302 chapter eight
rative components of Sun Wenbo’s poetry, or how exactly is his poetry
narrative? The answer opens up the full width of the sliding scale be-
tween content and form, with referential, cognitive matter at one end
and non-referential affect at the other.
«The Program» has conventional story-like qualities. It ostensibly
relates a chronologically unfolding course of events and their internal
dynamics. One could with some justification approach the text using
structuralist narratological concepts like narrator and focalization. Al-
ternatively, Monika Fludernik’s “post-classical” narratological concept
of experientiality could also apply to «The Program». According to
Fludernik, narrativity occurs, that is: the reader views a text as a story,
upon encounter with any anthropomorphous agency that accumulates
and evaluates recognizable, “real” experience and displays emotional
involvement.^19 Especially in modern literature, there is no reason why
theory designed for one conventional genre cannot be applied to an-
other. Still, to explore and explain narrativity in «The Program» as
poetry, narratology would at best offer incomplete insights. More is
to be gained from adopting Aviram’s view of poetry’s sensory features
and its meaning as combining and interacting to tell of the power of
the poem’s rhythm.
Of equal importance to its paraphraseable aspects, then, the po-
em’s essential affective impact may be gleaned in its tone and rhythm.
The extension of the protagonists’ audience within the text to its “out-
side” reader establishes a direct relationship with this reader. Narra-
tive hues thus acquired on the level of tone are reinforced by “prosaic”
diction in words like and, thereupon, now, but in sentence-initial position
and by formulas like the expository this leads to and the phatic Well. As
for the text’s rhythm, its conventionally poetic, semi-metrical qualities
are clear, but on this level its narrativity is decisively enhanced by the
absence of rhyme and by enjambment in most of the line breaks. Ref-
erential matter in an abstract, neatly structured plot aside, the poem
almost sounds like the telling of a story. This is no less important for
its narrative status than the issues of content that have dominated the
discussion of narrativity in the avant-garde to date.
Content bias in scholarship on twentieth-century Chinese poetry
has its culturally and historically specific contextual reasons, previous-
ly mentioned at several points in this study: traditional Chinese ideas
(^19) Cited in Herman & Vervaeck 2001: 146ff.