Passion, Plainness, Allegory: Frank Chin, American Literary Tradition, and the Question of Style

Ingo Peters

doi:10.1515/zaa.2008.56.1.49

Abstract

The Chinese American writer Frank Chin owes his current status as a margin-alized figure in Asian American Studies not only to his anti-feminist vitriolics, but also to his writing style. Judged by common contemporary standards, Chin’s novels appear dis-jointed and crude: He routinely puts blunt, didactic statements from his essays into his characters’ mouths without even trying to give them any literary embellishment; yet at the same time all these doctrine-like, straightforward, and obviously instructional passages are infused with complex hints at ancient myths, and his competently lecturing pro-tagonists are prone to irritating sudden irrational outbursts of emotion. This article pro-poses that these peculiarities of Chin’s style - a combination of passion, plainness, and allegory - do not necessarily have to be seen as literary weaknesses; they can also be interpreted as a radical employment of strategies that helped form an important strain within the American literary tradition: the strategies that the first distinctly American writers (the plain, passionate, and allegorical Puritans) used. Viewed in this light, Frank Chin seems much less of an ‘outsider’ than before

Passion, Plainness, Allegory: Frank Chin, American Literary Tradition, and the Question of Style

Abstract

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