Jujube/methods-session-5

Methods_lens-based#Session_five

Reflecting on autobiography in my own work: reading Alexander Chee's The Autobiography of My Novel

A year ago, I wrote a short story called Eating Alone in Tallin. I call it a short story because I perceive it as fiction based on an encounter I had when I traveled in Estonia. But if I were to be precise, I should really say it was translated from that encounter, for which I substituted "I" with "she" and -- upon finding the protagonist change into someone else -- developed the characters further with my imagination.

I remember revelling in a whole new angle of the observer, watching the protagonist and those she interacted with sin bias. I was able to describe the external and internal happenings of all characters -- she, the waiter, the couple, the lone man. "She" represented someone mysterious, naïve and melancholic. The discovery of “she” led to a deeper curiosity towards her surroundings. From me. To the readers.

When I shared the story with the writing group, I didn’t mention its genesis until I received comments on the actual language. (Many were fascinated by the waiter and his actions.) I then told the group how I came about this writing. “Have you heard of auto-fiction,” someone asked me. She was a PhD in English Literature, I later found out. “It’s a debated term.”

Although I am aware of the use of “I” in fictions -- the most recent example I can remember is Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness -- I have never been able to write fiction with it. I have only used “I” in creative non-fiction, and was unable to use it in any different context; that is, before I started writing plays. Plays signified a transition of my relationship with “I,” but I never quite understood how or why.

This is why I am drawn to Chee’s essay, as he walks the reader through the process of writing his first autobiographical novel, Edinburgh. Chee shows his struggle of arriving at the novel after attempting at it with different narratives, characters and plots.

Chee refers to an early main character before conceving Edinburgh as "in some way autobiographical." The character, Jack Cho, possesses the same cultural background (immediately visible in the name) as Chee, and has the same sexual orientation, political leaning and activist practice. Chee calls him a cipher, “someone who is like me but not me.” Through the character Chee writes about his personal struggles in friendships, relationships and breakups.

At the time Chee was uninterested in writing about identity. “I was still discovering that this identity—any identity, really—was unreliable precisely because it was self-made.” He was fighting against the idea that he represented an identity (Korean American, gay, or both) in which other people found more meaning than he did.

This speaks to me. The reason that a lot of my “I” writing is trapped in non-fiction is, perhaps, out of the obligation (so I feel) to clarify an identity that has been burdened with other meanings. Two of the most predominant ones are, namely: Chinese (and a certain generation of it) and American (and a certain sect of it).

Chee keeps a binder of fragments of writing from his MFA at Iowa: short stories, poetry and chapters of an early novel, which he regards as gestations towards a novel about his experiences in life. He later describes his first attempt as unsuccessful because it merely presents a list of what happened, which is not necessarily a meaningful journey for the readers. His comments on the use of tenses are particularly interesting:

  I was interested in this idea of the self brought to a confrontation
  with the past through the structure of the narration. I found that
  writing in the present tense acted as self-hypnosis. … Using it casts
  a powerful spell on the writer’s own mind. And it is a commonly used
  spell. The present is the verb tense of the casual story told in person,
  to a friend — So I’m at the park, and I see this woman I almost recognize
  . . . — a gesture many of us use. It is also the tense victims of trauma
  use to describe their own assaults.'

In plays, most of time characters engage in direct speech or action. They use present tense. They do things in real stage-time. Even one of my playwriting teachers once said, “if you find your character start a sentence with: do you remember… Slash it.” This might explain why I am able to write as characters (and, when structuring the play, for) rather than about them, and why I have no trouble writing “I must tell you this. I must I must I must won’t you just list--” with a sincere sense of urgency than I could in non-fiction.

Chee starts his second attempt. “I wanted to write a novel that would take a reader by the collar and run. And yet I was drawn to writing stories in which nothing happened,” he reflects on his past works, which he later realizes as a reenactment of his childhood trauma -- to remain “still and silent” in order to protect himself from harm. In contrast, he finds plots from melodrama, something he has not written, resonate with the kind of novel his wants to write. “Stories about the most difficult things need to provide catharsis, or the reader will stop reading, or go mad.”

While doing other researches (geographical setting, psychological insight), Chee elaborates on his investigation into plot. As he reads Aristotle’s Poetics, he finds that he needs action rather than narration, which coincides with his realization on using present tense, and that his biggest problem is to create poetry rather than history. “A simple recounting did not convince,” he now sees the insufficiency of retelling what happened to him (and his mother) as was, “even if it felt like one of the great tragedies of my life… As a story, it was only the account of good people undone by misfortune.”

Revelation for Chee. And I.

What I have done in “Eating in Tallin” might have been great for developing the characters, but should I write a substantial story with the goal to move beyond just evoking melancholy, the method of changing “I” to “she” would not sustain. The translation of life events into fiction in this case is, at best, the account of a woman eating and feeling amused by being alone in a crowd.

Chee chooses the plot of the opera Lucia di Lammermoor, and changes the characters to fit the purpose of his storytelling. He takes inspirations from the myth of kitsune, the shape-changing Japanese fox demon, and -- with memories of his father pulling out a red hair (mythologized as a sign of having fox ancestry) and his own imagination about the demon -- constructs a half-Korean, half-fox protagonist. “[The protagonist] meets him when he takes a job at his school, falls in love with him, and is seduced, unknowingly, by the son of the man who molested him as a child, these many years later. Only after they fall in love do they discover the truth about each other.”

Now I come back to my relationship with autobiography. I have written two scenes of a play with all autobiographical materials. The first was a child observing the a line of ants moving the body of a dragonfly. The fifth (as I numbered it, for I always thought I would add more scenes in between) is a person, struggling with visa regulations and being forced to leave America.

I have thought of my personal life as thought-provoking, yet the best way to tell the story that will lead to moments of: sadness, aloneness, loss, vulnerability, and the empathy of all of these, is perhaps not an autobiographical one. It is something rooted in autobiography but goes beyond it.

Does it go towards the portrayal of a universal humanness (such as in Humans of New York) or does it go towards what Chee (and, to some degree, LeGuin) has done: an other-worldly telling of a tale?

For now, I remain pondering.