Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker: Diasporic Power Art

8/30/05

Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker: Diasporic Power Art

Deleuze and Guattari in “What is a Minor Literature?” discuss the “literary struggle” of a Diasporic literature (Jewish literature), an idea borrowed from Franz Kafka, who believes that Diasporic literature is “something impossible” when it is written in the language of the host country, because its cultural authenticity is compromised in the process (Richter 167).  What Kafka’s “literary struggle” suggests, then, is that in order to retrieve a true authentic meaning of a diasporic literature, the reader must be able to de-code the culturally cryptic, narratological intensions of the author, so, too, is the Native Speaker.  Overtly, the novel is about the three protagonists’ social descent due to their Asian complex, while covertly, it is about their ascension into the three hierarchical powers of America: (1) “finance,” by Henry’s father who is an “adopter”; (2) “intelligence,” by Henry who is an “assimilator”; and (3) “politics,” by Kwang who is a “merger.”  Ultimately, the social ascent of the three diasporic characters is achieved through what I call a “diasporic power art” for two reasons:  First, because their industrial successes are rendered through intense, dynamic reinventions of their diasporic subjectivities and conditions in semi-fictitious ways.  Second, because each of their individual American becomings can be aesthetically described as a “diasporic cultural art” which entails “cultural aesthetics”—the elements that elevate/cultivate one’s cultural refinement.

Asian diasporas are adept cultural artists, who reinvent themselves in order to acclimate from one end of cultural atmosphere to another—from East to West.  The nature of diasporic condition—living not in one’s motherland but in an adopted/foreign land—requires nomadic “choices,” “versatility,” and “resilience.”  It requires constant mental, physical, and cultural adjustments, but most importantly, entails recasting of their personas.  Linguistically, culturally, and phenotypically, since the East and West are arguably not the most alike, Asian diasporic acculturation into Western decorum and society is more adversative and intense.  Their inchoate American becoming is molded and remolded into an often indeterminate subjectivity by turbulent, (at times traumatic) bipolar cultural forces, thus their new life in America is almost a fiction to their consciousness.  It is a process that requires both artful nimbleness and itinerant hardiness on their part, which can be described as a “diasporic cultural art,” something that cannot be gauged by methodical or political formulas.  Rather, its appreciation comes through the lens of “cultural aesthetics”—elements that elevate or cultivate one’s cultural refinement.  Of the infinite elements of what one considers/includes as cultural aesthetics, there are at least two prevailing traits shared by all three diasporic characters which enhance/sanctify their immigrant life: (1) their ability to make prudent or conscientious choices; and (2) their nomadic versatility—the ability to reinvent themselves as needed.  The three characters in the novel employ in varying degrees these and other diasporic cultural aesthetics, not only to cultivate their nascent American subjectivities, but more primarily to adapt to their new culture.

Just as the immigrant stories of the three characters in Native Speaker —Henry’s father, Henry, and Kwang—differ from one another, so are the colors and shapes of their diasporic arts.  To fare well in their new adopted land (America), these three characters reinvent themselves as three different types of semi-fictitious personas: (1) Henry’s father as an “adopter”; (2) Henry as an assimilator; and (3) Kwang as a “merger.”  Each of these characters half-fictitiously “chooses,” in most part, what function they want to play for the dominant in power.  For instance, Henry’s father selectively “adopts” primarily one ideology of America—capitalism—while he largely ignores the others.  He therefore chooses to “adapt” to America’s economic conditions in the ghettos for financial gains.  Henry, on the other hand, wants to be singularly American, so he chooses to assimilate by gaining American intelligence.  Finally, Kwang dreams of coalition among different ethnic groups in America, so he chooses to merge different cultures for a political reason.  These brands of diasporic characters face challenges unique to their own type, and each of their moral or sociopolitical “rise” (ascent) and “fall” (descent) involve synergy of multifaceted cultural aesthetics aforementioned.  While on the plot level, their ultimate “fall” as an “adopter,” “assimilator,” or “merger” may be merely sympathetic to the readers of Western consciousness, it is simultaneously unnerving and heartening to the diasporic readers, because behind each of the character’s “fall” is the antithetical message of “rise” (hope) for them.

I. The Father’s Fall and Rise as an “Adopter”

As an opportunistic “adopter” of Western ideologies, Henry’s father fully subscribes to American capitalism, even at the cost of demoralization and intellectual enervation.  In Henry’s words, his father considers “capitalism” to be the “unseen force” and has been “single-minded[ly] determine[ed]” to succeed “through [his] twenty-five years of green-grocering in a famous ghetto” (49).  As an owner of labor-intensive grocery chains, he is proud that he is a rich man, though not proud of the industry.  He suffers intellectual atrophy and dehumanization, not only because his high scholarship from Korea is wasted—a top “industrial engineer” with a master’s degree from the best college—but because his limited English and ethnic isolation displace him from the social and intellectual centers of the U.S. (56, 57).  Though he lives in an upper class neighborhood, the wealth he amasses merely becomes an ethnic signifier—“Oriental Jews”—which does nothing to help him blend in with the mainstream Americans (53): “he never fe[els] fully comfortable in his fine house in Ardsley (affluent neighborhood)” (52).  His American becoming is thus at the social periphery, where he is a perpetual outsider without affect.  More tragically, he is even diminished to ethical immorality.  Henry describes his father’s demoralized mentality in America: “If anything, I think my father would choose to see my deceptions in a rigidly practical light, .  .  . the need to adapt” (297, emphasis added).  Thus as an ambitious adopter of capitalism, Henry’s father “falls” (becomes dehumanized), as his subjectivity alters from his former intellectual Korean self into an American nobody—the metamorphic versatility of a diaspora.

Indeed, at a glance, the intellectual and moral “fall” of Henry’s father seems to be a high price that he pays as an adopter of American capitalism.  Worst yet, since he loses his wife early from cancer, and he himself dies rather young without fully enjoying the fruits of his hard labor, the readers get a sense that his life in America ultimately signifies “death” or nothingness.  Yet from a historical context, there is more to his immigrant story than just the cost of dehumanization and death.  Jae Min Shin’s chronological analysis of Korean immigrants in his editorial column of Korea Times sheds insight into Henry’s father’s historical background and his financial motivation.  Shin reports in his editorial that until the 1960’s, Korean immigrants in America largely consisted of poor class: students, war-orphans, and females married to Americans; but in the 70’s, it shifted to the middle class capitalists with visions of economic expansion in America; then since the 80’s, it consists of even a higher class of entrepreneur Koreans with large investments in American companies (Shin D8).  According to Shin’s data, then, as a product of the 70’s and 80’s Korean American opportunism, Henry’s father has, in fact, successfully played his role as an “adopter” of American capitalism.  In other words, his principal reason for coming to America is not to augment his scholarship, but to make “enough money [so] that he could live in a majestic white house in Westchester and call himself a rich man,” even if that debases him into laboring with “a handful of vegetable stores” (333).  Thus, the cost of dehumanization and intellectual degeneration on the part of Henry’s father are factored in as a “fair” sacrifice to fulfill his financial desires.  In a word, he “chooses” to be what he is in America—an opportunist.  Then regardless of one’s intention, this “option to choose a different nation-state” as one’s new home is the advantageous “power” of the contemporary diasporas, which eventually does translate to his financial success in America, more than what his homeland, Korea, offers.

As a former industrial engineer, Henry’s father not only realistically estimates the “most” financial success he can accrue in America as a first generation immigrant, but maps the “maximum” his son, Henry, can approximate by purchasing a house in an affluent neighborhood.  With what he can financially provide, he wishes that his son will do better than him, and Henry, too, wants to do better than his father by studying hard, obviating his mother’s “tears. . . from her concern over [his] mediocre studies” (77).  Thus as a capitalist, Henry’s father’s seemingly dehumanizing existence is actually the intended, prudent course he willingly takes to humanize his son, and between the two, there is an inextricable causality, as the father’s “fall” (dehumanization) paves a way for his son’s intellectual “rise” as an upper class American.  Henry later comes to a deeper appreciation of his father’s sacrifice for him: “I see how my father had to retool his life to the ambitions his meager knowledge of the language and culture would allow . . . I am his lone American son, blessed with every hope and quarter he could provide” (333).  Considering the fact that Lee (the author) himself has intellectually “risen” from his well meaning immigrant parents, it is helpful to know that he has respectfully dedicated his first novel, Native Speaker, to his parents: “For my mother and my father.”  If we infer from the author’s reverence paid to his own parents, then the opportunistic immigrant life of Henry’s father which is devoid of human sociality does not suggest—contrary to its face value—that it is meaningless and pathetic.  Rather, the moral of this story is about how the father’s financial success can elevate/cultivate his son’s intellectual and social refinement in their adopted land, which sanctifies the father’s immigrant struggles.

II. Henry’s Fall and Rise as an “Assimilator”

Since, Henry as a spy is immorally engaged in treacherous activity against his own people, Henry’s moral “fall,” then, is textually a valid outcome.  While Henry’s father is a single-minded adopter of American capitalism—who enjoys a certain degree of independence due to his socio-political alienation—Henry, as an “assimilator,” on the other hand, is more scrutinized by the American society.  Henry is “a linguist of the field. . . [with] the troubling, expert power” (171, emphasis added).  Henry’s intellectual status is what Crystal Parikh in his essay, “Ethnic America Undercover: The Intellectual and minority Discourse,” describes as a “gained social position” of “minority intellectuals, [who] in gaining access to the mechanisms of cultural and political representation, no longer speak from a marginalized position” (Parikh 258).  Henry relies on his “gained intellectual position” to define himself as singularly American, an ultimate “assimilator,” by pledging allegiance to the dominant in power.  In order to keep his vows with the established— though his work involves extensive racialization and exploitation of ethnic minorities, including his own—he blinds himself to the racial dynamism in his work (Dennis’s private detective agency).  As a spy, he instead abuses his own cultural insidership and familiarity to “sell out” his own people.  He fictitiously and perfunctorily performs the racial dance which his superior, Dennis Hoagland, choreographs: “I am the obedient. . . the invisible underling. . . [and] this [is] my assimilation, so many years in the making” (202, emphasis added).  Most tragically, Henry’s fictitious selves created through the “legends” at his work—the fiction that allows him to be many persons at once—are the vestiges of a schizophrenic assimilator, who has morally “fallen” (22).

Henry’s versatility of being “many persons at once,” however, is precisely the auspicious edge of postmodern Asian Americans, when interpreted from a contravening contemporary point of view.  As an assimilator, the remnant of Asian silence in Henry is a cryptic language to those around him, including his most intimate wife, Lelia, and superiors at work, Jack and Dennis.  For example, Lelia cannot decipher “Henryspeak” (Henry’s reticence), and Jack and Dennis cannot decode the silent language and affinity exchanged between Henry and Kwang.  Henry, on the other hand, can both penetrate and dismantle theirs at will: “I and my kind possess another dimension.  We will learn every lesson of accent and idiom, we will dismantle every last pretense and practice you hold, noble as well as ruinous.  You can keep nothing safe from our eyes and ears” (320, emphasis added).  What Henry articulates in this passage is, in effect, an enunciation of the cultural edge of the contemporary polyglots—the irreducible linguistic versatility of diasporas.  

In our postmodern world, the versatile polyglots also have more “options,” both publicly (occupational) and privately (moral).  Henry—as someone with intellectual and cultural edge—is  a “denizen,” a royal assimilator not to be condemned, but to be emulated for the conscientious choice he ultimately makes between the oppressor (his boss) and the oppressed (him and his people).  According to Robin Cohen in Global Diasporas, “denizen” is a privileged postmodern diaspora with “considerable wealth and portable skills—a different group from the unskilled labour migrants of the nineteenth century” (164, 168).  In other words, in contrast to “the unskilled labour migrants” of the past, postmodern diasporas no longer need to tolerate any forms of oppressions, if s/he has the proper social, professional, or legal training/resources—in other words, “intellectual power” (Cohen 168).  As an educated person, Henry finally understands that an assimilator also has “options”: that wanting to assimilate to dominant culture does not mean one must allow oppression.  Upon this epiphany, he unshackles himself from his boss’s demonical bondage (Dennis’s detective agency).  Assertively, to the messenger of his boss, Jack, who asks, “Dennis thinks you will come back,” Henry answers, “Dennis is wrong” (288).  Henry continues, “Listen, Jack.  This is my mind finally speaking” (288).  The fact that it is Henry, not Dennis or Jack, who has the last word in the final scene of their relationship, symbolically and literally diminishes the power of the institutionalized racism in America.  Thus, as a contemporary assimilator, Henry exercises this “right to choose” as a denzen—to quit, if he must, those who oppress and exploit him and his people.  Ultimately, then, Henry’s such capability to make moral choices—free from vocational insecurity—is the prerogative of the diasporic intellectuals.

As an intellectual diaspora, Henry’s “right to choose” stretches farther than rejecting oppression; it extends to disseminating his linguistic expertise to other migrants.  At the end of the novel, Henry makes a conscientious choice.  He becomes an ESL teacher to share his intellectual privilege with the underprivileged.  He disseminates “knowledge of power”— English—unto the ethnic migrants of America, to help them better entrench their future in their new land.  Clearly, the fact that Henry converts from being a treacherous assimilator (his moral “fall”) to an intellectually nurturing teacher (his moral “rise”) is the acme of contradicting moment in the novel, which Lee deliberately dramatizes for didactic implications.  One way of interpreting Lee’s antithetical narratology is to deduce that Henry’s moral “fall” and “rise” is about an assimilator—with an intellectual power in America—making conscientious “choices” between his two cultures.  Henry ultimately chooses empathy and responsibility towards his fellow diasporas, and this change of attitude in Henry exemplifies what Lee may hope to see in other diasporic elites towards their marginal counterparts.

