aesthetic device, instead of an existential fact. And I see this as Gu
Cheng’s strategy of balancing himself between the Western “city”—
where he finds himself physically located and yet ultimately muted and
excluded—and his native “city,” which he had left behind and yet he
could still fancy reentering. This also means that he could still main-
tain a certain artistic leverage and human possibility against the
morbid and alienating reality, even if already deprived of the magic
power of a “child in nature.”
On the other hand, when he says that he wrote City—a work
executed on a much larger scale than The Ghost Enters the City—as a
ghost, Gu Cheng seems to indicate that he is by now sinking irre-
versibly into his lost native “city”: the walled city of Beijing and him-
self. Being a “ghost” and thus possessing a certain psychic mobility
and double vision, Gu Cheng is nevertheless much sobered by the fact
that this “city,” once reentered, is utterly unreal and offers no hope of
escape or redemption. Hence the “ghost” is much more vulnerable
and desperate, no longer just a persona, disguise, device, or maneuver,
but a “naked” incarnation of his true existential self trapped in
history. And such a “city” is in fact a liminal space, or, a limbo.
Limbo in a Posthistorical Time:
Gu Cheng and the “City”
Indeed, if in The Ghost Enters the Citythe focus is still on the “ghost”
as a human persona, then in Citythe attention is definitely transferred
to the “city” itself, which, however, appears phantomlike.
The relationship between Gu Cheng and the city demands much
in-depth investigation. Among existing studies of Gu Cheng, some
already have played with the pun on Gu Cheng’s name “Cheng”—
which means “city”—attested by such a book title as Gu Cheng
Abandons the City (Gu Cheng qicheng) (Xiao 1994). While also
employing this pun, I will, however, make a further twist here and
propose a radical reading. That is to say, in comparison with
“nature,” the “city” is equally, if not more, a crucial complex that
entangled Gu Cheng throughout his life and poetry. In fact it may
well be the city and not nature that metonymically represents Gu
Cheng’s original—rather than alter ego—“self,”^6 from which he had
been trying to escape in his early poetry and toward which he had
increasingly yearned to return in some of his last works. As for his
final move of “abandoning the city,” it signifies a tragic and yet
apodictic act of “self-abandonment,” and the completion of a process
Gu Cheng’s Metamorphosis 129