Interventions into Modernist Cultures: Poetry from Beyond the Empty Screen
200
Interventions into Modernist Cultures: Poetry from Beyond the Empty Screen
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Overview
Reading various works by U.S. expatriates Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, Parry compares the cultural politics of U.S. canonical modernism with alternative representations of temporality, hybridity, erasure, and sexuality in the work of the Taiwanese writers Yü Kwang-chung and Hsia Yü and the Asian American immigrant author Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Juxtaposing poems by Pound and Yü Kwang-chung, Parry shows how Yü’s fragmented, ambivalent modernist form reveals the effects of neocolonialism while Pound denies and obscures U.S. imperialism in Asia, asserting a form of nondevelopmental universalism through both form and theme. Stein appropriates discourses of American modernity and identity to represent nonnormative desire and sexuality, and Parry contrasts this tendency with representations of sexuality in the contemporary experimental poetry of Hsia Yü. Finally, Parry highlights the different uses of modernist forms by Pound in his Cantos—which incorporate a multiplicity of decontextualized and ahistorical voices—and by Cha in her 1982 novel Dictee, a historicized, multilingual work. Parry’s sophisticated readings provide a useful critical framework for apprehending how “minor modernisms” illuminate the histories erased by certain canonical modernist texts.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822389866 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2007 |
| Series: | Perverse Modernities |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 525 KB |
About the Author
Amie Elizabeth Parry is Associate Professor of English at the National Central University in Taiwan.
Read an Excerpt
Interventions into Modernist Cultures
Poetry from Beyond the Empty ScreenBy Amie Elizabeth Parry
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2007 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3818-5
Chapter One
The Historicity of the Fragment: toward a Critical Comparativism
I BEGIN THIS STUDY of modernism with a comparative analysis of modernity-troped poems by Ezra Pound and Yü Kwang-chung, two poets who are widely influential in their own contexts. My intent in doing so is not to name these poets as patriarchs of any poetic movement or school; rather, I want to flesh out a problematic for which their poems can stand as emblems, one canonical and universalist, the other combining canonical and minor functions. I begin with Yü's poem, then move back in time to Pound's, in order to allow the historical hindsight gleaned from the reading of "Hsilo Bridge" to frame an understanding of "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" and, thereby, illuminate how the often-unseen historical trajectory of twentieth-century U.S. imperialist expansion and "remote control" (Chen, "Missile Internationalism") in the Pacific surfaces in modernist writings as oblique references, aporial temporalities, or dispersed fragments. Specifically, my initial concern in this chapter is to show how an ambivalent illustration of some of the effects of postwar U.S. neocolonialism (withthis agent never identified as such) are drawn in Yü's representation of one of the first steel suspension bridges in East Asia as a metaphor for industrial modernization. Second, by way of critical contrast, I illustrate how, in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," which as Pound's "farewell to London" is purportedly not about "America," the early stages of U.S. imperialism in the Pacific are, nevertheless, narrated in a modernist poetics of erasure and displacement.
Thresholds of Modernity The unsettling circumstance of existing in the moment of an impending crossing is represented in Yü Kwang-chung's "Hsilo Bridge" vis-à-vis the bridge it describes and the sensations it provokes, and, as do many poetic texts, this one ends where it begins, that is, before the crossing takes place:
Loomingly, the soul of steel remains awake. Serious silence clangs. Over the Hsilo plain sea winds wildly shake This design of strength, this scheme of beauty; they shake Every nerve of this tower of will, Howling and yelling desperately. Still the teeth of nails bite, the claws of iron rails clench, A serious silence.
Then my soul awakes; I know I shall be different once across From what on this side I am; I know The man across can never come back To the man before the crossing. Yet fate from a mysterious center radiates A thousand arms to greet me; I must cross the bridge.
Facing the corridor to another world, I tremble a little. But the raw wind over the Hsilo plain Blows against me with the tidings That on the other side is the sea. I tremble a little, but I Must cross the bridge.
