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The 17th Congressof the International Comparative Literature Association
The Spaces of Solitude: the Concept of Linguistic Homeland in Beidao’s Exile Poetry
by
Cynthia Chung-man, KO
Postgraduate Student
The ChineseUniversity of Hong Kong
Beidao has significant numbers of outstanding poems with spatial images representing the linguistic homelands. Beidao encounters his language crisis since he has started his exilic life since the 1989 June Fourth Incident. His mother tongue, the Chinese language, fails to facilitate him in interacting with the western cultural context effectively. Beidao’sviolent poetic style does not gain the international acclamation because of its aesthetic value, but because of its close association to political dissentience, probably commented by western readers or critics. Exile is, in this way, a crisis to Beidao’s identity as a writer, and also the alienation of the aesthetic power of the language against the foreign context. However, situating away from the home culture motivates him to view the language and his “self” from a completely new perspective. Beidao’s construction of the linguistic homeland, therefore, means his attempt to discover a new way to interact with the new living environment. Self-examining the language processing is natural and necessary for him torefresh his vision upon the more philosophical issues about the intrinsic properties of language, and his identity as a writer. As the linguistic homelands represent a new position that the Beidao enjoys after the exile, language becomes the surrogate cultural root where the poet could negotiate a new relationship among the mother tongue, the poet himself, and the foreign linguistic environment.
However, Beidao’s linguistic homelands remain to be the spaces of solitude because Beidao dwells within the enclosed spaces of language while finding ways to solve the language crisis. To establish a conceptual framework, I will outline, in the second section of this paper, the defining characteristics of the linguistic homelands of the exile writers. This conceptual framework would lay a solid basis for the analysis in the third section. The pre-requisite of the sensible analysis is a brief introductionto the language crisis of exile writers in the coming section.
- Exile and Language Crisis
Exile writers often encounter language crises. Language is the pre-requisite of the “unified fields of exchange and communication” among the members of the community, or the nation-state since the twentieth-century(Anderson, 44), language functions most properly as a medium of interaction when it is placedwithin its culture. The reason is that the languagesystem is part of its own cultural system and is the best medium to accommodate verbally the ideas and concepts of its culture. Therefore, “practising” the mother language “actively in the everyday context” in a prolonged period of time (Daniel, 34)is particularly essential, but is also the most unconscious way,to formulate an individual’s cultural values, and to consolidate the membership of his own culture, or the cultural identity. The languages of the lonely travelers are said to be displaced, or uprooted because they are unable to attain the purpose of facilitating them to interact with the foreign cultural system properly. Dwelling alone within the enclosed language system, the exile poetry often givesan impression of solitude, emptiness and insecurity.
The themes of emptiness and insecurity are frequent in many of Beidao’s exile poems throughout his writing career. In his earlier exile poem, “February,” Beidao described his writing experience as, “I and my poems/ sink together” (1994: 194). Sinking to the underground symbolizesbelittling oneself to escape from the threat of the external reality. His identity as a political exile makes his poetic voice being exposed to the public judgments. Belittling himself indicates his desire to preserve privateness. An image of uprootedness appears in the recent poem called “Walking Together,” “Words float at sea in the whole night” (2002: 95). Losing the function of interacting with the outside reality, language becomes a closed system within which the poet indulges in his artistic creations. The juxtaposition of many different sounds of languages in the mind of the exile writer is concretized in the image of floating at sea, whichis often associated with scatteredness and lacking in direction. Despite the freedom of artistic creation that the exile experience gives, expressing the beauty of language out of the scattered sounds of languages requires constant struggles. Beidao’s effort to cast a critical perspective upon the language is to resolve the uneasyrelationship amongthe poet, the language, and the new living environment.
From the above textual evidences, Beidao’s language crisis should be studied together with thedrastic change in poetic style before and after his exile. Brought up during the Cultural Revolution, Beidao lived in a “totally ideologized” environment (Zhong, 13), within which the mass media invents political jargons to preach the state ideology. Beidao’s violent impressionin his poemsbefore his exile is inherited from the vigorous, and highly ideologized propaganda language; but at the same timethe individual poetic hero rebelled against the propaganda language which represents collectivity. Although the ambition of rebelling against the authority is the centre of public attention, including both the critics in the mainland China and in the western countries; after his exile, Beidao feels his existence as a writer being threatenedwhen he is being frequently associated with the June Fourth Incident. Therefore, Beidao’s anxiety towards his language, which is manifested in the poetic images of uprootedness,is at the same time his existential crisis of being a writer.
