China Perspectives 2012/1 | 2012 China’s WTO Decade Surviving Civilization: Rereading the History of Taiwan and Modernity Wu He, Les Survivants (The Survivors), trans. Esther Lin-Rosolato and Emmanuelle Péchenart, Arles, Actes Sud, 2011, 300 pp. Sebastian Veg Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/5831 DOI: 10.4000/chinaperspectives.5831 ISSN: 1996-4617 Publisher Centre d'étude français sur la Chine contemporaine Printed version Date of publication: 30 March 2012 Number of pages: 69-72 ISSN: 2070-3449 Electronic reference Sebastian Veg, « Surviving Civilization: Rereading the History of Taiwan and Modernity », China Perspectives [Online], 2012/1 | 2012, Online since 30 March 2012, connection on 21 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/5831 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ chinaperspectives.5831 © All rights reserved Review essay China perspectives Surviving Civilization: Rereading the History of Taiwan and Modernity SEBASTIAN VEG* he novel Yu sheng 餘生 by Wu He 舞鶴 ( Dancing Crane, the pen-name used by Ch’en Kuo-ch’eng 陳國 城 ), first Tpublished in 1999 in Taiwan, has become something of a literary myth in certain circles, the work of a writer showered with prizes in the 1990s after re-emerging from ten years of Wu He, reclusion in Tamsui. Born in Chiayi in 1951, Wu He lost his Les Survivants (The Survivors), mother at 18 and began studying engineering at Cheng Kung trans. Esther Lin-Rosolato and University before transferring to the Chinese department in 1973. He was revealed to the literary scene with the publication Emmanuelle Péchenart, Arles, of his first novella “Peony Autumn” ( Mudan qiu 牡丹秋 , included Actes Sud, 2011, 300 pp. in the collection Sadness/Beishang 悲 傷 ). He then became strongly involved in the literary journals associated with the Tai - wanese “modernist” movement, in particular the “Avant-garde” the memory of the Musha Incident ( Japanese transcription; series ( Qianwei congkan ). After having belatedly served out his Wushe 霧 社 in Mandarin ), the massacre of more than 100 military duties in 1979-1981, he lived in reclusion during his “ten Japanese colonisers by the Sedeq aboriginals led by Mona Rudao years in Tamsui,” during which he wrote several other novellas, (1882-1930) on a sports field in 1930, followed by terrible re - including “The Two Deserters” ( Taobing er ge 逃兵二哥 ; also in - taliation by the Japanese colonial authorities, who resorted to cluded in Sadness ), which were only published after his “return aerial bombing and the use of toxic gas. The remaining Sedeq to the world.” When he moved back to the south of Taiwan in (many had committed mass suicide) were interned in camps. 1991, he notes that he seriously considered a final retreat to a The Japanese also instigated a retaliatory massacre by another Buddhist monastery before deciding that he could not renounce tribe, the Tuuda, in 1931, an event known as the Second Musha literature. (1) Incident. The novel is structured around the figure of a narrator The translators have therefore done francophone readers a who rents a house in Qingliu, a village near Puli, previously great favour by giving them access to the first foreign translation named Chuanzhongdao (or Kawanakajima in Japanese, the Island of a cult text, the fruit of many years of reflection by the author Between Rivers), where the few dozen families of Sedeq “sur - on Taiwanese culture, and of two “fieldwork” trips to an aborig - vivors” of the 1931 events were eventually resettled, and where inal village during the winters of 1997 and 1998. This text prob - the narrator tries to steep himself in the culture of the “moun - ably presented some very significant difficulties to the translators: written as a single paragraph of more than 200 pages * Sebastian Veg is director of the CEFC. in the original, divided into a little more than 20 sentences sep - 1. For this and further biographical information, see the appendix to the PhD disser - tation by Lin Li-ju, Lishi yu jiyi – Wu He de xiaoshuo yanjiu (History and memory arated by full stops, written in a mixture of the precise and an - – Research on Wu He’s fiction), Guoli zhongyang daxue, 2006, pp. 153-165, down - alytical Chinese used by the narrator and the more oral style loadable from http://thesis.lib.ncu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN= reflecting the “non-standard” language used by the “mountain” 92131006 (consulted on 27 February 2012). Wu He also explains his choice of pen- name as inspired simply by the “beauty of image” despite all the literary references aboriginals in the area around Puli (near the centre of the island), it contains. it is not always an easy read. On the whole, however, the trans - 2. A few remaining problems should be pointed out for correction in