碩士論文
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures College of Liberal Arts
National Taiwan University Master Thesis
虛構拮抗文學史：郭松棻作品中的新面向 Fiction contra Historiography:
New Dimensions in the Works of Guo Songfen
陳鼎貳 Ting-Er Chen
指導教授：齊東耿 博士
Advisor: Duncan McColl Chesney, Ph.D.
中華民國 108 年 6 月
June 2019
Acknowledgement
I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Dr Duncan Chesney, my thesis advisor, for his bighearted tolerance for my uncommon choice of topic and his patience with my provocative opinions, sluggish progress and disorganized writing. I owe him a lot for seeing me through a series of unexpected difficulties during the year of writing. My belief in the historical and social values of literary forms was
cultivated and sharpened not only by his seminars on Frankfurt School and sociology of literature, but also by my experience as TA in his two survey courses on nineteenth and twentieth century European and English literature. I am forever grateful for his erudition, enthusiasm and sense of humor while teaching.
My gratitude also goes to my committee members for thesis defense: I am very grateful for Dr Huang Han-yu for his generous support and for Dr Li Hung-chiung for his critical opinions. I thank Cindy Chen, Megan Li, and the staff at the DFLL office for helping me with the paperwork during the four years.
I am deeply indebted to Dr Shen Shao-ying, who taught me everything about formal analysis and offered opportunities of teaching assistantship for me. Her kindness, straightforward but unbiased judgment, and her good appetite for arts and cultures around the world never failed to energize and encourage me in my years with her in class.
I also want to thank Dr Chang Li-hsuan of Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature, who led me into a whole new field that directly influenced my choice of topic. I learned a lot from the discussion and assignments in her seminar, her knowledge of Taiwan literary history, and the part-time jobs she provided. I also thank Dr Guy Beauregard for his constant encouragement and moral support. I learned to cherish details and accuracy in his seminars.
During the four years in graduate school I owe a lot to my colleagues and friends.
I would like to thank my colleagues for their kindness and faith in me: Joseph Chang, Peter Chang, Amelia Chen, Hsiung Peng, Chloe Hou, Michelle Hsu, Rolf Huang, Michelle Lin. Also I learned a lot from my juniors: Ken Chao, Annie Chen, Chen Ding-liang, Jennifer Chen, Hong Tzuyu, Kim Jin, Anastasia Wu. I particularly owe to Annie Cheng and Andrea Lay, who helped me with Japanese and French during my writing. I would like to thank my friends at the Graduate Institute of Taiwan
watching films, engaging in academic discussion, and gossiping. I particularly want to thank Tsai Min-ying for her warmth. Also, I want to thank the students I encountered in my first two and a half years as a TA for giving me precious opportunities to contribute to each other’s life.
I could not have made it to the end without my friends, especially Archie Liao, Weng Shu-yu, Li Jo-wen, Carol Lin, Lin Yu-chen. This thesis also benefitted from my life in Yonghe, and I want to say thank-you to my flat mates: Ho Kuanling, Darik Fang and Zheng Youjia, who took care of my well-being. My new friends at the
“Better Man” reading group kept me company and made me feel much less lonely, and I would like to thank them for their energy and sympathy. My classmates from high school and colleagues during the military service, especially Liu Shangru, also offered their support, and I am grateful for it. Finally, I would like to thank my mother and brother for their love and support.
摘要
本文目的有三：其一為批判在臺灣文學史書寫歷程中所奠定的意識形態，
及其對目前領域整體視域、方法、政治向度所設限制；其二是以有別以往的觀 點與方法，發掘郭松棻小說中尚未受到重視與討論的新面向；其三乃以郭松棻 為範例於台灣文學測度、開拓比較文學的可能。在方法論上本文以西方馬克思 主義美學為重要理論資源與典範，在文本細讀的基礎之上，描述並發掘形式與 修辭層次上的歷史與知識論意義。
本文緒論追溯臺灣文學史書寫如何以「抵抗意志」與「本真需求」為原則 建立臺灣文學的意識形態與烏托邦範式。第一章發展緒論所述，說明臺灣文學 史意識形態如何建立在寫實主義與現代主義的美學與知識論基礎上，並試圖證 明兩者互相涵攝的關係。第二章重探日本近代思想史接受西方現代性時展現的 內在辯證以何種方式反映在近代文論與小說敘事觀點問題，藉此分析郭松棻小 說《驚婚》中關鍵的法庭場景與第一人稱敘事段落。第三章研究福樓拜小說美 學對郭松棻短篇小說〈月印〉、〈月噑〉、〈雪盲〉可能的影響，說明郭松棻 如何運用錯置修辭客體、諷喻、敘事盲點、無用美學化語句等技巧否定地挑戰 小說反映、救贖歷史的正向關係。第四章則從歷史虛構、時間政治與神話方法 三個角度重探郭松棻在〈今夜星光燦爛〉發展出的晚期修辭風格與主要意象，
批評前行研究流行的救贖說，並說明此一風格亦觸及臺灣本位文學史書寫中殘 留的民國問題。本文結論則再以「傳統」與「世界文學」為軸線脈絡化本文的 書寫過程並提出對臺灣文學未來的建議。
本文尚有兩篇附論：其一強調已成常識的「想像共同體」論中內建的形式 限制，並從西方馬克思主義提出辯證性較強的國族想像；其二從〈草〉文中在 場的黑格爾與不在場的馬克思、恩格斯著手，從哲學與敘事觀點探索郭松棻從 政治轉向創作的淵源。
關鍵詞：郭松棻、臺灣文學史書寫、意識形態、西方馬克思主義、比較文學
Abstract
This thesis expects to achieve three goals: first, I aim to critique the ideology consolidated by Taiwan literary historiography and the limits it has set on the vision, methodology and political dimension of the discipline; second, from new perspectives I try to locate dimensions that have not been considered or discussed in details in Guo Songfen’s works; third, I view my reading of Guo’s works as an experiment to
measure the possibility of conducting comparative works with Western tradition in Taiwan literature. I refer to Western Marxist aesthetic as the methodological paradigm, and I wish to unearth the historical and epistemological significance in literary forms on the basis of close reading.
In the introduction I argue that Taiwan literary historiographies establish the utopian telos of Taiwan literature according to two principles: “will to resist” and
“demand for authenticity.” The first chapter follows the argument developed in the introduction and illustrates that the ideology is actually based on aesthetic and epistemological premises of realism and modernism, and I strive to find proof for the inherent interrelation within their ostensible antagonism. In chapter two I revisit modern Japanese intellectual history to tease out the immanent dialectic in its contact with Western modernity, and I observe how this dialectic is reflected in modern literary criticism and problematizes the narrative perspective in prose fiction. I use what I find to read a critical scene in Guo’s novel Jinghun. In the third chapter I study the possible influence of Flaubertian aesthetic on Guo’s stories “Moon Seal,”
“Wailing Moon,” and “Snow Blind,” demonstrating how Guo uses rhetorical techniques such as displaced object, irony, narrative uncertainty and useless aestheticization to negatively challenge the affirmative reflective relation between fiction and history. In chapter four I research the late style and imagery in Guo’s
“Brightly Shine the Stars Tonight” from three angles: historical fiction, politics of temporalities, and mythical method, so as to criticize the well-accepted “redemption hypothesis” in previous studies and to illustrate how Guo’s late style touches upon the remnant of Republic of China in Taiwan-centered literary historiography. In the epilogue I contextualize my thesis in two axes: “tradition” and “the world,” and propose my advice for the future of Taiwan literature.
