由《生活在瓶中》到《夜遊》：論馬森的文學現代性與80年代前期台灣文學場域

Abstract

This essay aims at the relationship between Ma Sen's literature and the Taiwanese literary field in the early 1980s. The early 1980s is the crucial period of the paradigm shifts from the discourse of ”Siang Tu” (the local) to ”Ben Tu” (the native). After the debate on the local literature in 1977, the development of Taiwanese literature has moved quickly into political writing and following the market rules. This paper intends to demonstrate, in this new type of literary field, how Ma Sen's literature catches the reader's eyes through its inner aesthetics and external structure, and further to explore the significance of the new phenomenon revealing to us.Ma's two novels, ”Living in a Bottle” and ”A Night Journey”, highly symbolize the political and social situations of Taiwan in the early 1980s, isolated from the world as if living in a transparent but intangible bottle. This is a dawn for exploration of aesthetic forms and of various styles while the political condition in Taiwan is neither clear nor stable. At this moment, however, the Taiwanese literature is seen through an aesthetic lens rather than political one. Ma Sen's returning to Taiwan is like an attendance at ”a night journey”, in which Taiwan has been experiencing a turnover from the old world to the new one. As the female protagonist shows in the novel, ”A Night Journey” represents the women's situations in Taiwan in which they search for liberation from their imprisoned bodies. Thus, it attracts the reader by the quality of its sense and sensibility. Its advanced topic also forecasts the prehistory of Taiwanese literature in the early 1980s that it is going to transit from modernism to social realism in aesthetics, with the popular topics about the city life and the exploration of the restrained body of women.