War Memories in the Novels of Tash Aw, Vyvyane Loh, and Tan Twan Eng
2015
Hochschulschrift
Zugriff:
103
Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue (2004) and Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain (2007) share the theme of Malaya and Singapore’s traumatic history of the Japanese Occupation. The three novels tell stories of war memories, through which other types of memory, such as postmemory, cultural memory and ethical memory, sustain the narratives. Underneath these war memories are the novelists’ reflection on distrust and betrayal that not only allude to how people react to the other during wartime, but also illustrate how the generation of postmemory remembers the traumatic Pacific War. Put under the context of war memories, the three novels exemplify diasporic Anglophone Malaysian and Singaporean novelists’ literary access to the repressed history of Malaya, including the history of the Malayan Communist Party. The first chapter deals with Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory, together with a brief retrospection of the history of the MCP and clarification on the status of the Chinese Malay(si)an as outsiders since the heyday of the MCP and Japanese Occupation. Based on the archetypal structure of a son’s retracing the history of his father, this novel brings to light the im/possibility of the representation of history in an age filled with archives. I also regard this novel as Aw’s participation in the revival of the “communist writing” (Magong shuxie) after the publication of a series of related Sinophone novels in the early 2000s. In Chapter Two, I will discuss Loh’s Breaking the Tongue through the lens of cultural memory and violence. Wars are undoubtedly brutal, so the description of trauma and violence cannot be avoided when Loh writes a novel set in warfare. However, Loh is different from the other two authors by accentuating the details of torture and pain. The violence represented in this novel will be elaborated from the perspective of overt violence and insidious violence. Furthermore, Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain, examined in Chapter Three, will be read as a counter example to Loh’s novel in the previous chapter. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army are still depicted in Tan’s novel, but to a much less extent than that in Loh’s novel. The main Japanese character is characterized not as a cruel murderer but as the mentor to the young half-English and half-Chinese protagonist. An intimate relationship is established between the Japanese diplomatic official and the protagonist. Such representation of war memory seems to betray the collective memory of Chinese Malayans. Tan in this novel challenges the connection between one’s side to the good, and the other’s side to the evil. The complex relationship between self and the other in war will be tackled in the light of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s elaborations on a doubled ethical memory, Jacques Derrida’s insights on the foreigner question, and Ashis Nandy’s idea of the intimate enemy.
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War Memories in the Novels of Tash Aw, Vyvyane Loh, and Tan Twan Eng
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Hsiung, Ting-hui ; 熊婷惠 |
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Veröffentlichung: | 2015 |
Medientyp: | Hochschulschrift |
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