Violence of Representation: The Writings of Chen Yingzhen and Shi Mingzheng

Wen-Shan SHIEH

University of California, Davis

 

Beginning in the 1980s, writings by Taiwan writers bringing to light the hidden sufferings caused by the “White Terror” began to emerge. This essay argues that these representations of violent actions such as suicides, governmental crackdowns, and revolutions are best deemed to be part of an overall violence of representation. Its two chief forms are violence represented in writing and violence committed through the act of representation itself. It is best not to draw too firm a line between these two forms, since in so many cases, writing is not only about violence but also is a form of violence in its own right. More crucially, the dynamics and complexity of a writer and his work cannot be exhausted by any critic’s one-sided, intolerant view, arrived at simply to suit his own political or aesthetic preferences.  

My attempt is to illuminate the similarities and differences between the two authors arrested as political prisoners during the 1960s: Chen Yingzhen (b.1937), a leftist writer and Shi Mingzheng (1935-1988), an apolitical poet, painter, and novelist. Holding divergent attitudes toward politics, the fact cannot be neglected that they both have a religious background (Christianity) which influenced their work in different ways. The work of both Chen and Shi drive one to ponder: What or whom is authorized to represent suicide and death? How is it that descriptive power, or a manifesto advanced by an author, is able to become a mode of violence in its own right? Are the protagonists in these two authors’ stories merely typical victims of political coercion, or has some other, unnamable coercion already been internalized within them? When one is dealing with characters devoted to revolution or having suffered as a political prisoner, can one still discern, at work in them, any direct aesthetic experiences that intimately involve the bodily and emotional dimensions?