Carelessness, haste and poor quality of reading are the common characteristics of our times. This is an era of essays and columns, and forcing people to read modern poetry is sometimes a punishment. The trend in recent years shows that no matter whether poetry writing is understood as the contraction or expansion of words, poets use minority languages, which, by definition, includes absolute resistance to public reading and consumer reading. So poets don't have to expect their works to have thousands of readers. The problem is that contemporary poets read each other's works, which are generally sloppy and of low quality. They often express their likes and dislikes through their impressions after the first reading (we all know that the poet's impressions are generated by his own writing habits), and rarely delve into them. In this reading fashion, it is extremely unlikely that Flaubert's fascinating "writing wonderland" will appear.
Appearance is the theme of "Ci Jing" focused by Yongming Zhai Groundhog. Yongming Zhai and I are very close friends, so I plan to quote some private background materials before reading, so as to put the early writing process of this poem in reading brackets. Groundhog was published in the issue of 1992 today 1, but I read the manuscript of this poem as early as the winter of 1989. I fell in love with this poem almost immediately without thinking, but reading seems to stop there-under normal circumstances, liking a poem means I have the legal right not to reread it. It was not until April this year that I read Yongming Zhai's beautifully bound personal poems that I remembered the groundhog again. The reason is simple: I can't find this poem in this 267-page collection of poems. This makes me curious, because I know that Yongming Zhai himself likes this poem very much. Soon I received a letter from her, in which she talked about how the Groundhog was written: "Speaking of The Outer Edge of Poetry, I wrote it shortly after He Duoling and I got married. At that time, he often sang a song, which was a poem by Heine: "I wandered around to make a living and took a groundhog with me." "I like it very much ... the groundhog gave me the urge to write, so I wrote this poem with a wave of my hand."
What I usually trust is the kind of reading that emphasizes distance, moderation and opacity, that is, zero reading without the author present. I quote private extra-poetic materials here, which will undoubtedly interfere with my credible reading behavior to some extent. But I think this kind of interference may be necessary for reading the poem "Groundhog". Not every poem is suitable for zero reading.
Adding one poem to another is my trick.
One person plus one animal
Will cause rapid vagrancy
"One plus one" appears twice in the first paragraph, as if suggesting that the author did not take a zero position in writing this poem. So, is there a feminist writing position like Adrian Ritchie's? Ricky once said that she "split into a girl who writes poetry, a girl who defines herself as a poet, and a girl who is defined by her relationship with men." Richard Rorty interprets Richie's split personal situation as a broader female writing situation and historical fable, that is, before feminism matures, women's writing "has no ability to stop defining their own situation through their relationship with men". In Emily Dickinson's and sylvia plath's early writing career, we can clearly understand the above situation: the more vivid, intense and touching the self-description of female poets, the more torn and torn by the overall separatist forces. Women's self-description can not be immune to the complete glory of human nature, because language games are controlled by men, and men's situation in life (redundancy or absence of men) is an independent variable in language games, while women's description is forced to become a dependent variable. Perhaps it is this overlap of independent variables and dependent variables that forms an unforgettable language called "thick description" by new historians as a compensation for the abyss-like silence in women's self-description. From this standpoint, Catherine McKinnon said, "I want to propose an unpracticed role for women, and my foundation is what an unchecked voice may say but has never been heard."
On the one hand, I make a review from the standpoint of women's writing, because I strongly feel the role anxiety and role resistance contained in the problem of women's identity confirmation. I mean, if the poem I'm reading is written by a woman, I'm afraid I have to clarify one thing first, which I will never encounter when reading the works of a male poet. In this regard, Hélène Cixous, a contemporary French woman writer, feels very sad: "When someone talks about women to you, you always have to answer, just like answering an accusation." On the other hand, before Yongming Zhai wrote Groundhog, he wrote a lot of women's poems with extremely wide influence (such as the group poem "Women"), which we must consider before reading Groundhog.
