Man yearns for a free and self-determining life, yet cannot but struggle to manoeuvre under the bonds and constraints of the real world. Man yearns to steer his own fate, yet can never escape the palm of necessity, and has to suffer the toying of destiny. So man has built one utopia after another for himself, as a refuge for the soul. Literature is the aesthetic utopia that man has built by means of language. Yet, facing the harsh laws of the real world, the literary utopia is fragile and feels rather false. Under the all-out encirclement and induced surrender of the “postmodern,” the literary aesthetic utopia is on the brink of collapse.
The arrival of the Internet age seems to change human fate. When electronic media build for man a digital “cyberspace” — a virtual space that can stand its own ground against the real material world, and that links and interacts with the real world in a half-real, half-illusory way — humanity, and humanity’s mode of existence, has taken a step into a process of great change. By the same token, the human mode of language is also bound to undergo a transformation. So: is this good news for poetic language, or a nightmare?
1. Cyberspace: The Carnival Square of the Folk
To explore the question of poetic language in cyberspace, one cannot confine oneself to works that go under the label of “online literature.” Open the doors of literary websites such as Under the Banyan Tree (Rongshu xia), Gold Book House (Huangjin shuwu), or White Deer Academy (Bailu shuyuan) and try, in the literary language of these sites, to find poetic features that mark them off from traditional literature, and disappointment is sure to follow. Perhaps the anonymity of online writing lets the writer write in a freer frame of mind, lets the self be flaunted without reserve, and even, because of the self-amusing character of such writing, lets the “self-image” of the language balloon to the point of farcical deformation and absurdity. Perhaps the instantaneity of online publishing and the speed-scanning mode of online reading force the language toward the brief, the leaping, and the careless and rough-edged. Yet none of this is enough to deliver a threatening blow to traditional literary language, or to count as the distinctive poetic feature of the language of online literary works. The fact is: once a work has been selected and published — whether on a literary site or in the literary column of a general site — it has already been filtered through an established “literary standard,” and however more permissive that standard may be, it stands in an unbreakable line of descent from the traditional view of literature. Online writing that enters a literary site or that is labeled “literary” has trouble escaping the canopy of tradition; the features of its language have not yet undergone any substantive change.
What deserves attention in cyberspace is not only the writing marked off as “literary,” but the whole of online writing. Within this space, except for the artificially drawn line between “literary” and “non-literary,” all has been undone. The Internet builds up a virtual world that is like a masquerade ball: everyone hides his original identity and status, and, by his own wish and imagination, casts a new role for himself, freely expressing feeling and venting desire. So whether on literary sites, in chat rooms, or in instant-message posts, online writing is, in essence, free and uninterested writing — creative writing, writing that expresses the individual self and gives vent to feeling. In this respect it is no different in essence from literary writing. And yet it is precisely within the precincts that traditional thought regards as non-literary that new linguistic phenomena flourish in the most abundant way, expanding and even recasting poetic language. One could say: it is just this free online writing that will determine the future direction of poetic language.
Cyberspace is the carnival square of the “quasi-folk.” The qualifier “quasi-” is needed because cyberspace, after all, has thresholds of technical knowledge and material condition. Although a primary-school child can come and go freely in it, for one who lacks the basic operating skills the only thing before his eye is a screen with nothing on it — cyberspace simply does not exist. For one who lacks the necessary material conditions, it is more nearly a luxury. The thresholds of technology, knowledge, and material condition already divide and partition the “folk.” Yet cyberspace, all the same, possesses nearly every feature of the folk carnival square: its unofficial, non-power, and anti-aristocratic character makes its folk stance and position fully visible; its unbounded freedom, its overturning of rational authority, its scorn for the order of rank, and its chasing of sensuous desire all turn this space into a carnival square thronged with many voices.
In Rabelais and His World: Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Bakhtin works out at length the life and culture of the folk carnival square. He holds:
In the carnival square — under conditions of the temporary suspension of all rank-differences and barriers between persons, of the suspension of certain norms and prohibitions of everyday (non-carnival) life — a special, both ideal and real, type of interpersonal communion takes shape, one impossible in ordinary life: a free contact between persons in the square, without any distance and without any standing on form. New types of communion often give rise to new forms of speech-life: new speech-genres, a re-recognition or abandonment of certain old forms, and so on. [1]
For Bakhtin, the carnival square is a world that is both “ideal and real.” It is real, for it does indeed exist; its yearly re-enactment is itself part of life. It is ideal, for the everyday world is full of distinctions, barriers, norms, and prohibitions, and there is no real human freedom and no equal, intimate interchange. It is only in the carnival square that people have, by laughter and mockery, leveled distinctions of rank, dissolved barriers, overthrown norms, and made fun of prohibitions. Power and “truth” are “uncrowned” in laughter and become absurd, become “the carnival straw-man.” The sacred is “lowered” into the vulgar and the foul, even into “excrement.” All is leveled into a “folk” existence and turned into intimate, free communion. The carnival square is full of joyous play-spirit, and it is this spirit that pulls square-activity out of the routine of life, free from life’s laws and habitual order. This is a “world turned upside-down,” a sound world, an ideal utopia.
