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The National Allegory Revisited:

Writing Private and Public in Contemporary Taiwan
Margaret Hillenbrand

The idea for this article began some time ago when I gave a presentation on
questions of national identity in contemporary Taiwanese fiction at an academic gathering. As soon as I had finished speaking, a well-known scholar
of modern Chinese literature who was in the audience shot up his hand and
asked in cool tones whether I was familiar with Fredric Jamesons theory
of the third-world national allegoryand if so, whether I was comfortable with the fact that the focus on national identities in my essay seemed to
echo Jamesons infamous paradigm and its patronizing take on the literary non-West. As it happens, Jamesons essay, entitled Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism (1986), was one of the very
first things I read as a graduate student. It was mandatory reading, as was
the brilliant polemic by Aijaz Ahmadpublished in the following issue
of Social Textwhich ripped Jamesons paradigm to shreds. At the time,
positions 14:3 doi 10.1215/10679847-2006-016
Copyright 2006 by Duke University Press

positions 14:3 Winter 2006

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I was horrified by the question and hastily tried to distance my essay from
the theoretical black hole that Jamesons national allegory has become in
postcolonial studies. Yet with hindsight perhaps the question itself was, in
its own way, just as tendentious. Or to put things another way, perhaps the
most basic point Jameson makes in his essaynamely that many postcolonial texts use the story of the individual to tell the story of the nationis
not so very different from Fanons uncontested and oft-repeated claim that
colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question
constantly: In reality, who am I?1 That question resonates throughout
cultural practice in the postcolonial world and, inevitably, engenders texts
in which this search for subjectivity signifies both for the individual and the
ethnonational collective. And if, in fact, an allegorical impulse to write the
nation does animate many non-Western writings, are there ways of thinking
about this impulse that do not lapse into the kind of Eurocentric condescension that so incensed both Ahmad and numerous critics since?
This article sets out to probe that question, briefly in general terms and
more extensively as it relates to literary practice in contemporary Taiwan.
The discussion begins by charting the mixed fortunes of the national allegory since its critical debut, highlighting the paradox between its supposed
pariah status and its very real tenacity as both a creative and an interpretive
mode in non-Western literature. This paradox has kept Jamesons essay
firmly in the critical frame, as the rush to polemical judgment has often
given way to a tentative rehabilitation of the paradigm that once seemed
irretrievably beyond the pale of political correctness. Both the original paradigm and the work of its recent apologists, I argue next, take on new meanings in the case of Taiwan, a place where postcolonialitythe linchpin
of the entire debatesignifies in extraordinary ways.2 Moreover, narrating
the nation has been an all-conquering cultural vogue in Taiwan for the
last two decades (at least among elite producers), and both the profusion of
texts and their infinite variety beg many questions about the old warhorse
of the national allegory. This article goes on to address these questions,
pleading the case for allegory as metaphoric mode and, more particularly,
exploring the rich play of meaning showcased in the postmodern and postcolonial forms through which the allegorical impulse now so often manifests itself. Here I argue that the incompatibility that is frequently assumed

Hillenbrand Writing Private and Public in Contemporary Taiwan

635

between postcolonial allegory (which strives to subject the imperial past to

alternative interpretation) and its postmodern counterpart (which is wary of
any attempt at truth) is intriguingly resolved, at least to some extent, in the
cultural production of contemporary Taiwan. Finally, this article concludes
by offering a case study of this postmodern/postcolonial allegory: a close
reading of Zhu Tianxins Xiang wo juancun de xiongdimen (Remembering My Brothers from the Military Compound; 1992). This text, which
explores life in the mainlander residential compounds that grew up after the
nationalist decampment to Taiwan, provides a paradigmatic example of the
subtleties of allegory in action.
Jamesons Paradigm: The Fall and Rise of the National Allegory

Before proceeding any further, however, it may be useful to return momentarily to the original casus belli, Jamesons essay and its infamous paradigm.
At the core of this piece is Jamesons claim that all third-world texts are
necessarily . . . allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as
what I will call national allegories.3 He further elaborates this claim by stating that the story of the individual is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture or society.4 As a result, Jameson argues,
the deep gulf between public and private that shapes the literary landscape
in the West is bridged again and again in the third world, whose literary
productions become far more political than they are ever solipsistic. And
while such texts belong in campus curricula because of the instruction they
can offer into the lost arts of political engagement, they may well disappoint the student of literature who has been weaned on Proust and Joyce
and recoils at such overt didacticism. Of Ahmads ripostenow almost as
famous as the essay that it takes apartit is perhaps sufficient to note the
sure-footedness with which it halts Jamesons totalizing thrust in its tracks,5
brutally unpicking the keywords of his analysisthird-world, national,
and allegoryand revealing what they tell us about the ideological investments of the man himself.6 In subsequent years, moreover, numerous other
critics have jumped on the antinational allegory bandwagon, as righteous
indignation at Jamesons Eurocentrism has combined with a rather less dignified schadenfreude that a critic of his fame and stature should have set

positions 14:3 Winter 2006

636

himself up for such a fall. As Imre Szeman puts it, Jamesons essay stands
as an example of what not to do when studying third-world literature from
the vantage point of the first-world academy.7 In the process, disavowing
the national allegory has also provided something of a self-definitional
opportunity for postcolonial studies, as critics have pitted the myriad specificity of the literatures they study against the blunt instrument of Jamesonian generalization.8
Either way, and despite often very justified critiques, the truth of the
matter is that national allegorism (the act of interpreting a text as if it were
indeed about the particular nation-state to which its author owes some
kind of ethno-emotional allegiance) has yet to disappear from the postcolonial horizon. True, many critics either shy away from acknowledging allegorical tendencies or, when these become too conspicuous to be ignored,
substitute class, gender, or racial identifications for the obvious national ones
that might lay a trail back to Jameson. Numerous others, howevermany
of them in Chinese literary studiescontinue to avail themselves of Jame
sons theory as and when it suits; but they do so on the sly, invoking the
spirit of Jamesons piece as opposed to its letter, and thus keep their heads
safely ducked below the parapet.9 Still others blithely pursue national allegorism without any of Jamesons unswerving self-reflection and read nonWestern texts so allegorically that they become little more than elegant
storage units for positivist data about the nation that is their supposed subject.10 It seems transparently clear in this regard that China plays a greater
role in analyses of Yu Hua, Mo Yan, or Wang Shuo than Britain does in
scholarly studies of Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, or Julian Barnes. Indeed,
whether it is protested against too much, deployed surreptitiously, or put
to work in unthinking orientalist analysis, national allegorism crops up
everywherein both cutting-edge and traditional approaches, and in the
work of both native and nonnative intellectuals. Few would now dispute
that Jamesons essay has its flaws; but at least he was honest about it.
Of course, the real point here is that Jameson was not just honest about
allegorism but was on to something in his paradigm of the national allegory.
And if his execution had been nimbler, his core argument might have been
evaluated on its own terms, rather than being tossed out along with the
bathwater. Perhaps, therefore, something of a backlash against the backlash

