** This is a preliminary, unpolished draft; some sections contain outlines for a larger project rather than fully developed arguments.)

Revisiting the Modernist Literary Movement in Post-1949 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang The University of Texas at Austin

Since the early part of the twentieth century, aesthetic modernism has spread in different regions of the in sporadic, fragmented, and variously mediated ways. Yet the trend has been persistently recurring, creating significant impact on local literary scenes and frequently accounting for its most celebrated artistic accomplishments. What are the similarities and differences between the various incarnations of literary modernism? Can we identify commonalities in the evolutionary trajectories of these modernist trends? In view of the fact that East Asian literatures are more often than not studied against theoretical notions derived from western literary traditions, contemplations on these questions are aimed to build a different critical paradigm that takes into account distinctive features of modern East Asian literary culture. The present paper, a preliminary effort in this direction, consists of the following: Section I situates the project within contemporary critical discourses; Section II introduces two sociologically oriented conceptual frames; Section III offers a sketch of analytical schemes to be explored; Section IV proposes three modules around which future investigations will be organized; the final section, then, revisits postwar Taiwan Modernist literary movement employing the critical methods suggested in the preceding sections.

I. Critical contexts for the need to build a new critical paradigm for East Asian modern/modernist literature (**Limited by space, details of the arguments are omitted in this section.) 1. New and old forms of temporality and spatiality Scholars of postmodernity and globalization, like David Harvey and Arjun Appardurai, have called our attention to the emergence of new forms of temporality and of cultural formations that transcend boundaries of the nation-state in the late twentieth century. What about the cultural processes that preceded this Great Divide, when literature was conceived and developed as a new modern social institution in the East Asian regions, as part of their “belated” modernity with a compressed time-table? 2. The issue of positionality Postcolonial discourse has opened up sophisticated and nuanced deliberations on positionality. Yet many new narratives revolving East Asian literature still inadvertently take Western academicians as their primary audience/dialogic partner. We need to shift the focus further to consider systematically the concerns, strategies, and cognitive mappings of literary agents in East Asia in different stages of their compressed modernization processes. 3. Correspondence between the aesthetic/cultural dimension and the material/societal dimension of modernity Cultural Studies have contributed to the shift of focus by literary scholars from literary modernism or aesthetic modernism to the generative conditions, in particular to the material culture in the urban milieu. There is a dire need to reexamine the corresponding relationship between the two, and to greatly refine the terms in which such “deterministic” approach has been applied to studies of literary texts. 4. Implications of new phases in the industrialization of culture Nestor Garcia Canclini sums up the process of the “industrialization of culture” as presently reaching its final stage. The digital revolution has caused exponential growths in visual and audio forms of cultural production and consumption, as well as the institutionalization of the study of new modes of aesthetic existence, such as visual culture. This presents challenges to the conventional disciplinary boundary of “literature,” and provides a good occasion for us to look back at the no less drastic reorientation of the institution of literature in modern East Asia.

II. Proposed conceptual frames: theories of the “field of cultural production” and “literature as a modern social institution” (**Again, details are omitted in this section.) 1. The field of cultural production

2 I propose a modified version of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory on the “field of cultural production.” The theory has a synchronic and a diachronic dimension. Synchronically, by envisioning literary agents and texts as occupying specific positions in the literary field, the theory first enables us to comprehend the field as a complexly interwoven network of forces and relations in a syncrhonic sense. It also allows us to spell out how momentous changes in external world—political, economic, technological changes— exert their impact on the literary works indirectly, in the manner of “refraction,” through intellectual discourses and ideological presuppositions and through affecting the structure of literary field, in a “refractive” manner. Diachronically, we may tract the trajectories along which these aesthetic positions have evolved, career trajectories of the literary agents, as well as the evolution of the cultural field itself in anay given historical period. 2. Literature as institution Modern East Asian literature was reincarnated as a modern social institution during the course of the global spread of modernity. In Anthony Giddens’ terms, modern literature may be regarded as a sub-institution of the market, one of the four distinctive modern institutions he identifies, in so far as the production, transmission, and consumption of literature in modern times increasingly became embedded in the economic network of publishing industry, which gradually infiltrated, eroded, or superseded the traditional literary practices. The institutional approach allows us to better examine literature’s complex relationships and interactions, in a synchronic sense, with other modern institutions, such as mass literacy, nationalism, state surveillance, urban cultural industry, para-military mobilization associated with warfare and revolution, that are being entrenched in the society at the same time period. It also helps to elucidate the diachronic dimension of literary transformations in modern East Asia, frequently along disjunctive and convoluted trajectories.

