1 Trevor Hope Autobiography as SelfInscription: Maxine Hong ...

Trevor Hope Autobiography as SelfInscription: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior SUMMARY I respond here to five presentations on autobiography, biography and memoirs in relation to questions of literary genre. Considering these five very different presentations—on the biographies of Christian Saints, on the role of music in the life of Nietzsche, on Chateaubriand as a memoirist, and on what we might call the “postmodern” autobiographies of Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Maxine Hong Kingston— I conclude that genre is historically variable, defined neither by some fixed essential form nor by complete discontinuity. Rather, each writer works within—but also against—a received set of generic conventions. Key Words: autobiography, cultural difference, feminism, subjectivity, phonocentrism. ÖZET Kendini yazıya dökme eylemi olarak özyaşamöyküsü: Maxine Hong Kingston’un Kadın Savaşcı’si Geçtiğimiz 30 yıl içinde insani bilimler alanında gerçekleşen geniş anlamda kuramsal devrimin –basitçe yapısalcılıksonrası olarak adlandırabileceğimiz bir devrimin merkezinde yer alan sorular, otobiyografi türüne uygulandığında özel bir ivediyet kazanmaktadır. Gönderme, deneyim ve öznellik ve daha büyük kültürel söylemlerle ilişkili olarak öznenin kuruluşu fikirleri; içlerinde yapısalcılık, yapısöküm, psikanaliz ve Foucault tarzı iktidar/bilgi çözümlemesinin bulunduğu bir dizi kuramsal yönelim tarafından krize sokulmuştur. Farklı toplumsal özneler için bu kavramların zorluğu bize feminist kuramcılar ve etnik incelemeler alanında çalışanlar tarafından da hatırlatılmaktadır. Kısacası, ben’in ve onun metinsel yazımının doğal, değişmez ve evrensel bir formunun olduğu fikri, otobiyografi incelemesinin lehine olmak üzere, şiddetli bir eleştiriye maruz kalmıştır. Aynı zamanda, otobiyografiyi naif bir tür olarak görme tuzağına düşmenin neredeyse dayanılmaz eğiliminin sürekli olarak bilincinde olmamız gerektiğini düşünüyorum. Böylece, romanla veya hatta biyografiyle karşılaştırıldığında, metinselliğin işlemesinin dışında ve öncesinde basit olumlu bir varlığı olduğu varsayılan benliğe açılan masum saydamlıkta bir pencere sunan bir aktarma biçimi sunulmaktadır. Bu naifliğin ideolojik gücü, otobiyografi “kadın otobiyografisi” ya da “etnik otobiyografi” olarak nitelendiğinde daha da görünür hale gelmektedir, çünkü türü niteleme işleminin kendisi, evrensellik sorununu krize sokmakta ve akademinin hem içinde hem de dışında anticinsiyetçi ve antiırkçı aktivizmi etkileyen bazı kimlik politikalarının baskısı “otantiklik” talebini artırmaktadır ve bu elbette edebi üretimin metalaşmasının bir etkisidir. Maxine Hong Kingston’un çok popüler ve etkili olmuş metni Kadın Savaşçı’yı (ABD’de 1976 yılında yayınlandı) örnek olay olarak kullanarak, ÇinliAmerikalı bir kadın yazarın bir eserinin, otobiyografi türünün ögelerini bizi tam da benlik ve otantiklik gibi, bireysel ya da “ulusal” ve “kültürel” kimlik düzeyinde kurulsalar da,

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naif ve masum gibi görünen kavramların tehlikelerine karşı uyarmak için nasıl kullandığını kısaca göstermeyi umuyorum. Özellikle, konuşma ve yazının metinde nasıl işlendiğine yoğunlaşarak, Bildung’un, önceden baskıcı toplumsal güçler tarafından sessizleştirilmiş bir azınlık/kadın öznenin muzaffer bir şekilde “dile gelmesi” olarak algılanan görünüşte özgürleştirici anlatısının, metinde nasıl direnişe uğradığını göstermeye çalışacağım. Gerçekten de, metindeki yazı böylesi sözmerkezli varsayımları sorgulanmaya açmaya güçlü bir şekilde hizmet etmekte ve bunu yaşamsal siyasal öneme sahip bir biçimde yapmaktadır. Anahtar Sözcükler: özyaşamöyküsü, kültürel farklılık, feminizm, öznellik, sözmerkezcilik.

