Dictee

Dictee
	1st ed, Tanam Press (1982)
Author	Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Language	English, French
Subject	a classic work of autobiography
Published	1982
Publisher	Tanam Press
Media type	softcover
Pages	179
ISBN	978-0-934378-09-3

Dictee is a 1982 book by Korean American author Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Considered to be Cha's magnum opus, the book, a genre-bending poetry collection, focuses on several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyun Soon Huo, and Cha herself. All these women are linked by their struggles and the way that nations have affected and twisted their lives.

Publication history[edit]

The book was first published in 1982, the year Cha was murdered. The book was out of print for a while, but due in part to the publication of an edited collection on her novel, Writing Self, Writing Nation (1994), Cha's work began to receive critical attention. In 1997, with the resurgence of Asian American studies and Third-wave feminism, the book was brought back into print by Norma Alarcón and Third Woman Press.^[1]

— (1982). Dictee (1st, pb ed.). New York: Tanam Press. ISBN 9780934378109.
— (1994). Dictee. Berkeley: Third Woman Press. ISBN 978-0-943219-12-7.
— (2001). Dictee. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-23112-2.
— (2009). Dictee (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-26129-7.

Genre[edit]

Critics^[who?] contend that Dictee, though considered a novel, is difficult to define by genre. It has an unorthodox structure, and consists of descriptions of the struggle to speak, uncaptioned photographs, tellings of the lives of saints and patriots, and mysterious letters that seem not to relate to the other material. Cha "borrows from avant garde and film editing techniques such as jagged cuts, jump shots, and visual exposition", based on her experience in the video and performing arts.^[2] The work "deviates from genres, themes, and styles" and fails to fit a single descriptor or label with clarity.^[3] It has been described as auto-ethnography, due to its highly subjective view of heritage and the past. "It is part autobiography, part biography, part personal diary, part ethnography, part auto-ethnography, part translation. And all these genres are presented with an intertextual mix of photographs, quotations, translations, and language so as to create a history. Cha's move in Dictee is to collage multiple voices American, European, and Asian---so as to build a history".^[4] Cha uses a lot of photographs to engage the reader and create a certain atmosphere. Dictee is composed of various genres, such as autobiography, fiction, history, and poetry and this diversity not only reflects on genre, but also on culture and language.

Cha criticizes the prejudice towards and oppression of women, which greatly affects the genre. She “not only challenge[s] the traditional autobiographic ethnic mode, it also disturbs the reader’s expectations by breaking down the boundaries between genres and playing with them”.^[5] In other words, Cha creates a pathetic atmosphere in irony. Erotic narrations disclose the inequity in society and reveal Cha's strong resistance. What her goes through is shown in aesthetic forms that eulogize the female characteristics. In addition, her fragmented memories suggest her ambiguous Korean identity and inner loss. In all, her depictions are shaped by and shape genre.

Structure and critical observations[edit]

Dictee is organized into nine parts, a structure that arises from the nine Greek muses. These include Clio, Calliope, Urania, Melpomene, Erato, Elitere, Thalia, Terpischore, and Polymnia. The nine muses are the titles of nine chapters of Dictee. Cha's use of nine muses is derived from Hesiod, who first used them. But Cha's employment is a subversive revision because of her "feminist intervention and patriarchal order." The catalogue of nine muses Cha examines with nine women characters, vary widely from "Greek goddesses to a Korean shamanistic matriarch and from historical figures to fictional ones".^[6] The meaning of the muses is shown with nine women who all reject patriarchal roles and cannot have a voice for themselves for different reasons, because of unhappy marriage, exile, turbulence and immigration. At the end of chapter "POLYMNIA SACRED POETRY", Cha writes "Tenth, a Circle within a circle, a series of concentric circles"(Cha 175). Cha uses this image to describe how the women always come together and the child becomes the mother and the mother will have a child and it is like a circle, a life circle for women. At the same time, trauma from the mother's generation is always passed on to the next generation. So this circle is both physical and mental.

The novel is mainly written in English and French, but some Korean and Chinese characters can be seen in the pictures posed to support the text. Unexplained Chinese characters as well as Korean words lead incomprehension visually and linguistically. Cha wants to keeps a realist ideal of equivalence and deliberately get rid of the sense of foreignness without extra translation, though these characters stand outside the textual order, instead, they create "self-contained diatinction and feeling of otherness".^[7] Cha didn't want to disturb readers’ reading experience by doing this—on the contrary, she wanted the readers to join her. The process of reading this book was to call on Korean people to resist the colony of Japan. So this book could be called a book with history of blood and tears.

The stories of the women in the book (including Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and her mother Hyun Soon Huo) focus on patriotism and exile identity. Cha's purpose of using multimedia and how do visual elements is to attract the readers' attention in different approaches. Focusing on the photograph of Cha's biological mother, Hyung Soon Huo, though it is uncaptioned, it conveys the ways the past that speaks to "escape the capture of discursive language" with this historical character. And in a deep sense, it also "clear a way for what Dictée understands as the necessary reply to not repeat history in oblivion".^[8] She also uses a still from the silent French movie called The Passion of Joan of Arc to give the readers a direct concept of what is going on in the text. So readers could think about the reliability of narration and focalization,^[9] multimedia and art,^[10]^[11] the ambiguity^[12] and authenticity in photography taking,^[13] and the boundary between fiction and nonfiction.^[14]

Critics have read the book as a social discourse, aiming at informing the readers of the world about the history of the Japanese Colonial Period.^[15] The trauma suggested is also the product of nationalism, patriarchal forces, and colonialism during that period.^[16] What's more, it also shows the struggles that the Asian American have been through in the aspect of the culture identity. Cha managed to call public's attention to this kind of special group, at the same time, it also let the people who have the same experience or culture background find their own culture identity.

