fringe poetry, but not prose 223CHAPTER SIXFRINGE POETRY, BUT NOT PROSE:
XI CHUAN AND YU JIANXi Chuan’s poetry and Yu Jian’s are widely seen as representative
of the Elevated and Earthly aesthetics respectively, and as reflecting
diametrically opposed poetics. Bearing this in mind, I like to think
of the present chapter—preceded by one on Xi Chuan and followed
by one on Yu Jian—as bridging a stretch of nobody’s land from one
end of the avant-garde textscape to another. I hope the reader will
excuse my use of this clichéd image, if only to question a moralizing
you-must-take-sides criticism that is occasionally practiced in both El-
evated and Earthly camps and focuses on the incompatibility of vari-
ous poetics within what I have called a single Easthopian discourse,
rather than celebrating diversity and interconnectedness. I proceed
from the observation that two early 1990s texts, one by Xi Chuan and
one by Yu Jian, stand out by their sheer length, and by their testing
of the boundaries between poetry and prose—or, analogous to the
image used above, by their forays into nobody’s land between the two
genres. Perhaps, for Xi Chuan and Yu Jian and for poetry and prose,
we shouldn’t merely speak of nobody’s land, but of middle ground as
well. The texts in question are Xi Chuan’s «Salute» (㟈ᭀ) and Yu
Jian’s «File 0» (0 ḷḜ), both written in 1992. For aspects of «Salute»
reviewed in chapter Five, I will offer the occasional summary rather
than repeating the argument.
Within the avant-garde, «Salute» and «File 0» count as milestone
texts and have acquired canonical status, even if «File 0» remains con-
troversial to this day. Their publication history shows that readers in
China and elsewhere tend to classify both texts as poetry. In addition
to bibliographical detail on «Salute» outlined in the previous chapter,
I note that Yu Jian has consistently referred to «File 0» as a long poem;
after unofficial circulation in 1992-1993, it was officially published in
China in the poetry section of the literary journal Grand Master (ᆊ)
in 1994, accompanied by a review by He Yi that emphatically con-
firmed its classification as poetry, in fact ascribing to it a leading role
in the development of the genre; in 1995 both text and commentary