Metamorphosis from a Korean-American Bartleby to a Whatever Being in Native Speaker
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Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker has been regarded as a preeminent, catching yet problematic narrative of globalization and ethnic cultures in the U.S. This paper aims to examine how Henry, Korean American protagonist, becomes a scribing-machine in scripture economy, how he turns into an ethnic Bartleby using his famous formula—I prefer not to—to finally realize his belonging to a community of unidentifiable beings such as illegal immigrants or subaltern women. For this project, I extensively use Giorgio Agamben’s such ideas as “whatever being” and “coming community” as well as Édouard Glissant’s choas-monde. This paper begins with paralleling Native Speaker with Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to find allegorical allusion. This allusion also leads to the discussion of how Henry works as an invisible man in a scripture economy and how he starts listening to voices of the dead, employing Michel de Certeau’s theory. Then, I traces how Henry gets over this Bartleby’s fate by the recognition that he is just a member of a community where unidentifiable beings live in the opacity of an abysmal archipelago of relations which Édouard Glissant calls chaos-monde. After analyzing this community of unidentifiable beings and exemplifying subaltern women, especially Ahjuhma in Native Speaker, I end this paper with Henry’s final transformation into a speech monster.
Abstract
Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker has been regarded as a preeminent, catching yet problematic narrative of globalization and ethnic cultures in the U.S. This paper aims to examine how Henry, Korean American protagonist, becomes a scribing-machine in scripture economy, how he turns into an ethnic Bartleby using his famous formula—I prefer not to—to finally realize his belonging to a community of unidentifiable beings such as illegal immigrants or subaltern women. For this project, I extensively use Giorgio Agamben’s such ideas as “whatever being” and “coming community” as well as Édouard Glissant’s choas-monde. This paper begins with paralleling Native Speaker with Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to find allegorical allusion. This allusion also leads to the discussion of how Henry works as an invisible man in a scripture economy and how he starts listening to voices of the dead, employing Michel de Certeau’s theory. Then, I traces how Henry gets over this Bartleby’s fate by the recognition that he is just a member of a community where unidentifiable beings live in the opacity of an abysmal archipelago of relations which Édouard Glissant calls chaos-monde. After analyzing this community of unidentifiable beings and exemplifying subaltern women, especially Ahjuhma in Native Speaker, I end this paper with Henry’s final transformation into a speech monster.
참고문헌 (14)
- Ahearne, Jeremy, "Michel De Certeau: Interpretation and its Other" (1995), Stanford UP
- Agamben, Giorgio, "Language and Death: The Place of Negativity" (1991), U of Minnesota P
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- Glissant, Édouard, "Poetics of Relation" (2010), U of Michigan P
- J. Paul Narkunas, "Surfing the Long Waves of Global Capital with Chang Rae-Lee’s Native Speaker: Ethnic Branding and the Humanization of Capital", Modern Fiction Studies, 54(2), pp.327~352 (2008)
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- Lee, Chang-Rae, "Native Speaker" (1995), Riverside Books
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