and Gu Cheng have been seen by their readers and critics as Rimbaudian
child prodigies who perished, however, due to a fateful “innocence.”- Again, this affinity between “nature” and “child” applies to many other
“misty” poets as well. “Nature in Misty Poetry is portrayed in a predomi-
nantly positive way and is often contrasted to negative social systems.
Nature promises freedom from inhibitions imposed by society... To be
free of societal inhibitions is to be childlike” (Yeh 1991c: 407). For the role
“nature” played in Gu Cheng’s early poetry, also see Li Xia 1999: 181–185
and passim and Patton 2001. - See Gu Cheng: “The Western ‘nature’ and the ‘nature’ as presented in
Eastern philosophies are different... The so-called ‘conquering nature’ or
‘protecting nature’ in the Western sense all take nature as an object, which
is the approach of scientific analysis, defining nature as ‘realm of nature’
(ziran jie), but it should not be confused with nature in the Eastern sense”
(Gu 2005a: 110–111). - The confusion of “it” with “him” in this sentence may not be a random
spelling error on Gu Cheng’s part, but an intentional effort of anthropo-
morphizing the rock. It reminds one of the “stone” symbolism in A Dream
of Red Mansions(Honglou meng), where the “stone” is incarnated into the
protagonist Baoyu. Perhaps Gu Cheng is making a similar self-reference
through the rock. - This quoted section also opens Ying’er(Gu 1993: 9), showing that this
“ghost” will be a guide leading readers into a different “new world” of Gu
Cheng’s late poetry and fiction. - Gu Cheng acknowledges “I often dreamed of returning to Beijing, to the
place where I lived as a child... I’m recently writing a sequence of poems
entitled ‘City.’ ‘City’ is my name and also Beijing” (Gu 2005a: 230).
Wolfgang Kubin renders the title of this sequence directly as “Beijing.I”
and notes, “The title of the cycle ‘Cheng’ (), a pun on his first name,
bears the subtitle ‘Liusi’ }~(June 4th).. .” (Li 1999: 23). - Later used as the foreword to City(Gu 1995: 856), in the latter version the
phrase “about that murder and the dead ones” is curiously omitted. While
this passage might sound almost proleptic, it also can be read as referring
to recent Chinese history. For this interpretation, see Kubin: “The omission
of the passage... is perhaps open to various interpretations... but my
marginal note points quite clearly to June 4th... Gu Cheng is not only
dealing with his own personal trauma, but also that of his fellow countrymen,
the majority of whom have succumbed to silence, apathy and forgetting”
(Li 1999: 25). - Joseph Allen argues “These tensions... seem to have produced the best of
his poetry, as it struggled to draw his innocence and experience together”
(Gu 2005b: xii).
9.Cityis indeed open to readings at multiple levels. See Gu Cheng:
When I wrote about this [City], I felt it was really realistic. I don’t
think it is a “psychological reality,” and perhaps it can be called a
spectral reality. For instance, my writing of Cityis closely related to
142 Yibing Huang