the disenchantment of the life-world, a power that can sustain that
anarchic love of nature that is a characteristic feature of radical ecology”
(Smith 2001: 191).- In addition to repetition, contiguity, and metonymy, other modes of
primary process thinking (linguistic misprision, unconscious “logic”)
include: metaphor, tropes, figures of speech such as periphrasis, ellipsis,
denial, digression, irony, litotes, etc. These and others are touched upon
by Shoshana Felman in her discussion of a (Lacanian) “rhetoric of the
unconscious” (Felman 1985: 119–25, 180–183). Laplanche and Leclaire
list “timelessness, absence of negation and contradiction, condensation,
displacement” (Laplanche and Leclaire 1972: 248). See also the work of
Charles Rycroft for numerous analyses of primary process thinking
(1985; 1992). - Elsewhere, Davis elaborates on this argument: “[L]iterature is a special
mode of knowing which alone, perhaps, gives us an adequate apprehen-
sion of concrete experience. Whereas other ways of thinking inevitably
compromise life’s complexities, literature preserves ‘the whole of things’
in a nonreductive and concrete totality.... So understood, literature, like
philosophy, is a comprehensive and autonomous mode of ontological
knowing” (Davis 1978: 35). - A note on Taiwan’s emergent nature writing canon and an as-of-yet still
to emerge canon of nature writing from the PRC (as of 2007). Marxist
praxis will be essential in our academic considerations of differences
between these two versions of Chinese nature writing, which will surely
beg comparison and contrast in the future. The literature from each place
instantiates the local writer’s attempt to constitute, negotiate, and give
meaning to encounters with his distinct natural surroundings vis-à-vis—
or perhaps, more appropriately, in opposition to—dominant domestic
discourses on nature that are saturated with political ideology. Whether
Marxist-Maoist or Capitalist, domestic nature writers in each milieu have
to take up a linguistic, imagistic, and affective struggle against Taiwan
and PRC public discourses on nature that seek to harmonize and domes-
ticate nature to economic, social, and political goals for national develop-
ment and modernization. Academic studies of nature writing must remain
sensitive to these differing local and domestic contexts. Perhaps both
places, having been overrun by urban sprawl, pollution, and overpopula-
tion, will produce works that focus on nature’s precarious and limited
presence within the urban metropolis. Some of Liu Kexiang’s work, for
instance, repeatedly addresses this unique (non-American, I would argue)
sensitivity to, for want of a better term, “urban wildlife.” - For a much earlier fictional formulation of a very similar type of com-
plexly condensed nostalgia, see Wang Wenxing’s short story “Flaw”
(Wang 1995: 235–245). - The Camus essay “Absurd Freedom,” discusses an analogous paradoxical
state, the “appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of
102 Nick Kaldis