In the Confessions, when JeanJacques tries to explain how he became a writer, he describes the passage to writing as the restoration, by a certain absence and by a sort of calculated effacement, of presence disappointed in itself in speech. To write is indeed the only way of keeping or recapturing speech since speech denies itself as it gives itself. Jacques Derrida 1 Questions central to the broadly theoretical revolution that has taken place in the humanities over the last 30 years—a revolution we can rather loosely call poststructuralist—take on a special urgency when applied to the genre of autobiography. Ideas of reference, of experience, of subjectivity and of the constitution of the subject in relation to larger cultural discourses have been thrown into crisis from a number of theoretical directions including structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and the Foucauldian analysis of power/knowledge. We have also been reminded of the different stakes of such concepts for different social subjects by feminist scholars and those within the field of ethnic studies. In short, the idea that the self and its textual inscription has a natural, invariable and universal form has come under rigorous scrutiny, very much to the benefit of the study of autobiography. 2

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Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 142. For an excellent history of feminist theorization of autobiography and of the various theoretical models that have worked against naive assumptions about subjectivity, reference and the supposedly liberatory power of expression see Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s introduction to Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. 2

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At the same time, it seems to me that we still have to be constantly aware of the almost irresistible tendency to fall back into the trap of seeing autobiography as a supremely naive genre, offering a form of transcription that, in comparison with the novel, for example, or even with biography, offers an innocently transparent window onto a selfhood which is assumed to have some kind of simple positive existence outside of and prior to the workings of a textuality through which, in this account, it is belatedly rendered. The ideological force of this naivety becomes all the more apparent when the autobiography in question is qualified as “women’s autobiography” or “ethnic autobiography,” since, at the same time as this very act of qualifying the genre throws questions of universality into crisis, the pressure of certain kinds of identity politics that have affected antisexist and antiracist activism both inside and outside the academy intensifies the demand for “authenticity,” which is also surely an effect of the commodification of literary production. 3

Using Maxine Hong Kingston’s hugely popular and influential text The Woman Warrior (published in the U.S. in 1976) as a case study, I hope briefly to illustrate how one work by a Chinese American woman author uses elements of the autobiographical genre to warn us of the dangers of precisely such naive and innocentseeming concepts as selfhood and authenticity. In particular, focusing on how speech and writing are figured in the text, I shall try to show how the text resists 3

Biddy Martin expresses with great clarity and succinctness the manner in which the injunctions of identity politics can exacerbate the demand for referential immediacy: “Of course ‘lesbian autobiography,’ in its bound singularity, could appear to be a match made in a rather conventional heaven, plagued as both terms are historically by ‘facile assumptions of referentiality.’ Their combination brings out the most conventional interpretation in each, for the lesbian in front of autobiography reinforces conventional assumptions of the transparency of autobiographical writing” (138). A footnote indicates that the characterization of “facile assumptions of referentiality” is taken from Paul de Man’s “Autobiography as Defacement.” Frank Chin’s notorious assault on The Woman Warrior, does raise some important questions about the manner in which autobiography may respond to the demands of specifically white reception within a context of literary commodification, and reminds us that the confessional elements of autobiography, far from being simply universal, have a culturally specific history. In his dismissal of Kingston’s text, however, he falls into an extremely problematic differentiation between the “real” and the “fake,” although arguably it is precisely the fantasy of the “real,” the “authentic” that is exploited in the commodification of “ethnic” or “multicultural” autobiography. See also the discussions of orientalist consumption in Sauling Cynthia Wong and Yuan Shu. For further analysis of the early excoriation of Kingston by male Asian American critics see Lim. 3

a seemingly liberatory narrative of Bildung perceived as the triumphant “coming to voice” of a minority/female self previously silenced by oppressive social forces. Indeed, writing in the text works strongly to bring into question such logocentric assumptions, and it does so in ways which are of vital political significance. 4

Questions of genre in relation to The Woman Warrior are, in fact, rather complex. The text is generally treated in autobiographical terms, although some critics have designated it a work of autobiographical fiction, rather than of pure autobiography. It has been reported that Kingston herself originally intended to publish the work as a novel and that the decision to categorize it as nonfiction—one apparently successful in marketing terms—was that of her original publisher. The subtitle of the text, meanwhile, is “Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts,” and some critics, and Kingston herself in one essay, have insisted strongly on the distinction between memoirs, with their supposedly greater latitude for fragmentary and fantastic accounts of the self, and the genre of strict autobiography. 5 Critics have asserted with equal conviction that, whether autobiographical or not, the work either is, or is not, a narrative of Bildung. 6 The one thing that many critics do agree on, though, is that the text deliberately plays with the limits and boundaries of genres, mixing for example 4

