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9 _ “A New Rule for the Imagination’’ Rewriting Modernism in Bone DONATELLA IZZO “Call me Ishmael.’’ See? You pictured a white guy, didn’t you? . . . A new rule for the imagination: the common man has Chinese looks. From now on, whenever you read about those people with no surnames, color them with black skin or yellow skin. —Maxine Hong Kingston, TRIPMASTER MONKEY E VER SINCE MY FIRST reading of Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone when it was published in 1993, I was struck by its stylistic and compositional subtlety . Despite the deceptive simplicity of its prose, Bone—written over a ten-year span—is very far from documentary realism or autobiographical straightforwardness. Quite the reverse, the peculiarity of this novel seems to me to lie in its full, deliberate, and even openly displayed engagement with the structural, stylistic, and thematic features typical of some of the more canonical novels of mainstream American modernism, such as The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury, or Absalom, Absalom!: a preoccupation with time as a philosophical, historical, and existential category and experimentation with temporal disruption in narrative discourse; an epistemological interest in subjectivity and perception, mirrored in a variety of treatments of narrative perspective and voice; a reliance on metaphor rather than metonymy as a favorite connective trope operating to create a coherent, spatialized texture for the novel; a metatextual self-awareness and self-reflexiveness.1 One reviewer of Bone explicitly mentioned Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and indeed there are several resemblances between the two texts, in terms 138 \ I N T E R T E X T S of both their overall structure and the rich texture of their prose, which plays on the recurrence and variation of images and keywords revolving around the themes of memory, hope, and the promise and nightmare of America.2 My reading of Bone, however, does not aim at demonstrating the intertextual influence of Fitzgerald’s novel on Ng’s; while I believe that several echoes do exist between the two novels, my point is different. By highlighting the relevance of modernist compositional techniques to Bone, I will be taking it as a case study for the relation of the Asian American novel to modernist aesthetics—not just the aesthetics of modernist literature, but the ideology of the aesthetic as a separate sphere that modernist literature problematically elaborated, New Criticism refined into critical dogma, and today’s literary theory frequently seems to have internalized even while reacting against it. What I hope to show is that engaging the aesthetic standards of modernism—as Asian American texts can and frequently do—does not automatically entail subscribing to an ideology of the aesthetic; that the kind of close reading traditionally applied to canonical modernist literary works can in fact enhance our perception of the aesthetic direction of Asian American texts; and that as the formal is never disjointed from the ideological, so does the aesthetic fully subsume the political—not in the sense of aesthetic transcendence, but quite the reverse, in the sense that an aesthetic engagement with the mainstream canon is simultaneously and inevitably a full engagement with the ideological, political, and racial issues underlying the canon’s formation. Reading Bone as a self-aware rewriting of modernism , then, does not aim at claiming for it the canonical authority or aesthetic rarefaction of modernist texts, but at raising questions about the cultural significance of the novel’s positioning vis-à-vis both the mainstream and the ethnic canon within an overdetermined literary space. What I will contend is, finally, that the relation of Asian American literary works to the dominant canon should not be represented as one-way—that is, as inevitably one of either aesthetic assimilation or political resistance to the gravitational tug of an inherently more powerful dominant literary model. Indeed, confronting the canon can be an empowering move, enabling the ethnic author to shape it in his or her turn. As suggested by the “new rule for the imagination’’ tactically proposed by Wittman Ah-Sing in Tripmaster Monkey, learning to visualize the narrator of the American epic par excellence as black or yellow-skinned can be a way to “conjure up and inscribe our faces on the blank pages and screens of America’s hegemonic culture.’’3 “ A N E W R U L E F O R T H E I M A G I N A T I O N ’ ’ / 139 One Mile Forward and Eight Miles Back: Compositional Structure...

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