Hillenbrand Writing Private and Public in Contemporary Taiwan

637

was inevitable. Recent years have seen a rehabilitation of Jamesons paradigm, at first stealthy but now increasingly bold, as critics have either begun
to out themselves as national allegorists or at the very least concede that
Jamesons paradigm, for all its totalizing tendencies, still has plenty to say
about cultural production in the non-West. Thus Dai Jinhua argues openly
for the enabling possibilities of third-world critique (di san shijie piping)
and claims that Jamesons interpretive paradigm of the allegorical text sets
up a dialogue, or perhaps a crossing of swords, between the first world and
the third world.11 In other cases this reappraisal continuesquite understandablyto hedge its bets. Michael Sprinker, for example, continues in
Ahmads antitotalizing vein by arguing that literature is never purely private in the first world either, but at the same time he is ready to acknowledge that certain forms of collective life have until now persisted more
powerfully outside the metropolitan countries.12 Imre Szeman embraces
the totality that has so often served as emotive rallying cry for Jamesons
critics,13 while Julie McGonegal probesrather more unusuallyJame
sons take on allegory and reads into his paradigm a flexibility of purpose
that distinguishes it from crude Manichean allegories of colonizer and
colonized.14
Whether Jamesons vision of allegory genuinely delivers on this flexibility
is, perhaps, a moot point; but his notion of allegory as a mode that operates through fluidity, rather than fixity, of form is key, and it lies at the
heart of the present article. My argument here builds on both the critiques
and countercritiques of Jamesonian national allegory that have emerged
in recent years, but it seeks at the same time to refocus the debate on the
second, and sometimes secondary, component of his politico-literary motto
about the third world. This is not to say, of course, that either Jamesons
detractors or his apologists systematically shortchange allegory. Most engage
with the concept, but there is a palpable sense right across this scholarship
that allegory plays a supporting role to the leading light of the nation
in the long-running debate over Jamesons 1986 article. As is clear from the
prcis outlined above, it is questions of nationness (Does the nation exist?
If so, is literature about it? If not, are there other forms of collectivity
that literature narrates into being throughout the third world?) that most
profoundly exercise commentators on postcoloniality. Allegory, meanwhile,

positions 14:3 Winter 2006

638

tends either to be used as further proof of the reductio ad absurdum into

which any catch-all theory for the literature of the non-West must surely
slide (What about all the other modes, forms and genres through which
the literary impulse finds expression?) or, in utterly converse fashion, to be
summoned in support of totality through arguments that revisit Northrop
Fryes claim that all representation is, of necessity, allegorical.15 This article
works from the assumption that collectivity of one kind or another does
indeed still matter in the non-West, but it pushes allegory to centerstage.
More specifically, it seeks to read Jamesons paradigm in the light of more
recent explorations of allegory in both its postcolonial and postmodern
forms. Taiwan, as will become apparent, is a singularly suitable case study
for this analysis.
Narrating the Nation in Taiwan

Even a cursory glance at the culture industry of contemporary Taiwan

reveals that the national allegory is both alive and well, and doing brisk
business right across the cultural market. Possessed of a sturdy pedigree
throughout Taiwans literary past, the national allegory has seen its stock
rise almost exponentially as political freedoms have grown and writers have
gained the right to choose their subject matter. Indeed, while it has always
been hard to find a Taiwanese author of note whose oeuvre is untouched by
what C. T. Hsia might have called the obsession with Taiwan, the last two
decades have seen the paradigm of nation as narration sweep across the
entire cultural sphere. The drive to write Taiwanhistorically, anthropologically, artisticallyhas transformed the ways in which knowledge is
produced and received across the island, and the result has been an investment in nationhood that makes something of a mockery of Western claims
that the nation and its ideologies areor at least should bedead and
gone. In the fields of literature and cinema this phenomenon has produced
a flood of what Jameson might justly call national allegories, narratives in
which the story of the private individual destiny16 is an extended metaphor
for larger public and political concerns about Taiwan and what it means to
be Taiwanese.
The point of origin for all these national allegories is, of course, the

Hillenbrand Writing Private and Public in Contemporary Taiwan

639

preoccupation with identity and identity politics that shows little sign of
relinquishing its grip over the Taiwanese imagination.17 This obsession,
national though it is in scale and scope, is anything but homogeneous on the
groundand most particularly within the space of representation, where
many diverse allegorical shapes find expression. Indeed, the result is less
the kind of metaphor envisaged by Jamesonin which the beleaguered
third-world intellectual battles to strike a path between annihilation or
assimilation by the forces of multinational capitalismthan a struggle
between competing national allegories, each of which stakes its claim to the
Taiwanese self in different ways. Thus we have aboriginal film and fiction,
recollections from the juancun (mainlander residential military compounds),
literary and cinematic narratives of the February Twenty-Eighth Incident
and the subsequent white terror, prison memoirs in different media, neonativism, and settler epics or romans fleuve (dahe xiaoshuo). Viewed as a
whole, these experiential narrativeswhich revolve around the lived
or inherited history of different social constituenciesappear more concerned with defining Taiwan in self-referential, historicist terms than with
what Jameson adamantly describes as the life-and-death struggle with
first-world cultural imperialism.18 Yet the underlying logic of national (or
at least collective) allegory remains intact across this wide representational
frame. Unlike the Western novelistic traditionin which (according to
Jameson and Stendhal at least) politics is as malapropos as a pistol shot in
the middle of a concert19these texts from contemporary Taiwan display
a linkage between the political and the libidinal, the public and the private,
that is fully naturalized and unabashed.
What is more, the way in which ethnohistorical experience is tagged so
neatly to a corresponding representational genre, which then speaks both
for and to different Taiwanese identities, seems to mark these texts out still
more emphatically as instances of national allegory. In fact, there is surely
a case for arguing that these literary and cinematic narratives are both more
national and more allegorical even than the paradigmatic texts singled
out by Jameson to support his much-maligned theory. Lu Xuns Medicine
(Yao; 1919), although it is for Jameson almost the locus classicus of the
third-world intellectuals visceral engagement with the political, remains
a text written by a literatus about the travails of the Chinese peasantry. Cer-

positions 14:3 Winter 2006

640

tainly, writer and fictional subject share a common plight as Chinese, and
Lu Xuns worrying consciousness (youhuan yishi) hangs over the piece like
a pall; yet a critical distance (a distance of which Lu Xun himself was all
too uncomfortably aware) divides the writer and his narrative subject. Many
of Taiwans experiential narratives, by contrast, are marked by a far more
intimate set of correspondences between author and those who act out the
national allegory within his or her text. Indeed, many of these allegories
are quasi-autobiographical in nature, as residents of the juancun recall a
childhood lived in segregation, expolitical prisoners write romans clef
about the experience of incarceration, descendants of Taiwans early settlers
raid the ancestral records to construct epic tales of frontier conquest, and
second- and third-generation survivors breach the taboo on the February
Twenty-Eighth Incident.
Allegory: A Dirty Word?

All in all, these experiential narratives suggest persuasively that the contemporary Taiwanese cultural field is rife with forms that fit the mould of
national allegoryand, for that matter, with critics who, openly or otherwise, practice the arts of national allegorism that Jameson rendered so suspect.20 It would seem, in other words, that his paradigm is as durable as ever.
Yet at the same time, the richness of Taiwans allegorical seam is left critically undervalued by the description Jameson offers up of the third-world
text and its impact on a seasoned and fussy Western readership: The thirdworld novel will not offer the satisfactions of Proust or Joyce; what is more
damaging than that, perhaps, is its tendency to remind us of outmoded
stages of our own first-world cultural development.21 These lines, and
their condescending regret at the incommensurability of first- and thirdworld literary sensibilities, have earned themselves a special infamy within
postcolonial studies. Cited again and again as proof positive of Jamesons
Eurocentrism, they jump so bluntly off the page that it is perhaps less than
surprising that the rest of the essay has become tainted by association.
I would argue that self-perpetuating prejudices about the allegorical process itself lie at the heart of Jamesons disappointment. The axiomatic conflation between national allegory and literary navet that informs his reading

