In his early poems, Luo Fu sought to transcend the painful historical
reality he encountered in Taiwan. On Quemoy, the regular shellings
had a catalyzing effect on Luo Fu’s art. An acute awareness of death led
Luo Fu to an awareness of his own alienated condition, which he
shared with all the people of China, if not with the entire modern
world. The immediate threat of death threw Luo Fu’s own alienated
condition into high relief. History for Luo Fu had become an “atrocity
exhibition at which he was an unwilling spectator” (Ballard 1970: 15).
According to Sartre, man attempts to overcome his alienated
condition through a dialectical process by internalizing his objective cir-
cumstances and then externalizing them through action, in an attempt
to change them. By this free act of consciousness, he takes what is out-
side and makes of it a structure of his inner life. But he must objectify
himself through his own acts in the outside world. Through creation,
man realizes himself and detaches himself from things as he inscribes his
work on them (Sartre 1968: 150). This dialectical process is what is
expressed symbolically in the first quintet of the frame poem. The
speaker internalizes the external—his stunned reaction to the naked
man battling death and the black stream roaring through his veins—and
then externalizes what he has internalized—his eyes make the stone wall
bleed. In this way, modern man’s creative activities become a form of
revenge on his cruel fate. Luo Fu observes: “What we see reflected in the
mirror is not the image of modern man, but their cruel destinies against
which writing poetry is a form of revenge” (Luo 1965: 1).
But exactly what form will this revenge take in Luo Fu’s case? The
second quintet provides the answer. In the opening lines, the speaker
compares himself to a tree, but one grown in fire. The life of such a
tree is symbolic of the lives of the Chinese people and China. Luo Fu
grew up during the war with Japan and the subsequent civil war and
division of China. On Quemoy, violence continued. It is the violence,
the uncertainties, and ultimately death that most people prefer to
ignore. In the last two lines, the speaker again compares himself to a
tree—in this case a bitter pear tree that has been chopped down, its
annual rings exposed to the light of day.
A tree’s annual rings are a record of its life; they are the tree’s inner
record of its life experience. Luo Fu is again speaking in symbols—
what the speaker is offering the reader is a record of his own inner life.
Luo Fu will have his revenge on history by banishing it and in its place
substituting his own authentic or existential history—what Heidegger
called Geschichte(Heidegger 1962: 236–311). His poetry, as he says
in the introduction to the collection, is a means of revenge against
modern man’s merciless destiny. Modern man can transcend the
The Poetic Odyssey of Luo Fu 71