Intertextual Trajectories of Remembering

Taiwan’s Authoritarian Past in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract

With the end of the Kuomintang’s authoritarian rule, in the late 1980s, Taiwan gradually opened to a public discussion of its own traumatic past, characterised by systematic government abuse, violent dissent suppression, and general disregard of civil and human rights. The memories of that history found ways to be expressed through a number of different media, including literature. This paper investigates two pieces of post-martial-law fiction, namely Zhu Tianxin’s “Once Upon a Time There Was an Urashima Taro” and Huang Chong-kai’s “Dixson’s Idioms”, which, in different ways and from different
authorial perspectives, elaborate on the experience of political imprisonment during the White Terror. In these texts, intertextuality is consistently used as a strategic narrative device to conjure the past into the present, and therefore constitutes a productive analytical perspective from which to look at Taiwan’s post-authoritarian literary mnemonic practices. 

隨著上世紀八十年代國民黨威權統治的結束，臺灣開始公開審視人們經歷的歷史創傷，深入探討政府對權力的濫用、對異見者的暴力打壓、以及對公民權利和人權的忽視。而文學作品成為這段歷史記憶的重要載體。本文選取朱天心《想我眷村的兄弟們》中的《從前從前有個浦島太郎》和黃崇凱《文藝春秋》中的《狄克森片語》
作為研究對象。這兩篇作品在作者立場和寫作風格上雖然有所不同，但描述的都是白色恐怖時期政治犯的被囚經歷。其中，互文性被用作一種敘事手法，巧妙地將歷史融入現實，構建出一個分析臺灣後威權時代文學記憶的獨特視角。