what was all the fuss about? 437you come home
through the streets
with a sign that’s been on your body
ever since you were born
you love bananas
and you hate applesWe need no detailed analysis of «Portrait» or «Mental Patient» (㊒干
⮙㗙) to observe considerable differences between the two texts, the
figureheads of Intellectual and Popular flagship books respectively—in
subject matter, tone, form and overall experience. But let’s return to
our metatextual business and examine a final, substantial contribution
to the Polemic.
Han Dong’s “On the Popular” (䆎⇥䯈, #77)—he often uses ⇥
䯈as a noun phrase—is the introduction to He’s Selected Chinese Poems.
The tone of “On the Popular” is reminiscent of “A Time That Suppos-
edly Loves Culture,” Han’s article in the Beijing Literature special feature
of the previous summer: not quite as bitter but equally heavy, with a
penchant for moralizing and abstractions of the sort we encountered in
chapter Eleven. Whereas in “A Time” Han scolds Intellectual Writing,
“On the Popular” is a much more constructive undertaking. The es-
say is divided into fourteen sections marked by subheadings. Some are
rhetorical questions predictably answered in the negative (p1, 6, 10):
Is the Popular a Fiction?
Has the Popular Accomplished Its Mission?
Does the Popular Cancel Out the Individual?Han includes a short history of the Popular. Here, the term cannot but
be read in the institutional sense of ‘published outside state control.’
Like Yu Jian (#14), Han traces Popular poetry’s genealogy through a
number of unofficial publications, back to Today. The importance of
unofficial status as a criterion for the Popular is clear in this passage
from the section entitled “The Popular in the Nineties” (p8):
Some poets who come from the Popular as it existed in the Eighties have
now set foot in the mainstream poetry scene, publishing their poetry in
official collections, getting public reviews, making regular appearances in
all kinds of media, craving to take part in foreign sinological conferenc-
es—they have knowingly divorced themselves from the Popular way.