poetic concept become a focused effort, resulting, no doubt, from the
necessity of the debate. Numerous poets and critics on both sides of
the debate are probably motivated by “a good fight” and write many
occasional and spontaneous essays to explicate and decipher the very
meaning of minjian, virtually making it a household name overnight in
this day of media explosion. Curiously, for those people who write
aboutminjian, Chen Sihe remains an unacknowledged source, even
though traces of Chen’s theorization are evident in quite a few writers’
employment of minjianas poetic concept. For example, Han Dong
fJ(b. 1961) emphatically pronounces that a chief characteristic of
minjianis “independent spirit and free creation.” And he continues to
expound,
The minjianposition is to safeguard literature, and to ensure that in an
age more materialistic by the day and with the balance of power as its
only standard, literature gets a chance to survive and develop, and to
protect the free spirit of art and its capacity for creation. (Han 2007: 27)Xie Youshun有h (b. 1972), the most outspoken advocate of
minjianpoetry, expresses a similar idea: “The meaning of minjianis an
independent quality. The spirit of minjianpoetry is that it never
depends on any colossal monsters; it exists for the purpose of poetry
only... The minjianposition is no more than an expression of the
unwillingness to be contained by certain systems or certain institutions
of knowledge” (Xie 1999: 21). Han’s and Xie’s formation of minjian,
clearly written for the sake of argumentation, if in want of Chen Sihe’s
scholarly objectivity and theoretical sophistication, contains nearly
identical understandings of the term as a third space in separation
from the realms of the state (system) and the intellectual (institution
of knowledge). Interestingly, qualitative vocabularies such as
marginalization, independence, nonconformity, and personalization,
which Han and Xie frequently invoke to define the minjianpoet, are
the ones that Wang Jiaxin and Ouyang Jianghe often use to describe
the intellectual poet. This is not to suggest that the debate is about
nothing, but the differences between the minjian school and the
intellectual school, however, are really the choices of signifiers and not
the definition of the signified.
This is not to say that the choice of signifiers does not matter in
critical discourses. Chen Sihe’s employment of minjianas an effective
strategy to rewrite modern Chinese literary history, as mentioned in
the above, has already proven otherwise. Among the proponents of
minjianpoetry, Yu Jian is perhaps the only one who is able to fully
190 Dian Li