III. Kwang’s Fall and Rise as a “Merger”

From one’s “gained position,” if Henry falls morally, so does Kwang, politically.  If Henry is a fictitious assimilator, Kwang, on the other hand, is a versatile diasporic “merger,” who is faithful to both his past and present cultures, and plays his bi-cultural roles for a higher stage—politics in America.  He is a consummate actor of both cultures.  He is in Henry’s words someone who is “effortlessly Korean [and] effortlessly American,” simultaneously (328).  Unlike Henry, who as a spy aids in the deportation and dispersion of the ethnic migrants, Kwang—“an ambitious minority politician [with]. . . unwavering agenda [and] stridency”—labors to reconcile the hostility among the variegated minority groups in New York (139).  Similarly, unlike Henry’s father who is unmindful of racial “irony,” Kwang is both sensitive and sensible to racial issues, and attempts to form a political coalition among different races (58).  His career as a New York City Councilman, however, ends tragically, as his illegitimate fund-raising apparatus—the Korean money club “ggeh”—is disclosed by his most trusted staff members, Eduardo and Henry (280).  These two, who betray Kwang, work for those who represent the major political powers in America: Dennis Hoagland (Henry’s boss), De Roos (Kwang’s opponent), and indirectly, INS.  Thus, Kwang’s “messianic” political rise—as a prototypical self-made “American [in]. . .flyer[s]”—is pulverized by his political superiors for subtly contesting and threatening the White American politics (141).  As a diasporic merger, Kwang’s political “fall” ultimately intimates the vulnerability and indeterminacy of his self-claimed American persona in the political stage.

Read literally, Kwang’s political fall is tragic and discouraging.  More than any other characters in the novel, Kwang as a politician, espouses and magnifies his diasporic consciousness—sensitivity to multi-pluralism.  Unlike Henry and his father, he rejects tertiary roles in racial plays that are strategized by the so-called superpowers of America.  Rather, from his diasporic margins, Kwang encroaches inroad to challenge the very core of the American racial politics.  He is in Henry’s words “a larger public figure who [is] willing to speak and act outside the tight sphere of his family [ethnic enclave],” and is not “afraid like [Henry’s] mother and father” (139, emphasis added).  Henry “hadn’t yet envisioned” that a public career is something that “a Korean man would find significant or worthy of energy and devotion,” but is what Lee would like to have his (fellow diasporic) readers to pay a closer attention to, as a source of America’s deep seated racism (139, emphasis added).  Thus, it is precisely the turbulent theatricality of Kwang’s public career—especially his political “fall”—which crystallizes Lee’s desire to raise political awareness in his readers.  Ultimately, Kwang, among the three diasporic characters, is the one who is portrayed by Lee as someone who reaches the highest pivot of the American hierarchical achievements: politics, which wields more influence than Henry’s father’s financial success or Henry’s intellectual aptitude.  He is the consummate diasporic cultural artist.    

Furthermore, if we flip the lens, Kwang’s “fall” in the political arena projects an inverted vision that is ineffably surreal and inspiring to the readers.  Contrary to those who think Kwang would commit suicide as a result of his political calamity, Henry as a fellow Korean American understands Kwang’s Korean way of facing life crisis, thus he believes otherwise.  Henry believes that no matter how bitter Kwang’s ignoble political defeat may be, he will choose life over death, as if Kwang is a Christ figure.  Henry solemnly narrates that “Koreans don’t take their own lives.  At least not from shame” (333, emphasis added).  Henry further explains why: “My mother said to me once that suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better.  If you bite your lip and understand that this is the only world, you will perhaps persist and endure” (333, emphasis added).  According to the mother’s definition of “noblest art,” then, Kwang indeed is the noblest hero who suffers sublimely.  Like Christ, he bears his cross—his political fall—without saying anything and answering nothing “as if he is deaf” (342).  Though the angry crowd “scream at him like he is a child . . . and spit on his shoulder, . . . nothing registers in his face” (342).  In Henry’s words, Kwang “is already in another world” (342).  As it is demonstrated through Kwang’s Christ-like suffering that seems to transport him to another spiritual world, diasporas’s tendency to “hope” and capacity to “persist and endure”are some of the noblest “diasporic cultural aesthetics,” which sublimate their immigrant tribulations and inspire the readers. 

Thus, just when the readers of Western consciousness think that Kwang is being buried by his superior political opponents, the fact is Kwang’s political fall is largely an enactment of self-induced, masochistic punishment to himself for failing his people.  It stems from his unremitting loyalty to his political constituents.  It is Kwang’s way of “enduring crisis with Korean nobility” (333).  Because Lee pitilessly encapsulates Kwang’s political fall in a racially and socially claustrophobic denouement, it does not allow catharsis for the readers, but ingenuously does the reverse.  Psychologically and aesthetically, Kwang’s political “fall” to (fellow diasporic) readers—who similarly persist and endure social injustices in America—is liable to produce de-catharsis in varying degrees:  Mildly, it may evoke a nagging “reciprocal yearning” to counter the situation.  Powerfully, it may induce a strong “insurgent impulse” to combat the racial situation in America.  Thus, instead of the purging effect, Kwang’s political fall intoxicates the (fellow diasporic) readers with the unquenchable emotions, and that is the narratological scheme of the author—Lee’s way of producing powerful and lingering feelings of political injustice in the readers through his literary reversal psychology.  Indeed, Lee’s deployment of de-catharsis inversely stir and turn the readers’ interests towards more political awareness and participation in American minority politics.

Thus, decoding the author’s alternate intensions enlightens us with the deeper meaning of the text—a moment of revelation.  This kind of reader’s moment of intellectual and spiritual union with the author’s encoded message is delivered through the power of diasporic literature—the diasporas’s cognitive and cultural bond with its literature which is impenetrable by their predominant counterparts.  For instance, while it seems to the Western consciousness that the moral or sociopolitical “fall” of the three characters—Henry’s father, Henry, and Kwang—signifies their ultimate failure in acculturating into Americanism, its contravening interpretations suggest otherwise:  They are diasporic heroes, who reach their individual “maximums” in the three hierarchical levels of American successes: (1) finance; (2) intelligence; and (3) politics.  Then what is easily neglected, but should be paid its due recognition to these characters, is that they—as the best positioned and equipped characters to make a difference in American politics—wield their silent de-cathartic affectivity by influencing their readers to adopt sensible anti-racist measures.  Thus, “diasporic power art” is the effect of an exceptional diasporic literature.  Through its exemplary diasporic protagonists who display nomadic finesse—like versatility, bold choices, or resilience—it inflames profound cultural reflections in the reader.  

Works Cited and Consulted

Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Lee, Chang Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Gilles, Deleuze, and Guattari, Felix. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Falling into Theory. Richter,

David H. Boston:

Parikh, Crystal. “Ethnic America Undercover: The Intellectual and Minority Discourse.”

        Contemporary Literature 43 (2002): 249-84.

Shin, Jae-Min. “Desperate Immigration (Jul Mang Yi Min).”  Editorial. Korea Times. 23 Sept.

        2002, D8

Sumida, Stephen H. “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies.”

American Studies International 38 (2000): 97-114.

My take from the historical novel “Pachinko”

The US bombs liberated Korea, but it couldn’t liberate the Koreans living in Japan.

It was shocking for me to know that Japan invaded Korea 714 times prior to its final occupation from 1910 – 1945. The U.S., by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, indirectly freed Korea. However, Koreans in Japan couldn’t be free geopolitically, socially, and psychologically, and “Pachinko” answers why.

In its last chapter, Solomon, a third generation Korean in Japan, who received American education all throughout his life, both in Japan and in the U.S., realizes that he cannot marry his Korean-American fiancé because she is too Americanized for her to be living in Japan with him. Although discrimination against Koreans is severe in Japan, neither does he grabs the opportunity of running away, being an American by marrying his American fiancé, as he is more at home in Japan than in the States.

“In a way, Solomon was Japanese, too, even if the Japanese didn’t think so. Phoebe couldn’t see this. There was more to being something than just blood. The space between Phoebe and him could not close, and if he was decent, he had to let her go home (p471).”

This quote is relevant to people like me who grew up in the U.S. I feel that I am an American even though I am not seen as an American by the majority. I know very little about Korea, and know much more about the U.S., but people still ask me about Korea which I can’t answer intelligently. My heart pounds about the crises in the U.S., but it doesn’t about the crises in Korea because I don’t understand their issues by heart.

My only consolation is that there are plenty like me everywhere, people in the peripheries, the cultural hybrids. We gravitate towards tolerations and inclusions, the qualities of which tend to mend more than break.

Why I Disagree with Both Leroi’s and Thomas’s Definition of “Race”

 Part I

         “The billion or so of the world’s people of largely European descent have a set of genetic variants  in common that are collectively rare in everyone else; they are a race.  At a smaller scale, three million Basques do as well; so they are a race as well.  Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences.”

—Armand Leroi, The New York Times 3/14/05

I disagree with Armand Leroi’s above comment.  It is scientifically inconclusive to say that race is biologically based.  However, I do recognize that race can serve as an important indicator that allows us to gain a better understanding of differences that exist among the different groups of people, such as the prevalence of certain diseases in some races but not in others.  Yet, I find Leroi’s statement to be problematic for two reasons:  First, the premise of his study is inflated and not holistic, in that the range of genetic differential that he attempts to categorize as different racial types of humans cannot exceed .01%, since according to human genome film, Homo sapiens are 99.9% genetically identical.  Second, his theory of genetic racialization is based on an inconstant and fluctuating sample of human genes.  That is, his sample base of human genes are not stable enough to make a scientific claim, in that Homo sapiens always have been, is in the process of, and will continue to be subject to evolution which involve the following unpredictable and incalculable forces: (1) external/natural environment, like climate, gene flow, and genetic drift; (2) internal/biological environment, like mutations, endemics, and blood types; (3) cultural behavior, such as various breeding patterns, migrations, diet, and beliefs. 

Bluntly put, Leroi’s scientific claim about human variation at genetic level is not based on precision over the whole population.  For instance, though the discovery of DNA has revealed human diversity with greater precision, virtually no one genotype is exclusive to one race.  For example, according to Molnar, though African-Americans show a higher frequency of sickle-cell genes, other ethnic groups also display sickle-cell genes, and they are categorized into different geographical types as they are found in locations such as Senegal, Benin, Bantu, and Asia (Molnar 162).  Also, in England, within one race of blood type-A patients who are afflicted with stomach cancer, a study of the frequency of this disease “revealed a difference between regions:  The mortality rate was higher in the North than in the South,” depending on other elements of people’s blood type (Molnar 99).  In other words, in this case of stomach cancer in England, racial type was not an indicator of why some have cancer and why some don’t.  Race is but one element of infinite number of other factors that determine the susceptibility of certain biological difference at a genetic level.  In other words, to borrow Alan Goodman’s term in his essay “Two Questions About Race” (2005), Leroi, as a scientist, is making a grave error because his concept of “genes as an indicator of different race” is based on a “shifting concept” (Goodman 3).  Goodman further critiques that Leroi “tends to forget about the 94% of variation that race fails to statistically explain (Goodman 3).  Rather, Goodman says that “race is an inherently unstable and unreliable concept, [which may be] . . . fine for local realities but not so for a scientific concept” (Goodman 3).  If, within this .01% of biological variability, certain traits are more common in one group of people than others, Leroi exaggerates this variability and postulates this tendency out of context as being a significant indicator of race disparity. 

Unlike Leroi, Molnar, on the other hand, believes that “study of biology forces us to reject perceptions of superficial differences, many of which are due to factors of nutrition, child growth, and climate” (Molnar 2).  In terms of nutrition and child growth as factors, I have personally noticed a change in appearance of Koreans brought up in US versus my other relatives who have never left Korea.  Korean immigrants in US more or less adopt American diet.  Consequently, unlike their relatives in Korea, Korean immigrants of US drink more milk and eat more pizza like the mainstream Americans.  This change in environmental and behavioral factors, in turn, affect genetic expression of the growth hormones in Korean immigrants’ children: Higher intake of dairy products causes their children to grow taller and stronger than their relatives in Korea.  As I am not a scientist, though I cannot validate my aforementioned hypothesis—that higher intake of dairy products produce taller people—Molnar cites cases in which diet seems to be a significant element in genetic makeup:  First, according to Molnar, Cross-culturally, and particularly in Asia, Africa, and in many European countries, more adults, opposed to infants, are classified as mal-absorbers of milk, because adults drink less or no milk compared to infants (Molnar 129).  However, a large percentage of adults in North America and pastoral tribes in East Africa are classified as absorbers due to their more exposure to dairy products (Molnar 129).  Thus, Molnar says that “milk-using experience . . .contribute[s] to high frequency of the gene for adult lactase persistence in some peoples of the world” (Molnar 129). 

Not only culturally specific “diet” affects human genome, but culturally particular “belief/behavior” also plays a role in genetic frequency.  For instance, albinism  type II, tyrosinase positive, is most frequently seen in Africans and Native Americans (Molnar 126).  One explanation for this phenomenon in one group—at least in the Native Americans—can be traced back to their cultural proclivity to the spread of Albinism:  In their culture, Albino males are treated well, doing lighter domestic jobs with women at home, which increase their prospect of mating and thus the chance of procreating more albinos (Miller, lecture).  In terms of both lactose tolerance and albinism, then, culturally particular human behavior—such as diet and sexuality—affect human diversity at a biological level.

 According to Molnar, climate is another indicator of human diversity.  For example, one type of protein called Haptoglobins (Hp1) which “have the capacity to combine with the oxygen-carrying pigment, hemoglobin” has the highest frequency in tropical locations (Molnar 120).  Molnar says that this is probably due to the fact that “this Haptoglobin (Hp1) type would be an advantage in populations where hemolytic anemia is very high”: the tropical areas (Molnar 121).  Another example of climate as an indicator of human diversity is that, though there are numerous exceptions, in general, “taller people [are] farther from the equator (as in northwestern European) and shorter people nearer [to] the equator” (Molnar 181).  Likewise, people are fatter and lighter in the northern cold regions versus their thinner darker counterparts in the warm humid areas (Molnar 186).  Even the various head sizes of human show correlation with the climate: In colder climates, the people on the average have “rounder heads than peoples in the tropics,” as “surface area and volume is a critical factor in heat radiation to regulate body temperature” (Molnar 188, 9).  Also, in terms of heat radiation/heat conservation, Homo sapiens’ other body parts like arms, legs, facial features, teeth, and hair are affected by climate, ultimately increasing the multiplicity and individuality of Homo sapiens, though within the .01% of human variation.  Most crucially, however, these milliard differences in human are merely correlations between climate and human variation; they are tendencies, not facts. Thus, any observation and assumptions about the phenotypical variation in humans—however genetically detailed the data may be—still do not stand as facts.  Ultimately, then, the very idea, such as that of Leroi’s—that humans are divisible into few racial types by observing their genes—is problematic, as many precursors to genetic difference, like climate cannot be measured by scientific methods.

