The Counterconfessional:
Reading Hak Kyung Cha
Linda A. Kinnahan argues in Lyric Interventions that the literary avant-garde's dismissal of the lyrical “I” is a dismissal of an unmediated or essentialist self, a challenge to masculine poetic and artistic theory, to lyric subjectivity. A similar work published in 2003 by Elisabeth A. Frost discusses how formal experimentation is a site for the expression of radical politics and an opportunity to "abolish the linguistic bases of gender binaries in a manner rarely seen among other feminist poets.” Indeed, much feminist criticism about avant-garde poetry focuses on the confrontation with the lyric self as deconstruction, a turn to “the ‘tenseless’ condition of language as medium” (McGann).
Whereas contemporary feminist avant-garde poetry dismantles the unmediated and essentialist self,” Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée reveals that formal experimentation is insufficient for addressing the multiple oppressions expressed by minority women writers. That is to say, while centering itself in the avant-gardism of language-centered poetry—in its most literal sense—Dictée departs from the surface conventions of language writing to subvert what reveal themselves to be the privileged concerns of avant-gardism while simultaneously redefining the confessional form of “women’s” poetry in what I will refer to as the “counterconfessional,” a form Cha employs to find words “physical enough” for her experience.
My term “counterconfessional” is indebted to Michael Leddy’s article, “See Armantrout for Alternate View,” in which he discusses Jerome McGann's terms, “nonnarrative and antinarrative,” as strategies language writers employ to subvert narrativity. Leddy improves on McGann’s strategies with what he refers to as the “counternarrative,” which he defines as “increasingly comic and parodic versions and subversions of the familiar.” A counterconfessional, as I intend the term, is also a subversive strategy, but specific to a form of narrative verse that has been deemed the purview of women poets.
Since the advent of Confessionalism, feminist poets have often turned to the combination of narrative and lyric as an opportunity to combine “the expressions of personal emotion and observation with the previously hidden narratives of the cultural and political histories from which those expressions arise” (Whitehead). Although the “personal as political” lyrical model does owe much to the Confessionalists, the counterconfessional reacts to the notion that personal, narrativized confession is necessarily the domain of women poets, not Confessionalism itself. Michael de Certeau and others have pointed out that narrative is a form of continuity and of particular interest to those for whom the “widespread need to tell individual women’s stories and the histories of whole cultural groups of women” is a particularly urgent one (qtd in Whitehead). In fact, the “personal as political” model has achieved such widespread popularity precisely because it “so neatly captured the way feminists mined individual experiences in order to understand what was wrong with society at large.” In this way, the confessional poem “provided the opportunity for autobiography, for honest and more complete revelation” and, more importantly, an opportunity to influence the reader herself and her socio-political context (still Whitehead).
It is precisely because personal narrative was seen as so politically urgent for marginalized groups of women that deviation from the “personal as political” in the form of linguistic and poetic experimentation met with such resistance. Even Ron Silliman so controversially argued for the urgent and undeniable political need of “women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the marginal […] to have their stories told” in an attempt to author themselves into history and out from under its objectifying gaze (qtd in Armantrout). Yet avant-garde poets and critics alike have argued that narrative, and its tradition in masculine poetics, may not be the best medium for expressing the nature of women’s oppression. The danger involved in a conflation of the private and public is that such a move “may merely repeat the traditional authorial pattern of asserting ‘private’ experience as universal” (Whitehead again). Further, a failure to acknowledge the division within this metaphoric system is an imperialist one that serves to write difference out of female poetic history. Perhaps, as Luce Irigaray has suggested, female experience requires a totally different language. Though even this proposition, as attractive as it is, could never be universal.
Although we have no statement of poetics directly from Theresa Hak Chung Cha to explicitly and conveniently illuminate her position on the gender of the lyrical self or her thoughts on ecriture feminine, her one and only poetic work, Dictée, serves in and of itself as a rejection of the confessional as the realm of women’s poetry and also challenges the socio-cultural privilege of the lyrical “I.” Whereas other avant-garde poet-critics explore language itself, Cha's formal experimentation reveals political oppression in absolute form: the complete subjugation of a culture.
