Faces of Modern American Literaturea Transnational and Transcultural Reading

1
Faces of Modern American Literaturea
Transnational and Transcultural Reading

• Zhu Ying Julia
• American Studies Program
• East China Normal University
• 1 June 2007, Shanghai

2
Outline

• I. The Past is an Inexhaustible ResourceToni
  Morrisons Beloved
• II. The Past Survives through TracesTheresa Hak
  Kyung Chas Dictee
• III. The Past as an Uncanny TrespasserDavid
  Marshall Chans Goblin Fruit

3
Paul Ricoeur The Reality of the Historical Past
(1984)

• three categories
• The Same the past is re-enacted in the
  present through documentary evidence and
  imaginative construction
• The Other the past is a pertinent absence due
  to temporal distance and otherness
• The Analogue the past is re-created by the
  integration of re-enacting and distancing

4
I. The Past is an Inexhaustible ResourceToni
Morrisons Beloved

• a. Living and Imagining the
  Historicalrevising the Same slave-narrative
  tradition
• b. Rememorying the Past Configuring and
  TranslationBeloved and rememory as the Other
• c. History Goes on Repatterned and
  Re-enactedstorytelling as a process of the
  Analogue

5
Toni Morrison

• I cant change the future but I can change
  the past
• (Taylor-Guthrie xiii)

6
National Amnesia

• We live in a land where the past is always
  erased, Morrison contends, the past is absent
  or its romanticized. This American culture
  doesn't encourage dwelling on, let alone coming
  to terms with the truth about the past (Gilroy
  179).

7
Historical Evidence Historical Imagination

• Margaret Garner A Tale of Horror in The
  Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (29 Jan. 1856)

• James Van Der Zees photostory in The Harlem Book
  of the Dead (1978)

8
a. Beloved as a historical novel

• It comes to those terrible spaces that
  nineteenth-century autobiographical slave
  narratives could not write about
• It rips that veil drawn over proceedings too
  terrible to relate (Morrison, Site 110)

• Sethes backAmy a chokecherry tree
• The tree (trace) of scars on Sethes back is a
  living trace or record of the sufferings of the
  slaves a bearer of mute testimony to forgotten
  histories (Ellmann 46)

9
b. Rememory Beloved

• Morrisons coinage
• noun and verb visual and spatial quality
  individual and collective (Beloved 35-36)
• memory as thought with a threat of repetition
  (Derrida 106)
• continual entry and re-entry of past into
  present (Ferguson 112)

• Sethes murdered daughter returnedan incubus of
  personal past
• Survivor from the Middle Passagea historical
  trace
• Unceremoniously buried slavesan absence of
  history

10
c. Reenacting with a Difference

• Definers vs. DefinedSchoolteacher, sheriff, Paul
  D., and Sethe
• double entendre pass on
• sharing overlooking
• ambivalent ending Beloved remembrance
  forgetfulness

11
Historia vs. Fictio (Facere)

• As a work of fiction bound up with history,
  Beloved aims to free, retrospectively, certain
  possibilities that were not actualized in the
  historical past, and to perform its
  liberating function. The quasi-past of fiction in
  this way becomes the detector of possibilities
  buried in the actual past (Ricoeur,
  Interweaving 191-92)

12
II. The Past Survives through TracesTheresa Hak
Kyung Chas Dictee

• From another epic another history. From the
  missing narrative. From the multitude of
  narratives. Missing. From the chronicles. For
  another telling for other recitations
• (Dictee 81)

13
Paul Ricoeur

• the past survives by leaving a trace
• --The Reality of the Historical
  Past (11)

14
Ricoeurs Three Categories

• a. The SameDictee is an imaginative and
  incoherent re-construction of documentary facts
• b. The OtherDictee is a female and
  polycultural side of the Word
• c. The AnalogueDictee is an enigmatic
  re-enactment of history and poetry

15
a. Dictee is a generic hybrid

• Various dictation and translation exercises,
  including prayers, liturgical texts, mythological
  allusions, documents of Korean history, which is
  a history of repression but also one of rebellion
  against the political and cultural repression by
  the Japanese.
• Chas mothers history of exile in Manchuria
  where she was forbidden to speak her Korean
  mother tongue.
• The uprising of 1919 led by the Korean Jeanne
  dArc, Yu Guan Soon, in which thousands were
  killed.