Hillenbrand Writing Private and Public in Contemporary Taiwan

641

requires some overhauling ifto cite the specific case of Taiwanwe are
to do recent allegories on nationhood justice. Allegory, as Jameson himself
observes, is a form long discredited in the West, and it may prove instructive at this point to revisit both the term and some of the biases that have
long attended it. In its traditional definition, allegory is a didactic metaphor sustained across an entire text or discourse. As such, it resembles other
forms of extended metaphor with moral intent (most notably parable and
fable); yet the structure of allegory tends to be more intricately plotted and
its underlying meanings less instantly conspicuous. Successful allegory is
predicated on a duality of signification: the events, characters, and settings
that lie on the surface of the text, and the meanings to which these point
on a metaphoric plane that is some way distant from the literal referentiality of what we actually read on the page. The praxis of allegory lies in
the techniques of patterning that the writer devises to link these two levels
through a series of leading but coded resemblances. The meanings harbored
on the metaphoric plane may be spiritual, political, or satirical, but they are
alike both in their weightiness compared with the surface story and in their
general desire to guide the reader along the path of virtue. Thus despite
the duality that is crucial to the allegorical impulse, the meanings it reveals
tendat least in traditional expositions of the formto remain singularly
unambiguous.
Indeed, the very term allegory seems to spirit us back to the European
Middle Ages, to an epoch of moral certainties, unassailable grands rcits, and
a cultural world in which both literature and the pictorial arts were almost
exclusively instructive in nature. Right across the ages allegory has traveled
hand in hand with moral edification, from Hate, Fear, and Terror in
Homers Iliad, to Fellowship, Strength, and Knowledge in the medieval morality play Everyman, and thereafter in such varied masterpieces as
Edmund Spensers The Faerie Queene and John Bunyans The Pilgrims Progress. All these texts, despite their artistry and the acclaim they have received,
require minimal interpretive prompting. And it is precisely the moral dogmatism common to many of these works that explains allegorys eventual
downfall in the West, or at least the downgrading of this mode in favor
of its more sophisticated cousin, symbolism. For Romantic poets such as
Samuel Coleridge, allegory was a dirty worda form that interfered with

positions 14:3 Winter 2006

642

the true understanding that works of literature can bestow. For Coleridge,
the very patternings and plotting that give the allegorical mode its structure
also alienate it from the reality it seeks to represent: this reality is lost in
the clunky translation from thought to figure that allegory undertakes. In
other words, a paradox is at work here in which the ambiguities of symbol
allow it to capture meaning with close fidelity, while allegoryfor all its
surface certaintiesis merely that meanings empty echo. Throughout the
nineteenth century, critics as varied as Thomas Macaulay, Matthew Arnold,
and Thomas Carlyle continued the job of rubbishing allegory; and with the
decisive advent of modernism, its demise seemed complete. Perpetually orientated toward the public, the moral, and the political, allegory was found
internally wanting: it seemed to project outward with more or less messianic
zeal, but to neglect its aesthetic duties in a manner that made it unacceptable to a critical world for which the realm of the text itself was becoming
increasingly important.
Allegorys fall from vogue did not, however, cause it to disappear entirely
from cultural view. Most notably, perhaps, the work of Baudelaire remains
consistently animated by allegorical purposea point seized upon by
Walter Benjamin, whose Arcades Project came to mark a key way stage on
allegorys road to comeback. Benjamin argued that the allegorical mode
was strangely suited to Baudelaires poetic vision of the commodified city,
a world of signs in which value is assigned in ways as capricious as those
emblems that mean love and death in medieval painting.22 Like Coleridge
before himthough with an entirely updated nuanceBenjamin distinguishes in The Origin of Tragic German Drama between allegory and symbol, claiming that the former is a fragment of the reality it represents, unlike
the latter, which belongs organically to its context and aspires to the whole.
The role of the allegorist is as assembler of these fragments into a montage
of new meaning. As such allegory ends up registering the disintegration of
fixity just as doggedly as it may reaffirm truth in didactic fashion; and
during historical periods when the questioning of any such absolutes is both
rife and necessary, allegorys destructive drive can make it the representational mode of choice.
The implications of this for cultural production in the third world,
with its bruising encounters with dogma and history, should be instantly

Hillenbrand Writing Private and Public in Contemporary Taiwan

643

manifest. Yet Jamesons essay lets this opportunity slip and taps instead into
the older Western vein of allegorical tradition and anti-allegorical backlash.
Indeed, despite ostensibly lending his support to the increased canonization
of non-Western texts, Jameson ultimately ends up using old-fashioned ideas
of allegory to write off these selfsame texts as literature. Thus although he
concedes that allegory has made something of a comeback recently, it is the
world of the symbolistsof Joyce and Proust and their so-called satisfactionsthat claims his true allegiance. And although he explicitly distinguishes third-world allegory from the stereotypes of Bunyan, Bunyan
and his pilgrim play the role of Banquos ghost throughout Jamesons analysis, their presence ever more visible for having been specifically denied. Ultimately, Jamesons theory of the national allegory belongs resolutely in the
world of Bunyan and moral absolutism, and it works on the assumption that
the battle between good and evil that is waged in the allegories of yore is
replaced in third-world literature by a political struggle between the evil
that is multinational capitalism and the good that is local, homegrown
nationalism. It is precisely because of this sense of dated dj vu, this trip
down memory lane to a world in which such absolutism seemed right at
hand, that Jameson and his assumed first-world readerswith their postmodern cynicism and fondness for polysemous playcannot help but find
themselves recoiling, albeit reluctantly, from the third-world text.
The problem with this schema is its failure to approach its major term of
reference with a suitably quizzical and appreciative eye. Thus allegory
the keystone of Jamesons argumentis glossed in ways that seem to have
altered little since the disparagements meted out by Coleridge, as if it alone
were trapped in time and insulated from the currents of thought that have
subsequently transformed the writing and reading of literature. Jameson
puts on a good show of arguing quite the opposite, stating that the allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogenous
representation of the symbol.23 Yet the sole example cited in support of this
apparently discontinuous, heterogeneous, and polysemous brand of allegory
is The True Story of Ah Q, in which, according to Jameson, both the
coolie Ah Q and his tormentors represent China, in the allegorical sense.
Jameson himself is quick to concede that this is a very simple example.24

positions 14:3 Winter 2006

644

But in the absence of extensive textual exploration of allegory as a wayward

spirit, it is the charges of literary navetwhich are, by contrast, ample
and sustainedthat carry the day long after Jamesons essay has been read
and digested. A fairer survey of third-world texts might draw far more
comprehensively upon recent work on allegory to conclude that while much
non-Western writing might indeed manifest an allegorical impulse, this
impulse itself assumes whole new shapes and meanings in nations grappling
with the dual complexities of decolonization and global flow. In the last few
years, writers have begun to recover allegory in both its postcolonial and
postmodern forms, demonstrating that there is plenty of life beyond Bunyan for the allegorical mode.25 This article seeks to show that the cultural
condition of Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s has produced a slew of national
allegories that go a step further and fuse these two forms into a highly distinctive kind of writing.
Postcolonial/Postmodern Allegory: The Paradox of the Posts

According to many noted theorists, such a narratology should by rights be

impossible. Simon During claims that the concept of postmodernity has
been constructed in terms which more or less intentionally wipe out the
possibility of post-colonial identity.26 And Kwame Anthony Appiah, in his
famous essay Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?
argues that even when African novelists become utterly disenchanted with
the nationalist project of the postcolonial national bourgeoisie, their rejection cannot be the postmodernist one: rather it is grounded in an appeal to
an ethical universal.27 Thus although postmodernism and postcolonialism
may be very much alike in their attitude of vive la diffrence, in their decentering drive, and in their determination to expose as myths the stories that
the metropole tells itself about the locus of power, history, and knowledge,
au fond they lie irreconcilably apart. The search for meaningchimera
or notsimply matters too much in the decolonizing world. And as far
as the allegorical mode is concerned, this means that postcolonial allegory
(with its desire to open colonial history up to alternative interpretation) and
postmodern allegory (with its distrust of interpretation in any fixed shape or
form) cannot comfortably coexist.