To explain the language crisis of Beidao, it is better to investigatefirstly, the relationship of language to the poet, and secondly, its relationship to the larger cultural context. Firstly, Beidao feels himself alienated against his language. Without a daily context to practice, the languages would calcify and be forgotten; and the exile writers would find difficult to deliver beautiful phrases and wordings. Secondly, the uprooted Chinese language is estranged from the western cultural context. The Chinese language cannot accommodate the poet’s perceptions and experiences of the western culture. Moreover,the democratic west’s suspicious perception of Beidao’s poems is an invasion upon Beidao’s individuality. Being classified as one of the young dissentient intellectuals downplays his unique aesthetic qualities and thus, his role as a writer. This enhances the poet’s alienation against his language: under the suspicious eyes of the critics, Beidao finds that his former violent poetic stylecould no longer create an identity that he feels comfortable with. A reexamination of the language is necessary to restore the poet’s insecure feeling towards his language.
Beidao creates the imaginary homelands aiming at restoring their displaced mother tongues “in place.” In other words, these imaginary spaces are constructed to reexamine the inherent properties of language so that itcould regain its function of artistic creativity in the western context. The tensions between the poet and language on both the individual and cultural level can be reconciled in the following two ways. Firstly, Beidao treats the linguistic spaces as the private shelter whichcould accommodate his inner feelings effectively. Secondly, the linguistic homelands are mental spaces for him to reexamine the inherent properties of language in order to discover ways to facilitate its interaction with the alien cultural context. Next section will explore how these two solutions of the language crisis are related to the concept of home.
- Linguistic Homelands for Exile Writers: Definition
To fully understand how the displaced mother tongues could be restored “in place”requires the investigation of the concept of home. Broadly speaking, home does not necessary mean any concrete geographical place, but refers to the “goal” of any “voyages of self-discovery” (Gurr, 13), which means the self-knowledge about his way of life in his initiation journey. Besides identity, the sense of home also implies security as home provides shelter which is a basic need to any individual. In this way,the linguistic homeland is an imagined space constructed through writing, so that the exile writer could restore his security feeling by adopting a critical perspective upon his own language, and thus his own position as a writer. The linguistic homeland resolves the language crisis in two ways. On the individual level, the exile writer feels confident with the aesthetic power of his language within the self-constructed space; on the cultural level, he needs to maintain a harmonious relationship between the language and the foreign linguistic environment. The spatial image is an appropriate textual manifestation of the concept of home because it connotes shelter and security; it also connotes an imaginary room for the writer to search forself-knowledge. As the secluded spaces in Beidao’s poetry imply the existence of a boundary, the sense of home, in this way, means the harmony within and without this imaginary room, which signifies the resolution of the contradiction between the inner desire and the outer reality.
Language constitutes a private space so that the exile writers couldfree from the threat from the alien environment. Because language is often regarded as the writer’s source of identification, it is an excellent material to construct a space that is totally belonged to oneself. The writer Julien Green observes that “a man’s language is so very much his own property that he almost identifies himself with it…We are inclined to consider that what belongs to us and what we cherish most is somehow a part of ourselves.” (Green, 160) V. S. Naipaul is a writer who makes use of his fictions as a private space to “struggle to face the new identity” through plot arrangement because of “permanent exile” (Gurr, 5). Instead of plot arrangement, the exile poems reveal the poets’ heightened consciousness of the spatial dimension, such as the images of dwelling within anenclosed space in Beidao’s poetry, when creating the linguistic space.
Privateness is important for the exile writers. For the exile writers, being regarded as politically dissentient is another form of threat from the collectivity after exile. Although the mother tongues cannoteffectively accommodate the exile poets’ descriptions of the perceptions and experiences in the foreign culture, the exile poets take this as an advantageby turninginward to portray, and to explore the more philosophical issues about existence and language as a subject matter. As the exile writers gain the freedom of thought, creating the linguistic space is a way to transcendthe cultural differences and examine themselves clearly, as another exile poet, Joseph Brodsky mentions in his prose, “If art teaches anything—to the artist, in the first place—it is the privateness of the human condition” (Brodsky, 46). Beidao uses a poetic style of clarity and purity to illustrate his existential crisis. The pure language style also means intentional omission of political jargons in order to withdraw himself from the political discourse, which reminds himself of his traumatic memory of political suppression before his exile. The sphere of pivateness fosters Beidao’s transcendence to the philosophical issues; but at the same time his withdrawal from reality. This poetic style explains the solitary mood of the linguistic homelands.
The exile writerfeels insecure about his language unless he could establish a harmonious relationship between the language and the foreign linguistic context. In other words, he is still rootless and vulnerable when he dwells in the interiority of the linguistic space without connecting it to a larger space, or the cultural context. Massey’s concept of the identity of a geographical place is applicable to the linguistic space. “It (The identity of a place) derives, in large part, precisely from the specificity of its interactions with ‘the outside’” (Massey, 13). Therefore, the linguistic space needs to connect to the larger reality, the foreign linguistic context. The process of searching ways to communicate with the foreign audience is a means to connect the private and the larger spaces. Gurr said, “the exiles, more pressingly concerned to find an audience than the metropolitan or expatriate writers …” (Gurr, 19). It is especially true for political exile writers such as Beidao because they are being deprived of the native audience due to the obligatory leave from the motherland. However, communicating with the foreign audience does not mean integrating into the host culture. The exile writers often maintain a distance to the foreign culture because distance gives the freedom of thought and insights. Therefore, Beidao’s linguistic homelands are spaces of solitude with the foreign audiencebeing portrayed as an entity outside the linguistic homelands.
