writing during and immediately after World War I. In Postcards from
the Trenches, Booth contends that the literature of World War I
captures the conflict between the notion of progress that predomi-
nated in the Victorian age and the immobility of fighting that charac-
terized the battles of the Great War. Citing historians Modris
Ecksteins, John Keegan, and Asa Briggs, she contends that during the
nineteenth century the concept of linear time that came from a view of
personal and natural progress held sway. This was the age of Darwin
and Marx, the Industrial Revolution, the growth of industries and
markets, and the expansion of colonial empires. The concept of
progress influenced the ways in which people viewed war as well;
Booth makes reference to Keegan in her discussion of Edward Creasy’s
notion of “decisive battles.” Rather than seeing war as evil, a violation
of “Christian formulations of justice” that derailed progress, Creasy
concluded that war actually played a key role in shaping the world
(105). Thus for most people in Britain and France, according to
Ecksteins, “the war... was a stage in the march of civilization, in the
continuation of progress” (105).
The unfolding of the military campaigns of World War I did not fit
within this conceptual framework of progress brought about by deci-
sive battles. Rather than lightning battles and advancing movement,
fighting in Europe quickly devolved into trench warfare exemplified
by immobility and attrition. Despite the high cost in human life, the
war grew static with little progress to report. The impact of these
trends on literature came, in Booth’s view, in moves away from plot-
ting war as a story and seeing it more as a condition (12). She notes:
“Attrition takes the story out of war by reconstituting its action. War’s
plot is no longer geared toward battle but rather spreads itself thin
over the maintenance of routine” (108). She argues that war derails
the sense of narrative sequence of beginning, middle, and end by
substituting a condition that, “because static, forces narrative to circle
around either a single moment or a series of moments that overlap and
repeat themselves” (108). With the collapse of plot comes the fading
of climax and of resolution as both of these require story development.
The nature of literature during and after World War I changed with
the breakdown of narrative and the tendency to depict static conditions
rather than vectors of action moving forward.
Half a world away and some forty years later, Ya Xian found him-
self in a similar situation as the modernist writers in Britain. A climate
of war persisted in Taiwan during the late-1950s and early-1960s as
the country remained under martial law and the government actively
promulgated calls for anticommunism and the recovery of mainland
62 Steven L. Riep