There are two additional excursuses: one stresses the inherent formal limits in
suggests a more dialectical version of nationalism from Western Marxism; the other reads Guo’s story “Clover” from the presence of Hegel and the absence of Marx and Engels to explain Guo’s definitive turn from political activity to literature from the story’s philosophical aspect and narrative problem.
Keywords: Guo Songfen, Taiwan literary historiography, Ideology, Western Marxism, Comparative literature
A Note on Texts and Format
Among Guo’s modest oeuvre, six of the stories: yueyin 月印 [Moon Seal], yuehao 月嘷, benpao de muqin 奔跑的母親 [Running Mother], cao 草 [Clover], xuemang 雪盲 [Snow Blind], and jinye xingguang canlan 今夜星光燦爛 [Brightly Shine the Stars Tonight], have been translated by various translators and collected in Running Mother and Other Stories, published by Columbia University Press. In the following citation, I will specify the page numbers of the original text followed by the translated version, separating them by a slash. Modification of translation will be specified.
My primary texts include guo songfen ji 郭松棻集 [Selected Works by Guo Songfen], published by Qianwei, and benpao de muqing 奔跑的母親 [Running Mother] published by Maitian. Guo revised several of his stories in the eighties and the nineties. I choose the final version of the stories in the book form, and I will not include the differences between versions into the discussion. “Moon Seal” underwent very minor changes in terms of diction and deletion of unnecessary passages when included in the Maitian collection; “Snow Blind” also underwent minor changes when included in the Writings. The ending of “Wailing Moon” was completely rewritten when this piece was collected in Writings. Guo supplemented some passages to the last section of “Brightly Shine the Stars Tonight” and some sentences were modified in terms of wording when the story was included in the Maitian collection. It is notable that both “Clover” is an extended version of a shorter early work hanxioucao 含羞草 [Sensitive Plant].
Except for the first mention, the English translation of titles of Mandarin Chinese
mention for the sake of convenience, but I retain the French titles of Flaubert’s works.
The titles of German texts will be given in translation.
In this thesis I generally follow the rules set by MLA Handbook, seventh edition.
Considering the primary and secondary texts in Chinese, for documentation and citation in this thesis I follow the format prescribed by Harvard Journal of Asian Studies and Chung Wai Literary Quarterly, which require authors to provide romanized titles of the original materials they cite. For Chinese materials I follow pinyin; for Japanese materials I follow the modified Hepburn system of romanization.
Chinese and Japanese names mentioned in the thesis follow the East Asian tradition:
surname first. I remove the hyphens in the names but retain the original spelling not in pinyin as long as I can trace the source; I use pinyin for names whose romanized version cannot be found. This general rule does not apply to names of authors who also writes in English.
Acknowledgement………..………...i
Chinese Abstract………...iii
English Abstract………...iv
A Note on Texts and Format……….………...…....vi
Introduction………...1
Excursus One………..……….…...41
Chapter One…..………..……….…...49
Chapter Two……….….…..91
Chapter Three ………...137
Excursus Two………191
Chapter Four…..………..………..………203
Epilogue…..………..………....…………242
Works Cited…..………..………..………261
来るのか。感傷や空想を雑じへない厳正な科学的思索のみが鮮明してくれるだ ろう。真実なる智識は現象を解釈するにあって、吾々を深い苦痛に引きづつて ゆくかも知れないが、併しあらゆる現象は歴史的法則の示顕せられた姿であっ て呪詛すべきものではないと思ふ。幸福は苦痛と努力なしには達成せられない であらう。只吾々はこのグルミーな社会に処するには正しき智識による歴史の 動向を見究め、いたづらなる絶望や堕落に陥ることなく、正しく生きなければ ならぬと思ふ。
龍瑛宗、「パパイヤのある街」
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.
W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”
Introduction
Fiction contra Historiography?
On the Affirmative Character of Taiwan Literary Historiography
The title metonymically demonstrates the conversation, if not conflict, between the two interpretive poles that lie at the core of the thesis. The former stands for my concerns for, and my experiment in, the new approaches to the aesthetic dimension in fiction itself; the latter epitomizes the ideology and interpretive convention that in the first place contributed to the establishment of Taiwan literature as a discipline. This ideology is established and exemplified by various literary historiographies. Within the field of Taiwan literature, literary historiographies, by their unabashed self- reflexive methodology and political partisanship, not only provide the theoretical premises and necessary contextualization for any discussion, but also condition the production of literary criticism by their potent ideological presuppositions (Lin 4). I propose that a new critical reading of a specific author, a specific work, or a specific phenomenon necessarily ought to force any critic to review, to reassess, to challenge, to critique, and to adjust theoretical and ideological consensus, common sense, and presuppositions of the discipline instead of reproducing and reinforcing them.
Moreover, despite its overt political character, the institutional authority of historiography of Taiwan literature is particularly vulnerable in the face of mutability of contemporary society. It consolidates and canonizes; it give meanings to the past for the present, but it cannot renew itself fast enough to adapt to the ever changing present. It may be unfair to ask literary historiographers to react to contemporary phenomena in real time, but if literary historiographies to a great extent determine the critical perspective (or perspectives, if there are) for the discipline and establish the
canon by selection and exclusion, the institutional authority will cast undeniable influence on future critics. Another danger of historiography is that even though literary works are conditioned by the surroundings of thier time, historiography, by renouncing its scientific and objective dimension, is an enterprise that absorbs the specificity of work and synthesizes them according to its ideology in good faith. The distinct historical backgrounds have to be synthesized into the ideology of
historiography. A historiography with a teleological goal provides a semblance of reconciliation of particular works of art and the historical account: that every work of art appears for a reason and reflects the reality. This semblance of reconciliation obscures (despite the calamities in the past, the polyphonic nature of Taiwan literature will create a broadminded republic of letters in the future), or insidiously lays bare (how dare you not join this great enterprise), the irreconcilable aspects that comprise the historiography. Literary historiographers working in Taiwan may not shun political ideological claims, but the ideological premises of the historiography that allows these claims receive less attention. As an especially new academic discipline with a strong political character, Taiwan literature excels at analyses of power dynamic in the cultural field: ideological criticism and the sociological study of contexts have been the two most striking strengths of the research. Since the eighties, however, under the aegis of multiculturalism, historicism, political liberalism and humanism, not many scholars question the political drive that dictates their own discipline. The ethical rationale is impeccable, but the political claim and technical aspects of literary criticism deserve further discussion.