III. Analytical schemes: asymmetric comparison, structural affinities, and issues surrounding the “evolutionary temporal lag” 1. Asymmetric comparison

3 When dealing with cultural production and consumption in East Asia under globalization, scholars have paid special attention to the “uneven temporalities” or “uneven modernities” within the Asian region itself.1 Younghan Cho, a young Korean scholar, identifies two salient features of the East Asian sensibilities in discussing critical discourses surrounding the Korean Wave: “[East Asian’s] asymmetric but synchronous spatialities and its uneven but simultaneous temporalities.” It appears that the same phenomenon of “sameness and difference” may be observed in East Asian literary developments in earlier modern periods -- even with itself. The two stories I always assign to students to conclude the Republican era, Eileen Chang’s “The Golden Cangue” and Chao Shu-’s “Lucky,” both written in 1942, powerfully illustrates this point.2 In addition to the dramatic differences in the habitus and social class of their authors, the enormous disparity between the literary cultures that produced these two stories may be conceived in terms of the institutional framework and mechanisms of literary production and consecration. These, in turn, speak to different types of cultural field that capitalist market and Communist ideology fostered in modern China and to the competing modernities they represented, which are crucial factors to be reckoned with along with the crude political factors that had resulted in the divisions between occupied coastal cities, Nationalist-controlled hinterland, and the Communist-reigned Yan’an region. The specific type and the stage of development of the particular cultural field is undoubtedly a significant factor to be considered when colonial Taiwan and in Northeast China are concerned. The first few years of the 1940s was also a time when the second-generation writers of Taiwan’s colonial period, Zhang Wenhuan, Lu Heruo, and Long Yingzong, reached their artistic maturity, with a number of impressive works published. The patently hybrid, complex nature of the cultural environment that nourished these writers is best captured in Shi Shu’s discussion of the “double-homeland

1 Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Duke UP, 2002). Younghan Cho, a young Korean scholar, identifies two salient features of the East Asian sensibilities: “its asymmetric but synchronous spatialities and its uneven but simultaneous temporalities” in his “Desperately Seeking East Asia amidst the Popularity of South Korean Cutlural Products.” Unpublished paper, p. 17. 2 These stories, available in English translation in the standard textbook Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas: 19419-1949 (eds. Joseph Lau, Leo Lee, and C. T. Hsia), are probably found in most reading lists for courses on modern in the US.

4 consciousness” of the young Taiwanese elite in mid-1930s, beneficiaries of Taiwan’s colonial modernity. The study of modernist trends in different East Asian regions involves a different set of problems, however, because we are then dealing with comparable, but non- synchronous cultural phenomena. The four waves of Chinese modernism—in colonial Taiwan, Republican China, postwar Taiwan, and post-Mao China—for instance, took place in different historical epochs and were largely disconnected from each other. The modernist trend in , by contrast, displayed greater continuity and lasted for a longer time span, despite temporary disruption by the war. If we assume, as we of do, the existence of some forms of correspondence between the modernist cultural configurations and the material conditions that accompany the society’s genera modernization process, then a comparison of these disparate modernist literary trends ought to be desirable, for it promises to illuminate the literary processes in modern East Asia. 2. Structural affinities of the cultural field The comparison, however, is by definition asymmetrical. A recent book by Margaret Hillenbrand compares fiction in Taiwan and Japan between the 1960s and the 1990s. 3 While the author’s approach may be characterized as primarily thematic—the chapters focus on such parallel themes as resentment of American military presence, disconsolation about the destruction of physical environments brought upon by modernization, changing attitudes toward sex and family in a society in rapid transition toward postmodernity, etc.—the very act of juxtaposing these two synchronous but asymmetrical literary traditions that are ostensibly different in their scopes, aesthetic orientations, and international visibilities is extremely noteworthy. Implicitly or explicitly, the discussions suggest structural affinities of the cultural fields in Japan and Taiwan of this period. The governing laws of the cultural fields, we believe, necessarily mediate the political and sociological forces that act upon literary works, but ought to be studied separately from those phenomena. For instance, the conservative dominant culture in Japan and Taiwan may be attributed to these two regions’ similar geopolitical positions in cold-war, but its overriding influences on literature can only be examined

3 Margaret Hillenbrand, Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance: Japanese and Taiwanese fiction, 1960-1990 (Brill, 2007).

