ABSTRACT
In 1949, with the power of the Communists growing across the mainland, the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan to preserve their remaining forces. Since then, the strait between the mainland and the island has cut one nation into two, with both claiming to be the legitimate China.1 The absolute physical division of national space did not prevent them from imagining each other across a brief passage of time and distance. Besides sporadic military conflict, the confrontation between the Nationalists and Communists continued in the form of words, but the battle in the literary field has been no less ferocious than in the field of arms. Both Taiwan and the mainland encouraged the excessive production of propaganda literature, which ran to millions of words in place of millions of bullets. After four years of mortal conflict between the Communists and Nationalists from 1945 to 1949, both parties finally got a respite. Intriguingly, in spite of the enemy being at a safe distance, neither of them seemed confident about the rare peace they had achieved, although they had longed for it for more than a decade; nor did they fully enjoy the time free from strife. Both were disturbed by the imaginary coming of the enemy. Thus, the factual spatial separation did not cut the psychological tie, whether in the form of interdependence or hatred. Both Communist and Nationalist lived in the shadow of the other’s intimidating image. The battle in the imaginary realm between the Communists and the Nationalists spoke of the discord between national space and the psychological sphere. The inability of territorial sovereignty and spatial independence to guarantee a free mind in the psychic universe is best represented in the contest between the revolutionary-historical novel in mainland China and antiCommunist fiction in Taiwan. On the surface, Chinese literature on both sides of the strait diverged in terms of thematic concerns and narrative structure. However, the political motivation and aesthetic principles that directed literary production were fundamentally the same. During the early period of the PRC, epic-scale novels flourished, a genre later referred to as revolutionary-historical novels (geming lishi xiaoshuo). These “red classics” typically told the story of heroic figures in revolutionary history with a teleological orientation and went on to frame an entire generation’s public memory of national history. In Taiwan, under the KMT’s propagandistic crusade
to return to the mainland, writers first attempted reconquest through literary fiction. This latter category of works is called “anti-Communist fiction” because of its political commitment. Both revolutionary-historical novels and anti-Communist fiction register the physical division of China, as well as the psychological consequences of the national divide, in their ostensible stance of being true to reality. No matter how poignant each one is in disclosing the other’s wrongdoing, injustice, and moral degeneration, the Nationalists and the Communists meet in these works-almost without exception-on the old battlefield of the years before 1949. For the revolutionary-historical novelists, their project is to imagine their own land and space. For the writers of anti-Communist fiction, it is to imagine the space that once belonged to them but has been lost. In this chapter, by comparing revolutionary-historical novels and anti-Communist fiction, with Du Pengcheng’s Baowei Yan’an (Guarding Yan’an, 1954) and Chen Jiying’s Chidi (Red earth, 1955) as examples, I investigate how the spatial imagination across the strait between the mainland and Taiwan operated on the level of narrative, and how this imagination reflected and embodied the psychological repercussions of the split in 1949. Following the spatial categorization discussed earlier in this book, this chapter is divided into three parts. First, I look at the issue of locality, showing the significance of physical space in reality through fiction. Like the cardinal importance of specific locations in military maneuvering, fictional settings offer both revolutionary-historical novels and anti-Communist fiction prime positions from which to attack the other. Meanwhile, these localities illuminate the human attachment of both the Communists and the Nationalists to specific places. Second, I investigate the trialectics of individual, family, and nation, analyzing the social construction of human relations as advocated by both parties in their respective generic representations. Family as the nexus between individual and nation is given different degrees of priority by each side. Third, I use the dialectic between retreat and return to expose the way localities are reclaimed by both parties in their constructions of symbolic space. For émigré mainlanders in Taiwan, exile on the small island was supposed to be temporary. They strongly believed that they would return to their home(land) in the near future. Desire for real or imaginary possession introduces heavenly power into the natural world so that symbolic space is connected with the supernatural world. Revered as the revolutionary cradle of Chinese Communists, Yan’an has received ample popular and critical interest. He Jingzhi’s 1956 poem “Return to Yan’an” is familiar to several generations because it was included in the middle school Chinese textbook.2 Reporters and researchers on the Chinese Communist Revolution have noted the geographical distinctions of Yan’an and its significance since Mao’s arrival there. I will not rehash the critical consensus on Yan’an as a geographical site, incubator of Chinese Communist revolution, and its long-lasting influence in Chinese life. The revolutionary manifestations in Yan’an’s physical and social location have been brought to the fore by Edgar Snow, Mark Selden, Shum Kui-kwong, David Apter, and Tony Saich.3 My
concern in this chapter is larger than Yan’an per se. I take Yan’an as a synecdoche to see how the national space is literarily imagined, socially configured, and symbolically claimed through the revolutionary-historical novel. This spatial imagination is especially poignant, given that a regime outside the mainlandthe Nationalists in Taiwan-claims this very territory and the anti-Communist fiction writers convey the same desire to reclaim it. On top of the comparative and contrastive investigation of the revolutionaryhistorical novel and anti-Communist fiction through the spectacle of space, the chapter takes the cause of the antagonism between the mainland and Taiwan to be the intervention of the other.4 Jacques Lacan’s postpsychoanalytical discussion of the split of self and the other in one entity5 is useful here, alongside the phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of the self and other manifest in two different entities.6 The enmity between the mainland and Taiwan immediately after the great divide in 1949 mostly resulted from the threat of the other, both real and imaginary. Because of the existence of the aggressive other, each self cannot achieve its completion, nor can it be content as an independent national entity. Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection is instructive for understanding the Nationalist campaign to profane the mainland in view of the Communist crusade to construct a sacred Yan’an.7 The mainland to the Nationalists is the abject; it is where the Nationalists emanate from. Since it has been taken over by the Communists and has lost its purity, the Nationalists are forced to abnegate it. Yet the mainland continues to be an object of eternal longing. The two parties across the strait are so alike in self-presentation, political coercion and psychic disturbance. But neither side could admit this resemblance. Each side needs the other to provide and reinforce the legitimacy of its political structure and ideological inculcation. In other words, they offer each other the premise of existence but disidentify with each other. Ironically, it seems that neither party realizes that in revealing the devilry of the other, they inadvertently expose their own vices, however industrious they are in persuading people of their own virtues. The Communists and the Nationalists are paired like the one and its other in the mirror, splitting and collaborating for more than two decades.
