One day in May 2020, I received Zhu Zhu's email address of the third part of "Qinghe County", which he had just finalized, which was exactly 20 years before the completion time of the first part of "Qinghe County" (2000). In between, the second part of his Qinghe County was completed in 2012, when it had a title, "Little Cloth Bag.". When the COVID-19 pandemic eased up a bit, I intently read the third part twice, and re-turned out the first two (including his poetry collection "The Suitcase" and "Winter on the Fifth Avenue" respectively) and read them together.
Now, the "Qinghe County" trilogy is all included in the new "The Sea on Me". This is Zhu Zhu's poetry collection of more than 30 years, using the "New and Selected Poems" arrangement method commonly used abroad, composed of works selected from his poetry collections and latest poems from different periods, in addition to the "Qinghe County" trilogy, there are also long poems "Flowing Accounts" that have been written for many years and were finalized last year. As for the principle of selecting poems, Zhu Zhu made a brief explanation in the "Compilation Instructions" at the end of the poem collection: "This is an anthology with obvious subjective tendencies, which treats the completion of the works themselves in each period with the current understanding, avoids personal nostalgia, the particularity of the writing motivation, and the influence of being quoted by critics, and the early poems are not included as separate parts." It is not difficult to find that he injected the vision of the present in the process of selecting poems, and focused on the later stages of the work, especially the 10 years after "The Story".
Written by | Zhang Taozhou
"The Sea on My Body", by Zhu Zhu, Edition: Yazhong Culture | Beijing United Publishing Company, May 2021
One. The wrestling of human nature
The "Qinghe County" trilogy can be called an axis of Zhu Zhu's poetry creation for more than 30 years, connecting with the gradual unfolding of his poetry towards a rich and open realm in the vertical and horizontal directions. The writing process of this trilogy also reflects the trajectory of the transformation of his poetic style to a certain extent.
The first part of Qinghe County was completed in the year when the collection of poems "Salt on the Dry Grass", which established Zhu Zhu's early personal style and established his poetic reputation, was published (People's Literature Publishing House, 2000). He once mentioned that the collection of poems made him feel "almost physiologically disconnected from his past writing", which is obviously a summary of his early writing. Corresponding to his resolute, "lonely" posture at that time was the cold, sharp and restrained temperament shown in the many poems in "Salt on the Dry Grass":
Go upstairs, there is already Chopin in the darkness.
Go downstairs and die lonely in the crowd.
- "On the Stairs"
The collection is littered with poignant metaphors: "This snow is my strange itch" ("I am François Viyong"), "The roof ridge is like a rusty pendulum that sways" ("The Kitchen Song"), and from time to time there are light and evocative combinations of words between the lines: "The south has passed, / The sun keeps it in its eyes" ("Pray for a Heart"), "Butterfly, / Spread its wings in the smallest loss" ("Incitement"). In addition, there is no shortage of exquisite so-called Jiangnan scenery in the collection: "There is a ray of light spreading along the undulating roof, / Rain falling on children and dogs." / Leaves and lights on the walls are silently lit" (The Sax of the Town). All of this put a pair of "hardened armor" for his words.
Of course, the text of "Salt on the Dry Grass" also vaguely exudes a certain ambiguous atmosphere of Eros (lust): "The leaves stained with lime / the murmur of a woman's / silk clothes" ("You by the Sea"). That may be related to the beautiful region where Zhu Zhu is located, or it may be due to his preference for a certain type of art. These breaths, combined with the delicate text, evoke a strange feeling of slight trembling:
A strong wind opened the dark cabinet,
Blew the apron down at his feet again.
