Just some thoughts on Dictee and the Kim essay we're reading for Wednesday.

First, Dictee. While on the one hand I admire Cha's subversion of the traditional novel and story-telling framework, I found the form to be almost completely inaccesible. I'm not sure where the form came from. I'd like to say that there is some basis for it, that it is designed to convey something, but in thinking that I feel that puts it beyond my scope of understanding. If the form is extraneous, however, and simply an artistic flourish, then it becomes ridiculous and makes the book a waste of time. Either way, the form is problematic for me. I'm sure that, despite all the glowing reviews on Amazon, I can't be the only person who found the book so inaccesible at times.

Form is directly related to content (in my opinion, at least), and finding the form so problematic made me also feel as though the content were beyond my understanding. Form, at many points, clouded the content, such that I spent more time trying to figure out what Cha was writing about than actually thinking about what she was trying to say (for instance, Erato and Thalia). When the form begins to obscure content such that the audience cannot understand the content, I find that to be a great problem. The French language exercises play into that greatly; if you don't speak French, how are we to understand the importance of the exercises? I found myself skipping over them entirely. And yes, you can argue that there's a point there (me skipping over that part I didn't understand is similar to the way cultures ignore other cultures they "don't understand" or "don't relate to"), but I feel like there might have been a better way to achieve that same possible point than filling pages with something many readers will simply ignore and never think about.

I also felt as though the content were extremely culturally specific (I'll address this more later). While yes, it is a good critique of mainstream understanding and cultural history, etc. etc., it isolates the reader. I don't think that I'm completely ignorant of a history that isn't mainstream or that, as Kim suggests, has been suppressed, but there were only bits and pieces of Dictee that I could actually pick out. The March 1 Movement, for instance, or the Japanese takeover of Korea. The rest of it feels so specific that it is exclusionary. Yes, the experience is specific and very under-represented, but making it exclusionary in a book that finally gives the experience representation seems, excuse my lack of better words, stupid.

Perhaps I'm just stupid, culturally ignorant, and so trained by the mainstream that I cannot grasp or fully appreciate this book. But then think of this: is the desire of an underrepresented voice to be heard by the mainstream? If it is, does the work not need to try to reach those people? Dictee may gain people's attention because it is so different, so bizarre, so very anti- everything established, but if people cannot understand what Cha is trying to say, then she has done very little to represent her experience.

Or has she?

Another totally random note: I only understood the use of the Muses occasionally. Most of the time, I had no idea what was going on with that motif.

Moving on to the Kim essay...

I read this quite a while ago, so forgive me if I say something truly idiotic; all of this is taken from my highlighting and notes on the essay, and I'm not entirely sure I know what I was talking about in my notes.

First of all, I was confused by the way Kim presented Cha's experience is crafting an identity between the "Korean," "Korean-American," and "woman" as being somehow very unique. In many ways, I think we all do this. All of us have a cultural and gender heritage that is both unique to us and shared. All of us carefully select, exclude, and incorporate various aspects of the various aspects that make up our identity. Perhaps Cha had the special experience of consciously and obviously picking between the ideas, or being able to write this amazing (read: absolutely insane) book, but I think all of us have had experience creating "a kind of third space, an exile space that becomes a soure of individual vision and power," and I certainly don't think Cha is the only Korean-American woman to have done so (Kim, 8).

This is something I can't figure out, but maybe someone else felt the same way? I guess when I first read this essay, I felt irritation during the second section (part II) because Kim made it sound like the the exclusion of a certain facet of history (in this case, Korean women's experiences) was a) totally awful and b) totally unique. My thought was, "Like that doesn't happen EVERYWHERE?" If we're talking about the selectivity of history, that's not a new idea (think: the winners write history, etc.).

I find it interesting that Kim sort of sidesteps the issues of form with the book, and instead focuses on what little content she can draw out of it. A lot of the things she quoted I didn't remember at all, or they didn't stand out at all amidst the noise of the rest of the book. Most of what Kim discusses, though, is specific to the Korean/Korean-American/Korean woman/Korean-American woman experience. Since Kim herself is Korean-American, this makes me wonder whether or not someone very far removed from the experience can gain anything meaningful from struggling through the book (if they make it that far). Perhaps it is a critique of the mainstream, that "normal" people wouldn't be able to identify the history or culture written into it, but again, I wonder what the point of possibly isolating an auidence is.

Ultimately, what I got from the essay was a feeling that I didn't have the proper cultural background to fully appreciate the book, so BAD ME. The mainstream HATES Korean women (like it doesn't usually hate most minorities and women?), and Cha is giving a voice to that experience. Which I approve of, but for me, a lot of that voice was lost somewhere in the convultion of the form, which Kim hardly addressed.