The Importance of Being Perverse: China/Taiwan 1931-1937
中文版
copyright
Joyce C.H. Liu
ublished in Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History, David Der-wei Wang and Carlos Rojas, eds.,
Duke University Press, 2004. In Press.
In a previous paper I presented at the conference on “Writing Taiwan” held at Columbia University in 1998, I proposed to re-examine the two waves of modernism in early Taiwanese literature in the 1930s and in the 1940s. I re-evaluated their relation to the Taiwanese modernist movement in the 1950s, and suggested that the reason these two early modernist movements were ignored and forgotten by later Taiwanese literary historians was due to the historical background of the rise of Taiwan New Literature, as well as to the tradition which Taiwan New Literature maintained in later decades. From the very beginning, the Taiwan New Literature, under the influence of the Chinese New Literature and the May Fourth Movement, had been imbued with heavy colors of social realism and endowed with the mission to reform society. Repeated debates between the nationalistic social realism and the modernist movement, as well as the consequent cleansing and abjection of the avant-garde, show that the return to the social-realist norm has been the imperative in the history of Taiwanese Literature. I referred to this imperative return to the social realist norm as the “the Oedipal Syndrome.” When I used the term “the Oedipal” in dealing with the issues in the socius, I was borrowing Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “molar formation” which they powerfully developed in Anti-Oedipus. That is to say, psychoanalytically, the strong collective desire to organize and normalize all discourses so that they fit into the symbolic order of the Nationalistic construction, the social Phallus, is analogues to the process of the socialization and normalization of an individual. Such desire to cling to the whole, determined by the social Phallus of their time, will consequently shape their literary and cultural identities.
The present paper intends to further investigate this Oedipal Syndrome in the Taiwanese literary field of the 1930s, with the hope that we can see better the complex interrelations between early Taiwanese modernism and its social context. The early Taiwanese literary field, being organized around a collective norm, has demonstrated a tendency to synchronize the twin nature of the avant-garde in the modernist movement (i.e., that of re-shaping literary conventions, and that of re-building society) and redirect them into a social-realist track. Within this normalized track, the act of seeking a brighter and more progressive society turned out to be the single cause for both literary activities and social movements. The dual impulses of "the abject" – to purge away the unclean or to abandon oneself and become the "deject" – as discussed by Julia Kristeva in her book Powers of Horror, also emerge in this context. Faced with this totalitarian discursive field, the modernist poet willingly plunges into the writings of the filthy, the waste, the violent and the erotic. This writing of the abject is what Julia Kristeva calls perverse writing, through which the poet maintains his resistance against the system and the norm.
The pervert and the schizo, viewed from the perspective of the literary field, can be seen as the defense mobilized by the libidinal energy to resist the force of organization and normalization and, by implication, Thanatos itself. The resistance, according to Kristeva, is caused by the fear of being “one” for an “other.” In discussing Baudelaire and his Les fleurs du Mal, Kristeva writes that “Perversion … proposes its screen of abject, fragile films, neither subjects nor objects, where what is signified is fear, the horror of being one for an other. Modern writing, according to Kristeva, is closer to “wandering psychosis” than to neurosis, which “imposes on the individual the erotic problem of the socius.” Thus, the modern writer, the one by whom the abject exists, is an exile, a “deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself) and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing.” Writing then is an act to exercise the perversion and to empty out the filth inside the body. By writing about waste, decay, rot, the obscene, and the demonic, the pervert in language resists the norm, and also its own death.
The aim of this paper is to examine the perverse writing employed by the first Taiwanese modernist poet and novelist Yang Chichang, and discuss the significance of his perverse writing, his theories of the "new spirit," "new relation," and his impulsive longing for the writing of horror. In so doing, I need to first delineate the cultural background of the 1930s in which I see the manifestations of clear Oedipal Syndrome, or what Deleuze and Guattari would call the “Oedipal Neurosis.” That is, a strongly organized collective will to strive for the group spirit and for the brighter side of the society.
