26 chapter one
in binary oppositions, as polemically inclined critics have done. In
fact, even individual oeuvres easily seen as quintessentially Elevated
or quintessentially Earthly resist such simple classification. Xi Chuan’s
work tends toward the Elevated but contains important “anti-
mythical” and “relativizing” elements; Yu Jian’s work is representa-
tive of the Earthly but contains important “absolute” and “mind”
elements; Zhou Lunyou is a central figure in the “anti-cultural” or
“pre- cultural” Not-Not group, but his work contains important “cul-
tural” elements.^34 The Elevated and the Earthly, then, are not
pigeonholes but coordinates in a multidimensional body of texts. If
we bear this caveat in mind, it is safe to say that across the contem-
porary period, the overall trend has been away from the Elevated
and toward the Earthly.
By a trend from what to how I mean a development away from
easily paraphraseable, often historically-referential subject matter
and toward the elaboration of individual style, made up of things
like (experimental) idiolect, thematics, figures of speech, and acoustic
and visual poetic form. Crudely put, in the 1970s and the early
1980s, after the gruesome upheaval of the Cultural Revolution and
in the midst of exhilarating developments toward regaining a modi-
cum of individual freedom, so much needed to be said that how it
was said was of secondary importance. Hence, the message domi-
nated the medium at the time—but the balance shifted from the
mid-1980s onward, and especially in the 1990s. For reading the
earliest avant-garde poems, basic knowledge of recent Chinese his-
tory is indispensable: well-known specimens of Obscure Poetry such
as Bei Dao’s «Answer» (ಲㄨ, 1972) and Gu Cheng’s «A Genera-
tion» (ϔҷҎ, 1979), for example, hinge upon the reader’s interpre-
tation of the dark night and the ice age as metaphors for the Cultural
Revolution.^35 In later years one can usually do without such back-
ground knowledge. Often, China is simply not there. When it is
(^34) See, for instance, Xi Chuan 1999a, Yu Jian 2000 and Zhou Lunyou 1999.
(^35) Yan Yuejun et al 1985: 1, 122. «Answer» was written in 1972, not in 1976, as
has been widely and understandably assumed. When Bei Dao published it in Today
in 1978, he dated it April 1976 to give it an ideological alibi by linking it to the
Tiananmen Incident, which the Beijing Party Committee had recently reassessed as
not “counter-revolutionary” but “completely revolutionary” in nature. See Van
Crevel 1996: 51 (note 87) and 59-68.