Surviving Civilization: Rereading the History of Taiwan and Modernity

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)Surviving Civilization: Rereading the History of Taiwan and Modernity WuHe, Les Survivants (The Survivors), trans. Esther Lin-Rosolato and Emmanuelle Pechenart, Arles, Actes Sud, 2011,300 pp.The Yu sheng by Wu He ... ( Dancing Crane, the pen-name used by Ch'en Kuo-ch'eng ...first published in 1999 in Taiwan, has become something of a literary myth in certain circles, the work of a writer showered with prizes in the 1990s after re-emerging from years of reclusion in Tamsui. Born in Chiayi in 1951, Wu He lost his mother at 18 and began studying engineering at Cheng Kung University before transferring to the Chinese department in 1973. He was revealed to the literary scene with the publication of his first novella Peony Autumn ( Mudan qiu ..., included in the collection Sadness/Beishang ...). He then became strongly involved in the literary journals associated with the Taiwanese modernist movement, in particular the Avant-garde series (Qianwei congkan). After having belatedly served out his military duties in 1979-1981, he lived in reclusion during his ten years in Tamsui, during which he wrote several other novellas, including Two Deserters ( Taobing er ge ... also included in Sadness), which were only published after his return to the world. When he moved back to the south of Taiwan in 1991, he notes that he seriously considered a final retreat to a Buddhist monastery before deciding that he could not renounce literature. (1)The translators have therefore done francophone readers a great favour by giving them access to the first foreign translation of a cult text, the fruit of many years of reflection by the author on Taiwanese culture, and of two fieldwork trips to an aboriginal village during the winters of 1997 and 1998.This text probably presented some very significant difficulties to the translators: written as a single paragraph of more than 200 pages in the original, divided into a little more than 20 sentences separated by full stops, written in a mixture of the precise and analytical Chinese used by the narrator and the more oral style reflecting the non-standard language used by the mountain aboriginals in the area around Puli (near the centre of the island), it is not always an easy read. On the whole, however, the translation is successful in rendering both the letter and the tone of the original text, including the creative coining of new words.(2)It is not easy to provide a simple characterisation of the narrative created by Wu He. On one level, it is an investigation of the memory of the Musha Incident (Japanese transcription; Wushe in Mandarin), the massacre of more than 100 Japanese colonisers by the Sedeq aboriginals led by Mona Rudao (1882-1930) on a sports field in 1930, followed by terrible retaliation by the Japanese colonial authorities, who resorted to aerial bombing and the use of toxic gas. The remaining Sedeq (many had committed mass suicide) were interned in camps. The Japanese also instigated a retaliatory massacre by another tribe, theTuuda, in 1931, an event known as the Second Musha Incident.The is structured around the figure of a narrator who rents a house in Qingliu, a village near Puli, previously named Chuanzhongdao (or Kawanakajima in Japanese, the Island Between Rivers), where the few dozen families of Sedeq survivors of the 1931 events were eventually resettled, and where the narrator tries to steep himself in the culture of the moun* tain people. As the progresses, however, it appears that the historical investigation takes place less by recording memories of the events than through a collage of both discursive and narrative fragments of history. Although Wu He, in an interview with Lin Li-ju, mentions the French nouveau roman as a source of inspiration (the fragmented history of Claude Simon comes to mind), his novel is in fact more discourse than narration, sifting various interpretations of history through the critical lens of a reflexive judgment. …