Hillenbrand Writing Private and Public in Contemporary Taiwan

645

This apparent incompatibility between the postcolonial and the postmodern within the cultural lifeworld of the non-West may well hold true for a
good many decolonizing nations. Those where the imperialists hailed from
a single European nation; where poverty still reigns; where democracy fails
to beckon; and where a unified collective identity remains a viable hope in
the face of chaos and corruptionthose, in fact, that preoccupy the scholars referenced abovespring immediately to mind. But what happens in
places that were every bit as colonized but have found themselves following
utterly different trajectories in the years before, during, and since? Do the
postcolonial and the postmodern continue to cross wires jarringly in Taiwan, for example? Surely different rules may well apply in a nation that has
been colonized in succession by the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the
Japanese, the Chinese nationalists, andto a degreethe United States
during the Cold War; that is home to a buoyant economy and the worlds
second-largest foreign exchange reserves; that has proudly assumed the
mantle of the first Chinese-speaking democracy; and that has the kind
of long, bitter, and ongoing history of interethnic strife that makes unified
collective identity something of an illusory quest? This is not to say that
identity and nation do not matter in Taiwan. They do, and profoundly so
given the islands checkered past and riven present. After all, Taiwans very
status as a nation since derecognition in 1971 has been left open-ended in
ways that are as nerve-racking as they are unique. But just as important to
Taiwans cultural producers is the play with meaning that Western intellectuals like to dub postmodern, the ludic impulse that can be more readily
indulged when capital flows freely, when history has already shown itself to
be false, and when the demand for identity is a far more delicate business
than Jamesons life-and-death struggle with first-world cultural imperialism.
Contemporary Taiwan, as Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao has astutely noted,
is replete with both nationalist and postmodern ideologies.28 These simultaneously jostle and overlap with one another in ways that are as happily
interactive as they are, from a Jamesonian perspective, counterindicative.29
Indeed, Taiwans cultural condition seems to embody in an almost peerless
way the process whereby these two thought systems can at once dovetail and
diverge in the decolonizing nation. In practice, this means that just as Tai-

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646

wanese intellectuals may turn to postmodernism in order to break down the

centralized structures of authority installed by successive colonialist regimes,
so at the same time they will mobilize postcolonialism as a way of recovering
deleted histories and reinscribing the effaced self. Identity and the urge to
debunk the latter as dogma chase each others tails in a politico-cultural arena
that throws up endless paradoxes: China poses a constant territorial threat, yet
remains a magnet for Taiwanese talent and capital; Japan is the old colonial
enemy, but its popular culture is feted to the point of obsession; the notion
of Taiwan as orphan of Asia strikes a poignant chord, yet in recent years
the island has arguably turned imperializer itself across the poorer swathes
of Southeast Asia; the nations politics are both passionately contested and
ruthlessly stage-managed; cultural nativism has long preoccupied writers, but
leading intellectuals devour Western literary theory. Taiwan lends a whole
new resonance to the notion of glocalism, and its dominant cultural condition plays the paradox between the posts both ways.
Underlying this hospitality to paradox, moreover, is a readership for Taiwanese fiction that problematizes Jamesons claims that third-world literature is tied to another reader, . . . the Other reader, for whom a narrative,
which strikes us as conventional or nave, has a freshness of information
and a social interest that we cannot share.30 The existence of this Other
reader in millennial Taiwan is surely a moot point. Just as colonial vicissitude has given way to the economic triumph, political pluralism, ethnic
strife, territorial uncertainty, nascent neo-imperialism, and intellectual cosmopolitanism of Taiwans present, so too have the readers of serious fiction evolved into cultural consumers with substantially more subtle tastes
than Jameson would credit. And even when that literature takes the form of
national allegorywith its apparently knee-jerk invitation to condescending critiquedue attention to the sophistication of reader response can
prevent the coexistence of postcolonial and postmodern desires in this writing from being harnessed, yet again, to the juggernaut of Western theory.
Rather than providing freshness and social interest for an audience that
reads literature as a repository of hard positivist fact, many Taiwanese allegories appeal to their readers because they go some way toward capturing
the complex, contradictory dialectic between past and present, nationalism
and counternationalism, that has made these readers what they are. In the

Hillenbrand Writing Private and Public in Contemporary Taiwan

647

process, such texts demonstrate the sheer potential of allegory as cultural

form: discontinuous, heterogeneous, and, to paraphrase Arjun Appadurai,
decisively at large.31
More specifically, I would argue that national allegories are everywhere
in 1980s and 1990s Taiwanese fiction because allegory is the perfect mode
through which to balance this familiar tension between the two posts
in an intellectual context that wishes to avail itself of both. Helen Tiffin
alludes to the reconciliatory potential of allegory when she describes a key
zone of overlap between postmodernism and postcolonialism as the rehabilitation of allegory and the attack on binary structuralisation of concept
and language. Immediately afterwards she joins ranks with Jameson, During, and Appiah by stating that the two posts are energised by different theoretical assumptions and by vastly different political motivations.32
Yet her reference to the allegorical mode, and the implications of its binary
nature, is illuminating. Needless to say, this is not allegory as Coleridge or
even Jameson has defined it but a conception of the term that turns those
very aspects that once damned it out of hand into the basis of a representational practice that can be both subtle and satisfying. As discussed already,
allegory is all about duality: it is a double discourse in which the notion of
a single, central, unified meaning is always potentially undone by the splitlevel structure of its form. In the traditional allegorysay, for example,
George Orwells Animal Farmthe ambivalence afforded by this duality is
resolved into a neat surety of meaning by the fact that we all know (or at least
presume) that the farm is revolutionary Russia, Snowball is Trotsky, and the
text itself is a cautionary tale warning against the dangers of totalitarianism and tyranny everywhere. If, however, we banish the notion that the
extratextual meanings encoded within any given allegory are always fixed
and instantly knowableand are instead subjective, arbitrary, changeable,
and contingent upon reader responsethen allegory as a metaphoric mode
can be restored to a far richer kind of potential. That is to say, if we follow
Benjamin and practice far more vigorously what Jameson preached about
the discontinuous, heterogeneous, and polysemous nature of the allegorical
form, then our interpretations of national allegories will, in their turn, allow
these narratives to move beyond literary navet to a space where both postcolonial identity and postmodern distrust can live alongside one another.

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Indeed, allegorys two-tier structure allows it to be both didactic and

indeterminate, both affirmative of meaning and suspicious of it, both reconstructive and deconstructive, both committed to the retelling of lost histories
and suspicious of any attempt to know the past. No resolution of this tension
is either necessary or desirable, since both modes of thoughtthe postmodern and the postcolonialare useful resources for makers of meaning
in the aftermath of empire as they strive to write Taiwan in their work.
Thus if the postcolonial desire to construct identities slidesas it sometimes caninto a homogenizing, fundamentalist nationalism that seeks to
prescribe one brand of Taiwaneseness for everyone rather than inscribing
it in as many versions as are necessary for a multiethnic society, then postmodernisms urge to decenter and differentiate can promptly come to the
rescue. Allegory allows for representational compromise between the two
without ever finding, in any decisive way, for one side or the other. What is
certain, however, is that allegory is divested of its autocratic and reactionary cast when the referents for its metaphoric movement are as unstable as
those we find in decolonizing, multicultural, glocalist, even neo-imperialist
Taiwan. Indeed, when the context to which allegory is tied is as fluid as that
of Taiwanwhere so many different pasts and futures lie waiting to be
claimedallegory can become a finely modulated means of writing about
questions of nation, identity, and belonging.
Hence national allegories of the kind common to Taiwanese fiction and
film of the 1980s and 1990s operate on several discrete yet interlocking levels.
To begin with, each of the experiential narratives I listed at the beginning
of this articlefrom settler epics to prison narratives to memoirs from the
juancunare grounded in a set of external historical referents that seem
to point the way toward some kind of preordained interpretation. Thus Li
Qiaos Wintry Night trilogy (Hanye sanbuqu) is all about the pioneering spirit
of the Hakka Taiwanese; Hou Hsiao-hsiens Good Men, Good Women (Hao
nan, hao n) reads the incarceration of the individual as the incarceration
of the nation; and Zhu Tianxins short story Remembering My Brothers
from the Military Compound presents itself as one womans assertion of
mainlander history. So far, so conventionally allegorical. Yet at the same
time, each of these narratives aligns itself confrontationally against a shifting official history and seeks to wrest that history back from its professed