Cyberspace greatly expands the territory of the literary utopia, strengthens its own spirit of freedom, and, through online writing, recovers the folk-ness that literature once disdained and forgot. With the rapid development of information technology, the human mode of life and the structure of society have been transformed. The original demarcations between states, between regions, and between persons have been broken through by electronic media. The network, through electronic information, abstracts and virtualizes the world; it builds anew a mammoth non-physical world; with the fluidity of space and the instantaneity of time, it replaces the spatial stability and temporal succession of the physical real world; and from out of the real world it carves out a “festival square.” Within it the distinctive cultural resources held by different social groups have been redistributed and revalued. The traditional writer and reader no longer enjoy a privilege; what really stirs within online writing is a band of rule-flouting, boldly mischievous young pups. In this new virtual world, free from material weight and from established condition, free from social environment, interest-relation, and social norm, every manner of human identity, position, and office is lost along with the loss of cultural, social, and historical meaning; man is reduced to nothing — to a stripped-bare existence — and seems to realize a “phenomenological reduction.” When man becomes unconfined by any restraint and no longer bears the weight of tradition, when he even becomes a “bit”-existence without bodily mass, he wins a freedom never before attained. He communes freely, creates freely, speaks freely, without the least hesitation. This thoroughgoing freedom-spirit is anti-authority, anti-power, anti-control. When everything has become a digital existence, this drags man back onto the same horizon. No one holds privilege; no one can control any other; everyone is equal; everyone can take up his own place in cyberspace, give voice in his own voice, and show his own existence. Anti-authority, anti-power, anti-control: these are real factors of folk utopia. When cyberspace is filled with the spirit of freedom and the factors of folk utopia, language too wins a fundamental liberation; it spreads itself out joyously as the carnival spectacle of many voices.
2. The Many Voices of the Carnival Square
Speaking of the language of the folk carnival square, Bakhtin notes:
On the square a special speech holds sway — a speech that pays no heed to form, which approaches a language all its own — a speech that could not exist anywhere else and that differs sharply from the languages of church, court, tribunal, and office, from the language of official literature, and from the language of the ruling class (the privileged stratum, the aristocracy, the high and middle clergy, the urban upper bourgeoisie). Yet under certain conditions square-speech, as a spontaneous force, has burst into their linguistic territories. [2]
The earliest folk speech was natural, tangled, and full of life; it was often blunt, paying no heed to form. With the differentiation of social strata, language too became differentiated through use. Out of the need for hierarchical principle, propriety, and rule in interchange, the official language gradually formed its own linguistic norms; these norms are not to be transgressed, for they are themselves the sign of identity and power, and to break them is to lose identity and power.③ Though official language remains a minority within linguistic use as a whole, because its users hold privilege it carries a dazzling power; it has, as it were, become the guide of all language, perched above all other discourse. And in the writing that has been all but monopolized by the rulers, the privilege of the official has left a clear mark. On the question of writing, Roland Barthes points out that every regime has its own writing. He holds that writing is the manifold form in which language reveals itself; it contains within it both the existence of the real and the showing of power; and the history of this political style of writing makes up the most important part of a social phenomenology. For example, during the French Restoration there developed a class-style of writing in which petitioning workers were called “fellows,” strike-breakers “gentle workmen,” and the obsequiousness of magistrates “tender vigilance.” On this ground Barthes incisively condemns this writing — found “in every authoritarian regime” — as “the writing of the police.” [4] What Barthes points to here is only the value-judgment of the ruling stratum, parasitic on the limbs of language. In fact, within writing, power is everywhere; it nests itself in written language in still more hidden ways and grows together with written language. This power has been steadily cultivated by the long-standing monopoly that the privileged have held over writing. Writing is sacred; the character is sacred; even the “character-paper” bearing written letters is sacred — even when it becomes scrap, it must be “treasured.” It is precisely this “sacredness” that pushes writing ever further apart from the folk; through its sacredness, writing becomes mysterious — a “sacred object” to which the folk pays prostrate worship but dares not draw near, dares not look at directly, much less play with.
