Le Moulin: A Forgotten Taiwanese Avant-garde Modernist Magazine

Le Moulin, an avant-garde magazine published in Taiwan in the 1930s, challenges the assumption that the transnational turn helps Western modernist periodical studies bring diverse and regional modernisms into conversation. Published by Taiwanese poets who had studied in Japan between the 1920s and 1930s, Japanese-language Le Moulin was an ephemeral modernist magazine emphasizing surrealist literature, hyperbolic imagery, and transnational modern life. It only had four issues and merely seventy-five copies per each issue were available between 1933 and 1934. The Moulin poets, through reading Japanese translations of the writing of the French Surrealists and studying Japanese Surrealist works, constructed a sense of synchronous effect in their poetic texts to reshape Taiwanese literature in the Japanese colonial period. In addition, they published their poems, short stories, and poetics in local and popular newspapers, advocating their aesthetic theory and innovative literary experiments. In other words, the Moulin poets established their cultural bonds not only through a high-end, non-commercial magazine but through a common, daily readership. Le Moulin showed how the transnational Surrealist movement reached East-Asian intellectuals through translation and empowered these avant-garde poets to disagree with the proletarian doctrines that Taiwanese left-wing literary circles promoted to dismantle Japanese colonialism. However, because the surrealist aesthetics the Moulin poets adored were not welcomed by their contemporary proletarian writers, and because there is only one surviving hard copy of number three of this short-lived modernist magazine, Le Moulin has been forgotten over the past seventy years, remaining absent from this transnational modernist network. After the KMT regime came to Taiwan in 1949, Mandarin was ruled as the only official language. Furthermore, this colonial power endeavored to purge socialist and communist thoughts and activities between the 1950s and the 1980s. Material ephemerality as well as linguistic and political suppression erased Le Moulin from Taiwanese literary history and cultural memory. Global modernist scholars and digital humanities projects attempt to expand the scope of modernisms with different temporalities and geographies. In these transnational and digital networks, temporalities are not necessarily linear, structured with a genealogical trace, but are multi-layered, multi-directional, and synchronous, as Le Moulin shows. Meanwhile, the reconsideration of geographies brings colonial literatures and the global south into international modernist conversations. However, modernist scholarship tends to simultaneously lock modernist studies into an Anglo-American-European circuit and reemphasize the North-Atlantic literary exchanges that have accumulated over decades. This article problematizes the “Pan-Atlantic” perspectives that have dominated transnational periodical magazines studies and shows how a Taiwanese literary magazine, published under Japanese colonial rule and far away from the Western metropolises, challenges the current breadth of modernist periodical studies, and expands the literary territories modernist scholars can explore. 

Modernist Magazines in Global Modernisms

Modernist magazines have been regarded as one of the avant-garde literary forms since the late nineteenth century. In recent years, scholarship has focused on literary production, print culture, readerships, experimentalism, social and, increasingly, radical networks (Churchill and McKible; Morrison).[1] Recently, digital humanities projects such as the UK Modernist Magazines Project and the US Modernist Journals Project have contributed to preserving the afterlife of short-lived modernist magazines and help scholars easily access these ephemeral and out-of-print modernist works. The study of magazines indeed extends the trajectories and concerns of modernist studies; however, I argue, it simultaneously reinforces an established Anglo-American-European circuit, emphasizing the literary conversations produced by particularly celebrated literary magazines, and treating North-Atlantic literary studies as the main audience of such research. Though modernist magazines provide a platform where diverse discourses and radical thoughts become visible, the majority of periodicals researched are Anglo-American or Eurocentric. Moreover, some of the high-profile digital humanities projects on modernist magazines like The Modernist Journals Project and The Modernist Magazines Project have an anglophone focus.[2] If modernist magazines are a “world form” as Eric Bulson’s book title claims, the study of this medium should also possess its multi-cultural diversities of languages, nations, and temporalities.[3] Nevertheless, over the last two decades the study of Western modernist magazines still resides in a transatlantic network and reconfirm English-language literary magazines to their institutional and aesthetic importance. I will demonstrate how a Taiwanese avant-garde magazine exposes the systemic absences within modernist magazines studies and argue that historicizing and translating modernist magazines from non-Western national and regional areas prove crucial to diversifying the transnational modernities that global modernist scholars emphasize. 