The span of time I have selected are the years between 1931 to 1937, the period which began with Japan’s formal invasion of China in 1931 and ended with the outbreak of the Sino-Japan war in 1937. During this period of time, the sense of the serious danger that threatened China’s subjectivity rose up across the nation. The slogans of “National Defense Literature,” “People’s Revolutionary Proletarian Literature,” “Unified Frontline,” and “New Life Movement” also rapidly emerged. From these slogans, we see clear expressions of the nationalist urge for the new order and the demand for a strong ethnic identity. The Chinese literary field of the 1930s was therefore dominated by obvious nationalist tone both from the leftists and the rightists. In 1932, Shi Zhicun, Mu Shiying, and Du Heng, with the help of Liu Naou, established Xiandai. Facing the forceful organization and total mobilization in the contemporary literary field, the modernist group became the target of attacks from all sides, and a series of debates on their apolitical position as the “Free People” and the “Third Kind of People” appeared in various journals. The modernist style of writing, or so-called “Xin ganjuepai,” was severely criticized, for example, as “the perverse and morbid urban life in the semi-colonial region.”
In the same year that Japan began its invasion in China, the Japanese colonial government in Taiwan also strengthened its military control over the Taiwanese and arrested most of the Taiwanese communist leaders. The leftist leaders and the ethnic movement advocates shifted their base to literary associations and magazines. With the rise of the Taiwanese nativist consciousness and the organization of the leftist literary associations, the Taiwan New Literature movement turned out to be the tool of anti-colonialism and social realism. The Taiwan New People’s News (Taiwan xinminbao), originally established in Tokyo, started its Chinese edition in Taiwan in 1931. Taiwan Culture Association, an unofficial leftist organization, was formed in 1932 in Taipei, and started two related magazines, the Formosan (Fu'ermosa) and the Avant-garde (Xianfa budui). In 1934, Taiwan Literary and Art Union was formed, and subsequently Taiwan New Literature appeared in 1935. It was in the context of this political atmosphere and nativist literary discourse that Yang Chichang in 1933 established the short-lived surrealist Fengche Shizhi, also called Le Moulin, the first modernist poetic magazine in Taiwanese literary history. Sharing a parallel destiny with the Xiandai established in 1932 in Shanghai, Fengche Shizhi was severely criticized by the social realist camp as being decadent and perverse.
Both Xiandai and Fengche shizhi were reactions against the contemporary totalitarian organization of the nationalist as well as the nativist norm. The editors and writers of both Xiandai and Fengche shizhi were heavily influenced by contemporary Japanese and European modernism. Through re-examining the perverse writings produced by Yang Chichang, this paper seeks to show that Yang Chichang’s writings offer a mode of negative consciousness could help to explain the similar perverse writings in the modernism of the 1950s in Taiwan as well as those in the 1980s in China
Before we move on to the Taiwanese scene, a brief sketch and re-assessment of the studies of modernism of the 1930s in China will help to provide a starting point for our discussion. The beginning of the New Era in China in the 1980s, the so-called Xin shiqi, was accompanied by the rise of modernist literature such as “Menglong Poetry,” and was followed by a powerful tendency to Welcome western cultures. The same dynamic forces also triggered a wave of re-discovery and re-appraisal of the suppressed and long forgotten modernist literature in the 1920s and 1930s. Dozens of literary histories of modernist literature were published in an attempt to correct the mistakes of the past, which viewed social realist literature as the only legitimate trend of modern Chinese literary history. The modernist literature, such as the Xin ganjuepai [New Perceptionist Movement] of Shanghai in the 1930s, was brought to the foreground in this new wave of literary historiography.
From the studies of the modernist literature of the 1930s, we noticed the subtle criticism scholars showed against the monolithic discourse which appeared in China in the 1930s. They pointed out that the reason that the modernist literature was dismissed and forgotten by Chinese literary historians was because China in the 1930s chose a different path from that of the modernism of the New Perceptionist School. The choice made by China – which stood either in terms of what Zhou Yi termed “the Culture’s choice,” or what Chen Houcheng referred to as “the choice of the history”) was to head toward a new order, with a more organized, bright, progressive, correct, and uniform system.
We can go a step further in our discussion of this phenomenon of the collective forces of organization in Chinese literary discourse of the 1930s. Concerning the mainstream discourse's intolerance for the "westernized" or heterogeneous elements in literary works, the question is not only “Why did they resent the polymorphous and the perverse?”, but also, “Why did they desire their own repression with so strong a will?” We want to analyze, as suggested by Deleuze and Guattari, “the specific nature of the libidinal investments in the economic and political spheres,” with the hope of explaining why and how “in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression.”
