Dissertation-UCB_Camargo-2003_sm

Immigrant Subjectivities & Commodity Culture:
Cultural Citizenship, Americanization &
Immigrant Autobiographics
in the Late-Twentieth Century United States
by
Carlos Fernando Camargo
B.A. (Florida International University, Miami) 1988
M.A. (University of California, Berkeley) 1991
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
English
in the
GRADUATE DIVISION
of the
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Committee in charge:
Professor Richard Hutson (English), Chair
Professor Hertha Sweet Wong (English)
Professor Sau-ling Cynthia Wong (Ethnic Studies)
FALL 2003

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The dissertation of Carlos Fernando Camargo is approved:
_________________________________________________________________
Richard Hutson, Chair Date
_________________________________________________________________
Hertha Sweet Wong Date
_________________________________________________________________
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong Date
University of California, Berkeley
FALL 2003

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IMMIGRANT SUBJECTIVITIES & COMMODITY CULTURE:
CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP,
AMERICANIZATION & IMMIGRANT AUTOBIOGRAPHICS
IN THE LATE-TWENTIETH CENTURY UNITED STATES
Copyright 2003
by

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ABSTRACT
Immigrant Subjectivities & Commodity Culture:
Cultural Citizenship, Americanization & Immigrant Autobiographics
in the Late-Twentieth Century United States
by
Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature and Language
Professor Richard Hutson, Chair
This study takes the literary works of immigrant writers and autobiographers as
occasions to explore and theorize the relationship between identity formations in
narratives of Americanization and the social discourses and material practices that make
these texts possible and related genres intelligible during periods of high migration in a
global labor market system. In particular this study is concerned with tracing the
generative tensions and contradictions of ideological discourses surrounding nation, self
and representation in the United States in the last quarter of the century in order to
demonstrate the "material force" of ideational and ideological discursive formations
within a culture structured around relations of exchange and commodification—i.e
advanced late capitalism. In brief, by investigating the discursive formations around
notions of self, nation and life-story in the autobiographical narratives of immigrants,
this study attempts to account for the emergence, development and imperatives of what
some scholars have labeled a "culture of autobiography" in evidence throughout U.S.
cultural formations within the last three decades of the 20th century. Additionally, this
study attempts to map the development and response of U.S. immigrant autobiography
to heated public debates over immigration at the 20th century's end, echoing the heyday

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of a similar nativist assault in fin-de-siecle 19th century America lasting into what social
historian John Higham has characterized as the “Tribal Twenties” in his classic study of
turn-of-the-century U.S. nativism, Strangers in the Land (1964). Lastly, this study
documents the ideological triumph of economies of exchange underwritten by
commodity relations at the present historical juncture which call for an accounting of the
reifying and utopian possibilities and constraints of all cultural formations, but most
especially those of emergent immigrant and ethnic formations since these, as this study
will argue, provide a unique perspective on the economic, cultural and social cleavages
within the discursive and material fabric of the United States. Immigrants are
Americans writ large. Added to this socio-literary dynamic is the advent of what
immigration historians Castles and Miller call "the age of migration" providing us with a
unique opportunity to examine the role and expansion of commodity relations at both
phenomenological and structural planes because the commodities now in motion and in
circulation speak, write and represent themselves: they are the men, women and
children who have entered this country as immigrants, refugees & asylees.
Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature & Language
__________________________________________________________________
Richard Hutson, Chair Date

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DEDICATION
TO WILLIAM AND VIVIAN SARTELLE
AND
TO JOSEPH SARTELLE

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION.....................................................................................................................I
TABLE OF CONTENTS........................................................................................................II
LIST OF FIGURES ..............................................................................................................V
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .....................................................................................................VI
PART I: NOVUS ORDO SECULORUM: AD AUGUSTA PER ANGUSTA ....................................1
CHAPTER 1: CONCEPTUALIZING NARRATIVE AGENCY: UBI BENE IBI PATRIA................2
SYNOPSIS: IMMIGRANT GENRES...........................................................................................2
TRANSCENDING THE DICHOTOMY: THE TALES WE TELL.................................................3
ETIC AND EMIC NARRATIVE SELVES— SUBJECTIVITY AS FUSION OF BIOGRAPHY
& HISTORY ..............................................................................................................................4
THE DUALITY OF STRUCTURE: BEYOND THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY TOWARDS
TEXTS IN CONTEXT ...............................................................................................................6
OPERATIONALIZING HABITUS IN THE ANALYSIS OF AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICS OF
AMERICANIZATION..................................................................................................................10
HABITUS AS SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE: NARRATIVE & SOCIAL REGENERATION,
RENEWAL BY KILLING A SELF..........................................................................................15
CHAPTER 2: IMMIGRANT AUTOBIOGRAPHICS IN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC &
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION ...................................................................................................23
VARIETAS DELECTA: DRAMAS OF BEING & BELONGING................................................23
NOMEN EST OMEN..............................................................................................................25
INTER CAECOS REGNAT LUSCUS.....................................................................................27
QUE NOCENT, SAEPE DOCENT.........................................................................................32
MELODRAMAS OF INDIVIDUATION & CONSOLIDATION ..........................................34
REPETITIO EST MATER STUDIORUM................................................................................36
VULNERANT OMNES, ULTIMA NECAT...........................................................................39
CHAPTER 3: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA............................................42
SYNOPSYS: PERFORMANCE, PERSONALITY AND IDENTITY DEFENSE IN ..................43
LIFE-STORY & AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DISCOURSE ...........................................................43
LIFE STORIES: WHAT DO WE TELL WHEN WE TELL THEM? ...........................................46
DEFENSE MECHANISMS IN LIFE-STORY FASHIONING: INTERVIEW EVIDENCE .........49
BEYOND THE INTERVIEW: DEFENSE MECHANISMS IN THE LIFE STORY ....................53
WHO HEARS THE STORY?.....................................................................................................58
AUDIATUR ET ALTERA PARS!................................................................................................60
CONCLUSION ...........................................................................................................................63
PART II: IMMIGRANT AUTOBIOGRAPHICS: HISTORIA EST VITAE MAGISTRA.........64
CHAPTER 4: NARRATIVE PURSUITS: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FABULAE .............................65
THE SOCIO-CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF NARRATIVE IDENTITY &
SUBJECTITIVIES IN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DISCOURSE...................................................65
NARRATIVE INDIVIDUALISM: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DEUS-EX-MACHINA.....................68