Le Moulin Poetry Society

In the third issue of Le Moulin, Yang Ch’ih-ch’ang, a leading member of the Moulin Poetry Society, rigorously advocated his poetic theory:

Poets always produce great poems during fires like this. . . . Our home Taiwan is blessed especially by such poetic contemplation. The literature we produce features the color of banana and music of buffalo, as well as the love songs of indigenous girls. Literature of the 19th century grew within the thinness veiled by music. Modern 20th century literature constantly demands powerful colors and angles. In this case, Taiwan is the hotbed of literature, and poets work inside transparent curtains. . . . Poems summon fire and poets create poems.[4]

Similar to those famous avant-garde manifestos promoting innovative literary forms, emphasis on surreal imagination and free play of sensations, in this declarative piece Yang introduced surrealist poetics to Taiwanese literary circles in which the doctrines of proletarian literature had exerted considerable influence.[5] Yang argued that Taiwanese writing brought freshness and vitality to modernist literature, while this experimental literary movement produced new spirit and freedom in poetry.

Though Yang and other Moulin poets blew a surrealist breeze through Taiwan’s literature, Le Moulin was an ephemeral modernist magazine and criticized by left-wing writers. The Moulin Poetry Society was established by a group of Taiwanese poets who had studied in Tokyo between the late 1920s and the early 1930s. During their Tokyo years, these young poets such as Yang Ch’ih-ch’ang and Li Chang-jui were amazed by the Japanese Surrealist movement and modern poetry. Japanese poet and critic, Nishiwaki Junzaburō, studying in England and familiar with modernist works of Charles Baudelaire, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and André Breton, brought these avant-garde thoughts back to Keiō University in 1926. Other writers like Haruyama Yukio, Kitasono Katué, and Takiguchi Shuzo followed this literary approach to marketing the new surrealist spirit and, along with it, a novel language for poetry, with montage and fragments becoming crucial to the Japanese Surrealist movement. In Poetry and Poetics, these Japanese avant-garde writers translated and introduced works by Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, Charles Baudelaire, as well as futurists and Dadaist to Japanese readers. Yang was strongly committed to French and Japanese surrealist poetics: he not only learned French to study modernist writers but also adored the texts of Nishiwaki and Haruyama.[6] After completing (or not completing) their studies in Japan and returning to Taiwan, these poets living in Tainan started to exchange their poems and stories of the avant-garde milieu they had experienced in Tokyo. Between 1933 and 1934, the Moulin poets published four issues of Le Moulin which included their poems, short stories, and some literary criticism. The name Le Moulin was associated with: “the famous French theater Le Moulin”; “the windmills that dot the landscape of saline areas like Chiku and Peimen in Tainan”; and an “allusion to the need of fresh air to foster a new atmosphere in our poetic circles.”[7] Even for a so-called “little magazine,” Le Moulin’s print run was remarkably small: each issue only had seventy-five copies and its lifespan was no longer than four issues. The aesthetic approach of the Moulin poets was not compatible with the Taiwanese left-wing literary movement popular in the 1920s and the 1930s, which maintained that literature should represent the suffering caused by Japanese colonization and should unite the Taiwanese people in rebellion against the Japanese colonizer. The Moulin poets’ emphasis on art for art’s sake and the pursuit of experimental poetics were not appreciated by their literary contemporaries. In Yang’s 1985 recollection, he admitted that the short-lived Le Moulin was “a painful encounter of being encircled and suppressed by a society that in general did not understand” (Kuo-ch’ing Tu, “Yang Ch’ih-ch’ang,” xii).

Not only was it diminished in the 1930s, Le Moulin was also forgotten over the following seventy years. With the mandating in 1949 of Mandarin as the only official language to be taught and used in educational and public spheres, those Taiwanese writers who received a Japanese education needed to learn a new language if they wished to continue their literary career. In the KMT regime’s desperate efforts to eradicate communist movements and to persecute intellectuals who had socialist thoughts, Moulin poet Li Chang-jui was wrongly accused of being associated with insurrection and sentenced to death. This coercive and authoritarian dominance of culture and politics between 1949 and 1987, the so-called White Terror, silenced Le Moulin.[8] Now only one hard copy (number three) survives and is housed in the National Museum of Taiwan Literature. Le Moulin was physically transitory, and has since faded from visible and invisible collecting endeavors.

