objectification and the long-short line 257like Han Dong’s «Of the Wild Goose Pagoda», discussed in chapter
Two. The two poems are alike in their attention to ordinary people’s
lives, their short lines and their colloquial, minimalist usage, and in
the casual shock effects they deploy. In Han’s, this is someone com-
mitting suicide by jumping off the proud symbol of Chinese-national
culture that is the Pagoda, rather than dutifully taking in the view and
descending by the staircase. In Yu’s, it is Luo Jiasheng’s violent, utterly
meaningless death by an accident at work.
«Luo Jiasheng» exhibits Yu Jian’s skillful employment of the low-
key style that set the new trend apart amid its literary environs. The
final two lines, for instance, are a powerful understatement in light
of what has gone before, precisely because of their flat, unmarked
diction: luo jiasheng / hasn’t come to work. The poem’s composition also
contains features that are typical of Yu’s art. It smoothly conjoins the
moving burial scene described by a detached narratorial voice with
what appears to be a personal memory experienced by Luo’s fellow
workers: once he’d fixed your watch / it’d be better than new. Objectification
is visible in the willed superficiality of the speaker’s observations. This
recurs throughout Yu’s oeuvre and makes for another similarity with
Han Dong; as in chapter Two, I use the notion of superficiality not
as a sign of the postmodern but to denote a mechanism that causes
defamiliarization by blocking out conventional lines of reasoning and
association. The causal relationship between the necktie and Luo
Jiasheng’s brutal removal from work, for instance, is not made explicit.
First, this implicitly mobilizes the reader’s knowledge of the Cultural
Revolution: say, the fact that a tie could count as signaling bourgeois
mentality or Westernization. Second, it makes the event “objectively”
defamiliar, not to say absurd. Third, this in its turn does in fact imply
the opinionated, moral judgment in which the text pretends not to
engage.
Lest the notion of objectification limit our vision of an oeuvre that
is versatile within its unmistakable style, let’s consider a very different
text. «A Wall» (, 1983) is another early poem, but thoroughly dis-
similar to «Luo Jiasheng»:^11
(^11) Yu Jian 2004a: 75-76.