Dictée is famous for its unique print format and typographic design, using untranslated French, Korean, Chinese, collage and fragmented text in the book. Not only the title of the book is dictation, but many of the contents of the book are also written in strict accordance with the dictation format. Cha's Dictée carries it out of melancholia into mourning, by working through multiple personal and political traumas as an outstanding work of postmodernity.

Reviews and criticism[edit]

Reviews for Dictee have been rather positive, with Carole Maso quoted in Spin Magazine commenting, "Dictee enlarges the notion of what a book is...because it is ephemeral, fragile, fierce, and indelible, because it is subversive, because it yearns and is luminous."^[17]

Historical context[edit]

Dictee mainly embodies two periods, The Japanese Colony (1910-1945) and Liberation, Division and The Korea War (1945-1953).

In 1919, Korea active nationalists drafted and distributed a declaration of independence of Korea and planned a large demonstration of independence. To gather a large number of people into demonstration, they turned the funeral for King Kojong into a protest against Japanese. "Demonstrations supporting the declaration of independence quickly spread throughout the country. It is estimated that more than a million of Korea's 20 million people participated in street demonstrations."^[18] This movement is called March 1st Movement. Women and Children were beaten and killed by the police and soldiers. Yu Guan Soon, who was a student of Korea and an organizer of March 1 Movement. She "passed out copies of the declaration and led demonstrations in her hometown area south of Seoul. She was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured, and after a year she died in prison."^[18]

Japan used a variety of policies to control and assimilate Korea since 1930s, especially through education policies. "In 1934 Ugaki introduced a new curriculum in Korean schools that featured increased instruction in Japanese language, ethics, and history. The new curriculum eliminated the study of Korean and the use of Korean in general instruction. Eventually, the colonial government would insist that only the Japanese language be used in all public offices, and by the 1940s all businesses and banks were forced to keep records exclusively in Japanese."^[18]

After the end of World War II, Japan lost the war and control of Korea, Korea was free from Japanese occupation. However, Soviet and U.S. troops moved into Korea from north and south, they occupied Korea after Japan left. "The responsible bodies in Washington suggested to the President that the Japanese forces north of the 38th parallel surrender to the Soviet forces and those south of the 38th parallel surrender to the US forces. The two colonels who had prepared the decisions — one of them being the later Secretary of State Dean Rusk — had chosen the 38th parallel because it left the capital Seoul under US control.3 This line had already been mentioned in internal dis-cussions of the US military at Potsdam when they had envisaged the military occupation of Korea for the first time. The suggestion to choose the 38th parallel as dividing line became part of an instruction, approved by the Presi-dent, to General MacArthur, Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces. This instruction was also communicated to the British and Soviet government." "The 38th parallel was considered to be a temporary line to fix military responsibilities. Therefore, it has been called a "military expedient". Yet, once Soviet troops had entered the northern part of Korea, facts were established which could not be removed."^[19] Two different governments were established under Soviet and U.S.'s support, and they had a few conflicts after establishment. June 25, 1950, the Korean War started. North Korean Army with China's help and South Korea Army with U.S.'s help started a war in Korea Peninsula. The war ended on July 27, 1953.

References[edit]

^ Lewallen, Constance (2001). The Dream of The Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951 -1982). University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-23287-7.^{[page needed]}
^ Cheng, Anne Anlin (2001). The Melancholy of Race. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-515162-6.^{[page needed]}
^ Yi Kang, Hyun; Kim, Elaine H.; Lowe, Lisa; Sunn Wong, Shelley (1994). Writing Self, Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Third Women Press. ISBN 978-0-943219-11-0. Retrieved 10 July 2018.
^ Spahr, Juliana M. (1996). "Postmodernism, Readers, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's 'Dictee'". College Literature. 23 (3): 23–43. JSTOR 25112272.
^ Parker, Adele; Young, Stephenie (2013). Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women's Writing. Rodopi. p. 122. ISBN 978-94-012-0890-1.
^ Lee, Kun Jong (2006). "Rewriting Hesiod, Revisioning Korea:Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee is a Subversive Hesiodic Catalogue of Women". College Literature. 33 (3): 77–99. doi:10.1353/lit.2006.0040.
^ Sue-Im Lee (2002). "Suspicious Characters: Realism, Asian American Identity, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee". Journal of Narrative Theory. 32 (2): 227–258. doi:10.1353/jnt.2011.0065. S2CID 163149394.
^ Kim, Hyo K. (2013). "Embodying the In-Between: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee". Mosaic. 46 (4): 127–143. doi:10.1353/mos.2013.0041. S2CID 144019120.
^ Diengott, Nilli (1995). "Narration and focalization: the implications for the issue of reliability in narrative". Journal of Literary Semantics. 24 (1): 42–49. doi:10.1515/jlse.1995.24.1.42. INIST:3725010.
^ Morrison, K. A. (2004). "Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, D.G. Rossetti, and the 'Art of the Book': A Note on Dictee". Notes on Contemporary Literature. 34 (2): 9–11.
^ Paulson, Sarah J.; Malvik, Anders Skare, eds. (2016). Literature in Contemporary Media Culture: Technology - Subjectivity- Aesthetics. John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 978-90-272-6754-2.^{[page needed]}
^ Kim, Sue J. (2008). "Narrator, Author, Reader: Equivocation in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee". Narrative. 16 (2): 163–177. doi:10.1353/nar.0.0002. JSTOR 30219281. S2CID 146476662. Gale A178674400 Project MUSE 237017.
^ "Descriptive Images: Authenticity and Illusion in Early and Contemporary Photography". Description in Literature and Other Media. 2007. pp. 289–316. doi:10.1163/9789401205214_010. ISBN 978-90-420-2310-9.
^ Paulson, Sarah J.; Malvik, Anders Skare, eds. (2016). Literature in Contemporary Media Culture: Technology - Subjectivity- Aesthetics. John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 978-90-272-6754-2.^{[page needed]}
^ Cheng, Anne Anlin (1998). "Memory and Anti-Documentary Desire in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée". Melus. 23 (4): 119–133. doi:10.2307/467831. JSTOR 467831. Gale A55909805.
^ Chambers, Evan (2012). "Re-opening Dictée: interpreting the void in Theresa Cha's representations of Christianity". Religion & Literature. 44 (2): 123–146. JSTOR 24397672.
^ Bell, Madison Smartt (January 1996). "My Back Pages". SPIN. p. 92. Retrieved 25 February 2016.
^ Jump up to:^a ^b ^c Peterson, Mark (2009). A brief History of Korea. Facts On File. ISBN 978-1-4381-2738-5.^{[page needed]}
^ Kleiner, Jurgen (2001). Korea: A Century of Change. River Edge, N.J.: World Scientific. pp. 49–50. ISBN 978-981-02-4657-0.

