Session 95: From Leftism to Aestheticism: Literature of Colonial Taiwan

Organizer: Pei-Yin Lin, National University of Singapore

Chair: Kuo-Ching Tu, University of California, Santa Barbara

Discussant: Bert Scruggs, University of California, Davis

This panel examines how various writers of Taiwan’s Japanese period negotiated the colonial reality in their writings. Rosemary Haddon’s paper analyzes how Lai He and Lü Heruo managed to continue writing even during the perilous times of colonial assimilation, and demonstrates the shift from nationalism to socialism many Taiwanese intellectuals took at that time. Tarumi Chie’s paper deals with how Zhang Wenhuan’s works exemplify the oscillation between aesthetic pursuit and national/political concerns. It also investigates the trajectory of Taiwanese writers from keen participants in left-wing movements to individual inward searching, inquiring whether there is any essential difference between the literature of the colonizer and that of the colonized. Yamaguchi Mamoru’s paper asks the crucial question about what space was left for the colonial writers as they were forced to compose in their colonizer’s language—the case of Yang Kui is examined. As the Japanese accelerated their colonial control aver Taiwan, realist writing and left-wing movements offered no way out to writers in the colony. Pei-Yin Lin’s paper explores the two other writing styles in Taiwan during the 1930s—the surrealist poetry by Yang Chichang, and the neo-perceptionist writing by Weng Nao. It argues that Taiwanese writers focused so much on colonial resistance that alternative literary styles inevitably became repressed. Together, these four papers examine the opulent and multi-layered spectrum of colonial Taiwan, scrutinizing the diversity of styles and positions adopted in these writers’ self-definition and quest for a cultural identity as colonial subjects.

Negotiating Colonialism: The Writing of Lai He and Lü Heruo

Rosemary Haddon, Massey University

From the second decade of Japanese rule (1895–1945) to the final years of the Pacific war (1937–1945), Japanese colonialism evolved in Taiwan from relative liberalism to a repressiveness brought about through assimilation and other policies of wartime Japan. These policies impacted the colony where writers of new, or vernacular, literature responded to the changes by devising strategies to ensure that their artistic voices continued to be heard. This paper focuses on the strategies formulated by two realist writers who negotiated the political landscape, while not compromising disproportionately with official wartime policy.

Lai He (1894–1943) was the first writer to emerge under colonialism and led the way in formulating paradigms of ethnicity that gave expression to his unswerving spirit of resistance. As a nationalist, Lai was the only writer to write in Chinese and wore a queue to symbolize his anti-Japanese resistance. In the early 1930s, Lai’s writing showed the impact of militarism that ruled out overt expressions of anti-colonialism. The modes of class and allegory that developed reflect the means Lai He resorted to in order to continue his critique, albeit in the form of inference.

Lü Heruo (1914–1951) elaborated on Lai’s paradigms during the nature phase of the new literature. A quasi-socialist ideology frames the first two of Lü’s works that escaped suppression due to the category of class. A Chinese cultural critique that followed similarly enabled his publication under the tightening censorship. Lü’s career concluded with an ambivalence that was a costly reminder of the perils of assimilation.

A Colonial Writer and His Stylistic Reorientation: A Study on Zhang Wenhuan

Chie Tarumi-Yomata, Yokohama National University

Focusing on Zhang Wenhuan (1909–78), one of the first generation of Japanese language writers from colonial Taiwan, this paper compares the "tenko" (reorientation, which refers mainly to a change of artistic styles or ideological belief) experience between Taiwanese and Japanese writers in order to discuss the differences in reception of left-wing thought in Japan and Taiwan. "Father’s Demand" (1935), a work representative of Zhang’s early period, is about the arrest and conversion ("tenko") of a Taiwanese student participating in the Tokyo left-wing movement, and is related to Zhang’s previous experiences in Tokyo. In 1934, the Japan Proletarian Writers Alliance (NALPF) was disbanded and discussion of the "tenko" movement in Japanese literature began. Many writers began to rethink their artistic direction. Zhang Wenhuan was no exception. Although the theme of "Father’s Demand," an intellectual’s vicissitudes between leftist movements and his family role as a father, can also be found in the works of Japanese writers, Zhang Wenhuan’s work is somehow different. "Father’s Demand" depicts a young intellectual’s suffering in the colony and his love affair with a Japanese woman. This is where the originality and uniqueness of Zhang Wenhuan’s work lies. In addition to offering a detailed analysis of Zhang’s works and his stylistic reorientation, this paper examines the rise and decline of left-wing movements in Taiwan. It also investigates whether it is possible that literature from colonial Taiwan contains some special elements which cannot be found in Japanese literature.

The Imagined/Created Colony: Yang Kui and Zhang Hezhou

Yamaguchi Mamoru, Nihon University

This paper examines how Yang Kui (1905–85), a representative left-wing writer from Taiwan, challenged the "imperial" literary system through his writing. To sharpen the discussion, it will compare Yang Kui with his contemporaneous Korean writer Zhang Hezhou (1945–97). In the Japanese left-wing literary world of the 1930s, Yang Kui and Zhang Hezhou were the writers who respectively represented the two Japan-ruled colonies: Taiwan and Korea. However, when looking at the comments made by Japanese left-wing critics towards these two colonial writers, we can discover a tendency in which the critics’ imagination about their colony was connected to the creation of a colonial image. Such an image was usually full of exoticism. Furthermore, the Japanese critics failed to understand that even though the colonial writers composed in the "imperial language," the imperial language was often subverted and could be reversely used in the process of resisting imperialism. The Japanese critics regrettably misunderstood the works of colonial writers and criticized the language of those colonial writers as being "immature." To address the problems caused by the trans-cultural interactions and embedded in the imbalanced colonizer/colonized relationship, this paper will first review the works and ideas of the Japanese critics and analyze the "imperial" literary system at that time. It will then draw a comparison between the remarks of the Japanese critics and the writings of Yang Kui and Zhang Hezhou. It ends by investigating the predicament of, and probing into the possibility of, colonial literature.

Beyond Realism: The Avant-Garde Writing of Yang Chichang and Weng Nao

Pei-Yin Lin, National University of Singapore

Realist writing was the most common and dominant style of literature from colonial Taiwan. Many literary works produced during this period contained strong anticolonial resistance color. However, when Japanese colonialists accelerated their control over Taiwan, literary production from Taiwan encountered stricter censorship. Direct condemnation of Japanese colonialism and the attempt to establish colonial literature with realism became not only extremely difficult but also very problematic. Writers thus had to search for an alternative style to deal with the reality.

This paper examines the two alternative styles, the surrealist and neo-perceptionist, exemplified in the works of Yang Chichang (b. 1908) and Wang Nao (1908–1940). It comprises three pairs, each offering in-depth textual analysis. Part one discusses the surrealist poetics of Yang Chichang and the Windmill Poetry Society that he founded. It also analyzes the avant-garde spirit revealed in Yang’s poems. Part two focuses on three short stories by Wang Nao, a writer who eschewed realism and opened up an avant-garde mode. It analyzes how Wang’s works, by centering on the protagonists’ inner world with psychoanalysis, had moved away from the chestnut of "obsession with Taiwan" and opened a possibility for modernity in which individual integrity is much desired and highly celebrated. The last part examines the realist tendency of Taiwan’s colonial literature, as well as the reception and marginalization of both Yang and Wong’s works. It also attempts to revalorize the value and significance of these two literary styles.