Even though critics of younger generations working in the field have become less politically forthright and tended to opt for other critical concepts (many from cultural studies) to delineate their politics after the early two thousands, the dominant
political motif of the discipline, I would argue, remains Taiwanese nationalism, and the momentum that propels this motif is a corrective urge that strives to redeem the histories repressed and destroyed by the colonial administration and subsequent authoritarian regime of Kuomintang. This corrective impulse and the urgent political thrust forged the militantly affirmative character of the discipline. Its contribution in securing a institutional field to mine and preserve the archive, to justify and reevaluate repressed cultural productions, and to establish a critical convention for future literary works is undeniable and ought to be recognized. But one has to ask, does the impetus sustain, and does the political claim remain valid after two decades? Ultimately, the political legitimacy of Taiwan literary historiography essentially originates from emotional and moralistic claims (“Rupture in Literary History” 65). It seems to be an imperative that critics of Taiwanese fiction should identify historical and political references and should interpret literary texts in the direction of debates on jarring ideologies, colonial history, national identities, and the politics of memory.
Yet even the benevolent, morally valid political consciousness can become reified and simplified to the extent of mechanical knee-jerk reaction that leaves the whole discipline inert and stranded. My fundamental concern is that the discipline is in dire need of a self-reflexive dimension from the inside rather than from rivaling ideological camps. To do so, a review and criticism of the epistemological foundation of the discipline is necessary. My doubts regarding the theoretical premises and methodology lead to the problematic of this thesis. One of the major goals this thesis wishes to achieve is to critique the affirmative character that confines the possibility of advancement of the discipline.
The epistemological problems and ideological proclivity of the discipline more conspicuously surface in a particularly awkward case to locate in Taiwan literary
historiography. Guo Songfen 郭松棻, a Taiwanese fiction writer known for his difficult style, is such a problematic figure. Receiving considerable attention in the late two thousands, Guo’s fiction, which moves fluidly between realist narrative, modernist self-reflexive style, psychological mimesis, and enigmatic allegory, more than ever renovates landscape of Taiwan prose fiction. By dabbling in the history of White Terror his fiction accommodates an unprecedented dangerous political dimension that modernist writers in the previous two decades could not have imagined.1 On the other hand, in terms of subject matter, Guo’s affinity with the nativist realist writers is undeniable, but his aesthetic sensibility and the difficulty of prose far exceeds most of the nativist writers. This is exactly why Guo is a case worthy of research, because I find the label of the late-coming modernist writer that most critics agrees upon inadequate. Guo’s subject matter, Taiwanese intellectuals of different generations; the temporal frame of his fiction, the late forties to the early eighties; the setting of his fiction, Taiwan and the US; and finally his writing career through early eighties to the nineties, all of the above position this writer at the center of ruptures in Taiwan literary history (“Rupture in Literary History” 67). Guo’s fiction epitomizes and reflects the profound influence of cataclysmic events in modern Taiwan.
The ideology of Taiwan literary historiography can be explained by the dialectic of ideology and utopia proposed by Fredric Jameson. In order to prevent
instrumentalization of cultural critique and to allow the space in critique to think the politics of collectivity and revolution, critics must grasp that “the effectively
ideological is also, at the same time, necessarily Utopian” (Political Unconscious
1 Of course it seems unfair for most postwar modernist writers writing before him, because Guo wrote in the US and some twenty years later. The temporal (laxer political constraint) and spatial distance
286). How do they interact? In his quite surprising analysis of mass culture (or
“Culture Industry”), even the “the production of false consciousness and the symbolic reaffirmation . . . cannot be grasped as one of sheer violence” because it “must
necessarily involve a complex strategy of rhetorical persuasion in which substantial incentives are offered for ideological adherence. We will say that such incentives, as well as the impulses to be managed by the mass cultural text, are necessarily Utopian in nature,” no matter what one discusses here is performed by nationalism,
revolutionary politics or fascism (287). Jameson observes that the “Marxian ‘negative hermeneutic’” when “practiced in isolation . . . justifies the ‘mechanical’ or purely instrumental nature” (291), while “the Utopian or ‘positive hermeneutic,’” when
“practiced in similar isolation,” would relax “into . . . the edifying and the moralistic”
(292). The two poles must interact in a “reflexive play across these categories” (286), so Jameson then argues that “a Marxist negative hermeneutic, a Marxist practice of ideological analysis proper, must in the practical work of reading and interpretation be exercised simultaneously with a Marxist positive hermeneutic, or a decipherment of the Utopian impulse of these same still ideological cultural texts” (296). Even the most negative ideological function must operate according to a postive integral core, and to tease out the positive core, the “functional method for describing cultural texts”
that serves to reveal and to demythologize must be “articulated with an anticipatory one” at the same time (Political Unconscious 296).
The ideology of literary historiography obviously fits what Jameson describes theoretically in dialectical terms here, as my analysis of the whole discipline’s perseverance to craft a national identity/subjectivity clearly shows. In this
introduction I would like to invert Jameson’s dialectic: any positive hermeneutic must accompany a negative dialectic, as I aim to illustrate how the concentration on tracing
a trajectory from the past to the future, Taiwan literature misses its ideological
function in the utopian project confines, conditions and finally reifies the utopian telos and misses the present.
In the following part of this introduction I attempt to map out what I mean by ideology of literary historiography through a brief review of crucial historiographical works. I will begin from the foundational text of the discipline, taiwan wenxue shigang 台灣文學史綱 [A History of Taiwan Literature] by Ye Shitao 葉石濤.
Ye’s historiography is based on several premises, or to some extent, imperatives:
literature must reflect human life, humanity and its temporal-spatial environment (Ye 212). The inheritance of Taiwan new literature since the Japanese colonial period is the critical spirit of the time and society (187). The goal of Taiwan literature is to establish minzu fengge 民族風格, or a national style (217). Taiwan literature is committed literature, endowed with the mission to move and illuminate the common people (249-50). What exemplifies these creeds is obviously nativist realist literature.
Westernized modernist literature, in contrast, is deracinated and detached (217), and therefore contradicts and misses the reality in Taiwan (185).2 The epistemological foundation of Taiwan Literature established by Ye’s A History of Taiwan Literature has almost become the critical imperative of the discipline, at least for the majority of the nativist scholars. The subsequent scholarly works on Taiwan literary
historiography, including the current canonical literary historiography, A History of Modern Taiwanese Literature by Chen Fangming 陳芳明, basically inherit most of the political judgment in Ye’s work (Modern Taiwanese Literature 26-29).
2 These aesthetic creed had been formulated as early as the nativist debates from 1977-79. I will
From Ye’s work, two crucial critical motifs can be distilled, and I shall illustrate how they have become the dominant strand of among political consciousness in Taiwan literature. Just before I proceed, I should stress that the political claim is not invented solely by Ye himself; rather, it is the consequence of negotiations and competition between cultural discourses for decades. The two motifs may have constructed the two crucial axes of literary criticism, but they do not necessarily directly influence literary production per se. The following discussion, however, is useful to renew and explain the pervading critical common sense.