External links[edit]

Weiss, Laralynn. "Navigating Spaces: the Human Textual Body (Theresa Cha)".
Galu, Cristina (Fall 2004). "Ekphrasis and Multimediality: De-Stabilizing History and Subjectivity in Theresa Cha's Dictee". Rhizomes. 9 (1).
Cheng, Anne Anlin (1998). "Memory and Anti-Documentary Desire in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée". Melus. 23 (4): 119–133. doi:10.2307/467831. JSTOR 467831. Gale A55909805.

Categories:
1982 American novels
Korean-American novels
Literature by Asian-American women

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Dictée is the best-known work of the versatile and important Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictée is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha’s mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. The elements that unite these women are suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory. The result is a work of power, complexity, and enduring beauty.

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Review

"Reads like a secret dossier, stuffed with epistles and pictures, religion, and dreams." ― Village Voice

"Cha made quiet work with a disquieting impact." ― New York Times

"Too often, of course, the colonizing function of language goes about its invisible work without comment, but in Dictée each scene, each image, each poem or letter purposefully refers us back to it." ― Paris Review

"A fringe classic for students of women’s studies, book arts, and poetry." ― Artforum

“A resolutely avant-garde book. . . . Dictée has spent decades as a cult classic, becoming a fixture of Asian American and feminist studies syllabi across the country.” ― The Nation

"All writers who play with form that have come since are indebted to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, often without even knowing it." ― Kenyon Review

"It remains as radical a text as it was when I first found it, daring to hold a space open somewhere in between several genres, and to let tensions remain unresolved, or ambiguous, to pursue if not the articulation of the inarticulate, then, to let the reader experience what is inarticulate within themselves still in a space that makes room for it or even values it." -- Alexander Chee, ― Electric Lit

"Dictée was one of the first books that taught me the transformative power that art could have on the material of a life—that conceptual art wasn’t only populated by urban white folks, and lives like Cha’s or mine or my mother’s could make a strange and wild home there, too." -- Elaine Castillo, ― Electric Lit

"Dictée addresses themes of time, language, and memory that recur in much of the artist’s work while incorporating multiple forms of media, language, and historical material. . . . Nine chapters, structured around the muses of Greek mythology, result in a form that is novel, prose poem, biography, and photo book all at once." ― Hyperallergic

"Cha’s work is both academic and emotionally present, theoretical and practical. It eschews easy classification, and is influenced by filmmakers as much as it is by playwrights, visual artists, poets, and critics." ― Ploughshares

"Dictée enlarges the notion of what a book is. . . . Because it is ephemeral, fragile, fierce, and indelible, because it is subversive, because it years and is luminous." ― Spin

"The brilliance of Dictée is in its subverting the dynamics of understandability: incomprehensibility as the communicative channel, obscurity as the language to discuss illumination." ― Columbia Journal

About the Author

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982) was a poet, filmmaker, and artist. In 1982, Cha was murdered by a stranger in New York City, just a few days after the original publication of Dictée.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of California Press; Second edition (September 14, 2009)

Language ‏ : ‎ English

Paperback ‏ : ‎ 192 pages

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0520261291

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0520261297

Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces

Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #24,130 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

#6 in Asian Literary History & Criticism

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Customer Reviews: 4.4 out of 5 stars 97 ratings

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towercity

5.0 out of 5 stars Woah

Reviewed in the United States on December 6, 2012

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Buy this book. Trust me. Flip through it a little, it's a fun book to look at. Don't start reading it yet. Let it sit on your shelf for a while. Remember it. A month or so later open it up and flip through it again. It's got such a nice book. Take some time out to read it: choose a weekend without plans. Read it slowly, it's short enough to. After you're finished, set it down. Put it back on the bookshelf. Maybe later flip through it again. Try to think about it. It's a hard book to understand. Maybe revisit the Erato section--that was absolutely wonderful. Open to a random page and read that page. Set it down again. There's something about this book. What is it? Think about it. The object in your hands in something special, you just don't know exactly what.

I finished this a few weeks ago, and while I'm still not sure quite what I read, I'm glad I did. Looking back through sections, it really does add up somehow, in a way beyond words (which is quite fitting). I understand this review is not clear, not helpful, but it's all I've got. Trust me on this, even though we haven't met, this is a book to be read.

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Mike Starr

5.0 out of 5 stars An instant classic in ethnic or Asian-American writing, and abstract writing too

Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2021

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Very good piece for those who like a more artistic, abstract work.