The highly organized discursive norm in the Chinese literary field in the 1930s is similar to what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as the “molar formation” exercised in the “socius.” Deleuze and Guattari explain the major traits of a “molar formation” of a “form of gregariousness” (herd instinct) as follows:
They effect a unification, a totalization of the molecular forces through a statistical accumulation obeying the laws of large numbers. This unity can be the biological unity of a species or the structural unity of a socius: an organism, social or living, is composed as a whole, as a global or complete object. It is in relation to this new order that the partial objects of a molecular order appear as a lack, at the same time that the whole itself is said to be lacked by the partial objects.
According to Deleuze and Guatarri, the “socius” is a “body without organs,” and “the races and cultures designate regions on this body – that is, zones of intensities, fields of potentials.” We have observed that the norm of modern Chinese literary discourse follows the collective desire for the lack, or the phallus, which points to a new order, a more organized, progressive, correct, and uniformed system. This highly cathected partial object, the new order, demands that all individual writers strive to serve the phallus, to subject the individual to the organization of the society, to advocate the future utopian nation, to reveal the corruption of the society, and to correct the wrongs. In this powerful momentum of organization, all individuals willingly give up their personal fantasies, and desire with vehemence such repression.
It is also within such a highly Oedipalized collective neurosis that the fear of the perverse is intensified. From the studies appearing in the 1980s, we observed that, in spite of the attempted reappraisal of the Chinese modernism of the 1930s, the repulsion towards the abnormal, the decadent, and the perverse in modernist literature remained similar to that of the 1930s. Scholars of both the 1930s and the 1980s share the same sentiments of fear and resentment. Yan Jiayan, a pioneer in the studies of the Chinese modernist literature, for example, fully demonstrated in his “Preface” to the Anthology of the Xinganjue Fiction his severe objection to the “capitalistic” sadistic and perverted pleasure described in Shi Zhicun’s story “Shixiu” (32-33). Shi Jianwei also criticized the modernist writers, such as Mu Shiying, who presented their characters, following Freudian theories, as entirely dictated by sexual desires.
Closely allied with the reservation towards the abnormal and the perverse, is the urge for writers to join the collective forces of national reformation. Shi Jianwei, for example, has insisted that all literature should “relate the fortune of individuals organically with the revolutionary tides of the time,” “reveal the essential conflicts of the society” and “advocate the future ideal.” Such a critical stance echoes the typical leftist discourse of Ah Ying and others in the 1930s, who also demanded that writers should attend to the correct path and serve as the spokespeople of the proletariat.
The norm and the collective cannot tolerate the atomized self who refuses to enter the symbolic structure, and who resists having his/her desires stabilized, and identity fixed. This atomized self, or the “schizo” in Deleuze and Guatarri’s term, does not belong to any given social order. Deleuze and Guatarri write,
The schizo is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process—in terms of which the schizo is merely the interruption or the continuation in the void—is the potential for revolution. To those who say that escaping is not courageous, we answer: what is not escape and social investment at the same time. The choice is between one of two poles, the paranoiac counter-escape that motivates all the conformist, reactionary, and fascisizing investments, and the schizophrenic escape convertible into a revolutionary investment.
Choosing not to be a conformist or a fascist, the artist takes up the schizophrenic process and carries out the de-territorialization and re-territorialization through the forms of artistic work.
If we re-examine the “perverse and morbid” texts of the New Perceptionist movement, we realize that it is from this point that these modernist writers actualized their resistance and demonstrated their revolutionary force. Shanghai had been in a peculiar position because, since the nineteenth century, the ownership of its land had been given, piece by piece, to the British, the French and the Japanese governments, and it has therefore been called “the nation within a nation.” In the early decades of the twentieth century, Shanghai witnessed the complex intermixing of multiple cultures, including not only the English, the French, and Japanese, but also diasporic communities of displaced peoples such as the Russians, the Jews, the Romanians, etc., Leo Ou-fan Lee has pointed to the mixture of heterogeneous cultures of the Tang dynasty as the background in Shi’s fiction, and has observed that it is the combination of “the ancient exotic color” and the “modern psychological knowledge” which makes Shi Zhicun’s fiction different from classical historical romance. However, we also have to note that, as a matter of fact, such an “intermixing of heterogeneous cultures” perfectly reflects the conditions of Shanghai in the 1930s. When we read the stories by Shi Zhicun, we notice that the writer performed in his texts the arena for the boundary setting or crossing among diverse ethnic groups. The problems of blood origin, loyalty, history, heritage, and the authenticity or confusion of one’s cultural identity are prominently developed in Shi’s texts. Likewise, in the rapid montage of street scenes and psychic scenes in Liu Naou and Mu Shiying, we also can detect such uneasiness of cultural identity in the semi-colonial condition in Shanghai. Finally, we also notice a similar tendency when we re-read the perverse writings of Yang Chichang.
