fringe poetry, but not prose 233size of one Chinese character. The text thus shows a double discontent
with conventional line breaks. While it exceeds each line’s “normal”
quota, it also deconstructs the notion of the line per se, through the
use of line-internal short strings and the breaks between them. Thus,
as measured against typographic convention, the lines are excessively
long and the strings are excessively short. We will return to the signifi-
cance of this form in chapter Seven.
«File 0» also features breaks above the level of the short string and
the line, but I would hesitate to speak of stanzas. Each sequence of lines
has its own title and every blank line signals the end of a sequence. Of
the seven parts of «File 0», four have no subdivisions. The longest
has as many as 54 lines. The other three parts of the text are subdi-
vided into smaller, separately entitled sections, the shortest containing
a mere five lines. In the longer sequences, another visual instrument
used is that of boldface type, as visible in the excerpt from «History of
Growing Up».
In sum, it is not the lines that make «Salute» look like it does but the
stanzas, and it is not the stanzas but the short strings and the lines that
do so for «File 0». On levels above that of the stanza, both texts are
visually structured in what should perhaps be referred to as chapters,
in view of their numbering and their individual titles. The sheer size of
the texts in their entirety will be discussed toward the end of this sec-
tion. Let’s defer assessment of their status as (poetic) prose or (prosaic)
poetry until we have reviewed them from some other angles.
Now to sound. In chapter Five, we have seen that «Salute» stands
out by its acoustic qualities, both on the page and in recitation, through
devices such as rhythm and parallelism on the sentence and stanza lev-
els, and by rhyme in phrase-internal and end-of-sentence varieties. Be-
low is a generous portion of citation in transcription, to bring out the
acoustic richness of the text. The second passage is a more extensive
version of that cited in chapter Five.
Zuòwéi chéngkè de ni©o. Zuˇduàn de hédào. Wèi dànsh¿ng de érnǚ. Wèi
chéngxíng de lèishuÌˇ. Wèi k§ishÌˇ de chéngfá. Hùnluàn. Pínghéng. Shàngsh¿ng.
Kòngbái....
DuÙ xi©ng jiàoh©n, pòshˇÌ g§ngtiÁ liúxià lèishuˇÌ, pòshˇÌ xíguàn yú yˇÌnmì de
láoshuˇ lièdùi láidào woˇ de miànqián. DuÙ xi©ng jiàoh©n, dàn yào jìnliàng b©
sh¿ngyÊn y§dÊ, bù néng xiàng mànmà, ér yÊng xiàng qíd©o, bù néng xiàng dàpào