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2023 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

Clipping Wings: A Chronicle and Wang Wen-Hsing’s Art

verfasst von : Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

Erschienen in: Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century

Verlag: Springer Nature Singapore

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Abstract

Clipping Wings: A Chronicle (剪翼史) by Wang Wen-hsing (王文興), published in 2016, is the latest milestone in Taiwan’s Modernist fiction. The novel delves deeply into disturbing spiritual and ethical issues while bringing to a culmination Wang’s lifelong language experiment. Reading the work can be a soul-wrenching and aesthetically gratifying experience for those equipped with the proper decoding tools. However, the novel’s contemporary reception has been dishearteningly apathetic. It is a phenomenon this chapter intends to explore and hopefully illuminate. Following an introductory section on the general background, this chapter goes on to explore the novel’s central themes by referring to a specific narrative device Wang professed to have employed: covertly positing an “implied author.” The subtle but readily discernible oscillation of narrative distance that results may hold the key to a more nuanced interpretation of the work’s thematic messages. Next, the chapter brings attention to the modernist-inflected cultural elitism that principally informs the novel’s sociocultural critique. Notably, through Wang’s proficient employment of “parodic mimicry,” poignant criticism is “put into brackets” and transformed into ambivalent showmanship. The chapter then tries to enhance our understanding of Wang’s radical language experiment with insights drawn from Brian Massumi’s theory of affect. The concluding section consists of brief remarks on the implications of the novel’s parting of the ways with Taiwan’s younger-generation critics from the perspective of literary history.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Homegrown Stories: Gan Yao-Ming’s Fiction

Nächstes Kapitel Xia Yu, the Supreme Stylist

This chapter uses “Modernist” with a capital M to refer to the literary movement that took place in postwar Taiwan between the late 1950s and late 1970s, and “modernism” in the more generic sense of the literary trends and artistic concepts originated in Europe from the late nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century.

Wang was the recipient of the 13th National Arts Award from the government of the Republic of China in October 2009. In 2011, Wang received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the Minister of Culture of France and the 6th World Chinese Literature Award. The prolific activities that took place between 2008 and 2013 included scholarly conferences dedicated to Wang’s work; studio recordings of Wang’s readings of his fiction; seminar series in which Wang read aloud excerpts of texts from his two novels and offered interpretations; an elegant print volume of Wang’s manuscripts; and seven volumes comprising critical studies, interviews, and a sourcebook of research materials put out by the National Taiwan University Publishing Center in December of 2013.

There are of course different ways of periodizing contemporary Taiwan writers. Roughly speaking, after the Modernists were the fu-kan generation of the baby-boomers, the “inward-looking” generation born in the 1960s, the post-70 s generation, and the Millennials.

These writers include Yü Kuang-chung, Yang Mu, Pai Hsien-yung, and Ou-yang Tzu.

In a 1999 interview with Shu-ning Huang, Wang Wen-hsing claimed, “I am a hardcore disciple of Gustave Flaubert … we are still entrenched in the 19th-century realist tradition” (p. 301). Pai Hsien-yung, another prominent Modernist fiction writer in Taiwan, once remarked on how an IWW course on Madame Bovary encapsulated the quintessential spirit of creative fiction.

See pp. 371–376 in Wang’s conversation with Li Shih-yung (2013) in 語言本身就是一個理由—王文興訪談錄 [Language itself is the reason: An interview of Wang Wen-hsing]. When Critical Theory dominated the intellectual sphere in the mid-to-late twentieth century, critics might quickly resort to Althusser’s definition of ideology—as the individual’s imagined relationship with the Lacanian Real—to dissolve such epistemological doubt. In the case of Clipping Wings, however, the inherent cognitive limitation of the narrator leads to either existentialist angst or an older form of resolution for humankind, religious faith.

Tomkins uses the concept of affect to refer to the “biological portion of emotion,” defined as the “hard-wired, preprogrammed, genetically transmitted mechanisms that exist in each of us,” which, when triggered, precipitate a “known pattern of biological events.” However, it is also acknowledged that, in adults, the affective experience is a result of interactions between the innate mechanism and a “complex matrix of nested and interacting ideo-affective formations” (“Affect theory,” 2019).

Part I, Chapter 8.

Part III, Chapter 5.

Part I, Chapter 6.

Part II, Chapter 2.

Part I, Chapter 9.

Part III, Chapter 2, pp. 168–177.

Part III, Chapter 3.

Part III, Chapter 6.

A theatrically entertaining work, with the actors performing mime-like gestures.

Part II, Chapter 2, pp. 124–126.

Part I, Chapter 2, pp. 29–37.

Part I, Chapter 4, pp. 52–53.

Part III, Chapter 2, pp. 142–166.

At one point Wang used the term “trans-mimetic” to describe his practice (personal communication).

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Titel: Clipping Wings: A Chronicle and Wang Wen-Hsing’s Art
verfasst von: Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang
Verlag: Springer Nature Singapore
Buch: Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century
Print ISBN: 978-981-19-8379-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-981-19-8380-1

Copyright-Jahr: 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_5