Julian Gewirtz

I.

In the myth of Narcissus, the boy returns to his room late at night. He has had a few drinks and is alone. At the party, a silent man followed him around and wouldn’t shake. Narcissus wonders what his famous face looks like tonight, through the sweat and smoke of the party. He opens his laptop, still logged into PhotoBooth. The webcam’s green light shocks back on. His face fills the display. It is as if the screen remembered him.

II.

Late one afternoon in January, a boy sat in my dorm room loading a movie he had brought with him. Francois Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses flickered full-screen on my laptop.

“There’s only one good scene,” he said, like it was the best swing at the playground. Fastforward: Truffaut’s character Antoine Doinel is standing in a bathrobe in front of his mirror. He is looking at himself in the glass and spitting out the names of his two lovers and then his own name, over and over.

“Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel. Antoine Doinel...”

“My film TF told me about this movie,” the boy said, pausing it. Antoine Doinel’s lips froze, pursed on the open vowel, as if he were about to kiss his mother, or his own mirrored face.

“I think I’m going to write my paper on it,” he said. “Talk about Lacan, throw in a little Rorty, mention Picasso’s “Girl before a Mirror” in a footnote, and call it a day. Even has a title already—‘The Mirrored Stage.’ Get it?”

“Nice,” I said, looking at his hands, curled on the keyboard.

“I actually made my own version of this bit last night,” he laughed. “I don’t think I’m going to upload it to my YouTube account or anything, but you want to see?”

“Sure.”

He double-clicked on a file on his desktop. His background was a picture of him swimming in a lake, probably near his home in Connecticut. QuickTime opened, and the video began to play.

In the video, the boy stood shirtless in front of his computer. He looked startled at the sight of his own chest. He moved in close to the display—he must have been using PhotoBooth—and his face glowed pale. Very quickly, in a bad French accent, he began to chant “Antoine Doinel.” His eyes were very still, looking straight back out at me as he looked into the webcam. After about fifteen seconds, he backed away and began to say his own name instead.

The space where I was sitting reappeared. I imagined him saying: “Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz. Julian Gewirtz...”

A minute in, the image froze where the playback ended. His face became a million pixels suspended mid-moment, lips pursed on the open vowel, as if he were about to kiss—anyone. I was not sure that he ever had before. The back of my neck was slick with cold sweat. He put his real hand to it, and my real skin. We did not turn our faces from the screen.

III.

At age thirteen, I made a Xanga, then a LiveJournal. I wrote my heart out and shelved the contents online: my secret book of lowercase i’s and emoticons, my pitiable self-pity. Sometimes I even made up cool-kid tales about my digital alter ego, “julian gewirtz,” who faced problems I’d heard about on the radio or in books. No one could tell the difference. My friends commented, droll as robots. The more vivid, the better—and I admired the most exciting diarists among them, like my friend Aviva, who was in the year above me in school.

Years later, on the second day of 2009, I moved to Beijing to study Chinese. I knew no one there and was terrified to be going. Aviva was the last person I said goodbye to. After we hugged, she called back from her car, “Skype me!”

At the end of my second week in China, I was as friendless and forlorn as I’d worried I would be. Aviva and I exchanged emails about finding a time to talk. After dinner in China, just after Aviva woke up in New York, I climbed into bed with my computer and logged onto Skype. A bubble popped up on my display: Aviva’s call.I hadn’t used Skype much before. When videochatting on Skype, a large box takes up most of the screen—let’s call it the thou-box—showing the person you’ve called. A smaller box, the Ibox, shows you your own image. In this way, you can see what the other person sees in his thoubox, and your faces appear together, as if you’re in the same room. My friends had been on Skype long before I’d even heard of it.

Aviva’s voice came through sounding like a present packed with tissue-paper. “Let’s try the video?” she asked.The thou-box holding her face sputtered onto my screen. As I searched for the button to turn my webcam on, my I-box was still dark. Aviva’s face froze, and her voice went out.

“What’s going on?” she typed in the chat box.

“No clue,” I responded.

“Oy. What should we do?”

“Want to try again?”

We did. No luck.

“Another time, then?”

“Too bad. Sure. Just let me know.”

“Alright.”

“All right.”

“I thought either one was fine.”

“Maybe.”

“Bye!”

“Bye.”

I stopped typing and closed the chat box. My laptop hummed hot against my thighs. Inside the machine, its binary heart whirring, could the home I missed be processed? *Oh, one—*

* * IV.

