446 chapter twelve
Yu and Yi are worlds apart and so are the mature Xi Chuan and
Haizi—even if any supposition about Haizi’s development beyond the
time of his death must remain conjecture. Indeed, one could argue
that Yi Sha’s poetry is akin to Haizi’s and that Yu Jian’s poetry is akin
to Xi Chuan’s, as follows. Essentially, the poetic voices in Yi Sha’s and
Haizi’s oeuvres speak of who they are, and those in Yu Jian’s and Xi
Chuan’s work speak of what they see, a distinction which provides a
perfectly valid point of departure for the analysis and interpretation
of literature. But both Yu Jian and Yi Sha are from the provinces—
never mind the distance from Kunming to Xi’an—and both tend to-
ward irreverence if not stylized trouble-making, especially when they
write about poetry. Hence, they are lumped together. The same thing
happens to Xi Chuan and Haizi, because they went to the same uni-
versity and they were friends, and their friendship is documented in
Xi Chuan’s memorial essays after Haizi’s suicide. Here, the Chinese
adage that the text is like the person (᭛བ݊Ҏ) operates as an axiom
rather than a general proposition that is defensible in itself but requires
empirical, textual evidence before it may be applied to individuals or
be used to demonstrate their literary kinship. In situations that ulti-
mately arise out of an interest in the text itself, one is tempted to coun-
ter that the person is not like the text, or perhaps not invariably “as
good as” the text (Ҏϡབ݊᭛).
Geographical-cultural, institutional and biographical angles help
to expose a skeleton inside the tempestuous dynamics of the Polemic,
but an answer to the question of what was at stake remains incom-
plete without some reflection on the sociology of Chinese poethood.
As noted in the opening pages of this book, scholars such as Lloyd
Haft and Michelle Yeh have shown how early modern Chinese poets
grappled with the loss of the highly placed, well-defined social identity
that their predecessors had self-evidently enjoyed for centuries. Even if
the moderns themselves added to their loss by acts of their own initia-
tive that aimed to change the face of Chinese poetry, prior to that their
status had already suffered blows dealt out by socio-political forces
that were bigger than literature. As such, the poets’ identity crisis could
not be stemmed by a return to the old ways. At the same time, turning
themselves into a different, twentieth-century species wasn’t made any
easier by the bumpy road that poets traveled from the final years of
the Qing dynasty to the advent of the Reform era in 1978. Those eight