There used to exist this time in history when a person could walk into a bookstore, or a library or just any random person’s house, spot a book lying unobtrusively by itself, pick it up and within just a minute or two determine whether it was fiction or non-fiction, novel or autobiography, poetry or prose. And then the world changed and the rules of fiction were blasted into the atmosphere and such a quick and simple determination was no longer possible. Dictee, by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, is not just an example of the consequences of that explosion, but one of the most iconic and representative of examples.
The opening lines to the book are as follow, exactly as they appear in print:
Open paragraph. It was the first day period
She had come from a far period tonight at dinner
comma the families would ask comma open
quotation marks
A natural first reaction to seeing this on the page would be any of a number of things. It must be a work of fiction, since non-fiction writing doesn’t look like that. It is a novel or is a book of poetry? These are just a few of the questions that might strike one. But wait, there’s more to consider. Because, in reality, these are not the first lines to the book. The first paragraph is written in French and mimics the peculiar form and structure of the above excerpt. A single turn of the page and suddenly everything changes. The text occupies the full length and is presented without the odd spacing and, especially notable, the text makes absolutely clear sense. One need not work hard at understanding what it being said. This won’t last.
As more pages are turned, the reader is confronted with lists, with short poems situated in the middle of a page surrounded by empty space, with photographs, with Asian symbols to the uninitiated could just as easily be Japanese, Chinese or Korean. Then there is, in full, a petition from the Koreans of Hawaii to President Roosevelt dated 1905 (making that Teddy, not Franklin). And there is handwriting scrawled across the span of two open pages and a first person recollection written as memoir, and even more symbols that perhaps now occur to some readers might not be letters at all. And as the pages turn, more photos and longer poems and history.
When one thinks of the term “postmodern literature” one may not necessarily be sure what it means exactly, but they are pretty sure it applies to fiction. Postmodernism is a style that is often applied to the novels and plays and films and stories since the latter 20th century. It is not a term that one often hears applied to non-fiction. And yet that is what one holds in their hands when trying to make sense of Dictee. It is not an easy task so do not be ashamed to admit it. Dictee is a notoriously difficult text. Just how difficult can be attested to by the very fact that upon its arrival, those who criticized its form and structure were less likely to admit it print than they were simply to ignore it altogether. As a result, even among those who analyze literature for a living, there were many who simply couldn’t use their experience to categorize what, exactly, Dictee was or, conversely, fully reject it on the basis of what it wasn’t.
Consider that on some web sites, Dictee is classified as an “autobiography.” At the very same time, one can also find an entry on the book in the Encyclopedia of the American Novel. Which raises an interesting question and it is not: is Dictee a novel or autobiography? Instead, it is the profoundly more interesting and difficult question: can a book be both an autobiography and a novel at once?
