The Bildungsroman allegedly first appeared in 1795 with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) (Feng 2;
Hardin ix). According to the definition in Oxford English Dictionary, a
Bildungsroman is “[a] novel that has as its main theme the formative years or spiritual
education of one person.” Aside from this, in the introduction to Reflection and Action:
Essays on the Bildungsroman (1991), James Hardin also roughly defines the
Bildungsroman as “a type of novel, usually autobiographical (and sometimes hardly
distinguishable from that nonfictional form), and principally concerned with the spiritual and psychological development of the protagonist” (ix). Nevertheless, Jeffery L. Sammons criticizes that such an elucidation of the Bildungsroman seems too broad and sketchy (26). In fact, Hardin himself, after the general definition of the word, also points out that “there is no consensus on the meaning of the term Bildungsroman” (x).
As a result, in addition to the above definitions, I will try to delve into the relationship between the Bildungsroman and Chang-rae Lee’s fiction based on the narrative
pattern, the plot, and the denouement. Via the genre, Lee successfully depicts the ambivalence of the Asian Americans about their identity oscillating between
“ethnicity” and “nation.” During their Bildungs, however, the main characters gradually change their attitude toward identity. Actually, they do not need to give up their racial identity in order to own national identity. Instead, they can have both, which is the main message that Lee wants to convey to the Asian American and those who are bothered by the same situation.
In terms of the narrative pattern of the Bildungsroman, according to Pin-chia Feng’s analysis of Wilhelm Dilthey, two essential elements are a linear progression toward knowledge and social integration as well as a “spiral”6 upward movement toward spiritual fulfillment (2). However, Lee, in both of the novels, creates a dual spiral depiction not only in spiritual achievement but in the chronological progression as well through inter-weaving the past and the present. On the basis of Elaine Kim’s
“Roots and Wings,” the amalgamation of the past and the present is crucial, for it could be thought of as a significant linchpin to realize the present (2). In Native Speaker, Henry always recalls past memories in his daily and working life. For
instance, he remembers his childhood in which he lived with his parents. He thinks
6 Feng indicates that the spiral concept comes from Mary Anne Ferguson’s “The Female Novel of Development and the Myth of Psyche.”
that his father was too stubborn and cowardly to fight for his own right. Thus, even though a customer took a small bite of an apple and did not buy it, he just smiled as if nothing had happened. However, it is not until Henry grows up that he understands it is the way his father chooses to protect his family and their life from bullies. Through his narration, it can be sensed he feels sorry for his father and acknowledge that his thinking was immature then. More importantly, by means of his father, he understands the grief of being a Korean immigrant, which is why he strives to integrate into the white society. In A Gesture Life, Hata always retrieves the past whenever he sees any reminders or people reminiscent of his past recollections. For example, the pictures in a dusty box in the storeroom remind him of his adopted daughter Sunny and her childhood. In the meanwhile, the slightness of her build reminds him of Kkutaeh, the comfort woman in wartime. Through Sunny’s photographs and slender figure, Hata recalls the past, eventually comprehending that he views Sunny as a substitute for Kkutaeh. Accordingly, with Lee’s dual spiral of narrating progression and upward spiritual accomplishment, the two novels indeed have a unique pattern for the protagonists’ Bildungs.
As for the plot, “most Bildungsroman novels adopt the majority of the genre’s principal elements: childhood, the conflict of the generations, provinciality, the larger society, self-education, alienation, and ordeal by love. Also, the child will normally be an orphan or fatherless or repelled by a living father” (Selinger 38-39).7 In Lee’s fiction, most of these conventional points can be found as well. In Native Speaker, Henry as the narrator talks about what has happened from his childhood to adulthood.
After graduating from a university, he becomes a provincial spy, caring nothing but his family. Generally speaking, a spy needs to always stay calm and maintains
7 Selinger paraphrases Jerome Hamilton Buckley’s remarks in his Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (1974).
multiple identities so that s/he can carry out a task with precision. Because of these traits, he is forced to face alienation in a society filled with racism against nonwhites.
Moreover, As Bernard Selinger observes, “the secondary characters principally act as models for the protagonist, models which he can accept or reject. This modeling is central to the development of the Bildung, who attains individuality by, paradoxically, becoming like someone else” (50). Henry is asked to spy on John Kwang, a Korean American candidate for the mayor of New York. However, due to Kwang’s excellent performance in all respects, Henry thinks of him as a perfectly-assimilated American and a role model. Thus, with Lelia’s ordeal by love and John Kwang as a model, Henry realizes and re-conceptualizes ethnic and national identity. In A Gesture Life, Hata reveals what happened mainly in and after his youth. From his narration, we can know he is a Korean adoptee endeavoring to make others recognize him as an
American. As a result, he becomes a model minority both in Japan and in America.
Much to his amazement, though, his desire to be a model minority gives rise to the conflict with Sunny. Nevertheless, he also gets a different insight into ethnic and national identity via Kkutaeh’s ordeal and a yearning for Sunny. Hence, the plots of the two novels correspond to the conventions of the Bildungsroman.
