UCLA

Paroles gelées

Title
Genre-Crossing: Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Its Discursive
Community

Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/24v3331g

Journal
Paroles gelées, 14(2)

ISSN
1094-7264

Author
Lee, Hsiu-chuan

Publication Date
1996-01-01

Peer reviewed

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University of California
Genre-Crossing: Kingston's The Woman
Warrior and its Discursive Community

Hsiu-chuan Lee

This paper seeks to explore the potential of an individual's

practice of writing/speaking to be politically and culturally pro-
ductive. Taking Maxine Hong Kingston's controversial book The
Woman Warrior: Memoirs ofa Girlhood Amottg Ghosts (1976) as a case,
I will study the problematics of textual circulation dealt with in the
book as well as the way in which it dramatically reflects the
discursive transmission/ interpretation taking place around the
book. There are two reasons to choose The Woman Warrior as a text
most widely read and talked
of investigation: First, as one of the
about anthologized texts among contemporary literary works. The
Woman Warrior's circulation enacts a discursive community cross-
ing the boundaries of genres/disciplines.^ It is taught in courses
and departments ranging from composition, American culture,
ethnic studies, women's studies, and popular culture to
postmodernism and serves as rhetorical model, autobiography,
biography and even historiography. Second, not only does a
multi-generic discursive community ensue from the reading and
the transmission of The Woman Warrior; but the book itself is
concerned with the problematics of textual circulation. In a sense,
the telling and re-telling of stories in The Woman Warrior dramati-
cally reflect the discursive transmission/interpretation taking place
outside the book. While each myth /story /memory in The Woman
Warrior branches into divergent interpretations, the narrative of
the book as a whole similarly leads not to a self-contained, totaliz-
ing authorship, but to a dialogical and historical cognition.
Indeed, as the interpretive history of The Woman Warrior is

inscribed by the development of contemporary feminist, ethnic,

postmodern and, particularly, Chinese American aesthetic dis-
courses, the multiple discursive voices inside the book are corre-
lated with a Chinese immigrant history. As revealed in the trans-
mission of the "no-name woman" story. The Woman Warrior em-
bodies at least three different viewpoints of immigrant Chinese
and /or Chinese Americans: the viewpoint of the Chinese left
behind by their relatives and friends immigrating to the U.S., that

87
 —

88 PAROLES GELEES

of the first generation Chinese Americans who move to the U.S. in

adulthood and that of the second generation Chinese Americans
who are born in America and have knowledge about China only
form re-told stories. Every shift of a historical position and /or a
change of the story-teller calls for a new reading/interpretation of
an existing story. Or, it might be argued, underscoring each
individual's attempt at story-telling/writing is her/his need to
negotiate with a specific living/historical context. In either case,
story-telling in The Woman Warrior features less a repetition of
something already existing than a continuation and enlargement,
if not a conversion and a distortion, of earlier stories.

Using Thomas Beebee's theory of genre as a basis, the textual

transmission in and around The Woman Warrior reads as a continu-
ous genre-crossing.^ Beebee defines genre in terms of its "use-
value." To him, generic distinction is imaginary (as distinct from
symbolic) and genre is embodied in the reader's imaginary/lived
relations with a text. Put another way, the genre of a text is
determined at the moment when it is appropriated by a reader into
a specific "use," or, when it is cast into a specific interpretation
cm interpretation significant (useful) to the reader in her/his
particular subject/historical position. Since meaning is impossible
without the mediation of a genre or genres, each act of writing/
reading/ interpretation is to select/create a genre. To re-tell/re-
interpret other people's stories is then to appropriate those stories
into one's "use," namely, into one's "genre." Given the correlation
of "genre," "meaning," and "power,"^ all individual writing/
speaking somehow attempts self-assertion.
Nonetheless, as a genre is generally applied to a text retroac-
tively and no texts are "fully identical with their genres" (Beebee
19), not a single act of reading /speaking could be totalizing. A
polyphonic discursive community inside and around The Woman
Warrior is possible precisely because every reading/story-telling
is open to multiple re-readings (re-uses). Each act of self-asser-

tion/negotiation is historically based/bounded and inextricably

provisional. Kingston confessed that there are "omissions" in The
Woman Warrior she did not realize "until long after" she had
finished the book. She even declared that she would "make some
changes in setting" if she could rewrite The Woman Warrior (Lim
24-25). Moreover, since innate to each act of speaking/ writing is
not only a rebellion/revision of already existing stories but a
GENRE-CROSSING 89