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Frank

5.0 out of 5 stars New condition

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Bought this for a Comparative Literature class. Cheaper than the college bookstore, easier than the library and no worries about return dates.

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Cas

5.0 out of 5 stars Lovely Hybrid Book

Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2014

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Cha takes the reader to a word with odd syntax and diction, with lovely imagery and sounds. This book is a great read. It provides historical context through narrative, and provides a great look on a minority culture(s). I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who wishes to read something not following a cliched formula.

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3.0 out of 5 stars Seller was great, book not so much

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Seller was great, book not so much

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I’ve get this book with satisfaction! Thanks!!

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Meadda

5.0 out of 5 stars POST MODERN POETRY CLASS

Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2016

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I purchased this for my son's Modern and Post Modern Poetry class. The book was in good, used condition, and he enjoyed her poetry very much.

It was a perfect price for his needs, and the best we could find for this book with quick shipping.

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MiiMii

2.0 out of 5 stars Condition and fast delivery good

Reviewed in the United States on January 24, 2013

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Well this book was a bit confusing. If you like a challenge well then this book is for you. The best part was the images, aside from quick delivery that I needed it ASAP for a class.

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marcia

5.0 out of 5 stars beautiful book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 9, 2020

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beautiful book

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Laurent Sauerwein

5.0 out of 5 stars LUMINOUS

Reviewed in Germany on August 18, 2020

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Extraordinary, quietly lyrical, intimate autobiography of sorts, composed of multilingual collages, a heterogenous mix from which emerge luminous gems and insights.

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S. F.

5.0 out of 5 stars Really fun

Reviewed in Germany on November 30, 2013

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If you're at all interested in Asian American literature, get this book. It may seem quite crazy at first, but the great thing about Dictée is that you keep learning new things as soon as you accept Cha's way of storytelling.

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Gabriela

2.0 out of 5 stars Awesome book, bad packaging

Reviewed in Mexico on June 4, 2019

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Love this book, the only reason I’m not giving five stars is that, when the book arrived it was dirty and a little bit damage.

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Emily Deibert

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars

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Very interesting read.

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==

Dictee

by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

3.99 · Rating details · 2,614 ratings · 231 reviews

Dictée is the best-known work of the versatile and important Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictée is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. The elements that unite these women are suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory. The result is a work of power, complexity, and enduring beauty. (less)

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Published September 28th 2001 by University of California Press (first published October 1982)

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Ellie

Jan 03, 2011Ellie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, poetry, socio-political, 2018-gpchallenge

GR has this book marked by me as read. I'm sure I haven't read it because I've tried several times (unsuccessfully) in the past to read it.

Well, this time I finished it. In fact, I couldn't put it down. The language was mesmerizing and (what I was able to understand) was intriguing. However, I was frustrated by the fact that there was so much I didn't understand. So, even though I finished it this time, it's clearly a first reading.

So it's difficult for me to review this. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in Korea during the Korean War and moved to the United States with her parents. The book is, about other things, her struggle with identity as a Korean-American. This is demonstrated (in part) through a series of mock language lessons.

The book is also about Korea's struggle for independence, recounting the story of young Korean woman's brief life as a revolutionary. Again, language is key as the Japanese forbid Koreans to speak their language. As always with Imperial states, language is a primary site of struggle. The English did it in their colonies, the U.S. banned the use of Native American languages by Native Americans--always language is a key to identity and Imperialists look to dismantle the identity of the people they colonize. The author also recounts her own mother's painful struggle with the effort to keep her language alive, even at the risk of imprisonment.

The book is political but also socio-political. I always am interested in where the two intersect and Hak Kyung Cha was certainly formed in that cauldron.

The book is a mix of autobiography and history, poetry and narrative. It is endless interesting and beautiful. Tragically, Kyung Cha was murdered (by a stranger) shortly after the publication of this, her major work.

Often the language in this book is fractured, vividly demonstrating the effect displacement and war has had on language. I was able to detect themes even when I was not able to really understand what was taking place.

For me, the language in this book was amazing and the narrative passages I understood of great interest. It left me wanting to read this book that clearly contained levels I was not able to access in a first reading.

A challenging but exceptional read that will, I think, stay with me. (less)

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Adam Dalva

Mar 15, 2016Adam Dalva rated it liked it

It was difficult to get a handle on this, either because it's (a) above my intellectual pay-grade, (b) designed to resist easy interpretation, or (c) just not particularly good. I don't think (c) is right, because I read happily and quickly, but I found myself on shaky ground a lot of the time.

Now, DICTEE a lot of things at once and in some ways, I thought it was best when (predictable fiction writer statement coming) it was diving fully into the experimental (loved the incorporated art) or hewing closest to narrative. I most liked the photocopied cursive letter on 147-149, which was one of the two or three most straightforward sequences - that's the trick of putting the most directly narrative segment into an experimental form and getting away with generating interest out of melodrama because it looks funky. Beyond that, I gravitated toward the sequence with the brother dying (84), or the lovely CALLIOPE chapter in tribute to her mother, and the allusions to her Catholic childhood. Those sections sung, and it was a challenge not to skim through the murk to get to them. But I think it's worth talking about the inscrutability of Cha as well, because I think it's probably the point of the work.

One breadcrumb: I became very interested in the intermittently broken English - look at the french/english translation on 66-67 and her varying treatment of impossible for one of the clearer hints that she's timing her mistakes cannily. I did some searching and found this pretty good essay (https://bayareapublicschool.org/wp-co...) on the intentional inscrutability of the book - I was particularly drawn to this block quote:

"As Trinh T. Minh Ha argues...the insistence on a literature of clarity (which is what an emphasis on a literature of identity formation necessarily is) "is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order."