The first critical motif I want to discuss is the “will to resist.” The basic claim is that Taiwan literature, on the whole, is the cultural testimony to, and resistance against (whether inadvertent or self-conscious resistance), the two oppressive
authoritarian political regimes: the Japanese colonial administration (1895-1945) and Kuomintang authoritarian rule (1949-1987). After the democratization in the late eighties, this model is extended to any critical response to all kinds of oppressive social institutions according to the teaching of cultural studies (Modern Taiwanese Literature 26-29; 37-39). I emphasize the subjective, positive, humanist connotation by the word “will.” It is a potent and justifiable ideology, because it is ethically just, corresponding to “the corrective urge” as “postcolonial unconscious” (Lazarus 116- 17). It upgrades the passive principle that “literature must reflect human life,
humanity and its temporal-spatial environment” and supports the claim of committed literature, that literary production can and ought to react to social injustice and intervene (Shie 15). Lin Yunhung 林運鴻 indicates that this “will to resist” and
“historical memory” have become the prerequisite for the name “Taiwan literature”
(4).
I would like to stress that this “will to resist” not only presupposes the existence of an object that needs to be criticized if not toppled, but also implies that literary production is endowed with an agency to intervene, and the latter presupposition quite effectively transforms the negative connotation of and passivity within “resistance”
into an affirmative, constructive empowerment and political action. This may explain the affinity between Taiwan literature between Anderson’s theory of nationalism, identity politics and new historicism, all of which emphasize the formative power of texts the power dynamic they evoke, and promote challenging the authoritative oppression in any social sector.
Franco Moretti criticizes “the sweeping generalization” in literary
historiography of any literary form and theme into what can be called “the ‘Zeitgeist fallacy’”: “once one had defined a rhetorical form one felt authorized to link it directly to the idea . . . in which a whole epoch is supposedly summed up” (Moretti 25). “All rhetorical forms,” Moretti continues, “aspire to become the ‘Spirit of the Age,’ but their very plurality,” and simultaneous existence, I would add, “shows us that this term indicates an aspiration rather than a reality, and should therefore be employed as a highly useful conceptual tool . . . but not as a fact” (Moretti, 25-26, my emphasis). The fallacy exposes the fact that ideological preference can be a decisive factor to the extent that it arranges a hierarchy between different genres and forms.
Chiu Kueifen 邱貴芬, arguing for women’s presence and deserved position in literary historiographies, criticizes that privileging the “will to resist” necessarily expunges apolitical literature, at least that which are not directly involved with or manifestly representing political matters, from historiographies (Chiu 52; 118).
Moreover, this interpretive perspective based on a resistance model is much less convincing when tackling contemporary and future works produced without an
authoritarian regime as a dominant factor (Chiu 118). Yet she overall supports the claim that Taiwan literature as a discipline is an effect and a result produced by oppositional cultural discourses (137), and helps to consolidate a cultural subjectivity from old ideology of “cultural China” or “resisting Japanese imperialism” (140). By substituting discourses for individuals, Chiu’s argument is strategic application of an anti-essentialist politics of difference (134). It is in its own way problematic, as I will show below.
The “will to resist” may partially explain why Taiwan literature appears much more militant than other disciplines. It has its historical background, as the
commencement of an established national literature paralleled the rise of opposition movement in the political field. As a criterion of literary criticism, this critical motif may risk solely judging the value of a literary work by exterior factors rather than aesthetic merits. One serious problem deriving from this is that the emphasis of ideological analysis falls on determining whether the writer is actually resisting.
Depending on the critic’s own ideological stance, the analysis of the same set of texts will yield different results. The case I will deal with in chapter two, “the imperial subject literature,” can be strictly regarded as collaborationist texts or
compassionately understood as the result of an extorted compromise (Modern Taiwanese Literature 206-07). Postwar modernist lyrics in the sixties can be read as reflecting the poet’s “spiritual resistance” or “inner exile” (Modern Taiwanese Literature 347-78) or simply political quietism and conformism (You 245).
I argue that the “will to resist” ultimately determines the affirmative character of the discipline. The negative criticism that challenges authoritarian monolith always implies a predetermined positive and preferred ways of things. What lies ahead in any criticism according to the logic of resistance, dialectically, is a utopia not yet reached,
whatever its content. Ideological analysis along the trajectory toward a utopia is useful in cultural analysis, but its affirmative character, I believe, is overstretched. On the one hand, it confines political imagination by simplifying the ways and directions of political resistance. Politics does not always according to oppression and resistance.
That Taiwan literary historiography thrives upon the resistance model for at least thirty years suggests this perpetual power dynamic in which the resistance model operates cannot yet be solved. The affirmative character and a moralist euphoria radicalizes the ideological efficacy, preventing critical reflections from within. On the other hand, arguing the other way around that everything is political, as cultural studies may maintain, renders resistance too easily available. The utopian impulse dialectically allows an acknowledgement of the lack of it and a need for it in reality, and discursive analysis, especially in academe, is actually unlikely to shake society. If critics cannot more cautiously approach the “will to resistance,” it soon reifies and become a less effective dogma. The affirmative character of Taiwan literature, in the end, dialectically reveals the formidable presence and endurance of a reality that it seeks to intervene and change.
The first critical motif is supported and enhanced by the second motif, the
“demand for authenticity.” The claim to be authentic is more fundamental than the previous one in that while “resistance” only involves the intention and effect of literary production, “authenticity” concerns the raison d’être and value of literature itself, at least for specific genres. In the context of Taiwan literature, the demand for authenticity, I would argue, is moralized evaluation of historicity. To determine the authenticity of a certain entity also generates a strong ideological effect, as it directly involves how to perceive, to judge, to include, to exclude, to praise, or to criticize, a social phenomena, a text, a person. I argue that it is this criterion that demarcates
friend and foe (Lin 12). In this sense the demand for authenticity legitimate this “will to resist,” because deciding whether something is authentic at least partially involves moral judgment: the authentic has to be supported, but the inauthentic must be
criticized (Lin 59). Lin observes that nativist literary historiographies tend to construct conceptual dichotomies to legitimate their claim: the first one is the opposition and conflict between native tradition and Western modernity (Lin 11-13), and the other is the opposition of the popular and the official (Lin 25).3 Both dichotomies work according to the same logic: the former, tradition and the popular, is native, natural, spontaneous, popular, victimized, authentic, while the latter, Western modernity and the official, is imported, alienating, elitist, abstract, oppressive, inauthentic.
Western modern culture is inauthentic and oppressive because it is imposed via Japanese colonial regime before the war and via Cold-War structure, global capitalism and cultural imperialism after the war. Literary production sponsored and endorsed by official policies or remaining silent to them is inherently unjust and inauthentic. The demand for authenticity also appears when nativist critics argue that both modernism and postmodernism were unnatural, imported without a historical or social basis (“Postmodern or Postcolonial” 54-56),4 while nativist realism and postcolonial society is more fit to describe Taiwan society that underwent from authoritarian rule to democratization (“Postmodern or Postcolonial” 42; 54-58). Chen Fangming’s criticism of the importation of postmodernism is interesting and telling here: its advent in Taiwan was against the community’s wish (“Postmodern or Postcolonial”
57). This claim, though not necessarily wrong, is itself ahistorical. Chiu’s study shows
3 Lin Yunhong’s research persuasively argues how the state apparatus appropriates these dichotomies (11-13). Although Lin criticizes these conceptual dichotomies, I still find them persuasive critical coordinates in many ways.