Hillenbrand Writing Private and Public in Contemporary Taiwan

649

owners (the Japanese, the KMT, the Taiwanese nationalists). In other words,
these writings act transformatively upon the past, dispelling the notion that
allegory is the simple servant of the context to which it refers, a mere vessel
for truths located somewhere beyond the text.
Yet this very process of revealing heterodox hidden pasts suggests, by
implication, that no single version of history can ever be trusted anyway, and
that the Taiwanese identities forged through the literary encounter with the
past are themselves indeterminate and precarious. Indeed, the horizontal,
synchronic presence of so many different allegories of so many different
pasts produces what is well-nigh a mood of antihistory within the Taiwanese literary field. These allegories seem in their collective force to say that
history as we know it is dead; and what we have instead is a series of fictional
narratives that explore how Taiwans people live in the absence of a past they
can trust. Wary as so many postcolonial theorists may be of muddying the
waters with slackly defined ideas of how postmodernism functions in the
third world, it is difficult to argue against the presence of postmodern
thought in this unblinking cross-examination that many Taiwanese intellectuals carry out on the grands rcits of history. But all the while Fanons
simple question, In reality, who am I? persists, resonating across these
texts and demanding some kind of solid answer. This persistence brings
us full circle, back to history, interpretation, and the promise that fixed
meaningin the form of an articulated ethnonational identitywill be
delivered, after all, to the reader who looks for it. As we shall see, allegory
in Taiwan provides a home for sustained tension of this kind.
National Allegory and the Juancun

Any number of the experiential narratives from contemporary Taiwan

cited earlier in this article would serve our purposes here, but fiction from
and about the mainlander residential compounds perhaps exemplifies best
the ways in which identity and the drive to deconstruct it fit together like
nested Russian dolls in postcolonial/postmodern Taiwan. The juancun, or
villages for the families of servicemen and veterans, came into being after
retrocession in 1945 andmuch more noticeablyas the disordered remnants of the KMT evacuated to Taiwan after their defeat at the hands of

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650

the Chinese Communists. The establishment of these mainlander refugee enclaves was perhaps inevitable given the chaos of the time, but doubtless just as inevitable was the sequestered character that these communities
soon took on. More or less self-sufficient in social and logistical terms, the
juancun quickly evolved a subculture of their own, in which loyalty to
the China they had lost bred a sojourner mentality toward the Taiwan of
the here and now. Although residents of the juancun came from all parts
of the Chinese mainland, and thus spoke different dialects, ate different
food, and practiced different customs, they shared the exile that dominated
their lives, and this forged a distinctive fortress identity. Self-segregation
was further reinforced by the us and them approach that many native
Taiwanese adopted toward the juancun islands that had risen up in their
midst. Over time, the mainlander communities came to be seen as bastions
of colonial entitlement, just as their inhabitants were a class apart: richer,
safer, and as politically privileged as the rest of the population were vulnerable to the violent strictures of martial law.
As the dream of retaking the mainland gradually faded to fantasy, however, the spirit of the juancun began to change. Intermarriage with local Taiwanese and the birth of second- and third-generation exiles who possessed
only inherited memories of the mainland sped this process, and as Taiwan
inched toward political liberation during the 1980s, the so-called mainlander
identity crisis (rentong weiji) began to take hold. The erosion of monopolistic
KMT power, the surge in Taiwanese nationalism, and the cultural turn
toward nativization (bentuhua) have intensified this mood of crisis in the
years since, leaving many mainlanders with a sense of disempowerment
and exclusion. On a more personal level, the relaxation of laws prohibiting
travel to China has allowed mainlanders to return homeonly to discover that their ancestral villages are unrecognizable and that their kinsmen
now regard them as Taiwanese compatriots (Taiwan tongbao) rather than
genuine mainland Chinese.33 Far from being latter-day colonizers, some
in the mainlander community now see themselves as dangerously disenfranchised, and recent fiction about the juancun ( juancun xiaoshuo) articulates a
complex set of responses to the shifting status of this socioethnic group.34 In
some ways, this genre of narratives reads straightforwardly: writers pledge

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651

allegiance to Taiwan, plead for a more inclusive Taiwanese identity, and

protest against the tendency of some Taiwanese nationalists to tar all mainlanders with the autocratic brush of the KMT. As such, juancun xiaoshuo
is postcolonial: desirous of identity, preoccupied with its marginality, and
pitted against a metropole (albeit a local one). Yet at the same time, many of
these writings are pervaded by a postmodern wariness of identity politics,
and they harness allegory as a vehicle for this ambivalence.
Zhu Tianxins short story Remembering My Brothers from the Military
Compound offers an intriguing introit into the uses of postcolonial/postmodern allegory in this fraught context. The text, which reads as a fictional
memoir in the allegorical mode,35 exploits the indeterminacy of the form to
create a narrative that loops endlessly around itself in a game of hide-andseek with fixed meaning. This enchantment with fluidity expresses itself
across the board: voice, as discussed below, inhabits many guises; genre is
open-ended; and spatial and temporal perspectives move in mercurial ways,
doubling back on themselves so that the reader is left unsure of space and
time. All in all, Zhu primes the texture of her narrative so that it can play
host to a subtle and layered allegorical form. This said, the allegory appears
conventional at first sight. In line with the waishengren (or mainlander)
political agenda described above,36 Zhu appeals on behalf of the community of her birth, and her voice joins that of the many other contemporary
Taiwanese writers who have been composing national allegories in contrasting ethnopolitical keys during recent years. The narrative presents a
patchwork collage of fact and memory about the veterans village in which
its narrator grew up and ranges in an artfully disordered style over the grandeur and loneliness of exile, daily life in the cloistered mainlander community, the past and present destinies of the narrators peers, relations with
the Taiwanese beyond the compound gates, and the gradual vanishing of
juancun as a way of life.
In this sense, Zhu Tianxins narrative offers itself up readily to a straightup-and-down text-to-context allegorical reading. Large tranches of the text
read fluidly as a kind of I-for-we autobiographical allegory in which
Zhus first-person narrator becomes as collective in her identity as the I we
find in much misty poetry (menglong shi) from the post-Mao mainland,

