsky 1973: 99; translation by George Kline.