experimenting with a poetics of spontaneity and free association.
However, these free associations, unlike the ones presented in his early
poetry, often lack any visible logical links connecting the scattered
and disjointed phrases and images, and they appear all too arbitrary
and idiosyncratic.
For instance, among the fifty-two poems included in the City
sequence, most use the names of places in Beijing for titles, but such
place names and titles usually bear little or no immediate connection
to the actual content of the poems. This tendency can be shown in the
following two randomly selected examples:
Baishiqiao (Whitestone Bridge) DE桥
I thank the courtyard those are flying birds 我GH院J KL着的N
When I came here they slept with me 她P在我来S T我睡V
(Gu 1995: 875)
Ping’anli (Peace Neighborhood) WXY
I always hear the best voice 我Z[\最^的_`
The light in the corridor can be switched off aY的b cd关@
(Gu 1995: 878)
Such schizophrenic and sleepwalking murmurs at their best invoke the
eerie atmosphere of an old city haunted by its decayed past; at their
worst, they are too self-absorbed and become almost inaudible and
incomprehensible. In other words, as if its roots had been cut off, the
“city” that Gu Cheng had been dutifully rebuilding is a city of phantoms,
filled with fragmented and floating signifiers.
However, in spite of (or, perhaps, owing to) its lifelessness and all
too obvious deficiencies and flaws, most likely Gu Cheng’s Babel-like
“city” will find its way to continue to stand in contemporary Chinese
poetry. This is so because Gu Cheng had distinguished himself in
comparison with his peers, through his fully devoted effort to rebuild
his native “city,” recognize his own childhood dreams, and deposit
historical memories. Via this single-minded, almost innocent obses-
sion with “rebuilding,” Gu Cheng did succeed, even if just partially,
in transforming and condensing his exilic experience into a haunting
postexilic literary testament.^8
In the ideology and mythology of modernism, closed and claustro-
phobic spaces, such as towers or prison cells have long been invoked
as symbols for the celebration of total individual and artistic freedom
and autonomy, such as in W.B. Yeats’sThe Toweror Ezra Pound’s The
Pisan Cantos. We frequently see in the practices of modernist poetry this
Gu Cheng’s Metamorphosis 133