Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan
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Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan
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Overview
Situating her subject in its historical context, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang traces the connection between Taiwan's Modernists and the liberal scholars of pre-Communist China. She discusses the Modernists' ambivalent relationship with contemporary Taiwan's conservative culture, and provides a detailed critical survey of the strife between the Modernists and the socialistically inclined, anti-Western Nativists. Chang's approach is comprehensive, combining Chinese and comparative perspectives. Employing the critical insights of Raymond Williams, Peter Burger, M. M. Bahktin, and Fredric Jameson, she investigates the complex issues involved in Chinese writers' appropriation of avant-gardism, aestheticism, and various other Western literary concepts and techniques. Within this framework, Chang offers original, challenging interpretations of major works by the best-known Chinese Modernists from Taiwan.
As an intensive introduction to a literature of considerable quality and impact, and as a case study of the global spread of Western literary Modernism, this book will be of great interest to students of Chinese and comparative literature, and to those who wish to understand the broad patterns of twentieth-century literary history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822382591 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/28/1993 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Lexile: | 1650L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 364 KB |
Read an Excerpt
Modernism and the Nativist Resistance
Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan
By Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1993 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8259-1
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
The death of President Chiang Ching-kuo of the Republic of China on Taiwan in 1988 marked the end of an era in postwar Taiwan. This era began in 1949, when China's Nationalist government, led by Chiang Kai-shek, retreated from the mainland to settle on the offshore island-province of Taiwan after being defeated by the Communists in the civil war. The forty-year period under the autocratic rule of two presidents from the Chiang family was characterized by remarkable continuity and homogeneity in the social, political, and cultural spheres. Drastic structural changes, however, began occurring at all levels of the society in the mid-1980s following momentous political changes initiated by Chiang Ching-kuo during his last two years—the lifting of martial law, the recognition of an opposition party, the removal of the ban on founding new newspapers, and the resumption of communication with mainland China at the civilian level. New intellectual and artistic currents have emerged, many with the explicit or implicit motive of reexamining existing orders. The present moment, therefore, offers an ideal opportunity to reassess the literary accomplishments of writers from Taiwan in the forty-year period as an integral historical unit.
With China split into two political entities with different sociopolitical systems since 1949, the tradition of the Chinese New Literature (Hsin wen-hsüeh) has also been traveling along divergent paths in the two Chinese societies. On the one hand, writers in post-1949 Taiwan have been selective in developing their literary heritage; whereas revolutionary literature and "critical realism" were suppressed, the more inoffensive, lyricalsentimental strand of New Literature has enjoyed great popularity. On the other hand, from the anti-Communist propaganda of the cold war decade of the 195os, through the Modernist and Nativist literary movements of the 1960s and 1970s, to the expression of today's pluralism and burgeoning market-oriented mass culture, literary currents in post-1949 Taiwan have closely mirrored the country's larger sociopolitical transitions.
The elitist, Western-influenced Modernist literary movement of the sixties and the populist, nationalistic Hsiang-t'u wen-hsüeh yün-tung (Nativist literary movement) of the seventies may appropriately be regarded as "alternative" and "oppositional" cultural formations in Taiwan during this period, using terminology from Raymond Williams (112-114). As the Modernists adopted literary concepts developed in Western capitalist society, they simultaneously longed for an ideological transformation, taking such bourgeois social values as individualism, liberalism, and rationalism as correctives for the oppressive social relations derived from a traditional system of values. The inherent skepticism of the Modernists toward the dominant culture's neotraditionalist discourse, acted on fully in the later phase of the movement, was beyond any doubt potentially subversive.
The Nativist literary movement, in contrast, with its use of literature as a pretext to challenge the dominant sociopolitical order, may be properly considered counterhegemonic. The movement was triggered by the nation's diplomatic setbacks in the international arena during the 1970s. It provided a forum for native Taiwanese intellectuals to vent their discontent with the unbalanced political power distribution between mainlanders and native Taiwanese and with the socioeconomic problems that had accompanied the country's accelerated process of industrialization since the 1960s. The pronounced oppositional nature of this movement is evident in all three of its proclaimed goals: to destroy the political myth of the mainlander-controlled Nationalist government, to denounce bourgeois capitalist social values, and to combat Western cultural imperialism, which was thought to be exemplified by the Modernist literary movement.
