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11. Questions of Voice, Race, and the Body in Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand
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185 In this article I will examine ways in which the Asian Canadian authors Larissa Lai and Hiromi Goto exploit a number of strategies of voice in their works that in turn express a number of positionings towards the Canadian society in which both authors live and work. The multiple perspectives on ethnicity evinced by Asian Canadian fiction have been largely explored by critics.1 Emphasis has often been put on the resisting of fixed definitions of identity through strategies of textual hybridization. Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms is indeed replete with scraps of folk tales, myths, newspaper cuttings , and shopping lists. Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand incorporates Western and Chinese tales, Christian and Taoist mythology, and the novel’s textual multiplicity evolves from a deliberately skewed historiography as it deals in the recovery of history without legitimizing any one version of that history. Lai’s representation of the life of a ninth-century Chinese poet is grounded in the author’s admission that research into the poet’s life revealed conflicting versions of whether she was actually guilty of the supposed murder of her maid or innocent of these charges. Moreover, Lai could only access the available scraps of her poetry in translation, which of course opens up a field of inquiry into the value and sensitivity of those translations. Although they are not engaged in rewriting as a way of legitimizing an alternative history (in the mode of Rudy Wiebe’s A Discovery of Strangers for example), both texts do seem to be directed towards splitting open epistemological assumptions of cohesive nationhood in order to pose a few 11 Questions of Voice, Race, and the Body in Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand Charlotte Sturgess questions regarding what Daniel Coleman has called “the sedative politics of White civility” (“From Canadian” 36) with its anxious roots in Canada’s history of inclusions and exclusions. Or to put it another way, as Lianne Moyes does: “Literature has a lot to tell us—through its enunciative postures , its mapping of social space, and its mobilization of affect, for example —about the production of citizens” (112). Both statements suggest that literature not only reflects but enacts in a vital way through its strategies the subject’s positioning within the complex network of power relations constituting the nation. This paper proposes to look at one or two of the ways in which the playing with the conventions of narrative voice dismantles the unitary authority assigned to a teller and produces a chorus of enunciatory possibilities that are embedded in a cartography of alternative and alternating social relations. Sites of storytelling of all kinds in the narratives can be apprehended as sites of subjectivity whereby the female body is foregrounded. Regarding the body, both narratives mobilize the senses as areas of knowledge according to the principle of contingency theorized by Michel Serres in Les Cinq Sens. Serres argues that in the skin the world and the body touch each other, defining a common border between the one who feels and what is felt, the subject thus mingling with the world that mingles in the subject (82). Indeed , the senses not only engage us physically with the world around us, but pose the epistemological problem (particularly relevant to my subject of what is or is not either inside or outside of us, and how those distinctions produce our notion of private and public space and thus of social norms). Through the displaying, revealing, and dissimulating of identities linked to voice, both of these Asian Canadian novels materialize the conditions of the production of those identities. These strategies allow for a questioning of the racial and gender hierarchies constituting social relations in the times and places of these texts. In delineating the contours of their narrative voices, both When Fox Is a Thousand and Chorus of Mushrooms emphasize the act of performing, for both novels announce each of the three characters who have narrative responsibility in their respective stories. When Fox Is a Thousand does so according to the conventions of a play script telling us in the opening epigraph that it is “a narrative in three voices.” Each voice (the mythical Fox, the ninth-century poet, and the contemporary narrator) is signalled by a pictograph . In a recent edition of the novel, one of these pictographs has been changed (the contemporary narrator is now represented by a book instead 186 DIALOGISM, POLYPHONY...