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THE SOCIO-CULTURAL IMAGINATION AS BASIS FOR SOCIO-LITERARY
PERSPECTIVE: SELF-PRESENTATION, MIMESIS & NARRATIVE PURSUITS.................70
CONCLUSION ...........................................................................................................................79
CHAPTER 5: IDOLS OF THE TRIBE & FABLES OF AMERICAN NATIONAL IDENTITY:
SPEAKING OF IMMIGRATION......................................................................................................82
ONE PERSON'S STORY IS ANOTHER PERSON'S METAPHOR ........................................83
ASSIMILATION..........................................................................................................................85
ETHNIC RETENTION................................................................................................................90
ACCULTURATION ....................................................................................................................94
ETHNIC GROUP -- OR GROUPNESS?.................................................................................102
CHAPTER 6 : LOST IN INTERPELLATION: CHANG-RAE LEE’S NATIVE SPEAKER ..........106
THE NARATIVE PURSUITS OF AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL TRICKSTER .........................106
NARRATIVE SYNOPSIS: LOST IN INTERPELLATION .......................................................106
THE LONG PLANE RIDE: CHILDHOOD & YOUTH, OR WHEREIN THE PRE-REFLEXIVE
COGITO GOES BAD...............................................................................................................107
RHETORICS OF DESCENT & DIFFERENCE: TROPES OF FAMILY & FILIAL
SUBJECTIVITIES ....................................................................................................................109
IMMIGRANT AUTOBIOGRAPHICS: THE AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHIC IMPULSE..................115
THE ETHNIC OTHER: MY MONSTER, MYSELF? ...............................................................117
IMMIGRANT BRICOLEUR AS NATIVE-INFORMANT ..........................................................118
ENGLISH ONLY!: LANGUAGE AND THE NATIVE SPEAKER ............................................121
NARRATIVE RESOLUTIONS AND PLOTS OF MARITAL CONCORD ...............................123
PART III: AMERICANIZATION: PER ASPERA AD ASTRA...........................................126
CHAPTER 7: THE MAKING OF AMERICANS: ELITE & POPULAR ARTICULATIONS OF
NATIONAL SUBJECTIVITIES .......................................................................................................127
THE POLITICAL MODEL - AN 'IDEAS NATION'...................................................................128
THE DECLINE OF THE 'IDEAS NATION'..............................................................................131
MULTICULTURALISM.............................................................................................................133
THE CULTURAL MODEL........................................................................................................134
AN AMERICAN CULTURE?....................................................................................................136
THE FRONTIER: CRUSADE, CRUCIBLE AND CRIME .......................................................137
THE MELTING POT ................................................................................................................138
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF AN AMERICAN CULTURE ....................................................139
ASSIMILATION AND ACCULTURATION ..............................................................................140
THE ETHNO-RACIAL MODEL................................................................................................142
SURVEYING U.S. PUBLIC OPINION.....................................................................................144
WHO’S YOUR GRANDDADDY? OR WHO GETS TO BE AMERICAN, CULTURALLY
SPEAKING ...............................................................................................................................149
THE BREAK-DOWN OF AMERICAN OPINION..............................................................150
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION.......................................................................................153
CHAPTER 8: CINEMATIC DISCIPLINING OF THE IMMIGRANT OTHER ON THE U.S.-
MEXICO BORDER ...........................................................................................................................156
SYNOPSIS:..............................................................................................................................156
INTERTEXTUALITY: NARRATIVE, FILM AND SOCIAL DISCOURSES OF IDENTITY.....157
GEOGRAPHIES OF THE BORDER SELF AND SOCIUS IN CINEMA................................159
FRONTIER FANTASIES: HYPOTHETICAL SELVES & THREATENING OTHERS ...........161
LOCATING THE BORDERS OF SELF: BOUNDED IDENTITY & SPLIT SELVES ............163
DISCIPLINARY NARRATIVES: WHY SIZE MATTERS, OR DOES IT SCALE?..................167
THE IMMIGRANT BODY AS BORDER: ABJECT OBJECT?................................................170
IMMIGRATION DISCIPLINE: REMEMBERING THE SOUTHERN “OTHER”......................172
THE AMERICAN “SOUTH”: DISPLACED ANXIETY IN BORDER NARRATIVES...............173
CINEMATIC CONCLUSIONS .................................................................................................176

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PART IV: CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP: E PLURIBUS UNUM. .......................................179
CHAPTER 9: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AMERICAN AENEIDS: IMMIGRANT........................180
FAMILY FICTIONS AS TROPES OF SELF—OR, HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST .............180
THEIR ACCENTS BY DREAMING IN CUBAN ...........................................................................180
TENSE TROPICS: TROPES OF FAMILY & HOST COMMUNITY......................................180
ARTICULATING THE NARRATIVE SELF WITHIN THE IMMIGRANT SOCIUS .................187
QUALIS PATER TALIS FILIUS...............................................................................................193
HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS, AND GOT THEIR GROOVE...........203
SPANISH-AMERICAN PRINCESS: VENI, VIDI, VICI. ..........................................................213
DREAMING IN CUBAN WHILE LIVING ON THE HYPHEN .................................................219
EXILE DREAMS: THE BREADED LEVIATHAN & CUBA LIBRE!........................................221
SUGARCANE SHADOWS ......................................................................................................227
REVOLUTIONARY FAMILIES AND THE MYSTIC CHORDS OF MEMORY.......................228
CHAPTER 10: U.S IMMIGRANT SUBJECTIVITIES & NARRATIVES IN THE SHADOW OF
THE COMMODITY.........................................................................................................................234
TOWARDS A SOCIO-LITERARY PERSPECTIVE:...............................................................235
LE LY HAYSLIP'S MORAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP & THE POLITICS OF ABSOLUTION
IN WHEN HEAVEN AND EARTH CHANGED PLACES AND CHILD OF WAR, WOMAN OF
PEACE......................................................................................................................................238
THE AESTHETICIZATION & PRIVATIZATION OF LOSS AND RAGE IN EVA HOFFMAN'S
LOST IN TRANSLATION.........................................................................................................240
ALL IN THE FAMILY: LIFE ON THE HYPHEN WITH PÉREZ FIRMAT:CUBA'S SON IN
AMERICA, OR WHAT BECOMES A CUBAN MACHO MOST? ...........................................244
THE POLITICS OF RACE AND FAMILY VALUES IN MARK MATHABANE'S KAFFIR
BOY, KAFFIR BOY IN AMERICA , & LOVE IN BLACK AND WHITE..................................247
ILLEGAL DREAMS AND LABOR PAINS: THE SHADOWED LIFE A MIGRANT LABORER
IN RAMON PÉREZ'S DIARY OF AN UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANT...............................250
PART V: COMMODITY CULTURE: SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI.............................254
CHAPTER 11: WHAT IS COMMODITY CULTURE, AND WHERE CAN I GET IT ON SALE?...255
MY SO-CALLED LIFE: LABORING IN THE SHADOW OF THE COMMODITY ..................255
WHAT’S A HAND WORTH THESE DAYS? OR, THE COMMODIFICATION OF THE
BODY........................................................................................................................................256
PERSONS, BODIES AND THINGS........................................................................................259
THE LOGIC OF DEMONIC CAPITAL & DE-HUMANIZING WAGE-LABOR........................261
THE OCCULT HISTORY OF THE RISE OF VAMPIRIC CAPITALISM................................265
WAGE-LABOR AND GLOBAL COMMODIFICATION ...........................................................269
WHY SELL YOURSELF SHORT?..........................................................................................272
CHANGE IS THE CHALLENGE, NOT NEED ........................................................................275
WORKS CITED & ENDNOTES .................................................................................278
WORKS CITED IN CHAPTER 2 .............................................................................................278
WORKS CITED IN CHAPTER 10...........................................................................................290
ENDNOTES FOR CHAPTER 11.............................................................................................292

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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1--Texts in Contexts..............................................................................................................75
Figure 2- Context...............................................................................................................................79
Figure 3 - Sedimentation: From Habitus to Ideology...............................................................237
Figure 4 - Acculturation Process........................................................................................ ...........237

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Intellectually this study owes its critical interdisciplinary approach and scope to
the influence and teaching of Prof. Richard Hutson and of the Bad Subjects Collective
founded by Joe Sartelle at UC-Berkeley in the pre-bubble 1990s, before email and chat
rooms were all the rage. Additionally, it is informed by and has developed out of the
teaching practice and critical pedagogy I learned from Prof. Kathleen Moran and Prof.
Christine Palmer of the American Studies Program at UCB. From them, I learned to
decode texts in any context—and actually like it. From Richard, I learned to follow my
intellectual bliss. And, from Joe, I learned about bliss, period.