In “Experience,” Joan Scott links an opposition between vision and writing to a foundationalist conception of experience that has traditionally beleaguered historical analysis and often continues its ideological work within feminist and other oppositional forms of historiography: “Knowledge is gained through vision; vision is a direct, unmediated apprehension of a world of transparent objects. In this conceptualization of it, the visible is privileged; writing is then put at its service” (29 30). According to Scott, this relationship underpins analyses that take “experience” as an unquestioned foundation for analysis rather than submitting experience itself to a necessary discursive/genealogical analysis. I would argue that the opposition between speech and writing works in a similar way. The former is frequently taken to be the authentic and unmediated in relation to which writing comes to represent what Derrida, in his reading of Rousseau’s Confessions in Of Grammatology calls the “dangerous supplement,” that which betrays and traduces the very subjectivity it bears and mediates. My argument here will be that The Woman Warrior constantly subverts the fantasy of a pure speech before and at the origin of writing in order to show paradoxically, like Derrida, that speech is inhabited by a writing at its own impossible “origin,” that the speaking subject is one necessarily inscribed in an economy of writing. 5 On questions of genre, see especially Quinby and Lightfoot, who both argue in favor of memoir as opposed to the designation of autobiography. 6 Lightfoot, for example, argues that the text is not a narrative of Bildung, while it is central to Feng’s analysis that it is a Bildungsroman. 4

conventional firstperson accounts of childhood and maturation that maintain a varied degree of realism with fantastic rewritings of stories from Chinese legend as supposedly narrated to the protagonist by her mother, in an oral form. I shall here join that majority of critics who see the work as autobiographical, but I do so precisely in order to insist on the manner in which it questions the ideological presuppositions with which certain readings of the genre have tended to collude.

The story famously begins with an injunction against speech, the imposition of silence and indeed the outlawing of narrative: “‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you’” (3). The story the mother goes on to tell, the story whose telling she simultaneously expressly forbids, is that of the suicide of the narrator/protagonist’s aunt, her father’s sister, who has been besieged by her fellow villagers for a perceived sexual transgression that results in pregnancy and which may, or may not, have been a rape. We shall come back to the narrator’s identification with the aunt and the sense in which this story, told in the third person, also becomes a heterogeneous part of the larger autobiographical narrative, but it is important to notice that this first story, issued orally under an injunction to silence, is intended as a warning and perhaps arguably a kind of narrative prophylaxis as the narrator reaches adolescence. The fact that the text begins so dramatically with an urgency to silence is perhaps also what has made the reading of the narrative in terms of a progressive passage from imposed silence to the triumphant emergence of the selfwilled firstperson singular voice so irresistible, while the fact that the story in question involves a transgression against patriarchal codes of honor and that it is understood that the origin of the injunction against speech is paternal—“Your father does not want to hear her name” (15)—of course seems to lend considerable force to the idea that this trajectory is simultaneously a passage to feminist consciousness and the articulation of resistance to patriarchal oppression. 7 7

The classic analysis of the text in terms of an economy of silence and articulation is that of KingKok Cheung, who speaks of the “almost magical healing effect of words” (165), and according to whom “the relief sought by those frustrated by silence—forbidden or unable to speak—can only come through articulation” (172). At one level in Cheung’s analysis, the idea of “needs for selfexpression” (162) supports the sense of an authentic self to be rediscovered or reclaimed beneath the impositions of male authority such that Kingston’s and Walker’s protagonists must “go beyond the violent behavior and abusive language of the tyrant to become truly themselves” (168). Symptomatically, Cheung’s analysis leads her directly to 5

Neither is this interpretation undermined, I would argue, by the fact that the injunction is passed on—as is the story—by a woman, the mother. Indeed, the mother plays the key role in another scene which seems to combine similar symbolic elements. The narrator relates that her mother had “cut my tongue” when she was still a baby (163). “The Chinese say “‘a ready tongue is an evil,’” we are told, and there is clearly a strong implication that the cutting of the child’s tongue is an act of silencing and disciplining which is intended to bind her to the strictures of a patriarchal ancestral culture (164). The narrator’s mother, Brave Orchid, on the other hand, when asked, claims that she cut the frenum of her daughter’s tongue precisely in order to free it from its bindings: “I cut it so that you would not be tonguetied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language” (164). The mother, who incidentally forbids her children to speak at the dinner table, claims to see the bodily incision as an act of liberation, but the narrator clearly remains suspicious that this “tampering” has left her voicedeprived during much of her maturation: “You can’t entrust your voice to the Chinese, either; they want to capture your voice for their own use” (169).

