Yu Jian: Moment against Movement
When considered in contrast to many narrativized versions of the
Cultural Revolution experience, the temporal imagination constructed
by Yu Jian’s “Two or Three Things from the Past” stands out for how
it avoids representing the period as a linear movement from “here” to
“there.” Instead, Yu uses the form of the poem series, as well as the
resources of the free-verse poem, to emphasize a “spatial structure” of
remembrance for the Cultural Revolution years—not as a movement
through history, but as an internally complex moment ofhistory. Yu’s
introductory poem of the series creates a frame for conceiving the
Cultural Revolution period overall as an internally dynamic historical
moment. Subsequent poems—each presented as a discrete, isolated
event in the poet’s childhood—develop this frame with smaller, per-
sonal, unresolved moments that together form a poetically unified,
alternative imagination of the Cultural Revolution experience.
The prefatory poem of Yu’s series, “So Hot Then” ,
differs significantly from the eleven subsequent poems. Instead of
giving poetic structure to a singular event, it describes a general
atmosphere of the times. In effect “So Hot Then” offers an interpretive
frame for the subsequent texts, a frame whose conceptual weight is
realized by activation of the poetic function. Formal elements of note
here include typography, parallel syntactic structures, reiterated gram-
matical forms, and recurring metaphor. Although for purposes of
clarity I consider each of these more or less discretely, these several
levels of textual elements interrelate. Thus, within the iconic form of a
typeset poem, a repeated syntactic structure might contain a particular
repeated grammatical form, and a grammatical form might be the
vehicle for a specific repeated metaphor. It is the interplay among these
elements that creates the spatialized tension animating Yu’s constructing
of poetic memory.
A commonsense observation, yet one not to be discounted, is the
nature of written poetry as “typographically defined” (Finnegan
1992: 25). “So Hot Then” is, of course, typeset as a poem, and its
rather standard poetic layout acts as the most visually immediate
formal element to impede a feeling of linear sequence:
So hot then
red trucks loaded with !色的大卡&'着
adults’ burning tongues )*着+头的大-.
forward forward again 向0 1向0
disappearing down to the core of resolve 2失在56的核8
Poems of Yu Jian and Sun Wenbo 171