Traveling Theory and Self-Fashioning

Realism, a conscious and recognizable movement in modern European literature, found its way into China, Japan, and Taiwan in the early 20th century. The trio developed a peculiar literary alliance through the efforts of writers of fiction in the first three decades of the century: during the time when Taiwan was ruled by the colonial Japanese government but at the same time still retained close ties with its “fatherland” in terms of literary creation. This double identity was painful enough to incur anxiety and uncertainty among writers who were already brooding over Taiwan’s self-identity. For many writers, national identity and literary identity were intertwined. In 1895, the Taiwanese people became subjects to a foreign colonial power: its almost overnight cessation to Japan stipulated in the Shimonoseki Treaty was a bitter humiliation. About three decades later, in the mid-1920s, the first wave of Realism reached the island’s literary circle and triggered a reaction dubbed “New Taiwan Literature.” This first attempt at defining Taiwan’s literary identity focused on the use of the Taiwanese language as the medium of writing, a gesture of resistance against both the Mandarin and the Japanese language. This literary self-identity deliberately downplayed Taiwan’s ethnic as well as linguistic ties with China. It, at the same time, asserted a Taiwanese autonomy in defiance against the imperial decree that the local Taiwanese be changed into “the Emperor’s subjects.” The self-fashioning of colonial Taiwanese writers as their own masters received inspiration from the left-wing writers who were then gathering momentum in China and also Japan. Georg Lukacs, a major theorist of Marxist literary criticism, was a pivotal figure in the reception and dissemination of the notion of Realism in Taiwan, by way of China and Japan. The Lukascian Realist legacy persisted to the late 1970s. During a period of about 50 years, it took on vocally political tones, fueled by a zeal to seek a national (and) literary identity. This paper will first trace the journey of the Lukacsian Realist discourse to Taiwan; it will then discuss Realist texts by writers such as Lai He, Wu Zhuo-liu, Lu He-ruo, Yang Kui, and Li Qiao as illustrations for the historicity and problematics involved in this national (and) literary project of self-fashioning.