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PART I: NOVUS ORDO SECULORUM: AD AUGUSTA PER ANGUSTA
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain Unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to
secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these
ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute
new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing
its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect
their Safety and Happiness.
—(Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence of the
United States of America, July 4, 1776)
.
IMMIGRANT SUBJECTIVITIES
“The woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced.
Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after,
no one has any idea: the interest of man is confined
to those in close propinquity to himself”
(Tocqueville, Democracy in America)

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CHAPTER 1: CONCEPTUALIZING NARRATIVE AGENCY: UBI BENE IBI PATRIA
SYNOPSIS: IMMIGRANT GENRES
Writing this chapter has been particularly challenging – and has been described by one
colleague as my “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. This seems rather over-ambitious,
but I am trying to bring together some ideas that might be considered as sitting uneasily
together. In this chapter I introduce the conceptual framework I adopt in the study. This
framework involves the elaboration of three key areas from social theory, Pierre
Bordieu’s notion of habitus, the notion of ideology and its relation to underlying social
ideas, and Michel Foucault’s analyses of discursive formations. I spend some time
articulating the significance of these three key themes because it seems to me to be very
important that wherever possible I clarify what might be misunderstandings. I want to
argue that authorial decisions made by immigrant autobiographers are not solely
rational and self-directed (authorial) choices made by completely autonomous social
beings. Looking objectively at the situation once evinces that there are influences and
structures of thought and feeling which impose themselves on immigrant
autobiographers as they craft their life narratives. It is these influences and structures of
thought and feeling that are included in the notion of ideology, following Marx and
Williams. It is this level of thinking that is usually avoided in many formalistic studies of
immigrant autobiographical practices, especially so in classroom practice, largely I
conjecture because of the political nature of the ideas it represents. However, the
proposed Goffmanian, socio-literary approach to autobiographical narrative provides a
generative critical axis for narratological analysis of autobiographies as constituting
historical and biographically significant autobiographical social situations.
Critiquing ideology though is not enough to give us a clear picture of the messy swamp
of human interaction. I find my way through this swamp with Pierre Bordieu and his
notion of habitus as my guide. Michel Foucault brings to this venture his idea that there
is some underlying structure and rationale to the process of discursive formation. I do
not conceive of this chapter as a “Morrison’s Cafeteria” entree; but, rather it is a cordon
bleu arrangement of complementing and mutually enhancing components, the
integration of which is considerably more satisfying and powerful than any of the parts.
I hope you, the diner, will agree.

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TRANSCENDING THE DICHOTOMY: THE TALES WE TELL
Sie wissen da nicht, aber sie tun es
(They do not know it, but they do it)
(Karl Marx, Capital)
People know what they do, they frequently know why they do what they do, but
they don’t know what what they do does.
(Michel Foucault quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow and Dowling 1991; FLM 1991
Gender, Class and Subjectivity. pps 2 – 8)
It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what
they do has more meaning than they know.
(Pierre Bordieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p 79)
I write today for a reader who exists in my mind only phantasmagorically.
(Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory, p 182)
In this section I discuss the link between the form of social structure and the nature of
authorial agency, which acts as a precursor to my intention to study the structure of
immigrant autobiographers’ understanding of their work and practice from within a
social perspective as mediated by their serial attempts at autobiographic self-fashioning.
In particular, my approach assumes an interplay between structure and agency, and this
interplay needs to be conceptualized and operationalized. I see this interplay as
associated with Antony Giddens ‘duality of structure’, but identify some limitations and
drawbacks in the form of his conceptualization. Resolving these limitations requires an
approach that is capable of uncovering determinants and influences that act between the
social and the individual leading to a dialectical and dynamic constitution of both self
and society through autobiographical narrative forms. These determinants and
influences appear in subsequent sections of this chapter as habitus, ideology and
discursive formations.

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ETIC AND EMIC NARRATIVE SELVES— SUBJECTIVITY AS FUSION OF BIOGRAPHY &
HISTORY
Current perspectives on immigrant autobiographics appear to be caught in a
dichotomy, where approaches either suppress the significance of authorial agency or
ignore the structural determinants of the social world outside of autobiographical
production under question (cf: Boewlhower, Sollers and Dearborn). The need to
consider the interplay between social structure and authorial agency was identified by
Karl Marx when he claimed that
The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is
that things, reality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the
object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice,
not subjectively. (Marx 1844b, p 3)
Hence, the social world is to be seen as a practice, as human activity. I have
described in Chapters 1 and 2, my desire to know more about the mechanisms by which
society reproduces itself and how autobiographical practices and immigration self-
fashioning, in particular, contribute to social reproduction at the objective (genre-centric)
and subjective (text-centric) levels of articulation. I wish to do this, not by looking at
some wider overarching social practices, but to look into a critical site and understand
better how it is that covert social control & ideological domination may be sustained
through the way immigrant autobiographers conceptualize their work and their social
relationships in “presentations of self in everyday life” to borrow a phrase from
Goffman’s seminal study on self-fashioning as symbolic interaction, impression
management and social control mechanisms social formations evolve to reproduce and
maintain themselves over time (1952). Or, following Erchak in The Anthropology of
Self and Behavior, a standard college text in the field of psychological anthropology:
Societies produce the kinds of people they need: the socialization process within
a culture shapes behavior and personality in children in order to produce the kind of
behavior and personality in adults that will serve the general welfare while providing
satisfying lives for members of the culture. (emphasis in original, 1992, p 48)

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Thus, the basic exigency is to understand certain aspects or components of authorial
agency and their relationship to social structure and ultimately its impact on immigrant
autobiographics. This is tied to notions of domination and oppression, and involves a
conception of power and influences. Henry Giroux sees this as part of a critical
interrogation of “how human beings come together within historically specific social
sites such as schools in order to both make and reproduce the conditions of their
existence” (Giroux 1997a, p 71). Underpinning this interrogation is an assumption that
must form the foundation of a critical examination of autobiographical practice – the
dynamic and dialectical relation between structure (genre) and agency (text). This forms
a central plank of Pierre Bordieu’s approach to ideological inquiry—a foundational
prism for the present study:
There exists a correspondence between social structures, between the
objective divisions of the social world – particularly into dominant and
dominated in the various fields – and the principles of vision and division
that agents applied to it. (Bordieu, 1989a, p 7 quoted in Bordieu 1990a, p
12)
This process of construction and reproduction is not well-examined or understood in
specific sites and seems to lack clear conceptual and methodological tools for analysis.
Critical sites are those in which the very day-to-day struggles for identity and power are
all played out. One such site is the immigrant autobiographical narrative and it’s
pedagogical deployment in the language instruction classroom. I chose this site not only
because I am by profession a Writing-Across-the-Curriculum educator and socio-literary
scholar, but also because it is a critical site in the constitution of self and identity as my
years of classroom practice and research confirm, and herein seek to convey to a larger
public. In order to carry out such an interrogation I need to identify and conceptualize
the ideas with which to describe the appropriate micro and macro structures and

