“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”1
THE YEAR 1942 IS SIGNIFICANT in modern Chinese history. The Second Sino-Japanese War was entering its sixth year, and there was no sign of peace. Instead, Shanghai fell in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor; battles were fought as far away as Burma. A devastating drought happened in Henan that summer, and the consequent famine cost millions of lives. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party continued to thrive in the liberated area. In Yan’an, between May 3 and 23, Mao Zedong delivered three talks, thus setting the tone for Communist literary politics in the decades to come.
Few Chinese writers could avert their eyes from the ongoing national turmoil. Poets, in particular, were impelled to deliberate over and over again about the conditions of self-expression versus calls for solidarity. Debates about lyricism, which had started at the outbreak of the war, became all the more contentious. As discussed in chapter 1, whereas Xu Chi, Ouwaiou, and Hu Mingshu proposed to “exile lyricism,” Ai Qing and Hu Feng, among others, upheld lyricism as the form to disseminate the sound of China. The debates involved elitism versus populism, creative autonomy versus political commitment, formal experimentation versus formulaic demands. These issues, however, were so neatly polarized that they hardly addressed the complexity of actual literary dynamics. More often than not, personal whims mingled with public causes and ideological missions nurtured idiosyncratic visions. As a result, the boundaries of lyricism became more difficult to discern than ever.
This chapter focuses on He Qifang 何其芳 (1912–1977) and Feng Zhi 馮至 (1905–1993), two of the most talented modern Chinese poets. Both established themselves in the 1930s. A protégé of Zhu Guangqian and Shen Congwen, He Qifang won a top literary prize sponsored by Dagongbao 大公報 (L’impartial) in 1936.2 Feng Zhi was praised by Lu Xun in 1935 as “the best lyricist of China.”3 Both poets’ lives and works underwent a profound transformation during wartime. He Qifang went to Yan’an to join the Chinese Communist Party; Feng Zhi followed the great exodus to Kunming, Yunnan Province, where he taught at the Southwestern Associated University until the end of the war. Each produced a series of works very different from those of their prewar years, in style as well as thematics. He Qifang wrote to bear witness to his new life in Yan’an; Feng Zhi explored the possibility of spiritual rebirth in the shadow of war and destruction.
The timing when these two poets brought their works to public attention was significant. In May 1942, Feng Zhi’s Shisihangji 十四行集 (Sonnets) was published in Guilin, Guangxi, and was warmly received among colleagues and fellow poets in the hinterland. He Qifang was among the audience for Mao’s Talks in Yan’an; in the wake of the Talks, his collection of poems written from 1939 to 1942 was singled out for criticism. Finally published in 1945, under the title Yege 夜歌 (Night songs), it represents He’s farewell to his probationary years in Yan’an.
Judged by their activities in 1942, He Qifang and Feng Zhi could not be more different in either poetic endeavor or political choice. Nevertheless, before the war broke out, they both belonged to the Beijing school of modernism and therefore shared common roots. They were driven to write poetry to dispel a sense of unfathomable loneliness, to survive the angst of a life of “no flowers, no light, no love.”4 Whereas He Qifang sought inspiration in Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valéry, and T. S. Eliot, Feng Zhi followed the models of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and René Maria Rilke (1875–1926). Whereas He Qifang was captivated by the sensuous aesthetics of late Tang poetry, Feng Zhi tried to emulate Du Fu 杜甫 (712–770), the “Sage of Poetry.”
Even before the war, both He Qigang and Feng Zhi felt discontent with their work and were searching for a breakthrough. The war provided an opportunity to reorient their lives and visions. For all their conceptual and formal divergences, they both tended to reflect on a set of interrelated motifs: death and rebirth, selfhood and community, stagnation and dynamism. Above all, they both wrote to probe the heuristic experience of metamorphosis that promises a higher state of existence. For He Qifang, the hope of rejuvenation hinged on the Communist Revolution; for Feng Zhi, it was connected to the Goethean theme of destruction and change. On their paths to spiritual rebirth, they needed to overcome the traits of their previous incarnations—particularly their misgivings about loneliness. As will be discussed in the following pages, He Qifang pathologizes loneliness, trying to do away with it via recourse to the Maoist gospel. By contrast, Feng Zhi ontologizes loneliness, trying to live with it by means of the teachings of Rilke, Goethe, Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), and Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855).
Intriguingly, just as their thoughts and styles appeared increasingly divergent, Feng Zhi and He Qifang were moving toward the same destination. After 1942, He Qifang devoted himself even more to revolution, so much that he stopped writing poems altogether to become a cadre. Meanwhile, Feng Zhi emerged from his studio to protest the status quo, and he eventually embraced the Communist Revolution. By early 1949, He and Feng had become fellow travelers on the road to socialist China.
I describe in the following pages He Qifang’s and Feng Zhi’s pilgrimage to the Maoist Promised Land in terms of the poetics and politics of “born-again” lyricism. Its biblical implication notwithstanding, “born-again” is used here first to project the poet’s immanent urge for self-renewal, expressed particularly in romantic and modernist terms. In the context of Chinese literary modernization, this urge is related to the revolutionary momentum arising at the turn of the century. Liang Qichao made a “Poetry Revolution” (shijie geming 詩界革命1899) his first task in renewing Chinese citizenship; Lu Xun called in 1907 for the Mara poet, who “plucks one’s heart” so as to elevate one’s consciousness; Guo Moruo invested the May Fourth Movement with the resurrection myth of the phoenix (“Fenghuang niepan”鳳凰涅槃 [The nirvana of the phoenix, 1920]).5 Thanks to its power of incantation, poetry was regarded by these literati as the vehicle through which to enact national rebirth.6
But “born-again” also prompts rethinking the tension within modern Chinese poetics: whereas “born” implies the genesis of something new, “again” suggests a recapitulation of that which has already existed. At stake here is a dialectic regarding modernity as a project of and for “beginning.” That is, when Chinese moderns set out to launch a new poetic project, they were aiming at a moment of instantaneity, a “beginning” fortified by a drive out of nowhere and yet so powerful as to create something unprecedented. But simultaneously, when they claimed that their project meant to renew that which was dated or even lost, they inevitably reinstated the consciousness of time, so the “beginning” in question referred to both the here and now and the primordial moment that is repeated in the tradition of “heres” and “nows” over time. Modern Chinese poetry is seen as both newly “born” and born “again”; the urge for creation and the need of repetition are therefore mutually implicated. The cases of He Qifang and Feng Zhi are only two examples showing modern writers’ interplay between a desire for breakthrough and a “repetition impulse.”7
He Qifang’s and Feng Zhi’s cases point to the quasi-religious spell underlying mid-twentieth century Chinese cultural politics. “Born-again” implies the experience of epiphany and salvation the two poets underwent when confronting the moment (or monument) of apocalyptic magnitude. The way they piously seek poetic and ideological conversion dramatizes, however ironically, the Christian motto: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”8 This leads us to rethink the power of Mao’s revolutionary poetics—as evinced particularly by his 1942 Talks—over the two poets. Common wisdom has it that Mao’s Talks, as published, are merely a manual of populist propaganda. Close reading reveals that, through his call for collective bonding and socialist modernity, Mao manages to arouse among his followers a kind of political craving comparable to poetic euphoria. Otherwise, he would not have been able to enchant some of the most sophisticated minds such as He Qifang and Feng Zhi. Mao himself, after all, was a poet.9 In the Talks, he describes culture workers’ mission as intertwining discipline and blessing, asceticism and aestheticism, self-denunciation and self-fulfillment, this-worldly travail and the coming utopia. Mao’s delivery is as pragmatic as it is spellbinding; it sounds surprisingly familiar if judged by conventional utilitarianism, and yet it exerts a fresh pressure on readers. It drives home the paradoxical “born” and “again” syndrome of Chinese literary revolution since Liang Qichao’s era.
Nevertheless, if He Qifang’s and Feng Zhi’s poems written during this period are moving to us today, it has little to do with the way the poets transformed themselves to fulfill the subjectivity ordained by Maoist politics. Rather, the works impress us with occasional ruptures, signaling the poets’ accidental flight from the set path of revelation, even an undesired return to the previous cycle of their literary lives. The ruptures are a reminder that the “lyrical,” above all, arises as a rhapsodic “aside,” a momentary break in the flow of any routine expression.
As a result, there is yet another definition of born-again lyricism in Feng Zhi’s and He Qifang’s poems. It involves the caesura, a pause in a poetic utterance occasioned by metric and affective need, that punctuates their expressions. More intriguingly, this caesura brings about the aporia, an unintended fissure underlying the wholesomeness of a discourse or composition, that subverts both their works and careers. In the latter sense, “born-again” promises not merely a fresh beginning but the return of the repressed, or that which is supposed to have been done away with. Whichever way the poets came to experience a rebirth, “born-again” lyricism points to a relapse of their idiosyncratic poetic themes/symptoms that cannot be harmonized with the linear, monological flow of articulation.
In the aftermath of born-again lyricism undertaken by these two and many other like-minded poets in mid-century China, neither He Qifang nor Feng Zhi was able to produce poems commensurate in either subtlety or rigor with their works up to 1942. In order to better describe their zigzag paths toward poetic rebirth, I turn to He’s dream and Feng’s snake, arguably the most prominent motifs of their poems. The amorphous configuration of the dream and the serpentine traces left by the snake illustrate the precarious conditions of being a poet in modern China. The story starts in 1938.
He Qifang: “I very much prized my dream”10
On August 14, 1938, He Qifang left Chengdu for Yan’an. He did not travel alone; with him were Bian Zhilin 卞之琳 (1910–2000) and Sha Ting 沙汀 (1904–1992), both promising writers in their own right, and Sha Ting’s wife. They arrived in Yan’an at the end of August.11 Although exhausted, the young visitors were exhilarated by what they saw in the Mecca of revolution. Thanks to arrangements made by Zhou Yang 周揚 (1908–1989), they quickly met with Mao Zedong. “What is there to write about Yan’an? … But there are things to write about.”12 Comrade Mao greeted the young visitors with both a question and an answer.