4 Or, to use a more academic expression, the importation is “decontextualized” and “misappropriated”
how postwar modernism, imported by the academy and supported by Cold-War politics, triggered a defense mechanism: nativists accuse postwar Taiwanese modernism as a plagiarized version of modernity, while the modernist writers are submissive to the West, and fail to engaging in resistance against Western
imperialism (Chiu 209-10; 213). The task of nativist literature would be to “redeem”
and vindicate the homeland (Chiu 237). This is the fallacy whereby the demand for authenticity is moralized evaluation of historicity: one cannot not want what is in fact historical, because nothing is purely unhistorical. Any criterion to determine whether something is authentic or inauthentic involves ideological judgment, and ideology is itself a historical product. None of the aforementioned critical terms: modernism, postmodernism, realism, the postcolonial, are native and indigenous in Taiwan, and human will, collective or individual, has very little to do with the travel of these terms via global capitalism, academe, and Cold-War political structure. Insistence on the claim that Taiwan was not socially and economically mature enough to accommodate modernism and postmodernism is a dogmatic Marxist judgment, which ironically fetishizes and essentializes the Western historical experience.
David Der-Wei Wang 王德威, in contrast, disparagingly criticizes how nativist ideology emphasizing the naturalized affinity between land, lineage and political legitimacy emulates the rhetoric of the authoritarian regime (“Nationalist Discourse”
69). These responses in historiographies indicate the dialectical consequence induced by this ethical demand: the anxiety over and aspiration for authenticity only suggests the unquestionable and indispensable presence of Western culture in modernizing Taiwan. The political and ethical demand of authenticity quite effectively explains why nativist writers prefer literary realism, because it promises plausible
verisimilitude and can serve to initiate political identification through imagination
(Lin 59). In contrast, the self-referentiality and introverted inclination of modernist form are relatively more prone to evoke doubts and suspicion.
The demand for authenticity explains why “memory” occupies a crucial position in Taiwan literary historiographies, because personal, subjective experience is believed to be “truer,” or at least “no less false” than official history as a state apparatus. Taiwan literature, especially fiction, is burdened with a mnemonic function by writers and critics alike. Borrowed from psychoanalysis and trauma studies, the politics of memory often works according to a repression/trauma-belated compulsive repetition/uncanny model, which, through an intuitive connection without theorization, follows the oppression-resistance model that sanctions the value of literature and justifies its presence after the calamitous events during colonial and authoritarian regimes. Now, does the demand for authenticity authorize critics to transcend the boundary between fiction and reality? When the premises of new historicism are introduced, history has lost its authority of the truth claim. By the same token, the boundaries between memory, fiction, and historiography are blurred and effaced. The ostensible democratization of writings and texts becomes a political lever to challenge the official master narrative and contributes to a redistribution of cultural capital.
However, this democratization of “writing” does not overhaul the definitional
premises of each register, and it covers up many serious problems it provokes. When one makes the claim that fiction is memory, and by definition, what happens in fiction is not true, does the fact render memory unreliable? If it is so, can one insist the authenticity of memory? Or, does the actuality of memory as fiction efface the boundary between fiction and reality and entitle critics to immediately correspond fiction and historical referents? If memory is aestheticized and mediated by form, does the authority of authenticity still hold? I have to reiterate that I do not oppose to
any studies on memory. What I am against is blurring the boundary between art and memory without proper theorization. Even though politics of memory provides a more humane and intimate frame to articulate identity, just because memory and fiction share a narrative structure does not justify the predication, not to mention that memory is the privileged term among the two authorized by its connotation of
authenticity and experience. Effects of memory may be perceived through the play of logical claim of fiction, but it can at best retain a mimetic, ironic, allegorical, or dialectical relation with fiction. Hitherto literary historiographies still lack a satisfying theorization of memory.
The demand for authenticity also helps to explain the curious contradiction of the formation of national identity in the age of late capitalism: the debates around the politics of subjectivity. I would like to assert even though the value of authenticity has ostensibly been questioned and weakened under the sign of the postmodern, it
dialectically returns as a privileged signifier in Taiwan culture under the sign of the postcolonial (“Postmodern or Postcolonial” 56-58). The subjectivity that literary historiographies wish to formulate should be substantial, historical, and authentic.
Liou Liangya 劉亮雅 recognizes that the postmodern corresponds to the urge to decentralize the social monolith established by authoritarian regime (Liou 329), but it contradicts the postcolonial to create a national identity (Liou 328; 329; 340). In her study, although diversified identity politics must be recognized (Liou 350-51) the post-colonial national identity is always privileged (Liou 330; 334). Hsiau Achin also argues that the anti-foundationalist, oxymoronic coinage of “strategic essentialism”
only proves the obstinacy of essentialism, or at least its essentializing effect of
narrative construction (“Indigenization Paradigms” 369; 373; 377; 382). Liou’s claim that the postmodern and the postcolonial co-exist and contest with each other does not
effectively explain the particularity of the aspiration for a Taiwan subjectivity in Taiwan literary historiographies.
Reasonably, it would seem less progressive, humane and liberal if the postcolonial as the ultimate political consciousness do not include the
multiculturalism and liberation of social identities proclaimed by the postmodern, and it is what nativist critics happily do (Shie 376; Modern Taiwanese Literature 28-29), but this does not mean the postmodern and the postcolonial are reconciled. From hindsight, I interpret the effort to consolidate a Taiwan subjectivity and the
postmodern-postcolonial debate as a crucial juncture that symptomizes the maturation of the ideology of literary historiography. It synthesizes the “will to resist,” which has been converted from passive reaction of criticism to affirmative identity construction, and the “demand for authenticity,” which claims that a repressed popular tradition will triumph over the imported Western modernity and postmodernity and
authoritarian regime. Curiously this juncture is the last attempt to theoretically explain literary production, after which nobody knows what to do with literary historiography, testified by the fact that discussion on the nineties and the thousands appear vague and disorganized in most historiographies.