In Toward a Theory of Internet Literature, Ouyang Youquan writes:
“Writing” turned literary creation into a special craft. The “writer,” in becoming the exclusive owner and monopolist of literature, became at the same time the dispenser and instructor of the literary audience. The many-voiced, scattered-point broadcast of earlier literary activity became the privatized, linear extension under the hand of an elite. [5]
“Writing,” as a power, not only twists fact and falsifies history and shields the honored — it must also lodge “great meaning” within “subtle word,” “bear the Way and govern the state,” so that the audience can only stand in awe, trembling, daring only to “transmit” and not to “make.” Works honored as canon become the words of sages and worthies; the discourse takes on an unalterable sacredness. It allows only philological textual study and exegesis; it cannot be contradicted. Bakhtin calls this discourse the “authoritarian discourse” or the “fatherly discourse.” He writes:
Authoritarian discourse asks us to accept and to learn what it forces upon us, no matter how much inner persuasiveness it has for us. Before we came on the scene, it had already united with the force of authority. Authoritarian discourse has been organically tied to hierarchy since long ago and may be called the discourse of the fathers. It was already acknowledged in the past; it is a discourse that comes before us. [6]
As a sacred “fatherly discourse,” it allows no question or interrogation, and does not even require understanding; one can only accept it whole, use it to discipline oneself, clear out heterodox thought of every kind, and then, in the unified “standard tongue” of the fathers, parrot what others say.
The rise of print technology brought changes to written language. As a mechanical-reproduction technology, printing greatly lowered the cost of producing literary texts, making the wide dissemination of literary works possible and giving the common people a way to draw near to literature. The uniqueness, sacredness, and limited spread of the manuscript “original” were replaced by mass mechanical reproduction, commercial marketing, and rapid circulation. The result was bound to be the de-mystification of mystery, the down-grading of the sacred, and the depreciation of value. Print technology foretold the coming of the age of the mass.
In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt proposed that the change in the reading public in the eighteenth century was a very important reason for the rise of the novel form. He gives a detailed analysis of the change in the reading public: the appearance of libraries and circulating libraries led to a clear increase in readers of fictional stories; the growing leisure of the urban lower orders, especially apprentices and maids, and their need for literary reading, prepared a potential readership for the novel; the founding of periodicals fostered the reader’s reading interest; and above all, booksellers, who took the place of the great lords of the court as patrons of writers, pushed literary writing into the market. This freed literature from the hands of a small privileged few and handed it over to a much larger body of ordinary people, and tied the writer’s writing to the literary needs and reading taste of the public — finally bringing the novel to flourishing. [7] But every one of these changes rests on the development of print technology. Only with the development of print could the spread of libraries, the publication of periodicals, the rise of booksellers, and the cultivation of lower-order taste become possible. The rise of the novel is a liberation of literary genre, and also a liberation of the poetic quality of language. Poetic language was no longer cramped within the narrow genre of poetry; it strode forward into a grander, broader realm — the novel — and won a wider space for its existence. Within this process, poetic language itself was transformed: it tried to set aside aristocratic reserve and to court the commoner, to draw near the folk.
On the other side, with the development of print technology and the print publishing industry, a corresponding publishing system was established. The modern publishing system is the product of contention among various political forces over their own interests; it was achieved jointly through the mutual struggle, negotiation, and compromise of state power, booksellers, and writers. From writing to publication and distribution, the work must pass through layer upon layer of filtering — must travel a long, fate-uncertain road. This further strengthens the authority of publication and of the writer and the publishing institution. So on the whole the system safeguarded the mystery and the aristocratization of the work, restricted the writing of the common mass, and assured that the beautiful name of “writer” was bestowed only on a small number of “geniuses,” lest the halo above the “writer” fade. More important still: it had to ensure that publishing was always under the control of power. The mass did not become writers; writing never truly belonged to the mass; it had to obey the publishing system, take its orders from political power, and so became a symbol of power. Just for this reason, literary writing and poetic language of the print period could not, finally, truly return to the folk; they remained submissive to power. Even as they tried to draw coins from the pocket of the mass, they could not all the same fully shed their aristocratic character.
The age of electronic media is different. The mass is admitted not only into cyberspace as readers but, at the same time, sets foot there as free writers. As Mark Poster notes:
The distinction between author and reader collapses under electronic writing. A new textual form thereby emerges, one able to pose challenges to the canonicity of works and even to the boundaries of disciplines. [8]
In The Carnival of the Many Gods, Meng Fanhua holds:
The building of the myth of openness, freedom, and equality on the Internet has spurred the wild growth of online literature. Beyond doubt, whether or not one has had training in literary writing, whether or not one was ever a writer, so long as one wishes to publish a work, one can overnight become a widely known “writer.” The Internet offers every “writer” unlimited space and possibility. [9]
The vanishing of the line between writer and reader means that the writer is bound to be unseated from the throne of authority, that power is gradually to be withdrawn from writing, and that the aristocratic character of literary writing and of poetic language is bound to break apart. The poetic kingdom built up by writing and print media will face a great crisis.
