It is in the realm of these problems posed by the lyric where the
difficulty of their structure as a literary unit and the challenges to
interpretation manifest themselves. It is not that the lyric is uniquely
suited to this sort of analysis, which would be the New Critical posi-
tion, or that such interpretation is completely anathema or unsus-
tainable, but that it precisely subverts what in the first place it entices
us to do. Moreover, within the conundrums, the impasses into which
verse leads us, the lyric’s true worth is finally apprehended. Others,
such as Barbara Johnson, have argued that the modern French lyric,
beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, privileged a new
incarnation of intertextual relations between the poets of the time,
considered quite radical, and the oppressiveness of their literary
forebears. Paul de Man, reading the lyrics of Rilke, focuses our atten-
tion on the fact that the lyric in a very basic sense can simply be
babble—“poetry wagering all on the mastery of sound” (Johnson
1985: 46). While this assertion may seem sophomoric, de Man is in
fact being quite sincere in his argument, for what the resistance to
referentiality fosters in the reading experience is, in fact, a sort of
receding mirage of endless imperfect interpretations that never deliver
us to the ultimate interpretation. And it is in this deferring of the
ultimate meaning of the work that the essence of the lyric may be dis-
covered. From the accumulated re-reading of the theory of the lyric,
we can distil several trends in contemporary accounts of it: the idea
that lyrics create riddles that beg to be resolved but ultimately defy
resolution; the fact that this paradoxical tendency results from a com-
bination of the performativity of lyrical language and the intertextuality
of its semantic side; that this radical intertexuality ironically then
leads to a profound self-referentiality; and that one can therefore not
understand the poem from the point of view of simply symbol but
must instead trace the complex lines of allegory at work both in
individual lyrics and in the lyrical network that some poets establish
through groups of poems whether they are closely associated or
whether their association is looser and more a matter of the reader
connecting the dots.
For Zheng Chouyu, the significance of the lyric is found in the inde-
terminacy of imagery that undermines the reader’s ability to establish
a sustained and fixed notion in the mind of a fully concrete location in
space. Zheng’s imagery evokes alienation and exile and, by extension,
nostalgia. The lyrical is what conveys that sense of living outside the
nation. In the aftermath of war and in the midst of political division,
the lyric emerged for Zheng Chouyu as the only salvageable mode of
articulation precisely when narrative became an impractical alternative
Zheng Chouyu and Lyric Poetry 35