"Green, how I love you green" Lorca, Bei Dao's Waves, and Sleepwalking in History

Abstract

Employing the techniques of stream of consciousness, disjointed narrative structure, and multiple points oi view, Waves stands ,is a unique testament oi "underground literature" from that period and tells the love Story between two young people, Yang Xun and Xiao Fing, during the late Cultural Revolution.

Headnote

What keeps the sleepwalker walking is as much the inalibility of awakening from the sleep of history as the eternal lure of that most mystic "green" laid in the depths of dreams.

1

Federico Garcia Lorca's reception in China has been a story in itself. In 1933 Chinese poet Dai Wan gsh ii traveled from Paris to Spain and was impressed by Lorca's lyrical popularity on his native soil. lie became the first translator of Lorca's poetry in Chinese right afterward and was determined to continue working on this project upon the news of Lorca's murder in `936. In 1950, barely a few months after the founding of the Peoples Republic of China, Dai died of a sudden heart attack in Beijing. In 1956 his translation, Selected Poems of Lorca, was published in book form. Da i Wangsh us translation has until this day been acclaimed for its marvelous rendition of Lorca's A ida I usian imagery and sound in modern Chinese. But Lorca's real long-lasting influence would have to wait to he realized among another generation ol young poets, the later so-called Misty Poets who started writing during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and thirsted for any new inspirations that were beyond the rigid confines of socialist real sm and orthodo propaganda.

Bei Dao, the leading figure of the Misty Poets group, recoil nts this most unlikely encounter of his generation with Lorca:

I fist read Selected Poemss of Lorca in Dai Wangshu's translation in the early 1970s. That great book-banning Campaign only deepened our spiritual thirst and hunger.....When Selected Poems of Lorca passed through our hands hurriedly, it made quite a stir. Lorca's shadow once loomed over the underground poetry scene in Beijing. There was Lorca's echo in Fang Han (Sun Kang)'s poetry; as for Mang Ke's long-lost poem "Green within Green," its title was obviously derived from "Sleepwalker's Ballad"; in the early 1980s, I introduced Lorca to Gu Cheng, so his poetry was also tinted with Lorca's color.1

We can see the echo of Forca's "Sleepwalker's Ballad" and its haunting "green" in Bei Dao's own work - not just his poetry, but also his fiction. His novella Waves was first drafted in November 1974, revised in June 1976, revised again in April 1979, and, finally, surfaced to the aboveground and published in an official literary journal in 1981. Employing the techniques of stream of consciousness, disjointed narrative structure, and multiple points oi view, Waves stands ,is a unique testament oi "underground literature" from that period and tells the love Story between two young people, Yang Xun and Xiao Fing, during the late Cultural Revolution. According to Bonnie S. McDougall, the novella's English translator, "it was one of the first works to portray the complex new world of disillusion, betrayal, and despair."

In fact, "Sleepwalker's Ballad" is invoked by Xiao Fing, the female protagonist, when she and Yang Xun start to feel mutual attraction and a bond while walking together in "a damp night mist, under the dim "haloed streetlights":

Suddenly she stopped. "Do you like poetry?"

"Yes."

"If I recite a poem, will you listen?"

"Of course."

She gazed straight ahead, her voice at once gentle and fervent:

"Green, how I love you green.

Green wind, groen branches,

The ship upon the sea,

The horse in the mountains.

Green, how I love you green.

Myriad stars of while frost.

Come with the fish of darkness

Which opens the road to dawn.

The fig tree scours the wind

With the sandpaper of its branches,

The mountain, like a wildcat,

Bristles its angry bitter-aloes."3

The folkloric and surrealistic image of "green," according to Christopher Maurer, "is, simply, a longed-for, indefinable state of mind, like Maltarmé's image ol infinity: azur.'"' In Bei Dao's story, however, the enchanting "green" has a more concrete significance. It spells out a fantastic space of hope and freedom and also a lyrical, almost mystital time, which may not exist anywhere but shimmering in the dark, in a dream, delving the gravity ol the Cultural Revolution or history itself.

That is to say, for Bei Dao's male and female protagonists, the "green" almost instantly and Intuitively becomes their guide, leading them, even if only temporarily, out ol their immediate and oppressive existential environment into an entirely different world ol poetry and beauty, where they can breathe and love, to a much slower, deeper, and more natural rhythm, a rhythm of hypnotizing "waves," like blood ebbing and flowing inside one body, calling for its resonance from another. In short, for that moment, they are sleepwalking.

2

Still, "sleepwalking" also signifies that painful 'awareness ol being unable to awaken:

"It's a beautiful dream. What a pity it only lasts an instant before it dies."