What follows on the dissolution of authority and power is an “anarchistic” language, a language of many voices. Dou Limei calls the language of online writing a “third language,” a language built by the “virtual context” that stands beyond the spoken and the written. She holds that the “virtual context” is
a comprehensive embodiment of virtual objective factors and virtual subjective factors. Unlike the context of traditional language, the virtual context strongly accentuates the virtual character of the linguistic environment and of the linguistic subject, breaks through all sorts of existing norms and rules, and is freer and more casual in expression. [10]
The openness of cyberspace, the freedom of online transmission, the virtual character of context, and the anonymity of the writer truly grant online writing a great freedom and grant online language an extraordinarily casual creative potential. Virtuality has suspended the exercise of power by authority. Within the virtual realm, power has lost its hold and begins to be wantonly overturned by the rebellious.
Language at home in cyberspace is as though returned to the carnival square, returned to the age of folk speech; it has “uncrowned” power, has abolished and mocked the heavy traditions and severe norms built up by “writing.” The result must be the carnival of speech. Here nicknames, mockery, parody, irony, the grotesque, and even the coarse and obscene words once held down by writing all grow with full freedom.
3. From “Poetic Realm” to “Jest”
In The Realm of Poetry: Feeling and Image, Zhu Guangqian writes:
Every poem is a realm of its own. Whether for the author or for the reader, when one heart-meets a poem, there must be before the eye a painted realm or a scene of drama, fresh and vivid, suddenly leaping into view, holding the spirit and soul, with a touch of fright and a touch of joy. For that instant there is no room for any side-glance, as though within this small heaven-and-earth there were a self-sufficient joy, and beyond it the whole wide cosmos and the whole spectrum of love and hate, sorrow and joy of personal life, all in that instant fade like smoke. The mind in pure poetry is the mind in concentrated gaze; the realm gazed upon by the pure poetic mind is solitary and held apart; mind and the realm it gazes upon are like fish at play in water, fitting together without seam. [11]
Yijing (the poetic realm) is the seamless meeting of feeling and scene, the mutual blending of man and nature. For Chinese classical poetry, whether one can create a deep and living poetic realm has often been the criterion for judging a poem and measuring the poetic quality of its language.
From a genetic angle, the creation of poetic realm in language only ripened after written composition had taken hold. Qian Zhongshu writes:
I would venture that in the Three Hundred Poems there is description-of-things (wuse) but no scenic landscape (jingse). What the brush touches stops at a single grass, tree, water, stone; even the finest matching of color and naming reaches no further than the “Qu Ode” of the Nine Pieces: “Green leaves and white blossom, layered branches with thorny spines, round fruit hanging together, green and yellow mingled.” [12]
The Book of Songs, as a transitional work from “orality” to “writing,” touches on natural objects but often stops at the scattered depiction of single events and single things. It is no more than “description of things,” not yet the “scene composed by combining several things,” still less the poetic realm in which feeling and scene blend together. “Writing” greatly developed the human power of thought and so made it possible for man to go beyond the grass, tree, water, and stone before the eye and, by language, to reassemble objects into an organic whole — into a unified, transcending realm. Without “writing” to set, by the determinate material medium of the letter, language apart from the objective object and apart from subjective intention — without building between word, thing, and mind a relation of “distance-yet-touch” — man could not use language to create a wholly new unified realm, much less use language to bring feeling and scene together. Only by winning its own independence could language move freely among objects that were originally walled off from one another, drag them together by force, and meld them; and only by being distinct from object and distinct from mind could language, at its own wish, gather feeling and scene within itself and let the two freely meet and marry within language.[note]
Ye Lang has made a deep study of the formation of the category yijing. He holds that the category xiang (image) appeared as early as the Pre-Qin period. After a long historical process, by the Wei-Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties, xiang at last transformed into yixiang (intentional-image). Yixiang is the union of image and feeling. If xiang still adheres to and stops at the object, then yixiang has become spiritualized; it is the spirit using the sensuously-imaged xiang to manifest itself anew by way of language. The Tang period was the era in which the creation of poetic image reached the natural, the abundant, the round and full, the flowing-of-primal-breath — the era in which the language of poetry reached its peak. It is also the era in which the category yijing ripened. Wang Changling, in Shi Ge (Rules of Poetry), was the first to set up “realm” (jing) so as to distinguish it from “image” (xiang), dividing realm into three: “object-realm” (wujing) for the realm of natural mountains and waters, “feeling-realm” (qingjing) for