Chapter 40 1986 "Women (Group Poems)"

Genre: Poetry Author: Zhai Yongming Published: 1986 When "the woman in the black dress came at night", a poet who came from the "night" also appeared in the contemporary Chinese poetry circle - Zhai Yongming. In 1983, Zhai Yongming completed a series of poems, which contained 20 poems that put women's unique life experience and survival awareness at the center of the text expression, "shocked the literary world with unique and strange language style and shocking female standpoint".These groups of poems, together with her poetic manifesto "The Consciousness of the Night" completed in 1985, established Zhai Yongming's position in female poetry writing.Although Zhai Yongming has repeatedly claimed that he has no intention of engaging in the writing of a kind of female poetry and does not want to classify himself into the ranks of female poetry, the emergence of group poems, including the group poem "Jing'an Village" completed in 1985, and the group poem "Jing'an Village" completed in 1986 The series of poems "Life is alive" and so on, opened up a generation of women's writing atmosphere in poetry creation, and she herself became a leader in contemporary women's poetry creation.This article will start with the analysis of "Dark Night Consciousness", enter Zhai Yongming's poems again, and re-discover some things we have overlooked in her poems.

To enter Zhai Yongming's poetic world, one cannot bypass the central image in her poems, "dark night". The symbolic meaning between "night" and "female" was created by the poet. It is not a simple metaphor, nor is it a public symbol. For example, the bright moon symbolizes hometown, and the Great Wall symbolizes China.It is a private symbol based on the rich personal experience of the poet. "Dark Night Consciousness" is an experience and expression of Zhai Yongming's existence as a woman. It is the starting point for her writing about women's own feelings and a key to enter her poetic world.In Zhai Yongming's preface "The Consciousness of the Night" written for her series of poems, she expresses women's self-awakening and confirmation of the subject identity in the first person.She said, "Now is the moment when I really become stronger." "I" began to realize "the world around me and the meaning of being in it." runs through the whole set of poems.

Numerous critics have spoken of the correspondence between "night consciousness" and female consciousness, which is almost beyond doubt.However, most of the critics are vague on the key issue of how Zhai Yongming transformed his "night consciousness" into an aesthetic image.So we have a question: women's writing, of course, may have a certain sense of femininity, why did Zhai Yongming's "Dark Night" stand out and become the object of female poets to emulate and the focus of critics' discussion in the next 20 years?Why is "Dark Night" the banner of women's poetry instead of "A Flowering Tree" (Xi Murong) or "Women from Hui'an" and "Kapok" (Shu Ting), nor "Single Woman" (Yi Lei)?

To understand this "night", we must first understand its relationship with the "sun". The opposition between "I" and the sun appears many times in the group of poems—— "The sun keeps its wrathful breadth with a dictator's gaze / And seeks the top of my head and the soles of my feet" (Second Series, No. 1) "All the sky is sneering/No woman can escape/I'm used to learning the way the moon smiles at night" (Song 4 of the second series "Longing") "Here you lay, plotting a desert / Spawning laughter / Somebody is secretly dominating / A dream of the sunflower way" (Volume 2, No. 5)

"From now on I lift a heavy sky/Turn my back to the sun...so gentle, I am a tiny teardrop/Swallow the sun, only to mature in order to end myself/So my heart is impeccable." (Song 4 of the third series. "autumn") In the article "Consciousness of the Night", Zhai Yongming clearly regards "Consciousness of the Night" as an awakened female consciousness.In contrast, the sun in the group of poems is also a symbol. It is not a male consciousness, but a male order.As quoted above, "dreams of someone secretly dominating/sunflower ways".The "you" opposite to the "I" is just a man living in the sun.In Zhai Yongming's narrative, he is not the ultimate cause of my suffering, although he may hurt my body.But after all, he is just a man with a "dream of the sunflower style".

Zhai Yongming's resistance to the sun reminds us of the famous opposition between "Apollinian spirit" and "Bacchanalian spirit".In it, in order to fight against the rationalism represented by the sun god Apollo, Nietzsche constructed the artistic spirit represented by Dionysus.We know that Socrates has a famous "Allegory of the Cave", which compares a philosopher to a person who walks out of a dark cave and sees the sunshine.No matter in the context of China or the West, sunshine and even light have become synonymous with rationality (there is a so-called "Chuan Deng Lu" in Buddhism).But for Zhai Yongming, the dark night she is obsessed with is precisely a world without sunshine. In the first song of the fourth series "Rotation", Zhai Yongming wrote:

"It's not just the sun spinning, the sinking has already begun, when I was born backwards", She sees herself as a star in a dark night driven by fate to spin herself— "I wasn't a star when I came...but I couldn't stop it from turning / The smile came at last like a fatal blow". The night is chaotic, and there is no realistic rational order here. Zhai Yongming described it in "The Consciousness of the Night": "We have maintained a mysterious relationship with the night since we were born, an invisible language that runs through from body to spirit, contained in the senses and beyond the senses, hanging inside like clouds in the celestial body, with the As we grow, it grows."

