Charles Baudelaire once paid this homage to Victor Hugo, who was
then in political exile, and lamented the fate of his native city as the
latter was rushing toward a modern future, along its widened boule-
vards, in the wake of several abortive and bloody revolutions. Yet
Baudelaire also persisted in the tenacity of human memories:
Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie
N’a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs,
Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie,
Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs.
(Baudelaire 1993: 174)[Paris changes! But nothing in my melancholy
Has moved! New palaces, scaffoldings, blocks,
Old suburbs, all for me becomes allegory,
And my dearest memories are heavier than rocks.]Now at the beginning of the twentieth-first century, it is Gu Cheng’s
own native city that is undergoing a similarly drastic transformation.
The city has been busy with simultaneous demolition and reconstruc-
tion, expelling all of its residual ghost inhabitants from its old
neighborhoods as well as from its own history, ancient and recent, and
turning itself into yet another postsocialist and posthistorical “new
world.” It is here that we may suddenly find that Gu Cheng’s last and
desperate attempt at “ghost” poetry has foreshadowed certain
prospects of Chinese modernity and postmodernity in a cunning way.
This is the subtlety of sKtu失w的x妙z处
the failure of life
(Gu 1995: 674)
—Is it a whisper from a “child” enlightened in “nature,”^15 or from
a “ghost” lost in the “city”?
Notes
- The “child-poet” connotation is by no means specific only to Gu Cheng:
“[I]t seems clear that Nature’s Child is a prevalent persona through which
Misty Poets express their most ardent dreams and most profound
thoughts” (Yeh 1991c: 407). Also, in this regard, Gu Cheng shared a similar
fate with another Chinese poet Haizi |J (1964–1989). In fact, both Haizi
Gu Cheng’s Metamorphosis 141