"On the contrary, our generation's dream is too painful, and too long; you can never wake up, and even if you do, you'll only find another nightmare waiting for you." (96)

True, they are sleepwalking, but they are sleepwalking in history, not outside or beyond it.

Hence a sleepwalker sees the opposite of what the others see. Again, as Xiao Fing quotes Baudelaire in the story.

The sky is beautiful,

The sea is serene

But 1 see only

Darkness and blood . . . (136)

This clairvoyance epitomizes the melancholy and sentimental loss that have tinted the narrative of Waves throughout.

Waves, however, is not merely a bitter, sentiniental story. Rather, it is a philosophical inquiry on Bei Dao's part exploring the nature of history that a young generation has been ensnared in and living through. At some point in the story, Uncle Shen, a wise-old-man figure who once Studied Oriental history at Harvard, explains to Xiao Ling as follows:

Old Hegel says this: "All forms ol existence bind themselves to their own selfcreated history; furthermore, history as a kind ol concrete universal determines and transcends them. . . ." That is to say, it's very difficult for man to transcend his own body and recognize history, and those on the crest ol the historical wave recognize this even less: this, then, is the lamentable position of certain great men. (153)

Hegel is cited here Io affirm the all ombrai ing nature of history, but the same Hegel may be twisted by his own arms to expose the limits of his dialectic. What is realized, then, is the poignant idea that no one "great men" like Mao are no exception - an know or grasp history in its true and comprehensive sense. Far from being self-confident masters of a grand linear march or progress, individuals are, at most, sleepwalkers in a mazelike history. Any attempt ol rational ization, even with the and of such a Hegelian dialectic, is to no avail and only underscores the despair and helplessness Bei Dao and his protagonists feel while facing the Cultural Revolution as a collective, national experience of a bleak - and absurd - logic of historical inevitability. Such is the existential predicament that Bei Dao's protagonists find themselves squarely in.

"Green" in Lorca's "Sleepwalker's Ballad'' alludes to hope as well as to misfortune and death, and its Andalusian gypsy dream cannot avoid the abrupt intrusion by the "drunken" Civil Guards who are "pounding on the door." Similarly, Bei Dao and his protagonists have been branded by the very clandestine condition of the Cultural Revolution, which has, in a somber vet paradoxical tone, defined their outlook on the world: the world is as false as history is real.

3

Bei Dao acknowledged on many occasions that the death of his younger sister, Shanshan, in summer 1976 had greatly impacted him during his revision of the story. Waves also ends with Xiao ling's implied death, not unlike what happens to the gypsy girl in "Sleepwalker's ballad." Il we read it allegorically, the female protagonists in both works stand for individuals who have been alienated, suppressed, and eventually sacrificed by a large, dark force of history.

Nevertheless, different from the misty and yet passive, silent gypsy girl in lorca's poem whose waiting has been in vain, Xiao Ling in Waves assumes a defiant and dissenting individual voice, which, although isolated and fragile, confronts the numb, suffocating daily life and false world much more honestly and forthrightly than her male counterparts do.

Indeed, it is Xiao Ling who is Bei Dao's real intellectual mouthpiece in the story and questions the often orthodox view of nation and history that her male counterparts hold. With Yang Xun, she debates life's duty:

"Tell me something, please. ... In your life, what is there worth believing in?"

I thought for a moment. "Our country, for example."

"Ha, that's an outdated tune."

"No, I don't mean some hackneyed political cliché, I mean our common suf- fering, our common way of life, our common cultural heritage, our common yearning . . . all of these make up our indivisible fate; we have a duty to our country . . ."

"Duty?" she cut me off coldly. "What duty are you talking about? The duty to be an offering after having been slaughtered, or what?"

"Yes, if necessary, that kind oi duty."

"Forget it. I can just see you sitting in a spacious drawing room discussing the subject like this. What right have you to say 'we,' what right? . . . No thanks, this country's not mine! 1 don't have a country . I don't have one . . ." (93)

In front of Lin Dongping, a patriarchal figure embodying the party authorities, she defends the value oi the seemingly ephemeral and insignificant "waves" of personal emotions:

"Young people's emotional ups and downs are temporary, they come and go like waves."

"Have you experienced this temporariness, Uncle Lin?" [. . .]

"You're too obstinate."

"We must act out our own roles to the end."

"You believe in your own legitimacy too?"

"Yes, I believe the world won't go on like this Io re ? er. Perhaps that's the difference between us."

"You're still too young."

