Meditation on the Road:
Six Wartime Sonnets (IV)
Response to Comments
My interlocutor suggested a more comprehensive discussion of the first-person narrative of Feng Zhi’s Sonnet 6, which I simply indicated with quotation marks in my previous entry. Therefore, I ask myself anew: why does Feng Zhi choose a first person speaker for the poem’s primary voice?
Viewpoint Shift
If the opening line, “I often see in the fields,” makes us, the reader, impulsively identify ourselves with the first person speaker, lines 4-7 rather encourage us to shift our viewpoint—together with “mine”—to that of the boy and the woman: “Is it over some punishment or a broken toy? Is it over a husband’s death or a son’s illness?” These speculations require empathy that transcends the distinction between the observer and the observed, between “my”/our perception and theirs. In this sense, line 3 also prompts “me”/us to think with “the clear, wordless sky”: why do “I”/we remain “clear and wordless” towards the boy’s or the woman’s cry?
Boundary Transcendence
But hold on! Can “I” really transcend these boundaries? The setting and description in the first two lines, “I often see in the fields a village boy or peasant woman,” already establishes, however implicitly, a contrast between the superior speaker and the inferior subjects of his speech. Even the motives for his speech are suspicious: why does the speaker bother to tell a story about the boy and the woman?
Similarly, it is uncertain whether the speaker can truly think with the sky, instead of merely projecting his own vision on to it. The “clear, wordless” appearance is deceptive: the sky may look cloudy and responsive in the eyes of the boy and the woman. Their cry over “a broken toy” or “a husband’s death,” therefore, may not be as pointless and pathetic as it is in the view of the speaker, whose speculation limits the causes of their cry to ‘trivialities.’
If the speaker fails to transcend the boundary due to his self-conceit, what about us?
Double Uncertainty
The conjunction in line 9, “as if,” suggests a double uncertainty: first, it is uncertain whether the boy and the woman are aware of the fact that they are imprisoned. In other words, we do not know whether the speaker thinks “their whole life is laid in a frame” or the boy and the woman themselves think so. If the former, then “as if” reinforces the speaker’s I-know-better attitude toward the boy and the woman; if the latter, then they have an alternative reason to cry that surpasses the trivialities in the speaker’s view and scorns both his speculation and his arrogance.
Second, it is uncertain whether the assertion is a fact at all. The whole life of the boy and the woman may not be laid in a frame; they can be true to life and closely connected to each other. On the contrary, the frame is false, and the speaker is alienated: he accidentally frames the boy and the woman in (a scene he mourns), because he constantly frames himself out (of a world he considers desperate). The pity he offers to the boy and the woman springs from his self-pity and reveals his proud consciousness of being a universal foreigner—a wanderer in a permanently foreign universe.
By now, to whom do we find ourselves closer?
Maturer Wisdom
The last stanza, like the first, begins with “I feel.” This strengthens the contrast between the speaker and the objects of his observation, suggesting a different, non-trivial quality of the cause of cry recognized by him—“over a desperate globe.” If “as if” can be characterized as I-know-better, then “I feel” can be marked as I-feel-deeper or I-think-higher.
We, however, have learnt to be more cautious. Even though the leap from “some punishment or a broken toy”—from “a husband’s death or a son’s illness”—to “a desperate globe” looks at first sight like transcendence par excellence, we on second thought might ask ourselves:
Is the cry over the Weltschmerz really more qualified and meaningful than over trivialities like a broken toy? Can the latter be in fact more genuine and the former more artificial—like the false frame, a frame of the speaker’s own making? Isn’t the real, rather than the imaginary, what really counts?
Are these varying causes of cry really different? If the cry over a broken toy proves to be futile, what does the cry over a desperate globe bring about? If the cry over a transcendental phenomenon receives responses from a desperate globe, isn’t it possible that the boy’s cry as well evokes a desperate sky that appears “clear and wordless” only in the speaker’s view?
Further, if a narcissistic and sentimental poet’s sorrow at a miserable planet turns out to be as naïve and vain as a village boy’s cry over a broken toy, isn’t it better for him to take a critical approach the romantic paradigm? If a (self-appointed) philosopher’s mourning for the most desperate of all turns out to be as pointless as a peasant woman’s cry over her husband’s death, isn’t it wise for us to be skeptical of philosophical skepticism?
Finally, if it makes no difference over what we cry and whether we cry, why cry at all?
Rolling Ripple
After a circular exploration, we are back to the question that motivates this blog entry: why does Feng Zhi, unlike in other sonnets, choose a first person speaker for No. 6’s primary voice? A tentative answer: because he wants us to keep a contemplative and reflective distance from the speaker who embodies and crystallizes a series of self-evident, superficially indubitable concepts and attitudes. By inserting a false frame into the poem, Feng Zhi attempts to break a couple of true frames in reality.
The ending, in addition, gives us an impression that we are looking at our planet from another planet in the cosmos. As my interlocutor puts it, “Now we are in the sky, indeed beyond the atmosphere, looking back, having no words for the boy and the woman, but sharing words with those who are there—there beyond the frame—to hear.”
Indeed, life beyond the frame and life beyond the frame of that frame build an inevitable infinite ripple that “rolls through all time.”
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