The debates around the postmodern and the postcolonial endure and do not expire because they describe a dialectical relation of Identity and identities.5 The national Identity that Taiwan literature craves for is utopian, not yet fulfilled. The constant aspiration for an integrated subjectivity in politics and in culture proves the unavoidable presence of the fragmentary and complex nature of contemporary
5 Compare Jameson’s criticism: “One cannot acknowledge the justice of the general poststructuralist assault on the so-called ‘centered subject,’ the old unified ego of bourgeois individualism, and then resuscitate this same ideological mirage of psychic unification on the collective level in the form of a doctrine of collective identity. Appeals to collective identity need to be evaluated from a historical perspective, rather than from the standpoint of some dogmatic and placeless ‘ideological analysis’”
capitalist society. The precarious sovereignty and the unstable situation in multilateral international politics for Taiwan force the people of all identities to seek a legitimate, master Identity, but the demand that the Identity is supposed to tolerate the warring variety of identities makes the so-called Taiwan subjectivity empirically
inapproachable. The postcolonial seeks to redeem a repressed subjectivity. However, it is the multiple contesting interpretations of a post-colonial history that obstructs the formation of this aspired integrated subjectivity. The more the nativist critics wish to appropriate the postcolonial to consolidate the presence of a repressed tradition, the more it shows how precarious this tradition is (Lin 7). The emphasis on the substantial historicity of Taiwan literature in culture dialectically reveals its dubious foundation constantly challenged by contesting histories; the imaginary Identity that integrates all identities promised by the multicultural claim ironically shows a desire to control and the inability to do so. The more eagerly Taiwan literature tries to politicize the
discipline and underscores that Taiwan literature is committed literature in history, the more it proves how harmless and far less critical literature is in the face of party politics and global capitalism now. Even though the postcolonial is a utopian desire springing from the demand of justice in the wake of the fall of an authoritarian regime, the authoritarian spirit lurks in the call for a new integrated Identity. On the way to a currently incomplete national identity lies the danger of populism, an extreme identitarian politics provoked by an multicultural claim on retaining the radical difference and the factual irreconcilability in culture and politics. A nationalist ideology stays valid and persuasive only when the complete nation-state lies beyond reach. Most critics working in the discipline will be reluctant to acknowledge that it is precisely because a national Identity is utopian, and by definition absent in the present, that allows them to continue to project a totality while obstinately conducting
ideological criticism according to the “will to resist” and the “demand for authenticity.”
This is an extremely simplified description of social upheavals that Taiwan, and I may be unfair and risk cynicism by exaggerating the status quo in a paranoid way.
What has to be reiterated is that the political consciousness is legitimate: economic and cultural imperialism are empirically true, and the oppression of authoritarian rule cannot be denied. In this sense I endorse transitional justice is every sense. There are many archaeological and descriptive studies that cannot be said to move according to the ideology of literary historiography. But overall I still think my criticism of the ideology of literary historiography stands. In the end, before it wades into the debates on power and on politics, a critique of literary historiography necessarily reopens the ancient inquiry first: what literature is, what does the reader perceive through
literature, and how does literature allow the reader to perceive. Yvonne Sung-sheng Chang 張頌聖 criticizes that cultural products, especially middle-brow ones, provide the reader and the audience with vicarious satisfaction substituting for historical knowledge (“Rupture of Literary History” 65). The vicariousness, of course, is the core of the ethic of representational art: it prevents direct contact with the materials, and it offers fictional alternatives to reinterpret and reengage in historical experience.
Despite the fact that Taiwan literature as a discipline always asks the critics “to historicize,” the affirmative character conditioned by the ideology of “the will to resist” and “the demand for authenticity” burden the epistemological quest with an ethical imperative. However, the “will to resist” and “the demand for authenticity” are themselves ahistorical judgments. What actually renders these concepts historical is contemporary political needs.
I want to borrow Leo Bersani’s critique of a new critical register he terms the
“Culture of Redemption,” which has come to be “the enabling morality of a
humanistic criticism” (Culture of Redemption 7), so as to clarify what I mean by an ideology of Taiwan literary historiography. The general claim of Culture of
Redemption, writes Bersani, is that “the work of art has the authority to master the presumed raw material of experience,” no matter how “overwhelming, practically impossible to absorb” experience may be, “in a manner that uniquely gives value to, perhaps even redeems, that material” (Culture of Redemption 1). However, “art's beneficently reconstructive function in culture,” Bersani tries to show, depends “on a devaluation of historical experience and of art” (Culture of Redemption 1). According to Bersani, in this cultural regime, even though art is meant to rectify and to
compensate by reenacting and interpreting historical experience, it assuages the force of devastating experience while enslaved by historical materials that it is supposed to reenact. The goal of the “[reparative] cultural symbolizations” is to “repeat those catastrophes in order to transcend them, which means that they scrupulously reenact the failures they are meant to make not happen” (108). Bersani’s critique merits quotation at length:
[Culture of redemption authorizes] an aesthetic of art as truth divorced from phenomena, a truth seen here as merely an evocative sameness, an exact yet alien repetition of phenomena. In the myth of art as both a translation of life and as more real or more essential than life, the imaginary adheres to the real not in order to impart an existential authority or legitimacy to art, but instead to reproduce the real without any such authority, to demonstrate the superiority of the image to the model. And yet, precisely because of this adherence, the
‘substitute objects’ of art continuously remind us of the objects they are meant
to annihilate or transcend; what purports to be an essentializing repetition turns out to be the symbolic reminder, the symbolic symptom, of phenomena at once erased and indelible (26).
Bersani’s criticism is especially telling in the context of Taiwan literature. Having been forced to live in colonial and authoritarian regimes, literature is anticipated to compensate the oppressed history, interrogate the unjust historical paradigm, and to formulate a possibility for the future. Bersani, however, defies this way of thinking.
He asserts that cultural criticism should become “an instructive reminder of the power of appearances to defeat what may be imagined to lie ‘behind’ them . . . to the
possibility of pursuing not an art of truth divorced from experience, but of phenomena liberated from the obsession with truth” (26). Literary critics’ mission is “far from investing objects with symbolic significance” but to “enhance their specificity and thereby fortify their resistance to the violence of symbolic intent” (28). Bersani’s argument usefully characterizes the pervading belief about the possible relation between literary works and reality as well as between literary works and literary historiography. The “violence of symbolic intent” usurps history and enslaves the aesthetic. By insisting there is truth under the aesthetic appearance (of some literary products), literary historiographers justify their claim to resist authority, neglecting the fact that history has been inexorably transformed in representation, and it is the appearance that harbors history. Ironically, the effectiveness of the ideology of Taiwan literary historiography actually hinges on certain characters of literary form. I will move on to discuss how these two aspects of ideology of literary historiography derive from the critics’ critical assessment and judgment of modernism and realism in chapter one, and how this critical judgment later profoundly influences the
epistemological foundation and consequent debates of Taiwan literature in the first chapter.
Now my methodological claims derive from the problematics I have delineated above. In this thesis I do not intend to elicit the dialectic of the ideology of literary historiography by conducting a dialectical criticism immanently. I only want to retrieve some previously neglected and underestimated theoretical threads and illustrate how different approaches lie beyond the scope of literary historiography.
The different focus of my methodology mainly concerns two dimensions: a renewed attention to literary form and aesthetic, and Western influences.