She gave a little smile. "So this world seems too old." (196-97)

For Xiao Ling, the teleological progress of history is but a lie or fiction. What is deemed as trivial in the Hegelian picture of the world can turn out to be the most precious in life. In this sense all these "temporary" moments and elements of love and liberty constitute the core of life's true existence and independent value.

It is also in this sense that Xiao Ling stands out, in the entire story, as the only sober sleepwalker as well as the singularly mesmerizing and beautiful wave itself against a boundless background of darkness:

In a little while the light went out and she stood in the doorway, wearing the snowwhite dress, and walked over. The vast night behind her threw her into relief. Amidst the black ocean she was a glistening wave, and the stars countless drops of living loam. (173)

Such an epiphany represents an aesthetic and moral negation oi the apparently real and rational history. Ultimately, embodied by that sleepwalking figure of "a glistening wave," "amidst the black ocean," there persists a radical, heretical, and - one would say - less agnostic than Gnostic passion for truth and beauty.

4

In many aspects, Waves has not strayed far from the most famous allegory that Fu Xun had first established in his "A Madman's Diary" and "Preface to Call Io Arms" at the dawn of modern Chinese literature: namely, hislorv as a suffocating "iron house." bei Dao's "sleepwalker" is very much a continuation of Lu Xun's "madman," who is imprisoned in the "iron house" oi history, tossing in that painful, artificiali) prolonged dream and vet always anticipating the moment oi liberation and awakening.

"Poets should establish through their works a world ol their own, a genuine and independent world, an upright world, a world of justice and humanity."5 Such is the credo that Bei Dao has held fast to in many oi his early poems. Stephen Owen once reviewed these poems harshly: "Such sentimentality (or, perhaps, self-conscious posing) is, hovvev cr, the disease of modern Chinese poetry. ... It may be a poet's single most important task to learn to avoid passages like the following from 'Rainy Night'":

Even if tomorrow morning

the muzzle and the bleeding sun

make me surrender freedom youth and pen

I will never surrender this evening

I will never surrender you

let walls stop up my mouth

let iron bars divide my sky

as long as my heart keeps pounding the

blood will ebb and flow

and your smile be imprinted on the crimson

moon

rising each night outside my small window

recalling memories."

Yet Owen's criticism neglected that Bei Dao's emphatic announcement has its own context or pretext, which is presented in the very first stanza of the poem:

While the shattered night in the flooded

ditch

was rocking a new leaf

as if rocking its child to sleep

while the lamplight threaded raindrops

studded your shoulders

gleaming and rolling down

you said no

in such a resolute tone

but a smile revealed vour heart's secret.7

This is, again, another lyrical moment of sleepwalking brimming with ordinary yet genuine human sentiments oi intimacy and dream. The utter refusal to surrender both "this evening" and "you" is thus far from a heroic fallacy or romantic cliche, but a most brav e and noble act, even if such an act can never be rid of the shadow of tragedy and death as hinted at by the unsettling "crimson moon" and "bleeding sun."

"The august sleepwalker / has seen the sun in the night. "s The truth is that "sleepwalking" has been one oi the key themes twisting through Bei Dao's early poetry and fiction, which would culminate in such mid-1980s poems as "The August Sleepwalker" and "Daydream." Soon afterward he would leave China for exile. Ever since then, we may say that liei Dao has lived in a perpetual "sleepwalking" state - what is exile if not but another form of sleepwalking?

What keeps the sleepwalker walking is, howev er, as much the inability oi awakening from the sleep oi history as the eternal lure oi that most mystic "green" laid in the depths of dreams. And that precious, pearl-like "green," as already seen in Waves, like Forca's "Sleepwalker's ballad" itself, deserves every bit of love and memory, in any language, for us and for future generations.

Connecticut College

References

1 Bei Dao, The Rose of Time (Shijiande meigui) (Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.

2 Bei Dao, Waves, tr. Bonnie S. McDougall & Susette Ternet Cooke (New Directions, 1990), viii.

3 Bei Dao, Waves, 95-96. Here I slightly modified the translation of the most famous line in Lorca's poem: "Verde que te quiero verde."

4 Christopher Maurer, introduction to Collected Poems, by Federico García Lorca, rev. ed. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002), Iviii.

5 Bei Dao, Waves, vi.

6 Stephen Owen, "What Is World Poetry? The Anxiety of Global Influence," New Republic (November 19, 1990), 30; for more on Owen's controversial remarks, see David Damrosch, "What Is World Literature?" World Literature Today 77.1 (April 2003), 9-14.

7 Bei Dao, "Night Rain," in The August Sleepwalker, tr. Bonnie S. McDougall (New Directions, 1990), 51.

8 Bei Dao, "The August Sleepwalker," in The August Sleepwalker, 103.