desire for a hearing (for an audience, a community), a self-asserted

story-telling usually leads to a negotiation of self-other/self-com-
munity relations. The personal thus appeals — in the Bakhtinian
sense— dialogically to the collective. In the following analysis, I

will focus on the interaction of the different voices (or the Bakhtinian
dialogized languages /genres) in The Woman Warrior. ^My goal is to
see how an individual voice, instead of being self-contained, might
contribute to the cultural and the political in its participation in/
enactment of a polyphonic and multi-generic discursive
communality.
The Woman Warrior opens with the narrator Maxine's re-telling
of her mother's cautionary story about her no-name aunt. This
attempt at more correctly a re-interpretation, of the no-
re-telling,
name woman's story marks Maxine's intention to break out of her
complicity with her mother's imposed silence, a complicity which
has lasted for twenty years. What makes Maxine feel the need to
break the silence? What makes the silence suddenly unbearable for
her? Before Maxine realizes that she has to talk, the silence pro-
vides her with an illusion of emotional safety and signifying
stability. Maxine tells her readers, "I enjoyed the silence. At first it
did not occur to me I was supposed to talk ... It was when I found
out I had to talk that school became a misery, that silence became
a misery" (166). Silence becomes questionable when one sees
through the illusion of its taken-for-grantedness, this which is
demystifiable only when something alien is introduced into one's
living world to change one's perspective on things. The new
demand from school enables Maxine to see through her false
enjoyment in silence before school. Similarly, she can no longer
participate in her mother's silence when she has learned to see
things differently from her mother. Instead of accepting the story
of the no-name aunt for its cautionary use, Maxine reads it into
different "genres" and in so doing puts into question the caution-
ary value of this story.
Indeed, Maxine's biggest contribution in the section of "No-
Name Woman" is her transformation of a silence into "voice."
Whereas "silence" marks the closure of a story, the termination of
the act of story-telling, "voice" excavates the paradoxes inside the
story by exposing its innate incompleteness. In Lacan's graph of
desire, for example, "voice" is placed at the right end of his
signifier vector S-S' to indicate the objectal leftover of each signi-
90 PAROLES GELEES

fying process ("quilting") or, the process oicapitonnage. "Voice" is

therefore the remnant of each signification. As something unheld,

uncontrolled in meaning production, "voice" always passes to the
other and thus prevents the symbolic movement from being
arrested. Conversely, "silence" exerts a violent suspension of
"voice." It fills up the gap between each utterance and enunciation,
enforces an imaginary arrestment on the sliding signifier of the
symbolic, and embodies the moment of (illusory) signification and
understanding.
Hence a dominant signifying economy arises around a silence.
The taboo story of no-name woman is powerful precisely because
people circulate it in silence. While everyone secretly knows and
believes that they understand the story without ever prying into its
origins or possible ways to interpret it, the story serves as an
imaginary center of the village community. The shared silence is
not only a result of a shared fantasy /genre of the villagers, but also
a promoter of this shared fantasy/genre. Fantasy can be under-
stood as an imaginary scenario working to support (give consis-
tency to) what we call "reality." Since it enables the creation of
signification, it works like a genre, determining meaning produc-

tion /trcmsmission.
Although it seems that the villagers intended to banish the
aunt into forgetfulness, the creation as well as the (secret/silent)
remembrance of her story held the villagers together. Despite the
fact that in appearance the no-name aunt was punished because
she had broken the "roundness" of her village community (13), it
is perhaps more correct to say that the "roundness" of the commu-

nity was more conceivable after a law-breaking scapegoat was

picked. As Maxine guesses, her aunt might have escaped that
severe punishment if the incident had not occurred at a time when
her village community was under the danger of disruption, a
disruption resulting from wars, famine, floods and especially from
the departure of most of the village men to work overseas. She
points out that "[a]dultery, perhaps only a mistake during good
times, became a crime when the village needed food" (13). Instead
of following her mother's interpretation to read the no-name
aunt's behavior as casting her village community into crisis, Maxine
implies that the punishment was significant due to the villagers'
crisis.
GENRE-CROSSING 91