As a study of a Taiwanese writer’s works, my thesis is characterized by its probably overwrought investment in Western literary and cultural criticism. My choice to study Guo through Western literature (in chapter three and four) and Japanese intellectual history (in chapter two) on the one hand corresponds to Guo’s claim in an interview that he is “an out-an-out Westernized” writer (Interview with Liao 120). If his self-proclaimed influence comes from Western literature, I think comparative reading with foreign literature is at least worth a try. On the other hand, I do not wish to emphasize the tension between nativist tradition and Western
modernity already described by Chiu. On the contrary, I want to follow the advice prescribed by Yvonne Chang: a critical study the postwar aesthetic paradigm formulated by Western sources transported to Taiwan via Cold-War political institutions provides literary historiography with a broader referential frame to
observe how political ruptures—the end of colonization in 1945, the settlement of the KMT government in 1949, the baodiao 保釣 movement in the early seventies, the Formosa Incident and severance of diplomatic ties with the USA in 1979, and the democratization in 1987—influence literary production and literary history. A
comparative reading is, according to the common sense, a decontextualized approach, and I do not deny it. However, I propose a comparative reading to stimulate test out the following possibilities: to tease out unnoticed dimensions in Guo by a change of perspective to experiment with the potential of Taiwan literature as a player in contemporary world literature, to construct a possible relation between Taiwan literature and Western literature in a writer strongly influenced by Western literature, and to see if engaging with Western literature can stimulate the now hypostatized reading strategy in Taiwan literature.
Aesthetic and formal analysis as a critical register has been attacked for a supposed neutral and apolitical appearance. Take an aforementioned example:
postwar modernist lyrics. I disagree with Chen Fangming’s humanist myth that modernist writers resist the White Terror by consciously detaching themselves from politics and proclaiming the autonomy of art (Modern Taiwanese Literature 348).
You Shengkuan’s 游勝冠 accusation of political quietism is theoretically and empirically correct, but still I do not agree with his conclusion elicited from a discursive analysis of manifesto rather than from literary form and works of art themselves. Both critics appeal to moral judgment and political efficacy to evaluate the phenomenon. I endorse the claim that literary fiction is necessarily social and historical. However, in this thesis I do not intend to conduct a sociological analysis that studies exterior factors of literary production, nor will I resort to a humanistic understanding based on the author’s biographical background.6 Lin criticizes Chen that the latter’s humanist claim and praise for subjectivity and individual genius presuppose the immediate connection between writers and their times (“Two Types of
6 My choice of methodology no doubt directly reflects my training in Western literature and the fact that I write outside Taiwan literature. The difference and boundary between two disciplines determine my weakness in gathering, selecting and analyzing historical materials other than primary literary texts
Leftists” 167-68) and to a great extent neglect how exterior factors such as political institutions, ideologies, structural attributes, power dynamic, interpersonal networking, and distribution of resources overdetermine literary production (“Two Types of
Leftists”169). Lin doubts that any individual writer can directly influence literature as a social system (“Two Types of Leftists” 171). Lin is correct to argue that the
individual mind cannot be attributed as the ultimate cause of literary production. The danger of “humanist” criticism are two-fold: it lures critics to resort to moral
judgment and sentimentalism, and it shuns a theorization of the possibilities of an immediate correspondence of the individual and the historical. Conducting a literature review of past studies on Guo will illustrate this danger, especially in the earlier reviews.
Wu Dayun 吳達芸, writing in the belle-lettres lyrical tradition, emphasizes that Guo uses complicated narration, fragmented imagery to find the redemptive path for the geographical and mental exiles; he discovers an aesthetic restorative view to retrieve the liveliness of the world (542). She argues that Guo successfully finds a transcendent perpective that allows fusion of subject and object (531-32; 537), by which Guo can review and correspond the lives without any overt political
engagement (542). Not totally insensible, but the essay is less an analytical criticism than the author’s personal appreciation. Wu’s discussion on narratological problem may be the only contribution, and I will return to it in the second excursus.
Chen Mingjou 陳明柔 interprets Guo’s fiction as national allegory and fictitious memory that fill the gaps and ruptures in an official history undermined by violence (408-10). Despite the instinctively political interpretation, Chen Mingjou’s study indicates several characteristics of Guo’s fiction: he eschews realistic
representation of historical violence, but obliquely and lyrically depicts individuals’
fates. Guo’s idiosyncratic characterization undertakes but refracts the weight of collective memory (411). She argues that Guo not only tries to reconstruct history and summons the historical atmosphere (432), but tries to grasp the human existential condition through the politics of memory and forgetting (425). Chen Mingjou’s study, conflates, or at least does not differentiate, fiction and memory (408). I already argue that this is a dangerous inclination that neglects the fictionality of literary works. It is not problematic to argue that Guo’s writings depict the interaction between personal experience and history as a human condition, but if an analysis of emplotment and narrative devices can achieve this, why does the critic still prefer memory to fiction?
Do critics inadvertently equate characters as real life and deliberately confuse characterization and memory? I may be unfair, but I still contend that critics have to retain the boundary between reality and fiction even if artwork originate from society.
Wu and Chen’s essays already suggest the danger of humanist appreciation: the presupposed correspondence between the individual and history prevents a more rigorous study of form. It also blurs the necessary intermediary between the author and the text, fiction and reality. Both critics resort to lyrical language to describe and praise Guo through many more rhetorical tropes but are unhelpful for qualifying the formal characteristic of Guo’s fiction except vague description (Wu 540-41; Chen 422-23; 430-32). Another influential approach is to combine gender studies and nationalist concerns, exemplified by Xu Sulan 許素蘭 and Wei Weili 魏偉莉. Xu’s essay notes that Guo prefers women to be his focal characters (279), and she argues that Guo’s fiction presents the paradoxical aspect of national allegory by manipulating the irony deriving from gender differences (296): women’s ignorance, indifferent attitude toward politics, or even benevolent thoughts ultimately betray men’s ideals of political engineering (279; 291-92), and therefore Guo’s fiction tragically portrays the
tension between individuals and the larger historical picture. Xu’s essay, with repetitive rhetorical questions (288-89; 291-94) and an accusatory tone, relies on a binary system to support her argument: men/politics/illusory/victimizer and women/family/authentic/victimized. This essay may have indicated how gender politics expose the blind spot of nationalism, but Xu’s essay fails to differentiate and describe the homologous relations between different power dynamics, such as patriarchy in the domestic realm and the state apparatus (292; 295).
Wei Weili’s monograph was among the first extensive studies on Guo’s fiction that introduces literary theories into analysis. Her reading of Guo’s fiction still revolves around the problem of subject formation, which decisively influences her choice of the two critical axes: écriture féminine, by which she tries to elucidate how Guo deconstructs patriarchal grand historical narrative and national identity by using female perspectives in fiction (194); and diasporic transnational politics, by which she adopts Stuart Hall’s conception of cultural identity to demonstrate how Guo’s fiction rejects fixed identification predetermined by ideology (247). Wei’s problem is that her methodological approach is an arbitrary medley that combines cultural studies,
postcolonial criticism, Heideggerian phenomenology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and French feminism. Although she is certainly aware of the danger of essentializing gender roles (196) Wei’s analysis still resort to a binary model: she divides masculine/imperial/Chinese/politics/educated patriarchs and
feminine/colonial/Taiwanese/everyday life/domestic women (205-07). The nationalist politics apparently overrides gender politics, because women from China apparently do not belong to the latter category (Wei 206-07; Xu 294). By arguing that Guo restores the view of the most oppressed, both Xu and Guo exploit the oppressor- victim model without teasing out the nuances between the complicity between
nationalist and gender politics. By occupying the moral high ground, they replicate the ideology of Taiwan literary historiography: the oppressed is also real, and they deserve acknowledgement, too.
