Unreal Images: Bei Dao's Dialogue with the Real

Bei Dao's hermitic style of poetry has been baffling his critics ever since he started writing. While his earlier ”Misty” poetry met with strong resistance from official Chinese critics, his continuing insistence on fragmented syntax and disjunctive imagery, while writing in exile, has earned him a few detractors in the West. Does Bei Dao resist reading? Can one make sense of his poetry? What is the relationship between meaning and interpretative certitude? These are some of the questions that the paper tries to address. With a careful reading of his selected poems, I will show how Bei Dao privileges ambiguity and uncertainty by focusing on the construction of unreal images, images that strikingly defy conventional rationality because they shy away from an expected correspondence to real and common life events. This ”unreal” imagery, whose power comes from an imaginative reordering of the real, forms a key aspect of Bei Dao's poetics.