MODERN CHINESE POETRY from TAIWAN AFTER 1949 Silvia

From transparency to artificiality : modern chinese poetry from Taiwan after 1949 Marijnissen, S. Citation Marijnissen, S. (2008, November 5). From transparency to artificiality : modern chinese poetry from Taiwan after 1949. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/13228 Version: Not Applicable (or Unknown) Licence agreement concerning inclusion of doctoral thesis in the License: Institutional Repository of the University of Leiden Downloaded from: https://hdl.handle.net/1887/13228 Note: To cite this publication please use the final published version (if applicable). FROM TRANSPARENCY TO ARTIFICIALITY: MODERN CHINESE POETRY FROM TAIWAN AFTER 1949 Silvia Marijnissen Copyright © 2008 Silvia Marijnissen and Universiteit Leiden FROM TRANSPARENCY TO ARTIFICIALITY: MODERN CHINESE POETRY FROM TAIWAN AFTER 1949 Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van Doctor aan de Universiteit Leiden, op gezag van Rector Magnificus prof. mr. P.F. van der Heijden, volgens het besluit van het College voor Promoties, te verdedigen op woensdag 5 november 2008, klokke 15.15 door Silvia Marijnissen geboren te Made en Drimmelen in 1970 Promotiecommissie Promotor: Prof. dr. M. van Crevel Co-promotor: Dr. L.L. Haft Referent: Prof. dr. M. Yeh (University of California, Davis) Overige leden: Prof. dr. E.J. van Alphen Prof. dr. I. Smits TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 7 1. Oppositions: Poetical Debates from the 1950s to the 1980s 19 – China and Japan: Taiwan before 1949 19 – Nostalgia: Poetry or Politics? 27 – Dream or Dawn: Lyricism or Intellectualism? 37 – The Beautiful in the Ugly: Foreign Influences 47 – Make War Not Love: Readers’ Expectations 57 – Art and Life: Popularization 71 – Vineyard and On Time Poetry: Taiwan’s Melting Pot 80 2. A Changing Attitude to Poetic Language: The Poem as Construct (i) 88 – Poetry in Prose 87 – Tension 95 – Lexical Tension 98 – Syntactic Tension 107 – Fluidity, Verse Lines and Prose Poetry 111 – Another Form of Prose 119 3. Serial Forms: The Poem as Construct (ii) 132 – Yang Mu’s clinamen 136 – Luo Qing, Du Fu, and Wallace Stevens 146 – How Xia Yu Makes Sentences 154 4. Rewriting and Other Artificialities: The Poem as Construct (iii) 160 – The Natural Category 161 – Rewriting and Quotation 167 – Quotation as Procedural Poetics 179 – Disunion 194 Afterword 204 Character Index for Chinese Names 211 Chinese Originals of Poems Cited 218 Works Cited 252 Samenvatting 274 Curriculum Vitae 278 5 Acknowledgements I would like to thank a number of people who encouraged me in this research: Anne Sytske Keijser, Mark Leenhouts and the Leiden graduate students’ reading club, for criticism; the co-editors of Het trage vuur, for literary companionship; the Leiden University research School for Asian, African and Amerindian Studies (CNWS), for facilities and financial support; Luo Qing, for facilitating two long-term stays in Taiwan; the poets and translators for their permission to reprint their work in this study; Kirk Denton, editor of Modern Chinese Literature & Culture, for permission to reprint an essay on serial forms (chapter 3); my parents, Theo en Bep; and Martin, for his never-ending encouragement and analysis. 6 Introduction In the Western world, Chinese literature is commonly associated with literature written in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the big Chinese mainland, and only secondarily with literature written in Taiwan, the island where Chiang Kai- shek led his Nationalist party in 1949 to continue the Republic of China. Ever since, literature has been written in Taiwan using the Chinese language and authors have continued Chinese literary traditions in sometimes very different ways than in the PRC. From a literary point of view, it is remarkable that Western critics have for many years tended to overlook Taiwan literature, as its authors enjoyed more freedom for literary experiments than mainland writers under Maoism, although censorship existed in Taiwan also. No doubt, their primary focus on China – not only in literature but also in other disciplines – is largely due to the difference in country size and the more spectacular political events in the PRC, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong or the ‘social- ist market economy’ reforms under Deng Xiaoping et al. That writers in Taiwan have meanwhile been creating their own literature, independently from events in China, was more or less ignored. From the 1970s onward literature from Taiwan has slowly been getting somewhat more widespread in the West, through translations and scholarly work. The present study hopes to contribute to that in researching one specific develop- ment in modern Chinese poetry from Taiwan after 1949: that is, in the poetry written in the standard Chinese called guoyu, the language which was implemented by the Nationalist party in 1950. In the last two decades poetry in Taiwan has been written in other languages, i.e. Minnan and Hakka, which are the two languages that were spoken by the earlier ancestors who immigrated from the Southern Fu- jian and Guangdong provinces between the late sixteenth and nineteenth century. Of these two Minnan is the more common language, spoken by some seventy per- cent of the population. This thesis will deal with poetry written in guoyu only, be- cause that poetry forms the lion’s share; I will refer to it as Taiwan poetry, since Minnan is usually referred to as Taiwanese. 