And tall looms the massive silence, And awake is the soul of steel. (Chi et al., Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Literature, 101-2; Yü Kwang-chung's translation)
Probably written in the 1960s, the poem is about a real structure: a suspension bridge located in the rural county of Yunlin on the First Provincial Highway, which, before the construction of the north-south superhighway, used to be a main thoroughfare for cross-island traffic. Completed in 1952, it is the first of its kind in Taiwan and is reputed to be the largest suspension bridge in East Asia. Whether or not this is the case, it remains well-known locally for its impressive size and length and is, therefore, an immediately recognizable marker of modernity. The reference to this real bridge in Yü's poem addresses a complicated "time lag" because the bridge serves as a marker of modernity while at the same time representing a mysterious but inevitable and high-speed passage to it. The poem thus suggests that modernity is neither taken for granted nor seamlessly in place; yet it has arrived in a concrete form, even in Hsilo, the home of the timeless legends of martial arts practitioners.
At one level, the Hsilo Bridge in this poem could be taken for a Bakhtinian chronotope as it draws out the temporal and spatial significance of the highway connecting the northern and southern parts of the island. For this period in Taiwan, possible clusters of discursive associations that the chronotope of the highway or road might trigger include the radical newness of mobility; rapid industrialization; all changes considered or experienced as part of a larger movement toward technological Westernization and a break with tradition; the mainlanders' passage or crossing from the mainland to Taiwan after 1949; and, alternatively for Taiwanese, Hakka, or indigenous peoples, the move into expanding urban centers. The imperative to cross the bridge also resonates with some of Yü's biographical crossings: one of Taiwan's most well-known poets, with a career spanning from the 1960s to the present, Yü, like other "mainlanders" of his generation, crossed from mainland China to Taiwan around 1950. Then, as have other intellectuals of his generation, he traveled from Taiwan to the United States as a new and foreign mainland and from the United States back to Taiwan as a home that is still removed from the motherland. This reading emerges especially as the other side is described as "another world" whose alien quality is underscored by a physical response: "Facing the corridor to another world, I tremble a little." As the bridge spatially embodies the future and the past in the emphatically new present, then, this road chronotope is complicated by a necessarily aporial desire for a return to a home [hui gui] that is both spatially (removal from the mainland) and temporally (irreversible processes of industrialization, of displacement, etc.) distanced. Further, in Yü's poem, the chronotope takes the form of a particular kind of road. As a bridge, it also suggests a crossing, a threshold, a point or junction that marks another stage, both spatially and temporally. Yet, as the bridge to and simultaneously the arrival of that new stage, it complicates the condition of juncture or threshold, and, as a result, this chronotope embodies temporal contradictions in its frightful strength and inevitability. To this extent, it can be a figure for the temporal narrative of modernity as a point or junction of temporal crisis per se and, thereby, provide a discursive space in which the crisis can be addressed as such, without demand for its resolution. The lack of resolution is significant because it can open up a possibility for the critique of the conditions that have produced the crisis in the modernist (as critically antimodern) sense. The progress heralded by modernity is not seamlessly in place but "before" this occurs; it is called into question as such.
This is a provisional before because it is significant and appropriate that the time frame is not a straightforward one; rather, it is aporial: the poem is about the inevitability not only of the crossing but also of having already crossed. The possibility for critique brought out in the multivalenced temporality of the poem, however, can also obscure the simultaneous sublation of another critical possibility into precisely the irresolvability of the poem's modernist thematics and form. This would be the possibility for critiquing the way this poem, albeit subtly, positions Taiwan itself, emblematized in the industrial transformation of the symbolics of the Hsilo legends, as that unknowable, mysterious, and darkly anticipated future. As unknowable and irresolvable in form and content, this modernist depiction supports the post-removal Kuomintang (KMT) rhetoric that presented Taiwan not as a location of culture in itself but only as a periphery that is being used as a stop on the way back to full recovery of the mainland, which is seen as the legitimate site of Han culture.