5 through specific operations of prevailing discourses, individual agents’ positioning strategies, cultural policies and institutional framework, etc. Hillenbrand’s suggestion that the conservative state-monitored discourse of modernity inevitably weakens the subversive potential of a modernist position is a case in point. In short, the conceptual frame of the cultural field helps to produce valid and meaningful asymmetric comparisons of literary activities that seem to occur in historical contexts that are ostensibly apart and discrepant. It helps us to organize diverse and multifarious literary activities, to elucidate the relationships between external (political, economic, sociological) forces that act upon literary agents and literary text productions through the mediation of the structure of the field and its governing law. As a result, we can conduct asymmetric comparison not only of literatures produced in different places within the same temporal frame, but also those from different historical eras. This would be the basis for comparing various modernist trends that occurred in modern East Asia. 3. Issues surrounding the “evolutionary temporary lag” “Modernism is a troubled and fluctuating aesthetic response to conditions of modernity produced by a particular process of modernization” (Harvey 99). Comparisons of the East Asian modernist trends thus involve an additional dimension, that is, the different trajectories of modernization of the societies in which they took place. Such comparisons, therefore, are bound to be asymmetrical in nature. Based on Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, I consider that the structure of cultural field in the modern capitalist/consumer society develops toward greater maturity as the society advances in its modernization course, and that the institution of literature also evolves along a trajectory that is overdetermined by multiple factors having to do with the entrenchment of other sociocultural, political, and economic institutions. Accordingly, there is a correspondent relationship between the occurrence of the modernist trends and the stage of evolution of the cultural field and literary institution in the particular East Asian region. The corresponding relationship becomes even more undeniably tangible when we reach the later phases of the industrialization of culture, when, for the technologically mediatized visual and audio arts, technical and industrial infrastructures play essential roles in cultural production and transmission.

6 Social scientists routinely take into consideration of the developmental temporal lags between sociopolitical or economic institutions in the more or less advanced modern societies. Humanities scholars, on the other hand, are often preoccupied by other concerns when dealing with such comparisons. Media scholar Koichi Iwabuchi displays both tendencies in his Re-centering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, thus may serve as a good example. On the one hand, he observes the phenomenon of Japanese cultural brokers transmitting their marketing know-how to their counterparts in other Asian regions, made possible by the developmental temporal lag between them. On the other hand, he faults the Japanese middle-class female consumers of pop music for their failure to acknowledge their “coeval-ness” with their Asian neighbors. The appreciation of these Japanese women, he argues, derives essentially from a nostalgic feeling, as they perceive Hong Kong’s “present” as their own “past,” the memorable golden time of Japan’s pre-bubble era. No one, of course, would disagree with the progressive, democratic impulse behind Iwabuchi’s claim and critique of the problematic sense of cultural superiority harbored by consumers in the more “advanced” modern societies. Nonetheless, I am more interested in exploring the determinant impact of the staggered arrival of modernities in different East Asian geographical regions on their cultural processes, particularly if we go back to modern periods prior to the accelerated phase of globalization in the late twentieth- century, when the institutional dimension was less readily recognized as an integral part of the cultural affairs. Since the phrase “developmental temporal lag” seems to focus on the socioeconomic aspects of modernization, I would propose a different term and talk about the “evolutionary temporal lag” instead and, more specifically, consider the differences created by the disparate but comparable trajectories along which “the structure of the cultural field” and “literature as a modern social institution” evolve over time. Following this line, fruitful points of comparison may be identified. In a case study inspired by commentaries in by Michel Hockx and Karatani Kojin, for instance, I try to compare a crucial aesthetic choices made by Liu Bannong in China of the late 1910s and by Natsume Soseki in Japan in the 1890s. The comparison involves primarily the reorientation of the conception of “literature” that in a sense crystallized the fierce struggle between the indigenous (eastern) and the imported (western) systems of

7 knowledge; the literary agents’ attitudes toward the vernacular movement as an essential part of the nation-building project; and the changing structure of the cultural field in relation as a result of modernist nationalist projects and the development of the literary market. That the incidents selected for parallel comparison took place at different points of time obviously has to do with the evolutionary temporary lag in literary institution and modern cultural field between the two regions. Japanese genbun ichi movement began in the late 1870s, whereas its counterpart in China, the baihua yundong took place in the late 1910s. Complicated issues, of course, are involved in all cases of evolutionary temporal lag, and I would simply identify some of the most obvious ones here. First of all, later occurrences of the modernist literary trend typically exhibit varying degrees of temporal compression. Kobayashi Hideo observed in the 1930s that that the artistic trends that had taken a long process of development in the West were happened in Japan within a much shorter period of time. I myself also regarded the condensed timetable in the cycle of development of the modernist aesthetic forms a defining feature of Taiwan’s postwar Modernist literary movement. This temporal compression is, furthermore, always compounded by the fact that the delayed occurrence of an earlier trend is often infused with contemporaneous elements, those resulting from further evolution of the same in the more advanced literary traditions, for instance. The degree of impact of this sort is necessarily heightened by increased openness to and closer contact with the outside world, which has been observed as a salient feature characterizing the age of globalization. Chinese cultural scene of the contemporary, postsocialist era, having reopened itself to a wide range of diverse artistic traditions at a historical juncture of the “postmodern break,” is a vivid example of a large number of artistic schools and styles being rushed through in a couple of decades, with aesthetic modes originated in different historical periods coexisting in a single art object. Ah Cheng’s bitter comment on the drastically diminished role of serious writers in the cultural life of contemporary China found echoes in the lament on the death of “pure literature” around 1990s in Taiwan. His positive attitude toward a professionally manufactured, “good” commercial products like the Hollywood films, in fact, is similar in spirit to people like Peggy Chiao, Chen Guofu, after the “Arts or Commerce?” debate in the late 1980s among Taiwanese filmmakers.