Molnar explains that in any given population, studying its gene pool and frequencies are affected and shaped by other immeasurable factors such as “mutation,” “natural selection,” “genetic drift,” and “gene flow” (Molnar 56).  Mutation not only causes change in genetic codes but introduces a new variety of allele, increasing the number of different genotypes/phenotypes within a population (Molnar 59).  It is often driven by humans’ natural biological tendency to adapt, known as “natural selection” (Molnar 60).  For instance, polymorphism shown in human blood types is often a result of natural selection.  An allele such as Hbs, which is advantageous under harsh slavery conditions, for example, “appears more in several populations in Africa,” theoretically due to natural selection (Molnar 146).   Although its high frequency in several parts of India is hard to explain, at least in eastern Nigeria, it seems that this Hbs gene frequency was “spread by population migration and interpopulation contact, . . . because of its selective advantage” (Molnar 148).  The effect of natural selection is also seen in malarial cases—a widespread disease in mostly tropical areas.  For example, abnormal hemoglobin SCT are less able to support malarial parasite growth, and thus natural selection favors individuals with SCT, in that they are less likely to die from falciparum malaria than persons with all normal hemoglobin (Molnar 150).  The point is, how in the world Leroi can scientifically factor these natural phenomena into his truth claim—the genetic human variation?  Human variation, though parts of its aspects may be recognizable at genetic level, its holistic picture is impossible to neatly grasp, because human genes will be different tomorrow than what they are today; they are inconstant; they mutate. 

Gene flow and genetic drift are other random human social phenomena which forestall any human attempts to categorize genes into few racial types.  According to Molnar, “gene flow refers to exchanges between different population gene pools so that the next generation is a result of admixture” (Molnar 63).  Over the human history, Molnar says that invaders, colonists, travelers, and traders have all collectively contributed to this gene flow phenomenon (Molnar 63).  Thus, throughout the human history, this high rate of admixture, the phenomenon that is accelerating in our contemporary world, has been an important factor which prevents the development of unique gene combinations.  Evidence of diversification of genes due to gene flow can be seen in the case of sickle-cell traits in black populations.  According to Molnar, African-Americans in the US have, on average, less than one-fourth to one-half of the Hbs found among West African populations today (5-10 percent versus 20 percent)” (Molnar 160).  He says that “this reduction, occurring over the three-and-a-half centuries of their occupation in the New World. . . may be accounted for either by admixture with Euro-Americans or by an elimination of the selective advantage of the carrier of the sickle-cell trait.” (161).  On the other hand, Molnar states that Genetic Drift indirectly influences the course and intensity of natural selection, in that when a breeding population is too small, there is a possibility that not all gene combinations will be represented in the next generation—so called a “sampling error” (Molnar 64).  In short, smaller the population sample, higher the rate of gene frequency change between the generations (Molnar 65).  Thus, population size is another unmanageable, irregular factor which scientists like Leroi cannot accurately assess in analyzing human variation. 

   In conclusion, according to  Molnar, “the record of DNA markers tell us little about how we gained certain of these complex traits—how we acquire a certain size and appearance, a skin color, or rates of growth” (Molnar 179).  Molnar has also warned against scientists like Leroi, in that he says that “no matter how we may define or classify clusters of populations today, their composition will undoubtedly change over future generations, as a result of major alterations in evolutionary forces through human adaptation and because of continuing migrations and interbreeding,” which, I might add, has increased rapidly in our contemporary world (Molnar 2).  Likewise, Alan Goodman in his essay “Two Questions About Race” (2005) says that “we just don’t know” enough about human genes to make such a conclusive scientific claim.  Rather, human diversity is better explained in terms of “evolution and history” (Goodman 3).  Because Homo sapiens consist of enormous range of physical variability, any scheme to divide humanity into a few racial types is bound to be fallacious and misleading (Miller, lectures).  Thus, when Armand Leroi claims that race is genotypically distinguishable, he is—according to the human genome film—arguing and exaggerating the difference he sees within the narrow zone of .01% variability among different peoples, since cross-racially, humans are 99.9% genetically identical.

Part II

“Instead of obsessing about race, we could try to build a race-blind society.  Instead of feeding      the fires of neuroticism, we could start teaching people to forget about race, to move on.  But to   do that, first we must sideline the entire race relations industry—whose only function, it seems, is    to make us all deeply anxious about ‘race’—a concept they simultaneously believe has no objective reality.  “

 —Sean Thomas, Sunday Telegraph (London) 3/13/05

I also disagree with Sean Thomas’s above comment.  I find the idea behind it to be, well, wishful thinking at best.  To be “race-blind” means what?: that we forget the history of racial oppression which is so embedded in the collective unconscious?; that we do not recognize the multicultural reality of the United States?;  that we adhere to one set of ideas about American culture?;  if so, whose?  The phrase, “move on” is a phrase that Ralph Ellison has mocked in his Invisible Man.  There are people who actually fear remembrance of history and a culturally pluralistic society.  I suspect that this is what is behind Thomas’s message.

For one, the effects of imperialist colonialism of the past still linger among us.  Take India, for example, Eurocentric colonial nation building left ethnic strife among the colonized.  According to Kottak, “over a million Hindus and Muslims were killed in the violence that accompanied the division of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan” (Kottak 82).  Similarly, “problems between Arabs and Jews in Palestine began during the British mandate period” (Kottak 82).  Moreover, during WW II, both Canada and US ordered expulsion of Japanese from their mainstream centers (Japanese internment).  In the history of a young nation of merely 200 some years, US has enforced numerous discriminatory immigration and property laws against those other than “white”—e.g., Chinese exclusionary Act, to name just one.  Thus, contrary to what Thomas suggests, race is not something that can be “[taught to] to forget. . . [and] move on,” because it has, it does, and it continues to affect the people of color in enormous and powerful ways.

The effect of racism is inscripted in both collective consciousness and in real life of colored people.  For instance, not only in US, but world-wide, people with darker pigmentation are the poorest (Miller, professor).  In US alone, more people of color, particularly, blacks and Latinos, are disproportionately incarcerated.  They are paid the least.  They live in and their children go to worst schools.  They are thus the least likely to succeed physically, intellectually, economically, and politically.  Their sociopolitical odds, then, are enormous.  In short, it affects every aspect of a colored person’s life: wealth, education, career, health, and the list can go on. 

Now, I would like to discuss about my personal observation/experience with racism in higher education.  Because the nature of my discussion is somewhat theoretical and subtle, before I immerse into my argument against intellectual racism within the canonical circle of Western countries, US in particular, I would like to first reiterate Kottak’s definition of racism:  According to Kottak, “when an ethnic group is assumed to have a biological basis, it is called a race.  Discrimination against such a group is called racism” (Kottak 67, emphasis added).  Well, what I have observed is that this racism against ethnic group exists even in the intellectual community, namely, among the canonizers—those who compile textbooks of higher educations.  For the purpose of this essay, I call this a “canonical racism”—the racism of anthologizers against works of ethnic writers. 

Until recently, the inclusion into or the exclusion from the Western canon was dependent upon the work’s “familiarity” and/or “durability” within the dominant culture.  Although canon debates by their very exclusionary nature can never please all sides, traditionally, they have systematically marginalized literary works of ethnic writers.  Perhaps, Samuel Johnson’s observation still holds true today: that “the reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arise…not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages,…but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood” (230, emphasis added).  What Johnson’s theory is implying is that what survives as “revered” (the canonized) literature owes to its “indubitable positions” (the positions of white males) within the literary circles.

For example, a decade ago, in 1995, an Asian Diaspora who was raised in America since the age of three wrote a novel claiming numerous awards, to name just one from the long list is the Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award.  Most memorably, for his novel Native Speaker, he was selected by the New Yorker as one of the twenty best “American writers” under forty.  This “American,” or should I say “Korean-American,” is Chang Rae Lee.  However, his book, Native Speaker, though he won “the twenty best American writers under forty” award, was automatically labeled under the “minor literature” in a separate American canon, because according to Deleuze and Guattari, Lee’s Native Speaker fits the definition of “minor literature”: work of a minority writer in a major language (English).  The value of this incidence for my argument is that it illustrates what I mean by canonical racism in intellectual community in US. Frankly, I believe that none of this labeling business should be espoused in the process of anthology.  If a writer is an American, then, s/he is singularly American, and his/her work is singularly an American literature.  No prefixes such as “Afro,” “Asian,” “Latino,” nor qualifiers such as “minor” or “ethnic” is needed, unless the canon is willing to equally dissect the entire culturally hybrid, transnational writers of America. 

Pertinent to canonical racism is an essay called “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies” written by Sumida Stephen.  Stephen, in his essay, informs that “for about a decade the critique of Asian American ‘dual identity’ empowered Asian American studies with the contravening idea that it is the concept of ‘America’ that needs to be changed so that it is understood that Asian Americans are singularly American” (Sumida 1).  In the past, if silent submissive Asian Americans can be effortlessly alienated (e.g., Japanese internment and Chinese exclusionary Act) on the basis of “phenotypically/culturally being more foreign than others”—thus requiring qualifiers and prefixes describing what type of American they are—now, such systemized alienation are no longer feasible.  With the coming-of-age of children of the Asian Diasporas, who may be the future writers/scholars, who have grown up in America, and who are mentally, culturally, and legally “Americans,” need to be dealt with.  Surely, it is inevitable that the canon debates in the U.S., in the very near future, will have to re-examine the concept of “American” in categorizing the works written by Asian Americans, and by extension, other prefixed half-Americans. 

John Guillory in “The Canon as Cultural capital,” says that much of the canonical debates stem from racist nationalism.  In his essay, Guillory states that “the ‘West’ was always the creation of nationalism,” and critiques that Western universities are involved in the discriminatory “project of constituting a national culture” largely through the process of canonization (222).  According to Guillory, the method of sustaining what he calls the West’s “imaginary cultural continuities” begins with the assumed Eurocentric superiority, weighing what is culturally “Western” more principally into the canon, while subordinating or excluding literature that represents the “other.”  Thus, in this nationalistic milieu of the Western canon, ethnographic works are often pushed out as “not [representing] our culture” (222).  However, Guillory warns that “the very distinctness of cultures, Western or non-Western, canonical or noncanonical, points to a certain insistent error…in the supposed transmission of culture” through literature (223), because the very idea of “cultural homogeneity” is an illusion—a “fiction” (221). 

Similarly, the chief spokesperson of subaltern studies, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her essay, “Imperialism and Sexual Difference,” requests accurate, not distorted, representation of women of color in Eurocentric literature.  For example, in many literatures written by Western writers, women of color are portrayed as physically, intellectually, and culturally inferior—e.g., they are usually a slave, maid, prostitute, or mentally insane (like Rochester’s wife from Jamaica in Jane Eyre).  She challenges Western academia to stop misrepresenting the women of the third world by first deconstructing the tropological truth-claim made by the imperial masculists, meaning that this cultural violation stems from the fact that Western academia insists “the white race as a norm for universal humanity” (340).  Particularly, what troubles Spivak the most is that this cultural violation—committed by the Western male and female elitists—perpetuates through cultural ignorance of the teachers to their students, which she describes it as the “sanctioned ignorance” (345).  In order to avoid sanctioned ignorance, then, their misrepresented history written by the Eurocentric writers must be re-represented/revised; however this cannot happen without the “equal access” in the canon (347).

Like Spivak, critics like Bhabha also demands equal representation of the postcolonial cultural hybridity written by diasporas and other ethnic minorities.  He says, “The Western metropole must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity” (1335, emphasis added).  He proposes that “the centre of …[our] study would [no longer] be the “sovereignty” of national cultures, nor the universalism of human cultures, but a focus on those ‘freaks’ of social and cultural displacements,”’ meaning minorities (1340).  He asks the Western canon to endow equal access into their literary circles those who in the past have been perceived as “freaks” by the dominant culture.

In conclusion, just as my personal observation of canonical racism illustrates, even though race makes little sense on the genetic level, this does not mean that it is not real in a social sense.  Thus, Tomas’s notion of a “race-blind” society is naive.  Other than teaching people to treat others as individuals and not collectively as a race or group, how do you create a “race-blind” society?  It is just not possible.  Perhaps I’m pessimistic, but it’s a utopian ideal that is not realistic.  Moreover, what does he mean by the “race relations” industry? It seems to me that the only people who obsess about race as an issue and are anxious about it are those who feel the need to overlook race.  As I have mentioned in my introduction of my first essay, race can be an important indicator and an important measurement to gain a greater understanding of other groups of individuals, not only biologically to cure diseases, but to improve our social conditions.  However, to create this race-blind society is to argue that there are no differences among us.  It is only through open dialogue (e.g., in intellectual community) not by pretending that all of us could be “race-blind,” that we can “move on” towards racial equality (Thomas 2005). 

Works Cited

Bhabba, Homi. “Locations of Culture.” The Critical Tradition. Richter, David H. Boston:

       Bedford Books, 1989.

Gilles, Deleuze, and Guattari, Felix. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Falling into Theory. Richter,

        David H. Boston:

Goodman, Alan. “Two Questions About Race” 20 April 2005

        <http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Goodman&gt;

Guillory, John. “The Canon as Cultural Capital.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston:

        Bedford Books, 2000

Johnson, Samuel. “Preface to Shakespeare.” The Critical Tradition. Richter, David H.

         Boston: Bedford Books, 1989.

Kottak, Conrad Phillip. On Being Different. 2 Boston: McGraw Hill, 2003.

Lee, Chang Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Molnar, Stephen. Human Variation: Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups. 5 New Jersey: Prentice Hall,

          2002.

Spivak, Gayatri. “Imperialism and Sexual Difference.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H.

         Boston: Bedford Books, 2000.

Sumida, Stephen H. “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies.”

         American Studies International 38 (2000): 97-114.

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Jane and Pip’s Spatial Mobility that Traces Their Personal Growth in Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” and Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” respectively

Jane and Pip’s Spatial Mobility that Traces Their Personal Growth in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, respectively 

In both Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, the fact that the protagonists, Jane and Pip, are orphans potentially restricts their self-improvement, financial independence, and social status.  Interestingly, as Jane and Pip move away further from their homes, they come closer to realizing their desires of social ascent, though their morality is more severely tested.  For instance, Jane’s each escape from her quarters augments her self-improvement and independence, though her morality is tested in each of the dwellings. Contrarily, albeit as Pip moves father away from his home, his social status seems to ascend, it is actually a delusional success of being a gentleman. Thusly, the “spatial mobility” of the both orphans, traces their different stages of social/moral ascent or descent.