If one reading of the text would emphasize the imposition of silence as an enactment of gendered power and the protagonist’s victimization as a woman, however, there is evidence for another, possibly interlocking, reading of the text’s symbolism of imposed silence. Just three pages after this warning about the Chinese, the narrator asserts, “We AmericanChinese girls had to whisper to make ourselves American feminine” (172). Here the imposition of silence clearly bespeaks a racial economy of expression, although one which remains simultaneously intimately interwoven with gender. In this case, silence is required according to white standards of (gendered) propriety, and indeed the maintenance of certain regulated silences appears to be the price of continued admission to the American polity: “There were secrets never to be said in front of the ghosts, immigration secrets whose telling could get us sent back to challenge what she sees as the tendency of Derrida, Cixous and Kristeva to associate writing rather than speech with the feminine, but elements of her own analysis suggest a relationship of supplementation and compensation between speech and writing that could be taken as a starting point for unraveling phonocentric assumptions about voice and articulation: “The destructive weapon of tradition is turned into a creative implement, and speech impediment becomes literary invention” (162; my emphasis).

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China” (183). The fact that this fear of deportation simply for speaking unguardedly may be an exaggerated fantasy does not necessarily undermine the idea that silence is at one level an effect of racial oppression; rather it may reveal the effectiveness of an insidious regime of racial decorum in insinuating itself into the psyche of the immigrant and acting through the “proxy” of selfcensorship, an argument, in effect, for the installation of a kind of racial superego in the minority subject.

A similar effect is apparent in the embarrassment revealed by the narrator as she describes her mother’s “screams in public libraries or over telephones” (11). If immigrants (clearly including immigrant women) have “loud voices, unmodulated to American tones” (11), while also, especially, if they are women, having their tongues symbolically clipped, this may not suggest so much a contradiction on the part of the text as the effect of complex and intersecting codes of racial and sexual propriety in which what is conventional or even proscribed according to one set of codes (walking “pigeontoed”, we are told, is Chinesefeminine, while “Americanfeminine” comportment is “knees straight, toes pointed forward” [11]) registers loudly as abnormal or even transgressive in another. 8

All of this remains, then, I would concede, quite compatible with a model of the relationship of power to discourse which is basically negative and operates through censorship: racism, antiimmigrant feeling and patriarchal strictures specifically suppress in overdetermined ways the selfexpressive force of Asian Americans and women in a manner which suggests strongly that the principle of textual production of “women’s autobiography” or “ethnic autobiography” involves the overcoming of repression, the breaking of the chains of silence and the liberation of the Chinese American subject that is figured as always already having been awaiting this victorious moment of selfexpression according to a kind of perpetual discursive prolepsis. To push this reading of the text to this slightly parodic conclusion, 8

In the second section of the text, a version of the story of the legendary “Warrior Woman,” Fa Mu Lan is told. In the course of the story Fa Mu Lan (one of the narrator’s many doubles in the text) has to learn a new discipline of bodily comportment which is revealingly “literary”: “I walked putting the heel down first, toes pointing outward thirty to forty degrees, making the ideograph ‘eight,’ making the ideograph ‘human’” (23). As opposed to a foundationalist humanism, the text reveals the necessity of a genealogy of the production (through training, and through the rigors of discourse) of the “human.” 7

however, is to reveal the extent to which an analysis in these terms commits us to an utterly negative or prohibitive model of power, such as is forcefully criticized by Michel Foucault, among others, and installs the emergent self, as synecdoche for a broader emerging political resistance, in some timeless and therefore essentialized state of eternal expectation and final release. 9 This “prolepsis,” familiar from certain forms of identity politics, specifically precludes a discursive analysis of the

production of identity, seduced as it is by the fantasy of its own revelation as (if) a fullyconstituted entity that has been standing in the wings of history awaiting the appropriate moment for its emergence onto the contemporary stage. This is a fantasy, I would argue, that requires a genealogical analysis that would reveal as effect what here takes itself to be a fully autonomous cause. Specifically, the subject that is seduced into thinking that it has shed the enveloping sheet of discourse and power may need to face the possibility that precisely in the moment of its triumphant self discovery it has become most effectively knotted within the workings of power as a discursive regime. To put this rather crudely, we may never be more subject to the workings of power than when we proclaim ourselves confidently subjects: to say “I” with expressive conviction may precisely be to find ourselves convicted according to the injunctions of power.

It will also be central to my argument that the ways in which the text reveals this fantasy are tightly interwoven with the relationship between speech and writing in the text, suggesting a complicity between the reading of subjection to power only in terms of a unidirectional trajectory of liberation and phonocentric habits of thinking of voice as the medium of the subject’s authentic desire as opposed to the alienated mediation of selfhood in the exterior “prosthesis” of writing. 10 What we fantasize as being liberated from beneath the censoring constraints of power is classically, the voice, conceived as pure expressive sign of authentic inner selfhood.