8 That the change of the cultural environment on the Mainland elicited greater shock can of course be explained by the even more condensed timetable of the system-transition. Secondly, it is extremely difficult to effectively differentiate what are the results of conscious imitation or emulation of an alien artistic style and what are dictated by the evolutionary trajectory of the modern institution. What Anthony Giddens says about “reflexivity of modernity” is relevant here. The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character. (Giddens 38) . . . the social sciences are actually more deeply implicated in modernity than is natural science, since the chronic revision of social practices in the light of knowledge about those practices is part of the very tissue of modern institutions. (Giddens 40) The discourse of sociology and the concepts, theories and findings of the other social sciences continually “circulate in and out” of what it is that they are about. In so doing they reflexively restructure their subject matter, which itself has learned to think sociologically. (Giddens 43) The East Asia, like other places in the non-West, has been recipient of information and knowledge gained from the reflection of social practices in the West, such knowledge and information alter their social practices and provide foundations for building of modern institutions in their societies. Professional knowledge of particular spheres of activities in modern society gained through long processes of trial and error is transmitted to places where such activities are newly instituted. In a sense, one should take more seriously the impact on literary practices of literary and critical discourses that have entered the East Asian societies through returned students and academic institutions. less developed one.

IV. Modules proposed for organizing individual case studies Since western modernism was institutionalized in the academia in the 1930s and 1940s, scholarly discourses on the subject have undergone tremendous changes. From endeavors to identify the essential elements of an emerging modernism (Ortega y Gasset,

9 Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, and contributors to Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s authoritative volume, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890– 1930) to attempts at defining it as a passage to something beyond itself, to post- modernism (Matei Calinescu, Marshall Berman, Frederic Jameson, David Harvey, and Hal Foster (“anti-aesthetic”),4 representative scholars have invariably tried to situate the literary phenomenon within larger intellectual contexts and explain its occurrence in terms of historical transformations of basic human sensorial faculty and aesthetic modes. Whereas discourses on modernisms in the East Asia are much less developed in the scholarly sense, public discourses on the subject have nevertheless similarly revolved around some fundamental issues and relationships that have perpetually preoccupied its intellectuals in various regions. In a nutshell, these concerns center on relationships between East and West (the indigenous versus the imported), old and new (the traditional versus the modern), left and right (the socialist versus the liberal-humanist), and high and the low (the elitist versus the popular). Below, I use these broad categories as basis for developing three modules for systematic examinations of the literary processes associated with East Asian aesthetic modernism, with the hope of better situating the investigation within the larger context, against the backdrop of an ongoing evolution of the newly entrenched modern institution of literature in these regions. 1. The first module: encounter with the West Implicit in many discussions of modern literature in various East Asian regions is that a significant reorientation in the basic conceptions of literature, including those of its definition and function, took place. The most radical position, taken by some modernists, virtually regards modern literature as an entirely new social institution that embodies aesthetic ideals and performs ideological functions different from those presumed in traditional views of literature. The modern reorientation of the institution of literature has been implied in, if not directly alluded to, in recent scholarship on modern Chinese literature in the English language. A number of scholars talked about how the mainstream May Fourth literary tradition adopted a linear conception of history as progress. Others suggested that different types of modernity were repressed by the hegemony of such discourses, taking