Challenges Le Moulin brings to Modernist Magazines Studies

Le Moulin raises the following questions: can the current transnational turn of Western modernist periodical studies engage a variety of national and regional modernisms in conversation, especially when these indigenous modernisms occurred in colonies? The hybridity of Le Moulin represents a challenge for Western modernist magazines studies and global modernisms more broadly. Four Taiwanese and three Japanese writers shared their literary works and criticisms in Japanese in Le Moulin. The collaboration between writers of two countries, the use of the colonizer’s language, and the literary experiments mixed with French and Japanese Surrealist trends as well as the Taiwanese locality cross the boundaries of national and regional modernisms. Le Moulin itself was a transnational product: it adopted an economic, slight form popular in the early twentieth-century print industry to market the Moulin poets’ works. It served as a cross-national platform where French “Demi Rêve,” Nishiwaki’s poetic spirit, and Taiwan’s tropicality assembled together. Meanwhile, this modernist magazine grew in a Japanese colony.[9] Though the Taiwanese Moulin poets used Japanese as their mother tongue to demonstrate their pursuit of pure poetry, the literariness Le Moulin presented was seriously challenged. Shimamoto Teppei, a Japanese Moulin poet, “once offered a strong criticism, saying that the works published in Le Moulin lacked musicality and the descriptions were vague and made no sense to the readers” (Tzu-ch’iao Yang, “The Transplanted Flower,” 94). Shimamoto’s comment reveals his doubt that colonial atmospheres could produce “qualified” literary works that achieved the rigorous standards of modernist aesthetics. Moreover, Shimamoto’s critique also reflects a blind spot within Western modernist periodical studies: while the transnational turn encourages researchers to explore more modernist texts from areas ignored by Anglo-American-European modernism, can this change really deconstruct the preexisting hierarchies and imbalanced power relations that undergird our understanding of modernisms? How can modernist texts and movements emerging in colonies be incorporated into this matrix?  

The literary aesthetics that the Moulin poets possessed also positioned them in an ambiguous place in Taiwanese literary circles. In France, modernist, surrealist, Dadaist, and symbolist writers were, more or less, affiliated with anarchist and left-wing movements. Most modernist writers, though not communists, were sympathetic to socialist ideals. Japanese modernist writers in the 1920s had this tendency as well. Hagiwara Kyojiro, founder of Aka to Kuro, a short-lived radical literary magazine, was an anarchist. Although members of Poetry and Poetics revered the new spirit of modern poetry and countered Marxist doctrines, they still published proletarian poems in their magazines. Nevertheless, the Moulin poets did not have a chance to reconcile their avant-gardist aesthetics with the proletarian torch carried by other Taiwanese literary circles. For Taiwanese writers and others regarded as secondary citizens and discriminated against by the colonizer, the priorities were to encourage the Taiwanese people to rise up against Japanese colonization and to shape Taiwanese subjectivity. Subsequently, novels with an emphasis on proletarian themes and colonial hardship became the literary mainstream in the 1920s and 1930s as evidenced in magazines such as Taiwan Literature and Taiwan New Literature. Li obviously disagreed with this Marxist trend and further questioned the emptiness that Taiwan literature symbolized.[10] In “Poet’s Anemia: Literature of This Island,” Li audaciously addressed how his literary pursuit differed from those left-wing writers:

                                    I don’t know Chinese so I use Japanese to write, and don’t have any ambition to speak for the people . . . .

                        We have the resentment and resistance you depict but we don’t write them on purpose. . . . Considering from a bigger literary scope, I think our literary attitude should be accepted.

                                    Novels may not be able to exist beyond reality, but poetry is more abstract if it is distracted from reality.[11]

Li’s straightforward and powerful response to Taiwanese proletarian writers criticized the narrowness of these literary circles. Li believed that the themes of Taiwanese literature should not be limited to mass poverty, peasant life, and heroism and doubted if a literary text emphasizing the colonial subject’s rebellion and anger with plain words could truly be considered a good work of literature.

Li’s critique of his literary contemporaries exposes an inner tension within left-wing aesthetics that has remained under-examined within Western modernist periodical studies. For Anglo-American modernist magazines such as The Masses, The Liberator, or The Freewoman, their progressive standpoints promoted writers of different backgrounds, experimental texts, and radical political thoughts. Max Eastman was a Jewish editor of The Masses supporting socialism and the Harlem Renaissance, while Claude McKay published his famous protest poem, “If We Must Die,” in The Liberator in 1919. In the Anglo-American modernist network, left-wing thought and literary trends, avant-gardist aesthetics, race narratives, and political activism could coexist together in modernist magazines. However, in the Taiwanese colonial context, left-wing writers believed that the needs of the political and proletarian class should outweigh the pursuit of aesthetics. Li’s reflection of the debate between the aesthetic and the political demonstrated the intrinsic dilemma Taiwanese people encountered. Li understood the importance of the rebellious consciousness the colonial subject should develop, but he refused to sacrifice literary purity and absoluteness to political appeals. He claimed: “Literature, is an absolute and independent art. It cannot be used by any strategies. I have no doubt of this” (Li, “Poet’s Anemia,” 98). While Faith Binckes contends that “the notion that modernism generally separated the aesthetic from the political . . . has been thoroughly revised by the study of periodicals and magazines over the last two decades,” Li’s literary belief urges global modernist scholars to carefully reconsider the tension and possibility of a coexistence between art and politics in a colonial context.[12]