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where self-expression is the very opposite of solipsistic, private, and reflexive.37 In this interpretation, allegorical meaning lies in the veiled equivalence between the narrator and the world that she describes, in the flimsy
pretense that she is anything other than a private embodiment of the public juancun collective. Yet even a slightly more probing examination begins
to raise questions about the representational relationship between allegory
and this so-called juancun collective. Indeed, it soon becomes apparent that
Zhu Tianxins allegory is less concerned with a seamless symmetry between
waisheng and juancun than with elaborating the conceit of the veterans village as multiple microcosm. This microcosm is tellingly exhaustive, encompassing the Chinese mainland that is lost forever to the KMT, the mainlander community on Taiwan, the operation of KMT power, and Taiwan
itself under KMT rule. A single example of each will make this quadruple
allegorical structure clear.
Mainland China is, of course, the extratextual reality toward which Zhu
Tianxins exilic allegory might most reasonably be expected to point, and
the lost homeland enters her narrative through the suitably homely and
redolent language of food: Ah Ding, whos from Jiangxi, gives off burps
that smell much more pungent than those of Peipei, who comes from Sichuan. The Wang family kids, who are from Zhejiang, always reek of pickled fish and steamed fermented tofu, while Yaya and her brothers, who are
from Canton, always have a sour yeasty odor of congee about their burps.38
All of China is here, Zhu suggests, sequestered within the borders of the
juancun, and to ascribe to these fragrant children a single, homogeneous
identityas the catch-all term waishengren seeks to dois plainly physically absurd. What is more, the multifarious heritage of the mainland is
transmitted, orally and via the very sustenance of life, from one generation
to the next in ways that instantly recall Jamesons fascination with role that
the alimentary, chi, played in Lu Xuns national allegories. This same notion
of the juancun as miniature continues when Zhu turns to the representation
of the mainlander community on Taiwan. Here, and in equally allegorical
style, Zhu encrypts the text with constant coded references to famous, and
infamous, sons of the juancunwriters, politicians, business magnates, and
career criminals feature in what amounts to a high-glamour cross section of

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653

Taiwans waisheng population. These personae function at once as individuals and cutout templates of an embattled situation (the struggle for identity
among second- and third-generation mainlanders), and Zhus nods to the
roman clef pursue the allegorical point in predictable fashion. Juancun as
microcosm for the tentacular reach of KMT military power comes next,
softened and subjectified through the prism of its hapless dependents: The
mothers in the air force village were the most westernized. . . . The mothers in the land force village were the most honest and conservative. . . . The
craze for playing mahjong was most widespread in the navy village. . . . the
mothers in the military police village were nearly all native Taiwanese.39
The dark tones of Taiwans long years of war footing and martial law take
on a different hue here, as allegory allows the military machine to be reconfigured with a human, and suffering, face.
Finally, Zhu returns to the juancun-as-microcosm as she takes on the
more controversial theme of Taiwan as a totality under mainlander rule.
The chief bearer of allegorical intent here is Old X, a composite figure
whose multiple origins and generic name push the Everyman connection.
Old X is a retired veteran who is granted a sinecure as gatekeeper and factotum of the compound. Unmarried, childless, and sent out to pasture by
the army authorities, Old X squats in a shack by the compound gate in the
manner of the KMT itself, the spent military force cut off from its ancestral
roots that hovers on offshore Taiwan like a perpetual but pointless sentinel.
Old X is illiterate, but his body is inscribed with tattoos that read Kill Zhu
and Remove Mao, his voice is laden with the incomprehensible cadences of
his native dialect, and his memory is imprinted with great scenes from The
Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Up to a point, therefore,
he is a revenant of the mainland past, whose presence provides a physical, aural, and affective locus for mainland identification among the compound residentsrefreshing memories of China for the elders and creating
those memories for their children through the stories he tells. At the same
time, however, he also functions as a metonym for the KMT on Taiwan
that knows no Minnanyu (Taiwanese language) but preaches the doctrine
of fangong dalu (retaking the mainland), enforces Mandarin as the national
language, and instructs the Taiwanese populace in the cultural glories of
the misty Middle Kingdom. Most significantly, Old X is also a serial pedo-

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654

phile. Inside the confines of his shack, he abuses a little girl from the compoundlets call her little Ling . . . and every year, there would inevitably
be a larger or smaller number of Little Lings.40 All of a sudden, this abuse
turns Zhus text into an allegory in which the shack becomes the island
of Taiwan, the little girl its victimized people, and Old X the brutal and
depraved gerontocracy of the KMT. And all the while, of course, Old X is
also nothing other than a social type whose ilk can be found everywhere:
culpable and sinister, yet not devoid of a certain grotesque pathos. Once
again, the juancun has become an allegorical world-within-a-world, a symbolic shortcut to multiple, even conflicting, extraliterary realities.
Indeed, what should be immediately apparent from this four-tier structure is the status of the text not merely as a so-called national allegoryin
which the story of the individual is supposedly plotted against the destiny of
his or her societybut as an exemplar of that more supple and adventurous
entity, the postcolonial allegory. Most attention-grabbing in this regard is
the way in which Zhus imagined memoir uses allegory to confront head-on
the exclusionary rhetoric of rising Taiwanese nationalism, often via direct
intercessions on behalf of the islands mainlanders.41 In this sense, Zhus
national allegoryits particular take on the story of the individual who
represents a broader embattled situationbecomes less a transparent
image of history than a gauntlet thrown down to that historys current compilers. Rather than Lu Xuns Medicine, which tells the tale of China as if
it were a true story just awaiting a chronicler, Remembering My Brothers
uses its allegory to contest contemporary accounts of Taiwans postwar past:
the notion that mainlanders are all happy foot soldiers of the KMT, that
they have always relished their special status, that they have actively sought
a life of segregation, and so on. Indeed, whereas the reality to which Lu Xun
refers in connotative fashion is a stable and familiar one (consumption =
Chinas malaise; the tubercular boy [Hua] and the revolutionary martyr [Xia]
= both China and its tragedy; the blood-soaked mantou = the battening of
a rapacious tradition on the hopes of the future), Zhus allegory, while just
as socially transitive, is plotted against a reality that many would dispute.
Ultimately, her most contentious intimation in this regard is that Taiwans
waishengren (mainland people) are now so far from being colonizers as to be
quasi-colonized themselves, a point that emerges most evocatively through

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655

the topos of juancun itself, which begins as an outpost of mainland Chinese

empire and ends as a kind of shanty town, fit only for abandonment or
demolition.42 In this sense, the text does in literature what scholars such as
Liao Hsien-hao have worked toward in political theory: it refutes what the
latter calls unified subjectivity (danyi zhuti) under the aegis of Taiwanese
independence. As he puts it, in the process of forging this homogenizing
myth, waishengren are made to play the role of the Jews . . . in the underground media, and even in the official media. . . . if all the factors behind
social disharmony are attributed to Taiwans Jews, then we can very easily conceal those other power relations that generate conflict, such as class,
gender, and various minority groups.43 And as it mounts its literary version
of this same challenge to the new ruling credo, Zhu Tianxins text shows
its conviction that allegory, and the imagistic bridge it creates between the
private and the public, can transform our purchase on historical truth.44
Yet no matter how politically controversial Zhus insistence on the plight
of the mainlander community may be, to read her allegory in this way
remains, in strictly literary terms, old-fashioned: plaintive and didactic,
contingent on one specific version of history, and, therefore, critically starved
of what Stephen Slemon has called freedom in interpretive range.45 The
emancipatory steps it takes toward a waisheng history constitute, ironically, a
simultaneous retreat from the full possibilities of allegory as form. After all,
as Slemon has argued, the role of postcolonial allegory is to foreground the
fact that both fiction and history are discursive practices, subject to questions of authorship.46 An interpretation of Zhu Tianxins fictional memoir
that reads its postcolonial allegory only in terms of the confrontation that
the text stages with Taiwanese nationalism and the discourse of bentuhua
cannot help but miss the deeper ways in which the text is both postcolonial
and allegorical. Inevitably, perhaps, such a reading will also miss the narratives postmodernity and the decided pleasure it takes in using allegorys
polysemous form to play with the idea that postcolonial allegory functions
principally to reclaim the past for colonialisms historyless people.
Crucial here, as already suggested, is the sheer range of the texts allegorical application. Indeed, while the notion of juancun as metaphorical microcosm remains constant throughout, the reality to which this juancun-asallegory is pegged (China, the KMT, the mainlander community on Tai-

