Ideology and Poetics in Wang Wen-hsing’s Chia-p’ien and
James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

By Hui-Ling Lin

Abstract

This paper compares Wang Wen-hsing’s A Family Catastrophe (Chia-Pien) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the folloiwing directions : it questions how techniques of the modernist novel are used to portray ideological conflicts in different cultural settings and examines the different poetics at work in these two novels. It demonstrates how the modernist novel in Taiwan is quite distinct from the modernist novel in Europe: namely, this distinction arises from the very different kinds of cultural struggle that characterize Taiwanese life.
In this paper I employ various critical stances of Althusser, Adorno, and Pierre Macherey.
I will also take into account the notion of Joycean “semi-colonialism” in recent Joyce studies. My argument is that the hero in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man foregrounds Joyce’s modernist project by embodying himself as the self-fashioned artist.  Stephen Daedalus resolves his ideological struggles by overcoming them through an ideology of the artist in the mode of an artistic cosmopolitanism. Wang Wen-hsing’s anti-hero or mock-hero in A Family Catastrophe—presented in fragments as an artistically sensitive “historian”—responds to a different cultural dilemma. The problem of inadequacy is complicated in the novel through employing strategic distortions both in language and ideology. It captures the unresolved problems of a generation in Taiwan which sought transformation in the realms of art as well as life, but didn’t know how or if to turn toward the East or the West. As a shocking artwork, A Family Catastrophe inaugurates a post-modern poetics in Taiwanese fiction.

Keywords：Wang Wen-hsing 王文興、A Family Catastrophe (Chia-Pien)《家變》、Taiwan、Modernism、James Joyce、A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man、Psycho-narration、Althusser、ISAs、Adorno、The fragment、Post-modern novel