That makes a lot of sense. When I think of dictation, (the essay points this out), I think of the old French method of education, when students would parrot back at the teacher, not knowing what they were saying, until they got it right. This is an image that recurs frequently in the book, both literally and figuratively. We hear about many issues of colonialism and silenced resistance. Though the book didn't revolve around men - a nice change of pace - they lurk in the dictatorships (another inferred meaning of dictee) that dominate the edges and prevent women and indigenous peoples from maintaining their forms of expression.

And then, of course, Catholicism is patriarchal too, and also involves a call/response mechanism for learning, the catechism, that is deconstructed early and often. Throw in all the imagery of people losing their tongues (a constant theme), and something interesting is going on here w/r/t representation and speech. And looping back to good old T.T.M.H. (a ghost from my phd aspirant days), that seems to be a statement about feminism. I've been thinking a lot about what it is to write from the fringe - and experimental female writers were, unfortunately, a fringe for much of the century - and the argument that mistakes and quirks and fractures resist order and carry revolutionary potential is very smart. And then starting with an incorrectly attributed Sappho quote and getting one of the muses' names wrong is further stirring the pot.

The best example of this: Dictee opens with that photograph of graffiti written in korean on a coal mine wall. It apparently says: "I miss you mother. I am hungry. I want to go home." The most unvarnished emotion in this book is untranslated, unread, a shout in the dark that probably went unheard. That feels right to me. (less)

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Nathan "N.R." Gaddis

Nov 19, 2017Nathan "N.R." Gaddis added it

Shelves: 2017-gelesen

Dictee enlarges the notion of what a book is...because it is ephemeral, fragile, fierce and indelible, because it is subversive, because it yearns and is luminous. --Carole Maso

I read criticism. That's how I find the books I want to read. In Paradoxical Resolutions: American Fiction since James Joyce I discovered Dunfords Travels Everywheres a book which it would appear is not only BURIED but nonEXISTent. To name just one extreme example. My favorite kind of criticism is probably what which would be called genre criticism ; recognizing a general style/manner of approaching the question of writing fiction within a somewhat significant sample size. For instance, you've got LeClair's important study of excess in a certain direction of fiction writing in the Usofa :: The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. Or you've got this recent one, The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention which attempts to account for so many novelists seemingly including so much un=usefull information in their texts. So I like this kind of criticism which attempts to take a sort of mid=range brush to literary practice and attempt to understand this general trend.

That's why I was so excited to encounter Flore Chevaillier's two books of criticism (they're on their way as we speak ; thank you Friend=Ash). She seems to be of the few who are knowledgeable of the kind of fiction for which the likes of Danielewski and Federman et al are only the tip of the iceberg ; a kind of fiction which, generally, "looks like 21st century fiction" (to paraphr. Moore). There's her The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction which covers Joseph McElroy’s Plus, Carole Maso’s AVA, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE, and Steve Tomasula’s VAS. So you see, I couldn't not read DICTEE when it finds itself in such illustrious company.

But what is the novel like? It's short. It's lovely. It's evocative. But it is not conceptual and therefore I'd prefer to remain mute in the face of its experience, not render it into concepts. Let it live and breath and please to encourage you to pick it up for a fine afternoon and see what writing really can be like and has been like. (less)

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Aubrey

Jun 29, 2013Aubrey rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to Aubrey by: Kris

Shelves: person-of-everything, shorty-short, antidote-think-twice-read, r-2015, 1-read-on-hand, 4-star, r-goodreads, reviewed, antidote-think-twice-all, reality-check

4.5/5

From A Far

What nationality

or what kindred and relation

what blood relation

what blood ties of blood

what ancestry

what race generation

what house clan tribe stock strain

what lineage extraction

what breed sect gender denomination caste

what stray ejection misplaced

Tertium Quid neither one thing nor the other

Tombe des nues de naturalized

what transplant to dispel upon

I know I shall write a book, but not yet. I know it shall be experimental, political, and grotesque. I see myself gouging any and all that pertains out of university libraries and sitting amidst the booty, taxidermied with stuffed in papers and mayhaps bulleted with the post-its, I've grown fonder of the flitting graffitis during the course of my current occupation. I see myself rejecting the exigencies of tact, universality, and New Critcism, for to discuss that line comprising Dictee and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha one needs a haunting and a hell to pay that neither commercializes for profit nor solipsizes into ivory tower onanism can convey. Four stars, five stars, a star of doom that struck a woman of color writer down in the streets and blows wide the best suppression of literature and of life. What dreams I have I rarely remember, what nightmares comprise is memorial insertion, and horror's this fact of history to which I will give all that is required.

Some will not know age. Some not age. Time stops. Time will stop for some. For them especially. Eternal time. No age. Time fixes for some. Their image, the memory of them is not given to deterioration, unlike the captured image that extracts from the soul precisely by reproducing, multiplying itself. Their countenance evokes not the hallowed beauty, beauty from seasonal decay, evokes not the inevitable, not death, but the dy-ing.

Male martyrdom is accomplished, female martyrdom is assumed. How many authors are you aware of who were snatched up by their memento mori material just as said material was being revealed beyond the page. We could argue against gender dichotomy, postcolonialism, what was she doing existing without a chaperone, how was she dressed, etc, etc, etc, but analyses that ignores the origins is worse than useless. Chinese, epiglottis, the Roman Catholic Church, revolutionary sacrifice, cinematic framing, violence, ownership, blood, stone, voice. We could argue each of these concepts into oblivion so long as we subsequently committed to never engaging with each of them ever again. We could pass off this experiment as too obsessed with silence, with rhythm of breath, with lies and religion and history, too angry, too eerie, too vague and too difficult. Something embodied by a sundering and a void, laid out in images both cited and not, communication enacting an imprint if not understanding. The marrow of the matter is we cannot argue into oblivion death. We cannot argue into the void execution. Talk, is cheap, life is short, and no matter how many papers I write I am alive, and Cha is not. A knife thrust in the canon, and look how it defended.