The "use-value" of the no-name-woman's story is thus under-

standable. Then why does Maxine's mother Brave Orchid need to
re-tell this story when she is no longer in China? As we are told by
Maxine, Brave Orchid is strongly concerned with the code of
necessity. She only tells the "useful parts" of the story and she "will
add nothing unless powered by Necessity, a riverbank that guides
her life" (6). What then is the "use-value" or no-name-woman
story to her? Why should she appeal to a "traditional" "Chinese"
story in educating her daughter who was bom in and grew up in
America and has never been to China?
Here, it is useful to answer these questions in reference to
Brave Orchid's situation as an immigrant Chinese woman in
America. Before her husband sent for her, Brave Orchid was a
female doctor, a slave holder and according to Maxine, a "modem"
(76) and "professional" woman {77). Brave Orchid was by no
means a conservative village woman when she was in China. In
comparison with most of the women of her age, she was noted for
her adventurous spirit and untraditional thinking. That her think-
ing was accepted, even admired, among her community in China
is not because it was the "real," or the most correct/ objective, but

because she always was able to "talk" others into her fantasy/
genre. A "capable exorcist" (92), she could banish whatever was
incompatible with her thinking out of her living economy, just as
she once talked the Sitting Ghost "out of existence" (Sato 141).
However, after she arrived in America, her empowered role as a
"shaman" has been jeopardized. As a woman and immigrant
minority in society, she falls from respected female doctor to
laundress. Failing to integrate into her living economy the new
ideas and new ways of speaking/ doing things in America, Brave
Orchid cannot but conceal her anxiety of losing self-power by
telling cautionary stories, imposing silence upon her American-
born daughter.
Accordingly, when Brave Orchid asks Maxine not to "tell
anyone" she has an aunt (15), she is attempting to have her
daughter participate in her economy and thereby reinforces her
authority perhaps not only over her daughter but over her immi-
grant situation in general. First, as a story-teller, she has asserted
her position of knowledge; moreover, insisting that no "voice"
leak out of her story, she confirms her scenario. In fact, the no-name
woman's secret is not the only secret Brave Orchid attempts to
92 PAROLES GELEES

guard against disclosure. The narrator Maxine's world is filled

with immigrant secrets that her parents keep cautioning her against
revealing in front of Americans. Ironically, she would never know
what to tell even if she wanted to because she is never told what
these secrets exactly are (183). The usefulness of these secrets lies

—
not in whatever the substance they conceal if any but in their —
formal power as secrets to consolidate the Chinese community. To
the immigrant Chinese, the secrets create an illusion that there
must be something essential underlying the ethnic label "Chinese"
and thus elevate the Chinese to the status of the "real" while
relegating the American to that of "ghost."
Unable to achieve self-fulfillment in America, Brave Orchid
explains away her by reducing everything American into
failure
"ghosts": "This is a terrible ghost country, where a human being
works her life away" (104). Failing to exert control over her
children, she accuses her "American children" of being like "ghosts"
who have no "feelings and memory" (115) and of not being smart
enough to "tell real from false" (202). At the same time, she projects
the "real" onto the life in China:

Someday, very soon, we're going back home, where thereare

Han people everywhere. We'll buy furniture then, real tables
and chairs. You children will smell flowers for the first time. (98)
[my emphasisl

Ironically,Brave Orchid never really plans to go back to China. As

Maxine remarks, "my grandmother wrote letters pleading for
them [her parents] to come home, and they ignored her" (108). The
creation of secrets, the exorcistic gestures in facing the American
"ghosts," as well as the projections of the "real" to the life in China
—
only reflect Brave Orchid's need of self-assertion her self-nego-
tiation with the immigrant living condition she deems hostile.
The transmission of the no-name woman's story from the
villagers to Brave Orchid exemplifies a shift of the story's "use-
value." Brave Orchid appropriates the story for her personal use.
She establishes an imaginary relation with the story that is differ-
ent from the relation between the Chinese villagers and the origi-
nal story. This shift of "use-value" could be understood as Brave
Orchid's employment of a different genre in looking at the same
story. The introduction of her personal needs/experiences into the
story opens up the original reading and makes the story significant
 —
GENRE-CROSSING 93

in relation to her immigrant situation. Originating possibly as a

story of scapegoating, the story of the no-name woman becomes a
cautionary story imposing ethnic silence and complicity on Brave
Orchid. When the story is further handed down to the narrator
Maxine, it is her turn to re-tell the story in her own genre and
produce her own interpretations. Maxine's re-telling of her mother's
stories and ancient myth is not necessarily more revolutionary
than Brave Orchid's story- telling. She does not re-tell her mother's
stories and myth simply for the purpose of questioning her mother.
Like Brave Orchid, she inscribes her personal needs into the story/
myth and thereby makes the story /myth imaginarily useful to her
individual life.

