A book on the auditory dimensions of modern Chinese poetry in the last hundred years is very welcome. Much has been written about text and orality in pre-modern China, and on recitation as the favourite literary practice during the Cultural Revolution. But no monograph had till now brought together and examined the 20th-century Chinese collective idea of "voice" and poetic experimentation, movements for national salvation, language reform, theoretical debates on poetic forms, and various conceptions of poetry. So, the time is ripe for John Crespi's Voices in Revolution, a book that links all these aspects together, matches sources and shows how they have informed one another.
After tracing a concise history of Chinese performed poetry through oral interpretations of the Shi Jing, Crespi discusses texts from the 20th century. The first is Lu Xun's 1908 essay “On the Power of Mara Poetry,” a text that gives evidence of the emergence of the Chinese imagination of poetic voice together with an ideology of national agency and salvation. Crespi proceeds by giving an overview of poetic and theoretical work by 1920s and 1930s authors, exploring first discussions and experiments on the ways new poetry should be “voiced” in print and in performance. Particularly inspiring, I find, are those issues related to the performativity of the poetic text. It is suggested that the decision to give sound and voice to the poem constitutes in itself a social choice inasmuch as the corporeal nature of the oral performance helps create an interpersonal social and linguistic space of community. Modern and contemporary Chinese poets have debated how to reduce the supposed distance between reader and print poem; the most suitable language and forms for poetry that communicates to a large audience; whether poetry is an exclusively literary event or belongs to the realm of the extratextual “real world,” where the literary has a merely instrumental value? Evidence of these concerns is found in recent discussions on “live” poetry reading, poetry popularization and de-mystification. Thus this book is not only useful for providing a better understanding of different poetic tendencies throughout the modern period, but also for giving historical background to more contemporary discourses.
The central chapters in the book (chapters three and four) are dedicated to an examination of the proliferation of recitation poetry that took place during the 1930s and 1940s, and to associated discussions over content, language, writing devices, and recitation techniques, all of which contributed to the advance of recitation as literary practice. Critical writings drawn upon in these chapters include essays by Liang Zongda, Wang Bingyang, Xu Chi, Hong Shen, and Pu Feng. Crespi also consults diaries, journals and recitation reviews. As for the poetic texts, the chapters present us with excerpts from works by Gao Lan, Guang Weiran, Jiang Xijin, Zang Kejia, Mu Mutian, Huang Ningying and He Qifang.
By placing these writings in their immediate social context, by locating these writings historically, Voices in Revolution enriches our understanding of these texts as social experience. These are indeed works of the committed imagination, works complying with their contingency. As such, they aimed at acting socially, moving from the page to the street, and becoming almost invariably public poems.
During the Mao era (the focus of chapter six) poetry recitation evolved into a theatricalised art form that was sanctioned by the state, minutely annotated with guidelines, and performed by professional actors, in order to enthusiastically celebrate socialist achievements. The author convincingly points at rhetorical continuities between wartime recitation poetry, Mao-era political lyricism, and early Misty poetry. And this takes the reader to the final chapter of the book (chapter seven), dedicated to what is defined the “recitation renaissance” of the first years of the 21st century. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2005, Crespi describes cases of recent poetry recitations which appear to occur in the context of the booming real estate sector. The bizarre link is but an expression of the current “culture-economy,” and leads Crespi to the conclusion that poetry recitation, both as yundong (the mass campaigns of wartime and the socialist period) and huodong (events situated in the present time) has maintained the prerogative of a means used to mobilize the population to meet state goals.
I hope I have demonstrated that this is a book worth reading. One note of criticism would be the fact that many of the fundamental issues of Chinese poetics are often presented as more clear cut than they really are, therefore receiving limited attention. For example, the interesting question of automatic criticism inherent in public reading of poetry, the fact that a spoken poem may easily show up defects and weaknesses, as well as disclose unexpected moments of beauty, is only briefly mentioned. Similarly, the assumed silence of the written, not uttered word is taken for granted, as if a written word could ever be silent. At some point it would seem that the use of dialect in poetry has a clear communicative purpose in poetry recitation. But this is also, in my view, insufficiently explored and left unproblematized. The link between recurrent poetic projects based on the use of kouyu is not shown, despite the fact that this issue has been conspicuously revived by a number of poets in the 1990s. Further, the last chapter only summarily sketches the problematics of poetry recitation that is used to serve naked economic interests, or the emergence of a new type of “committed” poet. A final note of criticism regards the absence of the Chinese original of quoted texts. Although I understand that this might be due to an editorial decision, I think it does affect the usefulness of this book for scholarly purposes.
To conclude, I believe this book constitutes an excellent introduction to the topic of the auditory dimensions of modern and contemporary Chinese poetry, and as such I hope it will soon generate much more scholarship on the subject.