There is no surrendering you are chosen to fail to be martyred to shed blood to be set and example one who has chosen to defy and was set to be set an example to be martyred an animal useless betrayer to the cause to the welfare to peace to harmony to progress.

The muses are female because they exist to be used. Circumstance rendered yet another name tied to the stake of the archive that happens to be strung on tenterhooks over Korea, Japan, France, the United States, womanhood, the New Testament, words on a screen, writing on a page, ghosts in the shell, girl in the well. Lies have power, but extinction does it better. Interest has wonders, but dictee is best.

Suffice more than that. SHE opposes Her.

She against her.

More than that. Refuses to become discard

decomposed oblivion.

From its memory dust escapes the particles still

material still respiration move. Dead air stagnant

water still exhales mist. Pure hazard igniting flaming itself with the slightest of friction like firefly. The loss that should burn. Not burn, illuminate. Illuminate by losing. Lighten by loss.

Yet it loses not.

Her name. First the whole name. Then syllable by syllable counting each inside the mouth. Make them rise they rise repeatedly without ever making visible

lips never open to utter them.

Mere names only names without the image not hers

hers alone not the whole of her and even the image

would not be the entire

her fraction her invalid that inhabits that rise

voluntarily like flint

pure hazard dead substance to fire.

Others anonymous her detachments take her place. Anonymous against her. Suffice that should be nation against nation suffice that should have been divided into two which once was whole. Suffice that should diminish human breaths only too quickly. Suffice Melpomene. Nation against nation multiplied nations against nations against themselves. Own. Repels her rejects her expels her from her own. Her own is, in, of, through, all others, hers. Her own who is offspring and mother, Demeter and Sibyl.

Violation of her by giving name to the betrayal, all possible names, interchangeable names, to remedy, to justify the violation. Of her. Own. Unbegotten. Name. Name only. Name without substance. The everlasting, Forever. Without end.

Deceptions all the while. No devils here. Nor gods. Labyrinth of deceptions. No enduring time. Self-devouring. Devouring itself. Perishing all the while. Insect that eats its own mate.

Suffice Melpomene, arrest the screen en-trance flickering hue from behind cast shadow silhouette from back not visible. Like ice. Metal. Glass. Mirror. Receives none admits none.

Arrest the machine that purports to employ democracy but rather causes the successive refraction of her none other than her own. Suffice Melpomene, to exorcise from this mouth the name the words the memory of severance through this act by this very act to utter one, Her once, Her to utter at once, She without the separate act of uttering.

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jackie

Mar 22, 2017jackie rated it it was amazing

it is hard to give this book a rating, harder still to string together two sentences about it. the violence of language, the pain of speech, an attempt to decipher the undecipherable, an attempt to understand personal trauma parallel to national trauma, a decolonizing text, the strangeness and sadness of all human life

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catherine ♡

Sep 16, 2017catherine ♡ rated it liked it

Shelves: read-for-school, experimental

I'm normally a fan of experimental styles, but most of this book went right over my head... (less)

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Ying

Jul 20, 2014Ying added it · review of another edition

Shelves: yellow-brown-in-america, dream-syllabus

this was so hard, i had to put this down every ten pages or so. this book gave me some of the wildest nightmares (my subconscious isn't very subtle) - an embodied language, a dream of history, living in the pause, writing herself, myself, into and out of that space.. [...] (less)

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sean

Aug 15, 2018sean rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2018

wow. this is a really strange, difficult, beautiful book. as soon as i finished dictée i went and read the surprisingly large body of criticism surrounding it, not because i wanted it explained, but because i had no idea what a discussion of this text would look like. where do you start? what's your point of entry?

dictée reads more like a visual or spatial text than a novel. it stubbornly resists typical methods of textual interpretation. i knew nothing about its form when i went into it, which led to a lot of frustration on my part. the fragmentary sentences at the beginning seem to elide their subjects, and the repetition jars and distances the reader. but the flashes of lucidity further down the track hint to the reader that this is a deliberate, meaningful strategy to both challenge a colonial gaze and to provoke a linguistic "othering" of the reader, as they attempt to navigate a liminal space between comprehension and unintelligibility. it certainly encouraged me to approach the book on its own terms.

given i know next to nothing about korean history and the experience of korean-american women, i am not really the one to speak on dictée's broader context/conceptual underpinnings. but it's a beautiful, very unique book that incorporates cinema/contemporary art in a way i've never seen in a novel. (less)

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saïd

Nov 28, 2021saïd rated it liked it

Shelves: 1_fiction, hangeul, 2_nonfiction

I really liked this half-novel half-memoir, particularly its depiction of the immigrant diaspora experience, but I have to comment on this one line:

The ink spills thickest before it runs dry, before it stops writing at all.

No it doesn't! It gets all feathery and broken-up instead of smooth and solid. (less)

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Carrie Lorig

Feb 10, 2013Carrie Lorig rated it it was amazing

You are this

close to this much

close to it.

I don't think we have many ideas about what closeness is, about how space translates between the interior and exterior, how TIME translates between those spaces. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha has a search, a spill of searching through body spaces and body time and the history of bodies that are moved/spoken with through force. An incredible piece of electro constant murmuring that deserves our vivid and loving attention.

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W.B.

Dec 28, 2007W.B. rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Everyone

A masterpiece. How she died was unbearably cruel and unbelievably strange...what was it...the day after this book came out? On the street by a stranger's brutal hand? Intolerable to think of it...it's too punishing...and the work is so humane, so transcendently beautiful, trying (in an almost Promethean gesture) to heal the pain history inflicts on the individual. (less)

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Alexander

Jun 26, 2007Alexander rated it it was amazing

A modernist classic and a must read.

