Soliloquy Under Tradition

Soliloquy Under Tradition is Li Ao's breakout work. It collects twenty essays he wrote between 1961 and 1963; the author selected and assembled them in 1963, and their publication in Taiwan aroused widespread controversy and made Li Ao famous. The word "soliloquy" in the title is the author's own account: the attitude of resistance and contempt for tradition in these pieces felt "rather lonely" at the time, and all these thousands of words could only count as a personal soliloquy. The subjects look like a "miscellany": some discuss men's love and bachelor life, some women's clothes and "Miss China," some a mother's dreams and family trivia, some the absurdity of the law, the survival or abolition of Chinese medicine, the authority of the old and the prospects of the young; essays such as "Old People and Sticks" and "Thirteen Years and Thirteen Months" directly address the older generation's suppression of the young and caused a sensation in Taiwan's literary world. Running through them all is Li Ao's distinctive frankness and relish for satire: he calls these writings "wild and rebellious goods," holds that writing matters for conveying meaning and that form need not be fussy, and insists that a grinning, flippant piece can still be an essay and that the seriocomic can still be a major work. Li Ao's style is concise, biting, and often humorous, with extremely clear judgments of right and wrong and of morality; he also frequently blends historical research, documentary citation, and essayistic technique, creating a highly recognizable style. The book's critiques of traditional ethics, the education system, ideas of love, and the situation of women were quite shocking in the social context of the time and set the tone for the "critic" role Li Ao would play for decades. Read today, it offers both a cross-section of Taiwan's intellectual atmosphere in the 1960s and a glimpse of a young writer's sharpness and bias as he used words to collide with preconceptions.