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mechanisms employed by immigrant autobiographers in fashioning narratives of
personal transformation, migration and growth.
THE DUALITY OF STRUCTURE: BEYOND THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY TOWARDS TEXTS IN
CONTEXT
One of the most enduring problems of modern social theory and its application
in the study of literary texts is to account for and theorize the nature of authorial agency
and its role in the maintenance and construction of social and generic structures. That is,
to theorize why do we do what we do, and just what is it that we do and how we are
influenced by others and by the wider social forces to which we are subject before one
even sets pen to paper to craft a narrative self. Anthony Giddens gives an example of his
approach to this structure/agency distinction, that allows one to by-pass a naïve
intentional fallacy, through what he terms the “unintended consequences of intended
action” (Giddens 1976 2nd Edition 1993, p 84). He uses the terminology “duality of
structure” to denote the inter-relation between agency (text) and structure
(genre/context) in the social sphere, which I here apply to the narrative realm, and I
shall illustrate this with three quotes:
By the duality of structure I mean that social structure is both constituted
by human agency and yet at the same time the very medium of that
constitution.
(Giddens 1976 2nd Edition 1993, p 128)
In social theory we cannot treat human activities as though they were
determined by causes in the same way as the natural events are. We have to
grasp what I call the double involvement of individuals and institutions:
we create society at the same time as we are created by it . . . Social systems
are like buildings that are at every moment constantly being reconstructed
by the very bricks that compose them.
(Giddens 1982, pps 13 - 14)
Structure is the medium and outcome of the conduct it recursively
organizes; the structural properties of social systems do not exist outside of
the action but are chronically implicated in its production and
reproduction.
(Giddens 1984, p 374)

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There is a clear debt to Karl Marx in the development of Anthony Giddens’
‘structuration theory’, which Giddens recognizes as
an extended reflection upon a celebrated and oft-quoted phrase to be found
in Marx . . ‘Men make history but not in circumstances of their own
choosing’.
(Giddens 1984, p xxi)
Following Giddens lead, I would add that immigrant autobiographers are in no less of a
predicament vis-à-vis their own migration experience and the generic narrative
strategies at their disposal to craft narrative subjectivities that fit neatly and intelligibly
within a canon of American Subjectivities that range the historical spectrum from
Benjamin Franklin’s confident and action driven vita activa in an Revolutionary &
Enlightenment milieu to today’s post-modern and Advanced Late Capitalist consumer
millieu as fashioned by a less confident and “alienated” Eva Hoffman with respect to her
own incorporation and socialization into an American Habitus: and the trauma of being
lost in translation” in pursuing vita contemplative to find HER American Self:
“The extremes of immigration and of living in a second language are a kind of
exacerbation of the experience of being alienated from oneself, and of having
language de-familiarised. I suppose this is something that every writer
experiences, but it becomes exacerbated in a second language, so that the sense of
one’s own otherness becomes all too natural... Writing Lost in Translation was
therapeutic for me, but that was a surprise. I didn’t set out for it to be
therapeutic. And I didn’t know it would be. What was therapeutic was not only a
sense that I had found a voice, but that the book was received very generously
and I had the feeling that I had been heard. And that enabled me to put the
problem of immigration to rest much more than before, because I think that one
of the obsessions driving me was the sense that nobody really heard or
understood this particular experience.”
(Extracts from the radio series are based on the book — Foreign Dialogues, Mary
Zournazi, Pluto Press, 1998)
Yet, I do not want to present this approach as unproblematic or uncontentious with
respect to the Hegelian dilemma of gewornfenheit—existential angst over choosing
among World-as-found versus World-as-fashioned. However, a central issue is the
necessity to try to understand and describe the contribution that human subjects make

8
to the enduring social forms, norms, genres and subjectivities, and in turn how literary
engagement in the social world might influence a immigrant self-representation and
semiosis through speech acts that comprise action (in the Arendtian sense) in the
constitution of immigrant autobiography as a genre-qua-genre or meta-genre. This
requires teasing apart the duality, rather than clouding it or negating it. That is, how can
the immigrant autobiographer be seen as deriving the logic of their practice from the
social world? Central to this project is the notion that autobiographical engagement in
the social world is a multi-layered complex phenomenon, in which we must eschew
simplistic notions of overt domination or repression, and conversely simplistic notions
of power, agency or authorial intention:
Domination is not the same as “systematically distorted” structures of
signification because domination - as I conceive of it - is the very condition
of existence of codes of signification. “Domination” and “power” cannot be
thought of only in terms of asymmetries of distribution but have to be
recognized as inherent in social association. Thus - and here we must also
reckon with the implications of the writings of Foucault - power is not an
inherently noxious phenomenon, not just the capacity to “say no”; nor can
domination be “transcended” in some kind of putative society of the future,
as has been the characteristic aspiration of at least some strands of socialist
thought. (Giddens 1984, pps 31 - 32)
Anthony Giddens’ development of structuration theory is an attempt to overcome the
dualism in the agency/structure dichotomy by “squashing together structure and
agency into one tightly-constituted amalgam” (Willmott 1999, p 7). The problem with
such an approach is that it leaves the effects and interplay between structure and agency
as indistinguishable, and “we are left with an unfortunate but ineluctable conflation of
structure and agency” (Willmott 1999, p 7). To overcome such a conflation we could opt
for the alternative approach of “analytical dualism” (Willmott 1999, p 7), an approach
which does not assume some primacy or determinism inherent in structure, but seeks to
develop a social ontology capable of uncovering determinants and influences that act
between the social and the individual leading to a dialectical and dynamic constitution

9
of both self and society, and by extension to any autobiographical fashioning or
identitarian project like creating property and social capital through engaging in a
public act of self-display and projection involved in today’s market for Biography and
Non-Fiction titles down at the Barnes & Noble’s or online at Amazon.com. My interest
in this chapter is to present a view of how people might be driven to operate and
interact with each other and therefore structure their social relations; how individuals,
personalities and subjectivities are formed and how they coalesce, conflict and
interweave to sustain capitalist social relations, which in turn constitute the relations of
production. In order to do that I begin by looking at how we ‘think’ in the sense of how
we come to think about and structure what we do which then leads us to do what we do
in relation to others. This is not going to be a psychological study however, but an
exercise in looking for how we can conceptualize the social theoretical frameworks
through which individuals operate. There is a significant area of research in the
immigrant literature and autobiographics from Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts to Ma’s
Immigrant Subjectivities which looks at the structure of immigrant autobiographers’
cultural knowledge and rhetorical repertoires, which is helpful in identifying immigrant
autobiographers’ conceptual and cognitive structures along a material and socio-literary
axis of Extravagance and Necessity outlined by Sau-ling Wong. Like Wong, I find formal
merit in the work of the Ethnicity School, but ultimately find it’s ahistorical and thematic
approach to immigrant autobiographics simply misses the point. What we need is to
“penetrate beyond the discourses and consciousness of human actors to the conditions
and foundation of their day-to-day experiences” (Giroux 1983, p144).