If we shift our attention to the Taiwanese scene in the 1930s, we notice that Yang Chichang was facing conditions similar to those of the modernist writers in Shanghai at the same time. Yang Chichang, who studied Japanese literature at Tokyo University from 1930-31 and who wrote all of his own works in Japanese, has been repeatedly criticized for his interest in such topics as prostitution and sexuality, as well as for his "decadent" and "demonic" style.
When we examine the literary discursive trends in the 1930s, we soon realize that the reason why Yang was not welcomed by his contemporary writers was because the second wave of the Taiwan New Literary Movement was already under way. This “Second Wave” (zai chufa) was advocated by the Taiwan Literary Association, which was established in 1932. The theme of the first issue of Xianfa budui (the Avant-garde), the representative magazine of the Taiwan Literary Association, was to investigate “the road of Taiwan New Literature.” In 1934, in the editorial column of The Avant-garde, the editorial column expressed the editorial board’s discontent with the formal experiments practiced by the writers of the time, including such examples as Nanyin and Xiaozhong, which it felt had “run into a wall” (peng bi), remarking that “they fall back into the sensational, sentimental, playful and even low class literary act.” The Avant-garde also clearly stated that they wanted to organize the dispersed elements, and move toward the “authentic” (bengehua) path of construction. In this, we can see the internal censorship exercised within the Taiwanese literary field, which provided a check on the individualized and diverse formal experimentation of that era.
The rise of the Taiwan New Literature Movement at the beginning of the 1920s, influenced by the May Fourth Movement in China, clearly manifested its revolutionary and military tone. In the first issue of Taiwan Youth, published in 1920 in Tokyo, the editorial column stated that the purpose of this magazine was to wake up Taiwanese young people to face the cultural movement in the contemporary world. The article also wrote: “My respectable young comrade! Come forward and let’s march together!” Zhang Wojun, the most forceful advocator of Taiwan New Literature, wrote several letters in 1924, addressing Taiwanese youths, urging that they should try their best to “reform the society” and that they not continue sleeping. Zhang Wojun exclaimed in his letter: “come and fight, and march forward with no pause, and we'll meet our aim one day!”
The same tone of marching spirit and the will to reform were echoed in the poems which appeared in “The Avant-garde” in 1934:
March, the avant-garde!
Let’s march in this tense and bright atmosphere.
With the will to soar up high,
With the spirit which knows no limit,
With the steps which follow the path,
March!
March!
…
The avant-garde moves forward to build a New World. Their blood and flesh are running and hot, awaiting the other troops to come.
Don’t hesitate.
Don’t doubt.
Come.
Let’s assemble at this front line,
Freeze the ocean,
Move the mountain,
Let’s start,
Until
The New World of ours is actualized.
We can clearly see the strong desire for the collective organization behind these lines, and the severity hidden within such marching spirit. We my also recall how Deleuze and Guattari described the “violence” and the “joy” associated with feeling oneself “a wheel in the machine, traversed by flows,” and in a position “where one is thus traversed, broken, fucked by the socius.” The collective mobilization attracts all individuals’ personal desires and leads it toward the national phallus, the new order and the New World. The will to freeze the ocean, to move the mountain, with the running and hot blood and flesh, demonstrate a paranoid fantasy and the desire to obey and submit to the collective force. From what the Avant-garde attempted to achieve, we realize that the double impulse within the “avant-garde” spirit – to change literary conventions and to change the world – have found the solution on the track of the military forcefulness of the latter cause.
