Social Latitude, Awareness and Personal Capability: The Problem of Agency in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life

This paper examines the problems of agency in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life and argues that agency needs to be understood in terms of three distinct but inter-related concepts: social latitude (the freedom afforded by society), awareness (one’s understanding of oneself and one’s situation) and personal capability (the will and ability to act even when one has both social latitude and awareness). In contrast to Marxist and critical theories that stress the power of hegemonic metanarratives to mold subjectivities, this formulation of agency stresses the interplay of cultural forces and individual psychological factors. In Lee’s tragic tale, Franklin ‘Doc’ Hata is shaped not only by the social pressures of growing up an ethnic Korean in Imperial Japan or living as an Asian American in a largely white town in the USA, but also by the psychological mechanisms of defense he employs to navigate his difficulties. Although Hata’s modest aims seem perfectly attainable by most, he is repeatedly unable to take the actions necessary to achieve his goals because he lacks either the social latitude to do so, a true awareness of his own motivations or the world he lives in, or the personal capacity to act even when he finally sees the truth. In constructing a modern form of tragedy that stresses the interplay of social and psychological forces, Lee outlines some of the complexities of modern life and reveals some of the lacunae of contemporary theoretical formulations of agency.