318 chapter nine
Does poetry really go no farther than language? Wrong, the time of
language has come to an end, and the time of the awakened body has
begun.
We lay our lower body bare, the men their hilts and the women their
holes. This is how bad it is, so what have we to be scared of?The manifesto is typical of Shen Haobo’s style as a literary activist.
Its recalcitrance, aggression and anti-intellectualism and the phrase a
palpable presence of the flesh lead to association with the atmosphere sur-
rounding the Popular-Intellectual Polemic, as well as with Yi Sha’s
and Yu Jian’s style in their capacity as commentators rather than po-
ets.^13 Making poetic sentiment die an ugly death is the sort of thing
many self-styled innovators of artistic traditions the world over have
set out to do in the age of modernity.
Even if literary manifestoes are exempt from academic assessment,
Shen’s argument is conspicuously flawed. Announcing that as the flesh
happens, so poetry happens, he leaves one without a clue as to how this
is supposed to work, a question which gains in significance if the time
of language has really come to an end. The latter statement is an attack
on a renowned Earthly predecessor, delivered as an aside: as noted in
chapter Two, the claim that “poetry goes no farther than language” is
the best-known summary of Han Dong’s poetics. If one takes Shen’s
animal dreams seriously, problems arise as soon as he avails himself of
that accursed language, especially for writing more or less expository
text. Animals have no language in the human, let alone the literary
sense. If human expression is figuratively animal-like, this would have
to be in other art forms than literature: say, in music. The image of
original animal flesh also sits uneasily with the urban-decadent style of
the Lower Body group, in both life and work. In a more domesticated
piece for Poetry Exploration Shen follows kindred souls such as Yi Sha,
Xu Jiang and Hou Ma when he calls his preferred poetic usage Post-
(^13) See Zhongdao 1998, a partial but rich and informative collection of Yi Sha’s
poetry and related matter (interviews and so on), and numerous comments on his
work by others; and Yu Jian 2001b, following the corporeal orientation of Yu’s ear-
lier writings such as 1999b. In Yi 2001b Yi Sha’s focus on the flesh becomes a cari-
cature, perhaps because he addresses a primary audience consisting of admirers (cf
Shen Haobo 1999 and 2001b, and Duoyu 2000): the editors of The Lower Body, who
likely asked him for a contribution.