As I was reading Dictee, I was definitely frusterated. I honestly found the reading pointless (I love my 19th century novels!) because I could not break through the puzzles and diffculties of its structural exterior. I felt completely disconnected from whatever it was trying to tell me. I wondered why the work was written like this in the first place, wouldn't the author want people to be able to take something away after reading the text--if not complete understanding and/or satisfaction, still something. Many of the pages I read were hard to remember at all. I know it sounds like I am bashing this text, but I'm not. Although this type of work is not my personal favorite, I try to appreciate it and learn new things from it. So, I am trying to get to the point of my post, which is, that after reading Kim's essay on Dictee, I began to understand it, and its structure a lot more. After reading the essay I was able to take something away from my reading of Dictee.
Kim relates the text to her own experiences as a Korean-American woman. For me, her essay read like a reading companion to Dictee. It was a part by part analysis that helped me realize what Cha was doing with her text. Kim is especially interested in the treatment of Korean history in Dictee. She raises a lot of interesting and significant Korean history (the invention of gunpowder, the printing press, Japanese conflit, the significant effects of American Imperialism in Asia), that I had no knowledge of. I realized that I had been effectively lumped in to the category of 'typical american' that she was writing about, whose historical lense begins with Ancient Greece. I get it! (I thought). Dictee is about calling attention to Korean history. Cha uses her unconventional structure to suggest that Korean history has been buried by America's version of history and must be searched for, worked at, to understand.
But then, Kim discusses Dictee as being specifically about women. She tells the few stories that she remebers about Korean women. She questions America's eager sympathy for Asian woman, bringing up footbinding as on of the only things Americans know about Chinese history. Kim writes, "If Korean history is missing from the master narratives of the West and women are absent from recorded Korean history, the Korean American woman is invisible in both discourses" (19). I think this idea is present not only in the text of Dictee, but also the structure itself. Those huge gaps between paragraphs, and individual words emphasize the negative space on the page. Perhaps this negative space represents the woman who do not 'fit' into those master narratives? So Dictee is about positioning Korean and Korean-American women into both 'Eastern' and 'Western' society. Kim discusses many other points in the essay, which are helpful and insightful. But still, this is only Kim's reading of the text.
When I finished reading Kim's essay, I felt I had a bit more understanding of Dictee--I had at least cracked its surface. However, I still feel a little disconnected from the text. It is almost as if I am not equipped with the right resources to read it. If I hadn't read Kim's essay, I would still be completely in the dark as to the point of Dictee. I wonder if a work of literature should need a paragraph by paragraph interpretation in order to be understood. (Although, of course, Dictee is not the only text to have this sort of point-by-point break down....I know that) I wonder if Cha has gone just a little too far in challenging literary structure, to the point where she isolates her reader too much?? (Again, just my opinion...) Ultimately, I am not sure if I have been included by Cha to read Dictee, because I do not have the knowledge needed to fully understand it. However, the other way to look at that is simply that I can learn what I do not know through reading the text, as well as essays like Kim's. Although Dictee is not the type of literature I generally study, I do appreciate reading completely new things and having these sort of internal debates about them. After reading Kim's essay I have at least taken away from Dictee some understanding of what it is trying to accomplish, which is actually really interesting and significant.
-RACHEL BERMAN