Scrape the dirt from the side of the stove,
The lust of the box being opened by autumn is also brighter,
In fact, this breath also haunts the first part of Qinghe County: "Now her gaze/ began to move over and sip at my neck" (Naughty Boy); "She continued to wash and we were dizzy, looking down and looking up tightly together" ("Washing the Window")," "Her body was a pot of sweet juice/wire writhing like a wire, / to swallow me" ("Wudu Tou"), "He is more like a Dragon Boat of the Dragon Boat Festival/ Pulling waves, / Stirring our decaying waterways" ("Treasure Chest"). The novel work "Jin Ping Mei" on which "Qinghe County" is based is itself full of Eros plots and examination and reflection on it, which makes the Eros meaning in it inevitable. However, each poem maintains a good sense of proportion in dealing with the Eros relationship between the characters, appearing subtle and layered. The protagonist of the first part of "Qinghe County" is Pan Jinlian (the second part is also the second part), she is the center of everyone's attention, but in the whole poem, she does not appear as a character, but as the "other" in the eyes of several characters close to her, and appears in their statements - these characters are narrated in the first person "I", and their statements are like mirrors reflecting Pan Jinlian' multi-faceted mirrors, making her face clearest from different perspectives. In the second part of "Qinghe County", the perspective is reversed, and the only character referred to by "I" is Pan Jinlian, through her statement, the image of those characters, her relationship with them, and her attitude towards them are outlined one by one.
It should be further pointed out that Eros does not give the first part (and the next two parts) of "Qinghe County" a pompous tone, and Eros is not the theme of the poem, rather the whole poem shows the struggle of human nature. Zhu Zhu said in an interview: "The world of Qinghe County has not disappeared, and those people are walking around outside my window, although they have changed their names and surnames and are drinking Coca-Cola." In particular, I want to call people like the queen mother one of the archetypes of our nation, and so far my feeling is that there is a queen mother living on every street. I remember Mr. Jin Kemu mentioning in a short article that there were two people, Wang Po and Xue Po, who were the two most evil old women in the history of our country. Yes, they are evil, but they mean so much more than that—the black box of civilization, the living fossils, the weirdest link in the social fabric, and even the fact that you could say they live in a hidden center. What I want to accomplish in the poem is not a deliberate depiction of that sense of evil, but a complete and true image." This is also what Jiang Tao pointed out in a commentary: "Qinghe County" "deliberately provokes a lamp to let readers glimpse the subtle curves and cracks of history" ("Vermeer in Contemporary Poetry"). Some of Zhu Zhu's other poems that appear to have "nostalgic" overtones, including the later "Green Smoke" and "Jiangnan Republic - Liu Ru is before the Tomb", etc., all of which contain a certain toughness of Ju Kegang, offsetting or even resisting the possible "decadent" trend.
Zhu Zhu, born in 1969. Poet, curator, art critic.
Two. "Dark Grave"
The publication of Salt on the Dry Grass presents zhu Zhu's state of saying goodbye to the "first stage" of writing and entering the "dark graveyard" of writing. The phrase "dark grave" comes from Zhu Zhu's 2000 poem "Lamp Moth", in which the "tomb road" in the first sentence of the poem was originally a kind of realism, but he portrayed it as a metaphor for writing and the situation of the writer. In a small talk, Zhu Zhu mentioned that the "dark graveyard" is a necessary stage for poets whose writing tends to be stable, during which the writer's mind and endurance are tested in order to seek a way to self-renewal and transformation. In Lamp Moth, "A lamp moth/lamp moth tends to the brilliance of the underground, /His death record counts the evil/ of his companions and the eclipse of the sun on the ground", allegorically revealing the situation in which the writer rushes left and right into the "dark grave".
Zhu Zhu once said that "Lamp Moth" "means a very unusual crystallization in my writing in recent years." So, what is the "unusual" thing about this poem? It can be seen that the most significant point of "Lamp Moth" is that the tomb robber in the poem, who was abandoned by his accomplices and eventually "became a humanoid rubbing", describes in the first person what he feels and feels of being sealed in the tomb passage - although it is imaginary and virtual by the poet, it can give the reader a sense of immersion and authenticity because of the perspective of "I". Not surprisingly, the first part of "Qinghe County", which was completed later in the "Lamp Moth", was all in the first person (as mentioned earlier). The same is true of "The Slope", "Joint Burial", "In the Sandbar", "Robinson", etc. in the same period (these poems are included in the poetry collection "Suitcase"). Undoubtedly, this is an effective way for Zhu Zhu to lift the "hardened armor" of the Chinese words in his early writing, and then to get out of the "dark tomb".