But this does not mean that there is an uncompromising feminist writing position in the poem Groundhog. On the contrary, I think "Groundhog" shows that Yongming Zhai's writing is undergoing subtle changes from historical scenes to personal subconscious scenes (which is just the opposite of the changes that Cixous has experienced in recent years). On the surface, the materials handled by the groundhog are not much different from popular female poems, which are full of daily expressions such as running around, wandering, lover's spasm, dreams, loneliness, injury, farewell and so on. However, I notice that these popular and daily discourses neither point to the highly neurotic self-description nor try as hard as A.V.Woolf to identify the female specific identity of the "main narrator". In other words, everyday discourse does not occupy the position of the word even in an unconventional atmosphere, because the author carefully regards narrative voice as the language of the other and appears as the other, thus avoiding the unique role anxiety of female poets.
Adding one poem to another is my trick.
"A poem" can be understood as a poem being written (in this case, "groundhog"), and writing has the nature of self-reference from the beginning. "Another poem" obviously refers to Heine's poem about marmots, which was mentioned by Yongming Zhai in his letter to me (it seems that private information can really come in handy sometimes, but I must quickly declare that my reference to these materials ends here). I think Heine's poems are actually impure and changeable here, because for Yongming Zhai, words are not only words that turn into songs when they meet her, but also German that turns into Chinese. There may be some meaningful word subversion here. If we consider the function of the word "plus", we should pay a little attention to the abrupt usage of the word "trick". Of course, the subversion of words I am talking about is limited to the scope of words and does not involve identification. When reading the excellent works of another woman writer, Elena Cixous once said, "I found a Kafka, and this Kafka is a woman." But I think Yongming Zhai didn't necessarily want to recognize a female Heine when she was touched by Heine. Considering Heine is a German poet, I would like to add that there will be no ethnic identity crisis in Yongming Zhai because of Heine's touch. There is no role anxiety in the poem Groundhog. What readers see is that one poet touches another poet, and one poem adds another. It is not women who appear through their relationship with men, nor China people who appear in the illusion of a foreign country, but words.
The appearance of ci is a charming poetic dream. Wallace Stevens regards the appearance of words as the highest fictional truth, Ye Zhi regards it as the dance of the universe, and john keats understands it as the complete integration of beauty and truth. However, the appearance of words has no physical appearance, so words must be given a shape or a thing, so that the appearance of words can be pointed out, recognized and confirmed. Therefore, we read about the Tennessee jar in Stevens' works, the nightingale and the ancient Greek urn in Keats' ode, and the difference between dance and dancer in Ye Zhi's poems. It is thought-provoking that Ye Zhi's distinction between the two is put forward by rhetorical question, which contains strong and indistinguishable hints. Balderman keenly smelled the implication of pure form and methodology, and he further understood the appearance of words as the basic secret of reading.
In Yongming Zhai's "Groundhog", the words we saw were replaced by groundhogs. Regardless of the differences in aesthetic styles, the woodchuck in Yongming Zhai is quite similar to the dancer in the last section of Ye Zhi's Between Schoolchildren. Both of them represent non-existence, which is hard to see in life. But I think it may be more telling to point out the profound differences between them. Ye Zhi deliberately regarded the dancer as a masked "pure body", with almost no details to bear the mysterious rhythm of the universe. Yongming Zhai's life is about personal life and personal writing, which is difficult to present in Groundhog. This means that the groundhog refers to both the appearance of words and the appearance of love. And the groundhog comes from another poem, or a song (from He Duoling's elegant voice), which belongs to the voice of the other in the narrative voice. Its appearance makes the author's self-describing voice suddenly nameless and indistinguishable, and it is difficult to be recognized and heard alone. This may be exactly what the author (the main narrator in the poem) wants to face: the main narrator can use the "other language" to describe, or he can give the hidden part of himself to the "other" to present, thus completing self-shaping. Confusingly, the groundhog is not an image, a symbol, a metaphor or a fable, it just appears (precisely, it appears on its behalf). It comes, but no one knows where it wants to take the main narrator.
