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The Old Capital” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 38.2 September 2012: 139-160 The Heterotopic Agent in Chu T’ien-hsin’s “The Old Capital” Chien-hsin Tsai Department of Asian Studies, University of Texas at Austin, USA Abstract A number of heterotopias coexist in Taiwanese writer Chu T’ien-hsin’s novella “The Old Capital”: spaces of memory, reality, history; and here I analyze the female narrator in the story as a “heterotopic agent.” Building on Michel Foucault’s initial conceptualization of heterotopia as literature, I examine the agency of Chu’s narrator in terms of the operation of walking, the act of seeing, and the art of remembering, which, I argue, make the construction of a heterotopic space possible. The purpose of my Foucauldian reading of “The Old Capital” is twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to reconceptualize “heterotopia” in relation to the human subject. On the other hand, it intends to cast a new light on the creative agency of Chu, substantiated in her attempt to rewrite the past, live the present, and realize the future. From the perspective of “heterotopic agent,” we may further entertain a creative hermeneutics of contemporary Taiwanese identity. Keywords Chu T’ien-hsin, Foucault, heterotopia, city, space, mapping, nostalgia, temporality 140 Concentric 38.2 September 2012 I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal space that virtually opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives me my own visibility, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent. —Michel Foucault “Of Other Spaces” What is this place? . You began to wail. —Chu T’ien-hsin “The Old Capital” Introduction Chu T’ien-hsin has been one of the most celebrated writers in Taiwan for more than three decades. Since Jirang ge (The Song of Tossing Sticks), a long work of prose Chu wrote and published while in high school, readers have come to expect nothing less than her unique blend of social criticism and nostalgic lyricism. Many critics say that Chu’s achievement is best understood if we look at the influence, not only of her father, Chu Hsi-ning, an outstanding storyteller in his own right, but also of Hu Lancheng, a wartime collaborator with the Japanese puppet regime and ex- husband of Eileen Chang. While the influence of the two patriarchs is indeed tangible, Chu has developed her own eclectic view of Chinese history, politics, and philosophy. Although very much rooted in reality, the worlds Chu creates in her writings through her poetic imagination are seemingly unreal at times. Put another way, her commentaries on Taiwanese society and politics are sharply realistic, and yet the way she presents them gives one the impression of temporal disjuncture and spatial displacement. Her novella “Gudu” (“The Old Capital”) is a case in point. Intertextually rich, the novella frequently alludes to historical texts and moves rapidly and freely via its second-person narration. With its encyclopedic references to divergent spaces, times, and texts, this novella is virtually, in and of itself, a heterotopia. Michel Foucault has famously defined “heterotopia” (literally “another place”) as a space that exists in the interstices between the real and the ideal and among different structures of power. A heterotopia is something like a mirror, a space in and by means of which one may reflect on abstract concepts and thoughts pertaining to power, time, and one’s very own identity. The concept embodies Foucault’s attempt to think about time and history in spatial terms. Thinking of time Chien-hsin Tsai 141 in spatial terms or thinking of time as space calls for a creative hermeneutics of human activities that produce and give meanings to space. Foucault, however, does not elaborate on the role a human subject plays in the social production of space and time in “Of Other Spaces,” where he introduces the term heterotopia; he merely describes and notes the meanings of the places and spaces he calls heterotopia. In terms of space Chu, unlike Foucault, laboriously details the things people do and see that help delineate and define any given place and site. Therefore, my purpose in this essay is not to simply provide a heterotopic reading of Chu’s novella; I do not look for evidence in Chu’s novella to further support the Foucauldian conception of the heterotopia. Rather, I analyze the role of Chu’s narrator in the novella in terms of three interrelated functions—the operation of walking, the act of seeing, and the art of remembering—in order to elucidate Chu’s view of writing and literature as a creative way of both understanding the space and history of Taipei and of coming to terms with her father’s and Hu Lancheng’s teachings. Even though Foucault initially referred to literature as heterotopia, he later turned away from both literature and heterotopia. Foucault’s turn from literature, as Timothy O’Leary observes, is