This was a magic moment for He Qifang. On November 16, he published an essay, “Wo gechang Yan’an”我歌唱延安 (I sing for Yan’an), which became an immediate hit in the liberated area: “An atmosphere of freedom. An atmosphere of tolerance. An atmosphere of joy. As soon as I entered this town, I sniffed, inhaled, and drank in this atmosphere to my heart’s content.”13 The day after the publication of “I Sing for Yan’an,” He was sworn in as a Communist Party member. Two days after, he joined General He Long’s 賀龍 (1896–1969) troops in Northern Shanxi so as to experience military life firsthand.14
While it was not uncommon for progressive literati and intellectuals to go to Yan’an during the war, few could emulate He Qifang, who underwent a conversion so fast and unreserved. His case stands out even more if judged by the fact that before the war broke out, he had made few leftist connections, let alone any preparation for a revolutionary crusade. As a matter of fact, he had been closely related to the Beijing modernists, the opposite of the leftist camp. Nevertheless, He Qifang was so overwhelmed by the ambiance of Yan’an that he was determined to reform himself. When his friends decided to return to the hinterland after a few months’ sojourn in Yan’an, He Qifang chose to stay.
To understand the “pilgrim’s progress” of He Qifang, one needs to look at the earlier part of his career—or his previous incarnation. Son of a small landlord in Szechuan, He Qifang had a precocious, lonely life in his formative years, and he found in literature his only consolation. At the age of seventeen, He was sent to middle school in Shanghai, where he was quickly drawn to the poetry of the Crescent (xinyue 新月) School. He enrolled at Peking University as a philosophy major in 1931, but spent most of his college years on literature. His reading list included not only classical Chinese poetry but also Western works by authors ranging from Shelley to Tennyson, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Whitman, and Eliot. Meanwhile, he was passionately engaged in creative writing.15
By all accounts, the style of He Qifang’s poetry during this period fulfills the romantic definition of lyricism. His persona is a melancholy, self-reflexive young man forever yearning for love and companionship; his rhetoric is characterized by intricate imagery and melodious tonality. Bonnie McDougall notes that He’s first published poem, “Yuyan” 預言 (The prophecy), carries the imprints of Christina Rossetti, Valéry, Goethe, and Turgenev, among others.16 The poet fervently expects the arrival of the “Young God,” only to end up lamenting the god’s mysteriousness and inaccessibility:
Ah, at last you came as foretold, without a word,
And you leave without a word, Young God?17
呵，你終於如預言中所說的無語而來，
無語而去了嗎，年輕的神？
In “Kaitan” 慨嘆 (Lament), He Qifang assumes a posture reminiscent of Shelley and Keats, and asks:
How much have I lost of the freshness of clear morning dew?
How much of the quiet of starry night skies, filtered down through green shady trees?
The jests of spring and summer? The joys of flowers and leaves?
The songs of spring that I withheld for twenty years?18
我是喪失了多少清晨露珠的新鮮？
多少夜星空的靜寂滴下綠陰的樹間？
春與夏的笑語？花與葉的歡欣？
二十年華待唱出的青春的歌聲？
He Qifang toned down his style midway through his college years as he became increasingly familiar with Anglo-American modernism. His change coincided with the advent of I. A. Richards’ formalist poetics as well as T. S. Eliot’s poetry in early 1930s Peking.19 In the poem “Gucheng” 古城 (The ancient city), the ancient Peking becomes an Oriental objective correlative of “The Waste Land,”20 a desolate space of stifling loneliness and eerie escapades:
Run, ah, run to an even more desolate city
In the twilight mount the ruined battlements and look afar
Even more cramped by this northern world.21
逃呵，逃到更荒涼的城中，
黃昏上廢圮的城堞遠望，
更加局促於這北方的天地。
He Qifang also shared the Beijing modernists’ craze for late Tang poetry as perfected by Li Shangyin 李商隱 (ca. 812–ca. 858), Wen Tingyun 溫庭筠 (812–870), and Li He 李賀 (791–817).22 Fascinated with the opulent imagery, erotic allusions, and dense symbolism, he tries to find in it a link with Western symbolism and imagism.23 He is at his most imaginative when yoking together the medieval ambiance of decadence and the modernist sentiment of alienation. Take a look at one stanza of “Xiuxihong” 休洗紅 (Do not wash away the red):
The lonely sound of the pounding stone scattered over the cold pond,
transparent ancient waves quiver lightly as if beaten.
My idle arms want to reach down;
what can I pick among this gold and green?24
澄清的古波如被搗而輕颤。
我慵慵的手臂欲垂下了。
能從這金碧裏拾起什麽呢？
Mixing sound, color, light, and tactile imagery, the stanza evokes the style of late Tang ornamentalism as well as symbolist synesthesia. The title “Do Not Wash Away the Red” is not He Qifang’s original phrasing; it refers to both an anonymous poem of the Eastern Jin (317–420) and Li He’s work in the late eighth century. When time comes full circle in the poem, antiquity and modernity form an uncanny dialogue.
He Qifang’s poems are permeated with motifs such as dusk, phantasmal settings, lonely journeys, nocturnal encounters, and dreams. In the thirty poems in Yuyan 預言 (Prophecy, 1945), a collection of his early works and the most popular of his oeuvre, the character meng 夢 (dream) appears as many as twenty-seven times.25 One need not rely on any Freudian tool to discern He Qifang’s oneiric obsession with the liminal state of desire and trauma, illusion and reality. When a dream is situated in the temporal zone of mu 暮or dusk, his ghostly fantasies break free, and he interplays mu (dusk) with its homophonic double mu 墓 (tomb).26 In “Gudairen di qinggan” 古代人的情感 (The feeling of people in ancient times, 1934), an ethereal beauty lures the persona to pursue an otherworldly object. But what is the outcome?
As if trudging across a wasteland,
under the guidance of a will-o’-the-wisp;
at the end I find an ancient tomb.
I turn around,
my heart palpitating for life;
but as I walk into my room,
the walls have fallen apart.
On the bed lies my own corpse.27
仿佛跋涉在荒野
循磷火的指引前進
最終是一個古代的墓壙
我折身歸來
心裡充滿生底搏動
但走入我底屋子
床上躺著我自己的屍首
Like a sleepwalker, the persona takes a journey across the “wasteland,” only to return home and finding himself long dead. As life is enshrouded by nightmare, existence is always already a form of posteriority, death.
In 1934, He Qifang set out to compose prose under the influence of his close friend Bian Zhilin, and his model was the Spanish writer Azorín (1873–1967).28 The result is a series of sketches that either retell ancient gothic tales or elaborate on personal fantasies. These essays, which were eventually published in a collection titled Painted Dreams, won He Qifang the literary prize of L’impartial, marking the climax of his prewar career. In the preface, “Shanshang de yanyun” 扇上的煙雲 (Mists and clouds on a fan), He Qifang looks back at his literary endeavor to date and confesses that “I very much prized my dreams then. I even wanted to look into every detail of the dreams.”29 Later, in another essay, “Mengzhong de daolu” 夢中的道路 (Paths in dreams), he writes that “The way I came to write poetry is a path in a dream,” and that as a solitary traveler in the wilderness of dreams, “I was always hesitating between yesterday and tomorrow.”30 The poet wants to flee the gnawing loneliness by taking shelter in the exquisite world made of dream and language, yet he comes to a more poignant awareness of his crisis. His writing may be nothing but a “plaything” of the most illusory kind.31
The best of the essays in Painted Dreams share a fascination with some magic power that traverses the boundaries of cognitive and imaginary domains and turns things into what they are not. “Ding Lingwei” 丁令威 (Ding Lingwei) tells of a Han dynasty Daoist practitioner transforming into a crane; “Chunyu Fen” 淳于棻 (Chunyu fen) describes a soldier who enters a dream kingdom and experiences the vicissitudes of life in no time; “Bailianjiao” 白蓮教 (White lotus cult) features a magical encounter in which wizardry and history become exchangeable. Instead of achieving affirmative consequences, these “old stories retold” end by revealing the illusory nature of storytelling.