10
OPERATIONALIZING HABITUS IN THE ANALYSIS OF AN
AUTOBIOGRAPHICS OF AMERICANIZATION
But a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
(Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, “The Boxer”)
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please, they do
not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
(Marx 1852, p. 103)
Disposition: a tendency of an object or system to act or react in characteristic ways
in certain situations.
(Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy)
In this section I present my rationale for using Pierre Bordieu’s habitus and the approach
I adopt in working with it to elaborate the organizational structure of immigrant
autobiographers’ thinking. The habitus forms a central plank of my theoretical and
methodological framework in this study and I offer a four-fold operationalization of it
that can help us come to an understanding of immigrant authorial agency and practice.
Because one aspect of the habitus is embodied social structure, it forms a coherent
bridge between a structuralist analysis of society on the one hand and human practice
on the other. The other aspects of the habitus (dispositions, structuring and symbolic
violence) similarly indicate ways in which I can develop a framework for analyzing
immigrant autobiographers’ self-reflective discourse to uncover the practical and
compositional logic therein.

11
HABITUS AS THE BASIS FOR SUBJECTIVITY IN NARRATIVE
I will begin with a consideration of the significance and operationalization of the
habitus – a more generalized construct than Basil Bernstein’s ‘code’ which has really
only been operationalized in educational settings (Harker and May 1993, p 173). We do
need to consider the generative grammar of educational practices and such a generative
grammar is offered by Pierre Bordieu’s habitus, which avoids the determinacy of Basil
Bernstein’s code through the paradoxically useful indeterminacy of the logic of human
practice (Bordieu 1990a, p 77). Crudely (and possibly unhelpfully brief) the habitus is
EMBODIED SOCIAL STRUCTURE IN PRACTICE AND THOUGHT and thus it is a notion that
transcends the dichotomy and distinction between structure and agency. Social structure
becomes embodied by individual, textual practice as an effect of secondary socialization
(or enculturation) and consequently the resultant social practices and authorial
interventions deployed or marshaled in constructing an Apologia pro vita sua through
the medium of narrative relations and interactions immigrant autobiographers thus give
effect/affect to and sustain these underlying social structures.
In this section, I will address what I see as the significant elements of the
applicability of the habitus in deconstructing immigrant autobiographers’
understandings and negotiation of the American Habitus. These are: the habitus as the
embodiment of social structure, the habitus as habit and dispositions, the habitus as a
structuring device and the habitus as symbolic violence. These form the elements in the
agency-structure symbiosis characteristic of my operationalization of a Bordieuian
approach and are fundamental elements in the framework I am constructing in this
chapter towards a socio-literary perspective. I will look at each of these in turn. It needs
to be borne in mind that the habitus is not only a sociological construct for
conceptualizing and theorizing the nature of human practices. It is also a method for
analyzing and describing those practices and understandings held by practitioners,
hence its practical application in this study.

12
THE HABITUS AS THE EMBODIMENT OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE
Pierre Bordieu uses the habitus to replace ‘rules’ with a strategic “feel for the
game” (Bordieu 1990a, p 9). Rogers Brubaker sees the habitus as important within
sociological thought because it represents:
the system of dispositions that mediate between inert structures and the
practices through which social life is sustained and structures are
reproduced or transformed. (Brubaker 1985, p 758)
So conceptually, the habitus is Pierre Bordieu’s approach to theorizing how people enact
and embody dominant ruling ideas as well as in transforming and adapting them to
their purposed in the act of self-representation. Aaron Cicorel refers to this aspect of the
habitus too:
Studies of socialization have for the most part ignored Bordieu’s distinctive
way of calling attention to how power or forms of dominance are
reproduced in settings like the family and the school such that they have
lasting effects on future behavior and the way in which dominant groups
sustain themselves. Neither however have Bordieu nor most students of
socialization, language development, and educational processes examined
the local ways in which a habitus reproduces dominant beliefs, values and
norms through the exercise of symbolic power and by bestowing cultural
capital; in particular, the way children perceive, acquire, comprehend and
implement power. Bordieu’s notion of habitus, however provides a
powerful tool for examining domination as everyday practice; but this
notion must be cognitively and linguistically documented. (Cicorel 1993, p
111)
Hence, the significance of the habitus is that it “constitutes the means whereby
individuals are adapted to the needs of specific social structures” and by extension
narrative genres (Callinicos 1999, p 293).
THE HABITUS AS HABIT AND DISPOSITION
Pierre Bordieu himself often fails to offer a clear definition of the habitus -
because he claims it is indefinable and inaccessible outside of human practice. In much
the same way, it is difficult to define “autobiography” without referring to specific

13
practices in specific contexts. Generic definitions can prove constraining rather than
helpful. In Distinction, Pierre Bordieu describes the habitus as
both the generative principle of objectively classifiable judgements and the
system of classifications of these practices. It is in the relationship between
the two capacities which define the habitus, the capacity to produce
classifiable practices and works, and the capacity to differentiate and
appreciate these practices and products (taste), that the represented social
world, i.e., the space of life-styles, is constituted. (Bordieu 1979: 1984, p 170)
To some extent, this is a helpful development; or habitus is what we use to classify and
judge and at the same time it is the collection and make up of those judgements and so is
deeply implicated in our daily practices. One way forward is to consider the habitual
nature of the actions that make up our practice. Where do these habits come from?
Largely they derive from our up-bringing and social background and all that goes with
it such as beliefs, perspectives, interpersonal relations throughout the processes of
primary and secondary socialization:
The habitus acquired in the family is at the basis of the structuring of school
experiences; the habitus transformed by the action of the school is in turn at
the basis of all subsequent experiences. (Bordieu and Wacquant 1992, p 134)
Hence, the role of the school and autobiography-as-schooling-genre are critical in the
development of wider social organization. The habitus becomes transformed within the
school, yet with its possibilities limited. It tends therefore to be reproductive rather than
transformative. The habitus is not deterministic yet it is dependent on the social field--
different practices may be produced by the same habitus in different fields. The habitus
thus mediates rather than determines (Bordieu 1990a, p 116).
Between the child and the world, the whole group intervenes with a whole
universe of ritual practices and also of discourses, sayings, proverbs, all
structured in concordance with the principles of the corresponding habitus.
(Bordieu 1972, p 167)
The habitus is thus a reflection of social structure, but also illustrates how we become
constituted via generalized social dispositions that represent a repertoire of subjectivities
and identities available to immigrant autobiographers.

14
THE HABITUS AS A STRUCTURING DEVICE
This seems to offer some specificity to the notion of ideology, which I see as
related to rather than contrasted with the habitus. Or habits are not mechanically
produced, we have idiosyncrasies, or own inventions and creations picked up on the
way, partly depending on what we ‘choose’ to focus on and what we ‘choose’ to ignore.
Of course we may not actually consciously choose at all, rather, we may be (pre)-
disposed, conditioned etc.
We can always say that individuals make choices, as long as we do not
forget that they do not choose the principals of these choices. (Wacquant
1989, p 45)
The habitus and its relation to practice seem to be based not upon causality, (and
potentially, by implication, intentionality) but on relations. Ludwig Wittgenstein
problematizes the notion of causality following a Humean strain:
The proposition that your action has such and such a cause, is a hypothesis.
The hypothesis is well-founded if one has had a number of experiences
which, roughly speaking, agree in showing that your action is the regular
sequel of certain conditions which we then call causes of the action. In
order to know the reason which you had for making a certain statement, for
acting in a particular way, etc., no number of agreeing experiences is
necessary, and the statement of your reason is not a hypothesis. The
difference between the grammars of “reason” and “cause” is quite similar
to that between the grammars of “motive” and “cause”. Of the cause one
can say that one can’t know it but can only conjecture it. On the other hand
one often says: “Surely I must know why I did it” talking of the motive.
When I say: “We can only conjecture the cause, but we know the motive”
this statement will be seen later on to be a grammatical one. The “can”
refers to a logical possibility. (Wittgenstein 1958, p 15)
This seems a reasonable position to take, and one that is consistent with a Bordieuian
position.
It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that
what they do has more meaning than they know. (Bordieu 1972, p 79)
It does seem reasonable to argue that the dispositions we come to assume are quite
intimately connected to the frameworks that guide and organize or thinking about the
self and the nature of the autobiographical writing practice, as Seth Kreisberg suggests:

15
Ideology and hegemony work directly on the body as well that is on the
level of or everyday unconscious experience. On fundamental levels, who
we are, what we want, what we need, and thus what kinds of social
relationships we seek out and create are shaped by the patterns and daily
routines of our everyday lives. In part this occurs through the process by
which ideology seeps deep within our personalities into the depth of our
unconscious, shaping our personalities, needs and desires. I want to argue
though that the process by which social practices become sedimented and
reproduce themselves, while connected to ideological processes of
reproduction are also distinct from these processes. People tend to relate to
others in the same way others relate to them. We tend to act in ways we see
and experience others’ actions. Experience solidifies into habit, in fact
hegemony is most encompaszing when a dominant hegemony reflects and
is expressed in everyday experience and in a range of social practices and
structures in a society. In this society relationships of domination are
maintained by just such a correspondence of consciousness and experience,
which while never total and static is still powerful and broadly
encompaszing. (Kreisberg 1992, p 16)
Seth Kreisberg raises an important issue here and touches upon the relationships
between subjectivity, habitus and ideology. The relationship between subjectivity-as-
personality, habitus and ideology is not greatly theorized in immigrant autobiographical
practice and socio-literary criticism and part of my aim is to construct some mapping
between them. This is a central issue, because an understanding of how our dispositions
are shaped and organized by social structure and conversely how our dispositions
mirror those structures is crucial in exploring the agency/structure relationship as it
manifested in immigrant self narratives.
HABITUS AS SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE: NARRATIVE & SOCIAL REGENERATION, RENEWAL BY
KILLING A SELF
One of the key elements of Pierre Bordieu’s approach to understanding the role
didactic social practices like schools, textbooks and education practices and even
autobiographical speech acts play in social reproduction is symbolic violence (Bordieu
1972), a forceful phrase for quite a subtle idea. Symbolic violence occurs where the
arbitrary cultural norms of the dominant groups are presented not as arbitrary, but as
the legitimate and natural norms of narrative and social behavior: the classic example

16
being the White-Ethnic Americaniztion narrative tradition within which Faber,
Yierzerska, Cahan, Singer, Hoffman and Perez-Firmat write, and which can be thought
to have reached an apogee in the early part of the last century with the publication of
Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912) but remains a vital stock of the American
canonical repertoires available to newcomers to the United States. Important concepts
for Pierre Bordieu here are recognition and misrecognition. Symbolic violence is not
simply covert oppression, but involves resignation, a recognition of boundaries, but a
misrecognition of these boundaries as natural rather then oppressive. Power relations
are obscured, and this creates a narrative ‘false consciousness’ or “méconnaissance”
(Bordieu 1979: 1984, p 387). Translating this as ‘misrecognition’ loses the subtlety of
Pierre Bordieu’s original concept. Participants do not conceal or disguise a practice, but
render it invisible through reconstruing as something else that “goes without saying”
(Harker, Mahar and Wilkes 1990, p 19). An example of this would be the description of
certain immigrant autobiographical forms of language and phrases such as “Americans
in the Making” and so on. Use of such categorizations in turn impinges on the
formulation of the habitus of the ethnic and immigrant autobiographer, they become
constructed or constituted by such structures and thereby their individual trajectories
are specified through both objective structures in the socio-linguistic and cultural
systems and the interaction with the American habitus of others. Pierre Bordieu
considers this a symbolic form of violence that places constraints on the compositional
strategies available to immigrants further delimiting equality of opportunity with
respect to expanding the American canon of acceptable subjectivities through the
mutual recognition that Charles Taylor argues are the basis of social life and commity
(1988). Yet the discourses surrounding Americanization and acculturation into the North
American mainstream give the construal (that is the reconstrual) of wanting to do the
best for the newcomers, that restricting the autobiographical repertoires is not only
appropriate, but is in the best interests of Americans. A immigrant autobiographer’s

17
habitus becomes constrained or bounded by linguistic symbolic violence into
considering and positioning themselves as less able or not-yet-American and placing
them structurally in relation to others. This might then impinge upon their own view of
self, society and ideological belief about power, social structure, nature of self-narrative,
one’s positioning as cultural learner, social actor under conditions not of one’s choosing,
etc.
In being called an injurious name one is paradoxically given a certain
possibility of social existence, initiated into a temporal life of language that
exceeds the prior purposes that animate the call. (Butler 1997, p 2)
We have to see the name as part of the totality of the autobiographer’s social existence
and interactions. Does it fit with my view of myself? Does it fit with how I perceive
other’s view of me? (Althusser 1971. Orig.1970). This process of enforcement of
legitimate order plays its part in the structuring of the habitus. The habitus, partially
formed by early family experiences, influences the way in which the world outside of
the home, ethnic homeland or ancestral past, present or future is interpreted.
Conversely, the way symbolic violence is enacted in the Americanization process
influences in its part the way family life is interpreted as evinced by Hayslip’s journey
from “Child of War” to “Woman of Peace” (1989) and Hoffman’s appraisal of her
primary socialization & the role of the family and educational intuitions in mediating
one’s experience and expression, in fundamental ways:
“My immigration was very much my parents’ decision. I was thirteen at the time.
We were living in Communist Poland, and we were Jewish, so there were all these
good reasons to emigrate. I think my parents felt that they were doing it for the
children to a large extent but, for many reasons, I absolutely baulked at it. I didn’t
want to emigrate. It was in a way the wrong time... I was being yanked out of my
world and the process of growing up — out of childhood and the beginnings of
adolescence which I felt were very happy...” (Zournazi )
Eva’s pre-migration resistance is fuelled by perceived deprivation of vehicles for
secondary socialization offered by presumed or “imagined” co-national or co-ethnic
community that provides cultural markers and behavioral indices via peer-group

18
norming and trust-building both of which convey the acceptability of the practices as
well as working to exclude alternatives as unnatural or unthinkable. Power may not be
exercised or enforced directly or explicitly in everyday verbal and other exchanges, but
may be exercised more implicitly through a range of more subtle strategies that the
immigrant autobiographer may be unaware of – and which raises some problems for the
socio-literary researcher.
Empirical issues arise around a more immediate sense of consciousness and
the various ways in which participants of interaction can be said to be
unaware of exercising power or seek to convey the idea of not exercising
power. What strategies are employed that resist displays of power or that
seek to neutralize it? (Cicorel 1993, p 192)
Accordingly, cultural works by immigrant autobiographers will be positioned by
their involvement in the American socio-literary system in which symbolic violence is
enacted, and will react differentially. Aaron Cicorel is arguing that while there may be a
lack of awareness of the exercise of power - and by association, symbolic violence –
immigrant autobiographers may adopt strategies that seek to position themselves within
or to distance themselves from displays of autobiographical pride, social power or
immodesty. In viewing autobiographical practice as a form of social and symbolic
interaction and thereby adopting a socio-literary perspective with respect to
autobiography-qua-social-situation I align my efforts and consider them complementary
to recent efforts to bridge the dichotomy by sociologist Diane Bjorklund in her
comprehensive survey of two centuries worth of autobiographical writings by
Americans in the 19th
and 20th
Centuries.
Bjorklund grounds her analysis and conclusion on sound historical review of the
structural and ideologically-situated discourses that seek to offer an autobiographer a
platform upon which to enact a performance of self that fashions a narrative subjectivity
that is articulated and generated by tensions between the text of Self (consciousness-for-
itself) and the context of Socius-as-Other (consciousness-in-itself):