part of his attempt to “recognize the limitations of focusing on literature and language if one wished to make a thorough investigation of the ‘larger politics of subjectivity’” (94). In spite of Foucault’s abandonment of literature and especially of literary criticism in favor of urban studies and other social sciences, I find his notion of heterotopia illuminating in helping us understand the issue of agency in literary writing. As I hope to show in this essay, Chu T’ien-hsin’s “The Old Capital” can be read as a multilayered heterotopic space characterized by temporal discontinuities, (post)colonial transformations, and an imaginary nostalgia.1 In his introduction to The Order of Things, Foucault uses Jorge Luis Borges’s “Chinese encyclopedia” in “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” to explain his conceptualization of heterotopia. Borges’s encyclopedia divides different animals into seemingly unrelated yet overlapping categories. The strangely overlapping categories prompt Foucault to state that precisely because one category cannot remain one category among others and yet at the same time include all other categories, the Chinese encyclopedia must be a heterotopia. Foucault’s coinage of 1 To the best of my knowledge, Foucault has not discussed nostalgia in relation to heterotopia although he has repeatedly mentioned “history” in “Of Other Spaces” and The Order of Things. In her understanding of history (especially in her earlier days), Chu labored under a kind of imaginary nostalgia, and David Der-wei Wang thus refers to Chu as a postloyalist writer. For an in-depth discussion of “postloyalism” see Wang’s “Houyimin xiezuo.” For Chu, then, a heterotopic agent is akin to a postloyalist. 142 Concentric 38.2 September 2012 heterotopia (hetero + topos) echoes Borges’s encyclopedia in the sense that if topos simultaneously refers to a literary motif—indeed, a topic—and a place, then writing or a written page becomes the site where topics/topoi converge. Fiction as a heterotopia is therefore a commonplace of uncommonality that reveals unexpected kinships among different kinds of topics/topoi. Like Borges’s “Chinese encyclopedia,” “The Old Capital” is an audacious undertaking whose cross- references not only give evidence of but, more importantly, expand the Foucauldian heterotopia. As I will explain in the following, Chu’s “The Old Capital,” like Borges’s short story, disturbs the very nomenclature of a topos as a standardized method of constructing a place and an identity. Additionally, by having her narrator wander in the city of Taipei, Chu helps us understand not just what heterotopia is but how heterotopia may come to existence in relation to human actions. The narrator in “The Old Capital” assumes the role of an anthropologist who is carrying out an archaeological and cartographical project by walking through Taipei. As she navigates her way through modern-day Taipei with an old colonial map, the image of Taipei as heterotopia begins to emerge. More radically, I read both Chu and her narrator as heterotopic agents that illuminate the interconnections between different continents and conjure forgotten memories of the fraught relationships between colonies and empires. The heterotopic agent may seem to resemble Foucault’s heterotopia-as-boat, which remains the only moveable site among all his other examples—brothels, theatres, hospitals, museums, et cetera. Foucault speaks as if the heterotopia-as-boat had a will of its own and could move without a captain or a navigator, or as if a mirror could produce a reflection without ever having an object in front of it. It is worth reiteration that “The Old Capital” does not write itself; Chu and her narrator are the agents that make literature as heterotopia a realization. Critics such as Ng Kim Chew (Huang Jinshu) have referred to Chu’s narrator in “The Old Capital” as Don Quixote, and I wish to advance their comparison by calling attention to the way her narrator’s act of walking in the city with an old map is reminiscent of Don Quixote’s mad vision, and of the widening rift between things and words his journey represents. Perhaps more so than Don Quixote, Chu’s narrator as a heterotopic agent and her unique vision usher in a new way of understanding the world and its fast growing representations. It is not so much the “heroism” à la Don Quixote or the lack thereof that I wish to discuss in relation to Chu’s narrator as a heterotopic agent, but rather how Chu’s/the narrator’s practices of walking, seeing, writing, and remembering encourage readers to set aside existing (male-centered) historical discourses and read the space and history of Chien-hsin Tsai 143 Taipei anew. Taipei is heterotopic in the sense that it is Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, as well as Taiwanese; that it is as much a Japanese utopia as a Chinese nationalist and Taiwanese nativist dystopia.
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