the realm of human experience, and “intentional-realm” (yijing) for the realm of the inner consciousness. Jiaoran spoke of “realm springing from feeling” and “poetic feeling springing from realm.” Liu Yuxi held that “realm is born outside the image,” clearly setting jing apart from xiang and treating jing as that which is both born of image and yet breaks through the finitude of image, entering the infinite realm outside the image. So in his Rules of Poetry he wrote: “In selecting realm, one must reach the most difficult, the most dangerous; only then will the rare line appear.” In Twenty-Four Modes of Poetry, Sikong Tu went further and put forward the views of “image beyond image,” “scene beyond scene,” “transcending the image to gain the ring-center,” giving vivid expositions of every form of the poetic realm. [14] Yijing — the poetic realm or realm-of-mind — is the most outstanding fruit that Chinese classical poetry won through long centuries of development. It is the concentrated embodiment of the poetic quality of language, and marks the maturity of poetic language and the most splendid achievement it reached in the classical period. Hence Wang Guowei, in speaking of the evaluation of poetry, wrote:
Canglang’s so-called “interest” and Ruanting’s so-called “spiritual savor” are still only a description of surface appearance; better is my own taking up of the two characters “realm” (jingjie) to fathom the root. [15]
He also wrote:
The realm that presents itself to my heart and that is seen in outer things is all a moment’s thing; engraving it into deathless letter, one lets the reader come to it on his own, so that he feels the poet’s words to be word-by-word what his own heart wished to say but what he himself could not say. This is the poet’s secret marvel. [16]
To realize “realm,” the poet must first take hold of the essentials of the “secret marvel”: a clear, alert mind and a leisurely aim, an unhurried waiting for the arrival of inspiration; then a chasing-down of the “momentary thing,” and a wringing-of-empty-belly search for the “deathless letter” that will express it. As for the reader, he requires lofty feeling and an unhurried mood of mind in order to slowly, finely savor and grasp the poem. Lu Xun once spoke of a “Chinese-style” reading by the cultivated person:
to come down with a little illness, with some cash on hand and nothing to bother one, to lie on the bed, hold a thread-bound Chinese book in hand, and read it lightly, without effort. [17]
This is a writing by the “leisured” and a reading by the “leisured.” The “deathless letter,” tempered over a thousand years and gradually partitioned out to create “realm,” can only be aristocratic; it has nothing to do with the folk that struggles against the straits of subsistence. And it is by no means only “realm.” Such other classical poetic categories as “interest,” “spirit-savor,” “qixiang” (climate), “feng-gu” (wind-bone), “miao-wu” (marvelous awakening), “xinghui” (rousing-meeting), “yunjie” (savor-stowing), and “yinxiu” (hidden brilliance) — all embody an aristocratic aesthetic sensibility, an aristocratic aesthetic mode. When the poetic pursuit of literature gives off the strong air of the aristocratic, the language of poetry — tempered around this very pursuit — must also tend toward an “elegant,” aristocratic destiny. For just this reason, in the May Fourth period Chen Duxiu and the young writers of the New Literature called out aloud to “tear down aristocratic literature, build a literature of the commoner.”
The rise of modern new poetry seemed to take a great stride along the road of vernacularizing poetic language. Yet in the end, new poetry too failed to truly return to the folk and turned instead back toward an aristocratic, self-admiring corner. Through its excessive pursuit of linguistic defamiliarization, of the personalization of context, and of semantic haze, the language of modern poetry has been hard and obscure — in some respects even more so than classical poetry. Modern poets openly declare: “Poetry is the breaking of communication.” “Poetry is forever aristocratic.”
The appearance and flourishing of the novel form, from another angle, dealt a great blow to traditional poetic language: it vastly expanded the territory of poetic language and brought a great deal of spoken language, vernacular phrase, and mixed speech into poetic language, transforming the poetic character of poetic language. Yet, as a poetic pursuit and ideal character of poetic language, this character did not change fundamentally. As Hu Xiaoming puts it:
Chinese poetics, as it developed up to the Tang, came to the self-conscious age of this trait — the mutual blending of mind and object. The men of Tang called it xingxiang (rousing-image) or yijing (poetic realm). What it points to is not confined to the poetic art of the Tang alone; it is the very essence of three thousand years of Chinese poets, passed down generation by generation. Its inner content is not confined to poetics alone; it is the seeding, development, and outflowing of the traditional Chinese humanistic spirit. [18]
Poetic language grew and matured alongside the privileged “writing.” On this journey, it often longed for the age of orality and time and again tried to return to the folk. But because it was enjoyed only by the privileged, soaked, normed, and screened by their taste and fashion, it could not in the end shed its aristocratic character. The poetic quality of language built by “writing” is aristocratic, and the poetic language that grew with “writing” can never fully erase the aristocratic birthmark.
