Abstract
This essay looks at two recent Asian American texts written in the first-person plural – namely Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic (2011) and Chang-rae Lee’s On such a full sea (2014). Its main goal is to show that the ambiguities and tensions here generated by we narration prove particularly apt when it comes to calling into question essentialist views concerning the anatomy of community-building. But my contention is that these two we texts are particularly interesting at a theoretical level, too, in that they help us challenge the orthodoxies of traditional narrative theory – among which Gérard Genette’s all-too-rigid distinction between the homo- and heterodiegetic levels in a text, or the generalized assumption, which has been notably challenged by Mieke Bal, that every act of story-telling is necessarily indebted to ‘a’ narrator, and a narrator of anthropomorphic standards at that.
References
Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, & Brian Richardson. 2013. Introduction. In Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen & Brian Richardson (eds.), A poetics of unnatural narrative, 1–15. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Search in Google Scholar
Bal, Mieke. 2004. Critique of voice: The open score of her face. In Lazar Fleishman, Christine Gölz & Aage A. Hansen-Löve (eds.), Analysieren als Deuten: Wolf Schmid zum 60. Geburtstag, 31–51. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press.10.15460/hup.89.633Search in Google Scholar
Biggs, Joana. 2014. We: Review of Chang-Rae Lee’s On such a full sea. The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/27/we-4 (accessed 31 July 2017).Search in Google Scholar
Boehmer, Elleke. 2010. A postcolonial aesthetic: Repeating upon the present. In Janet Wilson, Cristina Şandru & Sarah Lawson Welsh (eds.), Rerouting the postcolonial: New directions for the new millennium, 170–181. London: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Booth, Wayne. 1983 [1961]. The rhetoric of fiction, 2ndedn. London: Penguin.10.7208/chicago/9780226065595.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Brouillette, Sarah. 2007. Postcolonial writers in the global literary marketplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1057/9780230288171Search in Google Scholar
Cheng, Anne Anlin. 2001. The melancholy of race: Psychoanalysis, assimilation and hidden grief. New York: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Dwivedi, Divya & Henrik Skov Nielsen. 2013. The paradox of testimony and first-person plural narration in Jensen’s We, the drowned. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15 (7). http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481–4374.2388 (accessed 31 July 2017). 10.7771/1481-4374.2388Search in Google Scholar
Fludernik, Monika. 2011. The category of ‘person’ in fiction: You and We narrative-multiplicity and indeterminacy of reference. In Greta Olson (ed.), Current trends in narratology, 101–141. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110255003.101Search in Google Scholar
Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a “natural” narratology. London & New York: Routledge.10.1515/jlse.1996.25.2.97Search in Google Scholar
Eng, David L. & Shinhee Han. 2003. A dialogue on racial melancholia. In David L. Eng & David Kazanjian (eds.), Loss: The politics of mourning, 343–371. Berkeley: University of California Press.10.1525/9780520936270-018Search in Google Scholar
Grewal, Inderpal. 2005. Transnational America: Feminisms, diasporas, neoliberalisms. Durham & London: Duke University Press.10.2307/j.ctv1168ctrSearch in Google Scholar
Hiddleston, Jane. 2011. Introduction. In Patrick Crowley & Jane Hiddleston (eds.), Postcolonial poetics: Genre and form, 1–10. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 10.5949/UPO9781846317187.002Search in Google Scholar
Jobert, Manuel. 2015. Odd pronominal narratives: The singular voice of the first-person plural in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic. In Violetta Sotirova (ed.), The Bloomsbury companion to stylistics, 537–553. London: Continuum.10.5040/9781472593603.0037Search in Google Scholar
Kacandes, Irene. 1993. Are you in the text?: The “literary performative” in postmodernist fiction. Text and Performance Quarterly 13. 139–153.10.1080/10462939309366039Search in Google Scholar
Lee, Chang-rae. 2014. On such a full sea. New York: Riverhead.Search in Google Scholar
Lee, Sue-Im. 2006. Introduction. In Rocío G. Davis & Sue-Im Lee (eds.), Literary gestures, 1–14. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Marcus, Amit. 2008 a. A contextual view of narrative fiction in the first person plural. Narrative 16 (1). 46–64.10.1353/nar.2008.0000Search in Google Scholar
Marcus, Amit. 2008 b. We are you: The plural and the dual in “we” fictional narratives. Journal of Literary Semantics 37 (1). 1–21.10.1515/jlse.2008.001Search in Google Scholar
