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Article Excerpt
Focusing on Chang-rae Lee 1995 "post-ethnic" classic Native Speaker, this article dwells on the novel's "legend" theme to suggest that Lee's book itself is a legend twice: first, because it furnishes the "legible" appearance, the story in which Lee comes before his readers, and second, because this story itself appears, is seen, and lends itself to reading (is made legible) via a legend in the etymological sense of the word. Embedded in the novel, this "key" warrants a certain reading of the book. Further, Moraru offers that the key is fundamentally Whitmanesque and by the same token central to Lee's engagement with America's tradition and culture. According to the critic, Whitman, the "legendary" native precursor, helps Lee lay his own claim to American writer status; Korean-born Lee becomes a "natural," naturalizes himself into America and its letters via the emblematically American, Whitman intertext lodged inside his novel.
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[A]nyone should be able to declare under oath: I have only one language and it is not mine; my "own" language is, for me, a language that cannot be assimilated. My language, the only one I hear myself speak and agree to speak, is the language of the other. (Jacques Derrida, Monoligualisni of the Other)
1. Of Legends, Spies, and "Ethnic Coverage"
Dennis Hoagland's Glimmer & Company uses "ethnics" like Korean-American Henry Park, the narrating protagonist of Chang-rae Lee's 1995 novel Native Speaker, to gather information on immigrants and the recently "hyphenated." "Each of us," Henry confesses,
engaged our own kind, more or less. Foreign workers, immigrants, first-generationals, neo-Americans. I worked with Koreans, Pete with Japanese. We split up the rest, the Chinese, Laotians. Singaporans, Filipinos, the whole transplanted Pacific Rim. Grace handled Eastern Europe; Jack, the Mediterranean and Middle East; the two Jimmys, Baptiste and Perez, Central America and Africa. There were a few others, free lancers who'd step in when we needed them. Dennis Hoagland had established the firm in the mid seventies, when another influx of newcomers was arriving. He said he knew a growth industry when he saw one; and there were no other firms with ethnic coverage to speak of. The same reason the CIA had such shoddy intelligence in nonwhite countries. Hoagland oversaw the operation from our modest offices in Westchester County. He was the cultural dispatcher. (Chang-rae Lee 1995, 17-18)
Before dispatching Henry on his new "assignment," businessman John Kwang--who is also Korean-American--Hoagland urges his employee to "work carefully through [his] legend," that is, to rehearse the story or cover under which Henry would get close to Kwang. The foolproof legend calls for an unassuming act, for a soft identity performance. "Remember," Hoagland says, "how I taught you. Just stay in the background. Be unapparent and flat. Speak enough so they can hear your voice and come to trust it, but no more, and no one will think twice about who you are. The key is to make them think just once. No more, no less." Since he deems Henry a "natural," he suggests that Henry weave details of his own life, including marital troubles, into his "alter identity" (1995, 181). "I can see," Hoagland observes, "that this thing with your wife keeps you self-occupied. That's fucking great! Really! It happens. It's life. I just want you to write a good legend for this and stick with it" (44).
Eventually, Henry puts together a plausible legend. But so does Lee, I argue. While the character is more than an authorial alter-ego, in Native Speaker Lee "works through" his own legend. For Hoagland, the term is equivalent to fiction, concoction, and disguising ploy, but legend also designates something we need to read first in order to read further. After all, etymology tells us that legenda are "things to be read." For instance, to consult a map, we must first go over its list of cartographic symbols and their explanations ("keys"). It is, in fact, through them that we read and comprehend the larger chart or text to which they are appended. In this view, Native Speaker strikes me as a legend twice: because it furnishes the "legible" appearance, the story in which Lee comes before his readers, but also because this story itself appears, is seen, and lends itself to reading (is made legible) via a legend in the etymological sense of the word. Embedded in the novel, this "key" warrants a certain reading of the book. I would also suggest that the key is fundamentally Whitmanesque and by the same token central to Lee's engagement with America's tradition and culture. (1) Whitman, the "legendary" native precursor, helps Lee lay his own claim to American writer status; Korean-born Lee becomes a "natural," naturalizes himself into America and its letters via the emblematically American, Whitman intertext lodged inside his novel. The writer wants his story to be heard through Whitman's voice, as a ventriloquial narrative that concurrently emulates and further modulates the precursor's symbolically capacious idiom. Thus, Native Speaker presents us with a novelistic glossolalia of sorts, speaks to us in tongues: in an emblematically "native" tongue, Whitman's, in the multitude of languages and resonances nesting in it, as well as in others whose inclusion in the national idiom and conversation, Lee implies, is as legitimate as his bid for recognition as an American author. I will call his glossolalic fiction cosmopolitan for not only does Lee engage and "finetune" his Koreanness dialogically, in relation with an American classic like Whitman, but he also sees the Whitmanesque vistas of American linguistic and cultural identity as germane to the drama of the self staged by Native Speaker.
