Whosestory is it? - Postmodernism, history and "historiographic metafiction" in the context of Taiwanese literature

Abstract

The commonly encountered account of the postmodern (including postmodernist cultural practices) is the one based on (or very similar to) Fredric Jameson`s view of postmodernism as representing the logic of late capitalism and being defined by the issues of surface, pastiche and paranoia. This also includes Jameson`s criticism of postmodernism`s supposed ahistoricity (or belief that when it uses history, it does so in a naïve and sentimentally nostalgic way). Such is also the prevalent definition of the postmodern in Taiwan, most recently adopted, for example, in Liu Liangya`s new publication, Postmodernism and Postcolonialism: Taiwanese Fiction since 1987. Offering an alternative view, this article deploys Linda Hutcheon`s project of "problematics" of postmodernism to argue that as opposed to the more or less dualistic view of postmodern vs. postcolonial tendencies in contemporary Taiwanese fiction (especially as regards postmodernism`s relation to history) it is also possible to describe the constant revisiting of the past in numerous novels by different authors in post-martial-law Taiwan in terms of Hutcheon`s "postmodern historiographic metafiction." This thesis is further demonstrated by means of an analysis of a short story by Lai Xiangyin.