Maxey, Ruth. 2015. The rise of the ‘we’ narrator in modern American fiction. European Journal of American Studies 10 (2). https://ejas.revues.org/11068 (accessed 31 July 2017).10.4000/ejas.11068Search in Google Scholar
Mda, Zakes. 1995. Ways of dying. New York: Picador.Search in Google Scholar
Morrison, Toni. 1988. Unspeakable things unspoken: The Afro-American presence in American literature. The Tanner lectures on human values, 123–163 http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/m/morrison90.pdf (accessed 31 July 2017).Search in Google Scholar
Otsuka, Julie. 2011. The Buddha in the attic. New York: Anchor Books. Search in Google Scholar
Otsuka, Julie. 2012. Six questions for Julie Otsuka. Interview with Alan Yuhas. Harper’s Magazine. http://harpers.org/blog/2012/06/six-questions-for-julie-otsuka/ (accessed 31 July 2017).Search in Google Scholar
Prince, Gerald. 2008. On a postcolonial narratology. In James Phelan & Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.), A companion to narrative theory, 372–381. Malden MA: Blackwell.10.1002/9780470996935.ch25Search in Google Scholar
Richardson, Brian. 2006. Unnatural voices: Extreme narration in modern and contemporary fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Richardson, Brian. 2011. U. S. Ethnic and postcolonial fiction: Toward a poetics of collective narratives. In Frederick Luis Aldama (ed.), Analyzing world fiction, 3–16. Austin: University of Texas Press.10.7560/726321-002Search in Google Scholar
Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2001. Narrative as virtual reality: Immersion and interaction in literature and electronic media. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Seed, David. 2011. Science fiction: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/actrade/9780199557455.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Sommer, Doris. 1999. Proceed with caution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1973. On the right to say “we”: A linguistic and phenomenological analysis. In George Psathas (ed.), Phenomenonological sociology: Issues and applications, 129–156. Baltimore: John Wiley.Search in Google Scholar
Wu, Frank H. 2002. Yellow: Race in America beyond black and white. New York: Basic Books.Search in Google Scholar
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- When not to tell stories: Unnatural narrative in applied narratology
- The “unnatural” French novel of today: Éric Chevillard’s L’Auteur et moi
- Your body is our black box: Narrating nations in second-person fiction by Edna O’Brien and Jennifer Egan
- We narration in Chang-rae Lee’s On such a full sea and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic: “Unnaturally” Asian American?
- Re-imagining first-person narrative as a collective voice in John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for you yesterday
- Nonlinearity and focalisation in Attila Janisch’s Másnap
- The world that wasn’t there: Interstitial ontological spaces in contemporary video games
- Forum: Sacrificial narratives
- Sacrificial narratives: Conversation from multiple perspectives
- Reversed ventriloquism: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s sacrificial narrative
- The concept of “bare life” in camp literature
- The Serbian mythomoteur as sacrificial narrative
- The Zrinski-Frankopan conspiracy as a national sacrificial narrative
- The poetic sacrifice: Cultural saints and literary nation building
- Mnemonic battles over the NATO bombing of Serbia – analysis and critique
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- When not to tell stories: Unnatural narrative in applied narratology
- The “unnatural” French novel of today: Éric Chevillard’s L’Auteur et moi
- Your body is our black box: Narrating nations in second-person fiction by Edna O’Brien and Jennifer Egan
- We narration in Chang-rae Lee’s On such a full sea and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic: “Unnaturally” Asian American?
- Re-imagining first-person narrative as a collective voice in John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for you yesterday
- Nonlinearity and focalisation in Attila Janisch’s Másnap
- The world that wasn’t there: Interstitial ontological spaces in contemporary video games
- Forum: Sacrificial narratives
- Sacrificial narratives: Conversation from multiple perspectives
- Reversed ventriloquism: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s sacrificial narrative
- The concept of “bare life” in camp literature
- The Serbian mythomoteur as sacrificial narrative
- The Zrinski-Frankopan conspiracy as a national sacrificial narrative
- The poetic sacrifice: Cultural saints and literary nation building
- Mnemonic battles over the NATO bombing of Serbia – analysis and critique