Jujube/methods-session-5

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 as I traveled in Estonia. But if I were to be precise, I should say that it was translated from that encounter, for which I substituted "I" with "she" first and developed the characters further with my imagination.

I remember reveling in the newly-discovered angle of the observer, watching the protagonist and those she interacted with from a distance. 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 a 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 fiction — a potent example is Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness — I have never been able to write fiction with it. My use of "I" was divided: in creative non-fiction whenever my writing was to be shared publicly and in private journals. The public, non-fiction use of "I" changed, however, when I started writing plays, in which the characters always spoke in first person ("I am tired of your sweet little nothings.") There was something about plays that enabled me to write "I" publicly, but I never quite understood how or why.

That's why I am drawn to Chee’s essay. As he walks the reader through the process of writing his first autobiographical novel, Ediburgh, I am starting to understand my conflicted with of using personal materials publicly and the liberation play as a form has brought me.

Chee shows his struggle of arriving at the final novel after attempts with different narratives, characters and plots. He refers to an early character before conceiving 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, characters engage in direct speech or action most of time. One of my playwriting teachers once said, “if you find your character start a sentence with: do you remember… Slash it.” The characters use present tense. They do things in real stage-time. They are not recounting events but living them. 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 would ever be able to muster up 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.”

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 characters, but should I write a substantial story with the goal to move beyond just evoking melancholy, the method of changing “I” to “she” will 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, a tragedy, 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 is 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 (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.

--- notes ---

Translate a (cultural-specific) experience to something universal

Next to read/finish reading

Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
W, or the Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec
Photographic Documents/Excavation as Art by Akram Zaatari. 2006/I181 (from the Archive)