Such a paranoid fantasy on the part of the writers of the Avant-garde stands in clear contrast to what Yang Chichang practiced in his writing. From Yang Chichang’s poetry and fiction we can see that, for him, while the colonial situation was impossible to ignore, that reality nevertheless could not be observed and described directly. Therefore, he did not describe the political resistance of the colonized directly, but rather used a form of negative description to write about their “traumatic experience,” and in this way used textual production to put this resistance into practice. He was neither willing nor able to pursue the goals of the masses, as was advocated in the Avant-garde manifesto. Instead, he could only stroll about aimlessly like a flaneur, sometimes even closing his eyes as he did so. The poem “The Sunday Stroller” (1933) can stand as a statement of his poetics. There, he shuts his eyes in order to “see still-life images,” thereby allowing the landscape to develop "through shattered memories,” as if in a dream. Strolling through this dreamscape, the narrator sees:
People laugh, seemingly cheerfully,
Passing through the rainbow-shaped space formed by their laughter, dragging along their sins,
…
I stroll along, listening to the voices in the space,
I press my ears onto my body, and
Listen to the demon-like voices from within.
What does the poet see if he does not open his eyes and look around at his surroundings? In another poem from 1933, "Hallucination," what he saw was the “gray brain,” the “moronic country,” the “cheerful people,” and the “virulent hallucinations” in the colonized land:
Shattering through the closely sealed windows of mine,
The gray Mephistopheles broke in,
The rhythm of his laughter painted musical notes in my brain
…
The awful breath of the night falls.
When will the snow storm start under this forgotten colonized sky?
The virulent hallucinations emerging from the sneer.
In the course of ordinary life, what the poet sees are the blizzards and fierce hallucinations which may rise up “under the forgotten colonial skies,” as well as the masses who unwittingly but contentedly commit sins and transgressions, and who “dream in their gray brain-matter of the open land of the moronic country.”
In another poem, "The Green Bell-Tower" (1933), the narrator finds himself walking through the streets of Tainan and, amidst the various sounds of “green reverberations of the tolling of the bell,” the purplish-green sound waves,” and the “explosive retorts of coverless trucks,” he glimpses “a prostitute who has frozen to death.” In a more recent poem, “Self-portrait” (1979), Yang also uses figures of “destruction,” “romantic city,” “peaceful morning,” “desolate world,” and “flickering life” to describe the city of Tainan, while the poet himself remains "buried in refuse."
Yang Chichang’s resistance as a writer is realized not through his manifesto of his political position, but rather through his resistance to the organized literary norms as they existed at his time, as well as his escape into the perverse writing. He fully understood the censorship Taiwanese writers faced during the 1930s, and realized that if he had written directly about reality and fully expressed what he saw and experienced, then it would have been impossible for him to have published his writings. Since he was not content to follow the banal track of his contemporaries, and write what other people expected of him, he therefore chose to write in a “perverse way” (Yichangwei), and revealed in his writings the traumatic experience of Taiwanese people under the colonial system.
Yang Chichang’s atomized style of writing, relying on scattered images, or a schizophrenic text, can be best illustrated in the poem “Demi rever,” which he wrote in 1934:
The morning absorbs from the violent snowstorms the lights of July.
Wave-like sounds of music, painting and poetry are like angel’s footsteps.
My musical ideal was the melody of Picasso’s guitar.
The sun sets with the dusk and seashells.
Picasso. Painter of the cross. Thoughts of the flesh. Dreams of the flesh. Ballet of the flesh.
Decadent white liquid.
An idea that came after the third lighting of the cigar pipe
Entered into a black glove.
Northwesterly wind blows across the windowpane,
As passion breathing out of the pipe turns towards the seashore.
The pollens of dream remain on the pale forehead, White ribbons of the wind,
The solitary air is unstable.
Sunlight’s fallen dream
Is in the music of the dried wooden angel. Green imagery starts to drift. Birds, Fish. Beast, trees, water and sand. They too become rain . . .
The anarchy of atomized images revealed in the above-quoted text, and the desaggregation of the will to control the text, appear similar to what Nietzsche, following Paul Bourget’s comments on the decadent style, observed with respect to Wagner:
That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, and the page gains life at the expense of the whole – the whole in no longer a whole. But this is the simile of every style of decadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms, desaggregation of the will.