This drama and its lead actor are cosmopolitan. Dispatched according to background, Hoagland's ethnic spies cook up their own stories so they can write the true stories of "others," their "remote, unauthorized biographies" (Lee 1995, 18). This is how Henry comes to see himself as a historian of sorts, a "prodigal and mundane" chronicler of their "cultural manner" (19) and mannerisms. His debriefings dwell on the resilient idiolect of strangeness. For this, Hoagland opines, white Americans are too parochial. They no longer possess a keen ear, unable as they have become to turn to the world their "other ear," to listen for otherness. (2) Moreover, they betray themselves before getting to betray (inform on) others. They give themselves away--blow their cover--too easily, out of some "charge or vanity of the culture, a la James Bond and Maxwell Smart" (172-73). This "cultural excess" makes them the "worst spies" because it prevents them from approaching the target as a "world-political creature" (19), as a cosmopolitan subject whose private worries and mysteries may matter and therefore may be worth nosing into from a perspective larger than the immediate community, nation, state, or culture of the spy. So what Hoagland needs is an analogously cosmopolitan type of spy. This "secret agent" must possess, first, cosmopolitan propensity, in other words, a balanced, "natural" albeit carefully understated interest in others like him, be those his kin or not, then a level-headed openness toward them, an inherent if tactically deployed neighborliness outside the native neighborhood, country, or religion; second, cosmopolitan ability, consisting primarily in multiple linguistic-cultural competence; third, cosmopolitan compatibility, a like-mindedness of the spy and the subject, a shared feel for the "big picture" beyond the self and its enclave. Common to all these skills is the capacity to operate in more than one world and go back and forth between these worlds, screen people and lives perceptively, sift through their often culturally unfathomable texts, sort out the relevant and the trivial, and then write it all out by translating and formatting it into a "story" the firm can in turn read and sell. This means that the cosmopolitan spy must also be a translator, and both are actually implied in the figure of the cultural go-between. As Peter Van der Veer maintains apropos of Dutch "Orientalist" and "scholar-spy" of Muslim law Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje,
The cosmopolitan person is not only a translator, but also a spy who commands more languages than the people he spies upon, as well as the ability to translate their languages into the languages of rulers. It is the ultimate cosmopolitan fantasy, well expressed in Kipling's writings, that the colonial hero has a perfect grasp of the language and the customs of the natives', the 'locals,' but still in his crossing over remains true to himself and returns to his own world where he uses his acquired knowledge for the improvement of colonial rule. (Van der Veer, 2002, 168).
Lee's is more than a cosmopolitan fantasy. It is, in fact, a critical counter-fantasy that goes against the voyeuristic, "intelligence-gathering" sort of cosmopolitanism in which his hero is engaged on behalf of other, "vastly wealthy voyeur[s]," hypothetical "xenophobe[s]," and chauvinistic America-firsters, overt and covert devotees of "national vigilance" (1995, 295). Undoubtedly, not all cosmopolitans are spies and informers on empire's payroll, even though Henry does spy and inform. Nor are his world and time colonial any more, and, we shall see momentarily, location and nativity no longer play out the way they did back in imperial and immediately postimperial settings. Van der Veer's analysis of spying applies to late Victorian empire, its Kiplings, and Conrads, a moment defined by the external, extra-metropolitan, exotic foreignness the British. French, and other empires were stumbling upon in their expansion, by the unsettling cultural enigmas imperial secret agents were called upon to solve. (3) Colonization and espionage did go hand in hand at the time, with the cosmopolitan the ideally positioned operative. In Lee, however, the settings and thrust of cosmopolitan contacts have changed. The latter's extensities and intensities are unprecedented, indeed "world-political," with New York the metropolitan stage on which the foreign no longer fascinates from afar, intriguingly yet safely "out there" "beyond U.S. borders," in a world "alien," "complex," and "incoherent." He is a worldly presence to reckon with concurrently "over there," in his nation-state never quite left behind in the age of "networks" and "border-crossing," but also "over here." Somebody capable of rendering alien, complex, and incoherent the very text of his new home, he is poised to interpolate American cultural-historical narrative, to "adulterate" the land's language by simply speaking it.
In this new, global context of more intense and intimate encounters, cosmopolitan aptitudes and knowledge can be put to a more ethical, authentically cosmopolitan work beyond the intelligence sought by "agencies" and empires old and new, a la Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. (4) A whole new dynamic of self and other obtains in Native Speaker, a post-divisional distribution of linguistic and cultural markers across ethnic and other divides, which complicates and, I submit, partly redeems the practice and trope of cosmopolitanism as spying. For, in a sense, Van Veer is right: cosmopolitan dealings do entail predispositions and talents also required of spies, undercover agents, and reconnoiterers of unknown lands. Conversely, a good spy is an effective scout of another's culture, a proficient reader of that culture's map. He or she must...
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