Furthermore, the change of the perspectives on ethnic and national identity that Hata and Henry experience could be regarded as the outcome of their processes of Bildung respectively. According to the early nineteenth-century critic Karl
Morgenstern, “a work will be called a Bildungsroman first and primarily on account of its content, because it depicts the hero’s Bildung as it begins and proceeds to a certain level of perfection” (Berman 77).8 As a result, the protagonist’s Bildung is a key component for a work as a Bildungsroman.
8 Karl Morgenstern’s remarks in this section are cited by Russell A. Berman from Hildegard Emmel’s History of the German Novel, which is translated by Ellen Summerfield.
In the eighteenth century, Bildung meant formation, “transferring the formation of external features to the features of the personality as a whole” (Koepke 130). Later, in the early nineteenth century, the term implied “‘cultivation,’ education and
refinement in a broad, humanistic sense” (Hardin xi). To put it another way, Bildung has two important connotations, namely, “cultivation” and “formation.” As Sammons mentions, “the Bildungsroman should have something to do with Bildung, that is, with the early bourgeois, humanistic concept of the shaping of the individual self from its innate potentialities through acculturation and social experience to the threshold of maturity” (41). For the concept of Bildung, Sammons further points out that “[it] is intensely bourgeois; it carries with it many assumptions about the autonomy and relative integrity of the self, its potential self-creative energies, its relative range of options within material, social, even psychological determinants” (42). Thus, Bildung could be defined as a process for the formation of one’s self from immaturity to maturity via self-education. And, the process of Bildung highly affects and relates to the development and the outcome of one’s selfhood and identity.
When it comes to the concept of Bildung in fiction, it is applied to the main character who undergoes a series of discouragements and encouragements, finally getting a more positive attitude toward self and the world (Hardin xii-xiii).9 In this regard, however, Sammons hold a different viewpoint. He argues,
Bildung is not merely the accumulation of experience, not merely
maturation in the form of fictional biography. There must be a sense of evolutionary change within the self, a teleology of individuality, even if the novel, as many do, comes to doubt or deny the possibility of achieving a gratifying result. (41)
9 For further information, please consult Der deutsche Bildungsroman: Gattungsgeschichte vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Jürgen Jacobs and Markus Krause in 1989.
In other words, for a Bildungsroman, “[i]t does not much matter whether the process of Bildung succeeds or fails, whether the protagonist achieves an accommodation with life and society or not” (Sammons 41). Instead, it is more important for the hero to gain a sense of evolutionary or revolutionary change in thought during the process of Bildung, even though s/he does not get a more positive understanding of self and the
world.
At the end of Native Speaker, Henry finally gets together with his wife again, trying to be himself more positively. On the contrary, in the ending of A Gesture Life, Hata departs from everything familiar to him, traveling alone without specific
destinations. Even so, both of them—as outsiders of white culture—get to understand themselves and change their attitude toward racial and national identity. For Henry, he becomes more enthusiastic about people instead of being indifferent. For Hata, he does not insist on being a model minority anymore. They eventually realize that it is more important to be what they are rather than being what others hope them to be. In addition, they comprehend that assimilation, just like hallucination, can never
camouflage the fact that they are nonwhites. They should not evade their original ethnicity, but try to face and identify with it instead. On the other hand, it is also a fact that they are Americans now. Even though Henry still cannot solve his identity
problem in the long run, he is not trapped within it. This is because he has realized that it is more significant to be who and what he is. As for the query of identity, Chang-rae Lee tries to solve it in A Gesture Life. The final insight that Hata has achieved is to come to a reconciliation among the identities of Korea, Japan, and America.
Based on the above analyses, we can reach three key points in regard to the connection of the Bildungsroman and Lee’s novels. First, Chang-rae Lee not only employs the conventional elements of the Bildungsroman in his novels, but also
makes a breakthrough in the traditional discursive development in the genre. Second, by writing these narratives of Bildung, he ultimately comes up with his answer to the problem of the identity crisis at the ends of both novels. Third, through deploying the elements of the Bildungsroman, Lee successfully creates a typology of the genre
“based on the protagonist’s participation in the social mainstream or his identity as an outsider” (Hirsch 297). For such a typology, Marianne Hirsch stresses that in recent times, “[the] manifestations of the genre seem to explore primarily the fate of outsiders, [such as] women, minority groups, [and] artists (i.e., spiritual outsiders)”
(297). In this regard, Henry and Hata are such outsiders. In addition, Morgenstern further points out that “[the genre of the Bildungsroman] promotes the Bildung of the reader to a greater extent than any other type of novel” (Berman 77). Through these Bildungsromans, Chang-rae Lee not only conveys his viewpoints toward the
oscillating identity of the Asian American, but urges the reader like me to (re)think about it as well. Therefore, I would like to conclude with my Bildung and argue that
“A Part” or “Apart” is only a matter of option at the end of the thesis. In the following two chapters, I will discuss Henry’s and Hata’s narratives of Bildung respectively. In Native Speaker, I will focus on the idea of linguistic identity and how Henry bridges
the worlds and the cultures of Korea and America. Similarly, in A Gesture Life, I will concentrate on the relationships between Hata’s traumas and the ideology of model minority, and further analyze how they are interwoven with each other, which could be considered constituting the process of his Bildung. Finally, through reading the Bildungs of Henry and Hata, I would try to delve into the different lifestyle between
the first and second Korean-American generations. After this, I would like to explore Lee’s understanding as well as thinking toward ethnic and national identity, and further scrutinize his reply to the identity crisis in the last chapter. Meanwhile, I will scrutinize my Bildung after reading and writing about the two novels as well. With the
thesis, I hope to offer another exit, another solution for those who are troubled by two or more identities.