19
“Unless autobiographers intend for their life stories to be private
documents only for themselves, they are communicating with a future
audience of readers. Autobiographers are not only constructing the stories
of their lives, they are also strategically presenting the self. We can usefully
apply Erving Goffman’s (1959) analysis of impression management to
autobiographers since they are a tempting to persuade readers that they, in
some crucial way, admirable people.
In viewing autobiographies from a symbolic interactionist perspective, Bjorklund
correctly argues that…
”putting together an autobiography is not simply a matter of recalling and
recording the facts of one’s personal history. As an action of
communication, it entails problems of composition and
rhetoric—something openly acknowledged by many autobiographers.
Autobiographers select “events” and “facts” from their lives that fit into a
comprehensible narrative. Thus, as the anthologist Edward Bruner (1984,
p. 7) also observed, ‘Life histories are accounts, representations of lives, not
lives as actually lived.’ The definition of self in autobiography is shaped not
only by historical changes in the available vocabularies of self…but also by
the constraints, complexities, and opportunities of the social situation of
presenting an autobiography. The autobiographer considers the
composition of the intended audience, the current ‘climate of opinion’
concerning what is an acceptable self, and the conventions of storytelling
and autobiography. The writing of an autobiography is a social act---both
as a part of the “community of discourse” and as a type of social interaction
in which one tries to influence others (Barbour 1992). (1998, p 17).
By envisioning an Iserian “idealized reader,” autobiographers can construct an “implied
reader” serves as both foil and touchstone for Americanness. As Bjorklund adds,
“[a]lthough the audience is not physically present and this is usually no face-to-face
interaction between autobiographers and readers (allowing no immediate feedback as in
a conversation), the autobiographer do take into account the reactions of the expected
audience” (ibid). A further extended excerpt from Bjorklund’s Interpreting the Self, will
help expand on the significance of grasping the historical evolutions in the constitution
of American selves and the role immigrant autobiographers play in extending,
subverting and perpetuating an uniquely American narrative of rhetorical
parthogenesis:
“The genre of autobiography provides us with a valuable written record of
how people have thought about the self. By comparing autobiographies
over time, we can behold the diversity in this bountiful feast of self-

20
narratives, yet we also can see clearly how these stories of unique lives
necessarily link to a larger cultural discourse about the self. We discern the
individual voices of the autobiographers, but we also discover culture
speak through the self. These self-narratives, however, have even more to
offer when we also recognize them as rhetorical accomplishments.
Autobiographers use vocabularies of self, not only to make sense of their
lives but also to present a praiseworthy self to their audiences. They are
negotiating their place in relation to cultural norms and values. We can see
them do so, for example, when they try to avoid obvious boasting, when
they declare they are telling the truth, and when they worry about wasting
their readers’ time with an uninteresting story. Autobiographies, therefore,
give us an opportunity to examine the complex interplay of the micro level
of social situation (as autobiographers strategically relate themselves to
norms and values) with the macro level of the historical and cultural
vocabularies of self.” (1998, p 158-159)
And, she goes on to demonstrate the importance of viewing autobiography-as-such as
an “action” following Goffman in viewing self-representation as constituting impression
management within the context of a “social situation” and mapping to a Burkean
“rhetorical situation” or Austinian “speech act”:
“This cultural discourse furnishes not only ideas about the nature of
selfhood but also evaluative standards for model selves and model lives.
Autobiographers show us which evaluative standards they are attempting
to meet as they offer the stories of their lives publicly. They are aware that
others will evaluate their actions, and the potential for feeling pride, shame,
or embarrassment as a result gives them good reason to try to guide the
readers’ judgements of their lives. From this perspective, we can
understand Philip Roth’s (1988, p. 172) claim that autobiography is
‘probably the most manipulative of all literary forms.’ Or the literary critic
John Sturrock’s (1993, p. 19) more kindly worded assessments that
autobiography is “he most sociable of literary acts.” (1998, p 159)
In constituting the canonical immigrant hagiography, immigrant makes use of available
discourses and genres in circulation at the time or that they have come to embodied
model or play out a script that provides a dramaturgical, hence, ethical dimension to
their self-pronouncements. Immigrants reside in an existential and ideational cognitive
space that bifurcates their self-reported vision and identity through a cross cultural and
bilingual worldview that structures and is generative of their understanding of the roles
migration and identity change has had on their respective life course and its attendant
narrative. As Hoffman corroborates…

21
The immediate condition of writing Lost in Translation was marginal to the
subject of the book... But I had been preoccupied with the subject of
language and self-translation for a long time. What I wanted to talk about
was not just language but the conjunction of language and identity, and
that to do that I needed a case study — and the case study I knew best was
myself. It needed to be done from within a subjectivity since it was so much
about subjectivity. I decided to write it as a memoir — quite reluctantly
because I am not a confessional person at all... (Zournazi, ibid.)
The clinical distancing evinced in the “case study” approach to self-representation
employed by Eva Wyrda, the narratee and authorial avatar (cf. Booth, Rhetoric of
Fiction) of Hoffman’s Americanization story premised on a life “lived in a new
language’ is ideologically, hence, symptomatic of therapeutic discursive practices in
vogue in 1980s United States where Hoffman’s narratee takes degrees in English
Literature and Language from Rice and then Harvard leading to her positioning as an
“émigré “ and exilic oracle to her New York bourgie friends and Texan boyfriend in
“The New World” triptych of her translation (Lost in Translation, p 198). She further
corroborates this therapeutic autobiographical intervention in a radio conversation with
European radio commentator Mary Zournazi:
“Writing is an attempt to close the gap on the sense of being estranged from
myself. In my case, this estrangement happened very much in daily perceptions
and daily life. In a sense, writing is the attempt to find a language that is embedded
in yourself and that somehow can express the self directly. I know that is a kind of
dream and not completely attainable, but it is the attempt to find a language which
sort of bubbles up directly. I don’t know if I have a coherent philosophy of
language. But my notions of language have to do with its relationship to
subjectivity. The one lesson of my experience is that the first language seems to be
attached to identity with a kind of absoluteness, so that it seems to be coeval with
identity and with the world; words seem to stand for the things they describe.
Subsequent languages don’t have that kind of absoluteness — I mean that one is
aware of a second language much more qua language qua its own system. (Foreign
Dialogues, 1998)
Hoffman identifies the linguistic register as her site of struggle and contestation towards
self-expression and self-definition. By so positioning her narrative subjectivity, she
endorses a worldview that exemplifies C. Wright Mills’ “sociological imagination”
wherein she overtly and tacitly acknowledges the dual role of socius in the constitution

