what was all the fuss about? 405are they but dreams, or ideas we entertain within our pain?
Perhaps we’re only witnesses to time, just like these old photographs
yellowed, cracked, but holding events, people
once called history, yet never real—The poem’s second half is stronger than its first. What concerns us
here is these lines:
to talk about a poem or a novel. We played Hamlet,
now imagine crossing the [W]aste [L]and, looking for the long-lost holy grail
near the campus flower beds at dusk, chasing Eliot’s lonely silhouette.
At the time I didn’t like Yeats, didn’t understand Lowell or AshberyThere is no reason why a Chinese poet shouldn’t refer to Western
traditions. Also, the text holds not a single clue regarding the cultural
identity of the speaker, unless we want to take the fact that it is written
in Chinese as such. Should we perhaps envisage the speaker as a West-
erner, precisely because he speaks of Hamlet and the rest? The casual
transition from public, historical, literary Westerners to an anonymous,
personal presence (you) in his life doesn’t make this a likely reading. Be
that as it may, without condoning cultural nationalism and protec-
tionism, it is understandable that the combination of the anthology’s
subtitle, Cheng Guangwei’s introduction and his naming of the book
after Zhang’s poem rubbed many readers the wrong way.
Shen Haobo’s Angry Response: “The Occupation of the Poetry Scene”An elaborate rejoinder to Cheng Guangwei’s anthology and its in-
troduction would appear early in 1999, in what may well be called
a counter-anthology edited by Yang Ke, with a counter-essay by
Yu Jian. But let’s first take a look at an earlier contribution by Shen
Haobo, who would soon take the lead in the Lower Body movement.
In October 1998 Shen—then calling himself Choushui—had pub-
lished “Who’s Fooling ‘the Nineties’” (䇕ᣓ “бकᑈҷ” ᓔ⎂, #8)
in the May Fourth Literary Journal (Ѩಯ᭛ᄺ) at Beijing Normal Uni-
versity, where he was a student at the time. It was first reprinted in
Oriental Culture Weekly (κᮍ᭛਼࣪ߞ), and then, in January 1999, in
the widely read Friends in Letters (᭛ট). The article, sometimes more
like an open letter to Cheng Guangwei, starts off in bold, vituperative
terms (p20):