Both Jane and Pip in their foster homes—Jane with the Reeds and Pip in his sister’s—feel that their self-improvement or social advancement is restricted.  As orphans, both Jane and Pip are fortunate that their foster homes provide them the basic shelter, food, and protection from the harsh world.  Both Pip and Jane, however, feel that they are emotionally, intellectually, and physically oppressed in their foster homes.  In particular, for instance, Jane’s cousin, John Reed, is overtly oppressive to her.  When Jane wants to be left alone with her reading, he emotionally and intellectually insults her by demanding her to not “take [his] books [since she is] a dependent” (8).  He further orders that she “ought to beg, and not live [there] with gentlemen’s children like [him]” (8).  This instance later develops into a physical trauma for Jane as well, as her Aunt locks her up in “the red-room” where her uncle died. (10).  Jane in her Aunt’s home hence feels that she is being treated like a servant: Am I a servant?” (9).  As long as Jane stays with the Reeds, therefore, she sees no brighter future for her, intellectually or socially.  Likewise, Pip sees no extraordinary future for him in his sister’s house, other than an apprenticeship under his brother-in-law (Joe), who is a blacksmith.  Joe narrates his conditions at home: “My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, . . . have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me” (12).  If Jane feels oppressed by her cousin, Pip feels oppressed by his own sister.  Moreover, Joe (his brother-in-law) to Pip is someone of “dismal intelligence” (13).  Like Jane, Pip therefore feels that his sister’s home is not conducive to his social and intellectual growth.  If Jane’s cousin John Reed is the patriarchal authority who restricts Jane’s self-improvement and independence, Pip’s sister and her husband—in Pip’s mind—are people who hamper his social refinement.

The protagonists’ first spatial movement from their foster homes to another space directs them to more opportunities of self-improvements.  For instance, as Jane moves away from the Reeds to Lowood Institution, her love for books and education materializes.  Jane narrates that upon arriving at Lowood charity school, the first person that she finds interesting is “a girl sitting on a stone bench. . . [who] [i]s bent over a book, on the perusal of which she seem[s] intent” (41).  Though Jane feels timid being in a new environment, she “from where [she] st[ands]. . . see[s] the title” of the book; “it [i]s ‘Rasselas;,’” she says in her mind, and the name “str[ikes] [her] as strange, and consequently attractive” (41).  Lowood to Jane is, then, a place where she grows intellectually, which in her Aunt’s home, she could not have done so freely.  Similarly, as a result of meeting Estella in Satis House, Pip yearns to have a higher social status.  When he is taken to Satis House by his Uncle Pumblechook to play with the beautiful Estella, he immediately falls in love with her, and dreams of becoming a wealthy gentleman so that he might be worthy of her.  He internalizes Estella’s disdainful treatment of him as “a common labouring-boy,” and feels more “ignorant than [he] had [ever] considered [him] self” to be (55).  He even hopes that Miss Havisham will make him a gentleman and marry him to Estella.  While Jane from Lowood Institution gains employable skills which enhance her self-sufficiency, Pip from Satis house soaks up vanity of wishing to be more than who he is—a gentleman.  The first spatial movement on the part of the both protagonists—Jane and Pip—nonetheless becomes an impetus for their further self-improvements and social ascensions.

The protagonists’ second major change of dwellings marks a higher level of financial independence for Jane and dependence for Pip.  For Jane, as she leaves Lowood to work as a governess at Thornfield, she feels she is alone in the world and must be self-supportive.  Her aunt (Mrs. Reed) confirms Jane’s independence as an adult when she—in place of her deceased husband (Jane’s uncle)—permits “that ‘[Jane] might do as [she] pleased, [for] she had long relinquished all interference in [Jane’s] affairs’” (76).  Likewise, as Pip moves from Kent to London, he feels that he is on his way of becoming a true gentleman of independence.  Pip narrates his elated sensation as he leaves his hometown: “I ha[ve] been so innocent and little [here], and all beyond [i]s so unknown and great. . . it [is] now too late and too far to go back,. . . and the world lay spread before me” (124, 5).  Although the fact that he is asked to come to London and begin his education as a gentleman is due to his secret benefactor, Pip is not ashamed of his financial dependence on him.   Instead, he continues to fancy that as a refined gentleman, he will be worthy enough for Estella.  Unlike Jane, who independently works for her own money and is more mature at this stage of her life, Pip, at this juncture of his life in London, is idle with financial dependence on a secret benefactor, and his maturity is yet to be called an independent adult, much less a gentleman.

Albeit moving from one home to another causes tremendous amount of anxiety and insecurity, Jane nevertheless removes herself  from Thornfield to St. John’s to resist temptations of immorality—the temptation of living in Thornfield as a mistress to Rochester.  Upon the shocking revelation that Rochester—the man she is about to marry—has a living wife in the attic, Jane goes through a powerful moment of confusion.  Though she loves Rochester dearly, she cannot debase herself to be his mistress, who in her mind is just as bad as a financially and morally parasitic prostitute.  In agony, she consults her heart: “’What am I to do?’ But the answer [her] mind g[ives]—‘Leave Thornfield at once’—[is] so prompt” (253).  Her third geographical movement is thus a flight from Thornfield to St. John’s abode.  This move proves to be the quintessential period in her life, because during her stay there, she is linked to a loving and admirable extended family (St. John and his sisters).  It is also during this period—with the help of her cousin, St. John—she discovers that her uncle of long distance has made her a wealthy woman through inheritance.  Yet, she is again morally challenged by St. John’s loveless marriage proposal.  Jane’s strong sense of morality, however, does not allow her to marry someone without true affections, so she refuses his offer by telling him that it is “because [he] d[oes] not love [her]” (351).  Irrespective of her morality being challenged in both places—Thornfield and St. John’s—she is able to withstand temptations of illegitimate or loveless romances.  From both places, she thus walks out with her finance and morality augmented.

Unlike Jane, who removes herself from the romantic temptations and restrictions on her independence that Thornfield and St. John’s represent, Pip further indulges himself in London, financially and sentimentally.  In London, Pip befriends a gentleman named Herbert, who helps Pip learn how to act like a gentleman.  Pip however lacks the maturity and morality that Jane possesses.  With the regular income from his fortune, he and Herbert lead an undisciplined life, enjoying themselves and running up debts.  Pip admits to his lavish life style: “As I ha[ve] grown accustomed to my expectations, I ha[ve] insensibly begun to notice their effect upon myself and those around me. . . My lavish habits led. . . into expenses that [Herbert] c[an] not afford, corrupt[s] the simplicity of his life, and disturb[s] his peace with anxieties and regrets” (208).  His financially dependent, affluent lifestyle in London thus morally degenerates him as well as others around him.  He also becomes increasingly arrogant.  He expresses disdain for his former friends and loved ones, especially Joe, but he vainly continues to pine after Estella, wishing to match his social status to that of hers.  While the fact that Jane is all alone as a governess makes her more morally alert and shuns away from sexual temptations, Pip’s financial dependence on an unknown benefactor and his amorous desire to marry Estella corrupts his morality.  Thus, while Jane’s mature self-control over sentimentalism makes her move away from material affluence (i.e., Thornfield), Pip’s immaturity and romantic idealism over Estella overshadows his basic goodness and demoralizes him.

Jane’s final movement back to Rochester in Ferdean is, in effect, a cardinal moment in her life where she makes an important pronouncement of her independence.  This final movement is profound, not only because it frees her from St. John—a restrictive patriarch—but because it is a choice that she deliberately makes, as Jane informs Rochester, as “an independent woman” (370).  Bewildered by her new aura and claims to independence, Rochester asks for explanation: “‘Independent! What do you mean, Jane?’” (370)  Jane gives him a stunning answer that not only informs him that she now has money of her own, but her subtle word play also implicates that she intends to keep and manage her own money: “‘Quite rich, sir…If you won’t let me live with you, I can build a house of my own close up to your door, and you may come and sit in my parlour when you want company of an evening’” (370, emphasis added).  Indeed, for Jane, each “spatial movement” dramatically challenges her morality.  She however does not succumb to irresponsible romanticism, thereby enhancing and fortifying her self-improvement and independence.

Unlike Jane, Pip’s final movement back to his home town does not accompany financial growth or increased dignity, except remorse.  He realizes that his great expectations of becoming a gentleman and marrying Estella have been an illusion, as he finds out that Estella is a daughter of a criminal, Magwitch, who is also his secret benefactor of big fortune.  Unlike Jane, Pip’s dizzying rise in social status at the end is thus accompanied by a sharp decline in his confidence and happiness.  Pip, however, learns from his mistakes, and shows improved morality: “I live. . . frugally, and pa[y] my debts. . . I work pretty hard for a. . . living, and therefore—Yes, I do well” (355-7).   Pip finally learns that social and educational improvements are irrelevant to one’s real worth, and that conscience and affection are to be valued above erudition and social standing.  Thusly, Jane and Pip—the two orphans in Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Dickens’s Great Expectations—increase or decrease their social status, independence, and morality, in relation to how they succumb to or overcome temptations and restrictions in each of their abodes.

Works Cited

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Norton & Company, Inc: New York, 2001.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Norton & Company, Inc: New York, 1999.

Chang Rae Lee’s “Native Speaker”: Diasporic Power Art

Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker: Diasporic Power Art

Deleuze and Guattari in “What is a Minor Literature?” discuss the “literary struggle” of a Diasporic literature (Jewish literature), an idea borrowed from Franz Kafka, who believes that Diasporic literature is “something impossible” when it is written in the language of the host country, because its cultural authenticity is compromised in the process (Richter 167).  What Kafka’s “literary struggle” suggests, then, is that in order to retrieve a true authentic meaning of a diasporic literature, the reader must be able to de-code the culturally cryptic, narratological intensions of the author, so, too, is the Native Speaker.  Overtly, the novel is about the three protagonists’ social descent due to their Asian complex, while covertly, it is about their ascension into the three hierarchical powers of America: (1) “finance,” by Henry’s father who is an “adopter”; (2) “intelligence,” by Henry who is an “assimilator”; and (3) “politics,” by Kwang who is a “merger.”  Ultimately, the social ascent of the three diasporic characters is achieved through what I call a “diasporic power art” for two reasons:  First, because their industrial successes are rendered through intense, dynamic reinventions of their diasporic subjectivities and conditions in semi-fictitious ways.  Second, because each of their individual American becomings can be aesthetically described as a “diasporic cultural art” which entails “cultural aesthetics”—the elements that elevate/cultivate one’s cultural refinement.

Asian diasporas are adept cultural artists, who reinvent themselves in order to acclimate from one end of cultural atmosphere to another—from East to West.  The nature of diasporic condition—living not in one’s motherland but in an adopted/foreign land—requires nomadic “choices,” “versatility,” and “resilience.”  It requires constant mental, physical, and cultural adjustments, but most importantly, entails recasting of their personas.  Linguistically, culturally, and phenotypically, since the East and West are arguably not the most alike, Asian diasporic acculturation into Western decorum and society is more adversative and intense.  Their inchoate American becoming is molded and remolded into an often indeterminate subjectivity by turbulent, (at times traumatic) bipolar cultural forces, thus their new life in America is almost a fiction to their consciousness.  It is a process that requires both artful nimbleness and itinerant hardiness on their part, which can be described as a “diasporic cultural art,” something that cannot be gauged by methodical or political formulas.  Rather, its appreciation comes through the lens of “cultural aesthetics”—elements that elevate or cultivate one’s cultural refinement.  Of the infinite elements of what one considers/includes as cultural aesthetics, there are at least two prevailing traits shared by all three diasporic characters which enhance/sanctify their immigrant life: (1) their ability to make prudent or conscientious choices; and (2) their nomadic versatility—the ability to reinvent themselves as needed.  The three characters in the novel employ in varying degrees these and other diasporic cultural aesthetics, not only to cultivate their nascent American subjectivities, but more primarily to adapt to their new culture.

Just as the immigrant stories of the three characters in Native Speaker —Henry’s father, Henry, and Kwang—differ from one another, so are the colors and shapes of their diasporic arts.  To fare well in their new adopted land (America), these three characters reinvent themselves as three different types of semi-fictitious personas: (1) Henry’s father as an “adopter”; (2) Henry as an assimilator; and (3) Kwang as a “merger.”  Each of these characters half-fictitiously “chooses,” in most part, what function they want to play for the dominant in power.  For instance, Henry’s father selectively “adopts” primarily one ideology of America—capitalism—while he largely ignores the others.  He therefore chooses to “adapt” to America’s economic conditions in the ghettos for financial gains.  Henry, on the other hand, wants to be singularly American, so he chooses to assimilate by gaining American intelligence.  Finally, Kwang dreams of coalition among different ethnic groups in America, so he chooses to merge different cultures for a political reason.  These brands of diasporic characters face challenges unique to their own type, and each of their moral or sociopolitical “rise” (ascent) and “fall” (descent) involve synergy of multifaceted cultural aesthetics aforementioned.  While on the plot level, their ultimate “fall” as an “adopter,” “assimilator,” or “merger” may be merely sympathetic to the readers of Western consciousness, it is simultaneously unnerving and heartening to the diasporic readers, because behind each of the character’s “fall” is the antithetical message of “rise” (hope) for them.

I. The Father’s Fall and Rise as an “Adopter”

As an opportunistic “adopter” of Western ideologies, Henry’s father fully subscribes to American capitalism, even at the cost of demoralization and intellectual enervation.  In Henry’s words, his father considers “capitalism” to be the “unseen force” and has been “single-minded[ly] determine[ed]” to succeed “through [his] twenty-five years of green-grocering in a famous ghetto” (49).  As an owner of labor-intensive grocery chains, he is proud that he is a rich man, though not proud of the industry.  He suffers intellectual atrophy and dehumanization, not only because his high scholarship from Korea is wasted—a top “industrial engineer” with a master’s degree from the best college—but because his limited English and ethnic isolation displace him from the social and intellectual centers of the U.S. (56, 57).  Though he lives in an upper class neighborhood, the wealth he amasses merely becomes an ethnic signifier—“Oriental Jews”—which does nothing to help him blend in with the mainstream Americans (53): “he never fe[els] fully comfortable in his fine house in Ardsley (affluent neighborhood)” (52).  His American becoming is thus at the social periphery, where he is a perpetual outsider without affect.  More tragically, he is even diminished to ethical immorality.  Henry describes his father’s demoralized mentality in America: “If anything, I think my father would choose to see my deceptions in a rigidly practical light, .  .  . the need to adapt” (297, emphasis added).  Thus as an ambitious adopter of capitalism, Henry’s father “falls” (becomes dehumanized), as his subjectivity alters from his former intellectual Korean self into an American nobody—the metamorphic versatility of a diaspora.

