“An Organic Behemoth Fossilized by a Black Magic Curse”: The Pseudo-Baroque Illegal Structure of Tangut Inn

Kimchew Ng has once accused Yijun Luo’s 470,000-word Tangut Inn
of being monstrously excessive, but this paper contends that Luo’s feverish
will to write towards infinity grants him the possibility to create a pseudobaroque
space. Kailin Yang has pointed out that Luo “displays the limit
of baroque writing,” but this paper aims to read Tangut Inn in relation to
Taiwan’s complicated historical background, and tries to trace the source of
Luo’s “Baroque fantasy of architecture.” In Taiwan, the “Baroque style” is
often erroneously used to refer to Pseudo-European or Semi-European buildings
constructed under Japanese rule. As far as the history of architecture is
concerned, the Baroque era ended around 1725, yet such Japanese colonial
architecture is indeed conceptually evocative of Baroque architecture, for both
emphasize sovereignty, order, surveillance and light. These four characteristics
define what Tangut Inn is not: the space of Tangut Inn is dark and cramped,
and its structure resembles a temporary “military dependents’ village” that
is illegally built upon a former Japanese colony. Tangut Inn mirrors Taiwan’s
perpetual state of being colonized by different sovereignties and Taiwanese
people’s apathy towards history. Such a state of exception (stato di accezione) is
reflected by Taiwan’s chaotic cityscape, where illegal structures multiply outside
the legitimate space. As a metaphorical illegal structure, the chaotic pastiche of Tangut Inn displays another state of exception: a writing that is located outside
the grammatical space.