Wai-lim Yip: Overcoming Disjunctions

A well-known modern poet-critic in Taiwan as well as an internationallyacclaimed comparatist and bilingual translator, Wai-lim Yip takes as his task tointerpret, and perhaps to reinvent, Daoist aesthetic for modern society. This thesisregards his poetry and poetics as a whole with full respect to each discipline as anorder self-contained. It aims at seeking their complex junctions and their commoneffort to continually overcome severance leading to possible confluence in literature,culture and life. This thesis exposes the historical trajectory in interactions among his poetry,poetics and life in order to grasp the common order between his poetry and poetics.The author finds that his life is full of disjunctions and confluences, but he never givesup singing silently and criticizing sharply. There are three parts to this thesis. The foreword introduces Wai-lim Yip's works and current research writings onhim, raising at the end a question to be unraveled and answered by the main part ofmy thesis. The main part consists of three chapters: Chapter One, following his physical and cultural exiles from Mainland China toHong Kong, to Taiwan, and to U.S, explains the important influences of differentregional politics, economics, cultures and academic surroundings. Wai-lim Yip'ssense of isolation came from the destruction of indigenous culture by colonial systemin Hong Kong, the inhibition of freedom by the dictatorship of Kuomintang in Taiwan,and the dissimilation of life by the industrialization in U.S. Running through thesethree terrains is a deep-seated feeling of cultural isolation, an angst about thepossibility of Chinese culture being fragmented thoroughly. This cultural vacuum, forWai-lim Yip, can, in part, be traced to the May 4th Movement that has exiled someimportant dimensions of traditional Chinese culture. Chapter two, with the help of the image of 'window', an image dominant in hispoetry, I want, on the one hand, to uncover his life philosophy, including the model ofquest and the model of transformation and, on the other hand, to disclose hisaesthetics, including his aesthetic ideal, poetic structure and language. This chapterends with a discussion of the modern value of his poetry. Chapter three integrates his literary criticism into an open hermeneutics poeticsin his system. It embodies three stages: First, in the70s-80s, he resurfaced a Chineseclassical hermeneutics with 'concrete experience' as a nuclear conception; Second,from the 70s to 90s he opened up discussions of cross-cultural hermeneutics in whichthe question of literary and cultural model became the core; Third, from the 90s on,critical perspectives from cultural studies have been incorporated. By theseanalyses ,we find that Wai-lim Yip stands by his Daoist aesthetics and engendersdialogues with western Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, that his attitude is everquestioning and questing, comparative, critical, and historical, and his approach istruly aesthetically, culturally and politically intertwined with his philosophy oflanguage. He has an ideal of finding modern relevance in Daoist aesthetics, endlesslypersuing multicultural dialogues and cooporations for his utopian cultural community. The last part summarizes the above views. First, Wai-lim Yip's ideal is that wemust leave all forms of beings as they are by nature, and his spiritual projection is toovercome disjunctions leading to possible confluence. Second, his questioning andquesting spirit and his reflective criticism form the inner logic of development. Last,his deep love for and the long anxiety over Chinese culture, especially his passionateinterpretation of the Chinese aesthetic horizon, form the cornerstone of his strength sowell expressed in a complex of landscape representations.