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Title |
Modernism in “Taipei Jen” and the fiction of Pai Hsien-Yung |
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Author |
Mamoru Yamaguchi |
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Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Culture, College of Humanities and Sciences, Nihon University |
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Abstract |
Modernism in the Taiwanese literature of the 1960s might be characterized by its orientation toward an acquisition of its subjectivity of writing, which properly could be considered experimental to achieve modernity rather than a movement for a new style or a new concept of a literature. With a foundation on their identity crises, young writers like Pai Hsien-yung and his coterie made zealous efforts to practice a modern interpretation of Chinese classics and use Western literature as an example of imagining modernity under the censorship imposed by the Nationalist party, which essentially blocked the progress of both the May Fourth literary tradition and that of nativist Taiwanese literature carried out under Japanese rule before 1945. Modernism in Taiwan literature can be considered a form of discourse that, while undertaken during specific set of social and historical circumstances, imagined and created literary modernity in Taiwan during the post war years. As a representative writer of this movement, Pai Hsien-yung particularly reveals his own modernity in Taipei People, which is set in against the contemporary era in which the stories were written, multi-layering a space, a time, and a culture, his technique reverberates a melodious nostalgia that produces an aesthetic of loss and depravity, providing a literary elegy to the people who rot away, singing a paean to inspire people who live on. It pays true homage to the people who lived in Taiwan after the war, by means of a sincere and earnest reimagination of 1960s modernism written against the weight of history and in the shadow of an identity in crisis. |
