Poetics of Emptiness: Transformations of Asian Thought in American Poetry

5. Pacing the Void: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée

5 / On the white surface of the virtual screen, an image as she partly describes it appears: in a dim performance space, separated from the viewer by a cheesecloth curtain whose effect is that of “an opaque transparency,” the performer slowly moves about in a candlelit, oval-shaped area, wearing a white robe and unfurling “20 meters of black and red cloth from underneath.” —trinh t. minh-ha, describing “a ble w ail” Through an atmosphere generated by a loose gathering of visual and cultural textures and culturally specific cues, “A BLE W AIL” calls to mind a shamanic rite, or kut, and perhaps more specifically, the Chinogwi kut, where a shaman (which in the Korean context would almost always be a woman) channels the spirit of Princess Pari, the mother of Korean shamanism , to cross over the great divide between this world and the afterlife , bringing with her long strips of cotton with which she will find the recently deceased and pull them out from the lower hells to a permanent resting place in paradise. While not a reenactment of this rite, Cha’s performance is striking for the prominence it accords to the white fabric worn by shamans (and during mourning), its ritualized movements (used in many shamanic rites), and the two lengths of fabric Princess Pari and those who channel her take with them to the afterlife. Cha’s description of Princess Pari’s journey, at the end of her novel/poem Dictée, is also remarkably close to Cha’s own description of “A BLE W AIL.”1 As is the case with all of Cha’s heavily heterocultural work, many cultural discourses simultaneously find their way into a state of media res, an in-betweenness. But it is important to note that the explicit and suggestive references to Asian religious, philosophical, and mythopoetic figures that permeate her work are not superficial exoticization, ornamental orientalism, or even instances of code switching—what Bill Ashcroft might call a metonymic gap, or places in a text that stand in for the unbridgeable distances between distinct cultural discourses.2 Instead, I would argue that their forcefields of meanings are as (or arguably more) active as the historical, poststrucPacing the Void: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée 158 / daoist imaginaries turalist, feminist, postcolonial, Greek, French, and Catholic discourses that have been commented on at great length. Yet works like “A BLE W AIL,” and Dictée, Cha’s well-known novel/poem, make available distinct cultural spaces conditioned by unique shamanic and Daoist cosmogonies left unaddressed by the growing field of Cha scholarship. Clearly, Cha’s Daoist imaginary can be seen as an outgrowth of her years of studying the Daoist art of taiji chuan3 and exploration of Chang Chung-yuan’s Daoist poetics (among other figures in the transpacific imaginary),4 but it can also be traced back to the source of her poststructuralism—Roland Barthes.5 It is important to note from the outset, however, that while Cha’s Daoist imaginary is informed by Barthes’s, it cannot be subsumed under his imaginary or that of the broader “Chinese dreams” of the Tel Quel group (Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Barthes, and others whose “dream” is the subject of Eric Hayot’s elegant book, Chinese Dreams). Cha does not turn to Kristeva’s “China,” a figure of the “bizarre, aberrant, lunatic,”6 or to Brecht ’s “China” as a figure of alienating “strangeness”7 (although she might employ elements of her transpacific imaginary to these ends). Instead, her use of key Daoist concepts reflects some of the same contours as the Daoist figure 5.1. Image of Cha performing “A BLE W AIL,” 1975. Photograph by Trip Callaghan, image no. 1992.4.32. From, The Dream of the Audience, 93, © Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press. pacing the void / 159 (informed also by Buddhism, which I do not foreground in this chapter so that the more active Daoist elements can be more clearly seen) imaginary of late Barthes, who, years after having moved on from his early “utopian dreams” of Maoist China,8 returns to Daoism (and rekindles his admiration of Zen) in a series of lectures (collectively known as “The Neutral” [Le neutre]) he gave during his first year at the Collège de France (the year after Cha studied at the Centre d’Etudes Américain du...