From Onlooking To Identification

TaiPei Jen and Crystal Boys are the two disputed and influencial works written by PaiHsien-yung after he went to America. This paper is a compared reading between the two works, focusing on the different narratations of TaiPei in them, especially of the city and its people, which displays PaiHsien-yung's gradual identifying with TaiPei and the"Spirit of TaiPei Jen"narrated in Crystal Boys.The preface is a brief summary of the history of the comments on TaiPei Jen and Crystal Boys made by domestic and overseas circles of scholars over more than forty years, and the research focus in nowadays, thus to define the subject of this paper. This paper consists of three parts. From the angle of narratology, the frist part starts its study on seven novels included in TaiPei Jen , thus to reveal the narrative tactics employed by the author to describe the obscure and dark life of parental generation. Firstly is on the level of time: Winter Day, the symbol of the loose end, is the aesthetic image of PaiHsien-yung's cultural pessimism at that time . Secondly is on the level of the scene: the enclosed private garden and living rooms show that PaiHsien-yung's sharp writings on the marginal people in a gloomy environment. Thirdly is on the level of space: compared with the mainland image in this fiction, TaiPei is a copy, so it is not given a positive description. In short, the parental generation talk to themselves with no onlookers. Therefore, the title, TaiPei Jen , is an irony to its real content.The second part analyses the repeated narration of the relationship between TaiPei city and its people in Crystal Boys. Firstly , this f iction shows us the colourful city, TaiPei, describing not only its real geographical space and details in normal life, but also its natural climate. All these descriptions participate in the narrative process of this fiction with the main leading clue of several young men's homosexuality in the city. Compared with TaiPei people's overlooking their city, the objective description of TaiPei in Crystal Boys provides an extensive context for the theme, which diaplays PaiHsien-yung's identitywith TaiPei. Secondly, this part points out that through the onlooking of the new generation, readers see that the older generation still stick to the past and obstinately contend with today's reality. Because of the homosexuality, intense contradictions happen between the two generations.A more complicated phenominon is that the identification occurred between them still exists confronted with their contradictions. Through the characterization of the image of an old man and the naratation of a father-and-son relationship, this fiction enables readers to see the beautiful scene of the two generations'forgiveing each other enventually. PaiHsien-yung successfully accomplishes the displaying of the"Spirit of TaiPei Jen".The last part concludes that there does exist such a possibility that we can read the modernist works by romanticism theory,and the reason why PaiHsien-yung can show us successfully the spirit of TaiPei Jen is his romantic emotion.