The aesthetics of Painted Dreams can be summarized by “Shan” 扇 (Fan), a poem He Qifang wrote in 1934 when he was about to embark on the project:
If a young girl’s dressing-case had no mirror
She might gaze all day at the palace fan on the wall.32
成天凝望著懸在壁上的宮扇
In a way, these lines encapsulate He Qifang’s aestheticism at this stage. In place of a mirror, which presumably reflects the goings-on in the world, the persona of the poem settles for a palace fan hanging on the wall. The images of “towers and pavilions” on the fan are like “reflections in water,” then are projected back onto the young girl’s gaze “blurred with spilt powder and tearstains, like mists and clouds.” The mutual refraction between the girl in the boudoir and the images on the fan then generates yet another trajectory of gaze:
Yet mortals on the cold, chilly moon,
Gazing each night on this apple-shaped globe,
Might think that under the dappled shadows of its hills and valleys,
Its inhabitants were very fortunate. …33
如寒冷的月裡有了生物，
每夜凝望這蘋果形的地球，
猜在它的山谷的濃淡陰影下，
居住著的是多麼幸福———
He Qifang was very fond of this poem, based on which he wrote “Mists and Clouds on a Fan,” the preface to Painted Dreams. The triangulated gazes may anticipate the circular gazing that made Bian Zhilin’s “Duanzhang” 斷章 (Fragment, 1935) an instant classic the year after.34 Both poems contemplate the ocular intricacy between the subject and the object of desire; both foreground the indeterminacy of vision when it is “screened” (or framed, in Bian’s case) by multiple layers of artifacts and perceptions. With Painted Dreams, He Qifang pushes the delicate, labyrinthine poetics of the “painted fan” to the extreme. But the collection also exposes his limitations. As he sighs in a poem, “I feel pain because I have painted myself into the corner of Hell.”35“I have my own loathing for my refinement. … Why, when I look back, has my stumbling, unaided progress proved no more than a path in the wilderness?”36
He Qinfang joined the exodus to the hinterland after the war broke out, and he returned to his home province in late 1937. By then he had already modified his style and subject matter, thanks to his travel and teaching experiences since graduation from Peking University in 1935. In the sketches and poems written during 1936 and 1937, he shows increasing concern about social injustice and national turmoil. No longer indulging in painted dreams, he seeks a form capable of mirroring the changes in reality. The war brought He Qifang to confront national crisis, solidifying his determination to renew his life and writing. In early 1938, he launched in Chengdu a magazine called Gongzuo 工作 (Work). In the essay “Lungongzuo” 論工作 (On work), published in the inaugural issue, he deplores his frailty and sentimentalism of bygone years and vows to work hard so as to remake himself. He asks, “Shouldn’t we abandon literary work for the sake of the present? … If we do not, what will become of us?”37 Strident in tone and provocative in argument, “On Work” reads almost like a manifesto of He Qifang’s leftist turn.
Another factor expedited He’s transformation. In May 1938, news about Zhou Zuoren’s collaboration with Japanese invaders reached the hinterland, scandalizing the literary and intellectual circles. He Qifang was outraged by Zhou’s treachery because the master had been not only a champion of the May Fourth Movement but also the spiritual leader of the Beijing school of modernism. Zhou’s quietism, refined taste, and belief in literary authenticity embodied the vision He had once adhered to. That Zhou should become a collaborator therefore represented for the young poet not merely a political betrayal but the implosion of the value system of lyricism he used to believe in.
At this juncture, Zhu Guangqian, He’s mentor, noticed that the young poet sounded excessively harsh in his denunciation of Zhou Zuoren. As Zhou’s former colleague, Zhu cautioned against hasty judgment and offered a more lenient view of Zhou’s motivation;38 he managed only to further infuriate He. Zhu perhaps failed to understand the twist in He’s psychology. That is, He took the Zhou Zuoren case so personally because he found in it all the “sins” he could have fallen into, had he still followed the lyrical path perfected by Zhou. His condemnation of Zhou, therefore, may have been almost a camouflaged ritual of self-flagellation.
In June 1938, He Qifang wrote “Chengdu: rangwo bani yaoxing”成都：讓我把你搖醒 (Chengdu: let me shake you awake). The poet’s days of emulating Tennyson, Valéry, and Eliot were gone. Instead, Mayakovsky and Essenin had become his new Muses. His style sounds straightforward and earnest; his imagery smacks of urgency and dynamism. The poem ends with a cry:
Let me break open your windows, your doors,
Chengdu, let me shake you awake
On this glorious morning.39
成都，讓我把你搖醒，
在這陽光燦爛的早晨。
Note the way the poet employs the imagery of a window/door in place of his erstwhile favorites, such as “painted fan” and “mirror.” Equally striking is the title (and key line), “Chengdu, let me shake you awake,” which squarely pits itself against the hypnotic, dreamy incantation of He’s early poetry. By evoking the thematic dichotomy between sleep and awakening, dream and sobriety, He Qifang recapitulates the tenor of Lu Xun’s fable of the Iron House. Lu Xun, it will be recalled, contemplated the dilemma about whether Chinese people, caged in an iron house, should be left in a deep slumber and die from suffocation, or be “shaken awake,” only to be trapped in the fatal havoc that would arise. He Qifang has few qualms. He takes it as a moral imperative to wake up everyone in the Iron House of Chengdu. He also believes that his wake-up call will bring hope and order, because out the “windows” of the Iron House, Yan’an is in sight.
Did He Qifang solve his oneiric algebra? Did he do away with undesired dreams by going to Yan’an? He appears to have been in high spirits after joining the Party; his new writings project a cadrelike persona ever ready to sing euphoric songs about the revolutionary holy land. “How open life is/life is ocean/wherever there is life, there is happiness and treasure.” “I treat myself like a soldier/I am prepared to fight for my whole life.”40 Nevertheless, beneath or between the lines, something disquieting lurks, as evinced by the proliferation of contested dream images:
Wake up from your dreams again
and open your eyes to the morning light41
你呵，你又從夢中醒來，
又將睜著眼睛到天亮
I loathe the most the absurd dream of the nineteenth century …
we are believers of scientific theory.42
我最討厭十九世紀的荒唐的夢———
我們是科學理論的信徒。
[Lenin’s] voice ring out in the Assembly:
而且我仿佛聽見了
他 [列寧] 在一個會議上發出的宏大的聲音：
“我們必須夢想！”
I must go and sleep under the low roof
and dream alongside my brothers.
Or wake with them, singing their songs.44
我要去睡在那低矮的屋頂下，
和我那些兄弟們一起做著夢，
或者一起醒來，唱著各種各樣的歌
To dream or not to dream, that is the question. He Qingfang wants to wake up from dreams, or if he must, dream only “good” dreams. The bottom line is that a dedicated Communist is supposed to work hard and remain alert to his mission day and night, even while dreaming.
He Qifang’s dreams then lead to a deeper concern. As his diaries and other writings indicate, for all his intensive work in the daytime, he had trouble falling asleep at night. More intriguingly, whenever he suffered insomnia, he had an urge to compose poetry. It is therefore interesting that He titled the volume of poems written between 1939 and 1942 Night Songs. This collection represents one of the most significant achievements of Yan’an poetry before Mao’s Talks. The poet gives a candid portrait of himself as he goes through a long and tortuous process of self-reform. He records both the excitements of the revolutionary itinerary and the drudgery, even tedium, of everyday life. There are moments when he dwells on a pensive mood and recalls his romantic days, but he quickly overcomes them with a positive note.
For our concern, the timing of these poems being conceived and composed is important. For one thing, Night Songs is a dubious title on its own terms. He Qifang begins “Night Song II” with a quote from Song of Solomon in the Bible:
I sleep, but my heart waketh.
我的身體睡著，我的心卻醒著。
And my mind is an open window
And my thoughts, my multitudinous clouds,
Drift toward me in scattered disarray.45
而且我的腦子是一個開著的窗子，
而且我的思想；我的眾多的雲，
向我紛亂地飄來
According to the revolutionary work ethic, after a long day’s laborious engagement, a model warrior should fall into a sound sleep at night. That He Qifang cannot fall asleep already points to a body yet to be fit for the biopolitical rhythm of the new life. It is a symptom of his erstwhile urban malaise, as attested by his early poem “Shimian ye” 失眠夜 (A night of insomnia) in 1934.46 Worse, instead of guarding the socialist realm of slumber, he lets his thoughts drift in “scattered disarray” like multitudinous clouds!
This somatic disorder bears a semantic problem. It shows that however hard he works, He Qifang has a dubious night life; he lets “thoughts” take over his body. It also brings to mind that in Painted Dreams, “mists and clouds” are euphemisms for romantic whims and languorous daydreams. If He Qifang’s newly refurbished corporeal abode has a “window” open to “clouds,” that certainly implies a residual longing for his infamous, petit bourgeois past.
He Qifang is worried about his inability to sleep and eager to find a remedy. Night Songs features a series of poems aimed at diagnosing the root of his problem, the most blatant one being “Jieshi ziji” 解釋自己 (Explain myself):
Comparing my personal history
with the history of China,
I appear indeed to lag behind.
把我個人的歷史
和中國革命的歷史
對照起來
我的確是非常落後的。
Looking back at this “previous life,” he realizes:
The sin I have committed is the sin that often befalls the weak:
I am lonely
I am cowardly.
我犯的罪是弱小者容易犯的罪，
我孤獨，
我怯懦
To remake himself, He Qifang welcomes public assistance:
I suddenly want, under the sun,
我忽然想在這露天下
解釋我自己
Above all, He declares, in another poem “Jiaohan” 叫喊 (Screaming),
I want to prove
I am a busy,
ardent worker,
meeting several times a day,
我還有證明
我是一個忙碌的
一天開幾個會的
熱心的事務工作者，
也同時是一個詩人。
Thus He Qifang undertakes an “interpretation of dreams” of a socialist kind. By tracing the deficiencies in his personality, examining the gaps of his upbringing, and projecting the hope of rehabilitation, he acts as his own psychoanalyst. This strong confessional impulse, to be sure, reflects the culture of self-critique in Yan’an, which gained theoretical grounds and methodological instruction thanks to treatises like Liu Shaoqi’s 劉少奇 (1898–1969) “Lun gongchandangyuan de xiuyang” 論共產黨員的修養 (On the self-cultivation of Communist Party members, 1939), and it became part of the Party mechanism in the wake of Mao’s Talks. Still, He Qifang had a deep-seated sense of insecurity that pre-dated his Yan’an days, and a penchant for drama in acting out his guilty conscience.
He Qifang enacts a masochistic theater in selected poems, sending his persona to seek atonement in (self-inflicted) pain and humiliation.49 One even finds a hint of eroticism in a poem meant to describe the purgatorial trial of a lost soul:
Taking off all my clothes
exposing my body stark naked.50
如同脫掉我所有的衣服，
露出我赤裸裸的身體。
The hyperbole and redundancy of his rhetoric suggest not so much lack of imagination as an unquenchable desire for the state of plenitude always one step beyond his reach. Only through self-debasement in public can he obtain a tentative, compensatory sense of fulfillment.51
The title of Night Songs sheds more light on the ambiguous nature of He Qifang’s poems. Insofar as they were composed during sleepless nights, the poems are not checkpoints of He Qifang’s thoughts; rather, they are bypasses that take him further down the spiral of his subconscious adventures. Through writing poems, he might have wanted to sort out the scattered threads of his thoughts, but he ended up with a linguistic construct generating more undesired dreams. Even his fervently confessional poems, as discussed above, create a trancelike sensation.