4 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism

10 either the gender perspective (Rey Chow, Lydia Liu) or the persevering traditional socio- cultural practices or visions (David Wang). Michel Hockx, while maintaining that the hegemony of the May Fourth literary tradition was a later projection, that it was never really dominant in the Republican era, nonetheless documented a reorientation of the literary conception modeled upon the Western version, done by members of the Association for Literary Studies. Lydia Liu, and others who do not necessarily adopt a postcolonialist standpoint, moreover, shifted attention to the institutional dimension of modern Chinese literary production, and to the agency of the native recipients of foreign influences as cultural translators. As the main body of these studies, with the possible exception of David Wang, focus more on what happened after the critical point of transition, it seems useful to bring in Japanese scholar Karatani Kojin’s book Origin of Modern Japanese Literature, first published in Japanese in the late 1970s. Karatani Karatani suggests that the fallacious assumption on the transparency and alleged expressive efficacy of vernacular language in the genbun ichi movement, unexpectedly gave birth to the notion of “interiority,” hitherto non-existent in Japanese literature and the arts. He then uses Natsume Soseki to illustrate the epistemological incommensurability of the modern Western and traditional Chinese systems of knowledge, crystallized for Soseki in their different conceptions of “literature.” He believes that in the third decade of the Meiji period an “inversion” took place, giving birth to new categories of knowledge and new domains of perceived reality that would later be taken for granted, as having been “always there.” I am inclined to believe that such an epistemological inversion has been a continual and incessantly recurring process. In fact, the modernist literary trends represent some of the sharpest clashes and more intense moments of conversion between two different sets of cognitive modes and perceptual categories. I therefore take “encounter with the West” as the first module for my analysis. 2. The second module: confronting political realities Historical factors have contributed to the varying degrees of dominance of the political principle of legitimacy in the cultural fields of twentieth-century East Asian regions. In decades following the first quarter of the century, fierce strife between the competing liberal-capitalist and the socialist ideologies of modernization overtook the

11 East Asian societies in such a sweeping manner that most literary agents spent a great deal of energy trying to come to terms with the broadly defined political legitimacy, arguable in rather different ways from their counterparts in contemporary Western societies. The modernist championship of artistic autonomy represented this effort par excellence. In my presentation at a Roundtable at the 2006 convention of the Modernist Studies Association, the mention of a “socialist modernity” appeared to have elicited total surprise from the audience, made mainly of scholars affiliated with English and Art History in the North American institutions. While they ostensibly resists the familiar paradigm of literary analysis in a liberal-humanist tradition, the attempts at theorizing the aesthetics of cultural production during the Cultural Revolution, the performativity and collective experience, and recent popularity of the term “postsocialist modernity” signals a paradigmatic shift that takes into consideration what has been dismissed as very much an huge anomaly. 3. Third module: shifting genre hierarchies Bourdieu considers the cultural field in modern France was moving progressively toward greater autonomy since the earlier stages of capitalist development in the society. The third module considers two mutually implicated forces that have affected the principle of hierarchization of literary products: the competition between traditional (Eastern) and imported modern Western systems of knowledge, and the evolution of the cultural field under market law. One working hypothesis is that because both of these processes have taken place in a rather accelerated pace, the shifts in genre hierarchies are often rather abrupt and artificially enforced. An interesting comparison would be to compare the status enjoyed by the modernist literary works, as products of the high culture quest, to some of the traditionalist literary genres or genres that occupy an ambiguous, in-between position on the genre hierarchy, such as Taiwan’s fukan fiction and the “middle-fiction” in postwar Japan, with such eminent representatives as Inoue Yasushi.

V. Preliminary outlines for a case study of the first module: postwar Taiwan Modernist literary movement; radicalism and the acceptance of professional artistry; rationality and the management of duality

12 In recent days, historians and political scientists in the China field in the US have been paying special attention to a documentary called The Rise of Great Nations produced by China’s Central TV station in 2006. While overall speaking more balanced and better researched than that of the 1988 River Elegy, one discerns visible traces of a persistent standpoint that has been part of the Chinese intellectual discourse since the May Fourth. A resolute determination to learn from the West at all costs was demonstrated by Peter the Great in eighteenth century Russia, who sojourned in Europe as a zealous apprentice for ?? years in the disguise of a commoner. His unconventional behavior was met with deadly resistance on the home front, which the young Tsar had to brutally suppress in order to carry out his reform. The narrator of the documentary also cites, admiringly, three terse phrases to describe the Meiji Japanese infatuation with modern Western civilization in the late nineteenth century: they were “first shocked, then captivated by its charm, and finally became possessed with it” (shi jing, ci zui, zhong kuang”). This radical stance is obviously what underscores the Chinese phrase quanpan xihua or “total westernization,” which has found spokesmen in every major cultural debate in the last century, Hu Shi and others in the May Fourth, in 1960s Taiwan, and Liu Xiaobo in post-Mao China. There were, of course, always an entire gamut of coexisting positions on the spectrum at those historical junctures when cultural self-reflections foregrounded the urgency of the issue of westernization in the intellectual sphere. In retrospect, these historical junctures often coincided with critical moments of intensified assimilation of Western influences in modern Chinese literary history, including the Modernist literary movement of postwar Taiwan that followed the Chinese versus Western Cultural Debate in early 1960s. I would like to further explore the homologous positions taken by literary agents, based on Bourdieu’s proposition on the homologous relationship between the structures of various fields in the society. More importantly, instead of concerning myself with the literary agents’ directly or indirectly (through literary works) expressed views concerning the issue of westernization, I am interested in how such positions oriented and circumscribed their aesthetic choices and their strategies in dealing with quintessentially literary issues within a space of available possibilities

