Sense of Wilderness, Sense of Time

Abstract

Taiwanese writer Mingyi Wu (吳明益, b. 1974) has garnered widespread scholarly attention for his perfection of Taiwanese nature writing. His nature writing The Book of Lost Butterflies (迷蝶誌—Midiezhi, 2001), The Dao of Butterflies (蝶9053— Diedao, 2003), and So Much Water So Close to Home (家離水邊那麼近—Jiali shuibian name-jin, 2007) enjoyed wide circulation and received numerous literary awards.¹ Celebrating “the experience of ‘wilderness,’ if not “wildness’“ (著眼在野性—wildness, 而僅止於荒野—wilderness),² Wu attempts to localize the nature writing form and turn this Western literary genre introduced to Taiwan in the early 1980s into a culturally nativized environmental criticism (“Forward“ 12). He supplemented “huangye“ (荒野) with its English equivalent, “wilderness,“ when delineating a “modern Taiwanese nature writing“ (現代台灣自然書寫— xiandaiziranshusie), relating, referencing, and reinforcing its English/American origin and value. Huangye or wilderness appears frequently as a readily available ecocritical nomenclature for the whole complex of fantasies surrounding and constituting nature—that is, as an evocative name for the ideal nature of Taiwanese ecocritical imagination. In Wu’s nature writing, interestingly, wilderness, as a translated Euro-American concept, has also taken on Taoist and local meanings to suggest an enduring record of and testimony to nature’s process of evolution and regeneration.