Indeed, at a glance, the intellectual and moral “fall” of Henry’s father seems to be a high price that he pays as an adopter of American capitalism.  Worst yet, since he loses his wife early from cancer, and he himself dies rather young without fully enjoying the fruits of his hard labor, the readers get a sense that his life in America ultimately signifies “death” or nothingness.  Yet from a historical context, there is more to his immigrant story than just the cost of dehumanization and death.  Jae Min Shin’s chronological analysis of Korean immigrants in his editorial column of Korea Times sheds insight into Henry’s father’s historical background and his financial motivation.  Shin reports in his editorial that until the 1960’s, Korean immigrants in America largely consisted of poor class: students, war-orphans, and females married to Americans; but in the 70’s, it shifted to the middle class capitalists with visions of economic expansion in America; then since the 80’s, it consists of even a higher class of entrepreneur Koreans with large investments in American companies (Shin D8).  According to Shin’s data, then, as a product of the 70’s and 80’s Korean American opportunism, Henry’s father has, in fact, successfully played his role as an “adopter” of American capitalism.  In other words, his principal reason for coming to America is not to augment his scholarship, but to make “enough money [so] that he could live in a majestic white house in Westchester and call himself a rich man,” even if that debases him into laboring with “a handful of vegetable stores” (333).  Thus, the cost of dehumanization and intellectual degeneration on the part of Henry’s father are factored in as a “fair” sacrifice to fulfill his financial desires.  In a word, he “chooses” to be what he is in America—an opportunist.  Then regardless of one’s intention, this “option to choose a different nation-state” as one’s new home is the advantageous “power” of the contemporary diasporas, which eventually does translate to his financial success in America, more than what his homeland, Korea, offers.

As a former industrial engineer, Henry’s father not only realistically estimates the “most” financial success he can accrue in America as a first generation immigrant, but maps the “maximum” his son, Henry, can approximate by purchasing a house in an affluent neighborhood.  With what he can financially provide, he wishes that his son will do better than him, and Henry, too, wants to do better than his father by studying hard, obviating his mother’s “tears. . . from her concern over [his] mediocre studies” (77).  Thus as a capitalist, Henry’s father’s seemingly dehumanizing existence is actually the intended, prudent course he willingly takes to humanize his son, and between the two, there is an inextricable causality, as the father’s “fall” (dehumanization) paves a way for his son’s intellectual “rise” as an upper class American.  Henry later comes to a deeper appreciation of his father’s sacrifice for him: “I see how my father had to retool his life to the ambitions his meager knowledge of the language and culture would allow . . . I am his lone American son, blessed with every hope and quarter he could provide” (333).  Considering the fact that Lee (the author) himself has intellectually “risen” from his well meaning immigrant parents, it is helpful to know that he has respectfully dedicated his first novel, Native Speaker, to his parents: “For my mother and my father.”  If we infer from the author’s reverence paid to his own parents, then the opportunistic immigrant life of Henry’s father which is devoid of human sociality does not suggest—contrary to its face value—that it is meaningless and pathetic.  Rather, the moral of this story is about how the father’s financial success can elevate/cultivate his son’s intellectual and social refinement in their adopted land, which sanctifies the father’s immigrant struggles.

II. Henry’s Fall and Rise as an “Assimilator”

Since, Henry as a spy is immorally engaged in treacherous activity against his own people, Henry’s moral “fall,” then, is textually a valid outcome.  While Henry’s father is a single-minded adopter of American capitalism—who enjoys a certain degree of independence due to his socio-political alienation—Henry, as an “assimilator,” on the other hand, is more scrutinized by the American society.  Henry is “a linguist of the field. . . [with] the troubling, expert power” (171, emphasis added).  Henry’s intellectual status is what Crystal Parikh in his essay, “Ethnic America Undercover: The Intellectual and minority Discourse,” describes as a “gained social position” of “minority intellectuals, [who] in gaining access to the mechanisms of cultural and political representation, no longer speak from a marginalized position” (Parikh 258).  Henry relies on his “gained intellectual position” to define himself as singularly American, an ultimate “assimilator,” by pledging allegiance to the dominant in power.  In order to keep his vows with the established— though his work involves extensive racialization and exploitation of ethnic minorities, including his own—he blinds himself to the racial dynamism in his work (Dennis’s private detective agency).  As a spy, he instead abuses his own cultural insidership and familiarity to “sell out” his own people.  He fictitiously and perfunctorily performs the racial dance which his superior, Dennis Hoagland, choreographs: “I am the obedient. . . the invisible underling. . . [and] this [is] my assimilation, so many years in the making” (202, emphasis added).  Most tragically, Henry’s fictitious selves created through the “legends” at his work—the fiction that allows him to be many persons at once—are the vestiges of a schizophrenic assimilator, who has morally “fallen” (22).

Henry’s versatility of being “many persons at once,” however, is precisely the auspicious edge of postmodern Asian Americans, when interpreted from a contravening contemporary point of view.  As an assimilator, the remnant of Asian silence in Henry is a cryptic language to those around him, including his most intimate wife, Lelia, and superiors at work, Jack and Dennis.  For example, Lelia cannot decipher “Henryspeak” (Henry’s reticence), and Jack and Dennis cannot decode the silent language and affinity exchanged between Henry and Kwang.  Henry, on the other hand, can both penetrate and dismantle theirs at will: “I and my kind possess another dimension.  We will learn every lesson of accent and idiom, we will dismantle every last pretense and practice you hold, noble as well as ruinous.  You can keep nothing safe from our eyes and ears” (320, emphasis added).  What Henry articulates in this passage is, in effect, an enunciation of the cultural edge of the contemporary polyglots—the irreducible linguistic versatility of diasporas.  

In our postmodern world, the versatile polyglots also have more “options,” both publicly (occupational) and privately (moral).  Henry—as someone with intellectual and cultural edge—is  a “denizen,” a royal assimilator not to be condemned, but to be emulated for the conscientious choice he ultimately makes between the oppressor (his boss) and the oppressed (him and his people).  According to Robin Cohen in Global Diasporas, “denizen” is a privileged postmodern diaspora with “considerable wealth and portable skills—a different group from the unskilled labour migrants of the nineteenth century” (164, 168).  In other words, in contrast to “the unskilled labour migrants” of the past, postmodern diasporas no longer need to tolerate any forms of oppressions, if s/he has the proper social, professional, or legal training/resources—in other words, “intellectual power” (Cohen 168).  As an educated person, Henry finally understands that an assimilator also has “options”: that wanting to assimilate to dominant culture does not mean one must allow oppression.  Upon this epiphany, he unshackles himself from his boss’s demonical bondage (Dennis’s detective agency).  Assertively, to the messenger of his boss, Jack, who asks, “Dennis thinks you will come back,” Henry answers, “Dennis is wrong” (288).  Henry continues, “Listen, Jack.  This is my mind finally speaking” (288).  The fact that it is Henry, not Dennis or Jack, who has the last word in the final scene of their relationship, symbolically and literally diminishes the power of the institutionalized racism in America.  Thus, as a contemporary assimilator, Henry exercises this “right to choose” as a denzen—to quit, if he must, those who oppress and exploit him and his people.  Ultimately, then, Henry’s such capability to make moral choices—free from vocational insecurity—is the prerogative of the diasporic intellectuals.

As an intellectual diaspora, Henry’s “right to choose” stretches farther than rejecting oppression; it extends to disseminating his linguistic expertise to other migrants.  At the end of the novel, Henry makes a conscientious choice.  He becomes an ESL teacher to share his intellectual privilege with the underprivileged.  He disseminates “knowledge of power”— English—unto the ethnic migrants of America, to help them better entrench their future in their new land.  Clearly, the fact that Henry converts from being a treacherous assimilator (his moral “fall”) to an intellectually nurturing teacher (his moral “rise”) is the acme of contradicting moment in the novel, which Lee deliberately dramatizes for didactic implications.  One way of interpreting Lee’s antithetical narratology is to deduce that Henry’s moral “fall” and “rise” is about an assimilator—with an intellectual power in America—making conscientious “choices” between his two cultures.  Henry ultimately chooses empathy and responsibility towards his fellow diasporas, and this change of attitude in Henry exemplifies what Lee may hope to see in other diasporic elites towards their marginal counterparts.

III. Kwang’s Fall and Rise as a “Merger”

From one’s “gained position,” if Henry falls morally, so does Kwang, politically.  If Henry is a fictitious assimilator, Kwang, on the other hand, is a versatile diasporic “merger,” who is faithful to both his past and present cultures, and plays his bi-cultural roles for a higher stage—politics in America.  He is a consummate actor of both cultures.  He is in Henry’s words someone who is “effortlessly Korean [and] effortlessly American,” simultaneously (328).  Unlike Henry, who as a spy aids in the deportation and dispersion of the ethnic migrants, Kwang—“an ambitious minority politician [with]. . . unwavering agenda [and] stridency”—labors to reconcile the hostility among the variegated minority groups in New York (139).  Similarly, unlike Henry’s father who is unmindful of racial “irony,” Kwang is both sensitive and sensible to racial issues, and attempts to form a political coalition among different races (58).  His career as a New York City Councilman, however, ends tragically, as his illegitimate fund-raising apparatus—the Korean money club “ggeh”—is disclosed by his most trusted staff members, Eduardo and Henry (280).  These two, who betray Kwang, work for those who represent the major political powers in America: Dennis Hoagland (Henry’s boss), De Roos (Kwang’s opponent), and indirectly, INS.  Thus, Kwang’s “messianic” political rise—as a prototypical self-made “American [in]. . .flyer[s]”—is pulverized by his political superiors for subtly contesting and threatening the White American politics (141).  As a diasporic merger, Kwang’s political “fall” ultimately intimates the vulnerability and indeterminacy of his self-claimed American persona in the political stage.

Read literally, Kwang’s political fall is tragic and discouraging.  More than any other characters in the novel, Kwang as a politician, espouses and magnifies his diasporic consciousness—sensitivity to multi-pluralism.  Unlike Henry and his father, he rejects tertiary roles in racial plays that are strategized by the so-called superpowers of America.  Rather, from his diasporic margins, Kwang encroaches inroad to challenge the very core of the American racial politics.  He is in Henry’s words “a larger public figure who [is] willing to speak and act outside the tight sphere of his family [ethnic enclave],” and is not “afraid like [Henry’s] mother and father” (139, emphasis added).  Henry “hadn’t yet envisioned” that a public career is something that “a Korean man would find significant or worthy of energy and devotion,” but is what Lee would like to have his (fellow diasporic) readers to pay a closer attention to, as a source of America’s deep seated racism (139, emphasis added).  Thus, it is precisely the turbulent theatricality of Kwang’s public career—especially his political “fall”—which crystallizes Lee’s desire to raise political awareness in his readers.  Ultimately, Kwang, among the three diasporic characters, is the one who is portrayed by Lee as someone who reaches the highest pivot of the American hierarchical achievements: politics, which wields more influence than Henry’s father’s financial success or Henry’s intellectual aptitude.  He is the consummate diasporic cultural artist.    

Furthermore, if we flip the lens, Kwang’s “fall” in the political arena projects an inverted vision that is ineffably surreal and inspiring to the readers.  Contrary to those who think Kwang would commit suicide as a result of his political calamity, Henry as a fellow Korean American understands Kwang’s Korean way of facing life crisis, thus he believes otherwise.  Henry believes that no matter how bitter Kwang’s ignoble political defeat may be, he will choose life over death, as if Kwang is a Christ figure.  Henry solemnly narrates that “Koreans don’t take their own lives.  At least not from shame” (333, emphasis added).  Henry further explains why: “My mother said to me once that suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better.  If you bite your lip and understand that this is the only world, you will perhaps persist and endure” (333, emphasis added).  According to the mother’s definition of “noblest art,” then, Kwang indeed is the noblest hero who suffers sublimely.  Like Christ, he bears his cross—his political fall—without saying anything and answering nothing “as if he is deaf” (342).  Though the angry crowd “scream at him like he is a child . . . and spit on his shoulder, . . . nothing registers in his face” (342).  In Henry’s words, Kwang “is already in another world” (342).  As it is demonstrated through Kwang’s Christ-like suffering that seems to transport him to another spiritual world, diasporas’s tendency to “hope” and capacity to “persist and endure” are some of the noblest “diasporic cultural aesthetics,” which sublimate their immigrant tribulations and inspire the readers. 

Thus, just when the readers of Western consciousness think that Kwang is being buried by his superior political opponents, the fact is Kwang’s political fall is largely an enactment of self-induced, masochistic punishment to himself for failing his people.  It stems from his unremitting loyalty to his political constituents.  It is Kwang’s way of “enduring crisis with Korean nobility” (333).  Because Lee pitilessly encapsulates Kwang’s political fall in a racially and socially claustrophobic denouement, it does not allow catharsis for the readers, but ingenuously does the reverse.  Psychologically and aesthetically, Kwang’s political “fall” to (fellow diasporic) readers—who similarly persist and endure social injustices in America—is liable to produce de-catharsis in varying degrees:  Mildly, it may evoke a nagging “reciprocal yearning” to counter the situation.  Powerfully, it may induce a strong “insurgent impulse” to combat the racial situation in America.  Thus, instead of the purging effect, Kwang’s political fall intoxicates the (fellow diasporic) readers with the unquenchable emotions, and that is the narratological scheme of the author—Lee’s way of producing powerful and lingering feelings of political injustice in the readers through his literary reversal psychology.  Indeed, Lee’s deployment of de-catharsis inversely stir and turn the readers’ interests towards more political awareness and participation in American minority politics.

