274 chapter seven
it has remained wet throughout
in this life its victory is never to have been dry
its time means water retention up until it
turns into other water splashed on the bottom of a trouser leg
of the poet who has just left the coffee shop to leave a wet mark2. Long Lines and Blanks
Who would want objective literature, if there were such a thing to
begin with? I have stressed that objectification doesn’t lead to any-
thing like “true” objectivity, that it is artificial and a manipulative in-
tervention on the part of the poet, and that as such it is an expression
of sub-jectivity. This is evident from the sympathy for Luo Jiasheng
in the poem of that name, and for the all too human protagonists of
«No. 6 Shangyi Street» and «Event: Conversation», as well as from
the indictment of standardization and modernization in «Event: Pav-
ing». Objectification, then, is of course a particular type of irony, in its
basic meaning of dissimulation or feigned ignorance. After the Maoist
years, starting in the 1980s and coming into full swing in the 1990s,
the resurrection of irony is among the most significant developments
in contemporary Chinese poetry, with Yu Jian and Xi Chuan as two
early contributors, each in their own way. As we have seen, Yu’s irony
often targets conventions of social intercourse and hierarchies of the
lofty and the lowly, be they human beings or objects, poets or rain-
drops. Proceeding from the content-oriented analysis in the preceding
pages, to conclude this chapter I will elaborate on the proposition that
objectification and the broader category of irony in Yu Jian’s poetry
also draw on the formal qualities of his work, and that they are in fact
contingent upon these qualities.
The most striking thing about the form of Yu Jian’s poetry is what
he calls the long-short line (䭓ⷁহ, with no obvious relation to this
term’s denotation of aspects of the Song-dynasty lyric [䆡]): long lines,
punctuated not by conventional marks such as commas, full stops,
(semi-)colons, dashes and so on but by blanks roughly the size of a
Chinese character. Here is an example from «Event: Conversation»,
with the translation in especially small type, to make it fit the original: