Moving Forward to Reach the Past: The Dialogics of Time in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Moving Forward to Reach the Past: The Dialogics of Time in Amy Tan's The ]oy Luck Club Marc Singer History and myth coexist in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, but they do not coexist easily. The novel forges connections between two generations of women, traces four family genealogies that span the twentieth century, and stresses the importance of ethnic heritage, suggesting a heavy investment in history and historical representation. Yet the family histories depicted in the novel are profoundly mythical—the tales of the mothers' youth are timeless fables filled with supernatural wonders, presenting a China that seems drawn as much from occidental cliché as from authentic Chinese history. Even events as clearly historical as the Communist revolution become transmuted into heavily allegorical parables such as An-mei Hsu's tale of angry peasants rising up against tyrannical magpies (Tan 272-73). ! This fusion of historicity and mythic fabrication is all the more unusual because Tan assigns radically separate cultural and temporal valences to each: the techniques of myth are unilaterally reserved to represent China and the past, while America is nanated with a historical specificity which, for Tan, connotes modernity and the present. Indeed, the split is so extreme that Tan creates two entirely different scripts of cultural identity, a realistically-outlined "American" identity for the daughters and an Orientalized "Chinese" one for their mothers. With such a drastic cultural and JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 31.3 (Fall 2001): 324-352. Copyright © 2001 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. Moving Forward to Reach the Past 325 temporal divide bifurcating its stories, Tan's work might easily be classified as a mere collection of independent short stories, or at best a novel pulled in two different directions by its dissonant components. Indeed, much of the academic criticism of The Joy Luck Club presumes that the novel is split into a dialogic divergence of different characters, voices, and cultural settings; some studies go so far as to attribute all of the novel's apparent discontinuities to its dialogic structure. Yet such readings do not consider the variety and the power of the interconnective tactics Tan deploys to integrate her sixteen short stories into a single overarching nanative. Amy Tan fashions a unifying nanative structure for The Joy Luck Club by aligning its sixteen stories into a coherent and deliberate temporal order. This order emerges from advancements and juxtapositions in the timing of each of the stories; the larger, suprananative plot only becomes apparent when the stories are connected and contrasted with each other, exposing a systematic progression through time. Furthermore, this nanative structure not only connects the past to the present, it also balances the modes of historicity and myth that Tan uses to represent those periods. Thus, the true dialogue in The Joy Luck Club is not a cacophony of voices but a convergence of different moments in and methods of representing time. However, few critics have explored Tan's use of time in The Joy Luck Club, despite its centrality to the novel's articulation and negotiation of conflicting modes of gender, generational, and cultural subjectivity. Tan models and previews her manipulation of nanative time in the novel's eponymous opening tale, which suggests that ling-mei Woo and the other daughters can only attain understanding and rapprochement with their mothers through techniques of temporal juxtaposition and investigations into the familial past. This interaction of past and present replaces any literal dialogue between mothers and daughters, which is actively prevented by the stories' temporal framing. Instead, the stories interact through their superstructural anangement into a nanative that stresses the importance of returning to the past in order to progress into the future; because Tan almost uniformly associates China with the past and America with the present , she also implies that this polychronic progression can resolve the temporalized contradictions of Chinese American female identity. Tan thus capitalizes on The Joy Luck Club's formal capabilities as a collection 326 JNT of interdependent stories to reconcile the potentially contradictory temporalities , ideologies, and subjectivities that drive her novel. Temporality, Dialogicity, and the Critics Many studies of The Joy Luck Club preempt any examination of these contradictions, however, by...