This method is exactly what Zhu Zhu himself mentioned many times and some commentators have also expounded on "becoming someone else". In a poem, he explicitly states: "Pass by me and become someone else" ("Night Visit"). The so-called "becoming another person" is, in short, to decompose or transform the self into an infinite number of others, or conversely, to gather all kinds of others within the self; to measure oneself and to measure oneself, and to highlight the multiplicity and complexity of the self and the relationship between the self and others through the role of the self. In an interview, Zhu Zhu explained: "The structure of 'I' as a whole, as a form, is really just a literary cliché – I don't know if it is more convenient? Maybe when you put on the mask of others, it is more difficult, that is, you must be someone else in tone, and your understanding, imagination and emotions must be mixed with it, rather than simply refracting yourself. To be the Other is undoubtedly one of our eternal desires, and the use of 'I' in literature is a two-way movement of unilateral will, stirring up a ripple of my own on the face of the other, and thus purifying the consciousness of the self. "It does give rise to a lot of issues that deserve to be explored in depth. The "I" who dominates the psalms, as an imaginative substitute for others, needs to figure out the personalities, looks, and habits of different characters, so as to grasp the tone, allocate vocabulary, and forge sentence patterns. It is true that in Zhu Zhu's above-mentioned poems, the use of "I" strengthens the meaning of his monologue or dialogue, adding many detailed narratives or portrayals, but this does not continue the so-called "narrative transformation" in the poetry of the 1990s. His "becoming someone else" has increased the ability to express words, broadened the horizon of his poetic expression, and made it more layered.
Zhu Zhu's method was earlier embodied in the poem "I Am François Viyong" (1998), the protagonist of which is a French poet with a legendary experience, and the whole poem is a vivid parody of his life and writing in a tone full of self-deprecation, and the words are playful and flexible. At the same time, the poem, together with the poem "The Plague" of the same period, shows the dramatic tension of "becoming someone else" in syntax:
People want a decorative, nibbling promise
Concrete is better than an abstract poem
Dark base that does not move:
death.
Earlier, in 1992, Zhu Zhu wrote in a short poem of only four lines, "An Observer Limited by Experience":
Unless, at the moment, I'm a fisherman on the boat
Look at yourself in a dark tower
Gaze at a cloud on the side of the ship
Radiate my tiny head and eyes
Indeed, as Zhou Zhan analyzes, the poem "can be seen as a little contemplation of the poet's ability to dop, "I (am)—the fisherman on the boat(look)—the fisherman himself in the tower, three spaces, three characters are the same person." Unless I am able to do this to separate one meself from myself and give this me the ability to observe another me that is separated from me, I am limited. The poet admits that he is limited. As an observer, he is limited by experience, but he can achieve a transcendent effort by 'gazing' 'a cloud', by 'radiating my tiny head and eyes', that is, expanding his own life, penetrating into the lives of others" (The Observer and His Doppelganger). It can be seen that "becoming someone else" has long been lurking in Zhu Zhu's writing ideas.
Three. "Be someone else"
Zhu Zhu's "Becoming Someone Else" lyric is based on various historical figures and characters in fictional works. The most important work in this regard is naturally the "Qinghe County" trilogy: Pan Jinlian and his associated characters in "Jin Ping Mei" have become the core of the first and second parts of "Qinghe County", compared with the original work, the images of these characters in the poem have been transformed or even "reversed" to varying degrees, and the whole poem revolves around Pan Jinlian to develop a dark and deep human world; the third part of "Qinghe County" focuses on the author of "Jin Ping Mei", a scribe with a semi-anonymous nature and his identity seems to be confusing. While tracing his ups and downs, he also looks into the tragic fate shared by the ancient scribes. Another part of the heavy work is the nearly 400-line "Flowing Water Account", which takes Li Yu, who is both familiar and unfamiliar to the world, as the object of writing, reshaping his multiple images as an individual, showing his situation of being trapped in his home country, life, emotions and writing.
These character writings can be described as the re-"invention" of characters. Obviously, they are not dragonflies or floating light to touch the life, deeds and social interactions of the characters, but based on a kind of "empathy" to make a new construction of the characters, of which the following aspects are particularly noteworthy:
Attention is paid to the background of the characters and their role in the characters and themes of the poems. In the highly anticipated "Jiangnan Republic - Before the Tomb of Liu Ru", the opening paragraph appears to be obscure, "At this moment, the city is lonely, all the city gates are closed, / Only the river tide is heard playing the horseshoe on the other side in the rush" and the ending tends to be bright and soft, "There will also be a peach blossom swaying in the clear mid-air, / The pool of water reflects the sky, and the sound of the pipa comes from the deep alley", which is a stark contrast, symbolizing the confrontation between "weak" women and the change of power.