When the electronic media of the Internet age multiplied rapidly and attempted to replace the handwritten and print media, when cyberspace offered literature and other kinds of writing an unprecedented freedom, the “Pandora’s box” of language was opened. Every manner of discourse poured out in a roar; the spoken, the mixed, even the obscene cavorted brashly in cyberspace, somersaulting and pulling dizzying faces. The hierarchical order and rule of language faced a never-before mockery and overturning, and the creative force of language found unprecedented release. The most outstanding feature was the playful attitude and jesting style of language: with a fool-headed, fool-hearted clowning, it freely deconstructed the mysterious, solemn, weighty poetic quality and realm built up by long history, attempting to smear the pure face of poetic language into a “big colored face,” even to swap it for the “rogue-faced” look of the punk. Within the many faces and many voices of online discourse, play-jest has become the most attention-catching linguistic phenomenon. Cyberspace is no longer the “pantheon” of language but the “carnival square.” Here the gods have been driven out, and the sacred poetic — yijing, spirit-savor, qixiang, marvelous awakening, and the like, all of which were built with the gods and held tightly to them — faces the awkward condition of being “fired,” and may even end up displaced for good.
To be sure, the traditional features of poetic language already faced serious challenge in modern works. In many works of the twentieth century, humor, jest, self-mockery, and clowning have become routine. In Wang Shuo, for example, the play-spirit fully fills the language of his works. Yet, distinct from these earlier phenomena, in cyberspace the play-spirit and rebel-spirit of language have already become the ideal of online writing — its most distinctive sign — or one might even say, the fate of online writing. As Dou Limei puts it:
Within the virtual context, the time and space that language faces are no longer concrete. Language becomes a direct play; the exchange and reception of language are no longer sacred. Within the unending play of language, language is fully expressed and exchanged. Letting-the-horse-go, unrestrained, free-and-easy: these have become the most outstanding play-features of the chains of online language. [19]
In Online Literary Landscape: The Free Realm of Online Literature, Yu Yang also notes:
Because of its distinctive mode of digitized existence, online language has a heightened tendency toward jest. Within the Internet, breeding, association, and innovation become a universal driving mode. In this environment, the extended meaning and the metaphorical meaning of language expand to an extreme, so that the “signifier” of language becomes ever more abundant. It often slips rapidly, and keeps cutting off the road by which people would reach the “signified.” The language of online literature thus becomes strange and unfathomable, even unintelligible, and takes on a heavier jest-coloring. [20]
The language of cyberspace is no longer shy or stammering. Contrary to its print-age character, it has become unbridled and let-it-all-out, even to the point of mischievous “flooding,” inflation, and self-flaunting. In this excess of flooding, inflation, and self-flaunting, the deep implication of language withers, leaving only the “signifier” to rampage, to slip, to play. The author of Spring Has the Cold of Winter, Summer Has the Cold of Winter — “Idle Woodcutter Night Rain” — introduces himself like this:
Man’s greatest sorrow lies in being unable to choose the age in which he lives. This is an age in which material is unprecedentedly abundant and feeling is unprecedentedly impoverished. Whether in my native place of grand mountain and crisscrossed rivers, or in the vast inland of the foreign country where I lived seven years, or in the great metropolis where I now make my home — all are markets of fame and gain within a roar, with little collision of wisdom and emptiness. So I feel like an actor who has walked onto the wrong stage, facing a hall of audience that has nothing to do with me, while the director makes me play the wrong part and asks me to make them laugh. [21]
The “director,” of course, is not some particular person but the age — or, more accurately, cyberspace. The moment the author logs on, he cannot help wanting to “make the audience laugh,” or rather, first of all to make himself laugh. The whole audience, after all, has “nothing to do with” him, and he could in any case never meet them face to face. So cyberspace bustles with figures like “Banyan Bug Bug” (Rongshu Chongchong), “The Pig That Won’t Stay in the Crosswalk,” “Sexy Pig Trotter,” “Murong Feihua,” “Groaning Without Being Sick” . . . As soon as one taps the keyboard and shows up online, the routine “dignified and elegant” are made fun of: out comes a face that first mocks itself, then mocks others. When the keyboard begins to dance, the language flies like prancing horses and stirring dragons in play. The mutually contradictory words, the discordant tones, the raw and earthy unconscious — all leap into action within laughter and mischief.