Contrary to the clear, rational, and masculine writing, Zhai Yongming's poems are like nebula and night, full of fragmented experiences.Only a weak relationship exists between the four parts of the whole group of poems.Let's look at these four groups: first series Premonition, imagining, instant desolate house, longing second series world mother night vision nightmare third series monologue proves edge july fall fourth series Spin life silent life end The four parts generally have a certain diachronic relationship—— The first series is about the germination of night consciousness, where the inner world of women that has been hidden for a long time is opened up here.Longing, fantasies, and awakening are all poured out along with the expression of the poet's emotions. "The woman in the black dress comes at night / Her mysterious glance wears me out / I suddenly remember that the fish will die in this season / And every road is crossing the tracks of birds".Here we clearly see the mournful and mysterious back of a woman, and hear her lonely and depressed voice.She is coming to us. This awakening and unstoppable female power is enough to shock everyone in that era.From imagination to desire for sex, the poem contains women's unique physical and emotional experience, especially the ending "Desire", which shows a strong color of "sex".

The second series Reflect on My Fate, from which the consciousness of the night is established.Reflect on the fate of women from the perspective of human beings and mothers respectively.What follows is "Night Realm", which is like a third-person story, and the poet seems to have gained a calm perspective.The last two songs describe the impact that "I" who has established the night consciousness will have on "you". Both the beginning and the end of the third series describe the relationship between "I" and "you".The first "Monologue" is called "Monologue", which is actually a confession to the "you" who is about to be alienated.The second "Proof" is the real monologue, a call to darkness.The third questioned the experiences of other women.The fourth song "July" and the fifth song "Autumn" are connected in time, telling the change of my relationship with you through the change of seasons.

In the fourth series, "you" who appeared as the opposite sex basically disappeared.The entanglement between women and men has already been fully explained in the previous three series, and it tends to calm down because of the establishment of the night consciousness of "I".At the end, a new question is raised-"Who can tell me: what happens after it is finished?" We can see that although this group of poems has a weak logical relationship, it is basically a way of writing that repeats, complains, and even rambles, and each series overlaps with other parts.In addition, each poem is full of complex and even fleeting metaphors, making the author's intention unclear.From the perspective of rhythm, most of the items in the group poems are not rich in music, but basically obey the needs of confession.The poet seems to be "speaking" casually, rather than singing lightly.A few of the poems in the group have a relatively smooth expression, but the rest are as chaotic as a nebula.The poet said in an interview 20 years after his creation:

"When it comes to technique, I always think that in the poem, my use of technique is not excessive, but not enough. When writing this series of poems, I was too much drawn by the excitement and emotion, so that I could not better control and To cut it down, a lot of times the articulation is just not clear enough." However, this lack of skills, or some kind of writing obsession, constitutes the unique charm of the novel.As we mentioned above, the dark night opposite to the "sun" just needs this brand new expression.This kind of expression can be very good, but in fact it is evasive, erratic, and endlessly arguing to reveal the major propositions related to the night, such as sex, fertility, power, fate, and death.In the daytime, under the sunlight that symbolizes masculine order, these are even unspeakable.The poet's ambiguity is not only due to the uncertainty of fate, but also to oppose the ideal male discourse. We might as well compare Shu Ting's or Xi Murong's style of writing, the former is similar to political slogans, full of masculine color—— "I love you by no means like a climbing sapling / Use your high branches to show off yourself... This is the great love, and steadfastness is here." ("To the Oak") The latter is full of little woman's grievances—— "I have been praying to the Buddha for five hundred years / Begging the Buddha to let us form a relationship / Then the Buddha turned me into a tree / Grow beside the road you must pass." ("A Flowering Tree") However, Zhai Yongming's writing is chaotic and violent, full of distrust of his own destiny.We have reasons to believe that the above-mentioned two kinds of female poems still have a masculine standpoint in their bones, while the group of poems that are only a few years apart from theirs is a reaction to male writing in terms of concept and language.In connection with post-structuralists such as Derrida's critique of logocentrism, Zhai Yongming's writing does coincide with the position of deconstruction. "Dark Night" strips away the language order of the day one by one, but this mystical "Night Consciousness" cannot be replaced by a new and clear idea, otherwise the group of poems and its manifesto "The Consciousness of the Night" What would become a "peasant uprising" for women.In Zhai Yongming's own words: "Standing in the blind center of the night, my poems will follow my will to discover everything that was lurking in me before I was born." In this "blind center," the sense of incompleteness of the female body -- "your body hurts me as the world hurts God" (Prasse), the entangled emotions of men -- "with the only human means, you Silences me", doubts about the ancient procreative thesis - "He who has stood at the hand of his mother shall be born and die" ( ), the impulse of revolution - "Thus I create the night that man shall spare Died"... All kinds of complex experiences are constantly rotating in the eternal night.A poem by Mu Dan can be described—— quietly, we embrace In a world illuminated by words, And the unformed darkness is terrible, The possible and the impossible fascinate us. (Mu Dan's "Eight Poems") The connotation displayed by the image of "Dark Night" should be said to be unique to Zhai Yongming's personal qualities. At the same time, the "Dark Night" she created belongs to all women, and is the rich life and spirit of "half of mankind". symbol.It is in the shroud of "night" that a huge metaphor is formed, full of emotional tension.What is striking is that Zhai Yongming did not continue this kind of writing after the 1990s.Her poems are like rushing rivers entering the plains, and a large number of daily experiences enter short poems in an orderly manner.The image of the radical reflector was replaced by the salon hostess who told short stories. In "The Consciousness of the Dark Night", Zhai Yongming said: "The consciousness of the dark night makes me strip all kinds of experiences of myself, society and human beings to a height of pure cognition, and makes my will and character strength overcome all kinds of confrontations. It develops more richly and maturely in the conflict, and at the same time bravely exposes its truth." Through this confession, we may be able to understand more deeply the "dark night" world she created, which expresses modern women with their own unique feelings. The confession of spiritual and psychological characteristics is undoubtedly a manifestation of female self-awakening. "As a woman, but also as a poet, in the observation and description of women themselves, in fact, my judgment of women's status and role in reality has been deeply infiltrated." Zhai Yongming's creation The world in which she lives is a self-monologue of her spiritual discourse, and it is also her confirmation and publicity of her role as a woman.Her poetry is not only her own, but also belongs to everyone who loves poetry. Zhai Yongming once described her beloved poet Lin Huiyin in an article: "Perhaps due to her background in engineering, her poems, including novels, all reflect a kind of firmness, restraint, clarity, and atmosphere, which is completely different from that of her generation. The sentimental affectation prevailing in the new literature and art writers.” In a sense, Zhai Yongming’s words can also be used to describe her own poems, especially the lyrical style of the poems.In fact, Zhai Yongming also has a university engineering education background.This similarity in educational background largely determines some similarities and coincidences in the aesthetic taste of poetry between the two, such as maintaining sufficient vigilance against sentimental elements.Of course, due to the differences in the context of the times, artistic personality and other aspects, the poetry writing of the two presents different appearances.Especially in terms of expressing the depth of female themes, Zhai Yongming has gone further than Lin Huiyin. Looking at the development history of contemporary Chinese poetry in the past thirty years, it is not difficult to see a process of change in the expression of female themes. In 1979, Shu Ting published "To the Oak Tree", a loud cry full of challenges to the male world: "I must be a kapok next to you, / stand with you as the image of a tree." In 1980, Lin Zi published In the lyric series "To Him" ​​written in the 1950s, there was a bold monologue at the time: "As long as you want, I love, I will give it all, / To you - my soul, my body." In that particular era, both aroused strong repercussions in the poetry circle.In the mid-1980s, after the publication of Zhai Yongming's poems, a female poetry writing group composed of poets such as Tang Yaping, Yi Lei, and Lu Yimin gradually surfaced, pushing the expression of female themes to a new level. Unlike Shu Ting's "To the Oak Tree" and other poems showing lofty dance and elegant posture, and also different from the almost hysterical lyrical style of Yi Lei's "The Single Woman's Bedroom", Zhai Yongming's poems are cold and sharp.For example, in the description of the relationship between mother and daughter: "You are my mother, and I am even your blood flowed at dawn / In the pool of blood you are surprised to see yourself, you wake me up / / Hear