Thus, decoding the author’s alternate intensions enlightens us with the deeper meaning of the text—a moment of revelation.  This kind of reader’s moment of intellectual and spiritual union with the author’s encoded message is delivered through the power of diasporic literature—the diasporas’s cognitive and cultural bond with its literature which is impenetrable by their predominant counterparts.  For instance, while it seems to the Western consciousness that the moral or sociopolitical “fall” of the three characters—Henry’s father, Henry, and Kwang—signifies their ultimate failure in acculturating into Americanism, its contravening interpretations suggest otherwise:  They are diasporic heroes, who reach their individual “maximums” in the three hierarchical levels of American successes: (1) finance; (2) intelligence; and (3) politics.  Then what is easily neglected, but should be paid its due recognition to these characters, is that they—as the best positioned and equipped characters to make a difference in American politics—wield their silent de-cathartic affectivity by influencing their readers to adopt sensible anti-racist measures.  Thus, “diasporic power art” is the effect of an exceptional diasporic literature.  Through its exemplary diasporic protagonists who display nomadic finesse—like versatility, bold choices, or resilience—it inflames profound cultural reflections in the reader.  

Works Cited and Consulted

Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Lee, Chang Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Gilles, Deleuze, and Guattari, Felix. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Falling into Theory. Richter,

David H. Boston:

Parikh, Crystal. “Ethnic America Undercover: The Intellectual and Minority Discourse.”

        Contemporary Literature 43 (2002): 249-84.

Shin, Jae-Min. “Desperate Immigration (Jul Mang Yi Min).”  Editorial. Korea Times. 23 Sept.

        2002, D8

Sumida, Stephen H. “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies.”

American Studies International 38 (2000): 97-114.

The Illogic of the American Canon that Segregates Ethnic Literature (Published in CSULA Significations 2007)

The Illogic of the American Canon that Segregates Ethnic Literature

While attempting to defend the Western literary canon, Edward W. Said in “The Politics of Knowledge,” reveals the Eurocentric mentality towards subaltern literature: “[literary] politics has needed to assume, indeed needed to firmly to believe, that what was true about Orientals or Africans was not however true about or for Europeans” (191). In essence, Said is trying to articulate his theory of “politics of knowledge”—that, in the canon war, an author’s “racial identity” translates to his/her “knowledge” and the quality of his/her work. In other words, if an author is other than “white,” then, his/her literary work is less likely to be received as equal to that of the “white” standard, thus subaltern. In this canonical dichotomy between the “White” and the “other,” America—the land of diversity—is no less a culprit to its steep division, in that, we, as well, divide our literature as either belonging to “white” (American Literature) or “other” (ethnic literature). This system of racialization in the American canon is illogical and problematic, because it is, in effect, denying the transnational subjectivity of America —the fact that America as a nation is a “nation of immigrants that produce cultural hybridity,” and thus its multiethnic literatures are, in fact, its primary building blocks. What American canon needs, then, is a re-conceptualization of “American literature” as inherently transnational, to include the works of minor/ethnic literature as its indispensable parts, categorized only by their different genres and chronology, thus obviating separate ethnic curriculum in institutions.

In order to show why ethnic literature should not be an extraneous component to, but an essential core of, an American literature, first part of this essay explores the racist and nationalistic milieu of the Western canon itself. First, it reviews the definition and the function of “ethnic” and “minor” literature to deduce why these types of literature would be marginalized by the canon. Second, it discusses cultural hybridism largely from the point of views of the critics who advocate fair and equal representation of the ethnic minorities in the Eurocentric texts. Third, it psychoanalytically probes into the notion of “foreigner” or the “other” to illustrate that the canon—by segregating ethnic literature as not part of its own—is, in fact, being self-antagonistic. Then the second part of this essay focuses on arguing against the biased practice of canon in couple of ways: First, it introduces an example of an ethnic literature (Native Speaker) in America to show how it is received and why it is labeled as a minor literature. Then the rest of this essay argues against and proves why the canonical segregation of any literature written in America as “ethnic/minor” is an act of self-negating the intrinsically hybrid, transnational “Americanism.”

I

Until recently, the inclusion into or the exclusion from the Western canon was dependent upon the work’s “familiarity” and/or “durability” within the dominant culture. Although canon debates by their very exclusionary nature can never please all sides, traditionally, they have systematically marginalized ethnic literature. Perhaps, Samuel Johnson’s observation still holds true today: that “the reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arise…not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages,…but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood” (230, emphasis added). Like Said, what Johnson’s theory is implying is that what survives as “revered” (the canonized) literature owes to its “indubitable positions” (the positions of white males) within the literary circles.

The canonical bias—which both Johnson and Said acknowledges—can therefore be stifling to ethic/minor literature of the colored writers. With this racism within the canonical circle in mind, I beg questions pertaining to the works by postmodern writers, particularly, those who fall into what Homi Bhabha in “Locations of Culture” calls the subjects of “liminal cultural locations.” They are those with ambiguous bi-cultural locality, or more popularly known as “diasporas”—ethnic minorities who are living, not in their homeland, but in their adopted land. Their cultural bi-locality places them in between the superior and the inferior social status. They are, for example, Americans who are not fully Americans, but “half Americans,” as their prefixes will designate: Afro, Latino, Asian-Americans. In short, they are America’s “ethnics,” and their literature is labeled as “ethnic literature.” Etymologically, “ethnic” is one who is not a Christian or Jew, but a Gentile, heathen, pagan, or simply the “other.” Similarly, according to Oxford’s contemporary definition, “ethnic minority” is a racial or other group within a larger system; hence, foreign or exotic” (emphasis added). Thus, “ethnic literature” is not really “American literature”; rather, it is a “foreign or exotic” literature of “racial or other group” within America.

It is precisely this widely accepted notion that “ethnic literature does not represent American mainstream culture, but that of the “foreigner’s,” which spurs American canonizers to rather marginalize it at its best, or exclude it at its worst. Since ethnic literature in their minds is “exotic” and “foreign,” it cannot be translated as part of an American culture, nor can it help them constitute and transmit “homogenous Americanism” through literature. John Guillory in “The Canon as Cultural capital,” says that much of the canonical debates stem from racist nationalism. In his essay, Guillory states that “the ‘West’ was always the creation of nationalism,” in that its “assertion of the continuity of Western tradition exactly corresponds in its intensity to the assertion of nationalism” (222). He further critiques that Western universities are involved in the discriminatory “project of constituting a national culture” largely through the process of canonization (222). According to Guillory, the method of sustaining what he calls the West’s “imaginary cultural continuities” begins with the assumed Eurocentric superiority, weighing what is culturally “Western” more principally into the canon, while subordinating or excluding literature that represents the “other.” Thus, in this nationalistic milieu of the Western canon, ethnographic literature is often pushed out as “not [representing] our culture” (222). However, Guillory warns that “the very distinctness of cultures, Western or non-Western, canonical or noncanonical, points to a certain insistent error…in the supposed transmission of culture” through literature (223), because the very idea of “cultural homogeneity” is an illusion—a “fiction” (221). However, Guillory admits that this fictitious conviction on the part of the canonizers—that the Western canon should represent the “great works of Western civilization only”—is “nevertheless a very powerful one (because it is ideological)” (221).

Then, what exactly is the distinctive trait of ethnic/minor literature that is more likely to be excluded from the Western canon? Deleuze and Guattari in “What is a Minor Literature?” define that “minor literature” is what “minority constructs within a major language.” They further list three other characteristics of the minor literature: (1) its language deterritorializes; (2) it is always political; and (3) the text serves as a collective enunciation. As an example, Deleuze and Guattari point to Jew’s experience of Diaspora to illustrate how their literature can de-territorialize cultural and national boundaries. They say that the act of “de-territorialization” happens as a result of a special situation where dispersed (often traumatized) Diasporas, who live in their host countries, cannot write their stories in their own language. However, left with no better way of emotional survival, they ironically write their Jewish story in the language of their oppressors, effectuating de-territorialization of the cultural and national boundaries. As it is shown in this example of Jewish Diasporas, the ultimate threat that a minor literature poses for the xenophobic authorities in the canon would be that it not merely transgresses its linguistic territory, but that it unavoidably penetrates the master’s culture, potentially undermining national solidarity.

Though the canonical authority in power may wish to bolster national solidarity through literature, critics like Bhabha demands equal representation of the postcolonial cultural hybridity written by diasporas and other ethnic minorities. He says, “The Western metropole must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity” (1335, emphasis added). He proposes that “the centre of …[our] study would [no longer] be the “sovereignty” of national cultures, nor the universalism of human cultures, but a focus on those ‘freaks’ of social and cultural displacements”’ (1340). He asks that our contemporary “critic[s] must attempt to fully realize, and take responsibility for, the unspoken, unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present” of the marginalized, hybrid postmodern subjects (1340). In other words, Bhabha is asking the Western canon to include those who in the past have been perceived as “freaks” by the dominant culture.

Similarly, the chief spokesperson of subaltern studies, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her essay, “Imperialism and Sexual Difference,” requests accurate, not distorted, representation of women of color in Eurocentric literature. She challenges Western academia to stop misrepresenting the women of the third world by first deconstructing the tropological truth-claim made by the imperial masculists. Spivak believes that western academic institutions commit “translation-as-violation” (344) both in a literal sense (linguistic translation) and in a representational sense (fictional misrepresentation of the women of the third world). She claims that this cultural violation stems from the fact that Western academia insists “the white race as a norm for universal humanity” (340). Spivak is insulted not only by the assumed racial and intellectual superiority of the Western universal masculist, but also by its feminist counterparts. She believes that feminist writers of the first world are complicit with their masculist counterparts, in that, they, too, grossly misrepresent the women of the third world in their writings. Particularly, what troubles Spivak the most is that this cultural violation—committed by the Western male and female elitists—perpetuates through cultural ignorance of the teachers to their students, which she describes it as the “sanctioned ignorance” (345). In order to avoid sanctioned ignorance, Spivak is, in effect, insinuating that ethnographic texts should be written and critiqued by those with cultural familiarity and authority. Consequently, for these culturally appropriate writers to re-vision their misrepresented history written by the Eurocentric writers and to create a new “just representation” of their presence as equal humans, they need, according to Spivak, an “equal right” in the literary circles, which also implies an “equal access” in the canon (347).

If those in control of the canon, or more specifically, American canon perceives minor literature to be less than American, it is because they see the minorities as “foreigners,” “the others,” who in their eyes cannot and is not yet fully assimilated to their culture. However, Julia Kristeva’s analysis of “foreigner” in Strangers To Ourselves, shows how the “others” are in fact “our nocturnal selves”—the dark strangers who are repressed within ourselves. Psychoanalytically, she explains that Freud’s “Uncanny, [means that] foreignness is within us: we are our own foreigners; we are divided:” (181). Hence, she says, “foreigner is neither a race nor a nation” (181). In fact, Kristeva believes that “it is [only] through unraveling transference—the major dynamics of otherness. . . [which is] . . . the foreign component of our psyche—that, on the basis of the other, [we] become reconciled with [our] own otherness-foreignness” (182). Most significantly, according to Kristeva’s theory, the so called “the other,” “the foreigner, “the stranger,” or “the inferior” is, in fact, none other than “ourselves.” We are all “an integral part of the same” (181). Then psychoanalytically speaking, the Eurocentric canon war is, in fact, self-antagonistic, in that each time it alienates/negates entry of what they perceive as “foreign texts” into its collection, it is ironically diminishing and self-effacing its own culture. Thus, if Kristeva’s interpretation of the Freudian “uncanny” is adopted, it would drastically change our concept of “foreignness,” and this change of our mind, in turn, would ideally dissolve the canonical racism in America.

II

Whereas Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves probes the notion of a “foreigner” in a psychoanalytical sense, a novel, Native Speaker explores the reality of being a “foreigner” in America. A decade ago, in 1995, an Asian Diaspora who was raised in America since the age of three wrote a novel claiming numerous awards, to name just one from the long list is the Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award. Most memorably, for his novel Native Speaker, he was selected by the New Yorker as one of the twenty best American writers under forty. This “American,” or should I say “Korean-American,” is Chang Rae Lee. Lee’s Native Speaker is an example of a “minor literature” which fits the definition of Deleuze and Guattari, in that it is written by a minority in a major language. Fittingly, Lee’s Native Speaker as a minor literature demonstrates how a “half American” (prefixed American), or more specifically, a Korean American writer, can write with the effect of racial, cultural, and national de-territorialization between Korea and America. Finally, as Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out, Native Speaker bears two other characteristics of a minor literature: it is “political” and “collective.” It exposes the political tension felt by the Asian immigrants in America, and one Korean protagonist’s immigrant life collectively expresses the life of all Korean Americans. Ultimately, the value of this novel is that it helps us examine how ethnic literature is received and labeled by the American canon.

On a plot level, the protagonist in the novel, Henry Park, is a second-generation, Korean-American private spy who works for a white racist, Dennis Hoagland, to spy on his own people, John Kwang. Henry is instructed by Dennis to get close enough to Kwang so he can betray him. Henry’s reports on Kwang, which of course are written in excellent English, surpass any native speaker in their fluency, form, and efficiency (Dennis rewards him for this). However, as Henry spends more time with Kwang, he identifies with Kwang, and starts to realize that he must do what he has avoided all his life: face up to and evaluate who he really is. Is he an American? Korean? Or Korean-American? Although he is an American born citizen with American education and American mentality, he is no longer sure that he is American, and thus clings to what his American wife—who is the “standard barrier”—says who he is (Lee 12). Though later she apologizes, the list she hands him cataloguing who he is, is long enough to kill the hope of any Korean-American who thinks s/he can become singularly American: “You are surreptitious / B+ student of life / first thing hummer of Wagner and Strauss / illegal alien / emotional alien / genre bug / Yellow peril: neo-American / great in bed / overrated / poppa’s boy / sentimentalist / anti-romantic / ____ analyst (you fill in) / stranger / follower / traitor / spy” (Lee 5). Her list basically sums up who Henry Park is to the dominant U.S. culture, and more specifically, by the American canon.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, Native speaker fits the genre of a minor literature, but does it really? True, it is written by a minority in a major language. Yet, Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of a “minor literature” is problematic for two reasons. First, the term “minor” implies that it is smaller in scale and/or is less significant than its “major” counterpart. Like the definition and connotation of “ethnic literature,” a “minor literature” similarly intimates something that is tangential, inauthentic second-class literature. Second, Deleuze and Guattari’s point that minor literature is “political” and “collective” in nature is also true, but these qualities are not exclusive to minor literature; rather, all literature is “political” and “collective.” Who in American/Western canon has written anything that was not political, and has not either implicitly/explicitly spoken for the group the writer represented? How is literature even possible to be written in a purely nonpolitical and noncollective manner? This is not possible, and if such a writing is possible, in that it is purely “objective” (as opposed to political) and “personal” (as opposed to collective), then, are not these two conditionals—“objective” and “personal”—mutually exclusive? In other words, can a writing be “purely objective” but “purely personal” simultaneously? Besides, is not “personal” (such as the list made by Henry’s wife) inherently “political?” Thus, the two of the three constituents of a minor work listed by Deleuze and Guattari—“political” and “collective”— cannot be used to label and place ethnographic literature under a “minor literature.” The point is that frankly none of this labeling business should be espoused. If the writer is an American, then, s/he is singularly American, and his/her work is singularly an American literature. No prefixes such as “Afro,” “Asian,” “Latino,” nor qualifiers such as “minor” or “ethnic” is needed, unless the canon is willing to equally dissect the entire culturally hybrid, transnational writers of America.