16
collage

• Personal letters, passages from history books, a
  petition sent by Hawaiian Koreans to President
  Theodore Roosevelt about the brutality of the
  Japanese Occupation (that the President ignored)
• Excerpts from the autobiography of Saint Thérèse
  of Lisieux with a variety of visual texts

• Empty pages and spaces between paragraphs marking
  rapture, collapse of voice, or meditative
  silence photographs, film stills, Korean,
  Chinese, and Japanese pictorial signs, the
  reproductions of handwritten letters, of
  paintings, maps, and illustrations such as four
  views of the larynx where voice is formed, speech
  uttered.

17
Dictee (1982)

• A product of dictationa French dictation,
  presumably at a school of French Catholic
  missionaries.
• Dictee, dictation opens a wide range of
  associations concerning power and repression the
  minds submission to the authority of the written
  wordfrom the rule of teachers to that of priests
  or missionaries, dictators and military
  oppressors, colonial regimes, or bureaucratic
  dispensers of immigrant identity.

18
b. dictée

• A metaphor of political, linguistic, and cultural
  dominance.
• Dictée has an additional meaningthe person who
  receives, is perhaps even formed by, dictation,
  is female since dictée also implies the gender
  of its object.
• Against the male and (mono)cultural written
  dictum/decree, it sets a female voice and a
  polycultural perception that emphasizes
  difference.

19
Dicteenine chapters

• Diseuse the opening sectionidentifies the
  narrator as female story teller, but also implies
  that someone is being spoken, who repeats and
  mimics but cannot yet speak for herself, stutters
  and stammers but is slowly and painfully finding
  voice and articulation The wait from pain to
  say. To not to. SayThe pause. Uttering. Hers
  now. Hers bare. The utter (4/5).

20
The Word

• To submit, to give in to dictation is to take in,
  to internalize, the Word. But the tongue that
  takes the Host (the Word made Flesh) is also the
  tongue that is to utter speech in a foreign
  tongue as much as it is the place of the lost or
  forbidden mother tongue. The dictation GOD WHO
  HAS MADE YOU IN HIS OWN LIKENESS is accepted and
  repeated but also turned around in rebellious
  parody.

21
c. Clio History

• Prelude to the first chaptera defiant evocation
  of the nominal In Nomine/ Le Nom/ Nomine (21)
  associates In Nomine Patris, in the Name of
  the Father, which, according to Lacan, is also
  the Law of the Father le Non du Père.
• Inscribed in the very dictation of the title is
  thus also the rebellion of the one dictated to
  (dictée)and the dissolution of dictation into
  the multicultural, multilingual, multimedial
  play/performance of the text as counterscript
  (18).

22
Nine Myth

• Nine chapters named after nine muses, the
  daughters of Mnemosynethe Greek goddess of
  memory, who had lain with Zeus for nine
  successive nights and give birth for nine
  successive days.
• Allusions to Demeter who, in her grief, wandered
  nine days with flaming torches in her hands in
  search of her daughter Persephone.

23
First final pages

• The first page is a photograph of an anonymous
  wall carving, according to secondary sources, it
  says in Korean script Mother, I miss you, I am
  hungry, I want to go home to my native
  placethis was probably scratched into a wall by
  Korean prisoners during Koreas occupation by the
  Japanese.
• The final page is a photograph cut to show nine
  Korean students (among them the martyred Yu Guan
  Soon).

24
Lost Found

• Text
• The loss of voice and native place, the
  repression of mother tongue, the pain of division
  and fragmentation

• Subtext
• Connected with the number nine, is
  re-constructive, stages a finding of voice, a
  homecoming and a reunion of daughter and mother.