In an unlikely way, Night Songs brings back some of the crucial moments of Painted Dreams, leading one to rethink the imagery of painted dream, mirror, and window. For He Qifang, the three images should project a progressive line in pursuit of ideological truth. However, as seen in the above analysis, they form a mysterious circle. Take one more look at the famous lines of “Painted Fan”:
If a young girl’s dressing-case had no mirror
She might gaze all day at the palace fan on the wall.
One can imagine that for comrade He Qifang in Yan’an, the “palace fan,” once so tantalizing, had long been discarded; instead, the wall of his residential cave most likely featured a portrait of Chairman Mao. What remains unchanged is the circular game of gazing and being gazed at, and He Qifang’s pained effort to locate the ever evasive object of his desire.
I would further suggest that this circular desire culminates in He Qifang’s play with a death wish and the trope of resurrection. In “Bei Zhongguo zairanshao II” 北中國在燃燒 II (North China is aflame! II), he claims,
Once I was a lost soul,
Like a survivor of a shipwreck clutching a plank,
I devoted myself to dream and love.
But dreams shatter as easily as glass,
And even love cannot compensate for human failings.
我曾經是一個迷失的人。
像打破了船的乘客抓住木板，
我那樣認真地委身於夢想和愛情。
但夢想和玻璃一樣容易破碎，
愛情也不能填補人間的缺陷。
He admits, “On the eve of a long journey, I always sleep badly.” And he is determined to forgo all his past:
I am destined never to rest,
I am destined to sing an elegy for the old world,
And sing paeans on the birth of the new.
I will bury myself with the old world,
And joyfully experience
我是命中注定了沒有安寧的人，
我是命中注定了來唱怪世界的輓歌
並且來讚頌新世界的誕生的人，
和著怪世界一起，我將埋葬我自己，
而又快樂地去經歷
我的再一次的痛苦的投生。
“North China Is Aflame!” is supposed to be the climax of Night Songs, a declaration of the painful rebirth of He Qifang years after his journey on the “path of dreams” like a living corpse. But the poem was never finished; for anyone familiar with his early works, it brings back rather than dispels his old dreams:
Why did I dream such a dream on such a night as this?
Why are my dreams much graver than my days?53
爲什麽在這樣的晚上我還做這樣的夢？
為什麽我的夢比我的白天還要沉重？
After Mao’s Yan’an Talks, He Qifang led his fellow writers in confessing his mistakes and demanding rectification.54 In “Gaizao ziji, gaizao yishu” 改造自己, 改造藝術 (Reform the self, reform the arts), he writes that he did not realize until after the Rectification Campaign that he “was just like the foreign mythical monster centaur, half-man and half-horse. Although I have participated in the crusade of the proletarian class, half or more than half of me still belongs to the capitalist class.”55 He Qifang’s confessional sequence culminates in the essay “Zhu zongsiling de hua” 朱總司令的話 (Words of Commander Zhu De). He urges intellectuals and writers to give up their “sense of pride” so as to recognize the “objective truth,” that is, “surrender, laying down arms altogether. That we came to Yan’an and work in Yan’an is but a shift from one political class to another. We have yet to discard those thoughts that do not belong to the proletariat. For this is a true surrender.”56 In the same year, He Qifang published “Liangzhong butong de daolu: luetan Lu Xun he Zhou Zuoren de sixiang fazhan shang de fenqidian” 兩種不同的道路：略談魯迅和周作人的思想發展上的分歧點 (Two different paths: on the point of divergence of Lu Xun’s and Zhou Zuoren’s intellectual developments). This essay serves almost as a belated rejoinder to those who criticized his radicalism in the Zhou Zuoren incident in 1938. He reiterates his denigration of Zhou while celebrating Lu Xun as the conscience of the Chinese revolution and forerunner of the New Democratism (xinminzhu zhuyi 新民主主義) that Mao promoted in 1941. For his unconditional dedication, He won Mao’s and Zhou Enlai’s trust.
He Qifang was appointed envoy on behalf of the Yan’an regime to Chongqing in 1944 and 1945 respectively, his agenda being to publicize Mao’s Talks.57 His dogmatic tendency and self-righteous manner irritated even veteran leftists in Chongqing such as Hu Feng and Feng Xuefeng.58 By the time he published Guanyu xianshizhuyi 關於現實主義 (On realism) in 1949, He had become a Maoist ideologue and Party hardliner. Meanwhile, his creativity declined rapidly. Between 1946 and 1952 he produced only one poem, “Women zuiweida de jieri” 我們最偉大的節日 (Our greatest festival), on the occasion of the founding of New China.
But did He Qifang really do away with his loneliness and dreams? His increasingly strident voice seems to be an overcompensation for his sigh uttered a few years before: “where there is no sound, there is loneliness.”59 Mao discerned the dubious echoes in HeQifang’s battle cries, and criticized He for having a “willowy” personality despite his efforts to prove himself.60 In 1952, He changed the title of Night Songs to Yege he baitian de ge 夜歌和白天的歌 (Night songs and daytime songs), hoping to give the wartime collection an upbeat tone in the new era.61 However, the new title, besides juxtaposing songs of nighttime and daytime, connotes the moment between day and night—the moment of dusk. This is when He Qifang used to travel alone on “the path to dreams”:
But as I walk into my room,
the walls have fallen apart.
On the bed lies my own corpse.
但走入我底屋子
四壁剝落
床上躺著我自己的屍首
He’s constant need to revisit his previous life and his ghostly shuttling between the realm of painted dreams and the dreamland of Yan’an, I argue, constitute the most poignant part of his born-again lyricism.
Feng Zhi: “My Loneliness Is a Snake”62
Feng Zhi spent most of 1938 on the road to the hinterland. When the Marco Polo Bridge Incident took place the year before, Feng was a German literature professor in Shanghai. He followed his university westward that fall, but did not arrive at his destination, Kunming in Yunnan Province, until the end of the year. The hardships on the journey, including a disease that almost killed his wife, brought sad memories even years later. Feng had all along been an admirer of Du Fu, but his personal experience of exodus made him understand the pathos Du Fu underwent in the aftermath of the An Lushan 安祿山 Rebellion (755–763). He wrote a quatrain when stranded in Jiangxi:
While a refugee with my wife and daughter,
I finally realize the truthfulness of Du Fu’s every word;
unable to appreciate the blood and tears permeating his poems,
I led a deluded life over a peaceful decade.63
擕妻抱女流離日，
始信少陵字字真;
未解詩中盡血淚，
十年佯作太平人。
Looking back from the vantage point of 1938, Feng Zhi had good reason for cherishing the decade before the war. In the summer of 1928, he returned from a teaching stint in Harbin to take a position at Comte-School;64 he also joined the editorial team of a new literary magazine, Luotuocao 駱駝草 (Camel grass), with Zhou Zuoren and Fei Ming. The following year, he was granted a scholarship to study at Heidelberg University; meanwhile, he fell in love. Feng Zhi spent six years (1930–1935) in Europe, and returned to China in 1936.
What Feng Zhi does not mention in the poem is that the “peaceful decade” was a period when his creativity went into a lull. For this poet who won acclaim as early as 1921, the ten-year hiatus was indeed suspenseful. Historical hindsight tells us that this decade turned out to be an intended pause in preparation for a comeback. Ironically, the event that helped rekindle Feng’s creative passion was the war.
Feng Zhi started composing poetry in his teenage years. Like He Qifang, he had a precocious and melancholy adolescent period, and he let motifs such as loneliness, melancholy, and death dominate his early works. Some critics attribute Feng’s style to his trauma from losing his mother in childhood,65 but it also reflects the romantic symptoms shared by his generation of Chinese poets. What makes Feng Zhi different is that, instead of indulging in sentimentalism, he shows a strong reflexive inclination. As he comments, “There is no poet whose life is not lonely, and there is no poet who does not face up to loneliness.”66 He reminds us that Nietzsche created Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the absence of any companionship and that Qu Yuan composed his masterpiece in exile. He believed that “a human being is eternally destined to be lonely,” and “friends and lovers are temporary relations. Only your shadow lives with you forever.”67
Feng Zhi tends to explore the subtle, mysterious aspects of human experience; his poems unfailingly convey a pensive and understated tone. In Lu Xun’s words, Feng Zhi’s poems are rendered in a “deep and exquisite” (youwan 幽婉) style.68 His earliest published poem, “Lüyiren” 綠衣人 (A man in green) is a good example.
walks with his head lowered
—sometimes looking at the roadside.
He looks very ordinary
must be content with his life
showing no hint of sadness.
Who would pay attention to him
coming and going day after day?
But his small hands
carry the fate of those in dreams.
When he knocks at this person’s door,
who would ever notice or think,
“This person’s horrible moment has arrived!”69
一個綠衣的郵夫，
低著頭兒走路；
——也有時看看路旁。
他的面貌很平常，
大半安於他的生活，
不帶著一點悲傷。
誰來注意他
日日的來來往往！
但他小小的手中
拿了些夢中人的運命。
當他正在敲這個人的門，
誰又留神或想——
“這個人可怕的時候到了！”
Written by Feng Zhi at sixteen, the poem demonstrates a set of motifs that recurred throughout his career: crises embedded in everyday life, communication that exposes the lack of communication, human existence as a suspenseful waiting for the revelation of fate. Although Feng Zhi would need many more years to develop his philosophy of poetry, the poem invites us to ask: Is the poet identifiable with the mailman, the studious messenger of fate, the mail recipient, the prospective reader of the unknown, or the ghostly voice hovering over the everyday catastrophe? Above all, what is the function of poetry besides bringing into sight the “horrible moment” at a peaceful time?
