what was all the fuss about? 411economic and poetic alike: say, Swahili, Finnish, Turkish, Portuguese,
Hindi, Russian, Arabic....
The above passage is typical of Yu Jian’s disregard for argumenta-
tive logic or nuance. Sometimes this rhetorical havoc appears to be
intentional, as in the distortion of Cheng Guangwei’s opinions. The
struck-out words are those that Yu Jian leaves out when he quotes
Cheng (p8):
Nineties writing requires the writer first of all to be an intellectual with
independent views and taking an independent position, and only then
to be a poet.“The Light” and Yu Jian’s other essays are cluttered with untenable
claims: historical events such as the founding of the People’s Republic
and June Fourth are irrelevant to the development of literature, poetry
was part of the everyday experience of ordinary people in the Tang
and Song dynasties, something similar is currently true for Popular
poetry by Yu and others, and so on. A conspicuous feature of his con-
tributions and of the Polemic at large, mostly in the Popular camp,
is the echo of Maoist literary discourse, or perhaps we should say its
resuscitation in a vastly changed context. This is manifest in the neg-
ative stereotyping of Intellectual status, and in the overall tendency
toward moralizing, righteous verbal assault in a manner that recalls
the preaching of political ideology. It is disconcerting if we bear in
mind some of the less pleasant experiences forced on intellectuals in
the Maoist years, and the avant-garde’s tense relationship to a cultural
orthodoxy that theoretically still adheres to Maoist literary ideas. Yu
Jian displays a curious anti-intellectualism in passages like the follow-
ing (p8):
The inherent deficiency of [contemporary] criticism has led it to rely
solely on the “Intellectuals” for its theoretical resources, in the end los-
ing the independent standpoint of criticism and degenerating to a level
not much different from that of poetry authorities such as those rigid,
“bookish” poetry professors in universities, poetry critics, Chinese De-
partments and anthologies.Yu’s anti-intellectualism combines Maoist overtones with an oppo-
sition of the creative and the critical in literature. Notably, this op-
position springs from a modern, romantic vision of the artist that is
incompatible with Maoist theory. In addition, whenever it supports
their argument, Yu and his comrades-in-arms use Intellectual to mean