One person plus one animal
Will cause rapid vagrancy
The abnormal function of Jia in this poem is full of twists and turns, which is worth pondering. It's better not to watch it and do a surgical disassembly analysis. First of all, the logical meaning of "addition" is cancelled. The result of "a person plus an animal" here is probably less than that of a person or an animal in a state of solitude, because there is the possibility of mutual substitution and deprivation of human nature and animal nature. Does this imply that the addition of the two is a reduction process? Words reduce the number of groundhogs, and the emergence of groundhogs will not make a person or a word more. Perhaps through the reverse decoding of "plus", we have touched the fundamental secret of the poem "Groundhog": in the process of adding words and senses, form and experience, self and others, the author gets an unexplained "difference" instead of the "sum" of all parties. Obviously, the groundhog represents a certain depth loss of life itself and the "difference" obtained by all parties. In Yongming Zhai's works, the woodchuck is in a state of wandering and escaping, and it has no place on the earth. As we all know, human's affirmation of life is always associated with the concern for the form of existence, and cities, villages and families are all formed because of this concern. Martin heidegger quoted the poet Friedrich H? Lderlin), pointing out that language is the home of people on the earth. In other words, even in the act of speaking and writing, human existence is not without position, "but is embedded in this article as a specific situation." It can be said that the state of being without living is "non-existence"
Returning to the analysis of "home", we may naturally consider that this word is homophonic with "home". This may be a coincidence or it may be intentional. I think the author has been thinking about the sad fact that woodchucks have nowhere to live. Anyway, now the poem "one man plus one beast" can be read as: one man, one family and one beast. As long as we are willing to pause, the groundhog has a sound "home" that can be read and heard. Although the author pointed out in the second section:
This poem is about our escape.
But what the author really cares about is where the groundhog lives. The found secret theme is secretly woven into the layout of the whole poem. In the first section, we find that the prairie dog's habitat is implied by a homonym (home/home). In the second verse, the shelter from the rain seems to be related to a painting (don't forget that He Duoling is a painter):
Midnight soles
Lines in the wind
In the third quarter, the dream appeared:
There are groundhogs in autumn and winter environmental protection dreams.
In the fourth quarter, the last verse of the poem, the woodchuck appeared in the moonlight and turned white. The two lines at the end of the author's poem point out that the real habitat of prairie dogs is the "plain".
It comes from the plain.
Better than all fictional languages.
With the gradual advancement of the theme of finding a place to live, the wandering life of the woodchuck has also experienced a change from the appearance of words to the appearance of love, from being close to human beings to leaving alone.
I am so close to it.
Its dark night is full of worries.
Read my manuscript again and again.
The author knows that whether it is a substitute for words, a substitute for others in themselves, or a substitute that does not exist in life, woodchucks are equally precious. So the author wants to use sound, pictures, words and dreams to keep it. But the groundhog can't stay. It comes from the plain. As a charming contemporary, it lives in the fairyland of ci, but in the end it escapes from pronunciation, lines and texts, from pure form and fictional language, and from its real body.
This poem describes its flocks of hair.
Send affection to the distance.
"Hair planting" is obviously deliberately exaggerated in rhetorical usage, which is intended to emphasize the pure physiological characteristics of the body. It seems that the appearance of substitute words has evolved into the appearance of the body itself. How should we treat this body? Words once described this body, but words can't become this body. The author tells us that this is the moment when the body world bid farewell to the word world.
These are priceless:
Its dry eyes remember me.
Its thin mouth is saying goodbye.
Give a loyal howl
Dry eye avoids tears and ink. Howling is of course the woodchuck's own voice, but whether the body sound is still "faithful" to the world of the word sound as the author said has its complicated side. With the appearance of words, we can see all kinds of bodies: Black's tiger, Nightingale of Keats, william wordsworth's Green Suzaku, jeffers's eagle, and the groundhog of Yongming Zhai that we read in the poem Groundhog. Poets created a language for the aliens they created, but these aliens refused to speak it. Because the body world "now constitutes a real nature, it is talking and developing a living language that excludes writers".
Reading behavior may also completely exclude the author. When Yongming Zhai tries to describe herself in the woodchuck's "language of the other", she feels that the author is "leaving me", which will certainly lower the voice of self-description, if not completely deprived. Writing is to lower yourself, even if the whole world adds this self, it is futile. If I push the above-mentioned surgical disassembly analysis of "home" to the extreme, "home" is not even a word or a pronunciation, but a mathematical symbol:+However, the previous discussion has shown that this symbol is difficult to perform normal mathematical functions (it does not mean an incremental process), so we have to look at it from the perspective of religious metaphor: a cross. This constitutes a "terrible symmetry" with the non-existence in life represented by the groundhog: weight and light, death and love, fixation and dispersion.