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wan, Taiwan itself) exists in an equally constant state of flux and, more to
the point, significatory overlap. The very fact that juancun as a physical,
ethnic, and political topos can referwithin the space of a single narrativeto both China and Taiwan, both mainlander and native Taiwanese,
and both KMT power and the abuse thereof is not so much narratorial
smoke and mirrors as it is a clear signal about the vagaries of both history
and identity in a place so inescapably postcolonial as Taiwan. And Zhus
decision to litter the text with off-the-cuff American and Japanese cultural
references (Stand by Me, Deep Throat, On the Waterfront, Tennessee Williams, and the Tanada Club TV program) only thickens the mix. Taiwan
is a place where coloniality is less a past than an ongoing state of being, in
which various players regularly shift their places in a game of musical chairs
that allegorywith its inherent sense of both presence and absenceis
preeminently skilled at transcribing into culture.
Yet while Slemons claim that postcolonial allegory refocuses our concept
of history as fixed monument into a concept of history as the creation of a
discursive practice may be astute in its Foucauldian attention to the wiles
of discourse, it falls some way short of explaining the distinctive pursuit of
allegory in Taiwan. The notion that history is written by the victors has
been well attested in China since the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian),
and in Taiwan more specifically, where in living memory successive different metropoles have sought to fix the monument of history (Japan, the
KMT, American neo-imperialism, Taiwanese nationalism), an awareness of
historys fickle fictiveness is surely second nature. Indeed, there is perhaps a
tacit assumption in Zhus text that it will be read alongside the various other
experiential genres referred to earlier in this article, each of which has a different version of the past to promote and a different idea of how the roles of
colonizer and colonized should be assigned. Rather than dismantling fixed
monuments, Zhu Tianxins allegory seems happier to play with historys
already disassembled constituent parts, arranging and rearranging them in
a metaphoric pattern that displays the past precisely as bric-a-brac. The crusade against monolithic authority (Slemons fixed monument) is less Zhus
concern here than the effects of history as a discursive practice on those who
live these past fictions as their present reality.
To describe all this as postmodern may not suit all tastes. One is vaguely

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657

reminded of Karatani Kjins claim that the postmodern sense of meaninglessness that is considered new and radical in the West is old stuff to
the Japanese,47 and perhaps the ultimate point of Taiwans identity literature is that any nation whose past has been raided and rewritten so many
times cannot but be wary of the grand narrative of history. Such a wariness
may even, in fact, be more traditionalas in long-standing and indigenousthan it is postmodern in the strictly Euro-American sense. Yet at the
same time, there can be little doubt that Taiwanese writers and intellectuals
are keenly attuned to the currents of postmodern thought, and evidence of
this alertness is strewn across Remembering My Brothers. Magpie cultural
borrowings, a bricolage approach to composition, and Zhus calculatedly
irreverent mood (flatulence as a marker of ethnicity being, perhaps, the
prime instance) are obvious examples. Just as pertinently, the text puts on a
strong display of narratorial self-awareness from its very first lines (Before
you read this story, please prepare in advance). Dialoguing with the reader,
that conceit so familiar from the Chinese vernacular novel, becomes positively antididactic here, as the audience with whom the narrator is conversing rotates in accordance with how we choose to interpret the central but
shifting metaphor of juancun. And if Zhus audience is slippery, her narrator is doubly so, sliding from author-identification to collective we to a
powerful kinship with the abused Little Ling. At the very least, these nods
and glances to what might justifiably be termed postmodern narratology
end up creating a fitting vessel for the kind of postcolonial allegory that we
can see taking shape in Remembering My Brothers. History, like both its
raconteur and its audience, is revealed as performative, the purveyor of provisional truths, and Zhus recourse to the narrative signatures of postmodernism underlines the point through a close match of form and content.
Conclusion

Nineteen years have passed since the publication of Jamesons essay, and for
the field of postcolonial studies those years have seemed far longer. In the
intervening period, critics have moved from speculating about what postmodernism will do to nationalisms in the decolonizing world (wipe them

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out, according to Jameson) to asking what such nationalisms can do for postmodernism (reinvest it with a radical, resisting charge, perhaps). At the very
least, it would appear that arguments for the incommensurability of postcolonialism and postmodernism in the third world are less than watertight
in the case of Taiwan and some of its recent literary productions. Indeed,
what Taiwans national allegories offer the reader is precisely this: a split
mode of narrative that precludes any final, fixed, or coercive meanings but
simultaneously holds out the possibility that new kinds of subjectivity can be
imagined through the evocation of lost, hidden, or taboo pasts. Unquestionably, the phantom of a waisheng identity still inhabits Zhu Tianxins narrative, waiting to be apprehended by the determined readerand in this
sense Remembering My Brothers can be interpreted as a stereotypically
postcolonial search for subjectivity. Equally possible, of course, is a reading
that homes in on the countercultural tenor of the piece and the attention
it pays to historys status as a story told, and retold, by the powerful as one
regime yields to another.
Yet for others who come to the text perhaps the real point of Zhus fictional memoir is not so much identity, nor even the recognition that history and identity are discursive by nature, but the stage that comes beyond
all this. What happens, in other words, when we acknowledge that selfhood
is constructed rather than given a priori, but we still want itand want to
write about itanyway? What kind of texts result when cultural producers feel themselves to be both postcolonial and postmodern? And, finally,
what role does allegory play in the expression of this epiphany? Ultimately,
perhaps, Zhus textual conceit of juancun as allegorical microcosmand
microcosm for so many thingssuggests that when who we are resides in
discourse, then, in a kind of twisted syllogism, we become necessarily every
component part of that same discourse. Indeed, by becoming allegorically
coterminous with so many different constituencies, the veterans village
in Zhu Tianxins prose not only opens Taiwanese identity up to waishengren but also opens waisheng identity up to Taiwan. Allegory, with its split
structure, brings both this duality and its possible reconciliation into being.
Appropriately enough, however, it is the readeras the allegorys most
privileged interpreterwho is granted the final say.

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Notes

1
2

3
4
5
6
7
8

10

I would like to thank the anonymous readers for their insightful and constructive comments on an earlier version of this essay. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove
Press, 1963), 203.
Postcolonialism, as scholars such as Anne McClintock, Arif Dirlik, and Masao Miyoshi have
shown, is a far from transparent term at the best of times. Yet Ping-hui Liao is surely correct in implying that it acquires whole new nuances of controversy in the case of contemporary Taiwan, where migr mainlanders, native Taiwanese, and the islands aborigines all
have different perspectives modulated by the islands turbulent history. See Ping-hui Liao,
Postcolonial Studies in Taiwan: Issues in Critical Debates, Postcolonial Studies 2 (1999):
199200.
Fredric Jameson, Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism, Social
Text 15 (1986): 69.
Ibid. (emphasis in the original).
The persistent recourse to a language of always and necessarilyas much as the lineaments of the argument itselfhelps make Jamesons essay so problematic.
Aijaz Ahmad, Jamesons Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory, Social Text
17 (1987): 325.
Imre Szeman, Whos Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization, South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (2001): 803.
See, for example, Jean Franco, The Nation as Imagined Community, in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nations, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti,
and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 131; and Madhava
Prasad, On the Question of a Theory of (Third World) Literature, Social Text 31/32 (1992):
7273.
A key essay by C. T. Hsia, Obsession with China: The Moral Burden of Modern Chinese Literature, appendix 1 of A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1971), marks the institutionalization of national allegorism in modern
Chinese literary studies, and its influence has been profound. Scholars far too numerous
to name have internalized the notion that Chinese writers are ruled by an obsession with
China; the result is a widespread perception that the nations canon can give us a ringside
seat on such dramatic spectacles as the shifting dynamic between the authoritarian state
and its intellectual conscience, the proliferation of mass cultures, and the changing status of
Chinese women.
Hence Liu Kangs claim that Western students of modern China tend to view modern Chinese literature as essentially a type of documentary evidence for their broad sociological and
historical findings, quoted in I-heng Chao, Post-isms and Chinese New Conservatism,
New Literary History 28 (1997): 35.