A unique treatment of some of the events related to the character. For example, in Liao Zhongkai and He Xiangning's "Joint Burial", the two verses of the poem are the confessions of the two men and the confession to each other, "synthesizing" a pattern of dialogue (echoing the title "Joint Burial") - wonderfully, Liao Zhongkai's confession details the process and feelings of his assassination with delicate brushstrokes, and imagines various scenes after his death; as a response and supplement, He Xiangning's confession focuses on her actions and thoughts after Liao Zhongkai's death. This treatment removes stereotypes about these two historical figures and highlights their individual personality traits. The same is true of "Wudu Tou" in the first part of "Qinghe County", which subverts Wu Song's tall heroic image by weakening his tiger fighting feat, but focuses on portraying his inner hesitation in the face of lust and humanity, so much so that he questions the meaning of life: "I am under house arrest in a prison uniform of yesterday's myth", "People love lies, and I have only fought the projection of a tiger".
Dissect the plight of the characters at the spiritual level. In Lu Xun's poem "Sad Questions", the introspective review of life becomes a continuous self-questioning. Whenever I read this poem, I am reminded of the extremely talented late critic Dr. Lai Yuhuang incarnated as Lu Xun and first-person reading and responding to the cross-time reading and response of "Sad Questions": "Zhu Zhu's poems use rhetorical question sentences instead of the prayer sentences of 'people can learn Lu Xun' and 'people should learn Lu Xun', he has about insight into the inertia of eighty years of time as stubborn as a rock, and I have tried to write and 'carved' like i walking on thin ice, and he confesses that it is no longer possible for people today to write like I do." Lu Xun's attempt to redefine literature, which he discusses: "I am facing the times, and the times oppress me to turn the whole into fragments, the strange into abruptness, the depth into sharpness, and the warmth into indifference, and the conflict between me and literature in this is to the extent that it is only spoken effectively rather than interestingly." ("I will persuade them to say goodbye to the literary journey"—a possible answer for Lu Xun in eighty years'" implies a desire to recreate new poetry.
In fact, the writing of characters in history requires not only in-depth understanding and understanding of various aspects of the characters, but also requires extraordinary insight and cognition of the history in which the characters are located. As Jiang Tao once said on a certain occasion, if poetry writes history only to list and accumulate historical materials, it is far from enough, and it should also be thoroughly eaten and digested to form their own views on history, so that they can write thoroughly. Impressively, Zhu Zhu always balances the tension between the individual and history with his restrained and free-moving brushwork, rejecting a certain argument of moral priority and abandoning the impulse to rush to history. If we compare Zhu Zhu's two poems by Lu Xun ("Sad Questions" and "Duolun Road") with other poems written about Lu Xun at the moment, we will find the chicness of Zhu Zhu's writing characters: the two poems, while penetrating into the wrinkles and fluctuations that are not easy to perceive in Lu Xun's heart, observing and interpreting his spiritual world, also show a grasp of historical complexity; lu Xun (and the history of the Republic of China in which he is located) is not too romanticized, full of a very sensational tone, or taking an old road of sublimation of themes, as some works wrote about Lu Xun.
"The Sea on My Body" almost encapsulates the essence of Zhu Zhu's more than 30 years of poetry writing. In the past 30 years, the trend of Chinese poetry has been fading one after another, the transformation of social and cultural contexts and the rise of various new media have made contemporary poetry complex and complex. But Zhu Zhu was unmoved, immersed in the continuous expansion of the experience of life and the unremitting exploration of poetry; he sought to be compatible with Chomsky's "system of self-composed" (crystal) principle and Piaget's "order in noise" (fire) principle, "with thousands of lightning bolts in one word", to find a way out for the "sea of the body"...
The author | Zhang Taozhou
Editor | Zhang Jin
Proofreading | Wang Xin