what was all the fuss about? 433“Intellectual Writing, or ‘In Dedication to a Limitless Minority’” is
a rebuttal to accusations from the Popular camp in which Wang pri-
marily responds to Yu Jian and Xie Youshun. He argues convincingly
that Yu Jian’s creative output, particularly his «File 0», is a far cry
from meeting the criteria for good poetry as laid out in Popular po-
lemical discourse. In addition, he questions Yu’s portrayal of poets of
the Chinese language, cited above. Wang points out that Yu is guilty
of the crime of “connecting” with the West as much as anyone else
(p48-49):
Aren’t Chinese poets writing in Chinese, and not in English? Is this
something that needs to be advertised? Can it be true that the translation
of works by Chinese poets into foreign languages doesn’t add to the glory
of Chinese poetry and becomes a poet’s crime instead? How is it that Yu
Jian, who himself has also hinted at and indeed flaunted the fact that for-
eigners place orders for his work, now poses as “refusing to connect”? In
plain words, all of this is but strategic behavior. All of this is but in order
to ride the rising tide of nationalism... All of this is but to show: while
the others are all busy connecting with the West, I myself am the only
one working to restore the dignity of the Chinese language. Of course,
to restore the dignity of the Chinese language is Chinese poets’ mission
throughout their lives—but how to go about that? By false, inflated, hol-
low words? By denouncing the languages of other nations?Wang questions the dichotomies that underlie Popular discourse, and
most of all the confluence of these dichotomies in an overall opposition
of Popular and Intellectual. In a simple aphorism, he submits (p40-
41):
Of course an intellectual is not the same thing as a poet, but a poet is
always an intellectual.According to Wang, all those embroiled in the Polemic are intellec-
tuals, in a country where that category of people was made to suffer
through large parts of the twentieth century. He laments that they
have now become antagonists, instead of allies in the face of common
enemies such as official cultural policy and the rampant commercial-
ization of Chinese life. He also rejects the parallel oppositions of North
and South and of the foreign and the Chinese, drawing attention to
the complexity and multi-directionality of things like literary influence,
intertextuality and intercultural relations.
As noted, a little over a month after Wang Jiaxin’s “Start from a
Misty Drizzle” had appeared in Poetry Reference and Poetry Exploration,