226 chapter six
job equally well. Xiaoxiao doesn’t engage with Lin Yiliang’s claim that
prose poetry is a true borderline case and belongs with neither prose
nor poetry, perhaps because Lin’s essay is included in a book called Lin
Yiliang’s Poetry Talk (ᵫҹ҂䆫䆱). In an anthology of French texts in
Dutch translation, Menno Wigman speaks of poetic prose only once,
otherwise of prose poems.^3
One could argue that the issue is that of the bottle being half full
or half empty. Does it matter what you call it? But such distinctions
of perception—and indeed of intent—can be crucial, certainly in the
realm of art. Poetry and prose don’t exclude each other, or lay claim to
all-encompassing generic classification. Still, they are the two ends of a
scale that co-determines how we approach literary texts, and the rea-
sons why we assign certain coordinates to certain texts are of scholarly
interest. One notable thing about the consensus among the authors
cited above is that while most pay homage to Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen:
Little Poems in Prose.... (Le spleen de Paris: petits poèmes en prose....),
they take little note of the fact that Baudelaire himself, in his letter to
editor Arsène Houssaye, speaks of “the miracle of a poetic prose,” not
of prose poetry or prosaic poetry. Wigman does mention Baudelaire’s
initial designation of his writings, but Wang Guangming has removed
the inconvenient opening words (struck through below) of Baudelaire’s
famous description of the texts, and quotes only its second half:^4
the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without
rhyme, supple enough and choppy enough to fit the soul’s lyrical move-
ments, the undulations of reverie, the jolts of consciousness.One wonders if prose poetry and ᬷ᭛䆫 would have eclipsed poetic prose
and 䆫࣪ᬷ᭛ or 䆫ᗻᬷ᭛ as the name of the genre if the title of
Baudelaire’s collection hadn’t eclipsed the letter that has often served
as its foreword.
The authors cited above have done more in the way of defining
than reaffirming a label. Xiaoxiao identifies two characteristics for
prose poetry: it must have fictional intent and produce an effect of hor-
ror. He names four ways to achieve this. These are the intermingling
of fiction and reality, the crisscrossing of time and space, the reversal of
(^3) Simon 1987: 3-4 and 697-698, Wang Guangming 1986: 687, Xiaoxiao 1998:
315-317, Lin Yiliang 1976: 45, Wigman 1998: 13-18. 4
Baudelaire 1943: 4 and 1989: 129, Wigman 1998: 15, Wang Guangming 1986:
688.