13 presented in the cultural field. Such available possibilities, in turn, had a great deal to do with the evolutionary trajectories of literature as a modern institution. In other words, under the conviction that literature is a mediated process, I would like to see if the new conceptual frames would enable us to better comprehend this process, and to spell it out in more specific manners. The structure of the cultural field and the evolutionary stage of the literary institution are factors that mediate the artistic choices and positional strategies of literary agents faced with sustaining consequences of the East-West encounter, and the modernist movement typically occurred at a moment of renewed intensity of such encounter. The choices and strategies within the literary field at such a time often involved what was perceived to be “native” and “traditional” aesthetic modes vis-a-vis the symbolically privileged and inherently intrusive “modernist” aesthetic mode. 1. Positions vis-à-vis the modernist reorientation of the literary institution and various factors of influence As I have argued elsewhere, Yu Guangzhong’s accomplishments had a great deal to do with the symbolic capitals and assets were distributed within the field in the early years after the Nationalist retreat, when the China trope played a prominent role. Between the late 1950s and early 1970s, however, he exemplified an important strategy of the Modernist self-positioning vis-à-vis modern Chinese literature as a young institution at a particular stage of evolution. I believe that to better understand forces behind such self-positioning and the aesthetic choices it entails would greatly help us in building a new critical paradigm applicable to other East Asian modernists. In a series of essays, Yu takes issue with the anemic, pulp quality of the May Fourth prose style. In “Jiandiao sanwen de bianzi” [Cutting off the pigtails of our prose”] (1963), he castigated prose writers of his time for their mediocrity and disingenuousness; and in “Women xuyao jiben shu” [We need several books] (1968), he again criticized the “prosaic, overly simplistic style” that was popularized by middle-school textbooks, fukan, and literary magazines, and valorized by Chinese Departments in colleges. The reforming measure proposed by Yu Guangzhong in his lesser known “Modernist prose movement” was clearly based on New Critical aesthetic principles. He said: “I tried to condense, flatten, elongate, and sharpen the Chinese language, tear it apart and piece it together again, fold

14 it in this way and that, so that I might put to test its speed, density, and elasticity” (208). The declaration at once implied a deficiency in the vernacular as linguistic idiom that resonates with Republican Chinese and modern Japanese writers and critics, and is found in the syncretistic position subscribed by writers like Bai Xianyong. In spite of my very limited knowledge in Japanese literature, I am tempted to see a comparison done between the syncretic positions toward aesthetic modernism displayed in the careers of Pai Hsien-yung and Kawabata Yasunari. Unlike Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata is said to have offered more in championing or theorizing the New Sensantionalist position as it appeared around 1924-1925 than in applying the most characteristic modernistic techniques in his literary creation, and has since moved between the two extremes apparently in quest for a syncretistic adaptation of both the modernistic and the traditionalist aesthetics. Shifting from the textual or biographical comparisons to positional strategies directed at finding aesthetic solutions for compelling issues faced by the Modernists, one may see a parallelism between the two, in Kawabata’s well-known “traditionalist” novels and Bai’s “modern kunqu” project, the broad appeal of both Kawabata’s novels and The Youth Edition of the Peony Pavilion can be largely attributed to a deep-seated traditionalist aesthetic sensibility still alive in the East Asian populace. Though less widely recognized, Wang Wenxing, whom critic Huang Jinshu regards as the chief architect of postwar Taiwan’s “translated modernism”--as opposed to the “Chinese modernism” represented by Yu Guangzhong and Bai Xianyong—takes the same position: he not only shares the same denigrating view of baihua as a linguistic medium for creative writing, but even expresses an unequivocal faith in the rich resources that traditional Chinese language and literature could offer to modern writers. At the same time, however, Wang has adopted a completely different strategy in his literary practice. As I noted in Modernism, Wang himself once suggested that his style of realistic writing might be appropriately labeled as a “trans-mimetic” mode of realism. Positioning himself, albeit somewhat dubiously, as a late-comer of the essentially “Western” realist tradition, the strategy is reminiscent of the underlying logic of “total westernization.”

