the most important functions of his poetry is “exorcism,” which is the
only way of reacting against hurts and traumas:
Exorcism, a reaction in force, with a battering ram, is the true poem of
the prisoner.
In the very space of suffering and obsession, you introduce such
exaltation, such magnificent violence, welded to the hammering of
words, that the evil is progressively dissolved, replaced by an airy
demonic sphere—a marvelous state!
Many contemporary poems, poems of deliverance, also have an effect of
exorcism, but of exorcism through subterfuge. Through the subterfuge
of our subconscious nature that defends itself with an appropriate
imaginative elaboration: Dreams. Through planned or exploratory
subterfuge, searching for its optimum point of application: waking
Dreams. (Michaux 1994: 83)If we apply Michaux’s “exorcism” to Gu Cheng, we discover that
in Gu Cheng’s late poems the increasingly frequent employment of
“ghost” and other images of death and violence is not just narcissistic
self-display, but also a desperate attempt to exorcise this “ghost” or
demon that has grafted itself onto someone who once was a “fairytale
poet.” This paradoxical realization can be seen in a confession, in a
third-person voice, that appears not in any of Gu Cheng’s poems but
in his novel Ying’er:
He is a well-disguised maniac. His fantasies and energy for realizing any
fantasies have all reached the extent of irreversibility. He wants to
exclude all exterior things, all men, all of the male world and society,
even reproduction and nature, including himself. He manipulates his
disguise of extreme shyness and death to cope with the world, to break
all secular order. This combination of understanding and madness
makes me fearful. One can understand one’s own madness and absurdity,
while at the same time all of his rationality serves this madness, and step
by step pushes life to its limits. This is no longer just madness. He is a
monster! (Gu 1993: 116–117)From “child” to “maniac” (fengzi) and finally to “monster,” Gu
Cheng presents an extremely complicated and entangled self-portrait.
Although when we trace the more immediate genesis of Gu Cheng’s
poetics of innocence/violence and child/ghost, we will once again
witness the haunting specter of the Cultural Revolution.
Gu Cheng devised for himself an earlier poetic persona during his
transition from “child” to “ghost.” This is “Bulin,” the protagonist of
Bulin’s File(Bulin dang’an) (1981–1987), and a character who, like
Gu Cheng’s Metamorphosis 135