| As a Chinese writer living in America, Guo Songfen was born in Taiwan at the end of Japanese occupation, grew up during the period of KMT’s recovery and "martial law,"then spent the rest of his life in the United States. He is deeply influenced by the culture of Taiwan, the Chinese mainland, Japan and America. Most of his novels scrutinize Taiwan in the view of spectators with multiple horizons, and expand from the particularities of Taiwan to the universalities of the world. This "inclusivity" makes his novels difficult to be classified.Guo Songfen grew up in an art family with a mulit-disciplinary education background consisting of philosophy, English, and comparative literature. His novels are filled with peculiar metaphysical meaning and aesthetic value. Because of his participation in the Baodiao movement in his early years, he was blacklisted by Taiwan authorities. At the same time, he spent eight years alone in the construction of utopian political theories. His novels represent another face of introspective political literature, and reflect his uncompromising emotions of idealism. He separated himself from storms of life and opened up a piece of land in literary world that goes beyond the boundaries of geopolitics, border, identity and cultural background. With his fluid Chinese writing, he creates classics of distinct literary identity, contemplating and introspecting on politics, history and humanity. Together with his generation of Taiwanese, he tries to find the essence modernity.During the intermittent creative career of Guo Songfen, his views regarding literature experienced two major shifts. From 1970 to June 1983, his writing laid particular emphasis on political deconstruction and social criticism. He was devoted to diverting his former passion for politics into the literary field, in effect using political reflection as a means to bid farewell to politics. After pulling himself back to reality from the pipe dream of utopian political theory, Guo Songfen from July 1983 to September 1989 turned to describing the reaction of individual subjectivity in Taiwan. He used human nature to cause common emotional resonance and reflection on the essence of life. His second change began in 1997, as Guo Songfen, in the late period of his career, cooled down from the rush of modernist literature and turned to "Rewriting history", recreating times past by recombining the memories of history and narrating the historical figures.Guo Songfen always insisted on his self-indulgent esthetics with despair and nihility despite the distinct discrepancy in the pith of his productions in different periods. As a "squeamish" writer in character and spirit, he tried his best to refine his expressions to make his works condensed. He is sober and accomplished at dealing with artistic forms, such as narration, time logic and rhetoric, and he dedicated his life to seeking the essentials of existence:to redeem his own soul and to realize the bleakness of human beings from the perspective of existentialism.Furthermore, in his three periods of writing, Guo Songfen shows his awareness of his role as inheritor of criticism of existentialism as well as his penchant for May 4th-style soul searching. His work makes reference to the western modernism, the natural applications of psychoanalysis, and a rational query of Christian culture. As he integrates ideological elements extracted from Sutter, Camus, Flaubert, Lu Xun and Shen Congwen into his own strong personal style, Guo Songfen’s writing reflects a world, including his homeland of Taiwan, yearning for emotional sustenance. |
