Post-1949 Literature in Taiwan

As introduced by the Taiwan Yearbook 2006:

Mainland Emigre Literature: 1950s

After Taiwan returned to ROC control in 1945, Mandarin replaced Japanese as the official language and increasingly replaced Holo Taiwanese as the language of much day-to-day usage. This language barrier greatly hampered the creative activities of many middle-aged native Taiwanese writers. Political fears also silenced native Taiwanese writers, as many intellectuals were persecuted during and after the February 28 Incident in 1947. The literary scene in Taiwan during the 1950s was, therefore, dominated by "mainlanders", writers who had come to Taiwan from China around 1949.

In addition to writing political propaganda, writers of the 1950s were frequently faulted for their amateurism. This was partly the product of a special institution in Taiwan, the fukan (newspaper literary supplements). Fukan were, undeniably, the most significant sponsors of literary activities in Taiwan before the new millennium. Nevertheless, with their large demand for works of immediate popular appeal, they also fostered casual, lightweight writing and pandered to middlebrow literary tastes.

Two broad categories of writings, traditionalist prose and realistic fiction, are considered representative of 1950s literature.

The prose style tended to be more literary, retaining a great many archaic expressions and allusions to classical literature. The proliferation of traditionalist prose in Taiwan during the 1950s, in the form of familiar essays and the hybrid genre of essay-fiction, was apparently a continuation of an earlier trend in China during and following the Sino-Japanese War. The decade's best-known essayists -- Jhang Siou-ya, Jhong Mei-yin, Syu Jhong-pei, Liang Syuan, and Ci Jyun -- were all mainland Émigré writers.

The 1960s saw the publication of several well-written, realistic anticommunist novels, such as Rice-sprout Song, The Whirlwind, and The Di Village. Although important in their own right, these stories were set exclusively in pre-revolutionary China, and their authors either never resided in Taiwan (e.g., Eileen Chang, 1921-1995), or were marginal to Taiwan's literary scene (e.g., Jiang Guei and Chen Ji-ying), thus diminishing their significance in Taiwan's post-1949 literary history. Far more relevant were such writers as Wang Lan, Meng Yao, Pan Ren-mu, Lin Hai-yin, Nie Hua-ling, Peng Ge, Jhu Si-ning, Duan Cai-hua, Sih-ma Jhong-yuan, and Chung Chau-cheng, who had established their literary reputations around the mid-1950s and who continued to play prominent roles in Taiwan's literary scene for some time.

All of these works were unique products of the contemporary cultural and political environment. Thus, it was only natural that they were set in the past and discussed such subjects as the oppression of women, the repressive nature of the traditional family system, and the conditions of working-class people and domestic servants.

Modernist Literary Movement: 1960s

The modernist literary movement was an expression of the predilection by Taiwanese intellectuals of the time to emulate Western high culture. It is readily observable that important literary figures of post-1949 Taiwan -- such as Liang Shih-ciou, former member of the Crescent Moon Society, Sia Ji-an, mentor of a core group of modernists, and Yan Yuan-shu, leading critic of the 1960s who introduced New Criticism to Taiwan -- had ideas that were fundamentally rooted in Western liberal-humanist traditions.

Taiwan's modernists stressed the principle of artistic autonomy. They explored new spheres of human experience, favoring rationalism, scientism, and serious philosophical contemplation. For example, apparently influenced by popular versions of Freudian psychoanalysis, young writers at the early stage of the modernist literary movement were particularly fascinated with nontraditional interpersonal relationships. These writers included Wang Wun-sing, Bai Sian-yong, Ou-yang Zih, Chen Ruo-si, Shuei Jing, and Chen Ying-jhen. Their sincerity and bold, honest self-analysis broke new ground in Taiwan's cultural context and redefined the boundaries of normality in human behavior, thus presenting challenges to the conservative middle-class mentality that had originally been the backbone of the dominant culture in post-1949 Taiwan.

The upsurge of aesthetic iconoclasm in the 1960s represented a significant moment in postwar Taiwan's literary history. The vigorous dynamics of newly introduced artistic concepts associated with modernism called into question conventional forms and criteria of literary excellence. The more enduring efforts generated by this initial enthusiasm eventually ushered in a new era of Taiwan's modern literary history.

