The harvest of a golden age
With the arrival of the 1960s, anti-Communist literature went into a gradual decline. Under the powerful influence of European and American culture, local literary circles began to Westernize and, in what was yet another rebellion against the government's monolithic cultural policy, turned towards Modernism. Modernism came to Taiwan when a group of professors from National Taiwan University (NTU) began calling for the importation of avant-garde Western literary theories, techniques and works. They were not advocating positions on sensitive political and economic issues, but rather were calling for the use of new and improved writing techniques to raise the standard of Taiwanese literature. The students in NTU's Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures in those days included such future luminaries as Kenneth Pai (Pai Hsien-yung), Chen Jo-hsi, Wang Wen-hsing, Wang Chen-ho, and Ou-yang Tzu. Together, they founded Modern Literature, a magazine advocating "experimental, exploratory, and creative artistic forms and styles." The group enriched the expressive repertoire of Taiwanese literature by boldly bringing to Taiwan the major works of avant-garde Western writers such as Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, Sartre, and Faulkner, works which frequently employed soliloquies and stream of consciousness in an effort to explore the unconscious depths of the human mind. The most important works produced by the Modern Literature group include Kenneth Pai's Tales of Taipei Characters and Wang Wen-hsing's Family Catastrophe. These were seminal works that used sharp, original language, structures, and symbols to reflect the society of the day and express their authors' strongly humanistic leanings.
Two other important literary streams also appeared in this period, one centered around Literary Quarterly, and the other around Wu Cho-liu's Taiwanese Literature.
The nucleus of Literary Quarterly consisted of writers such as Chen Ying-chen, Chi Teng-sheng, Hwang Chun-ming, and Liu Ta-jen who exploited realism and a socially critical eye to shape the lives and experiences of individuals in society into a substantial collection of literary works.
Wu Cho-liu, meanwhile, founded Taiwanese Literature on his own in 1964. Wu, who insisted that his periodical have "Taiwan" in the title, was determined to keep alive the New Literature tradition, which had been through hard times since the end of Japanese rule, and to promote Taiwanese Nativist literature. Taiwanese Literature has passed through several hands since the 1960s, but the magazine's Taiwanese spirit has never flagged. It has been the spiritual bastion of post-war Taiwanese literature, and few indeed are the Nativist writers who have not had ties to it. Over the years, its principal contributors have included Wu Yung-fu, Chung Chao-cheng, Li Chiao, Cheng Ching-wen, Yang Ching-chu, and Hung Hsing-fu.
The third Nativist Literature Debate
By the early 1970s, Taiwan was in a diplomatic bind. It had withdrawn from the United Nations and diplomatic ties with Japan had been severed. Along with the political debate, a wave of nativization swept through every level of Taiwanese society. Within the literary community, a reevaluation of the Modernism it had adopted with Westernization was unavoidable. A group of Taiwan's intellectuals embraced the people, became more engaged with the larger society, and returned to the land. Their change of focus resulted in a renewed interest in literary realism and a revival of the spirit of the Japanese-era New Literature Movement, with its sense of mission, its emphasis on social realism, and its depictions of the hardships of the poor.
When this group attacked the Modernist orthodoxy in the pages of the United Daily News' literary supplement and in China Tide, they kicked off a third Nativist Literature Debate. The heretics wondered how literature could limit itself to playing games with technique at a time when the country was facing crises at home and abroad, and argued that it should instead be considering the livelihood of the people and the future of Taiwanese society. They began publishing work after work critical of the island's politics, economic system and society. Hwang Chun-ming's novella Sayonara! Zai Jian! attacked Taiwanese society's infatuation with the West. Other writers, meanwhile, picked up themes which had once been considered marginal and brought them into the mainstream. Examples include Yang Ching-chu's workers' fiction and Wang Tuo's immigrant literature. The Nativist fervor even gave rise to new Nativist trends in film and music.
A polyphonic age
Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, Taiwanese literature has experienced a freedom unprecedented in Taiwanese or Chinese history, and a multitude of literary schools now clamor for the public's attention. In Taiwanese society at large, everyone has gained the right to freedom of expression and is able to criticize publicly the political situation, even the president and high officials. Within the literary field, a myriad of new directions have opened up. Aboriginal literature, new feminist literature, environmental literature, gay literature, and pornographic literature have taken the stage one after another, providing material for readers of every taste. The principal authors of this new era include Wu Ho, Chang Ta-chun, Chu Tien-hsin, Ping Lu, Tien Ya-ko, and Chi Ta-wei.
Some think of this as a period of literary diversity. Others see in it the "decentering" of a deconstructed era. Over the last 15 years, views on literature have changed radically. In this new age, it is axiomatic that Taiwanese literature should leave tragedy behind, and seek instead the personal and the pleasurable-literature no longer begins with Lai Ho, but with oneself. Today's writers have been exploring every kind of expressive possibility, inventing techniques as they go. Thematically, literature has abandoned politics and is now free to describe both hetero- and homosexual relationships. While the February 28 Incident is solemnly memorialized in the political arena, within the literary field, it has become a symbol, an object of satire, and even a product. The ascendancy of this hedonistic or perhaps individualistic literature can be seen in the media's efforts to make this new literature into a story and in the literary prize committees' attempts to add fuel to the fire.
Is this new, wide-open, multi-faceted literature, so different from the Taiwanese literature of the last 100 years, something to be excited about? Should we be concerned? What view should we take of the future of Taiwanese literature?
If Taiwanese literature is to continue to improve and advance, I personally believe that we should not just compare it to the Taiwanese literature of earlier eras, but that we should also place it out on the world stage to see how it stacks up against what the rest of the world has to offer. Only in this way can we avoid a self-satisfied complacency and move on to something new. Compared to work generally accepted as part of the global canon, Taiwan's best works are only second- or even third-rate. If Taiwanese literature is to improve, we have to be aware of both our own strengths and those of others. We must develop a thoroughgoing understanding of contemporary trends in world literature. We must, in engaging with the world, find that critical juncture that will take us forward. We must turn our gaze outward to the world.