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See especially Foucault’s analysis of the “repressive hypothesis” in Part Two of The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. 10 The critique of writing as a fatal exterior extension of speech, and its connection with memory, go back, of course, most notoriously to Plato’s Phaedrus. See Derrida’s criticism of this in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” as also throughout Of Grammatology. 8

There is, I think, one particular invocation of voice in the text which acts already as a kind of hinge to the theme of writing, or which, if Derrida’s analysis in Of Grammatology is to be believed, may reveal that speech is already, in some special sense, inhabited by a kind of writing which is its prior condition. “There is a Chinese word for the female I—which is ‘slave,’” the narrator informs us at one point: “Break the women with their own tongues” (47). The conviction that the text involves the emergence of an autonomous “I” from beneath and behind the superimposed prohibitions of language would seem logically to require a belief in an “I” which resides outside or before language—or perhaps buried and preserved beneath its “swaths”—and which then magically articulates for itself a new vernacular purified of the traces of linguistic enslavement. The alternative to this, I believe, unthinkable proposition, is that if the text marks a process of selfexpression, both of those terms—the self and its linguistic medium—must be understood as emerging in intimate cocomplicity with the workings of a power which can no longer be seen as purely prohibitive but which is also productive of subjectivity. If the tongue here is the agent of a rupture (“Break the women…”), what is ruptured, or cut, as we remember, is also the tongue: the tongue, that is, is ruptured from its imagined self presence, reflexively ruptures or cuts itself and redoubles itself through its eruption into language. The articulate tongue, that is, is always already severed from any fantasized point of singular, unmediated origin: it is traduced by language.

But again it is precisely at the point where the text reveals the intimate connections between subjectivity and power that the theme and symbolization of speech give way to what I would see as the text’s much deeper investment in the materiality of writing:

“I could not understand ‘I.’ The Chinese ‘I’ has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American ‘I,’ assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight? … I stared at that middle line and waited for so long for its black center to resolve into light strokes and dots that I forgot to pronounce it” (166).

Of course, the differences between the Chinese writing system and the “American” are important here, and I would argue that the text is explicitly resisting the idea that the genre of autobiography depends upon the acceptance of a universal form of the 9

subject that precedes its various cultural inscriptions. And yet both the Chinese and the American written sign for “I” are here revealed to be complex and constituted. If the American form at one point seems successfully to condense itself into a singular strong black center resistant to “resolution,” again arguably a critique of those western bourgeois norms of individualism that the autobiography has been criticized for reproducing, the American “I” also resembles the Chinese with its hat which reveals that it too is a composite form. Subjectivity is surely revealed in these “ideographic” figures of selfhood to exist not in the mode of the singular origin but in that of the achieved and composite effect, in a writing or material mediation that inscribes difference, or what Derrida might call spacing, at the heart of the self. 11

The text is full of vivid evocations of the manner in which identity is inscribed specifically in the written sign, a few of which I would like to consider here rather briefly, before focusing on two scenes of writing in more detail.

“There are no snapshots of my mother,” asserts the narrator, much of whose autobiographical account is actually dedicated to a literary portrait of her mother: “In two small portraits, however, there is a black thumbprint on her forehead, as if someone had inked in bangs, as if someone had marked her” (60). Read in association with the lack of snapshots, we might be tempted to read the ink as an 11

I borrow the concept of the “ideographic” constitution of selfhood from Quinby, but my interpretation differs from hers since she emphasizes the distinction between the American “I”’s “façade of autonomy” (305) and the “intricacies” (306) of Chinese ideographs. For her, the latter is associated with a resistance to specifically Western and modern “totalizing individuality” (297): “Each story adds a stroke to her ideographic selfhood, and each stroke is a form of resistance to the deployments of power that would either constrain women’s sexuality of hystericize it” (307). Anne Cheng faults Quinby for an uncritical “exotic investment” on this point: “In her eagerness to secure the narrator’s liberation from the oppressive conditioning of possessing a failed and unauthentic ‘American selfhood,’ Quinby falls back on Kingston’s supposed access to another kind of cultural authority… and thereby fails to note that the narrator finds the Chinese ideographic ‘I’ just as confounding as the simple three strokes of the American ‘I’” (219, fn 47). I agree with Quinby that the emphasis on the composite and hence achieved from of selfhood opens up a critique of the disciplinary production of selfhood, but she oddly occludes the necessary concomitant of this analysis, which is that each additional stroke of subjective inscription is also an overdetermining of the self within regimes of power. For an etymology of the Chinese word for “I” see also Chua, p. 70, fn. 15. Chua does not, however, seem to take account of the narrator’s assertion (as cited above) that there is a specifically gendered (feminine) form of the pronoun. 10

