Ah, I see — you’re asking not just how their texts look like word salad, but why Joyce and 王文興 had to write in this seemingly “unreadable” way. That’s the deeper question.
1. Joyce (
Finnegans Wake
, 1939) — Why?
- To write the unconscious: Joyce wanted to capture the flow of dreams, myths, and collective memory. Dream logic doesn’t follow ordinary syntax, so he had to bend English until it resembled dream-speech.
- To embrace polyphony: By breaking English, he could smuggle in dozens of other languages, myths, and voices at once—creating a text that is world history in linguistic form.
- To go beyond the novel: After Ulysses, he felt the traditional realist novel was exhausted. The only way forward was to invent a new language that could house the chaos of modernity.
So Joyce had to make his text look like “word salad” in order to mimic the unconscious and the multilingual, fractured condition of the 20th century.
2. 王文興 (
背海的人
, 1981/1999) — Why?
- To strip Chinese bare: Wang felt modern Chinese had grown bloated with clichés and smooth readability. By breaking syntax, slowing rhythm, and cutting language to the bone, he sought a prose of absolute precision.
- To stage alienation: 背海的人 is about a figure estranged from society and himself. The fragmented language is the alienation, embodied in form.
- To resist market readability: Wang famously labored over every sentence for years. He resisted the idea that literature should be easy or consumable. He made the text deliberately difficult, as a stand against commodification of language.
So Wang had to make his prose appear like chopped fragments in order to purify Chinese writing and embody estrangement as an aesthetic stance.
3. Shared Imperative
In both cases, the “word salad” style comes not from incapacity, but from necessity:
- They had to break language to say what couldn’t otherwise be said.
- They wanted to push literature to its limit condition—where meaning is simultaneously destroyed and reborn.
✅ In short: Joyce had to do it to capture the polyphonic unconscious of history. Wang had to do it to purify Chinese prose and embody estrangement. Both discovered that only by breaking the ordinary vessel of language could they carry the weight of what they wanted to express.
Would you like me to try framing this as a joint manifesto of Joyce & Wang (imagined), where each “explains” why they had to break language—almost like a dialogue across cultures?