Maxine's focus on "use-value" is evident when she talks about

the story of her no-name aunt: "Unless I see her life branching into
mine, she gives me no ancestral help" (8). The incompleteness of
Brave Orchid's version of the story offers Maxine an empty space
in which to inscribe her own problems, anxieties and wishes. Her
emphasis on the gender issue of the story reflects her personal
concern with the prevailing sexism in her living world. Her preoc-
cupation with the images of "silence" points to her childhood
terror of not being able to speak, a terror recounted in the final
section of the book.^ The mentioning of the no-name aunt's brav-
—
ery the aunt's willingness to protect both her lover and her child
in spite of the social consequences and her attempt to cross "bound-
aries not delineated in space" (8) — reveals Maxine's wish to be-
come a law-breaking, progressive female heroine. Finally, the
retelling of her aunt's loneliness and banishment from her commu-
nity reminds us of Maxine's fear of being unwanted by her own
family and community.
Additionally, the intended misreading of the tales of Fa Mu
Lan and Ts'ai Yen also exposes Maxine'sendeavor to relate the
story to her own problems. The combination of the story of Yue
—
Fei the famous hero whose mother inscribes words on his back
with the story of Fa Mu Lan brings light to Maxine's preoccupation
with the power of words. Her emphasis on "the hazards of cross-
ing gender boundaries," as well as her assertion of Fa Mu Lan's
womanhood, which she brings out by giving her a lover and
having her bear a child in battle, is again attributed to her own
concern with her marginalized gender position. In the story of
Ts'ai Yen, Maxine further re-writes the significance of Ts'ai Yen's
94 PAROLES GELEES

return to China: in the historical story, the redemption of Ts'ai Yen

is achieved when she is ransomed back to China, that is, when she
is released from her detention in the barbarian land. In the narrator's
version of this story, however, Ts'ai Yen's "moment of glory or
validation occurs" when
she "breaks out of silence into song,"
(Wong, "Cultural and Historical Context" 34) a song bridging the
communication gap between the barbarian and the Chinese. Twist-
own use, Maxine draws her reader's
ing the historical story to her
attention to the communicative function of art and validates her
own position as a story-teller by filling in the gap between her
Chinese parentage and her American life.
Here, in spite of a seeming mother-daughter conflict in The
Woman Warrior, Maxine's focus on the "use-value" of story-telling
makes her a good follower of Brave Orchid's code of necessity. If
Brave Orchid is a capable shaman who draws a strict line between
the reality and the "ghost" world and never allows "ghosts'"
intrusion into her world of pragmatism, Maxine must have found
in her mother a model of exorcism. In fact, a major part of The
Woman Warrior is devoted to Maxine's quest for certainty. Repeat-
edly she reminds herself that her mother's stories are meant to
"test" her "strength to establish realities" (5). She never ceases to
question what is real and what is made-up: "I continue to sort out
what is just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just
the village, just movies, just living" (205). When she grows up,
moreover, she feels that she has to leave home because she wants
to see the world "logically." She "enjoy[s] the simplicity" (204)
after banishing the "ghosts," such as anything incomprehensible,
from her waking "American" life:

To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights

before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the
deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of
impossible stories. (87)

Whereas Brave Orchid defends herself by denouncing everything

beyond her control as "American," Maxine categorizes whatever
is outside her conceptual logic as "Chinese." Both of them seek

excuses for their failure to resolve the paradoxes in their lives

under the banner of "cultural binarism." Neither of them realizes
that their conflicts are derived not so much from the incompatibil-
GENRE-CROSSING 95

