Meanings Between the Opposites: The Function of Paradox in Bei Dao’s Poetry
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Bei Dao’s hermitic style of poetry has been baffling his critics ever since he started writing. While his earlier “Misty” poetry met with strong resistance from official Chinese critics, his continuing insistence on fragment syntax and disjunctive imagery while writing in exile has earned him a few detractors in the west. Does Bei Dao resist reading? Can one make sense of his poetry? Is there such a thing as “intentional non-sense”? What is the relationship between meaning and interpretative certitude? These are some of the questions that the paper tries to answer. With a careful reading of his selected poems, I will show how Bei Dao privileges ambiguity and uncertainty by forcing seemingly unrelated or opposing things or ideas together and thus creating abundant eye-catching paradoxical images. These unending paradoxes, whose power comes from an imaginative reordering of things and events, form a key aspect of Bei Dao’s poetics.
Abstract
Bei Dao’s hermitic style of poetry has been baffling his critics ever since he started writing. While his earlier “Misty” poetry met with strong resistance from official Chinese critics, his continuing insistence on fragment syntax and disjunctive imagery while writing in exile has earned him a few detractors in the west. Does Bei Dao resist reading? Can one make sense of his poetry? Is there such a thing as “intentional non-sense”? What is the relationship between meaning and interpretative certitude? These are some of the questions that the paper tries to answer. With a careful reading of his selected poems, I will show how Bei Dao privileges ambiguity and uncertainty by forcing seemingly unrelated or opposing things or ideas together and thus creating abundant eye-catching paradoxical images. These unending paradoxes, whose power comes from an imaginative reordering of things and events, form a key aspect of Bei Dao’s poetics.