Loneliness is not merely a mood but the existential condition of humanity. Feng Zhi also states that for all the mystery and apprehension it arouses, loneliness can be seductive. Hence his most popular poem, “She” 蛇 (Snake, 1926):
My loneliness is a snake,
mute, without language.
If you should dream of it by chance
please, don’t be afraid!
It is my faithful companion,
whose heart is sick with feverish nostalgia;
it dreams of the luxuriant prairie—
the dark thick hair on your head.
Soft as the moonlight, it swiftly
glides to you
bringing you a dream
like a pink flower held in its mouth.70
我的寂寞是一條蛇，
靜靜地沒有言語。
你萬一夢到它時，
千萬啊，不要悚懼！
它是我忠誠的侶伴，
心里害著熱烈的鄉思；
它想那茂密的草原——
你頭上的、濃郁的烏絲。
它月影一般輕輕地
從你那兒輕輕走過；
它把你的夢境銜了來
像一只緋紅的花朵。
Here loneliness is embodied by a snake, ever haunting the heart of the poetic subjectivity. Tender and menacing, “faithful” and unpredictable, the snake slithers around in the poet’s mindscape, flaunting the equivocal relationship between romantic companionship and its antithesis, loneliness. Like the mailman in “The Man in Green,” the snake is supposed to help express the persona’s feeling for his beloved, but all the while underlines the untenable relationship between two lonely souls.
Feng Zhi recalled that he derived the image of the snake from an Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) illustration in which a snake curls up, holding a flower in its mouth, in front of a lady.71 He was aware that the “snake is not a lovable creature either in China or in the West. In the West it seduces Eve to eat the fruit of knowledge; in China, except for the legend of the White Snake, it does not give one any sense of beauty.”72 And yet Feng Zhi was fascinated with Beardsley’s snake, which appeared to him “not cunning or malicious but pretty and innocent. Its expression of silence looks just like the loneliness of youth.”73
However “pretty and innocent” he found the illustration, Feng Zhi could not have expected readers to accept his snake without any misgivings. For one thing, Beardsley was associated with the trend of European fin-de-siècle decadence, a far cry from the pristine May Fourth romantic spirit Feng Zhi grew up to embrace. As if justifying his interest in the British artist, Feng Zhi indicated years later that his mentor, Lu Xun, was also a connoisseur of Beardsley’s art.74 It should be recalled that Lu Xun wrote in his preface to Nahan 呐喊 (Call to arms, 1923), “this feeling of loneliness grew day by day, coiling about my soul like a huge poisonous snake.”75 And just a few months before Feng Zhi’s “Snake,” Lu Xun finished an essay, “Mujiewen” 墓碣文 (Epitaph), in which a “wandering soul” assumes the form of a “long snake.” With venomous teeth, this snake does not bite anyone but itself, ending up killing itself.76 Moreover, given his knowledge of Western literature, Feng Zhi might have been aware of the myth of Medusa, the monstrous beauty with hair of thousands of snakes, when describing the “dark thick hair” of his beloved; or of the myth of Lilith, the beauty trapped in the form of a snake, as lamented by poets including Keats and Dante Rossetti. Given such a lineage of snakes, one comes to understand Feng Zhi’s loneliness in a new light. Beneath its “deep and exquisite” appearance, there lies a serpentlike force intertwining innocence and decadence, tenderheartedness and fatal attraction.77
Feng Zhi took a teaching position in Harbin after graduating from Peking University in 1927, but the experience turned out to be disastrous. He writes in the preface to his work Beiyoujiqita 北游及其他 (Journey to the north and others) that what he encountered in Harbin was “grotesque”;78 his ressentiment was such that he often wandered aimlessly in the streets on the coldest and snowiest nights: “neither making any progress nor falling down.”79 He still believed in poetry, and felt in tune with Du Fu:
Finished with my drink, I find no home to return to.
Standing alone in desolation, I sing poems all by myself.80
獨立蒼茫自詠詩。
He tried hard to find a way to appease his angst, now an unbearable burden, but to no avail. In the end, he let the snake dominate his existence:
Like a gray snake,
going into hibernation motionlessly.81
像是灰色的蛇，
一動也不動地入了冬蟄。
Feng Zhi thus brought the youthful stage of his career to an end—like a snake going into hibernation. He rarely wrote poems in the next decade, as if waiting for a moment when the serpentine creature in him was ready to offer another “flower of passion.”
Enter Goethe and Rilke. Feng Zhi came to know the two giants of German literature in 1924 and 1925 respectively.82 Whereas Feng Zhi learned about Goethe and the Sturm und Drang thanks to the wild popularity of the Sorrows of Young Werther in Chinese translation in the early twenties, he was guided to Rilke’s world through his uncle, the aesthetician Feng Wenqian 馮文潛 (1896–1963). Feng Zhi found in Rilke a kindred soul immediately after reading The Lay of Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke. As he wrote in 1926, “this is a surprising, miraculous reward. Dazzling in color and melodious in tone, it is completely dominated by a melancholy and mysterious style.”83 But Feng Zhi did not fully grasp Rilke’s poetics until his Heidelberg days; reading Rilke led him to understand that the human condition presupposes an inescapable state of loneliness and that endurance and work provide the only way to survive such a destiny. He shared Rilke’s notion that death is the force of the Unknown that embraces all beings, and that precisely because of the untenable nature of life, one has to learn to open one’s eyes, refamiliarizing oneself with the goings-on of the world. The ultimate lesson Feng Zhi acquired from Rilke pertains to the paradoxical nature of beauty. As Feng wrote to his German friend Willy Bauer, “There is a saying in Rilke’s Duino Elegies, ‘Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.’ Every time I read this line, my heart trembles greatly. The world is unfathomable; so many secrets are yet to be unveiled. What beauty and other dignified things are about is to help [one] endure and grapple this world with courage and confidence.”84
Feng Zhi also engaged with other writers and thinkers of the German tradition during his Heidelberg days. He was familiar with the works of Hölderlin and wrote about Novalis in his doctoral dissertation; he attended Karl Jaspers’ lectures and learned firsthand the latter’s interpretation of existentialism and faith.85 He was attracted to Kierkegaard’s “Either/Or” philosophy. Still, Rilke played the key role in Feng’s apprenticeship years. Feng contended that “The romantic generation of German poets have staged a regrettable tragedy. … They have only youth but no adulthood, let alone the accomplished age with white hair. … It is Rilke who presided over the birth of a new will.”86 Although he produced very few poems during this period, Feng was mulling over a new poetic subjectivity after the model of Rilke, a subjectivity that endures loneliness yet is unafraid of making connections with the world. Upon his return to China in 1936, Feng translated Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet; in the preface he highlights Rilke’s dictum that poetry derives its power not from inspiration or sentiment but from “experience” and “work.”87 Feng’s statement marked the turning point of his own style; it also set the tone for his lyrical discourse during the war.
Nevertheless, Feng Zhi could not complete his ars poetica without the input of Goethe. Although he had reservations about the Sturm und Drang and the subsequent German Romantic movement, Feng acknowledged that Goethe was an extraordinary figure standing above his times. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Feng was never attracted to Goethe’s early works crowned by the Sorrows of Young Werther; he was more interested in the master’s achievements during his final years. In his letter to Bauer, Feng indicates that he is drawn less to Faust (1773–1831) than to Poetry and Truth (1831–1833). For him, Goethe at this stage had a profound understanding of humanity as a process of dynamic transformation and an agency independent of social intervention and historical ordinance. In Feng’s words, Goethe belongs to the generation of writers who “live in worlds of their own, live for themselves, and at the same time belong to the cosmos.” By contrast, “modern people live as a group, but they are eternally lonely.”88
Feng Zhi solicits from Goethe inspirations so as to sharpen his ideas about Rilke. He welcomes Goethe’s wholesome, robust attitude toward life and its continued transformation, celebrating its kinetic potential as a way to energize the Rilkean “solitude and endurance.” He stresses Goethe’s notion of entsagen—a resolution to renounce that which is apparently pleasing and indispensable to life—which he believes complements Rilke’s resistance to the routines of life and idées fixes. Goethe’s teaching is summarized by Feng in terms of Stirb und werde or death and change. As he wrote to Bauer in 1934, “‘death and change’ is the supreme motto for me.”89 Feng particularly appreciates Goethe’s poem “Blessed Yearning”:
Never prompted to that quest:
Die and dare rebirth!
You remain a dreary guest
Accordingly, metamorphosis through the cycle of death and rebirth is the most crucial element ensuring the vitality of human and cosmic life.
At this juncture, the snake, the creature that had tantalized young Feng Zhi romantically and then ushered him into the state of hibernation, resurfaced. In another letter to Bauer in 1934, Feng refers to the poem “Blessed Yearning,” describing it as “the best poem in exploring and expressing the depth of soul … the two ancient symbols, the molting of the snake and the pupal transformation into a butterfly, are most lively and enlightening.”91 Human beings need to rejuvenate themselves just as the snake sheds its skin or the butterfly breaks out of its chrysalis.92
Feng Zhi’s snake staged a comeback in his Shisihangji 十四行集 (Sonnets), a collection of twenty-seven sonnets completed in 1941.93 Feng salutes Goethe in Sonnet 13 and ends the poem with the image of a molting snake.
Just as the universe turns silently
Without a minute or a second’s rest
New signs evolve, all the time, everywhere.