The significant biographical study by Jian Yiming 簡義明 “Writing about Kuo Sung-Fen: A Writer without a Position and a Definition” is a thorough biographical project engaging in Guo’s life by excavating several important political documents in his past and several not hitherto discussed pieces. Jian’s methodology, however, is problematic and vague, and it is an deliberate act (17-24). Because he too faithfully abides by Guo’s biographical facts and tries to make his writings correspond to his life, he to some extent mystifies rather than sheds light on Guo’s literary career. He has completed indispensable work of excavating previously inaccessible political writings, but his interpretation of Guo’s writings never surpasses the range of
thematics (100-10) and does not do justice to Guo’s literary influences from Western literature (95-98; 111-16) and philosophy, and his formal analysis is
disproportionately inadequate in a supposedly comprehensive study (105-10). Jian’s reluctance to fall into any theoretical interpretive framework does indicate some formulaic interpretive inclinations of Taiwanese literary studies (14-16). The conclusion argues that acknowledging Guo’s refusal of a historical/ideological position is a fulfillment of a humanist belief, but by appealing to the humanist presuppositions by promoting the singularity of a writer and demanding a profound understanding of his mind is, again, gratuitous (so what?), and without a dialectical social analysis, the study loses its critical force (120-22).
A more recent monograph by Gu Zhengping 顧正萍 adopts a relatively traditional strategy: narratological analysis of (137), focus on imagery (124-25), sensuous impressions (168), and thematics (190-91; 246-51). Gu’s formal analysis of
Guo’s fiction is more rigorous compared with Wei’s and Jian’s, but she only identifies the themes in Guo’s fiction by a close exegetical, word-by-word reading. Because none of her thematic analysis: feminine/maternity (202); history/orphan (207);
language/homeland (216); metamorphosis/rebirth (225), exceed the previous studies, I do not think Gu furthers the descriptive textual analysis and illuminates the relation between text and history beyond representation.
Among the research on Guo, “Poetry, Ill Body of History, Motherhood” by Ng Kimchew remains the most profound and persuasive. Ng contends that Guo’s oeuvre traces “a left-wing intellectual’s decisive conversion to literature after disillusionment with socialist revolution” (Textuality 250). Ng characterizes Guo’s fictional writings as “a production of melancholy” (Textuality 250), or “allegory in the ruins of history”
(Textuality 255), and his determination to turn away from politics can be seen as the turn from dogmatic “dialectic materialism toward textual alchemy” (Textuality 250).
Ng argues that Guo chooses the “transcendental homelessness of the Chinese people in the catastrophe of modernization and Western imperialism” (Textuality 267) as his subject matter. This comment is particularly important because it not only
demonstrates that Guo’s stories, though not always obvious, are always deeply rooted in Taiwan history, from Japanese rule, to the February 28 Incident and consequent totalitarian rule, but also situates his political stance toward his fiction writing. Ng’s essay most concretely delineates how Guo’s texts apply allegory to relate images of
“ill body” and “historical calamities” (258). That is to say, Ng never loses sight of the literary mediation by noticing its inner conflicts (266-68). Ng also contributes by including the critical negative consciousness in Guo’s work by discussing of irony (259; 262; 268) and the political significance of the epistemological void created narrative (280-81).
Ng’s attention to intermediary relation between history and literary form leads to the following problem. Yet Lin’s argument is no less problematic. If Chen
Fangming is wrong to take for granted the direct causality in literary production: that time conditions the writers to conduct and finish their works, Lin’s criticism cannot explain how other exterior social forces influence literary works, either. The
intermediate factor, the style, is simplified and bracketed in literary historiographies and replaced by content analysis based on the plausible premise: the correspondence between fiction and history, and that the former always reflects the latter. In his treatise on literary historiography, Moretti argues that in a modern society which is
“irreparably divided between hostile interests and values” (Moretti 34), literary forms, be it ostensibly transparent realist narrative or obscure modern lyric, are “the
constraining and ineluctable attempt to make semantic ‘compromises’ between what have become totally heterogeneous and contradictory elements” (Moretti 35). Literary form is where “psychical and cultural forces” encounter and conflict, and their
“relation to [one’s] self-awareness” can be understood “only if its specific rhetorical formalizations are analyzed” (35). Literary form is the middle ground which will ultimately reveal human “desire to make the ‘adjustment’ to the existing order,” an idea which “[coincides] with some idea of ‘happiness'” (40). Moretti’s proposition may sound like common sense, but at the beginning of his review on literary
historiography, Moretti defines literary criticism “as a sociology of rhetorical forms”
(6), which includes “rhetorical figures” (6) and “the internal laws and historical range of a specific genre” (9), not an analysis of referents and content in specific works. A study of style is much more complicated than an analysis of content or themes, let alone constructing a coherent theory to describe the interaction between a form and its time. This is where many critics err. Accusing the autonomy of art of circumventing
and escaping from its ideological stance and asserting that “everything is political”
does not provide the excuse of ignoring the function of the attention to literary form, nor does it efface the presence of style as an intermediate between language, meaning, and reference.
The raison d’être of literary studies, I contend, lies not only in what is conveyed and reflected in the content, but more significantly in how literary form mediate social, historical, and moral meanings. This is why I turn to Western Marxist aesthetics, which provides the most powerful explanation on the interaction between history and art.7 Since the heyday of French Enlightenment and the rise of German idealism, philosophy turns its attention to history to either coalesce or resist the force of modernity. As Marxism draws energy from Hegel as well as scientific progress to renovate its politico-economic interpretation of human development to liberate human beings from inequality, Western Marxism, especially the Frankfurt School, more introspectively and philosophically reflects on how the dark side of capitalism
destroys human existence and the possibility to redeem it. This thesis will touch upon thoughts and writings by Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno (plus his collaboration with Max Horkheimer), and Fredric Jameson. From Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel, through Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, to Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, these critics strive to articulate how history necessarily produces corresponding literary forms, and that through form, the truth about history may be revealed. However, these critics never lose sight of how form reflects time,
7 Whether Taiwan literature, its methodology and its political inclination should be characterized as Marxist, or at least leftist, is debatable. Lin Yunhung’s study shows that the major leftist claims are nationalist rather than Marxist; the former merely utilizes the latter as token to reinforce the ethical claim. See Lin, Wangque jieji de liangzhong zuopai: bijiao taiwan wenxueshi lunshu zhong de houzhimin zuoyi yu zuqun daoxiang de jieji xushi 忘卻「階級」的兩種左派：比較台灣文學史論述 中的「後殖民左翼」與「族群導向的階級敘事」[Two Types of Leftists Who Forget about ‘Class:’
A Comparison between Postcolonial Left and Ethnically-oriented Class Narrative in Discourses on the