Last month, E. was sick at home and thought up an experiment.

She set her laptop and her brother’s side by side. She opened Skype on both computers and called her brother on Skype from her computer. From his computer, she picked up. She accepted her request to video chat. Both screens glowed more brightly. In the I-box, she saw herself. In the thou-box, she saw herself. Then she turned the screens toward each other and lowered her face between them. In each I-box, a small thoubox appeared, and a smaller I-box within, and a smaller thou-box within again.

You can get lost between the screens, if you let yourself.

V.

On one Friday morning, I had a very clear story in my head when I woke up. I’m still not sure about it.

It was a Friday night, the last time we were together. The hallway at 21 South Street was very dark. No lights were turned on in the office. We sat in old wood chairs and were not speaking. My computer rested on the desk beside him, its pale plastic logo undulating. Upstairs, a few people were dancing to The Supremes. “Reflections” came on. *In the mirror of my mind, I see reflections of you and me, reflections of the way life **used to be, reflections of the love you took from **me.* It’s all in the voice.

I wondered which room was darker, down here or up there. I wondered whether having more people in a room added any light, or took any away. There were three feet of room between us, three feet of silence, and then he stood up and walked out the front door.

I didn’t move to follow. The only thing I could think to do was open my laptop. The room became much brighter. I went to Facebook, typed in his name, and looked at pictures of his face. I could not get through to it. I don’t remember what song the people upstairs danced to next.

Since that night, I have searched online for his last name so many times that those letters are working their order into my fingers. Have the small muscles in my right hand actually reorganized, rearranged to spell it out?

I have been trying to get him back from the screen, and the screen has gotten back at me.

VI.

I took my first computer class in third grade. The teacher, Mr. Peters, was about sixty, as old as Hewlett-Packard. He was deeply tanned, with a crew cut that sat unnaturally on his big head, like a too-tight silver helmet. In class, he held speed-typing competitions and showed us how to use the internet. My parents were delighted that I was getting a true twenty-first century education even in 1999.

One morning, Mr. Peters was explaining to the class the way that computer processors worked. I was bored. My gaze wandered to the bulky monitor, which we hadn’t been allowed to turn on yet, though below the desk the processor was already on. I saw my face reflected in the monitor’s dark, convex glass.

A few weeks before, Mr. Peters had given us an old computer to “dissect.” The machine was on a table in the middle of the room: the girls held back, but the boys swarmed it. We clawed at the box, ripping off the hard black plastic, tearing through the wires, pushing our fingers hard against the sharp metal shapes of the motherboard. The other boys in my class—one would not exactly call them my friends—pushed me to the side with an accidental elbow to my ribcage. I spent the rest of the period watching the action. I didn’t know what to do with myself. There was no blood.

Mr. Peters was still talking. Suddenly he was pointing triumphantly in my direction. “Just like how your brain works!”

I began to blush, but the head-rush didn’t stop with my cheeks. I felt a hundred wires—red, yellow, blue—quivering inside my skull. Copper plates, cool to the touch, pressed against bone. My eyes widened, screens opening onto a world of glimmers and beautyless bits. The classroom around me, the students at their desks, even Mr. Peters, were all flickering furiously. I was surrounded by holograms.

And then it stopped. No one had noticed. My chair was hard beneath me. The monitor was still dark. I do not have a computer in my head.

VII.

When I boarded my flight to Paris, I checked my email on my phone. Rachel, one of my oldest friends, had sent me a picture she’d taken of herself, a “selfie,” with a tray of fresh-made croissants: *Self-Portrait* with Baked Goods. She was living in Paris, studying patisserie on a lark before starting at Yale. She wrote, “I’ll keep them warm until you get here!”

It was the November after we’d graduated from high school, the November of our gap year, and we were going to travel together. When I got off the Metro by Rachel’s apartment in the 4th, the sun had just crept over the horizon. A pinkish light filled the city’s bare trees, as if they were loaded with cherry blossoms. I felt tired and dirty. Few people were up yet. I noticed a woman walk past me. She was wearing a blue cotton dress and white wedges, but I couldn’t see her face. She paused quickly to fix her hair in the screen of her smartphone, then hurried on.

I dropped my bags at Rachel’s. She gave me a cold chocolate croissant and bad coffee and ran off to class. The croissant was delicious.

