self-reliant life, not relying upon society, you will have to be dragged
into the war of nature. In my experience, nature is a bunch of mouths,
either you eat me, or you eat him, and there’s almost no other way in
between. (Gu 2005a: 229)This bleak, almost Darwinian realization of nature in the “new
world” echoes Auden and Milosz quoted earlier. Gu Cheng’s poetic
metamorphosis thus takes a surprising turn. The formerly “willful
child” wakes up finding his new incarnation as a “monster” (mogui)
or a “ghost” (gui)—no longer wandering in the wilderness but trying
to enter the city.
The Ghost Enters the Cityis a sequence of poems Gu Cheng wrote
during his 1992 sojourn in Berlin. Narrating a ghost’s daily adventures
during a week, it consists of eight short poems that follow a short
opening section:
The ghost 0
At 0 o’clock 的
Walks very carefully
It’s afraid of falling !怕摔$头
And becoming &成
Human '
(Gu 1995: 843)
This introduction of “ghost” and “city” may be Gu Cheng’s single most
important attempt—both existential and aesthetic—to simultaneously
deny and (re-)assert his exilic reality and identity in the “new world.”^5
In Suizi Zhang-Kubin’s interview with Gu Cheng in 1992, there is a
rather intriguing discussion of the terms “human” and “ghost”:
Z: Did you write The Ghost Enters the Cityas a human or as a ghost?
G: A human can write ghost poetry without keeping a distance from the
ghost. That is to say, to completely enter a ghostly state, to exclude the
human breath of life, and to write poetry as a ghost. This state of
poetry writing brings one close to death. A human can also write ghost
poetry while keeping a distance from the ghost. In other words, it’s like
watching TV, watching a ghost story. If one is writing poetry as a
human, the human will not be harmed in any way. As a ghost I wrote
poems like “Houhai” and “Zizhuyuan” [inCity], while as a human
I wrote the sequence of The Ghost Enters the City. (Gu 1995: 4–5)Here Gu Cheng might appear splitting too fine a hair, but he has his
point. When Gu Cheng says that he wrote The Ghost Enters the City
as a human, he is actually positing the “ghost” as a poetic persona, an
128 Yibing Huang