The Politics of Ethnic Authorship: Li-Young Lee, Emerson, and Whitman at the Banquet Table

Abstract

What is it in me would devour this world to utter it? ... I would eat it all to utter it ... I would devour this race to sing it ... I would eat Emerson, his transparent soul, his soporific transcendence. --Li-Young Lee, Cleaving (83) In one of his longest and best-known poems, Cleaving, Li-Young Lee announces his desire to devour Ralph Waldo Emerson like a steamed fish in a meal. The reader forgives this breach of table etiquette because, as Lee informs us, Emerson said whole race was ugly--he deserves to be eaten. But Lee's poem is more sophisticated and more philosophical than this tit-for-tat scenario suggests. In Cleaving, eating is assault, but it is also digestion and assimilation. Lee brings butcher's shop close to banquet table by deliberately playing on two senses of verb cleave to suggest both chopping up and clinging to, and thus poem vacillates between act of rejection and process of assimilation. Eating in this poem may begin with butcher's chopping block, but it is ultimately about communion. The dialectics of Lee's poem reveal a blind spot in contemporary critical theory's discussion of author. In valorizing so-called element in ways that reproduce it as central to our cultural concerns, contemporary criticism, in spite of itself, insists upon segregation of ethnic from mainstream. As such, we are in danger of patronizingly valuing writing as a dynamic and colorful literature of outsiders that brings new life to America's tired literary traditions. By insisting on marginality for authors, we also ignore dialectical relationship that exists between these writers and various traditions of literature to which they, like any other author, belong. Li-Young Lee's dinner/communion with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman in Cleaving illustrates what is at stake when we approach a given writer as either American or American. Lee's poem shrewdly questions either/or between these authorial identities. I. ROMANCING THE MARGINS (1) We often use word as if it did not undergo its own shifts in meaning, but shifting relevance of the marginal in relation to larger body of contemporary literature highlights one of most remarkable paradoxes of authorship over past half century. A broad view of Asian literary production and consumption over past fifty years suggests that writing is no longer marginal, or, to see it another way, that marginality is no longer a negative marker to mainstream literary tastes. Asian writers such as Diana Chang, Toshio Mori, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, and Louis Chu published before 1960s, but their works fell quickly into obscurity. Even in wake of civil-rights movement, authors and publishers saw Asian writing as a risk. One famous example is Knopf's decision to market The Woman Warrior as nonfiction in 1976, perhaps emphasizing its tour guide status to culture (which sold well at that time) rather than letting it stand on its strengths as a novel. Also in 1970s, David Wong Louie reports that he decided to remove names from his stories in order to improve their marketability, a decision he made in response to rejections from editors who found his stories too Chinese (Simpson 67). (2) The status of Asian Americans in United States was at that time a purely negative factor for publishers. AS a result, most of Asian literature published during this period served to satisfy curiosity of white readers, and it reinforced illusion of superiority enjoyed by white culture by presenting Asians as non-threatening and inferior. The Asian writer was then tour guide to literary Chinatown. …