Escaping from speaking for either his home culture or the host culture, the exile writers often have close examinations of language as a subject matter, and of the communication process. Self-examination over language is common among exile writers, such as Joseph Brodsky, who casts the cold, critical eyes upon his mother tongue, the Russian language, in part of the poem called “A Part of Speech.” To restore the identity as a writer, the exile writersrepeatedly struggle over the language processing to escape from the political jargons, which contaminates their languages. Therefore, the process of producing language is examined as an independent subject matter, regardless of the nationality of the language, as shown in Beidao’s portrayal in a highly abstract and metaphorical way. Removing the language from the political discourse, the exile writers also restore the purity and universality of language by foregrounding the musical context in the poems. As music is the commonfeature in the poetry of different cultures and is powerful to “contain and represent any topics” (Yeh, 212), Beidao applies musical terms to his poems in form of images reveals his conscious thought upon the potential of language in order to make hispoetry culturally universal. Despite the effort to detach from politics, Beidao’s insecure feeling persists because the purity of the linguistic homelands is a constant reminder of his being closely associated with politics.
Next section will be about the analysis of Beidao’s five poems:“The OldCastle,” “Unlock,” “Musical Variations,” “Postwar,”and “Local Accent.” They are used to demonstrate his ways of constructing the linguistic homelands by manipulating the spatial relationships of inside and outside.
- Linguistic Homelands for Beidao
i) As a Room to Examine the Language Processing in Alien Cultural Contexts
To communicate with the foreign audience
Beidao uses the metaphor of exit among the intricated spaces to signify his effort to communicate with the foreign audience in “The Old Castle.”
the pine hedge labyrinth is grammar
you can speak until you find the exit
follow the staircases
deep into the interiority of language
unobstructed doors and hidden passages lead to
that hall which is like echo
you shout loudly, there is no echo (1999: 60)
The old castle is the secluded space as it is a shelter surrounded by canals; while the “pine hedge labyrinth” is another enclosed space within it. As Beidao has traveled to seven European countries from1989 to 1995 as mentioned in his essay collection, The Blue House,it is not surprising that he has visited the old castles and uses it as a source of poetic imagery. However, the specific local features of the European castles are absent in the poem when he uses this image to illustrate his individual problems. The castle signifies an unfamiliar context that the traveler would explore within it. Therefore, the “you” is the same as the persona because both are travelers within an unfamiliar context. While the foreign castle is the allegory of this poem, the objects found in the castle are also manipulated to complicate the spatial relationship. The “pine hedge labyrinth” represents the“grammar” of, probably, the different national language systems that Beidao encounters in the host cultures. The intricated spatial relationship between the labyrinth and the foreign castleassimilatesthe exile writers’ constant struggle among different language systems within the foreign linguistic context. Because the interconnecting paths within the labyrinth assimilate the complex patterns of grammar, searching for the “exit” of the language requires the poet’s detailed examination of the grammatical system and language processing. The “exit” is the means to connect the secluded labyrinth, to the castle, which represents the larger context; so that “you,” or the traveler, is able to speak to the foreign audience when the “exit” is discovered. Freeing from the specific cultural features, the abstract image of the castle not only exercises the purity of language, but also yields cross-cultural interpretations by exploring the multiple possibilities of the meanings.
Unfortunately, instead of connecting to the larger context, Beidao gets retreated from the reality as he goes into the entangled spaces. As the poet penetrates into the interiority,he would gradually withdraw further and further from the outside because the exit is at the centre of the labyrinth. Moreover, the persona’s passing through the spiral “staircases,” the “unobstructed doors and hidden passages,” and reaching of the “echoing hall” at the most centre of the castle are also images of withdrawal which signify the poet’s investigation over the language issue. These images evoke the silent mood that dwelling deep into his private self provides a temporary security feeling to the poet. Although the simile “echo” may also represents loneliness; it is better interpret as Beidao’s expectation to have his own voice heard within the metaphor of space. The absence of echo next line breaks his illusion down in a sudden. The absence of echo within the space of solitude makes the following implications: the breakdown of the enclosed space which disrupts the echoes; and thus, the exposure of the poet to the threatening exteriority. The fragile distinctions between the inside and the outside accurately portray the ever-existing insecurefeeling of the traveler.