China and the West

W.H. Auden and China : general.
2005
Stuart Christie : In China, Auden learned that the best poems often do not survive the journey home. I suggest that Auden's experience in China and Hong Kong ultimately motivates his symbolic disinvestment from all national-colonial allegories, in favor of the rejection of material context entirely, as a more principled basis for the writing of poetry. China serves mainly as an occult imagining against which the poet attempts to locate his increasingly liminal position in nationalist British culture and letters. Auden's sonnets engage with orientalizing and occidentalizing codes that challenge the British canon overtly and covertly, a concert that has at least two effects : first, a reaction against the colonial elite in Hong Kong and Shanghai, where Auden was hailed as an emerging talent ; and subsequently, a disorientation in the poetry resulting from the absence of what heretofore had been a coded familiarity of context – the call of homosexual traveling culture. Auden's canonical context was British, and that its ideology trailed him to China is an undeniable fact constituting much of the poet's cross-cultural predicament, what I call his disorientations, once he arrived there. Isherwood and Auden found themselves feted in the bosom of the British colonial establishment in Hong Kong, enjoying comforts in marked contrast to the war of liberation being waged by the Chinese against Japanese aggression just to the north in Guangdong province. In Spain, Auden saw mindless violence fully exercised in the name of nationalist confraternity. On arrival in China, he had no reason not to expect the same practice among the Japanese, Guomindang, and Communist forces. If Spain had occasioned Auden's encounter with the extreme tendencies of political change and disillusioned him, China forced him to reconsider and to affirm the liberal muddle of the ideological middle that E.M. Forster's position had always represented. Auden went to China empty of prejudice, a fact that encompasses equally his relative ignorance of Chinese language and culture as well as his principled willingness to dispense, as best he could, with the received wisdom of the career colonialists. Hong Kong's colonial resituation of Western values evidences, in Auden's case, the globalizing pressure placed on modernist poetry when faced with local mutations beyond the metropolitan ken. The colonial locale has erased the poet's memory of a British past and his Chinese present in equal measure, substituting for it only the eternal 'chatter' of power brokers at work. Without adequate knowledge of Chinese peoples or cultures as subjects, the poet cannot surveil China faithfully, he stalks and then kills it. Alternatively, he risks 'making' the English modernist canon new using Chinese materials, but entirely at the expense of the Chinese context, and again assassinates present truth. Not daring to risk orientalist platitudes shared among Chinese-English brothers as soldiers-in-arms, Auden's poet-assassin threatens the Chinese subject and himself in turn. Auden's rejection of national culture is linked equally to his specific historical context in Hong Kong and China that rendered his 'retour' at once disjunctive and homologous of uniquely colonial frontiers he could not cross, even as a homosexual 'passing through' privileged sites of British masculinity abroad. Auden can no longer simply remint English certainties in the Chinese context and call them a lost signified of oriental fantasy. The sonnets respond by invoking Chinese inscrutability to ward off unwarranted incursions the poet himself represents ; by conceding the universal presumptions of colonialism.
2007
Hugh Haughton : Where Isherwood's prose is personal, circumstantial and documentary, recording the details of their three-month journey as 'amateur war correspondents' in often comit terms. Auden's gnomic verse casts the war into an abstract allegorial idiom with almost no specific geographical, historical or personal indicators.