In wind and rain, fair weather and foul,
Comes new health from heavy sickness,
New strength out of desperate love;
You know why moths plunge into fire
Why snakes shed their skins in growth;
All things observe your creed
Which reveals the meaning of life: Death and metamorphosis.94
好像宇宙在那兒寂寞地運行，
但是不曾有一分一秒地停息，
不管風風雨雨，或是日朗天晴。
從沉重的病中換來新的健康，
從絕望的愛里換來新的營養，
你知道飛蛾為什麽投向火焰，
蛇為什麽脫去怪皮才能生長；
萬物都在享用你的那句名言，
它道破一切生的意義：”死和變。
Although 1941 was a difficult time for Chinese people displaced by the war, Feng Zhi was compelled to compose poetry again after a long hiatus. He foregrounds in the sonnets the poetic subjectivity’s interaction with things both trivial and magnificent, pays respect to literary and philosophical figures, and contemplates the natural cycle of birth and death vis-à-vis cosmic eternity. The only subject he does not confront directly is the war. But war—and its associations such as exodus, meltdown of human relationships, cultural destruction, and above all, death—constitutes the background against which his poems come into existence.
Both Rilke and Goethe figure prominently in Sonnets. Now that the war had resulted in the total breakdown of humanity, Rilke’s call for endurance, work, and communication became more pertinent to Feng Zhi and his implied reader than ever. He takes it as a poet’s moral imperative to unveil the obscure façade of the status quo, pointing to the vision of communication not only between human beings but also between human beings and the world beyond. Feng Zhi has little intention to promote patriotism, however. The communal relationship he is envisaging is more immense and idealistic than national bonding. It is a relationship that acknowledges both individual sufficiency and collective plenitude, both existential solitude and essential solidarity among the beings in the world.
Feng Zhi above all entertains a vision of rejuvenation that amounts to an ontological shakeup; to that end, Goethe’s concept of death and change serves as the pivotal force. Feng regards the Goethean trope of the molting snake as encapsulating Nature’s capacity to renew itself as well as the mythopoetic force that set human civilization in motion. As a corollary, he extends the molting trope to a series of analogies. For instance, he writes in Sonnet 2, “What falls from our bodies/We allow to turn into dust,” comparing the human with “autumn trees, each offering leaves and belated blossoms,”95 and concludes:
We align ourselves with nature: molted cicada:
We arrange ourselves for that
Coming death, a passage of the song.96
把殘殼都丟在泥裡土裡；
我們把我們安排給那個
未來的死亡，像一段歌曲
Molting takes on a botanical dimension in Sonnet 3, in which the eucalyptus tree is seen as “constantly shedding your bark,” and rising “‘midst the withering season.”97 In Sonnet 4, Feng praises the wild grass edelweiss: “But you exist apart from all names,/Live a minute life,/never fail in dignity and purity,/then quietly complete your life and death.”98 As the sonnet cycle develops, all elements of the cosmos, ranging from transmutation in outer space to the ephemeral existence of “a tiny insect,” are integrated into the dynamic cycle of death and change.
At a time when China was engulfed in violence and destruction, Feng Zhi’s Sonnets seems an unlikely incantation of the lyrical. It aims at rising above the contingencies of history to achieve a metaphorical and metaphysical magnanimity. It asserts the necessity of cultivating selfhood in the midst of universal changes and continuities. The greatest function of poetry, accordingly, is to witness and inscribe the transformations arising therefrom. Hence the declaration in Sonnet 1:
We are ready to receive profoundly
unexpected mysteries,
In these prolix times; the sudden appearance
of a comet, the whirling, gusty wind.99
我們準備著深深地領受
那些意想不到的奇蹟，
在漫長的歲月里忽然有
彗星的出現，狂風乍起。
Poetry functions as a fantastic vessel, containing that which is beyond containment and lending shape to that which is forever fluid.100 Nevertheless, for all its proclamations of endurance, self-cultivation, change, and rebirth, one cannot help sensing something ambiguous in Feng Zhi’s composition. In her succinct reading, Wang Xiaojue points out that insofar as the sonnet is a poetic genre based on a structure of subversion, Feng Zhi has to deal with the self-deconstructive tendency inherent in the form.101 This leads her to ask if Feng Zhi could really reconcile his form and content, or his meditation on solitude and pursuit of communion. Therefore, the questions raised by Feng Zhi, such as “What is our existence?/What have we brought from places far away?/What have we to deliver from here?”102 are not merely rhetorical but signals of deep-seated uncertainty.
We need to also examine whether Feng Zhi found a balance between Rilke and Goethe in formulating his thesis of death and change. As argued above, while Rilke taught Feng Zhi the solitary authenticity of subjectivity, Goethe provided him with a new form of agency through which change could take place and rebirth became possible. But critics have noted that Feng Zhi may have taken too great a leap forward in identifying the conceptual “connectivity” between the two German masters. Zhang Hui, for instance, points out that Feng Zhi is so fascinated with the vision of “mysterious harmony” proffered by Goethe that he tries to draw out a linkage between Rilke and Goethe. But in so doing Feng may have risked confusing the Rilkean brand of existential thought with the Goethean Weltanschauung.103 For example, Feng Zhi’s favorite notion of change: Goethe’s conception of change is derived from his theory of archetype, set alongside the notion of self. Rooted in romantic thought, the archetype is supposed to constitute the core of a living thing, ever striving for development.104 The expression of self, therefore, must be understood not merely as a static articulation but as a process in which the “core” of self continuously seeks expression in terms of “the core plus expression.”105 This involves an agent pursuing a goal and the formation of the modern concept of the organism; hence the valorization of the Bildungsroman as the climax of Goethe’s career.
Feng Zhi does not merely follow such a Goethean archetype but is equally committed to Rilke’s esoteric plan, which highlights the individual’s integration into the vast cosmic totality. For Rilke, the self is an existential entity, a lonely being whose validity consists in a continued interaction with things in the universe. Rilke may sound uncannily suggestive of the Goethean archetype in words such as: “the future comes anyway, a new human being arises, and on the foundation of the accident that seems to be accomplished here, there awakens the law by which a strong, determined seed forces its way through to the egg cell that openly advances to meet it.”106 A closer look, however, reveals that Rilke subjects individual developmentalism to the “embracing motherhood”: “above them all there is a great motherhood, in the form of a communal yearning.”107 Whereas the Goethean self enacts the continuous procession of metamorphoses, the Rilkean self seeks to return to the embryonic coexistence of things at large.
Critics from He Guimei to Han Mu and Zhang Kuan have pointed out Feng Zhi’s inclination to Sinicize the German concepts of modern subjectivity, to the point where he equates Rilkean solitude with the Confucian exercise of self-cultivation and interprets the Goethean espousal of the world and universe as a move of self-sacrifice for greater well-being.108 Moreover, as Feng Zhi admits, Goethe’s thought increased his understanding of the famous Yizhuan 易傳 saying, “As Heaven moves vigorously, the junzi strives to perfect himself incessantly” (Tian xingjian, junzi yiziqian buxi 天行健，君子以自強不息).109 Such a reading is highly equivocal: whereas the Chinese gentleman (junzi 君子) exerts his agency in resonance with the rhythm of Heaven, the Goethean hero is a soul emanating from the “archetype” and progressing toward the telos of plenitude.
This aporia becomes all the more noteworthy in Feng Zhi’s next two projects, the novella Wu Zixu 伍子胥 (1943) and the study of Goethe. Wu Zixu is an “old story retold,” based on the ancient historical account of Wu Zixu’s revenge for his father’s death.110 Feng Zhi started to write the novella in the fall of 1942, intending to express the thoughts developed in Sonnets in a historical context. In the original story, Wu Zixu starts out as a filial son, a dedicated brother, and a loyal subject of Prince Chu. After a deadly court intrigue, Wu Zixu’s parents are held hostage by the prince. Wu finds himself trapped in a series of dilemmas: he can either run to his parents’ rescue and therefore succumb to the prince’s deadly trap or run away to wait for an opportunity of revenge; either turn back to meet the demand of filial piety or violate his prince’s demand of loyalty. In the end, Wu Zixu’s brother chooses to meet their parents and die as predicted while Wu Zixu flees. He eventually helps Prince Wu conquer his own nation.
In Feng Zhi’s rewrite, Wu Zixu comes across as not a determined avenger but a Hamlet-like hero. The novella starts with Wu already on a lonely, fugitive journey, deliberating the conditions of revenge over and over. Unlike Hamlet, he finally comes to a moment of action. The action, nevertheless, is not as prescribed. The much anticipated revenge never materializes; rather, the action takes place inside Wu Zixu in that he has become an independent individual at the novella’s end, ready to stand firm on whatever decision he makes. Wu Zixu is last seen playing a flute in a market of the Wu kingdom, a shabby, wandering “stranger” (jiren 畸人) in the public eye.111
As wartime literature, Wu Zixu could have been written into an allegory of revanchism. But Feng Zhi has no interest in nationalist propaganda. He aims instead at a more challenging question: how, in the midst of national catastrophe, a Chinese individual can transcend moral and sociopolitical challenges and make an authentic subject of himself. Thus, taking revenge becomes secondary to Wu Zixu’s journey; it functions to launch the “parabolic trajectory” through which Wu demonstrates his resolution to change.112 Wu undergoes a series of epiphanies, each bringing him a step closer to his change. Not surprisingly, the Goethean snake plays a key role:
[Wu Zixu] thinks, beyond the woods, on the other side of the mountain, there must be a fresh, free world. Once he can walk out of the woods, crossing over the mountain, he will feel as if shedding heavy skin from his body. … The old skin no longer has anything to do with the body, but is still enshrouding it; the new and tender skin is yearning to contact the fresh air of the outer world. Zixu feels his new skin is growing and maturing, but when will the old skin finally be shed?113
Different critical voices were heard upon the publication of Wu Zixu. The young poet and critic Tang Shi 唐湜 (1920–2005), for instance, took issue with its metaphysical inclination and questioned whether Feng Zhi’s hero had a historical grounding. In Tang’s words, the novella has “no weight but aesthetic illusion,” “reminding one of the ‘Mists and Clouds on the Fan’ by another poet.”114 That other poet, of course, is He Qifang. Tang Shi may have judged Feng Zhi’s work too harshly, for where Painted Dreams indulges in a convoluted series of fantasies, Wu Zixu aims at a cerebral elucidation of human will and authenticity. Still, Tang touches on something ambiguous in Feng Zhi’s thought and work: Feng tends to philosophize his newly acquired Goethean position, treating historical experience as a backdrop against which his intellectual logic plays. A few years after finishing Wu Zixu, Feng followed He Qifang in turning toward the Communist cause, however different their reasons for conversion were. Thus, Tang Shi may inadvertently have spoken to the latent affinity between the two poets. Both tried to negotiate the raison d’être of lyrical subjectivity amid historical disenfranchisement and resultant existential crisis, and came to a point where either aesthetic fantasy or conceptual transcendence pointed to only one way out: revolution. The remaining question is how revolution transpires in their respective lyrical agendas.
