| The Communists' takeover of the Mainland in 1949 started an age of exile for millions of Chinese people in Taiwan. Nostalgia for the lost homeland has become a dominant social phenomenon. My study, however, is not a sociological investigation into this phenomenon although it tries to examine how this phenomenon is reflected in literature. My study focuses on specific styles of different writers rather than a general theme of exile.; In addition to an introduction and a conclusion which treat exile as a general phenomenon regardless of national boundaries, I also discuss five major writers, namely, Yu Kwang-chung, Yip Wai-lim, Pai Hsien-yung, Chang Hsi-kuo and Ch'en Jo-hsi. In Chapter II, I discuss Yu Kwang-chung's systematic pattern of nostalgia implicit in the images of the call of the bird and the gaze through the sight of the gun toward his homeland, the Mainland. In Chapter III, I try to point out how Yip Wai-lim's exile situations in different spaces are reflected in his juxtaposed images. His images in most cases are self-contained and self-explanatory. Through the autonomy of his images, he transforms the phenomenon of exile as a signified into a self-sufficient signifier. In Chapter IV and Chapter V, I discuss the relationship between the narrator and the narrated, the exile and the non-exile, or the exile and another exile. In Pai Hsien-yung's narrative, an intersubjectivity often takes place between each pair while in Chang Hsi-kuo's stories, a narrator often goes for an epistemological quest. In Chapter VI, I discuss a unique phenomenon: Ch'en Jo-hsi, a Taiwanese, "returns" to the Mainland. Her "return", I presume, is based on a conception of the dichotomy of the homeland and the motherland. Her idealism turns out to be a disillusionment, and her "return" is followed by another leaving to become another exile. |