15 In the summer of 2007, Center for Humanities Studies at National Central University dedicated a six-part seminar series to the novel Jiabian. Each of the seminars began with a pre-recorded reading by Wang himself of a section from the novel-- professionally done in a lab over the course of one year as part of Yi Peng’s grant project—which was then followed by a New Critical-style analysis by Wang, and concluded with a dialogue between Wang and a former student (Ko Ching-ming and myself both participated in that capacity). In answer to my question, Wang re-asserted the absolute superiority of wenyan wen (Classical Chinese) to the baihua vernacular as a literary medium, contrasting the latter’s impoverishment to the former’s inexhaustibility, using the adjective “haikuo tiankong.” Even more illuminating was Wang’s remark in response to queries from Lu Zhenghui at a later event. Lu suggested that perhaps the language in Jiabian was a mimetic rendition of the Fuzhou dialect, Wang’s mother tongue. This perhaps should be taken as a compliment, as it was preceded by Lu’s comment that contemporary Mainland Chinese fiction was so rich and lively mainly because of their incorporation of local dialects, the language of the “real people,” so to speak. Unsurprisingly, Wang refuted Lu’s leftist sounding assumption right away. If he did, Wang said, the novel would have been truly unintelligible. But the following words caused people to nearly fall off from their chairs. As a matter of fact, Wang confided after a brief musing, the language in my fiction was modeled after English. True enough, the modernist conception of mimesis has always emphasized on the singular importance of artistic reformulation. Because of the lack of viable models in the entire repertoire of baihua literature, Wang felt he had no choice but to find his models elsewhere, in modern classics written in English, in their artistically effective modulations and rhythms of fictional language. This appears to make perfect sense. What I find striking, however, is an exceedingly pragmatic attitude that underlies such artistic choices, a principle of expediency, so to speak. I got a similar feeling listening to Bai Xianyong’s talk on the production of the Youth Edition of Peony Pavilion, when he describes the limited modification made primarily selecting younger cast, shortening the performances, and adding fabulous spectacles to the stage setting. At a historical period when rejecting the baihua vernacular as a communicative medium was no longer an option, thanks to the rapid modernization process, Modernist

16 practitioners in Taiwan nonetheless insisted on its inherent deficiency as an artistic medium. While this dissatisfaction led to determined endeavors to transform the language, often with self-conscious incorporation of elements from classical or foreign literary traditions, the highly schematic and programmatic ways of assimilating these elements, however, belied a sophisticated acceptance of the notion of professional artistry, and a rationalistic, pragmatic temperament. It must be differentiated from the more ideologically informed “nalai zhuyi” of earlier periods in modern Chinese history, or the agony that Karatani detected in Natsume Soseki, being caught in the transition between two types of mutually incommensurable episteme at the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, taking seriously into account the surrounding milieu, one should pay greater attention to the impact of the relatively late stage of the industrialization of culture in which postwar Modernist literary movement took place. Many, including myself, have been intrigued by the exceptional energy invested on the psycho-acoustic effect of fictional language by Taiwan’s Modernists (c.f. Tsai Chien-hsin’s paper title: “writing sound /reading voice”). Was the strenuous effort necessitated by the fact that the exploration of the materiality of artistic medium had gone a long way since the initial modernist shock in the history of mankind? Heavier doses might have to be applied to evoke desired reactions from the human sensory faculty. At a time when digital revolution has been drastically transforming the vehicles through which art is transmitted and thus changing the aesthetic mode of many art genres, it is inevitable that our knowledge and judgments of aesthetic modernism would also be significantly revised. 2. Intellectual constitution of some prominent positions adopted by major Modernists in postwar Taiwan In this section I toy with several possible new directions in which we may explore further how these prominent artistic positions taken by Taiwan’s Modernists were intellectually constituted, nourished by what resources and traditions, and limited by what kind of constraints. In my book Modernism and the Nativist Resistance I made preliminary attempts at identifying the historically specific factors that structurally determined the governing laws and the internal structure of the cultural field in which Taiwan’s modernism took place, which, in a concentric manner, consisted of the political realities, prevalent intellectual discourses at the time, and a distinct literary culture that

17 set the artistic tenor and shaped the ideological outlook of Taiwan’s Modernists. More specifically, postwar-Taiwan Modernist literary movement occurred under the influence of the US liberalism in the postwar cold war era, and was charged with a mission to introduce an emancipatory, progressive cultural vision, at the time perceived as a highly desirable alternative to the conservative, conformist, and neo-traditionalist Nationalist- endorsed dominant culture. This cultural vision bore visible legacies from the Republican era on the Mainland, consisting of May Fourth iconoclasm, and more specifically what John Fairbank termed as Sino-liberal strand of the tradition. But it also incorporated the liberal-humanist emphasis of contemporary American intellectual climate. The closer assimilation of the liberal vision can be seen in the Taiwanese intellectuals’ more nuanced comprehension of the notion of professional artistry and their subscription to the reality of cultural stratification in modern society. Within the literary sphere, New Criticism and Formalist doctrines, introduced by such scholar-critics as Yan Yuanshu, Zhu Limin, Wai-lim Yip, and busted by the liberal institution of National Taiwan University, gave the movement an elitist makeup, as part of the high culture quest shared by other academic institutions and progressive public intellectuals of the time. Now, with a more systematically conceived conceptual framework, I hope to further refine or modify these arguments and observations, adding to it a comparative perspective. For instance, the fact that postwar-Taiwan Modernist literary movement took place after modernism was institutionalized in the Western academia (in the 1940s and 1950s) inevitably enhanced its high culture status, and the management and tempering of subversive, transgressive elements. That the modernist influence was mediated by the cold-war-period US intellectual and academic climate, favoring in particular the neo-classicist strand of the 1920s, represented by T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, with near total absence of the Continental leftist modernist trends that reached popularity in the 1930s with such important names as Bertolt Brecht and Andre Breton. Although, we did witness the interesting fusion of existentialism – yet the reception was patently selective, with Sartre was more or less cleansed of his leftist passion, while showering greater zeal on Camus’s nihilistic impulse. In particular, I hope a fuller examination would help to elucidate what I termed as the “Enlightenment rationality” in my first book, which I suspect can be more