As if responding to the questions raised by critics like Tang Shi, Feng Zhi wrote in 1946 an article, “Lun fushide li de renzaoren: lüelun gede de ziran zhexue” 論《浮士德》裏的人造人：略論歌德的自然哲學 (The homunculus in Faust: on Goethe’s natural science). In part two of Faust, Faust’s one-time assistant Wagner creates Homunculus, a miniature human creature who later guides Faust to meet with Greek gods. Feng Zhi calls this figure Man-made Man (renzaoren 人造人), noting that it is an artificial perfect human except that it lacks a life-sustaining power of its own; it has to live in a flask. As Goethe’s Faust goes, in order to attain a full birth outside the flask, Homunculus, who was created by the fire element, must seek union with the water element, the origin of life. Thus, Homunculus undergoes rebirth as an organic being when he enters the waves and succumbs to the Goddess Ocean.115 Commenting on this act of self-nullification so as to be reborn, Feng Zhi insinuates that the Chinese intellectual has also lived in an insular world and must throw himself into “the sea of life.”116 Only then can a full-fledged New Man (xinren 新人) be born.117
Feng Zhi became increasingly involved in politics during the postwar years. He considered for a while forming a third force vis-à-vis the confrontation between the Nationalist and Communist parties but finally decided to take a leftist turn.118 He was standing in the front row of the Peking University faculty welcoming the arrival of Communist troops in Peking on February 3, 1949.119
When Feng Zhi vowed on the eve of the founding of the People’s Republic that, at the people’s need, he was willing to throw himself either into the water like “a tiny droplet” or into the fire like “a bit of sawdust,”120 he was not merely mouthing propaganda but reiterating the transformative agenda of the Goethean homunculus. He had gone through the transformation from a lonely snake into a “stranger” and then a Man-made Man; he was ready to become a socialist New Man.
Born Again, and Again
Both He Qifang and Feng Zhi were enthusiastic participants in the making of New China. This was no doubt an “epic” era. But as critics and writers have said, it was also a “lyrical era,”121 in that the rebirth of the nation gave rise to a new sense of subjectivity: aspiring, dynamic, full of expressive desire in both political and personal spheres. For the first time in decades, Chinese people are said to have felt the drive to “Sing Out Loud” (Fangsheng gechang 放聲歌唱, 1956), as the title of He Jingzhi’s 賀敬之 (b.1924) famous poem suggests. Nevertheless, the notion of lyricism and lyrical subjectivity was subject to redefinition. As early as 1951, Mao asked literati and intellectuals to undertake the mission of “self-education; self-reform” (ziwo jiaoyu; ziwo gaizao 自我教育；自我改造), followed by a new Rectification Campaign later that year. The campaign led to the movement nicknamed xizao 洗澡 (bath), an ideological baptism of sorts aimed at cleansing the mind stained by the old society. A new poetics was born (again) as a result. Yuan Shuipai 袁水拍 (1916–1982) thus defines a poet in Shixuan 詩選 (Poetry selection), the first poetry anthology published in the new regime: “The poet can only be a revolutionary, a Communist fighter, a selfless person as described by Comrade Mao.”122 He Jingzhi summarizes that the poet has to be “a collectivist” portraying “collective heroism”; that “poetics has to be united with politics; the poet has to be united with the warrior.”123
Both He Qifang and Feng Zhi played key roles in the new lyrical politics. Next to Zhou Yang, He Qifang served as a spokesman for Mao’s literary policy; his visibility, or notoriety, culminated in his vehement attacks on Hu Feng in 1955.124 Feng Zhi stood out among the recently converted. Besides the eminent missions he was entrusted with both domestically and overseas, he published Du Fu zhuan 杜甫傳 (A biography of Du Fu, 1952), a project he had worked on since the war. In his portrait, Du Fu is the “people’s artist” of the Tang dynasty, anticipating the rise of the Chinese proletarian revolution.125 More striking is his poem dedicated to Mao, “Wode ganxie” 我的感謝 (My thanks, 1952):
You make the mountains and rivers
look so beautiful, lucid;
you make everyone regain their youth,
you make me, an intellectual,
have conscience again. …
You give birth to us anew;
you are our benefactor forever.126
你讓祖國的山川
變得這樣美麗、清新，
你讓人人都恢復了青春，
你讓我，一個知識分子，
又有了良心。
…
你是我們再生的父母，
你是我們永久的恩人。
Feng Zhi’s favorite metamorphosis motif remains unchanged. Instead of the Goethean brand of “death and change,” however, the poet now resorts to the Maoist magic of resurrection. Ten years after Sonnets, Feng Zhi again found himself reborn.
In the same year, He Qifang took up his poetic pen too. He wrote “Huida” 回答 (Response), a poem he did not finish until two years later. The first stanza reads:
Where does the strange wind blow from,
making the sail of my boat incessantly tremble?
My heart is thus being agitated,
it feels sweet, and a little bit frightened.127
從什麽地方吹來的奇異的風，
吹得我的船帆不停地顫動；
我的心就是這樣被鼓動著，
它感到甜蜜，又有一些驚恐。
The poem drew immediate criticism upon publication and was quickly censored. By calling on the “strange wind,” the poet starts with an eager but hesitant tone about his voyage. The beginning stanzas are dreamy and tender, reminiscent of the young He Qifang in search of the anchoring force of life, to no avail. The following stanzas, however, switch to a high-strung, ideologically correct tonality, thus making the poem as a whole inconsistent in both mood and structure.
One would assume that, given his Party membership, which can be traced as far back as 1938, He Qifang would have firmly endorsed the socialist republic, and that by contrast, Feng Zhi, the pensive philosopher-poet, might have sounded more tentative about the brave new world. But He Qifang seems still unable to let go of his old self, while Feng Zhi has no reservations in pledging loyalty to the national leader. By this, I am not suggesting that He Qifang’s revolutionary belief wavered or that Feng Zhi’s worship of Mao had to do with opportunism. Quite the contrary, I argue that after the liberation, at least for a short while, poets such as Feng Zhi and He Qifang believed that they could express themselves in any lyrical mode at will. They felt compelled to “explain themselves” either reverently or hesitantly because of their conviction in the Party’s generosity toward different sentiments and opinions. However, the fates of the two poems point only to the power of “exegetical bonding”—the technology of self- and mutual examination through discursive exercises—sanctioned by the Party.128
The poems also shed light on the changes—or lack of changes—in the two poets since the 1940s. Its pompous rhetoric notwithstanding, He Qifang’s “Response” reminds us of the poet’s “willowy personality” and his feeble, obedient response to Maoist politics.129 Feng Zhi, on the other hand, is surprising with his matter-of-fact attitude and affirmative tone, revealing the hibernal thrust of his “deep and exquisite” style, or even his personality. Feng Zhi’s sympathizers have attributed his fanaticism to the ideological baptism movement. But I suspect that Feng’s political activism may have resulted from not a radical break with but a radical summation of his intellectual pursuit of more than two decades. Unlike He Qifang, always compelled to overcompensate for his “original sin,” Feng Zhi shows an assured manner, even at a humble moment, as in “My Thanks,” presumably due to his scholarly confidence. Granted, his transition from an existentialist poet to a socialist propagandist was so efficient as to call into question whether he ever had a firm grip on either Rilke’s or Goethe’s thought—or for that matter, if he did justice to Mao’s ideology.
As far as the politics of lyricism is concerned, two factors merit attention. In 1957, Shikan 詩刊 (Poetry) featured seventeen classical-style poems composed by Mao and created a national craze for the great leader as a great poet.130 In the following two years, there arose a national New Folksong Movement (xinminge yundong 新民歌運動), resulting in hundreds and thousands of “red ballads” allegedly spontaneously created by the proletariat.131 Sandwiched by these two campaigns, one celebrating the (imperial) power of the national leader’s poetic talent, the other endorsing populist rhapsodic creativity, former modernists such as He Qifang and Feng Zhi were left with no room to perform. Intriguingly, the two poets’ thoughts and deeds crossed again at this time.
In 1956, He Qifang had written in his diary about a dream encounter with the poet Ai Qing, in which they chatted about the nature of poetry. He relates, “I think the most important thing about poetry is that it should stimulate readers. [Ai Qing’s] recent works are placid, not as moving as those of his earlier days. Ai Qing disagreed, and sneered at [my point]. Very unpleasant talk.”132 Ai Qing and He Qifang had come to know each other through a debate over Painted Dreams in the late 1930s; Ai Qing criticized young He Qifang’s decadent, self-indulgent inclination while He hastily defended himself.133 The two ended up becoming friends. In the 1956 dream dialogue, they seem to carry on the debate from where they had left off more than two decades before. The irony is that though He Qifang’s criticism of Ai Qing was accurate, it applied to himself too. 1956 might have been a good year for He Qifang to have dreams, as Mao loosened his control over literature and the arts. Still, given his prominent position and cautious personality, He Qifang was bold enough even just dreaming of someone like Ai Qing, who had been a dissenter all along. For us, the more important question is why, years after the success of the revolution, He Qifang still could not sleep well at night and still had dreams.
