Book Review
Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers: Lyricism, Nationalism, and Hybridity in China and Its Others.
by Gregory B. Lee. London: Hurst & Company. 1996. 286 pages. ISBN: 1-85065-219-8 (cased); 1-85065-265-1 (paper). E16.50.

The cumbersome title of this book reflects the fallacy of asking too many questions and providing too many answers. The book is not a whole. It is a collection of various articles, seminar papers, and private narratives about the issue of social identity and the effects of social/literary protest ranging from poets in contemporary China, to Chinese and French popular protest music, to a semi-autobiographical narrative on the author's small Chinese community in Liverpool, and a paean to the "exiled" poetry of Duoduo. Inter-alia is a running commentary on the competing theories which construct the world of literary criticism: poststructuralism, post-colonialism, post-modern, and post-Marxist. Gregory Lee, who is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Hong Kong, favors French theoretical thinkers such as Guy Debord, Paoul Veneigem, and Henri Meschonnic. In a style reminiscent of writing a letter, Professor Lee 'savages the Sinological Orientalists, Stephen Owen, W.J.F. Jenner, Arthur Waley, and the almost-Sinologist Fredric Jameson.

The above characterization is immediately telegraphed in the convoluted and indirect writing of the first paragraph: "...In discussing communities and cultures that transgress borders and boundaries, this volume, similarly, is designed to be theoretically, methodologically and ideologically transgressive. If the work seems inconsistent or contradictory, that is due in part to the author's difficulty in narrating the experience and developments of both society and the author as if from some omniscient unitary perspective of arrested time." (p. ix)

This book should be read by the scholars of cultural studies for several reasons: 1) it is the first major attempt to use modern literary critiques to a vast array of Chinese literature and literary experience; 2) it is an attempt to link the Chinese struggles with hybrid and "alteration" with struggles in Southern (Occitan) France; 3) it introduces the American and British reader to Continental theories on literary analysis and links them directly to the Chinese lyrical response to postcolonialism; 4) it is equally critical of the Maoist/Deng "Chinese socialism", and the commodity capitalism impregnating Chinese and world culture.

Whereas the scholar of comparative literature may benefit from this book, he/she will have to struggle through the material. The book is marred by a considerable amount of questionable scholarship and methodology: the discussion of "Misty Poetry" is misleading because it is extreme to say that this group of poets was FY contemptuously dismissed by the authorities" (pp.80,34), and the inclusion of the poet Duoduo is at least open to debate. The adumbrated use of Rey Chow's article on post-colonial writing in Hong Kong is not only unclear to this reader but also cites the wrong page in footnote 33. There is a strong tendency to write in long sentences that attack many targets in a laundry list of projectile grammar that quickly exhausts the reader (see page 26.)

Imbricated in the various critiques is a basic idealistic assumption that poetry "is to interpret material reality, to unmask the false, to reconfigure reality the better to demonstrate falseness, to attempt to describe what is not false, to reveal moments and images of hope, to construct landscapes of optimism, and visions of a material world remade" (P.44) Lee concludes his selection of essays with the nearly apocalyptic message: "...the poetic moment produced by the 'refashioned' poetic language of Duoduo..... slits open the veils of the once concentrated, now integrated spectacular [oppressive fascist/capitalist] society, exposing the inherent conservatism and nostalgia of an ideology shrouded in the threadbare clothes of an increasingly feeble nationalism and dedicated to a preservation of the present and its order. Where the process of the eventual abolition of poetry through its realization will start is not known--perhaps in China, perhaps in France, perhaps in the Mexican Chiapas--but the poem when made will without doubt be a hybrid epic of life and not an 'authentic' dirge of survival." (p. 271.)

My problem with Lee's difficult but thoughtful book is that it is so alienated from history. I am sure that his school of literary criticism rejects the notion of causality and linear narratives. He is able to reduce most of the complexities and changes in the modern world to a series of conclusions about the hold of fascism and capitalism on the world. There is a either-or argument imbedded in his analysis. There is no gray, no room for lives that do not appreciate, witness, or care about the macro-struggles. Let me just give one alternative to Lee's analysis. The Chinese poets of the 80's and 90's can be viewed within their own historical dimension. Michelle Yeh, Professor of Chinese at the University of California, Davis, has suggested that we analyze these poets within the paradigm of a "Cult of Poetry." (See :"The 'Cult of Poetry' in Contemporary China," in The Journal of Asian Studies, 55,#l (February 1996)pp.51-80.) Her analysis provides many more nuances and a greater historical sophistication than Lee's work. Together, they provide the reader with a broad range of theory and specific examples of the Chinese poet at work.