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Joey Shapiro

Apr 01, 2020Joey Shapiro rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I’m not going to pretend I understand all of this or even most of it, but I found it all really beautiful and haunting in the way really impenetrable poetry can be beautiful and haunting. It would be very inaccurate to call this a memoir like the back cover does, but it’s somewhere between that, poetry, history, and totally abstracted experimental prose. To give an example of what this looks like:

“Some will not know age. Some not age. Time stops. Time will stop for some. For them especially. Eternal time. No age. Time fixes for some. Their image, the memory of them is not given to deterioration, unlike the captured image that extracts from the soul precisely by reproducing, multiplying itself.”

Which is comparatively very straightforward and easy to follow when you consider passages like:

“Finally. View. This view. What is it finally.

Finally. Seen. All. Seen. Finally. Again.

Immediate. Seen. All. All the time.

Over and over. Again and again.

Seen and void. Void of view.

Inside outside. As if never.”

and then THAT is relatively clear compared to the passages that are a mix of French and English or just fully in French.

All that said, the complexity of it all I think makes it a more rewarding reading experience! Each chapter adopts a different writing style and a different subject. There’s a chapter about the history of the Japanese occupation of Korea that’s in plain prose, a chapter about Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soo that mixes prose and poetry, and four or five chapters about her (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha) and her mother that range from verse poetry to “Greek comedy” to love poem.

My favorite chapter was love poems because it reminded me a lot of Marguerite Duras (I’m sorry even when I’m not reading Marguerite I think about reading Marguerite!!!) in the spare, repetitive poetic prose of which I am famously a big fan. That chapter has you alternating reading paragraphs on the left and right pages and I thought that device was really interesting!

Anyway, big fan, felt like an impressionistic history of post-war Korea and how colonialism influences individuals and shapes their lives and their perception of their lives. (less)

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Dusty

Aug 27, 2010Dusty rated it liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to Dusty by: Julia Lee

Shelves: read-in-2010

Either Theresa Hak Jyung Cha has written a book of gibberish -- narrative, poetry, movie stills, personal documents, family photos, Japanese characters, Korean history, Greek mythology, all intermixed, their correlation unexplained -- or she has written a book so profound it defies human interpretation.

I'm inclined to believe the latter.

Many people have tried to read Cha's "poetics" against those of other authors, like Maxine Hong Kingston, but the book Dictee most reminds me of is Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera. Both written in the 1980s, in the wake of the movement toward American multiculturalism. Both written by women whose experiences as Americans are largely defined by their inability to "fit" prescribed categories. Both written in multiple languages, the authors refusing to translate their experiences for easy digestion by monolingual (white) American readers. Dictee is a text about borderlands.

Or so I choose to believe. I confess that I admire Cha's experimentation without even partially understanding it, and should you find it unreadable, I wouldn't fault you. For a book of so few pages (less than two-hundred), it requires an awful lot of patience and suspension of disbelief. Unfortunately, Cha wasn't ever able to elucidate her purpose in Dictee; she was murdered by a stranger in New York City just a few days after it was published. Weirdly, her book anticipates her tragic and untimely death: "Dead tongue," she says. "The ink spills thickest before it runs dry before it stops writing at all." (less)

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twrctdrv

Nov 18, 2012twrctdrv rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Ok, so the review thing up there says, "What did you think?" Hold on, I'll take a picture:

See?

So what I should write in this review is what I thought of this book, right. Problem is, I don't know what to think. I was caught off guard with no clue what to think. Truly impenetrable, Dictee almost seems to be wholly against using language to communicate in the ways I'm used to. This of course is terribly disarming. I'm caught between complete confusion and a little unsettled. There is no comfort zone in this book. Yet, somehow, there is something of beauty in it. This is especially evident in the Erato Love Poetry section, which is the most normal (I think) part of the book. Images appear and fade away in ways you can't put your finger on, like in a silent movie. This is wonderful! Cha has created a mode of literature I've never seen before, and I think it works. I still don't know what to think. Maybe later I'll come back and fix this review. I don't know. Maybe the point of all this is that there is something entirely incommunicable at the center of Dictee. It cannot be explained, or reviewed. Whatever. ? stars (less)

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Kate Savage

Aug 26, 2015Kate Savage rated it liked it

Reading this wouldn't have been so hard if I hadn't built such high expectations for it. Trinh T. Minh-ha wrote about this fragmented, lyrical, unhinged exploration into Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's memories and family and gender and race. It seemed like everything I love, interspersed with French poetry and dedicated in turn to each of the nine muses.

"La langue dedans. La bouche dedans

la gorge dedans

le poumon l’organe seul"

But the reiteration of sentence fragments, mostly detached from scene or story, eventually numbed my brain. The first time I read something like: "It murmurs inside. It murmurs. Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say. Larger still. Greater than is the pain not to say. To not say. Says nothing against the pain to speak. It festers inside. The wound, liquid, dust. Must break. Must void." -- I will be excited. But I can't sustain interest for an entire book of it. (less)

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Marc

Oct 17, 2021Marc rated it really liked it

Shelves: owned, postmodern-avantgarde-experimental

“To name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion. To extract each fragment by each fragment from the word from the image another word another image the reply that will not repeat history in oblivion.”

Cha was a writer who worked in many art forms, mining, it would seem, their various strengths to push boundaries and try to express/capture the inexpressible. A favorite professor recommended this book to me in the late '90s and it took a Pandemic-inspired buying spree for me to finally pick up a copy. I no longer remembered why it was recommended to me, nor what it was about, so I came to it with no history and no real expectations.

