A Snowy Morning: Eight Chinese Poets on the Road to Modernity (review)

142 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1996 Michel Hockx. A Snowy Morning: Eight Chinese Poets on the Road to Modernity . CNWS Publications, vol. 18. Leiden: Centre ofNon-Western Studies, Leiden University, 1994. 282 pp. isbn 90-73782-21-x. This book treats eight poets—Zhu Ziqing (1898-1948), Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967), Yu Pingbo (1900-1990), Xu Yunuo (1894-1958), Guo Shaoyu (1893-1984), Ye Shaojun (1894-1988), Liu Yanling (1894-1988), and Zheng Zhenduo (1898-1958)— who published a joint anthology in 1922. It comprises 187 poems, arranged chronologically under each poet's name, with the names arranged by number of strokes. All ofthe poets were members of the Literary Association of China (Wenxue Yanjiu Hui), and all are generally presented as forerunners ofthe "New Poetry" written in the wake of Hu Shi's 1917 call for literary reform. Rescuing their work from the footnotes and introductory chapters in earlier studies that focus on "that specific quality that is common to all successors: success," Hockx ultimately relegates them to one "fragment of the 'margin' to which early baihua poetry belonged" (Preface, n.p.). Having chosen his subtitle carefully, Hockx proposes to "reserve the term 'modern' for poems based on a new and independent poetics, allowing creative use of the perceived tradition" (p. 5). Distinguishing between poetic tradition as it was perceived by his subjects then and as it is perceived today, Hockx asserts that poets can be antitraditional without being modern. Thus they are "on the road to modernity," where they "happily dash . . . into one dead-end street after another, stumbling, falling, getting back on their feet, and starting all over again" (p. 186). Although Hockx concludes that the eight poets gradually succeeded in freeing themselves from tradition as they perceived it and developed a sense of direction that pointed the way to later developments, he admits that many of them wrote little or no poetry after 1922. He goes beyond the 1922 anthology to include poems published elsewhere, setting 1923 as a time limit. Hockx begins by challenging some common generalizations about early new poetry and about the Association. To Michelle Yeh's remark, quoting C. H. Wang (Yang Mu), that "what these poets tried to modernize was poetic diction, not poetry ," Hockx retorts that at least for these eight poets, "poetic diction was the least of their worries" (p. 10). The discussions in the rest ofhis book bear this out. To the remark that the early poets were unable completely to release themselves from tradition, as Hu Shi suggests with his metaphor of a woman's bound feet un-© 1996 by University bound, Hockx replies, consistently with his definition of modernity, that "not evofHawai 'i Presserv poet wanted to throw offthe whole of tradition" (p. 11). As for the dedication ofthe Association to realism in writing and to "art for life's sake" (as opposed to Reviews 143 "art for art's sake"), Hockx sensiblywarns against underestimating the differences between the new fiction and the new poetry (p. 23). In a perfunctory statement of the theoretical basis for his study, Hockx cites Wolfgang Iser and H. R. Jauss. Clearly finding Iser's reader response theory more congenial, Hockx charges Jauss with overemphasizing the author's horizon of expectations to the exclusion of that of the reader, "making it theoretically possible to study reception without studying reader response" (p. 25). His remarks are based on Jauss' "Racines und Goethes Iphigenie." Another article by Jauss, "The Poetic Text within the Change of Horizons of Reading: The Example of Baudelaire 's 'Spleen ?G" (in Toward an Aesthetic ofReception, translated by Timothy Bahti [University ofMinnesota Press, 1982], pp. 139-185), actually comes much closer to Hockx's chosen method, which is to study the response of earlier readers (i.e., earlier poetic criticism) to form either a basis for or a contrast to his own reading ofpoems or poetics. More problematically, while he carefully points out that "cultural gaps . . . are bound to appear when a non-Chinese writes about Chinese literature" (p. 25), Hockx seems curiously untroubled by the linguistic gaps that are inevitable when the Chinese poems are rendered into English. This is perhaps justified by his...