extension of the logic of the effacement of identity, an assault on individuality, although one of the vague reasons offered by the narrator’s mother for the smudge is the suggestion that it represents an attempt retrospectively to accommodate the image to a later fashion for bangs. In this sense, “inking” becomes surely not a censorship of identity (as wartime communiqués, for example, are subjected to the heavy ink of the censor) but actually an additive, productive and prosthetic assertion of individual style: a personalization of a portrait which becomes literary precisely insofar as it evades the logic of the instant snapshot in order to succumb to narrative self difference, the temporal dispersals and differals of retrospective rewriting. It is not that I want here to override entirely the sense of the negative, repressive or restrictive sense of the “mark,” but rather to show that, like the tongue that becomes articulate at the moment of its cutting, the regulative order is also simultaneously productive of a selfhood which is written as much according to the ratio of excess, surplus and supplementation within signification as it is according to that of the negative, of censorship.

The sense of writing as the production of the personal, and specifically of the corporeal, is sustained by another detail in the text. The protagonist has a sister whose American name sounds like “ink” in Chinese: “‘Ink!’ Moon Orchid [another of the protagonist’s aunts] called out; sure enough, a girl smeared with ink said, ‘Yes?’” (131). Again, there is no denying that this is a scene of power: to try to rid identity of its inscription within the political effects of the order (or bilingual orders?) of signification would be as futile as attempting to scrub the indelible stains from the skin of the narrator’s sister. This is, of course, a scene of interpellation, in which the girl is conjured up, as incarnate being, in the instant that she recognizes herself in the call. 12 The fact that the girl’s naming/interpellation takes place through the workings 12

Althusser explains the “moment” of interpellation as follows: “I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’” (174) Significantly, he subsequently emphasizes, “Naturally for the convenience and clarity of my little theoretical theatre I have had to present things in the form of a sequence, with a before and an after, and thus in the form of a temporal succession. There are individuals walking along. Somewhere (usually behind them) the hail rings out: ‘Hey, 11

of an interlinguistic pun suggests not just a situation of overdetermination in relation to two in essence discrete signifying regimes, but rather also the productive effects whereby new possibilities of (and new injunctions to!) identity and identification are produced within the social in general, and within the ambit of migration in particular.

The punitive or judicial element of textual inscription here is significant, though, and the correlative of the law’s power to indict is the imprinting of the signs of guilt on the subject’s hands. The entry into the signifying regime is marked by the signs of an ineffaceable guilt, although this is also perhaps the “moment” at which, to deploy a helpful paradox coined by Foucault (in Discipline and Punish), the subject “inscribes in himself [sic] the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (202/3). To put it crudely, the sister’s hands are covered in ink presumably not (simply) because she has been passively “inked” but because, at this moment she has also become a writer, a subject of the law and discourse: she has reflexively inked or inscribed herself. 13

you there!’ One individual (nine times out of ten it is the right one) turns round, believing/suspecting/knowing that it is for him, i.e. recognizing that ‘it really is he’ who is meant by the hailing. But in reality these things happen without any succession. The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.” (1745). The key point for our analysis here, of course, is that there is no “I” before the moment of its interpellation/inscription, although it is also worth noting that Althusser’s structuralism finally insists on the pathos of the single moment of captivation (as opposed to the narrative logic of sequence and succession), in effect turning the story of subjection into a snapshot (a version of what Derrida sees, in Of Grammatology as the symptomatic insistence on the “epigeneticist” conception of law and the social in Rousseau and structuralism), while a more deconstructive insistence on textual or narrative address might complicate the opposition between the seemingly carefree movement of strolling and the fatal moment of turning. The fact that the “call” appears to materialize itself as a writing on the skin suggests something of the “fixation” of the signs race in what Fanon calls a “racial epidermal schema” (112): “I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye” (109).

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If we take the novel as autobiographical, logically we might expect the narrative to take the form not simply of a general Bildung but specifically of the Künstlerroman. While at one level it disappoints such expectations, the apparent delegation of authorship to the sister seems to insist rather effectively that the destiny of all subjectivity is ultimately “authorial”: selfinking, selfinscriptive. 12

If the family in the U.S. is subject to forms of racist inscription, the narrator’s mother is also able to take revenge on the racist customers of the family’s laundry: “‘No tickee, no washee, mamasan?’ a ghost would say, so embarrassing. ‘Noisy Red Mouth Ghost,’ she’d write on its package, naming it, marking its clothes with its name” (105). The idea of revenge is elsewhere also associated with this notion of inscription: “The idioms for revenge are ‘report a crime’ and ‘report to five families.’ The reporting is the vengeance—and not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words—‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words too—that they do not fit on my skin (53). Arguably, the marking of the RedMouth Ghost’s “package” is eerily echoed in the logic which moves from the vengeance of reporting to the surplus of inscriptions that marks the narrator’s own body: the ink of her mother’s putative revenge stains her hands; her mother’s vindictive accession to inscriptive power is the moment of the daughter’s interpellation through an inking.