In an extreme sense, the above disassembly analysis seems possible. Cross can be divided into "one" and "three", which is less and less. If we want to achieve the degree of "as little as possible", we must force a "zero". Groundhogs belong to burrowing animals in a broad sense, so it may be reasonable to examine the "cave image" in this poem-caves are also "Ф". We soon found it in the word world:
Its dark night is full of worries.
Read my manuscript again and again.
But it is not so easy to find the cave image in the body world, unless we lead the reading and discussion to the field of gender politics, arbitrarily assume that the woodchuck has a female body, and then read two lines on the woodchuck under the guidance of Plath's poem "Your body hurts me like the world hurts God":
little darling
It is easy to get hurt in love.
Wounds here may be regarded as a privilege of gender politics, calling out the cave meaning of the body world. But the following two lines of poetry deny this reading rule:
I mean * * * in the bone.
Can you fill it up?
The bulges in these two lines are easily associated with Derrida's "phallogocentri * * * *", which developed the vision of male body. We can even "add up" the above two mutually negative interpretations and assert that the woodchuck has a hermaphrodite body.
Enough! Although I have mentioned that the reading and discussion here completely exclude the author, it is still too much, as if the author was murdered in absentia. Of course, I can find enough theoretical basis for the above reading method (I call it surgical disassembly analysis). For example, I can quote a passage from G.C.spivak to explain why I want to construct a reading position from disassembling a word (in a sense, it is the position I avoid). Spivak's passage is:
..... If we come across a word that seems to contain insoluble contradictions, and because it is a word, sometimes it is used to play this role, and sometimes it is used to play that role, thus indicating the lack of unified meaning, then we will ponder this word. ..... We should trace it into the text and find that the text is no longer a hidden structure, but reveals its self-transcendence and uncertainty.
I'm just staring at the word "plus" No matter how enlightening the contemporary theory is, it still contains elements of violence. It is often what the theory wants to read, and the work seems to be what it is. For example, if I want to read the shadow world of secular politics from the poem "Groundhog", I will find out the word "escape" in the poem and have an operation; If I want to read a private story about polyandry, I just need to start with "Lover's Spasm" or "Son".
Maybe this is the madness of reading. What I see from it is the division of word boundaries, which is the division of reading and writing. As mentioned above, female writers feel the split of self-description when they define themselves by their relationship with men. Yongming Zhai avoided this split, but she experienced a more real split in the "language wonderland" created by the woodchuck. I can fully understand her situation and her deep sense of powerlessness: in the world of Groundhog, her self-narrative has to endure the division of discourse, although it avoids the division of gender politics. I think all of us will feel powerless. Ci was divided after its appearance, and the complete brilliance of human nature was brought to another world of Ci by the voice of the other and the body of the other. I am glad that the division of race, class, gender and nationality there doesn't work. After all, we are just a group of pilgrims and lost people.
I'm glad to see the groundhog in Yongming Zhai reappear in another world of ci. Just like I like to see william blake's tiger appear in Borges' poems.
* Groundhog
Adding one poem to another is my trick.
One person plus one animal
Will cause rapid vagrancy
I mean * * * in the bone.
Can you fill it up?
Midnight soles
Lines in the wind
This poem is about our escape.
Like old scores
This poem writes a little legend.
Means a lover's spasm
little darling
Look into the distance.
Write a son on the page.
There are groundhogs in autumn and winter environmental protection dreams.
A poor man
And the loneliness of its hands
I am so close to it.
Its dark night is full of worries.
Read my manuscript again and again.
little darling
It is easy to get hurt in love.
It followed me in the moonlight.
Whole body whitening
This poem describes its flocks of hair.
Send affection to the distance.
These are priceless:
Its dry eyes remember me.
Its thin mouth is saying goodbye.
Give a loyal howl
This is a lyric poem.
About woodchucks
It comes from the plain.
Better than all fictional languages.