possible reprints: a repeated typo in the name of Tokugawa Ieyasu (p. 148 and note 36); the imprecise lation is successful in rendering both the letter and the tone of rendering of the play on words rubai/naibai : because of its obvious erotic overtones the original text, including the creative coining of new words. (2) this should probably be rendered as “milk-white”/”breast-white” or something sim - ilar; finally an unfortunate error (p. 255) probably due to a missing closing quotation It is not easy to provide a simple characterisation of the nar - mark in the Chinese original (Wu He, Yu sheng , Taipei, Maitian, 2000, p. 226): ac - rative created by Wu He. On one level, it is an investigation of cording to the grammar, it can only be placed after the words “chucao yishi.” N o. 2012/1 • china perspectives 69 Review essay tain people.” As the novel progresses, however, it appears that The point is therefore not so much to establish facts as to eval - the historical investigation takes place less by recording memo - uate and interpret history; in the light of contemporary norms ries of the events than through a collage of both discursive and in particular the act of “reaping” must be discussed in an episte - narrative fragments of history. Although Wu He, in an interview mological framework in which it appears as both a barbaric act with Lin Li-ju, mentions the French nouveau roman as a source and as the essence of the Sedeq civilisation. The last eyewitness of inspiration (the fragmented history of Claude Simon comes who has seen “reaping” take place provides the narrator, who to mind), his “novel” is in fact more discourse than narration, asks what he felt, with an answer that may seem unacceptable: sifting various interpretations of history through the critical lens “an incomparable pleasure, inexpressible —” (p. 165/157). The of a reflexive judgment. point is thus not so much to establish what happened in Musha The structure of the novel can be understood as referring to a as to return in an almost phenomenological manner to an event series of narrative models that appear as non-realised possibili - that has been obscured by two symmetrical interpretive ten - ties. The first model is the previously mentioned one of a histor - dencies: the mythification of Mona Rudao as an anti-colonial ical investigation: the narrator undertakes to interview several hero (4) and the rejection of “reaping” as a barbaric act. In the end, very old Sedeq villagers who remember the era of the massacre. both turn out to be denials of the specific civilisation of the Their testimony gives rise to a historiographical debate, drama - Sedeq. tised in a repeated discussion about the correct interpretation The interpretive debate about Musha is dramatised in the novel of the events: should they be viewed as an anti-colonial uprising in the form of exchanges between the narrator and two aborig - with a strong political agenda, or on the contrary, given that both inal intellectuals, Bakan and Danafu, who both oppose the idea the Sedeq and the Tuuda resorted to the traditional technique that Musha marked a political revolt (“the government has of “reaping” heads ( chucao 出草 ), are they better understood politicised reaping and has made it into an archetype of anti- as an ancestral ritual devoid of political meaning, which the Japanese resistance,” p. 23/47) or even a massacre, insofar as Japanese only “chanced” to fall victim to, so to speak? The sec - “the concept of massacre emanates from civilisation” (p. 22/47). ond structural model, that of a mystic quest, appears in the form On the contrary, they understand it as a ritual act endowed with of a search for the mysterious valley where Mona Rudao is said its own legitimacy, although it may be problematic for the “con - to have died (his body was only found three years after the temporary.” The narrator attempts to approach the incident in events, in 1933, p. 139/137 (3) ) and the narrator’s spiritual im - a non-normative manner, first from an anthropological stand - mersion into nature. Finally, a third structuring device is a polit - point, considering its evolution from a hunting to a coming-of- ical and anthropological reflection on the status of aboriginals age ritual (p. 145/142) and its links with sexual orgies in Taiwanese society after 1945, and more generally on the pres - (p. 167/159, p. 257/228). From an aesthetic viewpoint, he un - ence, within our modern societies, of the Other represented by derlines its particular form of beauty: “Certainly, at the instant the heirs of the civilisations we describe as “primitive.” when the head is severed, what exalts the human heart and The historical investigation model is the first to appear in the makes it quiver is precisely this distorted beauty” (p. 201/184).