ity of "Chinese" and "American" as from their different positions

as subjects in history.
Because of Brave Orchid and the narrator Maxine's partial-
subject position, any of their attempts to set up an economic
closure around their Uves is doomed to fail. The fantasy /genre
they depend upon is always traversable once one looks at the issue
from a different subject/historical position. For Brave Orchid, the
most obvious failure is seen in her intervention into her sister
Moon Orchid's marriage. In the section "At the Western Palace,"
Brave Orchid tries to reactivate her old myth of "the emperor's
four wives." She insists that Moon Orchid claim her right over her
husband who had left her immediately after their marriage in
China over thirty years ago and settled down in America with a
new wife. As expected, the whole "show" (150) arranged by Brave
Orchid to have Moon Orchid meet with her husband turns out to
be a tragedy. Not only can the husband not take Moon Orchid into
his house but Moon Orchid suffers from paranoia from then on.
Sau-Ling Wong rightly points out that Brave Orchid is in this case
"self-contained" and "utterly oblivious to her environment" (Wong,
"Reading" 46). Her insistence on the correctness of her own
reading of the myth/legend illustrates the limitation of her per-
sonal vision. Actually, Brave Orchid is understandably absorbed
in the myth of "the emperor's four wives." Moon Orchid's was left
behind by a husband gone overseas; her situation reminds Brave
Orchid of her own anxiety, perhaps not only before her husband
sent for her from America, but even after she has joined him there.
As Maxine observes, "Brave Orchid told her children they must
help her keep their father from marrying another woman because
she didn't think she could take it any better than her sister" (160).
Underlying Brave Orchid's attempt to "help" her sister is her
anxiety about her own marriage.
Following her mother, Maxine's probing for the absolute is
seen most clearly in the section "White Tigers." Marilyn Yalom
suggests a reading of Fa Mu Lan's story as Maxine's "wish-
fulfillment fantasy designed to counter the image of the victimized
aunt" (110). Whether Maxine really takes Fa Mu Lan as her model
warrior is still debatable; however, what is clear is that the Fa Mu
Lan described in her dream is endowed with an absolute vision
and a totahzing power, the two things Maxine wishes for in her
waking life. The myth starts with Maxine's crossing from the
96 PAROLES GELEES

symbolic world of her mother's story-telling into an absolute

world of dream. Or, borrowing from Lacan, she leaves a partial
world of "voice" for a visual world of specular totality.^ No sooner
has Maxine quit her mother's "voice" of story-telling than she
enters into the dream world which is marked by multiple colors
(Sato 139). Through the emphasis on the visual experience in this
section, the mysterious power of the old couple who adopt Maxine
in her dream is manifested in their possession of a magical water
gourd through which one can see the whole world. Moreover, the
training Maxine undergoes to be a warrior consists of exercises
which teach her to transcend the linguistic world of meaning
deferral to an ideographic world of imagery stability. First, she is
required to create the ideographic words with her body. Later, she
is supposed to copy the actions of owls, bats and tigers. Then, she

is trained to see "a dragon whole" (29) even though the dragon is

only a creature of human imagination. Her lesson concludes when

she is able to "point at the sky and make a sword appear" (33) an —
accomplishment demonstrating her ability to manipulate images
in the world at her will.
However, this dream vision is unfulfillable in Maxine's real
life. Even the author Kingston does not feel that the fantasy tale of

Fa Mu Lan manifests an ideal to be quested for. When asked why

she did not put "White Tigers" at the climax of her book, Kingston
dismissed the story to be a "childish myth" that she put at the
beginning of the book because it is "not a climax we reach for"
("Mis-readings" 57). There are at least two reasons for Kingston to
dislike the story of Fa Mu Lan. First, it features a dream for totality
while the sense of totality is inextricably an illusion. Not only is the
achievement of absolute vision impossible, but the search for the
absolute usually leads to an intolerance of differences, an impen-
etrable exorcism. Secondly, Kingston does not like the image of
"warrior." Her reaction to her connection with Fa Mu Lan was
"very negative": "I don't feel that she's me. I wish I had not had
. .

a metaphor of a warrior person who uses weapons and goes to

war" (qtd in Aubery 80). This pacifist position is reiterated in the
narrator Maxine's comment: "I mustn't feel bad that I haven't done
as well as the swordswoman did; after all, ... I dislike armies"
(Wflrnor 49). In addition,Maxine says, "[w]hat fighting and killing
I have seen have not been glorious but slum grubby.... Fights are
confusing as to who has won" (51). Underlying each fight is a
GENRE-CROSSING 97

desire to erase the alien, the uncontrollable, namely, the other. It is

"confusing as to who has won" because it is always hard to say

whether one can really win over the other or just temporarily
suppress the other and then suffer from the danger of the other's
resurgence.
Evidently, in contrast to her dream vision, Maxine's waking
life is filled with lack, frustrations and insolvable paradoxes. She
tellsus immediately after her recounting of Fa Mu Lan's story: "My
American life has been such a disappointment" (45). Doubly