Most modernist fiction writers in Taiwan stayed within the general confines of realism, but their conscious explorations of language and voice brought forth fundamental changes in rhetorical conventions of modern narrative. Since the attempts of earlier modern writers to offer realistic portraits of life were frequently hampered by the dominance of the subjective voice in the work's rhetorical structure, modernists tried to redress this deficiency by introducing a new "objective form". They strove to present an "impartial" picture of reality so that readers could be given the privilege of forming their own opinions and moral judgments.

Despite the fact that Taiwan's modernist literary movement took place in a postmodern period from the standpoint of the West (the 1960s and 1970s), the dominant tendency of this movement was more like that of the early phase of Western modernism (late 19th century and early 20th century). In the extremely compressed timetable of Taiwan's modernist literary movement, certain features could be discerned. These included the reversal of the conventional content-form hierarchy and the radical rejection of traditional writing techniques, ideas that represented a burgeoning skepticism about language and meaning. Most of the modernists' explorations of language unmistakably reflect Western influences, but original experiments were also made. These resulted from a new awareness of the unstable relationship between language and its referents, as well as of a reawakened sensitivity toward the ideographic nature of the Chinese language. These experiments, especially those found in Wang Wun-sing's two novels Family Catastrophe (1973) and Backed Against the Sea (1981), and Li Yong-ping's story series Chronicle of Ji Ling (1986), marked the apex of the development of modernist aestheticism in contemporary literature.

Nativist Literary Debate: 1970s

As the modernist fiction writers began to mature artistically in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so too did the resistance to modernism's dominance of Taiwan's literary scene begin. The precursor to a large-scale denunciation of the modernist literary movement was the 1972 Modern Poetry Debate, which bore a special social implication in that it was closely tied to the Taiwan intellectuals' growing consciousness of their endangered cultural identity. In what was later known as the "return to native roots" trend around the 1970s, progressive intellectuals criticized the blind admiration and slavish imitation of Western cultural models, and exhorted their compatriots to show more respect for their indigenous cultural heritage, as well as greater concern for domestic social issues. Many liberal scholars, especially those who had just returned from the United States, played important roles in igniting this new trend.

Shortly after the Modern Poetry Debate, a group of critics began to publicly renounce the foreign-influenced modernist work and to advocate a nativist, socially responsible literature. This trend reached its apex with the outbreak of two virulent Nativist Literary Debates in 1977 and 1978, and suddenly declined when, in 1979, several key figures of the nativist camp dropped out of the literary scene and became directly involved in political protests. The tradition of nativist literature as a creative genre -- of which the main features were the use of the Holo Taiwanese dialect, depiction of the plight of country folk or small-town dwellers caught up in economic difficulty, and resistance to the imperialist presence in Taiwan -- can be traced back to the nativist literary trend during the Japanese colonial period.

Nativists believed that Taiwan's socioeconomic system needed changing. They fiercely attacked the government's economic dependence on Western countries (especially the United States), deplored the infiltration of "decadent" capitalist culture into the lives of ordinary Taiwanese people, expressed indignation on behalf of Taiwan's farmers and workers who paid a high economic price for the nation's urban expansion, and attempted to draw public attention to the adverse effects of the country's overall economic development.

The regionalist sentiment implied in the nativist project immediately touched on an extremely sensitive issue, the "provincial heritage problem". Tensions had always existed between native Taiwanese and those who had arrived on the island following the civil war defeat, and their descendents, but were heightened by perceptions of an unbalanced distribution of political power at the time. As a consequence, even though some of the leading nativist critics were socialists or nationalists rather than separatists promoting Taiwan independence, the nativist critical discourse as a whole could not help but be one part of the ongoing political strife.

It is undeniable, therefore, that literary nativism was used by a particular group of people at a particular period in history to challenge the existing sociopolitical order. Attacks launched by the nativists on modernist writers, whose literary ideology was conspicuously apolitical, largely centered on the latter's supposed default of their social responsibilities as members of the intelligentsia.

