46 pages • 1 hour read
Theresa Hak Kyung ChaDictee
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Communal Nature of Creation
The book begins with a quote attributed to Sappho, a famous poet from Ancient Greece. The quote is: “May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve” (i). Sappho is called “the tenth muse,” a description that aligns with the chapter titles, as each chapter is named after one of the nine muses of Ancient Greek mythology. However, the quote is not from Sappho; Cha created this quote. Cha’s choice to attribute her own quote to a famous woman poet emphasizes the concept of communality of creation.
Rather than subscribing to the masculine view of the lone genius as the sole creator of works of art, Cha highlights the aspect of creation that is communal, meaning that the act of creating artistic objects arises from a set of societal conditions and is never achieved in isolation from either the past or present. In a sense, Cha is paying homage to Sappho as a great inspiration of hers, citing her as a way of proclaiming Sappho as a foundational source for her own originality. The quote emphasizes the barriers that a writer or speaker faces when employing written and spoken language to describe the embodied, or lived, experiences of people. Cha is proclaiming her creative mission at the beginning of the work, which is to overcome the distancing or alienating aspects of speech and arrive at the heart of the matter in human terms. She also seeks to disavow the perspective that art is divorced from society and instead expose how creation is a reflection of society and can potentially transform society.
The cropped photo of Yu Guan Soon, the Korean nationalist hero, is shown at the beginning of the chapter, “Clio History,” but the same photo also appears later in a second iteration at the end of the book. However, in the second version, the photo is shown in its totality, revealing Yu Guan Soon surrounded by a large group of women. Cha does this to show that the individual is always part of a larger social, political, and historical collective narrative. Though she only tells the story of one remarkable individual, there are many others who are just like Soon, who have stories that are similarly tragic, heroic, and painful but whose stories have been lost to history and can never be retrieved.
Likewise, the “Terpsichore Choral Dance” chapter shows how Demeter’s rites to bring back her daughter Persephone from the underworld were not performed in isolation. The section begins with imagery of alienation and separation: The speaker is separate from the congregation in the first paragraph. The chapter ends with an image of a polyphony of voices combining and rising together in “the bowl of sound” (162).
The Artifice of Art
Cha explores this theme through an unnamed woman (who appears to be a reflection of Cha) watching a film in a theater. This is an example of how narratives are transformed by the mediums in which they are expressed, whether that is through language or visual mediums. The woman notices another woman in the theater, but she never speaks to that woman and gives no details about herself either. This suggests the speaker’s self is watching the events play out from two different perspectives. In addition, Cha is commenting on the voyeuristic aspect of storytelling.
Instead of presenting herself as objective, Cha presents herself as a voyeur with biases, thoughts, feelings, and limitations. Cha is commenting on how these stories are all connected thematically and also on how storytelling is a contextual action that is being performed in a social reality. It appears as if the woman is watching herself watch the film. The tone of self-consciousness from the earlier sections in “Diseuse” carries over in the sections on the women in the theater, but once the speaker becomes absorbed into the act of watching others, her self-consciousness dissolves and the speaker loses herself in the darkness of the theater. The narrator comments that when watching a film, one is submitting one’s vision completely to the film, but then her mind wanders and “the expulsion” from the film’s illusion “is immediate” (79). Cha also suggests that the moments of sublime forgetting through absorption in art, film, music, and other forms of loss of self-consciousness allow one to return to oneself and remember. When she is watching the film, she thinks about how in the process of forgetting, she remembers things she has long forgotten and “return to word” (151). There is a duality to this process of forgetting and remembering in which each plays a role in the development of a new creation.
The voyeur in the theater knows that it is a mistake to believe that the act of watching makes a difference in the act of being observed, ruminating on “the illusion that the act of viewing is to make alteration of the visible” (79). This expresses Cha’s self-reflexivity, or her awareness that her invented narrative and its metaphysical relationship to the real people involved is unstable. Cha constantly questions her perceptions and their veracity, but she places her perceptions in the appropriate framework as a post-modern artist who desires to be truthful about the artifice of art.
The Insufficiency of Conventional Language to Express Trauma
Through many shifts in perspective, Cha contemplates how dehumanization occurs through exile, war, and conquest. Diaspora and the life of an exile are presented as a constant series of degrading experiences. This process of dehumanization brings about silencing and repression of trauma. By adopting many different personas throughout Dictee, Cha explores how trauma resists expression through conventional language.
In one such example, Cha adopts the perspective of the soldier who puts his duties to his country before all else: “You are your post you are your vow in nomine patris you work your post you are your nation defending your country from subversive infiltration from your own countrymen” (86). The imagery of the soldier camouflaged creates a sensation of paranoia for the speaker as she walks through a Korea that is no longer familiar to her. However, Cha also explores the soldier’s perspective, who must put the abstract ideal of nation above the reality of fellow humans; the soldier is stultified by his position within the war. This memory was inspired by Cha’s return to Korea in 1979, after years of living in the United States and France.
Cha’s distance from her own country of birth is captured when she reflects on no longer speaking the same language. She writes to her mother: “We are here for the first time in eighteen years, Mother […] I speak another tongue, a second tongue” (85). The sensation of alienation and dispossession is captured when Cha writes that time devours life, and individuals who die become only names without substance: The only thing that can attempt to give substance to these individual lives is words, but words are insufficient. Cha writes about time and time’s relationship to tragedy, violence, and oppression. She contemplates the division of Korea into North and South Korea and how this represents the “imaginary borders” between nations and the “unimaginable boundaries” between individuals (87). Over the course of Dictee, Cha’s style becomes increasingly incantatory, as if the release of traumas through their expression allows Cha to speak with more fluidity. In one such moment, Cha repeats the phrase “suffice Melpomene” (88-89), alluding to the common phrase “suffice to say,” which means that more could be said, but enough has already been said. Cha is poetically reenacting that time is a loop of historical tragedies, and there are no words that can erase or redeem them.
However, Cha writes as if she is making an offering to the Greek muse of Tragedy to prevent future tragedies, or “arrest the machine” (89). Cha is describing the process of words and images, exorcizing the memories of separation that characterize her and her mother’s personal history.