marginalized in her living world as both a woman and an ethnic

minority, Maxine is desperate to prove to her parents the useful-
ness of raising daughters as well as to assert her presence in front
of her racist boss. Speaking is important for her because she finds
that the only thing in common between she and Fa Mu Lan is "the
words" at their backs (53). Nonetheless, while Fa Mu Lan's words
are carved into her skin and conjoined with her body, Maxine's
reporting words are floating, sliding, subject to other people's
readings. Her position is less totalizing. Always exploratory and
fragmentary, her speaking both asserts her subject position and
addresses her to the judgement of a discursive community.
This also accounts for why Maxine has to keep speaking.
Unable maintain a signifying enclosure of silence, Maxine
to
suffers from the anxiety of losing hervoice: "Insane people were
the ones who couldn't explain themselves" (186). Moreover, once
she opens her mouth and starts speaking, it is again difficult for her
to hold herself back. One of the most obvious examples can be
found in the episode of Maxine's "telling list." The teenager
Maxine creates a list of over two hundred truths about her bad
thinking and misbehavior to confess to Brave Orchid in order to
"stop the pain in [her] throat" (197). What she wants to do is to hold
her anxieties and concerns under control through the help of a
regulating list and spoken language. However, when she starts to
talk, the bursting list is soon confronted by the striking back of
Brave Orchid, the "champion talker" (202). Maxine creates her
"telling list" to unburden her mind of her insecurities but instead,
the list continues to grow and it seems that she needs to talk more

to regain her stability. This episode is particularly interesting

because it reminds us of Kingston's situation life. Deeply
in real
engaged in the discursive community built around her book,
Kingston could have to spend her life-time clarifying, defending.
98 PAROLES GELEES

and thus re-writing the significance of her writings after the

publication of The Woman Warrior.
Given the fact that a voice leads to more voices, perhaps the
only way for the narrator Maxine to escape from the dialogical
complications of the world of voice is to self-impose an exile from
her subject position of uncertainty. Fa Mu Lan, as cm example,
leaves her village to accept tutoring from the mysterious old
couple in order to gain the supernatural power of a warrior. Facing
her husband's voyage overseas and her children's death, the
young Brave Orchid decides to leave her family to become an
exorcistic midwife in a medical school. Similarly, Maxine has to
leave her mother as well as her Chinese community in order to live
"ghost-free" (108). Here, exile implies freedom from her/his sub-
ject position in the discursive tension, aswell as an assimilation
into an established economic/conceptual/discursive system. In
other words, exile is a giving-away of one's exploratory subjectiv-
ity in exchange for a temporary illusory stability and safety, by
making oneself an object of another's desire and manipulation.
Taken at the generic level, it is to categorize oneself into a single
established genre rather than invent one's individual genre in
reading/interpretation. Lacking the courage required for entry
into a discursive community, this self-imposed exile features a
escapism, a relinquishment of one's individual agency.
spirit of
Therefore, although this form of escapism, self-relinquish-
ment and self-abstention from community is a way to resolve one's
sense of uncertainty temporarily, not advocated in The Woman
it is

Warrior. Actually, an be productive only when it is

exile could
followed by a return to the community, that is, when the person
returning from exile can bring something new into her/his origi-
nal community and re-map it in one way or another. The magic
power of Fa Mu Lan would count for nothing if she could not
avenge her family and community. After becoming a female
doctor. Brave Orchid was welcomed home as an empowered
figure expected to make a difference in her living world. Perhaps
the most obvious example is in the story of Ts'ai Yen: during her
twelve-year-stay in exile, she produces songs and poetry that serve
to bridge the communication gap between the barbarian and the
Chinese after her return to China.
A similar accomplishment might also be expected from the
narrator Maxine. The purpose of her assuming an American
GENRE-CROSSING 99

identitymust not be to reinforce Brave Orchid's belief in cultural-

binarism. Rather, it must be to introduce a new way to look at her
Chinese parentage. From a child who fears "the size of the world"
(99) and has to banish the discontinuous and the incomprehensible
from her perception, Maxine has to learn to make her mind large,
"as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes" (29).
A similar idea was developed by Kingston in an interview:
I have learned that writing does not make ghosts go away. I

wanted to record, to find words for, the "ghosts," They are not
. . .

concrete; they are beautiful and powerful. But they don't have a
solidity that we can pass around from one to another. I wanted
to give them a substance that goes beyond me. (Rabinowitz 178)

