Reality in Poetry and Art

One of the books that I have been reading this week, Moment of Rising Mist: A Collection of Sung Landscape Poetry, an anthology of translations by Amitendranath Tagore, includes a large section of poetry by Ou-yang Hsiu, an eleventh century poet.

Tagore tells us in his notes on the poetry that Hsiu rejected the imitative T’ang dynasty poetics of imitation: “Ou-yang Hsiu and mei Yao-ch’en together rejected this highly ornate literature, labeled it decadent and lacking in thought. They created the literature of their own time, a literature of great depth and content. The literary ideals they established remained the ideals of Chinese literature until they came under attack in the 1920’s when the pai-hua or colloquial literature came into the forefront.”

The idea of the poet in Chinese literature before the modern period always interacted with the world of political power explicitly. Poetic composition early on was part of religious observance, but for a very long time was part of the skill of the courtier. Chinese bureaucracy was not a function of a strict class system. People entered into it through an exam system that distributed positions meritocratically. Poetic composition was a part of the range of skills that a courtier required. Once one rose to become a member of the class of courtiers there was no guarantee that palace intrigue or changes in emperors would not completely dislodge the courtier from office or even the right to live where they chose. Frequently a fall from influence would include forced exile. As a result, many of the poets who might seem to the Western reader to be living the life of a poet were internal political exiles. Thus, the kind of “landscape poetry” that Tagore translated, while in some cases may be expressions of Taoism or Buddhist thought, is a kind of political expression, or at least a reaction to the fate that political events had forced on the writer.

Here are a couple of examples from Ou-yang Hsiu’s poetry that work in this way:

CLIMBING THE MOUNTAIN

Rapidly I climbed the high mountain,
Then sought out a steep ledge; I longed to enjoy this alone.
The fragrant grass by the rill was alarmed at first,
Suddenly I came across a hut overlooking the cliff.
The road by the forest edge I have lost already;
I can only follow the echo of the woodcutter’s song.

This poem can be read as a reflection of his experience in the Imperial court. The phrase, “The fragrant grass by the rill was alarmed at first,” can be read as a brillant poetic description of coming upon a field of grass being blown over by a hard wind only to rise back straight after the breeze passes. However, the anthropomorphism can be read as a reference to receiving a broad negative initial reaction to his presence at court.

COMING DOWN THE MOUNTAIN

Walking and singing midst the subtle blue,
 Together we descend the path ahead.
A Thousand peaks glow in the setting sun,
A bird plunges downward from the cliff.
There is no one to man the evening ferry,
The boat is tied on the islet.

Here Hsiu at first portrays himself as a carefree observer of the natural world in company with a fellow vagabond. However, as they participate in a general downward motion in the world they find themselves blocked by the indifference of authority to the needs of the people.

In these poetics, the world is presented primarily through realistic description. The reader can accept this surface reading, but can also read deeper if they choose. Being able to read his poetry at both registers at the same time gives the deepest reading and most likely the intended understanding. We can view this poetics, which dominated Chinese poetry for most of a millenium, as a form of doubled realism rather than a simple use of aestheticized landscape metaphors. This reading would certainly have been easily accessible to the originally intended readers.

The struggle to portray reality in art has a different affect in the work of the Boris Lurie, a survivor of the Holocaust, beginning in Riga, Latvia. Lurie’s struggle to deal with his experiences and his losses in the Holocaust was reflected in his understanding of the values of Art and the role of the artist in society. His views were extreme and his work was often coarse and purposely repellent. His intentions were to present a reality of the world that others were too blindered or too anesthetized to feel.

Lurie’s father had a talent for and was successful in business even during the New Economic Policy period in the early Soviet Union. The family fled Russia after the rise of Stalin when those who had participated in creating private businesses during the NEP Period were being arrested. They fled to Riga, Latvia where his father again built up his business interests. Things were difficult after the Soviet Union took over Latvia in mid-1940, but things became much worse when the Nazi regime invaded in June and July of the following year. They created a ghetto in Riga, and when they needed a place for a large group of German Jewish deportees the women and the elderly were taken to a rural location, Rumbula, stripped and instructed to lie down in pits over those previously executed and shot dead. Lurie’s mother, sisters and girlfriend were all among those killed at Rumbula.

Miraculously, both Lurie and his father survived the war. However, the shape of their lives and the way that they viewed the world was deformed in ways that were more or less obvious over time. Lurie’s harsh view of how the world worked was formed in those years. For all of those with any sensitivity to this experience, his odd behaviors, like his squalid living arrangements and his hoarding of expired canned goods, could be connected back to the experiences that he had in the formative years of his teens on the voyage between Riga and the Maidanek camp with many stops along the way.

Lurie exhibited artistic talent before the Holocaust years. He is now known in part because of a large series of drawings that can be read as straight documentation of his Holocaust experience that he did for his own purposes in 1946. However, his career as an artist took place in the United States in the era where Abstract Expressionism was in the ascendance.

The art world was in the 1940s and 1950s very New York centric and a kind of club of those who rejected the mores of the times. Commercial success was looked down on. The visual artists and sculptors shared space and company with Beat authors, Jazz musicians and Folk music performers. As the rebellion of the Abstract Expressionists began to achieve financial success and the Pop Art movement came to the fore, Lurie was coming into his own, creating powerful works of collage and assemblage. However, he retained and escalated his fight against what he viewed as the false or merely blandly collaborationist in art. This crystallized in the identification of Lurie and a group of other artists around him as the NO! Art movement. His use of his Holocaust experiences and his use of Holocaust and pornographic material was meant to be shocking. While he remained productive and was able to continue being the subject of exhibitions, his treatment by the art establishment thereafter was predictably dismissive.

What is important about Lurie’s work, like that of Ou-yang Hsiu’s, is the effort that he put into making art that helped make the problems of the world more visible, rather than more pleasant. The way that his art works requires a detailed explanation which I will get into next week.