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Title |
Exhausted Love: Modern Love and Its Discontents in Yi Sang and Weng Nao's Novels |
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Author |
Chen, Pei-Jean |
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Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature, National Chengchi University |
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Abstract |
This paper seeks to examine the colonial ambivalence that embodied in the pursuing of modern love and represented as what I term the “exhausted love” in the colonial daily life of Taiwan and Korea. The discourses on love were explosively produced in the early 20th Century East Asia; conceptions of modern love were created, transformed, and translated into local cultural practices in an effort to modernize the individuals. The writings and columns encompassed free love, marriage, and sexual issues by local intellectuals demonstrate the specificity of interior modernization and addresses complex issues of colonial modernity. However, the modern love is represented as what Elizabeth Povinelli (2006) terms “the intimate event” as a powerful regulative ideal, functions in the colonial situation by tracing how the conceptions of love are produced in the intersection of individual freedom and social bondage. Against this background, this paper focuses on love which fetishized and commodified in/with the literary works and intersected with the (anti-) modern consumption culture. The two novellas that will be examined in this paper－“A Love Story Before Dawn” by Weng Nao and “The Wings” by Yi Sang－were written and published right before Japan’s acceleration of assimilation policy and total war mobilization starting in 1937, and are often regarded as the pinnacle of modernist colonial fiction. These two novellas are narrated through monologues, and best represent the ambivalence of modern individual subjects, who exhausted the possibility of love (the symbol of civilization), as well as the narrative (means of self-representation). As this paper argues, the love of exhaustion is a sign for the reflective thinking on colonial modernity. The colonized exhausted the form and material of being modern, and these experiences of the colonial subjects resulted in a challenge to modernity and its imperialist ideology. |