The abandonment of rational control, the disintegration of form, the resistance to the earnest observation of the principles in reality, which we have observed in Yang Chichang’s writing, are all very alien to the Chinese and Taiwanese way of thinking. However, it is precisely through this alien form of abandonment and disintegration that Yang Chichang managed to probe the depths of reality and of the unconscious, which is so unusual in a Chinese and Taiwanese cultural context.
Besides these atomized images, the depths of reality and the unconscious are also revealed through Yang Chichang’s obsession with scenes of horror and images of death. Yang suggested that the technique employed by Hukui Keiichi, the artist who illustrated some of his books, constitutes a kind of “negative treatment” which reveals “the dark side of one’s consciousness.” He also explained that what he tried to accomplish in his fictional piece “The Rosy Skin” was to present “the joy of sex through blood”:
I attempted to make the blood vomited by the man flow onto the body of the woman. The man caresses her bloody body with his hand, and the woman hides her face in his bosom, like two naked bloody beasts, both enjoying in the ecstasy of love.
This kind of “strange love” and “cruelty,” according to Yang Chichang, is meant to present the “weird beauty and the strange light” of sex, so that his works can explore the "perverse state of modern neurosis."
To be more specific, the perverse and even sadistic obsession with the image of death reveals Yang’s perception of reality in the 1930s as being a combination of beauty and decay, as is illustrated by the following excerpt from his poem “The Image of the Moon’s Death—the Tomb-Stone of a Lady, II," (1939):
The lustful roses,
The fossil of flowers with the fragrance of the hair,
The snow-white stone statue with the fragrance of the hair.From within the window we can see the candlesticks.
The secrets of the night,
Flowers, fruits, gems, reptiles, . . ..
Ah, the sound of the bugs’ wings falling on the images of death.In the wind of failure,
The ritual of the dancing corpses has just begun.
Such an irrational juxtaposition of beauty and decay betrays a sense of horror in the face of total failure and despair. In “The Butterfly’s Thoughts – The Tomb-Stone of a Lady, I” (1939), we also see the close link between the beauty and the death:
Purple fingers of the death lantern extended underneath its shades,
The butterflies swarm and whiten the place,
The secret of dreams.Through the deep channel of light,
Exploring the fictive layers of the narrative,
The butterflies crouch on.The night which is magically transformed,
Is it the thinking of the bloody color?
Into the inscriptions on the tombstone of the woman who betrayed the season,
As numerous as the butterflies' powdered wings.
In “Tainan qui dort” (1936), Yang Chichang presents more fully the state of trauma he experienced during this period:
Under the attack of pale shock,
The crimson lips uttered a terrible cry.
In the death-like stillness of the dawn,
The blood-smeared wounds of my body are heating with fever.
Such a juxtaposition of beauty and death/corruption, or of beauty in the stillness of death, reveals the living conditions of Tainan that Yang Chichang was facing – that is, one akin to life in death, or of the living dead.
Perhaps we may say that the irrational juxtaposition of the contrary states of life and death, and of beauty and corruption, corresponds to the “new relation” discussed by the surrealist poet Nishiwaki Junzauro, whom Yang Chichang admired greatly. Similar to the “enigma” suggested by Mallarme, or Breton’s “beauty of wonder,” Nishiwaki Junzauro emphasized the excitement in the discovery of the “new relation,” and such excitement is close to the sensation of the “rational mind being attacked.” Mallarme, Breton and Nishiwaki all refer to the way in which a poem can combine together disparate elements to create a “new relation,” which is enough to present an overwhelming challenge to formerly fixed concepts. The way in which Yang Chichang’s “new relations” are most clearly manifested, is when he uses an anti-idealized juxtaposition of incommensurate concepts. In this process of atomization and fracturing of concepts, we may observe a retreat from idealism, together with a loosening of the strictures of the text.
However, we have to stress here that the “new relation” manifested in Yang Chichang’s poetry is not merely meant to provide a sensation of shock or a wonderous beauty, but also to lay bare, through a kind of “negative consciousness” or the “perverse” mode of beauty, the experience of trauma, failure, deception and despair. This experience of trauma and despair is all the more unbearable because it is silenced and imprisoned in the numb cheerfulness in the colonial land.