Since it is always a losing fight to try to impose silence through

writing and speaking, it is better to leave one's writings/stories
open to different genres of reading. Writing /speaking in this sense
isnot necessarily an exorcistic effort for through it, one not only
asserts her/himself in an intervention into a discursive commu-
nity but also continuously yields ground to her/his readers. As an
individual practice, writing /speaking provides a way for a person
to break out of any imaginary closure of signification by bringing
the personal, the uncategorized, the unspeakable as well as the
ghost-like into symbolic circulation.
An individual practice originating from Kingston's personal
life Woman Warrior is revolutionary because of its
experiences. The
openness both structure and content. Kingston tells her inter-
in
viewer, "I am always figuring out how the lone person forms a
community" (Rabinowitz 185). Writing with a community in her
mind, she plays out how individuals interact with a discursive
world: how they traverse the boundaries defined by others, how
they appropriate cultural objects to their use, invent new genres,
create new meanings, but also subject their own discourses to
other people's reading and writing. Kingston's community is a
community in constant change. It is a community of affinity and
dialogue, not of homogeneity. The taken-for-grantedness is con-
fronted with the personal. The history is opened up by an
individual's memory. In writing The Woman Warrior, Kingston has
tactfully formed a community of endless dialogues.
100 PAROLES GELEES

Notes

A survey on the courses and contexts in which The Woman Warrior

'

is taught and circulated is done by Shirley Geok-lin Lim ed., Approaches

to Teaching Kingston's The Woman Warrior (New York: The Modern

Language Association of America, 1991), 8-9. For the anthologization of

sections from The Woman Warrior, see Lim, 3-4.
^
See Thomas Beebee, "Introduction: Why Genre" and "Theoretical
Postlude: of Genre," The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative
The Ideology
Study of Generic Instability (University Park: The Pennsylvania State U P,
1994), 1-29 and 249-283.
^ Beebee: "No genre, no power" (12).
According to Bakhtin, unlike other genres, novel is a "genre-in-the-
*

making," a "genre" of "heteroglossia" and incompleteness in which a

"dialogue of languages" is staged (365) and where different genres
coexist, interact, and are parodied (5). See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1981).
^ This is in the "torturing scene" at the beginning of "A Song
obvious
for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," in which Maxine forces another silent Chinese
girl (her double) to talk. Maxine spells out her own anxiety of not being
able to talk when she tells her victim: "If you don't talk, you can't have a
personality" (180).
The Lacanian specular world is a world of image (picture) that
^

closesupon itself and features an illusion of completeness/ totality in the

symbolic. See Lacan, "What is a Picture," The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Norton, 1977), 105-119.

Works Cited

Aubery, James R. "Woman Warriors and Military Students." Approaches

to Teaching Kingston's New York: The Modern
The Woman Warrior.
Language Association, 1991. 80-86.
Baer, Elizabeth. "The Confrontation of East and West: The Woman
WarriorasPostmodern Autobiography." Redneck Review of Literature
21 (1991): 26-29.
Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed.
Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.
Austin: UofTexasP, 1981.
Beebee, Thomas O. "Introduction: Why Genre?" The Ideology of Genre: A
Comparative Study of Generic Instability. \Jn\veTsHyrark.Therennsy\-
vania State University Press, 1994. 1-29.
GENRE-CROSSING 101

— . "Theoretical Postule: The Ideology of Genre." The Ideology of Genre: A

Comparative Stud]/ of Generic Instability. University Park: The Pennsyl-
vania State U P, 1994. 249-283.
Cheung, King-Kok. "Don't Tell': Imposed Silence in The Color Purple and
The Woman Warrior." Emerging Voices: A Cross-Cultural Reader Read-
Madden-Simpson and Sara
ing in the American Experience. Eds. Janet
M. and Winston, 1990. 400-421.
Blake. Chicago: Hold, Rinebart
Chin, Marilyn. "A Melus Interview: Maxine Hong Kingston." Melus: The
Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the
United States 16.4 (1990): 57-74.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. "Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston." Ameri-
can Literary History 3.4 (1991): 782-791.
Gilead, Sarah. "Emigrant Selves: Narrative Strategies in Three Women's
Autobiographies." Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts
30.1 (1988): 43-62.
Goellnicht, Donald C. "Father Land and /or Mother Tongue: The Divided
Female Subject in Kogawa's Obasan and Hong Kingston's The Woman
Warrior." Redefining Autobiography in Twentieth-Century Women' s Fic-
tion: An Essay Collection. Eds. Janice Morgan and Colette T. Hall. New
York: Garland Publishing, 1991. 119-134.
Hunt, Linda. "'I could not figure out what was my village': Gender vs.
Ethnicity in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior." Melus:
The journal of the Society of the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the
United States 12.3 (1985): 5-12.
Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings
and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple U P, 1982.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. "Cultural Mis-readings by American Review-
ers." Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New Cultural Identities. Ed.
Guy Amirthanayagam. London: Macmillan, 1982. 55-65.
— The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York:
.