18 unmistakably discerned in postwar Taiwan modernism than in other incidents of Chinese or East Asian modernism. To the extent that the Enlightenment rationality is a primary target of the postmodernist critique, the further refinement of this argument is particularly relevant. My primary justification is that such rationality is manifested in the principle of artistic autonomy that all major Modernists sincerely subscribed to, if not actively championed publicly. This principle is based on the Enlightenment belief in the separation of three distinct spheres of human activities--aesthetics, morality, and science—and accordingly artistic enterprises and products are perceived as being governed by their intrinsic logic. In addition, rationality also seems to underlie the diverse and seemingly very different artistic practices and aesthetic judgments of Taiwan’s Modernists, conveyed, paradoxically, in the intellectual capacity for the tension and contradiction inherent in the salient modernist trait of duality. Quoting Baudelaire’s seminal essay “The painter of modern life’ (published in 1863), David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) characterizes modernity as the “conjoining of the ephemeral and the fleeting with the eternal and the immutable,” and that “[t]he history of modernism as an aesthetic movement has wavered from one side to the other of this dual formulation, often making it appear as if it can, as Lionel Trilling (1966) once observed, swing around in meaning, until it is facing in the opposite direction.” (Harvey 11). In the same book Harvey talks about how modernism in the inter-war years was both “heroic” and “fraught with disaster” for the following reasons: The fading of unified Enlightenment beliefs and the emergence of perspectivism left open the possibility of informing social action with some aesthetic vision . . .. The appeal to ‘eternal’ myth became even more imperative. . . . The myth either had to redeem us from ‘the formless universe of contingency’ or, more programmatically, to provide the impetus for a new project for human endeavor. One wing of modernism appealed to the image of rationality incorporated in the machine, the factory, the power of contemporary technology, or the city as a ‘living machine.” (Harvey 31) In postwar Taiwan Modernist work we find abundant evidence that the artists were responding to the need to come to terms with the inherent duality of things, a realization

19 that came from the fading of established belief systems and emerging perspectivism, similar to what Harvey describes here. And it may very well be that the neo-classicist and the liberal temperament combined that worked to temper the radical impulses of other strands of modernism. The Modernist writers, it seems, are iconoclasts with the temper of a realist. They are prone to dealing with the irrational through eminently rational means, reminiscent of what Frederic Jameson says, managing problems in reality through an aesthticizing strategy. The dangerous potential of the unbridled passion of the boys in the New Park, exemplified by Dragon Prince, is repeatedly contained or “domesticated.” The unsettling elements of autobiographical account in Family Catastrophe are “managed and contained” through the exceedingly meticulous, rational process of aesthetic reformulation. And I am still inclined to interpret the later part of Bai Xianyong’s Cristal Boys as underscored with a realist spirit, calling for reconciliation rather than resistance. The ending of Wang Wenxing’s Family Catastrophe is more disturbing, yet the ultimate goal of Wang’s literary project appears to be exerting control of irrationality (Fan Ye’s fanatic articulation of Enlightenment rationalism) or the duality of the sign of fate, and by association, religion (“Lines of Fate,” Backed Against the Sea) through his excessive investment in “form” and “style.” To conclude, I remain convinced that postwar Taiwan’s Modernists have come closest in spirit to the aesthetic modernism as embodied in modernist works in the West in the interwar years. The appeal to some forms of “eternal myth” seems to inform Wang Wenxing and Li Yongping’s Herculean enterprise of constructing a verbal edifice as a material vehicle for some idiosyncratic aesthetic visions. What they have extravagantly invested in such lifelong project is perhaps best comprehended as the outcome of a firm belief in the “possibility of informing social action with some aesthetic vision” and in the vision’s promise “to redeem us from ‘the formless universe of contingency.” (Harvey 31).

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