objectification and the long-short line 253mine. At the very least, however, they agree that Yu has gone further
than most of his contemporaries in creative reflection in his poetry on
language as the material (⠽ᗻ), formed (䈵) medium of that po-
etry as a linguistic construct, and on its relation to being (ᄬ) and
reality. With reference to traditional Chinese poetics, several critics
have remarked that Yu Jian does not engage in culturally conditioned
“expression of emotion and articulation of what is on the mind intent-
ly” (ᡦᚙ㿔ᖫ) or writing literature to convey the Way. Instead, they
argue, his cool-headed observation and examination of the physical
world defamiliarize human experience, thus establishing objectivity or
objective representation. Ideally, this leads to the ability to rename
that world or, truer to the register of the original, to “name it anew”
(䞡ᮄੑৡ).
Discussions of Yu Jian’s poetry in terms such as the above are very
much to the point. Rather than objectivity and objective representa-
tion, however, my analysis centers on the notion of objectification, which
I consider to be a mechanism that operates centrally amid the distin-
guishing features of Yu’s work. Here, objectification doesn’t mean the
denial of subjectivity in an Other, such as the reduction of woman to
a lust object under the male gaze. Objectification in the poetry of Yu
Jian is the presentation of human experience as dislodged from socially
determined, conventional and habitual perception and interpretation.
It denotes the process of objectifying and an attempt at objectivity, rather
than its attainment, which is particularly impossible in contexts such
as those of literature and art. For the made thing that is poetry, the
notion of objectification only works if we recognize that it is artifi-
cial and indeed a manipulative intervention on the part of the poet—
and as such, ultimately, an expression of the poet’s sub-jectivity. With
these qualifications, objectification offers a rewarding perspective on
Yu Jian’s oeuvre. The mechanism of objectification is of course by no
means unique to Yu’s poetry, but his particular employment of it is
worth a closer look.
Notably, as a global force in Yu’s oeuvre, objectification is locally
complemented by something I will call subjectification. That is, Yu
Jian’s imaginative, personifying attention to (inanimate) objects that
makes them subjects in their own right: say, raindrops and bottle tops,
to borrow Patton’s well-chosen examples.^7 Together, objectification
(^7) Patton 1998.