To illustrate why labeling any literary work as “minor/ethnic” is nonsensical, I would like to point to an example from the Native Speaker. On a plot level, an example of this racial categorization is again the previously mentioned list compiled by Henry’s wife, which symbolically documents in print her sundry reasons why she is impelled to de-legitimize her Korean American husband as not a true American. However, Henry’s white American wife, by writing this list, ironically creates a “minor literature,” since her list is “political” and “collective”: it politically alienates her husband from her culture; and implicitly, her list collectively makes a claim about Asian-Americans in general. Then who is to be blamed, in this case, for being political and collective? Meanwhile, Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker is segregated under the “minor literature” in a separate American canon.

Why can’t Henry’s American wife, who is the “standard barrier,” and metaphorically the American canon, allow Henry to be singularly American? He does what is required of him, but, her list, indicts him of being too alienated or “foreign” to be singularly American. Obviously, his wife has not been convinced by Kristeva’s theory that the “foreigner” (her husband) whom she resents is, in fact, “herself.” Pertinent to Henry’s dilemma of wanting to be singularly American is the essay called “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies” written by Sumida Stephen. Stephen, in his essay, informs that “for about a decade the critique of Asian American ‘dual identity’ empowered Asian American studies with the contravening idea that it is the concept of ‘America’ that needs to be changed so that it is understood that Asian Americans are singularly American” (Sumida 1). In the past, if silent submissive Asian Americans can be effortlessly alienated (e.g., Japanese internment and Chinese exclusionary Act) on the basis of “phenotypically/culturally being more foreign than others”—thus requiring qualifiers and prefixes describing what type of an American they are—now, such systemized alienation are no longer feasible. With the coming-of-age of children of the Asian Diasporas, who may be the future writers/scholars, who have grown up in America, and who are mentally, culturally, and legally “Americans,” need to be dealt with. Surely, it is inevitable that the canon debates in the U.S., in the very near future, will have to re-examine the concept of “American” in categorizing the works written by Asian Americans, and by extension, other prefixed half-Americans.

Though the canonizers intentionally or unintentionally mold “white race” as the true “American culture” through literature, just as African American history and culture cannot be cognitively nor textually segregated from “Americanism,” so is the ethnic/minor literature. For the variegated ethnic subcultures and their history are inseparable constituents of America. Although the nation’s white elitists may rather regard ethnic/minor literature as not American, more often than not, however, it overwhelmingly represents authors who are American citizens with American education and American mind (like Chang Rae Lee) invariably writing in some ways about “Americanism.” Thus, the fact that American canon routinely place literature written by its diasporic/hybrid scholars under the “ethnic category”—which automatically precludes them from being included as an essential part of the whole—is both insensitive and illogical, in that it defies the multicultural make up of the American populace.

Today, any large cosmopolitan country like England, and even China, for example, is transnational in nature, because it is made up of diverse peoples and cultures, let alone “America”—the land of liberty, equality, and diversity. Yet disturbingly, contemporary critics such as Said, Spivak, Guillory, and Bhabha would all agree that Eurocentric nationalism/racialization is the invisible force in the canon war that divides and groups, includes and excludes the wide-range of literature. However, Bhabha warns that “the very idea of a pure ‘ethnically cleansed’ national identity can only be achieved through…death” (1334). Similarly, Said in “The Politics of Knowledge” critiques that the illusion of culturally homogenous nationalism in the canon debates is that it is perceived and internalized “as if…it [is] pure and unchanging from the beginning to the end of time” (192). In other words, Said is trying to explain that (canonical) nationalism as a concept is susceptible to mutation and hybridization over time. Thus, the insistence on the part of the canonizers to forge and transmit monolithic Western culture through racially selective process of canonization not only threatens the sociopolitical harmony, but is a futile act of resisting the global currency. Instead, the authorities of the Western canon, more narrowly, those in control of the American canon need to re-assess and realign the concept of “American” as inherently transnational in scope to include the works of the prefixed American writers as singularly “American,” without qualifiers or separate curriculum.

Works Cited

Bhabba, Homi. “Locations of Culture.” The Critical Tradition. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 1989.

Lee, Chang Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Johnson, Samuel. “Preface to Shakespeare.” The Critical Tradition. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 1989.

Gilles, Deleuze, and Guattari, Felix. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston:

Guillory, John. “The Canon as Cultural Capital.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 2000

Kristeva, Julia. Strangers To Ourselves. Roudiez, Leon S. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Said, Edward W. “The Politics of Knowledge.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 2000.

Spivak, Gayatri. “Imperialism and Sexual Difference.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 2000.

Sumida, Stephen H. “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies.” American Studies International 38 (2000): 97-114.

Rivalry relation between Jane in Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and Bertha in Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea”

Rivalry relation between

Jane in Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and Bertha in Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea”

Adrienne Rich in “Jan Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman” articulates that “Jane Eyre, motherless and economically powerless” has successfully resisted “certain traditional female temptations” with dignity (470).  Rich quotes from Phyllis Chesler’s essay called the “Women and Madness” to explicate what she means by “motherless woman”: Rich explains that women for generations “have had neither power nor wealth to hand on to their daughters [because] they have been dependent on men as children are on women” (470).  Therefore, Rich says that for a woman to secure herself financially, she is left with one option: women must learn to “pleas[e] and attach themselves to, powerful or economically viable men” (470).  In Rich’s opinion, what makes Jane Eyre so different and admirable is the fact that she does not “please and attach” herself to a powerful or economically viable men in order to fare well.  Though she is an orphan, who is in need of financial support, Jane never compromises morality, self-respect, and dignity.

Adrienne Rich further lists four major temptations in Jane’s life which she courageously overcomes: (1) the temptation of victimization; (2) the thrill of masochism; (3) the temptation of romantic love and surrender; and (4) the deepest lure for a spiritual woman.  First, Jane’s “temptation of victimization” occurs when she lives with the Reeds (her Aunt), “a hostile household, where both psychic and physical violence are used against her” (471).  Though the insults and abuses she suffer from them are enough to diminish “her very spiritedness and individuality,” she manages to come out of this situation with her self-respect intact.  Secondly, “the temptation of masochism” springs from Jane’s deep affection and respect for Helen who is religious, forgiving, and ultimately masochistic.  However, Jane soon realizes that “the thrill of masochism is not for her, though it is one of her temptations” (474).  Thirdly, “the temptation of romantic love and surrender” comes to Jane at Thornfield, as she falls in love with Rochester and decides to marry him.  On the wedding day, however, it is reveled that Rochester has a living wife—a mad woman, Bertha.  Not only is it against Jane’s high moral to become Rochester’s mistress, but more implicitly, she flees from the risk of “becoming this [mad] woman” herself by marrying him (476).  Lastly, Jane’s final temptation which comes from St. John is the “most confusing temptation,” because it is “the deepest lure for a spiritual woman” (480).  As St. John offers her marriage without love which is instead filled with a spiritual sense of “duty and service to a cause” in India as a missionary couple, Jane, upon serious contemplation, rejects this offer (480).  Rich ultimately believes that it is Jane’s strong sense of morality, self-respect, and dignity that saves her from the usual trap and temptations of a motherless woman.

Although I agree with Adrienne Rich on most of her points about Jane Eyre, I take issue with her concluding comment of her essay, in which she states that “In Jane Eyre,…we find an alternative to the stereotypical rivalry of women” (482).  Rich believes that the women in the novel are supportive to one another, and they are “not…points on a triangle…as temporary substitutes for men” (482).  Though it is true that Jane and many of the women in the novel is supportive to one another, what Rich is neglecting with this comment is that she is completely overlooking the fact that the relationship between Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason is a relationship of “rivalry,” and these two women are the “points on a triangle” with one man— Rochester.  If Rich assumes that Jane’s relationship with Bertha is non-rivalry because that is how it is depicted by Bronte, then, she is complicit with Bronte for grossly misrepresenting and symbolically oppressing the women of color in Eurocentric literature written by feminist of the first world.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in “Imperialism and Sexual Difference” critiques that the feminists of the first world—such as Bronte and Rich—are complicit with the racist masculist of universalism, and asks that the female writers and critics to stop perpetuating the “racism within feminism” (347).  Spivak states that a novel like Jane Eyre commits “translation-as-violation,” because Bronte writes about woman of the third world (Bertha Mason) when she is “total[ly] ignoran[t] of history and subject constitution” of that world and its women (344).  Spivak says that such ignorance on the part of the first world feminist like Bronte is not only insensitive and arrogant—in that they assume their feminist paradigm is universal—but is also misleading because the distorted representation of the women of color, often as lunatics (like Bertha), becomes a generalized stereotype on the minds of their readers.

Spivaks fear of “translation-as-violation” committed by the first world feminists must have been comforted by Jean Rhys, who sympathetically reconstructs Bertha Mason in her novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, as a character who is victimized by Rochester.  While Adrienne Rich convincingly depicts the motherless Jane Eyre as an exceptional heroine who has resisted moral temptations in the world of patriarchy, Jean Rhys in her novel sympathetically reveals how Bertha not only became motherless, but why she became, fatherless, husbandless, childless, friendless, and penniless under the patriarch Rochester—the man Jane wins as a reward for her high morals.  Thus, though Adrienne Rich exalts Jane’s high morality and dignity, Jean Rhys novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which is written from Bertha’s point of view, helps us see that these two women are the “points on a triangle” with one man, Rochester, and thus are rivals to one another.

Works Cited

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Imperialism and Sexual Differnce.” Falling into Theory. Richter,

David H. 2 ed. Boston:Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.

Rich, Adrienne. “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman.” Jane Eyre. Charlotte

Bronte. New York: Norton & Co., 2001.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton & Co., 1999.

Forfeiting One’s Comfort for Morality in Daniel Defoe’s “Moll Flanders,” Henry Fielding’s “Joseph Andrews,” and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”

The Consequences of Forfeiting One’s Comfort for Morality in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

In Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Moll writes in her Memorandums than she was “Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own brother), Twelve Year a Thief, eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest and died a Penitent” (2). However, many of these circumstances could have been avoided if Moll had chosen comfort over morality.  The word “comfort,” in her case equates to “security,” which she desperately needs and seeks, but only with “moral” conscience. 

Moll’s first emotional battle over “morality” versus “security” is well captured in the event of her first marriage to Robert. For instance, when the elder brother encourages her to accept Robert’s offer—though she being an orphan knows marrying Robert will not only give her the security she needs from the harsh world, but is also the only option she has to guard herself against being homeless—she does not immediately take this offer. Rather, she is disgusted with the idea of marrying the younger, when her virginity is taken by someone else—the elder. She feels that she is morally bonded to the elder brother, though they are not legally married. She feels that she would be a prostitute in her heart if she marries the younger brother when she is in fact in love with the elder. She therefore demands moral clarification from the elder about their relationship, as well as making her own enunciation about woman’s chastity: “Will you Transfer me to your Brother? Can you Transfer my Affection?…whatever the Change of your side may be, I will ever be True; and I had much rather, since it is come that unhappy Length, be your Whore than your Brother’s Wife” (34). However, manipulated by the elder and pushed to no other alternative by the younger, Moll marries the younger brother, Robert, and attains the most needed security a young orphan girl needs—a family of her own. Nonetheless, her initial resistance to Robert’s offer deserves much credit to her high morals holding up against the temptations of security.  

Unfortunately, for Moll, the security gained through her first marriage does not last long, nor does she try to hold on to it as a widow. The security of a married woman ends as her husband, Robert, dies after five years of marriage, because she gives up the basic financial necessity and emotional security that she could have pursued and have as a widow of a prominent family. Instead, she quickly decides to leave the site of her first love because she feels she is loosing the moral battle against the imaginary incest. Moll, in her own word, explains the situation: “his Brother being so always in my sight…was a continual Snare to me; and I never was in Bed with my Husband, but I wish’d my self in the Arms of his Brother…In short, I committed Adultery and Incest with him every Day in my Desires, which without doubt, was…Criminal in the Nature of the Guilt” (49). Thus, bothered by her conscience throughout the marriage with Robert and after his death, she straight away sends her two children to live with Robert’s parents, so she can claim back her clear conscience, even if that entails forsaking security and facing danger of being all alone again.

Similarly, her third marriage to a plantation owner who is later revealed to be none other than her half brother becomes another situation that compels her to choose morality over security.  Moll marries her half brother inadvertently, both she and her husband with mercenary motives, mutually mistaking that the other party had great fortune. In light of finding out that each other has been misled into the marriage, they decide and move to Virginia where the husband has his family and plantations. For a while, the whole family get along well in America, and Moll enjoys the financial and emotional security and “th[inks] herself the happiest creature alive,” until one day she realizes that her husband’s mother is also her mother and that their marriage has been incestuous (70). Whereas with Robert, if incest was imaginary, this situation with her half brother is real enough to make all parties viscerally sick. Since she “loath[s] the Thoughts of Bedding with [her half brother],” Moll once again gives up her security for the sake of morality, and returns to England to face uncertainties and poverty (73).

Moll forgoes her security over morality again in the case of her unwanted pregnancy by Jemy. After she parts with Jemy, she realizes that she is pregnant by him. Much to her dismay, her pregnancy means that she cannot in her right conscience marry the banker who offers her the security she so desperately needs. However, abortive thoughts in regards to the life of a child—though her governess offers her help to miscarry the child—never cross her mind. Moll articulates this event to the reader: “if I was willing” she says, “[my governess] could [have] give[en] me something to make me Miscarry, if I had a desire to put an end to my troubles that way; but I soon let her see that I abhorr’d the thoughts of it” (133). In a word, rather than pursuing the security that would come by marrying the banker, she chooses the life of a child. Considering the fact that she had received offer to help her miscarry the unwanted child, Moll’s insistence in choosing the child’s life is, then, a courageous moral act on her part. Luckily, however, the banker remains devoted to Moll long enough, so the consequence of holding fast to her maternal conscience does not cost her the marriage/security itself, but the heartache of parting with the child with the “Country Woman” who shows “many a Tear,” in gratitude for receiving the child (140).  