The most common way in which Yang’s poetry manifests this use of a violent and anti-idealized method of bringing together disparate experiential elements, is in the conjunction of themes of decadence and seductive beauty. Alternatively, we could say that the juxtaposition of calm happiness and decadent setback, of the death and decay which underlie beauty, and of the wound lying under the surface of a static life – these are the keynotes of Yang’s poetry, and also constitute the plight in which he found himself as an inhabitant of colonial Tainan. Examples of some of his early poems addressing these themes include "Tainan qui dort" and “Image of the Moon’s Death.”
When the colonial situation entered a state of inexorable military conflict, we see Yang’s poetry begin to return to the theme of death with ever-greater frequency. Therefore, the poem “Image of the Moon’s Death” foregrounds a callous juxtaposition of life and death, as well as of death and seductive beauty. There, we observe not only still and solitary images of death, but also the “lustful roses” in the cemetery; we not only see the stone statue and the flower fossil, but also smell the fragrance of hair which permeates both fossil and the statue. Similarly, we see not only the withered skeletons of twigs and leaves fluttering in the wind, but also the mortal vestiges of deceased flowers, fruits, gems, and reptiles.
The figure of the butterfly appears frequently in Yang’s poetry, and functions as a crucial link stitching together the contrastive elements of cohesive beauty and mortal terror. As early as his 1935 work, “Veins and Butterflies,” we see butterflies in an aerial dance over the corpse of a young woman who has committed suicide in a classical manner:
In the dusk, the young woman raises her hand with its protruding veins,
In the forest behind the sanitarium, there is the corpse of a hanging victim
The pleats and folds of a butterfly-embroidered green skirt are fluttering gently.
Butterflies also dance in the twilight on Tainan, this city which was defeated and effectively destroyed, while the survival of the populace is inscribed in the "defeated land" itself. They can only whistle silently, like a lifeless and hollow conch-shell:
The people who sign their names on the defeated land,
Whistle silently, empty conch-shells
Singing old histories, old lands, houses, and
Trees, all love to meditate sweetly
Autumn leaves fluttering in the dusk!
For the prostitutes singing boat songs,
The sighs of the old homeland are pale and colorless.
In "Pale Song," from 1939, we also see butterflies fluttering within the morbid thoughts of another suicide victim:
Terrified of the suicide victim's white eyes, they flutter in the music
of the sick leaves.
In the poem “The Butterfly’s Thoughts – The Tomb-Stone of a Lady, I” published in the same year as "Pale Song" and cited above, we can glimpse even more clearly the butterflies dancing in the shadows of the death lanterns which illuminate an open grave. The purple antennae of the butterflies appear as though they have already learned the secrets of death and life's vacuous adornments: "Through the deep channel of light, / Exploring the fictive layers of the narrative,/ The butterflies crouch on."Himself living in a colonial territory, Yang was faced with a thorough and compulsory normalization, while still managing to maintain a superficial veneer of calm and happiness. He was similarly confronted with war, but found himself powerless to change or avert it. Meanwhile, the only thing that remained for him was a pervading sense of failure and desolation, together with the stubborn fantasies of violence and death and decay which lurk in the interstices between the silence and repression, as well as the systematic terror which lies hidden beneath these insistent fantasies.
In his poetic and fictional work, Yang Chichang employs a “perverse” writing style which resists systematization and organization, making his the first work in modern Taiwan literature to use “neurotic perversity” as well as a cruel and repulsive beauty as constituent elements. If he had not insisted on this atomizing perversity, had not refused to enter the literary organizations of the New Literature camps, and had not refused the assignation of a static identity, then he would not have had access to this "perverse" dimension which was so rare in early Taiwan literature, nor would he have been able to traverse the surface, textual appearance of cruel and repulsive beauty, and probe a deeper liminal zone embedded within a larger symbolic economy.
Yang Chichang has indicated that the concepts of "pure love, vestigial sentiment, dispassionate purity, and seductive beauty" can come around full circle to become transformed into "negligible darkness and shaded obscurity," while also being directly linked up to the aforementioned "cruel and repulsive beauty." Furthermore, the transformation of this sort of "negligible darkness," is made possible through its being grounded on the fulcrum of a "ruthless and icy gaze." This "icy gaze" is the way in which "those who feel deeply" regard life and death, because "in order to emotionlessly reveal it [life and death], it is necessary to tap into humanity's inherent icy stoicism."