I spent the day around the Marais. I went to a well-lit parfumerie and dabbed a half-dozen scents on my arms. I became a waft of lemongrass, vervier, clove, drifting through the city. I ate an omelette at Café Beaubourg, next to the Pompidou. I sat out in the Place Igor Stravinsky staring at strangers—cruising or people-watching, the difference is hard to remember—but didn’t meet anyone new.

The next day, Rachel was still busy with school. I went out to Versailles for the afternoon. The sky was one white cloud. I dawdled through the perfect gardens and the empty palace. I walked through the Hall of Mirrors. It must have been more impressive when Louis XIV built it, back when mirrors were rare and marvelous, like a wall of man-made diamonds. But now? The room was very chilly, and the pale sunlight glaring on the polished floor startled my eyelids closed. Shielding my face, I walked up to one of the mirrors and gave myself a looking-over. I noticed that the skin on my left forearm was red and raised. It didn’t look good.

I hurried back to Paris. Maybe I’d been allergic to one of the colognes, had contracted a horrible skin infection in transit, had an STD, had scarlet fever. What I didn’t have in Paris was a doctor, and Rachel was at school until the evening.

I got on my laptop and searched the Internet for pictures of something that looked like whatever was breaking out on my arm. I didn’t find anything that matched, so I decided to crowdsource. I pulled out my iPhone, took a picture, and uploaded it to an online medical message board. The caption on the photograph: “Does anyone know what this is?”

The next morning, I woke up early to re-pack. Rachel and I were heading off to Vienna. I was happy to notice that the rash had disappeared. I never checked to see if my post had gotten any replies.

In Vienna, Rachel and I went to the opera and the museums. She brought her sketchbook to the vast Kunsthistorisches Museum. I left her in a room of statues.

The first time I read John Ashbery’s poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” too early in high school, I wasn’t sure whether the painting that the poem reflects on really existed. “The portrait / Is the reflection once removed.” But there it was, Parmigianino’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, a small, dark circle framed on the museum’s wall. The sheen of the oil paints really did make its surface look like glass. I spent a few minutes watching it.

I don’t normally like to take tourist photographs, but—perhaps because I had been rereading Ashbery—I decided to take a selfie with the Parmigianino painting. All I had with me was my iPhone. I held it in front of me, my rash-free arm crooked so that I could position the painting in the frame. I saw my face in the screen, and Parmigianino’s behind. My thumb pressed a silver button, and the shutter clicked.The picture came out passably: not too blurry, with decent lighting for a smartphone photo. A piece of my hand holding the phone intruded at the bottom of the frame, bigger than my head—I’d kept it there too long after clicking the camera button. I looked a bit confused, but that was all right. I was a bit confused. I wandered back to find Rachel.And I deleted both the photos from my iPhone. I didn’t need to look at them again.

In the fall of 2010, Fudan University in Shanghai announced that its Chinese department was about to revitalize the country’s literature. Creative writing was getting “a new face.” But rather than announcing a new faculty member or the winner of a literary prize, Fudan was planning the establishment of mainland China’s first MFA program in creative writing.

One might wonder what took them so long. The graduate creative writing program—and its attendant phenomena, from the undergraduate workshop to the small-press book deal to the degree-carrying poet who lives off untenured teaching jobs—has become a central feature of a contemporary American literary education. The idea of a degree in creative writing is less than a century old; the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which is the oldest and most prestigious MFA program in the country, began in 1936. To reverse the national seal’s dictum: from one, many. Today it’s nearly impossible to find a major U.S. research university that doesn’t teach creative writing.

Chinese universities have been openly emulating American universities at least since the Reform and Opening in the late 1970s. Coinciding with Deng Xiaoping’s promulgation of a more liberal national political ideology, so-called “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” this series of policies increased China’s economic and political openness to the outside world. Law schools, business schools, courses teaching leadership skills—the Chinese academy now has it all. But an MFA degree in creative writing is something different. Certainly, Fudan sees it that way: the program’s detailed and somewhat extravagant syllabus describes the university’s ambitions as nothing less than transforming contemporary Chinese literature into a thoroughly “international and scientific” practice.

But all is not quite as it seems. The syllabus, even with its vague goals like “expanding students’ artistic consciousness,” mirrors in almost every way what one might see at Iowa or another American MFA program. Novel writing, the art of the essay, rediscovering the classics, interdisciplinary film studies—it’s all there, with one glaring exception. Fudan has completely omitted poetry from its scheme to revolutionize contemporary Chinese literature.