7 Although critics and scholars like Michelle Yeh, Dominic Cheung, Julia Lin, Ye Weilian (aka Yip Wai-lim), Lloyd Haft and Lisa Lai-ming Wong have written in English on modern poetry from Taiwan, the material is still rather sparse and mainly scattered over articles and introductions in anthologies, and fully fledged literary histories on poetry do not exist.1 One center that deserves special mention is the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany. In the early 1980s its Department of Chinese Language and Literature started to do research into literature from Tai- wan, with an emphasis on prose, under the leadership of professor Helmut Mar- tin, and after his death in 1999 the Research Unit on Taiwanese Culture and Lit- erature was established.2 Furthermore, since 1996 the University of California at Santa Barbara has published the semi-annual Taiwan Literature: English Trans- lation Series, edited by Kuo-ch'ing Tu and Robert Backus, which carries English translations of articles and literature by Taiwan writers and scholars, including poetry.3 In Taiwan itself Chinese language criticism and research on both its domestic prose and poetry are less scarce. According to Kuo-ch’ing Tu, in his foreword to the second issue of Taiwan Literature, this material can be divided into two main orientations: 1. Taiwan Literature is part of, or tributary to, Chinese literature, and the develop- ment of Taiwan literature is viewed within the frame of Chinese literature as a whole; 2. Taiwan literature has a distinct identity with its own historical origins and unique tradition, and is not tributary to Chinese literature.’4 1 Michelle Yeh has written by far the most; her introduction to Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry (2001) offers the most extensive overview of developments in modern Taiwan poetry, including the years before 1949. Other important studies or anthologies with introductions are: Julia Lin: Essays on Contemporary Chinese poetry (1985), Lisa Lai-ming Wong: Framings of Cultural Identities: Modern Poetry in Post-Colonial Taiwan with Yang Mu as a Case Study (1999), Ye Weilian: Modern Chinese Poetry: Twenty Poets from the Republic of China 1955 1965 (1970), Dominic Cheung: The Isle Full of Noises. Modern Chinese Poetry from Taiwan (1987) and Lloyd Haft: Zhou Mengdie's Poetry of Consciousness (2006). 2 Http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/slc/taiwan.html. 3 More has been written on prose; some important publications are: Jeannette L. Faurot (1980), Chinese Fiction from Taiwan – Critical Perspectives; Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang (1993) Modern- ism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan & Literary Culture in Taiwan & (2004) Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law; David Der-wei Wang (2006), Writing Taiwan : a New Literary History. 4 Kuo-ch’ing Tu 1997: xiii. 8 Personally I see a connection between modern Taiwan literature and classical Chinese literature, and I will sometimes point to such relations in the following, which would put me in the first category. I certainly do not want to limit myself to the second view, which seems to me more preoccupied with the political issue of national identity than with literature itself. Nevertheless, given Taiwan’s growing isolation from China since 1895, I believe that the country and its literature have had their specific characteristics and developments ever since and to that extent deserve to be studied in themselves. This thesis will not go into the relation between the two contemporary poetries from Taiwan and China. Kuo-ch’ing Tu fur- ther writes that ‘the study of Taiwan literature should have a vision beyond Tai- wan and China’.5 I agree that Taiwan literature should first and foremost be ap- preciated as modern literature per se, and not reduced to a regional product that happens to have poetic form. Taiwan abounds in material on its literature, in the form of books, articles and short essays on all kinds of subjects, but few substantial literary histories in book form have been written, and even fewer are devoted to poetry only.6 In an extensive article called ‘The History

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