Cha uses the nine Greek muses as a structural divide for the parts of this book and, like most of her art as I'm given to understand, it defies easy categorization. She blends poetry, language (English with a scattering of French), prose, biography, photography, hand-written letters, illustrations, and memoir. Loosely, it is the story of several women (Cha, her mother, the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter, and Persephone), but conceptually feels tied together by tackling marginalization, erasure, colonialism, and feminism. It's a challenging book but its word play is both mesmerizing and powerful. At times, like a prayer uttered as faith wanes; at others, poetic with a wonderfully forceful staccato (achieved as Cha breaks up the rhythm and structure of the writing with frequent use of periods).

I read the book as experimental in a way that felt more raw and honest than conceptual/performative--aware of the limits of language and attempting to move beyond them. Sadly, it would seem Cha's book and her art met with the same sort of marginalization/erasure she grappled with due to her being murdered shortly after its publication. Unbeknownst to me, she seems to be having a bit of a renaissance and has played an influential role in a number of younger/existing writers (see recent, insightful articles about her in The Nation and Hyperallergic, as well as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee, a 2018 art exhibit).

“It stays. All chronology lost, indecipherable, the passage of time, until it is forgotten. Forgotten how it stays, how it endures.”

----------------------------------------

TWO WORDS I LOOKED UP AFTER READING THIS

diseuse | relume (less)

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Jane

Dec 24, 2014Jane rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: owned, favourites

amazing book. sayumi takahashi characterizes this text as an artist's book, a genre employed by artists (not poets, though in my head there's little difference) to defy the book's limitations and to challenge the codex's colonial history, typifications, and material violence. a friend argues that dictee's conception of the self is liberal, i.e. that there's a self underneath social constraints and limitations placed upon it, that our selves do not falter as a tangible entity given external forces.

i'm not sure what the implications are of a liberal self, except that I feel that cha effectively uses it to interrogate colonialism, to embody its effects in that self. maybe having a coherent self beneath incoherent conceptions of self implies the possibility for coherent resistance... (less)

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spoon

Feb 03, 2017spoon rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry, memoir, maeum, api

i read this book in a house empty of all furniture save for a few tables and a mattress. was suffering because of a lack of malleable tangible communication because all the words in the world were coming loose and thank god for this book for talking not about all the things we couldn't say but of showing the ways in which silence takes place and moves through the body and punctuates the page, again, again, again. i read it out with a strangely placed urgency, loud in a room that echoed, and i laughed and laughed and laughed. (less)

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T E

Oct 01, 2017T E rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: library

My getting Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's book from the library was completely by chance. I had a vague idea of the content of the book, seeing it listed under the feminism section in a bookstore and attending a conference where her name had passed briefly, and I didn't know what to expect. I got more than I could ever imagine.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's book is unlike anything I have ever read. I can't sort it into a genre or say this book is A and not B. Dictee is everything. From feminism to war, from marriage to motherhood, from belonging to not belonging, from identity to the loss of identity, from having a nation to being completely devoid of any notional identity... From seeing a nation as your own to being a complete stranger in the middle of your own country... From one language to another.

Cha's language is a completely different language. It's not because she uses different sentence structures or incorporates French within her English chapters. It's because she uses the language in a completely new way. This book is something else because people don't use language this way. This is unusual - ly beautiful. (less)

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Christine

Aug 01, 2007Christine rated it it was amazing

I'm not sure I would have entered the text the same way without the help of genius post-colonnialist critic Tomo Hatori. Anyone know him? His voice is so soothing, I wanted always to sleep in his class, a painful thing because he was one of the best instructors I've ever had, and every missed ten minutes meant missing something good--something important and moving and insightful. He brought me to this wonderfully creative, challenging book. I read it about nine years ago in that class and I think about it all of the time still, refer others to it often. I just mentioned it today, which reminded me to post.

I love the visual aspects of this book--the layered forms of text and image. I love the difficulty of the content. If I were feeling remotely articulate (or awake), I could go on and on with what I liked about it... (less)

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Soo-Min

Dec 07, 2020Soo-Min rated it it was amazing

I think about the way that I have actually technically read this book 4-5 times but every time I need to stop at some point- every time it's more like a pause - a comma - and every time I return, I return a different version of myself - do I change or does the text change me? - I think a work of art is something that eludes easy interpretation- that has no single reading/meaning - something you need to return to more than just 4-5 times- something that might haunt you forever - I cannot fathom myself - I cannot fathom this art - but there is a generosity and sophistication and deep wisdom in this (less)

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ipsit

Oct 12, 2020ipsit rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: ref-uni

Dictee resists simple order, moving across film, video, performance documentation, mixed media assemblage, and literature; it is subtle and fleeting, though highly emotive through its minimalist spareness. Cha's mixing of languages, by using French and English alongside each other often in the same sentence or side by side, probes, disrupts, and collages the rudiments of language, to interrogate their use as systems of learning, and as modes of power taught and diligently implemented throughout the age of expansionism and colonization. Detached, alienated from the languages, we observe them as if they have been consciously learned, forging conceptual documentation, or as literary/linguistic puns estrangement from the text so that passages of the linear, more socio-realistic narrative lead to consider not just the meaning evoked by the words, but the structure of the language itself in which the words are delivered and condense to attain the construction of identity which is fluid, inclusive, and complex, oppositional as well as celebratory. An identity whose boundaries are impossible to fix and bring to mind what bell hooks termed "deconstructing belief", resisting stereotyping from without and essentialism from within; suggesting a methodology which can be extrapolated from its scrutiny of language and memory (or culture and history) to aid the reconstruction from the rubble of contemporary conflict. (less)