Of course, the Chinese are writing poems, and have been for thousands of years. Tradition credits Confucius with compiling hundreds of Chinese folk songs and poems into the *Shijing *or *Classic of Poetry*. This text forms the core of a canon—parts of which are memorized by every elementary school student—that also includes Tang poets like Li Bai and Du Fu, as well as latter-day literati like the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong. Mao, a prolific writer in the classical style, is perhaps the bestselling poet-politician in world history—and certainly the only poet whose image watches over his nation’s capital, as Mao’s portrait hangs above Tiananmen Square.

In many ways, Mao the Poet can coexist with Mao the Chairman because of a long Chinese tradition of the scholar-official (the *shi* class). Many canonical poets, like Qu Yuan, Wang Wei, and Su Shi, served in government. The imperial examination, a requirement from the Sui to the Qing dynasties for those who wished to join the national bureaucracy, focused on literary skills. Academic, poetic, and political success often intertwined.

But the tumult of twentieth century Chinese history created deep discontinuities between present and past. Poetry in China today is no longer a province of the ministry or the academy. China has not taken the path of the West, where the *poète maudit*, outside of society or outcast from it, dominates our cultural image of the literary artist. Instead, as poetry has dissociated itself from its historic affiliations, it has found a new territory to colonize: the Internet.

In a way that may be difficult for Americans to imagine, for young Chinese writers the poetry world now largely centers on decentralized online communities of non-professional, often anonymous writers. Forums like *bbs.chinapoesy.com* and *poem100.cn* allow poets to publish themselves, reaching large virtual audiences. There is no one authoritative site, no sole locus for this activity. Xiaofei Tian, a Harvard professor and scholar of Chinese poetry, calls these websites the “real world” in contemporary Chinese literature, in contrast to traditional venues like the universities and the publishing houses. Of course, as in any democratic literary model, quality varies widely. But, Tian argues, “Many of these online communities are actually very good.”

Some respond more critically to the content of the sites. Chinese poet Wang Ao acknowledges the creation of “more channels” and “more opportunities for readers to have access to more new poems,” in a country where book numbers (*shuhao*, like ISBN) and publication opportunities are closely controlled. But he criticizes the tone of complete egalitarianism that dominates these sites, where “everybody can post their poems online and call themselves poets.” The Internet, he stresses, cannot itself produce a new Li Bai or Du Fu—the poems will have to speak for themselves.

At the least, contributions to these open poetry websites are remarkably dynamic and diverse. They range from strict classical exercises to elliptical free verse. Some poets, especially frequent contributors, gain large followings. Others respond to the work of their peers on these sites—a virtual reenactment of the idea that poetic history is a kind of conversation among poets. Indeed, perhaps it would be most accurate to say that a great deal of the most vital activity in Chinese poetry today closely resembles a web chat, a blog.

The diffusive effect of the Internet seems designed to compete with what still exists of a Chinese literary establishment. The new “old guard”—popular middle-aged poets like Xi Chuan and Yu Jian—belong to national writers’ associations, publish with official presses, and win state-sponsored literary awards. And they fight their own battles: the schism between classical and vernacular styles, for example, remains a contentious topic.

These poets are unabashedly internationalized, even as they remain committed to writing for and about China. Robert Hass, the former U.S. poet laureate, recounts a recent trip to Beijing, where he met with a range of established Chinese poets. He asked them about their influences. “Yu Jian said that it was Walt Whitman, presumably in Chinese translation, who opened up poetry for him,” Hass remembers. Xi Chuan, meanwhile, reported that he had studied Borges, Pound, Milosz, and others. “It does look like this is a poetry that’s in conversation with the rest of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry around the world,” Hass says.

Wang Ao, who has won several major Chinese literary awards, agrees: “We all read foreign poetry, in all different languages, not just the major Western languages.” He remembers, “When I was in college we had some poets meeting with each other to discuss foreign poetry and also, at the same time, discussing classical Chinese poetry.” These multiple, multivalent influences have formed China’s establishment poets.

These figures, despite their success, often use their poems to express dissatisfaction with contemporary Chinese poetry. Xi Chuan, in his poem “Nightfall” (*mu’se*), writes,

You the dead, appear

All the living have shut their mouths

You the dead, where are you?