For different reasons, each movement dominated Taiwan's literary scene only for a relatively brief period of time. By the late 1970s and early 198os, the influence of both the Modernists and the Nativists had sharply declined, and some of their inherent shortcomings had become obvious with the passage of time. As most of the Modernist writers advocated artistic autonomy and were politically disengaged, the subversive elements of their works were easily coopted by hegemonic cultural forces and their critical impact consequently diluted. The more radical subscription to aestheticism by certain writers, moreover, was deeply at odds with the predominantly lyrical sensibility of ordinary Chinese readers. Even though the essential dynamics of the Modernist movement were not entirely exhausted with the loss of popular favor, both critics and general readers received the movement's most mature output in the 1980s with a disheartening nonchalance. In the meantime, the militant political agenda of the Nativists both threatened and bored middle-class readers, who were largely satisfied with the status quo. The resistant activities of the more radical Nativists, moreover, were increasingly channeled into direct political involvement. The subsiding of these contending literary voices thus paved the way for the rise of a "serious" literature more popular in nature and a resurgence of the lyrical and sentimental strain in the eighties. The younger generation of writers of this decade assimilated the technical sophistication of the Modernists and displayed a social awareness as a result of the Nativist influence. Their vocational visions, however, significantly departed from those of their mentors and were much more deeply conditioned by the market logic of Taiwan's increasingly commercialized cultural setting.
Critical discourse on Taiwan's literature of the last two decades has been deeply factional, and studies of Modernist writers, many of whom were heavily stigmatized in the overheated literary disputes of the 1970s, have been particularly scanty. In the United States, since C. T. Hsia observed in the preface to his A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (i97i, second edition) that "Taiwan since 1961 has enjoyed a minor literary renascence of genuine promise, even though few Western readers are yet aware of its existence" (vii), scores of serious critical essays have been written about this literary phenomenon, and a collection of articles on Taiwan fiction, which included some seminal studies of the Modernists, was published in 198o (Faurot). Nevertheless, no substantial scholarly treatment of the Modernist literary movement that covers both the early and late phases of its development has appeared in Chinese or English.
The present study, intended to fill this gap, examines this movement from several different perspectives. Chapters in this book separately treat the following subjects: the artistic reorientation of the Modernist writers that significantly distinguished their work from older forms of modern Chinese literature, represented in Taiwan by an older generation of writers active in the 195os; the various ways in which the Modernists appropriated Western literary modernism; cultural criticism and textual strategies found in works of the mature stage of the movement; and, finally, the contesting voices of the Nativist critics in reaction to the Modernist project.
Western literary influences on Chinese writers and transformations of various literary "-isms" in Chinese hands have been favorite subjects of study in the field of twentieth-century Chinese literature. By arguing in this book that certain literary practices in Taiwan during the Modernist literary movement may be defined, in a specially qualified sense, as "modernist," I hope to engage in dialogues with scholars of Chinese modernist trends who confront similar issues of literary history.