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11 Dai Jinhua, Xieta liaowang (View From a Tilted Tower. Chinese Film Culture 19781998)
(Taipei: Yuanliu chuban gongsi, 1999), 73.
12 Michael Sprinker, The National Question: Said, Ahmad, Jameson, Public Culture 6 (1993):
7.
13 Imre Szeman, Whos Afraid of National Allegory? 808.
14 Julie McGonegal, Postcolonial Metacritique: Jameson, Allegory, and the Always-AlreadyRead Third World Text, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 7 (2005):
260.
15 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum, 1957), 89.
16 Jameson, Third World Literature, 69.
17 This preoccupation began to gather pace during the fevered debates between proponents
of the China complex (Zhongguo qingjie) and their antagonists who pushed the nativist
Taiwan complex (Taiwan qingjie) during the early 1980s. See Taiwan yishi lunzhan xuanji
(Selections from the Debates on Taiwanese Consciousness), ed. Shi Minhui (Taipei: Qianwei
chubanshe, 1988). More recently Liao Hsien-hao has argued that subjective emotion continues to carry the day over inclusionist intentions in the identity debate. See Liao Hsien-hao,
Chaoyue guozu: weishenme yao tan rentong (Beyond the National: Why Discuss Identity?), Zhongwai wenxue (Chung-wai Literary Monthly) September 1995, 6162.
18 Jameson, Third World Literature, 68.
19 Ibid., 69.
20 Thus biography and birthright often supersede the text itself in academic studies of these
allegories, many of which assume that different ethnic backgrounds will almost axiomatically produce certain (and predictable) kinds of allegories. See, for example, Chiu Kuei-fen,
Identity Politics in Contemporary Womens Novels in Taiwan, Tamkang Review 30 (1999):
2754.
21 Jameson, Third World Literature, 6566.
22 See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London
and New York: Verso, 1998), 159235.
23 Jameson, Third World Literature, 73.
24 Ibid., 74.
25 See, for example, Stephen Slemon, Post-Colonial Allegory and the Transformation of History, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 23 (1988): 15768; and Jeannie Suk, Postcolonial
Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing. Csaire, Glissant, Cond (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 123.
26 Simon During, Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today, Textual Practice 1 (1987): 33.
See also Jameson, Third World Literature, 78.
27 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial? Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 353.
28 See Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao, Becoming Cyborgian: Postmodernism and Nationalism in

Hillenbrand Writing Private and Public in Contemporary Taiwan

29

30
31
32
33
34

35

36

37
38

661

Contemporary Taiwan, in Postmodernism and China, ed. Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 175202.
Chiu Kuei-fen argues that postmodern assaults on the subject are an impossible luxury
for postcolonialism; see her Shi houzhimin, bu shi houxiandai. Zai tan Taiwan shenfen/
rentong zhengzhi (Its Postcolonialism, Not Postmodernism. Revisiting Identity Politics in Taiwan), Zhongwai wenxue (Chung-wai Literary Monthly) April 1995, 144. Chen
Fang-ming, meanwhile, notes that postmodernism has lacked a natural incubation period
in Taiwanunlike the indigenous discourse of postcolonialismand thus veers dangerously toward the neocolonial. See Chen Fang-ming, Houxiandai huo houzhimin. Zhanhou Taiwan wenxueshi de yige jieshi (Postmodern or Postcolonial. A Reading of Taiwans
Postwar Literary History), in Shuxie Taiwan. Wenxueshi, houzhimin yu houxiandai (Writing
Taiwan. Literary History, Postcolonial and Postmodern), ed. Zhou Yingxiong and Liu Jihui
(Taipei: Maitian chubanshe, 2000), 4163.
Jameson, Third World Literature, 6566.
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 3.
Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonialism, Postmodernism, and the Rehabilitation of Post-colonial
History, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 30 (1993): 172.
See Joseph Bosco, The Emergence of a Taiwanese Popular Culture, in The Other Taiwan,
ed. Murray A. Rubinstein (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 393.
Other writers of juancun fiction include Su Weizhen, Zhang Dachun, Zhang Qijiang, and
Yuan Qiongqiong. Representative examples of the genre can be found in Taiwan juancun
xiaoshuo xuan (A Selection of Taiwans Juancun Fiction), ed. Su Weizhen (Taipei: Eryu wenhua chubanshe, 2004).
The text, like many other of Zhu Tianxins recent works, is deliberately hybrid in its form.
See Chiu Kuei-fen, Xiang wo (ziwo) fangzhu de (xiongdi) zimeimen: yuedu di er dai
[waisheng] (n) zuojia Zhu Tianxin (Remembering My (Self) Exiled (Brothers) Sisters:
Reading the Second-Generation Waisheng Writer Zhu Tianxin), Zhongwai wenxue (Chungwai Literary Monthly) 22 (1993): 102, for the blurred boundaries between autobiography
and fictional creation in her work.
In place of the term waishengren, Stphane Corcuff proposes the definition xin zhumin (new
inhabitants) as less semantically loaded and more politically inclusive. See his Taiwans
Mainlanders, New Taiwanese? in Memories of the Future: National Identity Issues and the
Search for a New Taiwan, ed. Stphane Corcuff (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 189.
See, for example, Chen Xiaomei, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao
China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 82.
Zhu Tianxin, Xiang wo juancun de xiongdimen (Remembering My Brothers from the
Military Compound), in Xiang wo juancun de xiongdimen (Taipei: Maitian chubanshe,
1998), 6869.

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41
42

43

44

45
46
47

662

Ibid., 81.
Ibid., 7879.
See, for example, Zhu, Xiang wo juancun de xiongdimen, 84, 86.
Chiu Kuei-fen echoes this in arguing that being the Orphan of Asia is not, in fact, the
monopoly of native Taiwanese, but rather the historical nightmare faced by every group on
Taiwan. See Chiu, Xiang wo (ziwo) fangzhu de (xiongdi) zimeimen, 105.
Liao Hsien-hao, Chaoyue guozu, 71. Liao Chao-yang, however, argues that Liao Hsienhaos tendency to attribute all the problems in Taiwanese society to Taiwanese independence (Taidu) is an extension of the propagandistic methods deployed during the White
Terror and claims that the Taiwanese cultural unity to which Liao Hsien-hao so vehemently objects is far from being realized on the island, whose mainstream media and
government agencies continue to be dominated by a version of Chinese culture. See Liao
Chao-yang, Guanyu Taiwan de zuqun wenti: huiying Liao Hsien-hao (On the Group
Problem in Taiwan: A Response to Liao Hsien-hao), Zhongwai wenxue (Chung-wai Literary Monthly) October 1995, 11819.
Remembering My Brothers is one of a collection of six loosely linked narratives by Zhu
Tianxin, each of which, in the words of Shu-li Chang, focus on the daily life and consciousness of one marginalized group. See Shu-li Chang, Zhu Tianxins Eros of Home/
Land: Nostalgia as a Literary Strategy, Tamkang Review 29 (1998): 52. They include tales
that describe invisible young housewives, homosexual lovers, and political dissidents.
Slemon, Post-Colonial Allegory, 165.
Ibid., 160.
See Joseph J. Tobin, ed., Re-Made in Japan: Everyday Life and Consumer Taste in a Changing
Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 7.