Nightfall invites you to speak

Then, in the final stanza of the same poem:

And nightfall spreads over the earth

Extends its grasping hand

Nightfall windowlight, and always someone

Taps gently at my door

The poem enacts many of the concerns of China’s establishment poets. The voice and imagery show the influence of the Latin American tradition, while at moments evoking W. S. Merwin’s early writing (the poem “The Hydra” comes to mind with Xi Chuan’s address to the “dead” and the “names”). The speaker critiques the present—“all the living have shut their mouths”—but understands that even the invitations of nightfall cannot resurrect poetry’s past. The ambiguous “someone” of the poem’s last stanza exists in a state that is not only liminal but also temporally dislocated: is this one of “the dead” or “the living”? The poem’s achievement is to make nightfall itself atemporal and nonlocational. Xi Chuan expresses a dissatisfaction that is both local and global; he combines Chinese and international approaches in a poem that addresses both the past and the present.

“Internationalization,” then, means many things as a priority of Fudan’s MFA program. Tian argues that “this creative writing program is almost reactionary” in light of literary developments on the Internet. She adds, “They claim they want to train writers in not only Chinese but also international perspectives, which makes it seem like they are trying to train writers who will produce Nobel Prizes for China.” Indeed, establishment writers in China cannot be happy that the only person writing in Chinese to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature is Gao Xingjian, a French citizen who has lived in Paris for over twenty years. When Gao won the Nobel, China’s then-premier Zhu Rongji responded firmly: “I trust that in the future there will be other Chinese works to win the Prize.”

Online poetry communities, despite their inherent openness to the world, are inward-looking in many ways. “The writers hardly care about what’s going on in the United States,” Tian says. Many of these writers, particularly those who write poems in classical forms or with dense, obscure classical allusions, are certainly nostalgic and perhaps even implicitly nationalistic. In a way, their attitude toward poetry—their faith in the Chinese language and tradition and their desire to stake a broad claim on the future direction of their art—mirrors larger social trends in China today. A wide variety of important reformist, critical, and experimental subject matter finds its favored home in Chinese cyberspace. For example, much has been written in the Western media about China’s “angry youth” or *fenqing*, whom the *New Yorker*’s Evan Osnos describes as “the new generation’s neocon nationalists.” The *fenqing* use the Internet—in particular, online forums and other communal digital spaces—to find each other and promote their views. Perhaps some of China’s online poets are this population’s literary analogue.

In any case, online poetry communities occupy an important political position. Wang Ao observes, “There are many things on the Internet in China now—political protests and poetry and music. It’s part of the character of our times.” As the “angry youth” phenomenon has demonstrated, the Internet in China allows public dialogue on controversial topics to occur before the government can catch up. “Poets now do not need to rely on the traditional venues, which have been censored,” Ao says. “‘Online police’ often do not understand poetry, so poets can write political protest in a metaphorical way.” Even though the establishment of an MFA program could be thought of as a step forward, legitimating and strengthening creative writing in China, these broader developments indicate a more problematic possibility: Fudan’s program opens up opportunities for control by bringing art within the purview of the academy. Chinese universities certainly do not yet have the traditions of academic freedom of their American counterparts. In a setting where successful professors are very careful about departing from the party line, and every school has a both a dean and a party secretary, an MFA program could potentially subvert the political and literary openness that online literary communities foster.

To Tian, Fudan’s aims are problematic, even “illusory.” She says, “I don’t think the university matters all that much” for the future of creative writing in China. Even Fudan seems to understand, reluctantly, some of its limitations. A founder of the program, a Chinese literature professor named Chen Sihe, offers one reason for Fudan’s lack of poetry offerings: “We don’t know how to teach poetry,” he says. “It’s too complicated.” As strange as this may seem to someone from a country where poetry workshops are a staple of the MFA diet, perhaps it makes sense for Fudan. Perhaps the academy will never be able to provide a meaningful alternative to the freewheeling dynamism of the online poetry world.

And perhaps this is not China’s loss. In the United States, poetry’s longevity as a medium seems, at present, to be inextricably tied to the patronage of universities. But China may offer another model. Xi Chuan expresses his dissatisfaction with contemporary Chinese poetry by suggesting that today’s writers “have shut their mouths.” But even now, above Beijing’s noisy streets or in the hush of a college library, China’s poets are opening their laptops.

Julian Gewirtz

Julian Gewirtz

Poetry

Fall 2010

Blood Orange

Spring 2013

Narcissus

Spring 2011

Poem

Fall 2011

Psyche in Bed

Fall 2012

Seem Tame

Commencement 2011

The Clew

Commencement 2012

Will Not Come Back

Fall 2012

Young Sick Bacchus

Features

Spring 2012

Self-Portrait in a Flat Screen

Commencement 2011

With Chinese Characteristics