In her first and only published work of poetry, Cha evokes multiple generic discourses and their accompanying conventions: lyric and epic poetry, autobiography, translation, catechism and historical narrative. Ultimately, Dictée reveals that no form in particular sufficiently comprehends the multiple positions of the Korean American immigrant woman writer. Whereas the “personal as political” lyrical model that feminists have so vehemently adopted privileges “private” experience as universal, Cha’s counterconfessional does not attempt to stand for Asian America, but rather illuminates the multiple positions of Korean women and destabilizes the tradition of linking the lyric “I” with a poet’s “real” self. Specifically, Cha’s “diseuse,” who allows others to speak “in place of her[, a]dmits others to make full” embodies an inversion and subversion of the “personal as political” by making the political personal. The diseuse, rather than embody the poet’s lyrical and intrinsic self, channels various women throughout history who have been the objects of cultural and political fantasy: the Nine Muses, Korean nationalist martyr Yu Guan Soon, St. Therese of Lisieux, and Joan of Arc, whose voices enter the diseuse “from without.” This external social reconstruction serves as a fantasy of actualization—the voice from within joins with the voices from without in a mode of literary production that shuns a single, unified, autonomous consciousness or identity.
This strategy serves not to revive heroines “as examples or models of ideal identification” (as Cha scholar Anne Anlin Cheng would have us believe) but rather challenges a feminist universal experience that excludes those who occupy multiple positions of marginalization. Throughout the “ERATO/LOVE POETRY” section, the confession of St. Therese de Lisieux is quoted in part. The section begins with a photograph of St. Therese playing Joan of Arc in a convent play. Throughout her confession she voices her many idealized identities: to be the divine spouse of Jesus, “Princess and Lady of His Kingdoms,” to be a martyr in his name like St. Bartholomew, St. John, St. Agnes, St. Cecilia and Joan of Arc—images which contrast sharply with her actual identities: “only a child, powerless and weak,” a victim, a “weak and imperfect creature.” The photograph of Maria Falconetti playing Joan of Arc on the final page of the chapter reinforces St. Therese’s desire for an identity that has been politically and culturally idealized. As Therese resigns herself and all women to the position of the incomprehensible and unfixed: “misunderstanding to be their lot on earth,” the notion of an essential and unmediated self is called into question.
If the seemingly dislocated images of Falconetti and St. Therese consequently disrupt those received notions of female narrative commensurality—infinitely exchangeable, infinitely interchangeable—the stories of the Korean women Yu Guan Soon and the speaker’s mother reveal that origins are never without context, never without socio-political complication. The mother—who is variously described as refugee, immigrant, exile, orphan—is neither Chinese nor Korean, neither native nor foreign, displaced as an immigrant in a foreign land, though none of these identities provide her with the wholeness such a “rescue mission” might demand. Similarly, although Yu Guan Soon, the “child revolutionary child patriot woman soldier deliverer of nation” is specifically relevant to the position of a Korean-American immigrant woman writer, Cha nevertheless asserts that her identity “is exchangeable with any other heroine in history, their names, dates, actions which require not definition.” Cha’s irony here is clear inasmuch as she proceeds to give her reader just that: specific dates, names and actions that clearly make Guan Soon not at all interchangeable with any heroine in history. Cha reinforces this irony later in the same chapter: “to the others, those accounts are about (one more) distant land, like (any other) distant land, without any discernable features in the narrative, (all the same) distant like any other.” Ultimately, the narrative wholeness that might return us to our origins is not only insufficient, but entirely irrelevant.
In this way, Cha’s counterconfessional rejects the confessional form in the utter intangibility of its lyric self. The photographs, epigraphs, graffiti, correspondences, confessions which do not confess, inaccurately attributed quotes, and unfaithfully translated dictée recur throughout the text as profoundly unlocatable events and protect the “I” precisely in their unlocatability. When the reader is most sure of a narrativized identity in the text, Cha turns the conventions of confession against themselves in a radical expression of difference that necessarily challenges ideological assumptions implicit in feminist poetic practice.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker has suggested that “when women writers write of continuities from one writer, artist, or thinker to another, it is thus not […] on the Oedipal model of killing and superseding the precursor, but on the Demeter-Kore model of returning and reviving.” By turning to feminist criticism on Cha and the counterlyric self, I intend not to usurp it, but rather to divorce the avant-garde from its marriage to gender difference in the underworld of literary criticism. American feminist criticism—indeed, American feminism—has long been accused of privileging concerns of gender over other margins of difference. In Dictée, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha dismisses both gender-based feminist criticism and “personal as political” confessional poetic modes as insufficient, irrelevant--limited: “not physical enough […] for this experience.”