Vintage, 1976.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
Li, David Leiwei. "The Naming of a Chinese American 'I': Cross-Cultural
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Literature and the Arts 30.1 (1988): 497-515.
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, ed. Approaches to Teaching Kingston's The Woman
Warrior. New York: The Modern Language Association of America,
1991. 8-9.
Miller, Elise. "Kingston's The Womayi Warrior: The Object of Autobio-
graphical Relations." Compromise Formatioris: Current Directions in
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versity, 1989. 138-54.
102 PAROLES GELEES

Myers, Victoria. "The Significant Fictivity of Maxine Hong Kingston's T//e

Woman Warrior." Biography: An Interdisciplinari/ Quarterly 9.2 (1986):
112-125.
Rabinowitz, Paula. "Eccentric Memories: A Conversation with Maxine
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Approaches
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Melus: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic
Literature of the United States 15.1 (1988): 3-26.
— . "Cultural and Historical Context." Approaches to Teaching Kingston's
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1991.26-36.
— . Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Yalom, Marilyn. "Critical Contexts: Genre, Themes, Form: The Woman
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^ & RESOLUTION
Literary Criticism at the
End of the Millenium

Special Issue
Paroles Gelees 14.2 1996

Selected Proceedings from UCLA's

French Department Graduate Students'
Interdisciplinary Conference
PAROLES GELEES
UCLA French Studies

Ce serait le moment de philosopher et de

rechercher si, par hasard, se trouverait ici
I'endroit ou de telles paroles degelent.

Rabelais, Le Quart Livre

Special Issue
Volume 14.2 M> 1996
Sponsors: French Consulate of Los Angeles
Borchard Foundation
UCLA French Department
European Studies Program
UCLA Graduate Students' Association
Co-Editors: Anne-Lancaster Badders
Marianne Golding

Assistant Editor: Diane Duffrin

Conference Marianne Golding, Committee Chair

Organizers: Anne-Lancaster Badders Laura Leavitt
Kimberly Carter-Cram Markus Miiller
Helen Chu Michael Stafford
Diane Duffrin Lena Udall
Erik Eisel

Design and Layout: Joyce Ouchida

Paroles Gelees was established in 1983 by its founding editor, Kathryn

Bailey. The journal is managed and edited by the French Graduate
Students' Association and published annually under the auspices of the
Department of French at UCLA. Information regarding the submission of
and subscriptions is available from the journal office:
articles

Paroles Gelees
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Back issues available for $7. For a listing, see our home page at:

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Copyright © 1996 by the Regents of the University of California.

CONTENTS

Introduction 5
Editors

Program 7

The Responsibility of Responsiveness:

Criticism in an Age of Witness 9
Ross Cliambers, Keytiote Speaker

Responsibility as Risk
(Some Thoughts on Ross Chambers's "The Responsibility of
Responsiveness: Criticism in an Age of Witness") 29
Emily Apter

On Responsibility, Cunning, and High Spirits:

A Response to Ross Chambers 35
Vincent P. Pecora

Reader's History Meets Textual Geography:

Towards a Syncretistic Theory of Reading 41
Arundhati Banerjee

"Romantic Effects":
The Difficulties and Usefulness of Literary Criticism 57
Naomi E. Silver

Islam, History, and the Modem Nation:

Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary
Moroccan Francophone Literature 67
Scott Homier
World and Economic Hegemony:
Literature
Free-Trade Imperialism and 'Whole Populations Conjured
Out of the Ground' in The Communist Manifesto 75
Chris Andre

Genre-Crossing: Kingston's The Woman Warrior

and Its Discursive Community 87
Hsiii-chuan Lee

Translation as Metaphor in Hildescheimer's Marbot Eine

Biographie 103
Julia Abramson

Literary Criticism After the Revolution or

How to Read a Polemical Literary Text 115
Janet Sarbanes

Cross-Cultural 'Othering' Through Metamorphosis 131

Kristi Wilson

Jamming the Machine: Yves Klein's Blue Monochrome

and the End of the Avant-Garde 143
/. Stephen Murphi/

"What About the Audience?/What About Them?":

Spectatorship and Cinematic Pleasure 153
Tatnnra Harvey

Ordering Information 163

Calls for Papers 164