The freedom of cyberspace stands in sharp contrast to the enormous pressure modern industrial society places on man. So the latent desire to deconstruct the strict rational order built up by industrial society finds its full expression in cyberspace. Young people at last use the figure of the mo lei tau (“nonsense,” “off-the-wall”) and the language of the mo lei tau to enjoy their own freedom:
The mo lei tau figure is the very tool that male and female office workers in the big office buildings use to escape from work-ethic, and the perfect path by which to vent their own primal instincts of the irregular, the uncivilized, the unsanctified, the unnoble, the un-elite. Mo lei tau language is at once a coarse-down language and an unrestrained one. It is at once a teasing-mocking language and a happy clowning one. To put it figuratively: mo lei tau language is a language of playing the fool. [22]
Just as in the carnival square, in cyberspace the “fool-playing” language is the normal language. When electronic media stripped away the traditional power of knowledge, the line between “mad” and “not-mad,” “foolish” and “not-foolish,” no longer exists. Here is only play, without the line that divides true from false or right from wrong, for play has already crossed every artificial line that should not have been there in the first place. So-called “mad” and “foolish” are only the “green light” opened in advance for the writer to deconstruct order, in the moment before the tradition is to be pulled down. Play is the nature of man; it is the inside-and-outside of human freedom. It is because of play that man is free; and it is because of freedom that man needs to play. The classical “poetic realm” also offers spiritual freedom and consolation, yet this freedom is limited — the freedom of a few “elites.” To get to the root: the classical poetic realm is bound up with man’s attachment to a beautiful heaven and to gods, and it stands like a “kingdom of heaven.” The freedom of heaven is no longer human freedom: did Adam and Eve not bring guilt and suffering on themselves for the sake of just a small share of freedom? Play is man’s instinct. When the idea of God grows steadily dim, when the metaphysical pursuit has been given up, when the sacred has been desecrated, when the sensuous space-time built by the poetic realm has been flattened into a depthless surface without time-feel, man can only entertain himself through play and jest.
The play of language in cyberspace differs from what Schiller called play. Schiller’s play is bound up with man’s wholeness, with man’s sound development. The play of language in online writing is “play for play’s sake,” the play of self-indulgence. At the same time, it differs from the play of the modern avant-garde. If the modern avant-garde is a helpless yet determined struggle out of fear of and resistance to the technologization of the world — a play against the repression of reality, a cynicism against social filth — then online writing is the unbridled play of one who lives freely in cyberspace, an excess of affectation. It is man living in freedom, so that the play-instinct gets its fullest exposure. The vast achievements won by network technology drive man into a prostrate worship of technology, and lead those who hold technology to lose themselves in pride, believing that network technology can cure the ills of modern industrial civilization. It is this self-confidence and self-pride that drive man to mock and to laugh at everything. Here the sacred is uncrowned, the vile is praised, order is deconstructed, tradition is mocked — online writing seems to have regained the power of God-creating-the-world. In its idle, casual, off-handed play, everything is turned upside-down and reassembled.
McLuhan said play may lack moral seriousness. [23] Play is supra-moral; it pursues only thorough relaxation and pleasure. With this play-spirit, language cannot help but mock everything: it mocks itself, mocks others, mocks society, mocks ideal, value, and the whole of existence. Everything becomes a playing-target. So play-jest spills out of the human mode of language and into the human mode of existence. In Jiang Gan Crosses the River to Invite the Young Phoenix, Shitou writes:
To leap or not to leap, that is the question. Silently to endure the cruelty of fate, or to stand up and resist the boundless suffering of Gongjin — to fight back and sweep him clean — which of the two acts is the more noble? Leap, and it is all over! Go leap, go swim, go swim . . . one might catch a cold! Ah, that would be bad — who knows in that cold water what sort of cold one might catch by swimming?
Here the author parodies a soliloquy from Shakespeare. Whether it is Hamlet’s painful choice, or Qu Yuan’s drowning himself in the Miluo River, or the great enterprise of governing the world — under the author’s pen these solemn, sacred things have all become language-play and a stifled chuckle. The meaning of life, the value of striving, melt away in the linguistic shift from “leaping to drown” to “swimming” to fear of getting in the water and of “catching some cold or other.” The sublime turns into the laughable; tragedy turns into comedy, and even into farce. This is another kind of “flattened” poetic, the jest after aristocratic depth has vanished, the laughter of the common folk in the carnival square echoing in cyberspace. Jest likewise pervades works such as Biography of Wukong, A Side-Story of the Red Chamber, and BBS and chat rooms. After the sacred has stepped down, the jest takes the stage, sweeping out every privilege and broadcasting once again the spirit of freedom, the spirit of rebellion, and the spirit of folk utopia.
4. The Fate of Poetic Language
When we say poetic language has moved from the classical “poetic realm” to the popular “jest,” we do not mean that linguistic jest has monopolized cyberspace. Just as the poetic realm was the ideal pursuit of poetic quality in the age of writing, so play-jest is the dream of language in cyberspace. Even now it is only scattered here and there, or pressed into a corner, but play-jest remains the most distinctive linguistic form of the age of electronic media — and at the same time an important way for poetic language to realize the folk and the freedom-ideal. Play-jest promises language a future that is equal and free. Cyberspace is a space of freedom, a republic of languages; every kind of language receives a polite welcome, and every kind can speak here freely, including classical and aristocratic discourse — only that they too must lay down aristocratic airs and join the feast of discourse on equal footing. On this folk carnival square of cyberspace, ridicule and irony, replication and parody, exaggeration and affectation, levity and gravity, vulgarity and elegance — all grow freely.
