Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money (Sinica Leidensia, 86)

240 chapter six

Iconicity

Let’s recall one of Simon’s claims for poetry, made in the spirit of Ro-
man Jakobson:^17

This is what poetry, and therefore prose poetry as well, must do: in the

sound, in the syntax, in the cadences of the rhythm, repeat, illustrate,

intensify the idea—provide the body, the soma that fits the psyche of the

particular utterance.

By iconicity I mean mechanisms that allow form to contribute directly
to content, which generally operate in poetry more than in prose and
make form an icon of content rather than its more or less arbitrary
stylization. Iconicity is not an especially salient feature of «Salute»,
although Xi Chuan’s diction is often an icon for his subject matter.
As noted in chapter Five, one concrete instance of iconicity in not just
the acoustic but also the visual realm is found in «The Monster», in
the alternation between long, heavy stanzas populated by earthbound
organisms, and short, airy stanzas populated by birds. This wouldn’t
have worked if the long stanzas had featured the birds instead. The
brevity of the bird stanzas is what makes them “light,” so that one can
imagine them as taking off, upward, away from the heavy stanzas. In
this respect, «The Monster» resembles Mallarmé’s famous «Winter
Shiver» (Frisson d’hiver), in which long stanzas alternate with short
ones that feature spiders living close to the ceiling.^18
«File 0», on the other hand, clearly displays iconicity in that it is
laid out as, and largely written in the style of, the file that it is about.
In this sense, one could think of it as an objet trouvé, a ready-made—but
modified—work of art in the tradition of Duchamp, or a collage of
countless bits of ready-made language. It may be no exaggeration to
say that iconicity is its most effective feature, especially since «File 0» is
in fact about the reinforcement and the taking over of content by form,
or the taking over of reality by representation. The criterion of iconic-
ity certainly doesn’t make either of the two texts prose, and it makes
«File 0» more markedly poetic than «Salute».

(^17) Simon 1987: 697; e.g. Jakobson 1960: esp 368-369.
(^18) Mallarmé 1935: 111-115.