violent sudden death; he might be a wise man, a madman, or a fool; he
might be philanthropic, or he might be a beast who concerns himself
only with devouring his prey. (Hong and Zhao 1993: 215)This quasi-Nietzschean “superman” of “nonaction/no inhibition” can
be seen almost too bizarrely as a prophetic self-projection of Gu Cheng.
It explains some characteristics of Gu Cheng’s late poetry, in which he
freely mixes good and evil, beauty and violence, life and death, wisdom
and madness, spirituality and bestiality, love and ressentiment. Gu
Cheng is actually promoting an antihumanism and nihilism, which in
turn is a natural outgrowth of his “natural philosophy.”
One supreme version of this “superman” is, of course, the “ghost,”
as we see in the last section of The Ghost Enters the City:
Ghost
No trust no righteousness ffg
No love no hatred f爱f恨
Ghost
No father No mother j爹 j妈
No son No grandson jJ jm
Ghost
Not dead not alive not mad no np nq
not dumb nr
(Gu 1995: 849)
In these few lines, via disjointed phrases and negative statements, Gu
Cheng aims at simulating a state of spontaneity and “no inhibition”
on the one hand, and a state of nonattachment and “nonaction” on
the other. The utter irony of this simulated portrait is, however, that
while the “ghost” may appear as an absolutely free spirit who can
roam all over the world, in reality he may have no dwelling place any-
where but be forever tumbling in a claustrophobic limbo. Eventually,
“no inhibition” circles back to “nonaction,” and transgression
degenerates into imprisonment. The metamorphosis from “child” to
“ghost” thus demonstrates a fateful disproportion between fantasy
and reality.
In the meanwhile, we cannot slight Gu Cheng’s “natural philoso-
phy” as a mere eccentric fantasy. Instead, we must bear in mind that
the most direct source of this “natural philosophy” is historical rather
than natural. And it is here that Gu Cheng shows that he had indeed
been possessed by the specter of the Cultural Revolution.^12
But as shown in Michaux’s case, such “possession” can be seen as
an attempt at “exorcism,” an attempt to expel the specter of Mao and
Gu Cheng’s Metamorphosis 139