The Modernist Literary Movement
The event commonly considered as having inaugurated the modernist trend in Taiwan's fiction was the publication of the literary magazine Hsien-tai wenh-süeh [Modern literature] (1960-1973; 1976—), founded by a group of young writers who were at the time still undergraduate students in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University. In addition to creative work by Chinese writers, the magazine also published translations of creative and critical works from the Western modernist canon, featuring such writers as Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and D. H. Lawrence. Initially, the magazine served only as a creative writing workshop for a score of precocious, talented students of Western literature, whose artistic vision closely reflected that of their dearly respected mentor, Professor T. A. Hsia. Soon, however, it turned into a reputable center for literature loosely defined as "modernist," and, in the next two decades, the outstanding achievements of its founding members lent it even greater prestige In the preface to an anthology of works selected from the magazine, Pai Hsien-yung could proudly claim that the collection included work by nearly all of Taiwan's promising writers active during the thirteen years when Modern Literature was published (Ou-yang, Hsien-tai-15-17)
Although not all of the successive editors of Modern Literature, who included several established writers and students of traditional Chinese literature, necessarily shared the vision of the magazine's founders, the editorial policy of the magazine was clearly to introduce new modes of art distinct from the prevailing ones. Deserving of particular attention is the justification offered for this undertaking in the foreword to the first issue of the magazine, which serves as a de facto manifesto of the Modernists: "We feel that old forms and old styles are insufficient in expressing the artistic sentiments of modern people" (Lau, Foreword 2). The presumption of the statement, that there is a necessary correlation between the artistic form and the episteme of a particular historical moment, is reminiscent of claims made by Western modernists, especially British ones, in the early part of the century, explaining their literature as a radical break from the past.
Although one cannot be certain that Taiwan's Modernists indeed share the belief of many Western modernists that a rupture in human history in the modern age severed them from the entire past of human civilization, themes and techniques developed in response to the societal modernization of the last two hundred years—mainly in the West—have appeared repeatedly in their writings. Although these appropriations may have assisted certain Taiwan writers in coping with the onslaught of capitalism in their own society, nevertheless a considerable disparity exists between this Chinese version of modernist literature and its Western models. This disparity is a result of profound differences in historical and cultural preconditions between the West since the mid-nineteenth century and Taiwan during the 1950s and 1960s.
Scholars and critics of post-1949 Taiwan literature have fervently debated the adequacy of such a term as "Chinese modernism." Those sensitive to the derivative, imitative nature of Taiwan's Modernist literature have argued that the superficial modernist traits of most of this literature are not intrinsically motivated. Lacking the animating spirit of modernism that underlies its Western models, it "becomes ultimately more form than content, more stylistic and technical showmanship than a doctrine of profound philosophical implications" (Lee, "Modernism" 20). Underneath the modernist surface are thematic concerns of a very local nature or even feigned, unauthentic sentiments. In sum, the implied criticism is that the Modernists' appropriations of Western modernism only occurred at the linguistic and stylistic levels, with the cultural and historical content largely displaced.
The more negative critics, mainly from the Nativist camp, displaying a bias against modernism similar to that of Georg Lukacs, dismissed literary technique as something superfluous in itself, a formal diversion that prevents writers from engagement with truly important contemporary issues. Motivated by both socialist and nationalist ideas, these critics were primarily concerned with preventing Western capitalism from taking root in Taiwan, and they regarded the Modernists as heralding precisely that process. Thus they have emotionally castigated the Modernists for having voluntarily imposed on themselves, out of vanity, such spiritual disease as the alienation syndrome, existentialist despair, and nihilistic moral depravity—all symptoms of the malaise of capitalist societies not yet endemic in Taiwan. As the Nativist critic Yü T'ients'-ung humorously put it, the Modernists have just "sneezed at seeing someone else catching a cold."
Although these arguments contain valid points to receive attention in due course, both views are strongly evaluative, reflecting the Chinese critics' sense of anxiety about the movement's implication of a master-slave relationship between the Western and the Chinese. In fact, this anxiety is rooted in precisely the same external conditions that motivated the Modernists to adopt Western models; holders of these views come mostly from the same generation as the Modernists. The present study, from the vantage point of a later historical moment, intends to point out, however, that the question of whether Chinese Modernist literature is "genuine" or "fake," or whether it renders a perfect simulacrum of literary modernism in the West half a century earlier is insignificant. What really matters and makes the movement worth studying is that the modernist influences have in fact produced significant consequences in Chinese literature and culture from a national perspective.
The significance of Taiwan's Modernist literary movement, therefore, deserves assessment primarily in terms of its generation of new dynamics among contemporary Chinese writers and its redirecting of their artistic mode of expression. Such an assessment is the task undertaken in the central chapters of the book. The present chapter examines the cultural and intellectual context of this movement along two lines of inquiry.