25
POLYMNIA SACRED POETRY

• Words cast each by each to weather
• avowed indisputably, to time,
• If it should impress, make fossil trace of word,
• residue of word, stand as a ruin stands,
• simply, as mark
• having relinquished itself to time to distance
• 
  (177)

26
Dictee as a poetic reading of the historical
trace

• The text, although seemingly finding rest in a
  final vision of return, in fact, oscillates in
  the memory of absent presence since it can mark
  origin (home) only as lost to time and
  distanceas trace inscribed, and as ruin
  re-presented, in the word.
• To evoke a pre-linguistic state of mind and
  communication that can yet be rendered only in
  and through words, a language beyond the dictate
  of the Fathera new (yet also re-constructed)
  Mother tongue.

27
Cha

• The main body of my work is with Language,
  looking for the roots of language before it is
  born on the tip of the tongue. (Cha in Lewallen
  80)
• My work has been a series of metaphors for
  the return, going back to a lost time and space,
  always in the imaginary. The content of my work
  has been the realization of the imprint, the
  inscription etched from the experience of
  leaving, the experience of America. (Cha in
  Lewallen 76)

28
Counterscript

• The writing grew out of the painful experience of
  loss and exile, but opened up and explored a new,
  if purely linguistic, space of belonging the
  language before dictation where open, fluid,
  multiple (female) self is able to find voice and
  home in the very gaps and silences of the
  scattered text.

29
III. The Past as an Uncanny TrespasserDavid
Marshall Chans Goblin Fruit

• I want this all to be a fiction, something I
  made up, something entirely of my own invention.
• I want to wake up and have the past eighteen
  years be just a dream.
  
• -- Goblin
  Fruit (39)

30
Dream

• a. The Same Hollywood dream of fame.
• b. The frustration of an Other imposter.
• c. The living pain of being an Analogous
  brother.

31
a. Show business

• the only work I read for requires an accent
  Japanese businessmen Im too young to pull off,
  or Korean grocers or Chinese restaurant delivery
  boys (28).
• The only roles I ever get, it seems, are all in
  martial arts flicks, minor one-line parts
  (43).
• Why is my life like the plot engine of an old
  Bruce Lee film? (43).

32
The World of Suzy Wong

• And the bad roles and bad haircuts and stifled
  careers of the Asian American actors of the 70s
  and 80s and before, I sometimes feel all that
  history ought to have created a better place for
  actors like me. Our passages should have been
  paid, for a world without the Charlie Chans, the
  Suzy Wongs, the kowtowing maids and butlers and
  delivery boys. What happened, I want to know? How
  did that older generation let it slip through
  their fingers? (44)

33
everybody was too busy kung fu fighting

• The old-timersthe Chinese who first came to
  Americahid their true names, adopted false ones
  I read this in college in an ethnic
  autobiography. They did this to elude their
  enemies and American officials, all those who
  were potential threats to them (46).

34
b. Im invisible

• Ive stolen my brothers name. Ive lost my own
  name and replaced it with a dead boys. I no
  longer call myself D., but am now M. around town,
  some people recognized me for the imposter I am.
  Otherscasting agents, cameramen, other former
  child actors whove worked with my brotherbecome
  unnerved upon seeing me, mistaking me for the
  original M., or perhaps not wanting to remember
  how my brother died. To most people, though, Im
  invisible (23).

35
Goblin Men

• were pitching it as the dark side of the
  E.T. storylike Honey, I Shrunk the Kids meets
  Aliens meets the Persephone myth as written by
  Clive Barker (34)
• read pages 34-35.

36
c. Dream of a dead brother

• Hes Ms been trespassing in my dreams. Hes
  taken residence in my thoughts. Maybe hes made
  that Ive stolen his name (46).
• Maybe M. doesnt know that I mean him no harm,
  that all of my success is his own, all of it
  achieved in his shadow. He reduces me to a
  phantom of himselfhis legacy, his memory
  (46-7).
• Their floodlights shine through to the dark
  corners of the room, revealing nothing, no
  ghosts (47).

37
The End

• Thank you!