By the mid-1970s, Taiwan's literary writers were already deeply split into opposing camps. Placed within a larger historical context, the modernist-nativist split was part of the continual struggle in modern Chinese history between liberal and radical intellectuals with different reform programs and different views of literature's social functions. The new paradigm of ideological writing as established in the mid-1970s moved in a direction diametrically opposed to that of the introspective, humanist, and universalist approach of the modernists, and deliberately focused on the historical specificity of contemporary Taiwan society. In addition to later works by Huang Chun-ming on imperialism, such writers as Yang Cing-chu and Wang Tuoh explored capitalist exploitation as it affected urban factory workers and fishermen.

Critical evaluation of nativist works produced in the 1970s is not generally positive. Although the change in thematic conventions was approved by a majority of critics, excessive ideological concern was considered to have detracted from their literary achievement. Just as modernist literature continued to evolve after the rise of nativist literature, the practice of nativist literature did not come to an end even though the Nativist Literary Debate folded toward the end of the 1970s.

Pluralism: 1980s

In a sense, articulation of dissident views during the Nativist Literary Debate paved the way for more intense struggles toward democratization in the early 1980s. Eventually, with the formation in 1986 of an opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party, literature was largely relieved of its function as a pretext for political contestation. It became even more inextricably involved in the country's booming mass media, however, most notably, in the two competing media giants, the United Daily News and China Times. Annual fiction contests sponsored by these two from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s gave creative writing a solid boost, with an overwhelming majority of the writers of the baby-boom generation rising to literary prominence by winning one of these contests.

The nativist theorists may have felt both frustrated and vindicated in the 1980s, as the "spiritual corruption" of capitalist society, which they had predicted, appeared along with the ascendancy of materialism and a sharp rise in the crime rate. The cultural environment also became heavily consumer-oriented. Not without a touch of irony, even nativist literature itself was largely co-opted by the cultural establishment, especially between the late 1970s and early 1980s. Newspaper supplements and literary magazines were inundated by pseudo-nativist works, which displayed an abundance of Taiwanese local color but contained little ideological content.

As public fervor for both the modernist and the nativist causes subsided, the literary scene of the 1980s became largely dominated by the baby-boom generation, whose vocational visions were drastically different from those of their predecessors. Rather than treating creative writing as an intellectual project or a political quest, they were more concerned with popularity and with various problems affecting Taiwan's middle-class urbanites. Some writers with a cynical intellectual pose, such as Huang Fan and Li Ang, offered critiques of materialism and the cultural impoverishment that it caused; while others with down-to-earth pragmatism, such as Siao Sa and Liao Huei-ying, examined the new social factors that had changed ordinary people's ways of life, showing particular interest in liberated sexual views and the problem of extramarital relationships; and still others, such as Yuan Cyong-cyong, Jhu Tian-wun, and Su Wei-jhen, fell back on the sentimental-lyrical tradition and focused their attention on subjective, private sentiment with a posture of complacency regarding sociopolitical issues.

With public debate over Taiwan-China relations intensifying on a daily basis, many writers from the baby-boom generation tended to deliberately stress their unique cultural identity, rooted in the specific sociohistorical realities of Taiwan's post-1949 era.

Writers' approaches to literature in the 1980s were certainly pluralist. Although writers of the modernist generation published their more mature works during this decade, literary products of the younger generation were marked by a rich diversity. Including "residential military community" literature, works about life in business corporations, political fiction (with a special sub-genre on the February 28 Incident), neo-nativist literature, resistance literature, feminist works, and science fiction, this phenomenon might be characterized as the orchestration of a multitude of discordant "voices".

The broadly defined trend of "returning to one's native roots" continued into the early 1980s, moving beyond the modernist-nativist contention. Several former modernist writers, including Shih Shu-cing and Li Ang, made notable contributions to this trend of cultural nostalgia. Lin Hwai-min incorporated both classical Chinese and folk Taiwanese elements in his choreography for Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. All of these accomplishments set the tone for creative endeavors in the new decade, even while encouraging commercial exploitation of traditional and native cultural signs.

After the mid-1980s, as the indigenous began to replace the foreign as the primary source of exotic imagination, and cultural identity began to occupy a more prominent place in the public consciousness, postmodernism became vogue again, raising issues about Western influences on Taiwan's contemporary literature. In a pattern closely resembling that by which earlier Western literary trends such as romanticism, realism, and modernism were appropriated by writers in Taiwan, the postmodern mode of writing became a new fad and its surface markers, such as double endings, juxtaposition of the factual and the fictional, and the technique of pastiche, among others, appeared profusely in works by both greater and lesser writers.

