426 chapter twelve
separately below, this warrants a long quote. The following passage
further illustrates Han’s uneasy relationship with “the West” (p74):
As for those who became famous in the 1990s... their reading is of the
purposeful kind... They have in their reading gradually entered into
role play. Hence, it is not at all difficult to understand their pathological
love of books... They only read books that they think they have written
themselves or could have written themselves, they are only concerned
with the lives (or the lifestyles) they think are their own or could have
been their own... They deeply love translated works of foreign litera-
ture and deeply love Western literary history... prostrating themselves
in admiration before so-called masters and giants... proving them-
selves familiar with their lives and anecdotes as if enumerating their own
household treasures... All of their inspiration comes from their reading,
and their writing style, patterns and forms never exceed that precedence... Like all collectors and antique lovers they identify absolutely with
books, and with a bookish value-judgmental attitude toward thinking
and art... Their most extreme manifestation is if they can produce
forgeries with their own hands... so that not even a connoisseur could
see the traces of those hands. If there is a difference with top collectors
and antique lovers, it has to be that our “reader-artists” ultimately fool
themselves.
Part two of the Beijing Literature special feature opens with an article by
Yu Jian, to which we will shortly return. Zang Di, in his “Poetry as a
Special Kind of Knowledge / Intellect” (䆫℠: Ўϔ辵⡍⅞ⱘⶹ䆚,
#40), emphasizes (p92)
the need to work hard to develop poetry anew toward a form of knowl-
edge / intellect that is independent from science, history, economics,
politics, philosophy.Zang warns that popularizing trends in twentieth-century Chinese lit-
erary discourse have turned against innovative poets more than once,
cautioning against a repetition of such mechanisms. Xi Du’s “A Plea
for the Right to Write” (Ўݭⱘᴗໄ䕽, #56)—an abridged ver-
sion of his “Thoughts on Various Issues” (#24), discussed below—is
important in that Xi Du questions the assumption that Intellectual
poetry is divorced from things like daily life, the zeitgeist of its authors’
here-and-now and so on. In “On ‘Western Language Resources’” (݇
Ѣ “㽓ᮍⱘ䇁㿔䌘⑤”, #54), Sun Wenbo berates Yu Jian for mobiliz-
ing ethnic and nationalist sentiments, citing Li Bai’s Turkish descent
as an example of the natural phenomenon of cross-cultural influence.