Author ｜
Chi-feng Huang
Abstract ｜
Song-fen Kuo (1938-2005)’s A Shocking Marriage (2012), his final published work, extends the oblique and modernist narrative style he cultivated since the 1980s. Told through the perspective of Yi-Hong—a female observer—the story gradually reveals the constrained conditions of three male intellectuals shaped by Japanese colonialism and Cold War authoritarianism. Saturated with the melancholic symptoms of disillusioned leftist youth, the text simultaneously embeds poetic landscape descriptions that emerge through the female gaze, creating a form of inner resistance and lyrical counter-narration. Echoing Kojin Karatani’s insight into how landscape in modern Japanese literature reflects a subject’s internal resistance to external reality, A Shocking Marriage similarly uses poetic scenery to mediate existential crisis. By placing Songfen Kuo’s leftist literary criticism since the 1960s in dialogue with the novel, this article further examines the narrative strategies and thematic implications of A Shocking Marriage. The study finds that the novel must be read through a female-centered perspective in order to disentangle the complex relationships among the characters. The poetic landscapes in the text operate as a counterforce to grand historical and political discourses, while the positioning of the female subject serves as a reflexive gesture of remorse and selfexamination toward the nation and the era. Ultimately, A Shocking Marriage delineates a historical tableau of the spiritual trajectories of Taiwanese leftist intellectuals across the prewar and postwar periods, alongside the gendered conditions of women of the same generation. At the same time, the novel probes the tensions, ruptures, and possibilities of reconciliation between the Baodiao movement generation, and their fathers’ generation.
keywords ｜
Song-fen Kuo, A Shocking Marriage, male, left melancholy,landscape