Crushing Classification
Dictee is a book that continues to defy all attempts at easy generic classification. Some sources list it as “autobiography” while is analyzed as fiction in academic encyclopedias devoted to the novels of the 20th century. Still others classify it as a history book. That this confusion is planned and not merely the result of haphazard writing on the part of the author is made clear as a result of the myriad ways in which text is presented. Some pages look like poetry (and, indeed, are poems) while others read like a memoir and others are presented as straight-up history and still others take the form of handwritten letters. And those examples are hardly comprehensive of the ways in which Dictee presents information that challenges all the notions that readers bring to a book.
Gender Politics
The book lacks a single focus on a single character easily determined as the protagonist. A much more appropriate identification would be that the ideal of “woman” is the lead character as the narrative covers an extensive range of female figures. The life of Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soo is juxtaposed against the martyrdom of St. Therese of Lisieux and Joan of Arc so that one of the most identifiable themes of running through the book is that of gender politics in which the expectations of women are historically on a collision course with the women who defy those expectations.
Language as Communication
The unsettled and constantly shifting presentation of the means by which information is presented in the book becomes the dominant manner in which it explores themes related to language as the facilitator of communication. The open page of the American edition contains two paragraphs, one in French and one in English, both absent punctuation and featuring odd spacing between words. Right from the beginning the book commences an assault upon the reader’s ability to easily translate the ability to read words into the ability to understand them. The essential element of the process known as communicating meaning is thus introduced as more complex and complicated than normally assumed. This complexity will continue unabated as the reader continues to be challenged on an ever-expanding series of assumptions one brings to a text.