Similarly, in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams suffers the consequences of substituting his comfort for moral duties. Unlike Parson Trulliber, Parson Adams is an epitome of Christ-like charity. Although his charity exposes him to inconveniences and harm, he volunteers to help those in need, namely Joseph. For instance, when Joseph injures his leg he falls into the care of the innkeeper’s wife. However, her husband berates the hostess and Joseph “for wasting Hog’s Puddings” (145). Adams being an active Christian is unable to bear such inhospitable manner of the host, so he “deal[s with] him so sound a Compliment over his Face with his Fist, that the Blood immediately gushe[s] out of his Nose in a Stream” (144). The host strikes back at Adams “with so much Gratitude, that the Parson’s Nostrils likewise began to look a little redder than usual. Furthermore, the hostess, too, ungratefully returns Adams’s heroic intervention by throwing “a Pan full of Hog’s-Blood…into the Parson’s Face” (144). Thus, because Adams chooses to referee when situations seem unjust for Joseph, he himself must suffer the injurious and humiliating consequences of being a moral parson.

Parson Adams’s another example of choosing moral duties over personal comfort occurs when he rescues Fanny from being raped. While he is almost being lectured by a gentleman who claims to be brave, he hears Fanny’s shrieks. Ironically, however, it is not the self-claimed courageous gentleman but Adams who respond to the scream and saves Fanny: “Adams, who was no Chicken…exert[s] his utmost Force at once, and with such Success, he overturn[s]” the rapist (161). Then he “call[s] aloud to the young Woman, [and says]…‘Be of good cheer, Damsel,’…’you are no longer in danger of your Ravisher” (161). Though he did not know that it was Fanny who was in trouble, his unfeigned concern for all human beings, not just the selective few, makes him react and rescue victims without any moral hesitations.

Although, Parson Adams’s fearless and selfless kindness is inauspicious to him, his goodness is constant. His unvarying kindness is evidenced by his willingness to help Fanny and Joseph while traveling together with him. Though he himself is poor and has been robbed of what little he had, he is willing to share all that he has with them, whether it be money, food, or clothing.  Because he is genuinely charitable, he believes others would likewise help him in need, and he does manage to procure help when in need. Unlike Parson Trulliber, then, Parson Adams not merely preaches charity, but lives it, and expects the same from others. Thus, Parson Adams’s continuous moral examples radiate to all those around him, though they cost him countless troubles.

Finally, we see Parson Adams’s unflinching moral character when he stands up to Lady Booby on behalf of Fanny and Joseph. Being a woman of influence, Lady Booby orders Parson Adams not to publish the “Banns” for Fanny and Joseph, but he is undaunted by her command.  Instead, he dares to counter-argue Lady Booby. He argues that he “would obey [her] in every thing that is lawful; but surely [he says,] the Parties being poor is no Reason against their marrying” (280). Furious by Adams’s protestation, Lady Booby threatens to “discard [him] from his Service,” but he is undeterred. In essence, Adams’s unwavering morality stands as a bulwark for socially inconsequential young people like Joseph and Fanny against social injustice from people like Lady Booby, and thus deserves utmost “respect” for being a true man of God.

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, one’s “comfort” signifies one’s social “establishment” and one’s “morality” equates to “love” that is unfeigned. The novel’s predominant issue is marriage, especially from women’s point of view. Its female characters’ only means to gain social “establishment” is through marriage with the right man, with or without true “love.” The novel’s protagonist, Elizabeth suffers consequences of not compromising “love” for “establishment.” Although the social norms at the time expects young woman to settle more for a reasonable comfort—than true love—in a marriage, Elizabeth does not want to forsake true affection in relationships.

An example of Elizabeth’s unwillingness to sacrifice true affection for comfort is seen in the case of Mr. Collin’s proposal to her. Because Mr. Collins would inherit her family estate, he would be an ideal match for both her parents and herself to secure their present financial status.  Mr. Collins makes the offer to marry Elizabeth, and she is pressured by her mother, Mrs. Bennet, to accept his offer. By implication, Mrs. Bennet’s attitude also mirrors social expectation of women in her era, which weighs the groom’s social establishment heavier than true affections exchanged between the couple. However, Elizabeth defies social norms and ignores her mother’s demands, albeit there is that risk of Mr. Collins being her first and last chance of being married. Concerning what is at stake, when Mr. Collins finds her refusal unbelievable, she steadfastly makes certain that he understands that she is not the average girl of her time: She tells him that she is “not one of those young ladies…[and that she is] perfectly serious in [her] refusal” (93). She further shamelessly articulates her point clearly by foretelling Mr. Collins that “[he] could not make [her] happy” (93).  As this scene suggests, Elizabeth is adamant about not settling for mere comfort in a marriage. Instead, what she expects and searches for in a relationship is unfeigned love, not financial establishment.

Elizabeth’s affection for socially dubious Wickham while rejecting well suited Mr. Collins is another examples that illustrates her innate tendency to value love above men’s social recognition. Although it is only their first meeting, Wickham tells her of his misfortunate status, especially due to—as he claims—Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth nonetheless falls for him all the more, out of empathy. Irrespective of Wickham’s social standing and his personal problems with the socially formidable Darcys, she finds him sympathetic and attractive. In fact, she defends him at every turn until her high regards for Wickham is proven wrong by Darcy’s revelation about his disreputable past. Nonetheless, Elizabeth’s initial respect and loyalty shown towards Wickham reveal her honorable side—the side that can never be diluted or tempted by man’s favorable social status.

Finally, Elizabeth’s courage to resist Darcy’s first proposal attests to her virtue—the fact that she is least concerned with Darcy’s immense social status than she is about true love and respect between the couple. Later when Darcy proposes to Elizabeth for the second time, he admits how surprised he was to have her reject him the first time, but thanks her for teaching him “a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous, [because it]…properly humbled” him (308). Because Elizabeth never compromises her virtue, she is given a second chance from Darcy. For it is Elizabeth’s resolute self-respective manner towards Lady Catherine that Darcy is encouraged to propose to her for the second time. Knowing Elizabeth’s “disposition,” Darcy knew that if Elizabeth has “irrevocably decided against [him], [she] would have acknowledged it to Lady Catherine, frankly and openly” (306). For Elizabeth, it is only when the truth is revealed about Darcy—his fairness and generosity in the matters of “Wickham and Miss Darcy” and “Wickham and Lydia,”—she is able to dismiss her prejudice against him. Because she is proven wrong about Darcy’s character, she is able to love him. For Elizabeth it is man’s character—not his establishment/status—that she attracts her. Thus for Elizabeth, not only that Darcy is “violently in love” with her, but that she, too, is with him is an unnegotiable factor in her romance. (305).

In the three novels—Moll Flanders, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, and Pride and Prejudice—the common factor among the three protagonists, Moll, Adams, and Elizabeth, is that they are not hypocrites, but are characters who hold firm to high morals at all costs (except Moll who sometimes is just as immoral as she is moral). All three characters risk comfort/establishment for morality/love and suffer the due consequences. For intance, Moll often risks her security to choose what is morally right in her mind. Similarly, Parson Adams jeopardizes his physical safety and finances to help those in distress, namely Joseph and Fanny. Finally, Elizabeth likewise never considers what comfort or social establishment she may be able to obtain by marrying a certain men, but rather painstakingly scrutinizes whether mutual love and respect can be traceable in her relationships. Thus, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen, by giving a happy ending to their respective protagonists in their novels impart a moral lesson: that whether it be “security” for Moll, “respect” for Adams, or “love” for Elizabeth, their ultimate reward were gained by withstanding the temptations of “comfort” that comes in various forms.

Outline of Spivak’s “Imperialism and Sexual Difference”

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Biography:

• Born in Calcutta
• Education: University of Calcuttan and Cornell University
• Chief spokesperson of “subaltern studies”
• Postcolonial theorist (with a global feminist Marxist perspective)
• Avalon Professor at Columbia University 1991
• Former Andrew w. Mellon Professor of English at university of Pittsburgh
• Social projects: Rural Literary Teacher Training (on grassroots level, in India and Bangladesh)
• Lit. Works:

1.  
   1. Translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967)
   2. Myself I Must Remake: The Life and Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1974)
   3. In Other worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1988)
   4. The Postcolonial Critic (1990)
   5. Outside the Teaching Machine (1993)
   6. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999)

 

“Imperialism and Sexual Difference”

Objective: Point out the “racism within feminism” against the third world women of color

Claim 1:  Academic institutions insist “White Male as a Norm” for universal humanity. Therefore, needs “The Tropological Deconstruction of Masculist Universalism.” (it means that “Truth Claim,” in this case, the truth claimed by the white male universalists, is no more than a trope, a figure of speech that passes as truth.  Therefore, it needs to be deconstructed—borrowed from De Man’s theory)

Q:   What does Spivak mean by the truth claims made by the postcolonial Masculists?

A:   She is talking about colonial texts that try to justify colonialism; for instance, (1)  colonialism was an act of benevolent masculism/paternalism; (2) it was a historically appropriate event, for instance “the Conquest of India” wasn’t really a “conquest.” Imperialism, in other words is “in loco parentis,” meaning that it was “in place of the parent”—to feed the starving, childish Indians who are utterly dependent on the first world.

Claim 2:  Eurocentric feminism is complicit with the white male imperialism.

quote: “even as we feminist critics discover the troping error of the masculist truth-claim to universality or academic objectivity, we perform the lie of constituting a truth of global sisterhood where the mesmerizing model remains male and female sparring partners of generalizable or universalizable sexuality who are the chief protagonists in that European contest. In order to claim sexual difference where it makes a difference, global sisterhood must receive this articulation even if the sisters in question are Asian, African, Arrab” (341).

 

Claim 3:  Eurocentric writers commit “Translation-as-Violation” (“total ignorance of history And subject constitution,” meaning that European writers mistranslate the language orculture of the third world women; or grossly misrepresent them in terms of gender andindividuality. In their writings, they are not really individuals, but a collective mass of dark inferiors)

quote: “kipling uses many Hindusthani words in his text—pidgin Hindusthani, barbaric to the native speaker, devoid of syntactic connections, always infelicitous almost always incorrect. The narrative practice sanctions this usage and establishes it as “correct,” without, of course, any translation. This is british pidgin, originating in a decision that hindusthani is a language of servants not worth mastering “correctly”; this is the version of the language that is established textually as “correct.” By contrast, the hindusthani speech of the Indian servants is painstakingly translated into archaic and awkward English…Let us call this ensemble of moves…translation-as-violation (344). 

quote:  “the second wave of U.S. academic feminism as a “universal” model of the “natural”reactions of the female psyche. This too is an example of translation-as-violation” (345).

Claim 4:  Institutions perpetuate the “Sanctioned Inorance” (blindness of truth telling, teachers teach without the true understanding of the 3^rd world women, therefore, the ignorance perpetuates)

quote: “Our own mania for “third-world literature” anthologies, when the teacher or critic often has no sense of the original languages, or of the subject constitution of the social and gendered agents in question (and therefore the student cannot sense this as a loss), participates more in the logic of translation-as-violation than in the ideal of translation as freedom-in-troping. What is at play there is a phenomenon that can be called sanctioned ignorance” (345).

 

Conclusion: 

1. Spivak is deeply interested in “the tropological deconstruction of masculist universalism. She knows that the “correction” of one trope points to another trope—the process is endless. Yet, she insists that critics must be persistent. 

2. The subaltern writers/critics want “the chance of an entry into the vertiginous process” of de-colonialization—the equal rights of historical, geographical, linguistic specificity, and theoretical sophistication” (347).

Questions:    

1. In our campus, is there racism within feminism? For example, does literature written by women of color receive equal appreciation as to their historical, aesthetical, and theoretical sophistication?  If no, why not?

2. Who has the ultimate authority to critique literature of the third world? Can white males/females of the first worlds critique texts of the third world? Are they capable of deconstructing the false claims of the masculist universalism? Who can de-colonialize racist texts?

Presentation by: Joey Reyes & Jessie Chen

T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

The Waste Land Explication

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I Could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence (38-41)

        This passage taken from “The Waste Land” is the voice of a male speaker describing his moment of sexual failure/impotence upon seeing the girl from his past, the hyacinth girl.  Although the girl’s “arms [are] full,” suggesting sexual energy and expression as if she is about to embrace him, the speaker’s biological senses suddenly collapse, and thus fail to respond to her sexual desire/seduction physically: He becomes mute (“I Could not Speak”) and blind (“my eyes failed”).  However, with the lost of his corporeal sight, his spiritual vision sees beyond the mortal ground where he can at least, with confidence, affirm that he is neither “living nor dead,” as if in a state of limbo/nothingness.  Though unable to verbalize his epiphany, his spiritual vision “look[s deep]…into the heart of light” and becomes aware of the “silence” that pervades this nihilistic realm.  In effect, while he is in this mental trance, all forms of his familiarity de-familiarize.  For instance, he no longer recognizes/reacts to his old acquaintance (the hyacinth girl) the way he should/is expected to, that is passionately/nostalgically.  In other words, his cognitive mechanism disintegrates, causing his social behavior to defy his character or his wishes.  His “memory,” “knowledge,” and perhaps even his “identity” efface into a nihilistic state where nothing is decipherable/explicable: “I knew nothing.”  Despite what the lushness/sexual ecstasy her “wet” hair suggests and “hyacinth” that symbolizes her fecundity, his inaction to such an enticing, pleasurable call begs questions: Can we trust the speaker’s senses?  Why does his sight fail? Why is his sensory-collapsing epiphany ineffable? Could it be that the hyacinth girl is only an oasis, an optical illusion the speaker thirsts for in the desert?  If the hyacinth girl does in fact represent the normalcy and fruitfulness of the past that is no longer possible in the Waste Land, then Eliot in this passage is wistfully delineating a bleak, barren view of the modernists whose sexual/mental intercourse has fragmented abysmally.