That said, the poem's aporial temporality bears further comment: "I know / The man across can never come back / To the man before the crossing." To know this, one must already be across, if only in the sense that the bridge as crossing and as threshold is itself a state of modernity, an impending one that nevertheless has already transformed its historical and geographic context. At this level, if the bridge is a chronotope, it is an aporial one: you can know you have crossed only after you have crossed and entered the threshold and its oscillations. Further, such an aporia might also be another way to address an exilic temporality characterized, as another mainlander poet has put it, by the impossibility of retracing one's steps. The temporality of this threshold that is also a forced forward movement with no way back can also be understood as an appropriation of a modernist discontinuity that is used here to mark, however obliquely, the historical circumstances that have brought about this sense of discontinuity. Wai-lim Yip has argued that Chinese modernism appropriates the aesthetic structures of Western modernism to formulate a response to the histories of invasion that largely contributed to bringing about the kinds of displacements that it narrates:
Their works must not be read ... by putting them against the stylistic markers as we understand them in the West, but rather, we must see them in light of their perception and their appropriation of Western aesthetic strategies as a function of their anxiety.... [T]he intensities-anxieties, solitudes, hesitations, doubts, nostalgia, expectancy, exile and dreams-of the Chinese writers rarely come from an insulated private space; they are at once intensely inward-personal and outward-historical, because they cannot help but be dialectical transfigurations from tensions and agonies of acculturation under visible and invisible forms of colonizing activities. ("Language Strategies," 19)
With Yip's definition of modernism in mind, we might understand Yü's aporial temporality as a distinct type of formal discontinuity partly based on enforced displacement. This is not to argue that discontinuity is a new form in Chinese writing, especially poetry. Rather, it is to point out that, given the historical contexts of the intensity of this discontinuity, including its expectancy and its hesitation, it constitutes an aesthetic strategy that "asks some unanswerable questions of Progress, and offers some answers of its own." Like Yü's oblique reference to a "mysterious center" that directs the crossing, these questions and answers put forward, in the formal hesitations that they constitute, a critical modernist stance with regard to these imperialistically derived histories of crossings and displacements while nevertheless sublating, into the poem's spatial aporia, another critical possibility concerning the representation of Taiwan as a location of culture.
This brings us again to the concern of this chapter, which is, by way of two case studies, to introduce how the disjunctions, gaps, and absences of what is often referred to as modernist aesthetic form (nondevelopmental, fragmented writing) address suppressed knowledges, both macro- and microstructural, that point to a shared historical formation connecting two locations of modernity (the United States and Taiwan). These distinct and geopolitically nonequivalent modernities, far from having nothing to do with one another, have formed out of a larger imperialist history that connects them and that does not conform to the inside/outside model of Anglo-European metropolis versus Third World colony that forms the basis of much postcolonial theory. This is the history of the building up of U.S. world hegemony over the course of the twentieth century (see, e.g., Miyoshi, "A Borderless World?"). This buildup culminated in the establishment of neocolonial sites such as Taiwan in the last half of the century, where U.S. "remote control ... can be even more effective, less imposing, more acceptable" than previous forms of colonialism (Chen, "Missile Internationalism," 178). As I have outlined briefly in the introduction, the fact that, in the United States, these sites are often taken as not having a shared history attests to a particular type of historical blind spot, one that Bruce Cumings has termed parallax vision, that characterizes the production of knowledge concerning the United States and East Asia. This larger history is itself a suppressed knowledge; yet, in this book, I demonstrate that it is "known" in the necessarily fragmented sense produced by layered historical erasures and disavowals. It is one form of suppressed knowledge that, even when it does not appear as the content, constitutes a fragmented epistemological structure derived from the text's unspoken historical contexts. Such contexts are addressed by the experimental form of modernist texts like Yü's to very different and sometimes mixed ends, however, depending on the cultural politics of the text in question. The aporial temporality of this poem that is tied to the sense of not being able to retrace one's steps, for example, registers a historical context that includes not only the diplomatic relationship (or lack of one) between China and Taiwan but also the more invisible agency of U.S. Cold War containment policies. This fragmented way of knowing and producing meaning constitutes a representational arena within which a politically varied range of understandings of otherwise invisible macro- and microstructures are formed; it can do so, moreover, precisely to the extent that these writings are safely framed as poetic, fictional, and nonrealist.
