Living an Emperor’s Life, Dying a Nobel Death. Li Hongwei’s Novel “The King and Lyric Poetry” as a Journey Through the History of Chinese Poetry

The present paper discusses Li Hongwei’s novel The King and Lyric Poetry (2017). The novel tells the story of the suicide of the last Nobel Prize laureate in the future history of literature, Chinese poet Yuwen Wanghu. Following the detective thread of the book, the essay reconstructs utopian and dystopian semi-virtual landscapes of the mid-21st century China which feed into two different models of lyricism: the poet as a knight errant who seeks inspiration far from modern civilization and the poet as a lonely warrior against (technological) tyranny. In the final scene, the two landscapes blur and the antithetical forces that infuse them: lyricism (Yuwen) and power/ knowledge (the King) merge into what may be seen as their dialectical synthesis to be fulfilled by the novel’s third protagonist – Yuwen’s young friend, Li Pulei. Mobilizing various contexts, including the suicides of famous mainland-Chinese poets, important poetry polemics, and intertexts ranging from classical Chinese literary theory through to Truman Show and Matrix, I argue that the novel mirrors the development of poetry discourse in the PRC with its various myths, conflicts, complexes, and ambitions. I also show how this discourse, shaped for a long time largely by the so-called Third Generation poets born in the 1950s and 1960s, translates into the * PhD, an assistant professor at Adam Mickiewicz University and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on literature and its interactions with other disciplines, especially the sciences. She is also an active translator of contemporary Chinese literature in prose and in verse into Polish. E-mail: joanna.krenz@amu.edu.pl | ORCID: 0000-0003-4689-6677. ** The paper is part of the research project The World Re-Versed: New Phenomena in Chinese Poetry as a Challenge and Inspiration to Literary Studies based at the University of Zurich within the Bekker Programme (Program im. Bekkera) fellowship funded by National Agency for Academic Exchange (Narodowa Agencja Wymiany Akademickiej). Project no. PPN/BEK/2019/1/00164.