The pleasure which the observer feels while his flesh drips with fresh blood, or while being entranced with the decay and seductiveness of death, or while listening carefully to the demonic voices within one's own body – all of these examples from Yang's poetry illustrate the ways in which he uses "perverse" scenarios to challenge traditional values. At the same time, they also constitute a departure from the organization of human desires under the Oedipus complex. Once the subject enters the organization of the Oedipus complex, he or she can follow the path of desire, and can pursue a systematized absolute standard as well as a unified object. Gendered identity, national identification, political orientation, as well as abstract moral standards all become the foundations for a structured desire. Within this hidden foundation, the creation of a distinct "subjectivity" is made possible, together with an identification mechanism inclined toward the superego. The superego demands that the ego reject all of the vestigial traces of the primal mother, just as it demands that the self forcibly expel all of the impure elements within its own body, in order to complete the process of purification and systematization.
This negative, negating, and demonic style of brutal pleasure and cruel, repulsive beauty which Yang develops in his writings, constitutes a rare exception within the context of early Chinese and Taiwanese modernist literature. Furthermore, the significance of Yang's works lies in the manner in which he uses a perverse attitude to extricate and distance himself from the conventional monoglossic discussions of New Taiwan Literature, and thereby open up new ideological and literary terrain. Seen from this perspective, the figure of the prostitute, which continually reappears in his works between 1933 and 1939, is therefore an indirect expression of Taiwan's own prostituted consciousness as a colonized territory.
The topics of sex and prostitution appear frequently in many of Yang's other poems from the period from 1933 to 1939. Similarly, we have noted that in such poems as “Tainan qui dort” and “The Pale Bell Tower” (1933), “Rose-colored Skin” (1937), and “Images of the Death of the Moon” (1939), the vocabulary of blood, silence, and death in Yang Chichang's writings also gradually increased during the same general period. This slow process of change in Yang’s writing runs parallel to the progress of the warfare between Japan and China, as well as to that of the larger war in which countless Taiwanese young men were drafted to join the battle in Southeast Asia. This vocabulary of distorted emotion reveals the hidden violence as well as suppressed fear which characterizes these scenes of death.
Yang Chichang used a literary strategy grounded in "thoughts of the flesh, dreams of the flesh, and ballet of the flesh" ("Demi-rever") to lead his readers into a fantasy realm exploring the materiality of abstract signifiers and the margins of the human spirit. He suggested that the readers must transform their cultural identity and escape their ethnic positionality, while also demanding that poetry be removed from reality, and that it be a product of processed reality, opaque language, and the manifestations of a developed subconscious. When we consider these aspects of his literary project, together with his use of surrealistic imagery and of a demonic and seductive atmosphere, we can easily understand why his "demonic works" were repeatedly criticized by the realist literature organizations for being characterized by "indulgent beauty," "decadent beauty," "demonic beauty," "repulsive beauty," "cruel beauty." We can similarly understand why his mixture of modernist poetics and his "neurotically perverse writings," constituted such a shock to the literary establishment. Finally, we may also understand why the Mingtan as well as the Avant-garde publishing houses both failed to include him within the category of "Taiwan" New Literature.Sex and violence, as Georges Bataille discussed in The Tears of Eroticism, bring the same mode of intensified sensation of pleasure because each can serve as the outlet for an inner hidden fear. Consequently, the compulsive fantasy of extreme pain, as well as the convulsive violence and eroticism, are strategies used to resist the suppressed horror in the face of death (132-33). The subject of Bataille's discussion was the writings and paintings which Sade and Goya produced during their respective periods of imprisonment: after witnessing the brutality and death in the war, de Sade was imprisoned for thirty years, while Goya was deaf for final thirty-six years of his life. Both started their violent writing and painting during their period of imprisonment.
I would suggest that whatever the form of imprisonment – be it institutional, physical, or cultural, such as the one in which Yang Chichang found himself – the forced silence in the presence of physical violence and death breeds violence and perversity in all forms of expression. Taiwanese literature in the 1950s and 1960s, especially the writings of the surrealist mode during the first decades after the establishment of Martial Law in 1950 (for example, Luo Fu), together with Chinese literature in the 1980s (for example, Can Xue), both reveal a close affinity to the perverse writings of Yang Chichang.
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