The complexity of Taiwan's modern history may have contributed to the relative neglect of academic studies on it as compared to other East Asian sites, the vexed issue of sovereignty in Taiwan causing it, in East Asian studies, to fall between categories-it cannot be studied as a part of China, and at the same time it is has not been recognized by the United Nations as an independent nation since 1971. However, it is precisely this complexity that makes it an important site in extending and revising current understandings of the effects of colonial histories on culture. Taiwan's modernity has been formed out of multiple imperialist occupations, beginning with the partial occupation of the Dutch, who were finally driven out by anti-Manchu forces in 1662. According to Jonathan Spence in The Search for Modern China, the several indigenous populations, on the one hand, and the smugglers and pirates who had long had footholds in Taiwan, on the other, were then joined by an increasing number of anti-Qing, pro-Ming factions (53-55). Although the island was soon recovered by the Qing, over the next two centuries it continued to attract political dissenters because geographic remoteness helped prevent the central government from maintaining a strong hold on the island until it was ceded to Japan in 1895, beginning a fifty-year period of Japanese colonialism. Spence maintains that Taiwan's historically marginal and ambiguous relation to the mainland had its roots in the Qing's badly conceived emigration policy: "By forbidding emigration to Taiwan but failing to enforce order adequately, the Qing ensured Taiwan's development as a rough-and-tumble frontier society, only peripherally bound to the administrative structure of the Qing state" (58). The post-1949 Nationalist removal to Taiwan (after the loss of the mainland) is the most recent of these crossings of the Strait. KMT nationalism-presenting the Republic of China, as opposed to the People's Republic of China, as the last reserve of Chinese culture (especially after the Cultural Revolution)-had to disassociate the KMT's own flight and "settlement" from those of its "rough-and-tumble" predecessors and the indigenous inhabitants. Part of this attempt included maintaining that, because "We are all Chinese," KMT occupation and martial law were justified, even as the "temporary" period of martial law lasted almost forty years (until 1987), making it one of the longest in world history. During the martial law period, all forms of media were strictly controlled, travel to and from the island was restricted, Mandarin was enforced as the official language in schools and other public arenas even though Taiwanese and Japanese were the most prevalent languages at the time, and intellectually led resistance from the Left was almost completely suppressed by means of tactics that have come to be known as the White Terror, culminating in the February Twenty-eighth Incident.
This occupation and its rhetoric implicitly define Chinese cultural modernity as that of the mainland in the early days of the Republic, and Taiwan, that "rough-and-tumble frontier society," is positioned as a stop on the way back to recovering the mainland. Such a stop is not a destination in itself and is seen as lacking a legitimate culture of its own. In "Making Time," Marshall Johnson argues that KMT nation constructing in Taiwan is caught up in a temporal state of betweenness, with KMT rule of a unified China posited as both the past and the future of the nation. Johnson shows further how this is a particularly difficult stance considering that, prior to the KMT removal from the mainland, the Republic of China never existed on Taiwan since the island was under Japanese colonial rule until 1945. He points out that such a vexed temporality could actually be put to use in KMT ideological rationalization of its ongoing martial law rule: "The KMT ran the world's longest-lived martial law regime as China's delegate. Another armed group temporarily usurped the space of China, and so elections were matters of other past and future times, past and future space" (111). This focus on Chinese national identity, combined with the violence and suppression of the martial law regime, incited the development of contending Taiwanese identities and a Taiwan independence movement. This situation, moreover, is further complicated by the histories of the indigenous peoples who have been continually forced off their land, first by the Fukinese, who began to emigrate to Taiwan in the seventeenth century, then by the Japanese colonists, and, finally, by the KMT in the latter half of the twentieth century. By the 1980s, the division of labor had played out in a complex manner along ethnic lines: government positions and many positions of the highest intellectual and cultural capital were held by elite mainlanders; many businessmen, scientists and doctors, and wealthy entrepreneurs were Taiwanese; and agricultural, industrial, and domestic labor forces were and are constituted by indigenous people, working-class Taiwanese, and migrant and undocumented workers from the Philippines, Thailand, and other Southeast Asian locations. The aging, low-ranking KMT soldiers who also made the crossing, many with no relatives in Taiwan, were provided with poor-quality, high-density housing and little monetary compensation.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction / Canonical Modernisms, Minor Modernisms, and the Cultural Politics of Fragmentation 1
1 / The Historicity of the Fragment: Toward a Critical Comparativism 21
2 / “Completely Painted Over but Painted Full of Empty Spaces”: Stein’s American Allegories and the End of Progress 44
3 / “Learning a Lesson in the Superficial Song Lyrics”: Hsia Yü’s “Underground” Poetry 80
4 / “For the Other Overlapping Time”: Pound’s Ideogramic Universalism and Cha’s Countermodernist Translation 113
Conclusion / The Cultural Uses of an Interventionary Poetics 148
Notes 153
Works Cited 171
Index 181