Jest stands opposed to coercive discourse. Coercive discourse drives out the other voices outside itself, forces the object into absence and silence. Like a stern inspector, it beats down those speech-intentions that hesitate or remain dim and seals up the unconscious for life-long imprisonment, finally letting language wither into a pale, dried-up leaf. Jest scorns coercive power and mocks pretended seriousness, pouring fresh life of laughter back into language, urging it through the forbidden zone to burst forth. At the same time, jest is not biting sarcasm; it embodies the intimate communion among persons. Like a masquerade ball: once the masks are on, the distance and strangeness between persons vanish. The mask takes the place of the “real mask” of everyday life; the “iron law” of role-norms melts away; hypocrisy and pretension peel off. The mask leads to the true outpouring of human feeling — wearing the mask, the man comes out as his authentic self. In cyberspace, the play-jest of language dissolves the barriers between persons, draws them closer, and, because the real names of persons are hidden, makes person-to-person communion more easy and free. Spatial distance, age distance, and difference of identity no longer carry actual weight; so long as people are jointly online, hearts open at once, and the original nature shows. What is not said in everyday contact, what is not convenient to say, what one had not even thought of saying, all at once leap into laughter on the screen. So the language of jest, with its interpersonal warmth, becomes a calling-out and a cohesive force for other discourses as well; with the laughter it dissolves the serious rules of language; with an all-tolerating breast it calls forth every manner of discourse, building a joyous world of laughter. This feature of jest also makes language “unfinished”: it gives language a power to propagate. Within the whirl of laughter the latent energy of language breaks out; it slips the grip of human consciousness and of linguistic rule, dashes wantonly out, freely scattering joy.
In cyberspace, cultural resources have been redistributed, and this brings on a change in the participants of literary activity, in the groups, modes, and ranges that use poetic language — and above all in the relations among man and language, among man and man, among man and world — and so in the state of human existence. This is bound to bring on a mutation of poetic language. If the poetic quality of language in the age of writing lay precisely in literature’s setting up a virtual realm and drawing the writer and the audience into immersion in it, then cyberspace not only sets up virtual situations and creates a virtual subject, but also — by comparison with literature — creates a vaster, freer, and more “real” virtual world. Everyone can directly become creator and practitioner; through the virtual one liberates oneself, fully relaxes, fully vents one’s feeling and desire, and lays bare the “authenticity” of the world of being. Cyberspace offers a “romantic world” rich in “poetic flavor,” so much so that the literary world looks redundant and pale by contrast. For just this reason, poetic language has extended its own territory to the whole of cyberspace.
What fate, then, does the loss of the literary boundary and the expansion of poetic territory bring to poetic language?
Because computer writing scatters the subject within a non-linear time-space, because of its non-materiality and its overturning of stable identity, computer writing builds a factory for postmodern subjectivity, manufactures a machine for constructing non-identical subjects, writes an inscription for an other (another) of Western culture, and enrolls it within Western culture’s most precious manifesto. One could call it a monster. [24]
Does this lead to the end of poetic language? The answer is plainly no. Computer writing can reconstruct human subjectivity but cannot abolish the human yearning for freedom. So long as there is man, there is language; so long as there is human freedom, there is poetic language. In cyberspace, poetic language may grow coarse, tangled, and boundless, may grow with weed and grain mixed, may grow beyond recognition — yet it will never wither and die.
To be sure, the postmodern “visual turn” and the computer multimedia pose the greatest threat to poetic language: they press in upon language with their proud sound, light, and form, encircle it, and try to suffocate its shy poetic. But cyberspace, after all, offers language its best dwelling-place. Language is still generating itself and quickening within online writing, mutating at unprecedented speed. Poetic language is no longer confined to the narrow precinct of literature. It now holds the whole of cyberspace, seeping into nearly all online writing, and because of its quickness and changeability it has gained new powers of survival and adaptation. In this free space, language has begun its laughter-laden journey of returning to the folk, returning to the oral, returning to the primal. Play-jest is rooted in human nature and instinct, in the folk, in the oral, in the primal. Once it has shaken off the threat of power, language slips away of itself to its spiritual home, taking on a primeval, exuberant vitality and a power of free growth. Perhaps the native state and the authentic spirit of language will be revived in cyberspace as well.
Man is born free. The multidimensionality of human existence and the richness of the human state of being decree that man cannot leave poetic language. As the times and society move forward, poetic language will accompany man, walking with the changes in his mode of existence and continually unfolding new splendor of its own.