When the other is racially inscribed, however, when its package is returned marked by the hand of the other that is supposed, ideologically, to sustain the fantasy of an

unmarked whiteness (this is, after all, a laundry and not an ink factory!), is it not perhaps significant that what are marked are, precisely, clothes and not skin? Is it not therefore tempting to fall back once again on the fantasy of a pure body to be wrested apart from its binding in an order of signification imposed from without? Perhaps, but in order to take this line I think one would have to invest rather a lot of energy in overlooking the text’s insistence on the surface of inscription as something that adheres so closely to the skin as to be the skin’s skin, not a secondary skin so much as a skin that overthrows the very sense in which there is a primary (intact, pure, innocent) surface of inscription prior to the moment of inscription itself. 14 One might 14

My deconstructive attention to the inscription of both identity and the body (and of the relation between the two) of course owes a large debt to the work of Judith Butler. She reminds us of the dangers of apparently critical discourses which nevertheless reproduce traditional metaphysical conceptions of the relationship between the body and power: “The sex/gender distinction and the category of sex itself appear to presuppose a generalization of ‘the body’ that preexists the acquisition of its sexed significance. This ‘body’ often appears to be a passive medium that is signified by an inscription from a cultural source figured as ‘external’ to that body. Any theory of the culturally constructed body, however, ought to question ‘the body’ as a construct of suspect generality when it is figured as passive and prior to discourse. There are Christian and Cartesian precedents to such views…” (129). Moreover, she points out that even Foucault and Nietzsche paradoxically ground their genealogical critique in 13

even say that the confusion of inkproduction and laundrywashing is precisely aimed at a critique of the Christian metaphysics of baptism that would appear to lay bare the pure body through a washing away. This critique reveals, genealogically, that what poses as a washing away is itself simultaneously a reinscription within the workings of power: the dipping of the body in the ink of discursive production.

The container of the narrator’s mother’s medical diploma, sent from China, is a metal tube which is itself a kind of palimpsest, densely overinscribed with multiple addresses, stamps and postmarks: “It got crushed in the middle, and whoever tried to peel the labels off stopped because the red and gold paint came off too, leaving silver scratches and rust” (57). The point surely, in this description of the mother’s interpellation/certification in the field of medical technique, including “surgary” [sic], is that no scalpel can pass between the body and its inscription.

The second section of this notably fragmentary text provides a fantastic account of the legendary Chinese warrior woman Fa Mu Lan, although it combines this syncretically with elements of the story of Yue Fei, a twelfthcentury Chinese national hero. 15 In the version the narrator tells us, itself a reconstruction of her mother’s oral accounts, the narrator fantasizes herself as a Fa Mu Lan who takes her father’s place in battle and fights for her village. Before she leaves, though, her father writes a series of names and oaths onto Fa Mu Lan’s back, first brushing them on in ink and then finally cutting them into the skin with a knife. As is suggested also by the other instances of writing I evoked above, identity here is in a certain sense imposed upon the body, which thus becomes the unquestionable critical horizon of genealogy: “By maintaining a body prior to its cultural inscription, Foucault appears to assume a materiality prior to signification and form. Because this distinction operates as essential to the task of genealogy as he defines it, the distinction itself is precluded as an object of genealogy” (130). The logic of inscription as the setting down of the sign on a material substrate, however, has produced a set of contradictions in conventional metaphysics which provide a fruitful starting point for deconstruction: substrate as originary, intact, innocent and “inmost” hylè for instance, as opposed to the substrate as belated, prosthetic, exterior, mediate technè. The way forward, I would argue, lies not in the abandonment of the notion of inscription but an investigation of the ways in which this notion foils any attempt at the wresting away of sign from substrate or body necessary to the instating of a logic of the primary versus the secondary. Derrida has investigated this in his poetics of circumcision, writing and “impression” central to Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. 15 On Kington’s use of traditional Chinese stories, see Gao. 14

the body: it is the result of a technique and not of some prior essence, and yet it also becomes so intimately incorporated into the body’s own materiality that it is only when Fa Mu Lan is flayed by her enemies that the writing will become fully visible, like a piece of lace. Identity neither flows expressively from some pure inner point of origin nor is it simply superimposed deterministically by the workings of some purely exterior hand of patriarchal power, as some versions of social constructionism seem to imply. The writing on the body, refigured later in the text in the invocation of xrays of the narrator’s inexplicably ailing body, is neither purely of the self nor simply an imposed alien element. If it is what we might call a “prosthesis of selfhood,” it is at the same time a negative trace, a wounding that reveals subjectivity to be working according to the compensatory, supplementary, economy of writing.

