陳映眞의 『忠孝公園』에 나타난 ‘不忠’과 ‘不孝’ ― 식민지 남성의 연약함을 중심으로 ―

Abstract

Taiwan's complicated colony background was used as a good source of material for the author's writing a novel. Yingzhen Chen's 『忠孝公園』(Zhongxiao Park) is a novel about an individual and his nation's love and hatred and revenge. The main characters of the novel are all males. Here, this paper intends to analyze how a plane novel enlivened a vulnerable male image in a colonized nation stereoscopically. The first subject matter is of the empire's reverse writing. The places in the colony and abroad described in 『忠孝公園』are very complicated. Starting from Taipei's '忠孝公園,' the background goes backward to the Japanese Empire colonization period, the Manchurian Empire, the Pacific War, and the Chinese Civil War. The novel also viewed the relationship between the empire and the colony as a contrasting one involving morality and immorality, perfection and destruction, beauty and ugliness, thus describing the melancholy colonial period. The second subject matter is of an imperfect life, that is, an aged soul in '忠孝公園' and '歸鄕(hometown).' This is again divided into two phases. They are of an old man's tears and unbearable feeling of facing a colonial identity. Yingzhen Chen described the male figure vulnerably as it cannot stand even a single attack. Because one's identity cannot be acknowledged, a male's tears touch heartstrings of the reader and give a feeling of anxiety and unrest. An old male of a colonial identity is like a helpless child, and how could anyone can expect "忠(loyalty)" and "孝(filial piety)"! There lies difficulty of existence which one cannot find out how to establish one's identity between the attachment to the past and the despair of the presence. The time has changed, and the soul wondering in the park also changed accordingly. Wouldn't the author's message be aiming for co-existence of various surrounding beings, who were liberated from imperialism but had differences, in order to pursue creative transcendence for the sake of political resistance from a perspective of Post-Colonialism ultimately to restore oppressed elements?