The younger writers of the 1990s consciously subscribed to a more cynical postmodern ideology, as is evidenced by their emphasis on difference and pluralism, and indeterminacy, which are uncongenial to modernist temperament. There were also similarities between the two generations of writers: their intellectual disposition, their globalism, and the way they looked to the West, or Western-influenced literary traditions, such as those of Eastern Europe and Latin America, for literary models.

Multiculturalism and Postidentity Politics: 1990s

Taiwan underwent a change in terms of national identity in the 1990s. Literature of the 1990s tends to use mixed genres and multilingual devices, drawing on a wide range of both global and local cultural codes, idioms, and traditions, to express the fluid, albeit disoriented, structure of feelings.

In the 1990s, Jhu Tian-wun and Chang Ta-chun were still prominent in the field of political fiction, especially for their nostalgic narratives on the dissolution of the distinctive culture within government housing compounds. Chang was reputed for his technique of intermixing various genres -- including history, dream text, diary, and news reports -- and voices. As a writer appropriating all news and media events, Chang gradually moved from writing cynical diaries and "factual fiction" (such as that based on the tragic death of a navy officer), to producing public TV programs and becoming a media personality. Jhu's Notes of a Desolate Man won the 1994 China Times best fiction award. Although the second-generation mainlanders who serve as the subjects of this novel reappear repeatedly, Jhu's sensitivity to the ethnic tensions, rupture of traditions, and societal psychopathologies is nicely matched by her literary style and narrative coherence.

Between Jhu and Chang was Yang Jhao, a young writer who successfully blended romance with saga, collapsing the distinctions between both public and private, and personal and social. Yang is currently a cultural critic, political activist, and novelist. His multiple roles in the public and cultural arenas, as well as his impressive talent in fusing personal and interpersonal histories, are self-evident in one of his trilogies, A Dark Alley on a Confusing Night.

In contrast to Li Ang, who severely criticized the patriarchal system of domination, younger women writers emerging in the 1990s, such as Luo Yi-jyun and Cheng Ying-shu, were more playful in their treatment of sexual liaisons (often lesbian) in bars, of the object-choice "medial woman", and of the fantasies and frustrations of the so-called generation X in relation to the new, unsettling social milieu that had thus far failed to take shape. Writers like Cheng were moving toward postidentity politics, celebrating postmodern flexibility and unpredictability in the global cyberspace of easy accessibility. Their counterpart in the field of poetry was the late Lin Yao-de, who employed the language of the fax machine and computer terminal to describe the fluid human relations in a transnational capitalistic society. Lin was very active in the 1980s in promoting postmodern poetry about urban culture and cityscapes, following poets like Luo Men, Lo Ching, and others. These poets differed greatly from the humanist traditions set up by Luo Fu and Wai-lim Yip, as well as from the traditions revised by Jian Jheng-jhen, Syu Huei-jhih, and Jiao Tong, who added phenomenological, psychoanalytical, and even post-structuralist twists.

Several writers tried to highlight issues associated with the Taiwan independence movement, minority discourse, political feminism, and environmental protection. Reportage, science fiction, and biography were their favored modes of literary expression and ethnographic exploration of everyday political subjects. Ku Ling was one celebrated political satirist; Yu Fu poked fun at politicians through his cartoons. A prolific poet covering similar subjects was Li Min-yong. It was in the Little Theater, however, that serious political satire truly intermingled with comic relief. The stages used for these mini plays took many forms, being found in theaters, on the street, in city halls, or even in front of the Legislature. Some differing and milder versions of post-avantgarde theater, on the other hand, were offered by playwrights such as Stan Lai and Li Guo-siou, who drew their inspiration from a range of Chinese and Western dramas, both traditional and modern.

Revival of local vernacular traditions was an important trend of the 1990s. As localization took root, Holo Taiwanese and Hakka became preferred linguistic mediums for literary expression. In this regard, Jhang Chun-huang was particularly acclaimed, following publication of her pioneering prose work Paths to Youth in 1995, which made her the first prose writer to write in Holo. This work represents a crucial rearticulation of literary tradition in which linguistic nuance and cultural diversity are celebrated. After all, it is the diversity of languages and customs on the island that has enriched the literary expressions of the people of Taiwan.