430 chapter twelve
does justice to the article’s scope and ambition. It contains Yi Sha’s
shamelessly biased report on who said and did what at the conference,
and his presentation of the event as the outcome of an overall schism
in poetry and criticism dating back to the 1980s. Yi looks back on
Haizi’s suicide as a defining moment and a rare opportunity for the
Intellectual camp to maneuver its aesthetics into a position of privilege
on the poetry scene, so that (p80)
a rhetorical conspiracy made of metaphor made muddle-headed West-
ern sinologists think they truly dared confront Chinese reality.True enough, Haizi’s posthumous mythification has been dispropor-
tionate. Still, Yu Jian’s, Xu Jiang’s, Yi Sha’s and other Popular voices’
studied irreverence toward his life, work and death strike one as strate-
gically inspired breaches of a taboo, carried out for sheer effect. Other-
wise, it is hard to see the relevance of comments like this, made by Yu
Jian (#36) in the July 1999 issue of Hunan Literature (फ᭛ᄺ) (p75):
Apparently, Haizi couldn’t even ride a bicycle but still thought of himself
as a king among men who hadn’t been given the position due to him,
and so he went and killed himself.Yi Sha is of the opinion that when poets hold a conference this is not
to exchange views but to exhibit their temperament, and his style in
“End of the Century” and elsewhere indicates that this also applies
to written presentations. His promise of objectivity and fairness rings
accordingly hollow, if it isn’t intended as a joke to begin with. Yi’s
self-contradictions alternate with wickedly clever arguments. He turns
Wang Jiaxin’s employment of Cultural Revolution terminology against
him, as if Wang were not citing such terminology to illustrate the Pop-
ular resurrection of Maoist discourse. Yi’s castigations of the Intellec-
tuals contain macho, sexist and misogynist comments, such as when
he associates the phrase Middle-Aged Writing (Ёᑈݭ), used by
poets like Ouyang Jianghe and Xiao Kaiyu, with sexual impotence,^17
and when he reports on his own speech at the conference (p79):
So-called “Intellectual Writing” makes me think of the notion of “Wom-
en’s Literature.” What I feel about “Women’s Literature” equally ap-
plies to “Intellectual Writing”: as a man, I hardly ever think about what
it is grows in the crotch of my pants, and I definitely don’t need to go
trumpeting it around.(^17) Ouyang 1993a: passim, Xiao Kaiyu 1997a: 226.