When the Anti-Rightist Campaign surged in the following year, to no one’s surprise, Ai Qing came under immediate attack. Feng Zhi was among the most vehement voices denouncing him. The titles of his writings, such as “Bo Ai Qing de ‘liaojie zuojia, zunzhong zuojia’” 駁艾青的了解作家，尊重作家 (A rebuttal of Ai Qing’s “understand writers; respect writers”) and “Cong youpaifenziqiequ de yizhongwuqitanqi” 從右派份子竊取的一種武器談起 (On a kind of weapon stolen by the rightists and other issues), illustrate the militant nature of Feng’s charges.134 It is hard to judge Feng’s motive, but the fact that he joined the Party in 1956 must have increased his sense of duty to carry out its mandates. In any case, Ai Qing was exiled to Xinjiang for almost twenty years.
In 1962, He Qifang published a critical anthology of Chinese poetry. This is a peculiar volume because it gives an uneven representation of the history of Chinese poetry from ancient times to the 1950s. For the modern poetry section, He Qifang introduces Guo Moruo, Wen Yiduo, and Feng Zhi, a politically correct selection indeed. Interestingly, of Feng Zhi’s numerous poems, He Qifang picked “Snake” and “Nanfang de ye” 南方的夜 (The night of the south, 1929). He Qifang comments that Feng Zhi used to adopt “heavy color and silhouettelike imagery to express a kind of deep and thick atmosphere, leaving one in a haunted mood after reading,”135 and that by contrast, with few exceptions, Feng’s poems after the revolution “sound placid … no longer showing the characteristics of his early years.”136 In a tongue-in-cheek way, He Qifang concludes, “There are various kinds of poets, and we need various kinds of poets. Those poems that can really move us and endure multiple readings are poems that have both passion and perfect form.”137
Just like his 1956 dream encounter with Ai Qing, the way He Qifang reads Feng Zhi’s poems suggests something more. Both “Snake” and “The Night of the South” touch on the forbidden theme of the new era, loneliness; both project the persona’s decadent wish to reach out and love. By featuring these two poems, even if just for the purpose of critique, was He Qifang seeking objective correlatives for his own unspeakable desire? “Snake” was discussed above; here are the key lines of “The Night of the South”:
After all, we don’t feel that we belong to the tropics,
in our hearts always resides the solitude of autumn and winter.
The swallow says, there is a rare flower in the south
blooming only once every twenty lonesome years—
at this time, I feel a flower concealed in my heart,
bursting like fire in this quiet night!138
總覺得我們不像是熱帶的人，
我們的胸中總是秋冬般的平寂。
燕子說，南方有一種珍奇的花朵，
經過二十年的寂寞才開一次。——
這時我胸中覺得有一朵花兒隱藏，
它要在這靜夜里火一樣地開放。
By allowing Feng Zhi’s “Snake” to glide into the socialist dreamland and featuring his lonely “rare flower” (zhenqi de huaduo 珍奇的花朵) that blooms every twenty years, He Qifang appears to have traversed the boundaries of time and ideology in search of a lyrical vision like that in his Painted Dreams. And he finds, as it were, a zhiyin 知音—someone who shares his tune—in the Feng Zhi of yesterday.139
Feng Zhi, however, had little time for nostalgia. He vehemently denounced his own works before 1949, particularly Sonnets, while producing new poems in accordance with the changeable Maoist formula. Granting the hegemonic power over everyone at this time, we cannot help wondering if Rilke’s teaching of individual sobriety helped Feng discern any flaws in Mao’s utopia, or if Du Fu’s historical pathos ever disturbed him when he composed the following lines during the Great Famine:
In our nation,
this is common sense:
tillers of the land do not starve, weaves of cloth do not freeze …
the people are happier and healthier year after year.140
在我們的國家裡，
有一個道理本來很平常：
人民一年比一年更幸福，更健康
Everyone familiar with Feng Zhi spoke fondly of his generosity and modesty.141 But a modest person may wittingly or unwittingly act on behalf of a totalitarian power. Feng Zhi severely criticized fascism for promoting collectivism at the cost of individual integrity.142 Ironically, his low-key lifestyle and conformity to the party line bring to mind Hannah Arendt’s description of the “banality of evil”—great evil (such as the Holocaust) can be executed by ordinary people who accept the premises of their state and therefore participate in the belief that their actions are normal.143
Both He Qifang and Feng Zhi underwent difficult years during the Cultural Revolution. Besides enduring public humiliations, they were sent down to the cadre school for reform—or another cycle of rebirth.144 Even during this period, nevertheless, dream and snake stayed in their writings. He Qifang describes two dream sequences in “Womengjian” 我夢見 (I dreamed of), written in 1974. In the first one, he finds himself caught in a riot, waiting for someone to come to his rescue: “I accomplished nothing on the battlefield,/Counting only on the help of class brothers.” More significantly, in recounting the second one, he criticizes the bourgeois penchant for mysticism and modernism.
Beginning with “art for art’s sake,”
only to take the path toward revolution;
from escaping reality to fighting reality,
this is the rule by which to break with the old world.145
最初”為藝術而藝術”，
後來走革命的道路，
從逃避現實到戰鬥，
是怪世界分化的規律。
Even toward the end of his career, He Qifang was still haunted by a sense of guilt and felt the need to condemn himself. His last poems include “Mao Zedong zhige” 毛澤東之歌 (The song of Mao Zedong), which praises the Chairman at a hysterical pitch; the poem was never accepted for publication. At the same time, He took up the format of classical-style poetry. The most peculiar piece is inspired by Li Shangyin’s “Jinse” 錦瑟 (The intricately painted zither),146 arguably the most obscure and intricate of the late Tang poems that had once fascinated young He Qifang.
The zither has been covered in dust for thirty years.
It makes me sad every time I think about it.147
錦瑟塵封三十年
幾囘追憶總淒然
From the Maoist sublime to medieval Chinese decadence, He’s “path of dreams” thus runs full circle.
The snake is resurrected in multiple forms in the poems from Feng Zhi’s late years. In 1972, a temporary relief of political circumstances inspired him to write:
The passage of time prompts one to cherish integrity in one’s final years;
shedding old skin, I feel my body lightened;
in the wake of lingering wind and rain
I am pleased to see a red glow reflecting a clear sunset.148
歲月催人晚節重，
怪皮脫落覺身輕；
常於風雨連綿後，
喜見紅霞映夕晴。
Here the Goethean motif of molting reappears in anticipation of the return of peace and order. Years later, seeing the decadent turn of the post-Mao society, Feng Zhi cried, “I am in pain. There is a snake troubling me, flirtatiously” (“Wo tongku” 我痛苦 [I am in pain, 1988]):
[The snake] devours the dreams of humanity,
vomiting venomous juice
…
It stays next to human beings, refusing to be driven away,
it is agile in motion but terrible in looks.149
(蛇) 它吞噬著人間的夢想，
吐出來致命的毒汁。
…
它體態輕柔，面目可怕。
Then there comes a sober snake in “Shenian jixing” 蛇年即興 (Thoughts occasioned by the year of the snake) in 1989:
The hustle and bustle of the dragon year makes us dizzy,
the quietude of the snake year makes us sober.
For our nation, socialism, and our work,
we should learn the integrity of Madame White Snake;
to help our dear Adams and Eves
learn the sense of shame, tell good from evil,
we should think of the merits of the snake in Genesis.150
龍年的熱鬧弄得人頭昏腦漲，
蛇年的寂靜讓人頭腦清醒。
對祖國，對社會主義，對我們的工作，
要學一學白娘子的忠貞；
為了讓親愛的亞當、夏娃們，
懂得羞恥，辨別善惡，
要想一想《創世紀》裏那條蛇
立下的功勳。
The snake year would have been significant to Feng Zhi because he was born in 1905, which, in the Chinese zodiac calendar, was a snake year too.
Thus, through recapitulating the images of dream and snake respectively, He Qifang and Feng Zhi brought their journeys of born-again lyricism to a close. The twists and turns along the way testify to both the attraction and the danger of their search for a poetic form to address their choices: modernist authenticity or socialist sincerity; individual desire or collective will; the lyrical or the epic. Whereas He Qifang sought doggedly to tease out the truth from layered painted dreams, Feng Zhi continued to modify his selfhood like a molting snake throughout his life. But there always lurks in their favorite motifs something uncertain. Dreams may beget only more dreams; the snake may lead not to change so much as serpentine repetition. As far as their born-again lyricism is concerned, one wonders if their lifelong pursuits brought about the “poetics of beginning” anew or merely confirmed its untenability. Their aspirations and misgivings seem to have already been embedded in a poem by Feng Zhi, “Ye II” 夜 II (Night II), as early as 1934:
I return home every night,
as if from somewhere far away;
“All roads I took today led me astray”—
I will have a new beginning tomorrow.
One night, I shall return home,
as if from somewhere far away,
“All roads I took in my life led me astray”—
and yet I will never be able to begin tomorrow’s journey.151
我夜夜回到我的家裏，
像是從一條很遠很遠的道路；
“我今天所走的都是迷途”——
明天的道路我要從新開始。
一晚呀，我回到我的家裏，
像是從一條很遠很遠的道路；
“我一生所走的都是迷途”——
明日的道路我卻再也不能開始。