Not only did their surrealist aesthetics distance the Moulin poets from their literary left-wing counterparts, the language policy and coercive measures the KMT practiced all but eradicated Le Moulin from Taiwanese literary history. Seventy-five copies per issue was small-scale, even at the time of circulation, and over the proceeding years fewer and fewer people remembered this avant-garde magazine and had difficulties preserving copies. Following Li’s execution in 1952, his family burnt and discarded his books and collections to avoid unnecessary and non-stop harassment from the police. Under the authoritarian regime, Le Moulin experienced both linguistic and political pressure. The White Terror further cut Le Moulin’s modernist connections with Taiwanese literature. In the 1950s another “New Poetry” movement dominated Taiwanese literary circles. Poets such as Ji Xian and Lou Fu migrating from China to Taiwan after 1949 proposed a “horizontal transplant,” linking their Surrealist poems with Baudelairean Symbolism and Mallaméan poetics. This modernist wave soon changed the Taiwanese literary environment and more writers dedicated themselves to modernist practices from novels and poetry to theater. Unfortunately, Le Moulin and the Moulin Poetry Society remained buried in silence. 

The linguistic and political aphasia imposed on Le Moulin questions the optimistic assumption that digital humanities help to revive and diversify the study of modernist magazines. How can the digital humanities preserve a modernist magazine’s afterlife if this magazine was not simply transitory but actually left no hard copies? Today’s digital humanities projects aim to digitize modernist magazines so as to broaden researchers’ access to primary sources. These projects, however, have yet to construct a synchronous and inclusive platform that collects different mediums such as newspaper, music, and film to allow scholars to study modernist magazines within their social and political contexts. Though Le Moulin was an ephemeral literary magazine, the Moulin poets also actively published their criticisms and works in Tainan Shinpō [Tainan News], Tainan Nichinichi Shinpō [Tainan Daily News], and other literary magazines. Yang was the editor of the literary supplement to Tainan Shinpō in 1933 and published a plethora of literary works contributed by the Moulin poets in literary columns. In the 1930s these mass newspapers were the main channels for the intellectual and literate Taiwanese people to acquire new knowledge and appreciate literary works. Through a modernist magazine and daily newspapers, these avant-garde writers strived to cultivate multi-dimensional circuits to publicize their poetics and artistic endeavors. In time, I hope that digital humanities projects will be able to create platforms that enable this synchronicity to be showcased.

Conclusion: Historicizing and Translating Modernist Magazines of Different Temporalities

The transnational turn that global modernist scholars hail should focus on rigorously historicizing and translating modernist magazines of different temporalities. Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross have observed that “anthology-making has been one of the principal strategies by which modernism has been consolidated and contested.”[13] This method of collecting and anthologizing, I agree, proves effective in allowing scholars and readers to understand multi-faceted modernisms in different areas and temporalities. By collaborating with experts in local languages and literatures, Global Modernists on Modernism anthologizes diverse and non-Western modernist texts from the Global South, Middle East, and Asia. The annotating and translating effort foregrounded in projects such as this one establishes conversations between modernist texts of diverse temporalities and further investigates how global modernisms challenge the imbalanced power relations inscribed in modernist studies. In giving voice to silenced, non-Western modernist texts like Le Moulin, we redefine the categories of modernism and modernity. While transnational modernist studies is currently flourishing, focal points still tend to rest on Eurocentric perspectives and geohistorical standpoints. Contemporary modernist periodical studies should avoid too close an alignment with either Susan Stanford Friedman’s viewpoint that modernism is “the expressive domain of modernity,” or a more traditional approach that modernism derives from modernity.[14] Instead, we should challenge how institutional training and digital resources as they stand now blind us to the discovery of silenced modernist magazines. Historicizing and translating the temporalities of Le Moulin enable global modernist scholars to reconsider their interpretive endeavors and give this forgotten modernist magazine its afterlife.