First, the Modernist literary movement is seen as another instance of the larger project of Chinese intellectuals' emulation of Western high culture. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, shocked by the devastating effect of China's encounter with hegemonic Western culture, modern Chinese intellectuals have embarked on various programs of cultural rejuvenation, the most potent formula for which consists in assimilation of Western cultural products. Taiwan's Modernist literary movement, as one of the latest in a series of such programs, inevitably displays some of its essential characteristics. Second, an important link is perceived between this movement and the liberal strand of thought in China's pre-Revolution era, especially that of the Anglo-American wing of intellectuals. Taiwan's Modernists particularly stressed the principle of artistic autonomy, among other liberal conceptions of literature, and, by and large, have more thoroughly adhered to this principle than their pre-1949 liberal predecessors.
An Elitist Program for Cultural Rejuvenation
Scholars have often attributed the unusually strong influence of Western literature on Taiwan writers of the post-1949 era to the inaccessibility of the literary heritage of their own immediate predecessors. According to this argument, the banning of works by most pre-1949 New Literature writers created a vacuum that forced young writers in Taiwan to turn to foreign sources for literary inspiration. The more political interpreters of this phenomenon, however, have stressed the effect of the ubiquitous workings of cultural imperialism, contending that the prominent American presence in post-1949 Taiwan necessarily fostered excessive zeal for American cultural products.
While the arbitrarily created breach in modern Chinese literary history is regrettable, placing too much weight on the apparent discontinuity between literature in Taiwan and pre-1949 traditions sometimes unduly lures our attention away from certain consistencies in Chinese intellectual attitudes toward the West in both the pre- and post-1949 eras. Despite the different strategies adopted, similar patterns are discerned in the way Chinese intellectuals from different periods cope with their ambivalent feelings about hegemonic Western culture. The way founding members of Modern Literature perceive and justify their pro-Western position, for example, draws its strength from the persistently recurring hsi-hua (Westernization) discourse.
The specific logic of the Westernization discourse entails an acknowledgment of the wretched condition of contemporary Chinese affairs and an enlightened acceptance or active assimilation of positive features of Western civilization for the ultimate purpose of self-rejuvenation. Thus, in the foreword to Modern Literature's inaugural issue, Joseph Lau says that the editors do not want to deceive themselves by taking pride in China's past glory but instead would "face our own backwardness" (2). In assuming a self-critical stance, Lau goes on to declare that "the territory of the New Literature is desolate, if not entirely barren" (2). In a later issue, Wang Wen-hsing also claimed that the dissatisfaction with the current decline of art had motivated the young college students to devote their energy and time to the prospect of a "Chinese Renaissance" ("Hsien-tai" 4).
Editors of Modern Literature apparently conceived their efforts at invigorating modern Chinese literature with a liberal vision. Lau states in the same foreword that he and his colleagues would pursue their causes with "sobriety, wisdom, receptiveness, and modesty." Even Wang's more iconoclastic editorial note aims ultimately to beseech an attitudinal change among the conservatives. With a sprightly analogy, Wang compares in this note the potential opponents of the Modernists to tyrannical fathers who forbid their offspring to play ball, sing songs, ride bicycles, and listen to the radio—simply because these activities are all "Western" ("Hsien-tai" 6). The seemingly radical assertion of the supremacy of Western civilization in modern life is, after all, intended to elicit open-mindedness.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Modernism and the Nativist Resistance by Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang. Copyright © 1993 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
ContentsPreface
ONE Introduction
TWO The Rise of the Modernist Trend
THREE Appropriations of Literary Modernism
FOUR Modernists Reaching Maturity: Cultural Critique and Textual Strategies
FIVE The Nativist Resistance to Modernism
SIX Conclusion: Entering a New Era
Notes
Select Bibliography
Sources of English Translations of Literary Works from Taiwan
Glossary
Index