Chapter 2
Who Am I? : A Spy’s Identification in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker
You are surreptitious, B+ student of life, first thing hummer of Wagner and Strauss, illegal alien, emotional alien, genre bug, Yellow peril:
neo-American, great in bed, overrated, poppa’s boy, sentimentalist,
anti-romantic, ______ analyst (you fill in), stranger, follower, traitor, [and]
spy.
Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker It is significant to know exactly who one is. Yet, Henry Park seems to omit or neglect this because of his desire to be assimilated into the white society. Lelia Boswell, Henry’s wife, leaves him with the list above, which triggers a process of self-inquiry for Henry. Through his Bildung, Henry grasps the significance to be what he is.
According to Sämi Ludwig, “this is a false identity that he [Henry] has assumed for himself; she [Lelia] has taken the initiative to provoke him by showing him this mirror of himself” (224). On top of the very above identities, Lelia adds one
more—a“[f]alse speaker of language” (Native Speaker 6). Language epitomizes the culture and acculturation of a nation, especially in terms of the usage of slangs and idioms. For immigrants, it is hard to internalize these linguistic practices, especially for those who have never touched the language before. Yet, it is essential for them to learn to be fluent in a new tongue in order to survive and adopt well in the new environment. Even Henry, an American-born Korean, also undergoes a bitter process of learning English because its pronunciation is markedly different from that of Korean. Nevertheless, through Lelia, Henry realizes and sees more because “[she]
acts as a window for Henry to reflect on the lives of struggling immigrant laborers and
their children” (Yoo 58). She is a speech therapist for children, helping those who have problems speaking English, including ESL kids. Among her students, two Laotian boys and their fathers catch Henry’s eyes. While listening to the fathers and sons communicating with customers in broken English, Henry “knows all too well that the boys will soon break their association with their native language in hopes of adopting and assimilating the new language” (Yoo 58). Nonetheless, Jane Yoo also comments that compared with those second-generation children, their parents are more reluctant to acquire the new language and embrace the new culture; instead, they are more willing to stick to their native roots (58). It could be the reason why the old Korean au pair in Henry’s home is not so friendly to Lelia. All in all, throughout the novel, the power of language is the key to “shape success, failure, acceptance, [and]
rejection” (Belluck, “Being of Two Cultures”). That is, for immigrants, and even the American-born Henry, English is a requisite to live well in America.
In addition, the spy job for Henry is critical to his awakening. Pam Belluck in a New York Times interview delineates Henry as a spook “for shadowy, private clients,
whose duty to blend into various roles forces him to suppress vital parts of himself.”
On account of the employment, he always needs to change identities, like a master of disguise, a chameleon, in order to protect himself. Nevertheless, not until shadowing John Kwang—a Korean American candidate for New York’s mayoral position—does Henry waver and begin to question his life and himself. Kwang actually becomes a special person. According to John Whittier Treat, Kwang for Henry is a role model who “can admire as well as battle, because Kwang is to all appearances a perfectly assimilated Korean American” (339). Henry also longs to be a well-assimilated American, just as his father wishes him to be. He struggles to learn English well, enters a good university, and marries a white woman and has a lovely
Korean-Caucasian son, all of which help him maintain the image of a model minority
until the demise of his son. The son’s passing away, according to what Lee explains in his interview with Belluck, stands for the end of “a way of thinking about the future,”
compelling Henry into a messy life. Nevertheless, after knowing Kwang, his humanity seems to awake gradually. At the same time, he holds a different view concerning identity.
In this chapter, I will dwell on Henry’s query of identity problem and the process of his Bildung. As Tina Chen points out,
Henry experiences as a Korean American whose American birth does not preclude his grappling with linguistic fluency and a cultural legacy of silence; as a man who woos his speech therapist wife without truly
fathoming the mysteries of how to make himself heard and understood; and as a spy whose professional success is predicated upon his ability to
impersonate someone else, to speak a story not his own. (639)
Sandwiched between Korean and American cultures, Henry struggles to be identified as a native, only at the expense of his self. His problem lies in the loss of selfhood.
Accordingly, in the latter part of the chapter, my concern will focus on the influence of linguistic identity to Henry and how he goes through a process of development from his spy assignment and encounter with Kwang.