the world Voice, you gave me birth, you made me with misfortune/The terrible twin of this world. For many years, I can't remember the cry tonight//The light that conceived you, how distant and suspicious, Standing between life and death/, your eyes have darkness and how heavy the shadows that enter the soles of your feet".The poet does not express the warmth between mother and daughter, but tries to reveal the common darkness in the fate of two generations of women who are connected by blood. The description of love also transcends the conventions of expression: "When you go, my pain / To vomit my heart out of my mouth / Killing you with love, whose taboo is this? / The sun rises for the world !I am only for you/I pour the most hateful tenderness into your whole body/From feet to top, I have my way" ("Monologue").When love and death, tenderness and hatred are mixed together, the connotation of love has undergone a qualitative change, and the image of women in a weak position in love relationships has also been completely rewritten. Of course, this kind of lyrical discourse is not perfect, and sometimes it may affect the expressive effect of poetry due to excessive pursuit of cold and sharp style.The poet once reflected on this after several years: "The fanatical passion at that stage also brought some carved and rough elements to my poem, and I realized this after I finished writing it." However, as far as On the whole, the poet's lyrical discourse shows the poet's distinct language style and unique artistic personality. It is worth noting that in the group poems, we rarely see the shadow of men.Even if it appears occasionally, it is just a very vague figure from the back.The poet clearly deliberately excludes the presence of men.Correspondingly, masculine danger is magnified: "In the air of undeclared savagery/winter undulates cruel masculine consciousness" ("Premonition"). "Masculine" has been downgraded to "masculine" and given modifiers such as "barbaric" and "cruel", and it is not difficult to see the rejection in it.The absence of male characters is undoubtedly to highlight the importance of female characters. In Zhai Yongming's works, the female image is no longer limited to a certain fixed pattern of previous male discourse, but constantly seeks new breakthroughs: "Water makes me change, water paints everywhere / lonely color, it can't fix me / I am an endless woman / My eyes once became amber / Deep into the heart, making it more inviolable" ("Proof"); "I was born with such deep affection / So tender, I am a small teardrop / Swallow the sun, and mature in order to end myself / so my heart is unassailable" ("July"); Not far away/So I heard a burst of tide, with an ancient breath” ().In these poems, the original meaning boundary of the symbol of woman is completely broken, and the connotation of the female image is expanded in different dimensions. In addition to the positive shaping, the breakthrough of female image is also reflected in the collision of multiple themes.For example, in the book, the three themes of reproduction, death and dreams are intertwined, "From the dusk, in the world death that fell to the ground / Aries is still shining above the head / Like the door of human reproduction, the precious and terrible light of motherhood /Before I was born, I was destined//to plant the roots of black dreams for those primitive rock formations. They/grow by my blood". However, it needs to be pointed out that the image of "endless woman" carefully created by Zhai Yongming is not designed according to a certain formula of Western feminism, but an artistic improvement made after personally understanding the pain of women's experience.As she said in an interview later, "When I was writing a series of poems, the concept of feminist poetry first appeared. I think my writing really started from the perspective of feminism during that time. At that time, the concept of feminism was actually I don’t have such a clear understanding, it’s entirely because there are feminist elements in the subconscious.” The so-called “subconscious” here is actually the subtle accumulation of the most primitive perceptual experience of female life. As a brand-new female image, the relationship between "Endless Woman" and the world must be rebuilt.Zhai Yongming wrote in the preface to the series of poems: "As half of human beings, women have faced a completely different world since birth. Her first glimpse of this world must have her own emotions and perceptions. . . . Projecting life with all its might to create a night? And transfiguring the world into one gigantic soul in every crisis? In fact, every woman faces her own abyss—selfish pain and Experience - Not everyone can resist this balanced ordeal until destruction. This is the first night, and when it rises, it leads us into a new world with a special layout and angle, and belongs to women only. This is not salvation It is a process of understanding, but a process of thorough enlightenment.” Obviously, what Zhai Yongming emphasizes here is the acquisition of the independence of the female subject.The keywords "night" and "abyss" are metaphors for women's special life experience, and their essence lies in richness and inclusiveness."Salvation" and "Total Enlightenment" respectively represent two attitudes: the former is passive, and the latter is active.From salvation to enlightenment, the relationship between women and the world has undergone a fundamental change. The poet sometimes imitates the tone of the Creator outside the world and declares: "I have seen the world/Therefore, I created the night to save mankind" (); Structural relationships: "The whole universe fills my eyes" ("Imagination"), "The waves beat me / Like a midwife slaps me on the back, so / The world broke into my body / Scared me, confused me, I feel a certain ecstasy” ( ); sometimes highlighting the tension between myself and the world: “I am so small and so dependent on you / But some day my dimensions / will coincide with the shadows of the sky, making You are amazed" ("Longing"), "From then on I lift a heavy sky/Turn my back to the sun" ("July"), "The body undulates/As if resisting the invasion of the whole world" ().The above verses expound the intricate relationship between the universe, the world and "I" from both internal and external dimensions. And in "The Desolate House", the poet declares to the world "I come, I approach, I invade", which reminds people of Caesar's famous saying full of ambition: "I come! I see! I conquer!" It is worth noting Yes, even though the subject here is replaced by a woman, the aggressive tone revealed is not inferior to that of a man.In other words, the author deliberately replaces the dominant position of men with women here, so as to highlight the independent status of women. Of course, the relationship between women and the world reconstructed by the group of poems is not once and for all, but with an "unfinished" vulnerability.In the poem "Completion" at the end of the group of poems, the poet repeatedly questioned "what after completion", expressing doubts about "completion", that is, doubts about the stable "reconciliation" relationship between women and the world.