Collective Cultural Identity Analysis

443126 Jing Wang
L04 449 Writing from the Periphery
The Question of Collective Cultural Identity in Notes of a Desolate Man Notes of a Desolate Man not only depicts a homosexual man’s wonder of the issue of life and death, of love and loneliness, but is a work that quests beyond that. One of the issues it addresses is the question of the collective identity, seen in that how the characters struggle between their Selves and the collective Other. That being said, this paper aims to discuss the question of collective cultural identity in the novel by focusing on the process of the protagonist, Shao, in using writing to position a new self confronting the collective. It argues the transcendence of the narrator’s self at length in crossing
the binarism of the collective cultural identity as a core/periphery, an either/or divide.
To reach this conclusion, it is necessary to look at the phases the narrator goes through in finding his own voice in relation to the collective cultural identity. The first phase is described as “the happy age without doubts about identities” when everybody is assigned an identity that encompasses everything (Ch.5). The narrator, Shao, is thus “authentic” in every sense and possesses this “authentic Chinese” identity as a monolithic and collective one. The break with this innocent age and beginning of his wander around as a desolate man takes place at the outbreak of the sexual consciousness of the gay community against the backdrop of democratization in the 80s in Taiwan. The collective identity is broken into pieces, resulting in the concurrence of several cores and peripheries with cores in each periphery as well. It is seen that Shao and his friend, Yao, go onto a diverged path though both remain desolate in the sense that neither has found a positioned self against the broader context. Yao chooses to be the core of the periphery and appears to find his position in the postmodern, fragmented world, yet this condition is fragile at best, as seen in how he remains a “fly man” even if he seems grounded in a collective movement he believes in. Shao, on
the other hand, chooses to exile in the periphery of the periphery. He loses a collective identity and wanders around in the collective world. The turning point of Shao to find his own position within a collective world is the moment he acknowledges the power of words and writing. It seems that Yongjie, who saves Shao from the Ying, helps him to link his old and new selves. However, his salvation ultimately comes from writing. It is through writing that he can finally situate himself in the struggle between the core and the periphery, upon his acknowledgement of the always already lost “authenticity” of his collective identity in national and cultural terms. His “relics of youth” residing in the collective identity as Chinese of the “happy age” actually is “never lived” and that collective identity can only exist in words (Ch. 13). His journey of finding an identity continues and can best be described as a search for a self-identity which is unfixed in relation to the old collective identity and new possibilities. By doing so, he achieves an individualized hybrid identity that is no less authentic than the “original” which is also a making after all (Chen “The ‘Right’,”17). As Chen puts it, his writing does not situate himself in patriotism in the query of voicing his peripheral identity against the core but rather crosses national and cultural boundaries into a globalized one (“Globalized,” 232-4). His success is thus seen in avoiding essentializing himself in the binarism of a core/periphery, an either/or collective cultural identity and achieving a self-determined identity in relation to the collective Other.