But what happens when the protagonist herself takes up pen and ink in order to become the scribe of her own identity, that is, when she becomes doubly and reflexively inscribed in the text as both protagonist and narrator? Does she not, even in her subjection, also assume a degree of agency? My point is not utterly to deny any possibility of a liberatory reading as we turn from the economy of speech to that of writing. This would simply be to invert the presumed naturalness and innocence of speech into the guilt of a fallen writing, which, in terms of the logic of phonocentrism, represents no inversion at all. But it is through attention to the materiality of textual inscription, a materiality that we fantasize to be absent in the voice, that we have to understand that the moment of fantasized selfpossession through language is also the moment at which the self is once again surrendered up to its necessary embodiment in and through the negative prosthesis of language.

Like other elements of the autobiographical narrative, we have seen that the moment of selfinscription is generally subject to effects of delegation or surrogation: it is the mother who “writes back” to racist whites, the sister who ends up with ink on her hands. Let us return finally to the figure of the first aunt, the “No Name Woman” who commits suicide by throwing herself, along with her newborn baby—a girl— down a well. This image of apparent narrative eclipse, in which the aunt’s presence is censored at the hands of the community by a washing in the inky waters of the well, also evokes the materiality of writing. The narrator evokes the traditional rites of paying respect to dead ancestors, saying, “My aunt haunts me—her ghost drawn to 15

me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her, though not origamied into houses and clothes” (16). The narrator can only tell her own story by establishing a devotional or even sacrificial textual economy in relation to her lost double. On the one hand, the narrator’s faithful passing on of the aunt’s story avenges and compensates for the aunt’s death (according to the logic whereby “revenge” is synonymous with “reporting a crime”). Yet on the other hand, the aunt’s ghost clearly remains unconciliated by the niece’s act of textual inscription, perhaps precisely because of the ambiguities of inscription detailed above: “The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute” (16; my emphasis). The text might function as a monumental inscription to the aunt, and one that undoes the social injunction to forget her, to leave her unnamed, compensatorily “fixing” her loss in ink. But what if the conscription of the story to ink produces an economy in which what is preserved is simultaneously forgotten, what is remarked is by the same gesture blotted out, censored? If the aunt sees the niece as her supplement, this is surely intelligible precisely insofar as the niece, in her writing, must already be understood as having chosen the aunt as her own surrogate, to be drowned and sacrificed according to a textual economy in which selfpresence, autonomy and identity are necessarily haunted (and ultimately rendered impossible) by the very surplus and supplement that is the medium of their inscription. The injunction that the ghostly presence of the aunt imposes is not that the niece sacrifice self for alterity, but that the niece acknowledge that the alterity of the written economy, as symbolized by the well, and by the aunt, the giver of life and fount of poetic inspiration, is the loss that founds the subject. As Derrida comments on Rousseau’s autobiographical work in Of Grammatology,

Affecting oneself by another presence, one corrupts oneself by oneself [on s’altère soimême]. Rousseau neither wishes to think nor can think that this alteration does not simply happen to the self, that it is the self’s very origin. He must consider it a contingent evil coming from without to affect the integrity of the subject. But he cannot give up what immediately restores to him the other desired presence; no more than he can give up language (153).

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Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts. New York: Vintage, 1975. Lightfoot, Marjorie J. “Hunting the Dragon in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. MELUS Vol. 13, No. 3/4 (Autumn Winter, 1986), 5566. Lim, Shirley Geoklin. “Feminist and Ethnic Theories in Asian American Literature.” Feminist Studies. Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn 1993). 570595. Martin, Biddy. “Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Difference(s).” Femininity Played Straight: The Significance of Being Lesbian. New York: Routledge, 1996. 137161. Quinby, Lee. “The Subject of Memoirs: The Woman Warrior’s Technology of Ideographic Selfhood.” De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julie Watson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 297320. Scott, Joan W. “Experience.” Feminists Theorize the Political. Ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott. New York: Routledge, 1992. 2240. Shu, Yuan. “Cultural Politics and ChineseAmerican Female Subjectivity: Rethinking Kingston’s ‘Woman Warrior.’” MELUS, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 2001). 199223. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Madison, U of Wisconsin P, 1998. Wong, Sauling Cynthia. “Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour? Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and the ChineseAmerican Autobiographical Controversy.” Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives. Ed. James Robert Payne. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1992. 248279.

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