MEDICIÓN DE LOS INDICADORES
2.5 Análisis comparativo de los resultados del Pre-tes y el Pos- tes
1.7.1 The Response to KMT Criticism
By 1977, when this essay was written, the implicit political criticism in Wang Tuoh’s fiction had become explicit political criticism in his literary essays. This is because Wang felt compelled to reply to KMT criticism in the ‘Debate on Nativist Literature’ mentioned previously. As in Auntie Jinshui, Wang is drawing a concrete picture of the ‘present reality’. He uses a skillful assemblage of biographical detail, factual information, historical events and reports, and careful quotation of others’ works to build this picture. He mentions his own awakening during the Diaoyutai protests;104 and notes his own and others’ ‘reportage’ for The Intellectual magazine.105 He adds in newspaper reports of working conditions for farmers and miners,106 together with the facts of the historical events from 1970 to 1972.107
Wang’s extensive quotations of others’ works are carefully chosen to add emotional background to his facts. For instance, Wang Xingqing’s “Condemnations and Appeals”108 exemplifies the enthusiasm and awakening of political and social consciousness of youth. It also talks of a national crisis and the need for social and political change. Wang Tuoh doesn’t edit out the call in this essay also for “the government to...thoroughly and totally reform politics.”109 His quoting of “The
104 “It’s ‘Literature of the Present Reality’…” p 64 105 op cit p 65
106 op cit p 67 107 op cit p 60 108 op cit p 63 109 ibid
Complete Story of the Taida Volunteer Service Corps”110 also exemplifies the views
of youth, and by telling of the youth investigating rural conditions, also hints at the need for change. More explicitly Wang Tuoh also leaves in this quote that “school didn’t talk about anything meaningful”111 as an attack on the KMT controlled education system. The quotes from Wei Tianzhong112 represent the fears and confusion of Taiwanese caught in a period of great social and cultural dislocation. A quote from Wei on how “our current modern literature and Taiwan’s real life have become separate”113 is used to bolster the Nativist view that literature and society cannot be separate.
The historical events of 1970 to 1972 would still have been in the memory of Wang’s readers in 1977 and indeed would have been reinforced by subsequent international setbacks for Taiwan. Referring to these events still fresh in the collective memory, is the only way Wang can appeal to a Taiwanese historical consciousness, because formal and open study and discussion of Taiwanese history was impossible at this time.114 The implications of these international events resonate with the unrecorded folk memory of the Taiwanese.
1.7.2 The Problem of Imperialism
Having used these various means to build his picture of Taiwan’s ‘present reality’, Wang then attributes many of the economic problems in this present reality to Japanese and American imperialism. His readers don’t need to think too hard for
110 op cit p 65 111 ibid
112 op cit pp 71 and 74 113 op cit p74
examples of the impact of Japan and the US and their capitalist system and economic exploitation on their own lives, and on their country, so the link Wang makes is easy to understand. Wang then very cleverly uses a Western historian to attack the West when he quotes Arnold J Toynbee’s attack on capitalism for causing class war and social division.115 This is exactly the problem that Wang sees arising in Taiwan, with its increasingly uneven distribution of wealth.116
Examples are given of Western literature that Wang sees as representing “an elegy for Western culture” 117 and as “evidence of systemic collapse.”118 These examples are all modernist in style, and by mentioning these works Wang also obliquely attacks Taiwan’s Modernist school of writers, the main literary rivals to Nativist writing. He says that many Western-influenced Taiwanese writers produce only “hazy, pallid, coy imitations”119 of Western literature. He goes on to condemn using Western standards of literary criticism to assess Taiwanese works.
Wang’s answer to these literary problems he writes of is that “Literature is required to take a position rooted in the reality of life and to stand in the same position as the masses”.120 At its base is Wang’s argument that “If I don’t reflect the
Taiwan I was born and raised in, what do I reflect?”121 To reflect reality Wang Tuoh “can’t leave Taiwan”.122 Here is Wang Tuoh’s answer to the KMT government’s concern about his fiction’s subject matter. He is merely reflecting ‘present reality’ and the KMT should face that reality too.
115 Jie xiang gu sheng p 70 116 op cit p 66 and 68 117 op cit p 72 118 ibid 119 op cit p 73 120 op cit p 75 121 Wei p302 122 op cit p 352
1.7.3 Redefining ‘Nativist’ Literature
Because the ‘Debate on Nativist literature’ featured attacks on a small part of the Nativists output (stories about rural life or the working class), in the final section of his essay Wang redefines Nativist literature. He says that Nativist literature “was produced from a perspective of, and sense of, opposition to foreign culture and to society’s injustices,”123 and is therefore the opposite of those “blind copies of western literature”.124 It is not localist, which he calls “narrow, divisive, and emotional”, nor is it nostalgic.125 Wang Tuoh avoids nostalgia, because if one “overlooks the objective reality of historical and social progress, it is even easier for people to fall into a kind of nostalgic and sentimental depression”.126 Wang says that Nativist
literature isn’t simply concerned with rural regions and people (bu shi xiang tu), rather it is concerned with the ‘here and now’ (xianshi) of Taiwan society as a whole range of social environments. ‘Nativism’ should therefore be defined as literature rooted in Taiwan and reflective of it. An additional important point is that Wang Tuoh uses the word xianshi (present reality) rather than the word xieshi (realism): this served to widen the scope of Nativist literature to include all levels of society and also removed the confusion inherent in the use of the Western literary term ‘realism’ (xieshi) which was associated with the Western-influenced Modernists.127
123 Jie xiang gu sheng p 77 124 ibid
125 op cit p 78 126 ibid 127 ibid