We can say that — but only if we also add some nuance. Let me unfold it carefully:
1.
Yes — They Are Over-Zealous Experiments in Modernist Language
- Joyce (1939): Finnegans Wake is the extreme endpoint of modernist experimentation. If Ulysses stretched the novel to its limit, Finnegans Wake went beyond — dissolving plot, character, and readability, leaving only a torrent of language. It’s “over-zealous” in that it pushes modernism’s credo (make it new) to near-absurdity.
- 王文興 (1981/1999): 背海的人 similarly rejects smooth storytelling. Wang famously spent years revising single pages, crafting a prose that is “difficult for difficulty’s sake” in the eyes of many readers. His novel exemplifies modernism’s obsession with form over content.
So yes, both texts can be described as modernist word-laboratories, where language becomes the real protagonist.
2.
But — They Are Not Just Over-Zealous
If we stop at “mere experimentation,” we miss the stakes:
- Joyce wasn’t experimenting idly. He was trying to write the unconscious of humanity, a dream-language containing all myths, histories, and tongues. What looks like excess is also ambition to universalize the novel into a total archive.
- Wang wasn’t experimenting idly either. He believed Chinese literature needed purification. By forcing estrangement, fragmentation, and hyper-controlled rhythm, he wanted to renew Chinese prose, resisting its collapse into cliché and market readability.
Both, then, were animated by a serious metaphysical/aesthetic mission.
3.
Modernism as the Common Horizon
- Modernism, East and West, is marked by suspicion of ordinary narrative, a sense that only by breaking form can literature represent the fractured modern condition.
- Joyce represents the European avant-garde culmination.
- Wang represents a Taiwanese/Chinese modernism, drawing from both Western models and local urgency — writing against cultural stagnation, political silence, and the homogenizing tide of “readable” literature.
4.
So the Answer Is Double
- Yes: both are products of modernism’s over-zealous language experiments.
- But: they are not only that. Each also embodies a mission beyond experiment — Joyce’s to contain the unconscious of history, Wang’s to purify Chinese prose and embody alienation.
👉 In other words, calling them “nothing but” over-zealous experiments risks reducing them to empty fireworks. Better to say: they are over-zealous experiments that embody the highest ambitions (and excesses) of modernism.
Would you like me to frame this as a diagnosis of modernism’s pathology — i.e. that Joyce and Wang reveal how modernism, in its zeal, often tips into unreadability, where language devours life? That could give your analysis a sharper critical edge.