22
of the self and its narrative posts. One could accurately characterize an undermining
undercurrent to Eva’s quest for individual voice through an self-analysis that highlights
the embedded and sedimented nature of language. The warrant to her argumentative
thread is a an implicit recognition of the ontological primacy that “socialization rather
than self-initiated cultivation of self” has throughout the life course for which she
attempts a narrative depiction (cf. Bjorklund, p 127).
Moreover, Hoffman’s reflections on her autobiographical acts a decade after the
fact, paint a picture of existential trauma resulting from psychologically powerful
experiences occasioned by migration at age 13—much like Mary Antin before her, as
Eva reminds us in the “Exile” section of her autobiography where she recounts her
Errand into the Linguistic Wilderness:
“The first real condition which spurred me to write about my immigration was the
peculiar experience of being virtually without language for a short while. It was
because I came to Canada without English and because Polish became completely
unusable, and for reasons which probably did have to do with the circumstances of
my immigration and psychological factors. I somehow hid my Polish. I suppressed
it. So I was without language — I was without internal language, and that was a
terribly traumatic experience which I never quite forgot and which haunts me still.
I think this kind of radical state of language loss lasted... well I don’t know,
perhaps not even a year. But it was a very quick lesson in the vital importance of
language to one’s identity. It was not a state which could be sustained, so I started
to try filling the gap with English. But that was a terribly long process, I mean in
the sense that the language didn’t quite belong to me, that it wasn’t quite inside,
that it wasn’t mine. I would say this lasted — I know it is shocking — for about
twenty years. (Zournazi, op. cit.)

23
CHAPTER 2: IMMIGRANT AUTOBIOGRAPHICS IN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC &
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION
VARIETAS DELECTA: DRAMAS OF BEING & BELONGING
The paperback edition of Fae Myenne Ng’s 1993 novel Bone is blurbed “national
bestseller” on the outside and, on the inside, boasts the several pages of “more acclaim”
that are designed to lure readers like a two-thumbs-up movie review. The hyperbole is
the expected fare for advertisements and letters of recommendation, but the content of
the praise seems less routine. “This is the inside view of Chinatown,” writes Edmund
White, “one never presented before so eloquently.” But White’s praise of Ng’s depiction
of Asian experience is followed by a notice from the New York Times which offers a
most American seal of approval: “With the buoyant parting image, Ng invites
comparison to F. Scott Fitzgerald and the last line of The Great Gatsby.” Likewise, blurbs
on Chang-Rae Lee’s paperback Native Speaker feature the work not only as Korean but
also as an echo of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, while Lee himself begins the novel with
an epigraph from Walt Whitman. Ethnic American authors have met with criticism for
not representing their culture accurately, but the disparate nature of these reviews, I
think, raises the question of which ethnic group, precisely, such works actually do
represent. “Though it is often regarded as a very minor adjunct to great American
mainstream writing,” Werner Sollors writes in Beyond Ethnicity, “ethnic literature is, as
several readers pointed out in the past, prototypically American literature” (8).
The distinctly “ethnic” and the distinctly “American” are closely related in
autobiographical and fictional works on immigration and assimilation, but I want to
suggest that it is precisely this negotiation between ethnic and American cultures that
makes these works so American—i.e. basically playing out a drama of individuation and
groupness--the essence of immigrant autobiographics in the United States. Robert F.
Sayre reminds us “American autobiographers have generally connected their own lives

24
to the national life or to national ideas. As Scott Fitzgerald wrote in the 1930s, America is
not a land or a people. ‘France was a land, England was a people, but America, having
about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter’” (149). Autobiographies, then,
are stories of the ideas individuals live by, and the principal American idea or myth is
one of self-creation. No one participates more fully in this self-creation than immigrants,
who must of necessity reject or reevaluate their heritage, their parents, and their former
life. Hence, the stories and histories recounted in immigrant autobiography are
American self-invention writ large.
Given this cultural emphasis on self-creation, it is no wonder autobiography
plays such a large role in the American literary tradition. From captivity narratives to
Benjamin Franklin to Henry Adams to Gertrude Stein, the American bookshelf is filled
with individuals telling their own stories. Sayre notes “autobiography may be the
preeminent kind of American expression. Commencing before the Revolution and
continuing into our own time, America and autobiography have been peculiarly linked”
(147). Evaluating the connection between autobiography and American culture, Sayre
considers landmark autobiographies (those of Franklin, Whitman, Adams, and
Frederick Douglass) rather than “the memoirs of military leaders and statesmen” or
unsung private individuals, explaining that “the former is perhaps too much a citizen;
the latter takes his citizenship more or less for granted. Thus neither has been so
valuable to other Americans as the autobiographers to whom citizenship, in the broadest
sense, is a major issue in their total development” (168). Given this criterion, it seems
logical to expand Sayre’s ideas to include immigrant autobiographical writing, for
perhaps no one is more concerned with citizenship in extremis than the immigrant. Here
the issues of citizenship are played out explicitly, for high stakes.
Autobiography also seems a natural genre for self-creating Americans not only
in content but also in form. Telling the story of one’s life requires one to shape or
reshape events, picking and choosing, in order to create a new self or persona who

25
proceeds along a distinct trajectory -- in short, the literary form is another version of self-
invention.
The American tradition of individualism is much noted and long established:
Alexis de Tocqueville noted the emergence in America of individualism (as opposed to
what “our fathers [knew as] egoisme (selfishness)” (192)), a drive to separate from
society at large and to function as a distinct entity. Tocqueville saw individualism as a
fact but not necessarily a virtue; in a culture governed by this philosophy,
“the woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced.
Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after, no one
has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity to
himself” (194).
Examining late-twentieth century life in terms of Tocqueville’s diagnosis, Robert Bellah
in Habits of the Heart identifies two essential aspects of American individuation as
“leaving home” and “leaving church,” a sometimes-temporary separation from the life
and values of one’s parents in order to forge one’s own distinct personality. “Separation
and individuation are issues that must be faced by all human beings,” he admits, “but
leaving home in its American sense is not. In many peasant societies, the problem is
staying home -- living with one’s parents until their death and worshipping parents and
ancestors all one’s life. [...] For us, leaving home is the normal expectation” (57). One
may maintain a warm relationship with one’s parents, and return to their home or
beliefs, but American culture demands that they be examined critically and accepted by
choice.
NOMEN EST OMEN
For many “native” Americans, these separations are somewhat metaphorical,
involving perhaps a cross-town move and one’s own choice of career. But no one leaves
“home” and “church” as dramatically as the new American, whose physical separation
from the country of origin and submersion into a new culture create a need to reinvent

26
the self as distinct from parents and heritage. The example of Mary Antin, a Jewish girl
whose family immigrated to Boston from Russia in 1894, dramatizes this.
In The Promised Land, Antin describes existence in the Russian Pale as
“medieval,” suggesting not only backwardness but also a time in which much of life was
predetermined; people followed the roles laid out for them by their parents, and the
social system was rigid. Watching the treadmill horse at the bathhouse in her hometown
of Polotzk, Antin could see a microcosm of life in the Pale.
I knew what a horse’s life should be, entangled with the life of a master:
adventurous, troubled, thrilled; petted and opposed, the buzz of beasts and men
in the market place; to-morrow the yielding turf under tickled flanks, and the
lone whinny of scattered mates. How empty the existence of the treadmill horse
beside this! As empty and dull as the life of almost any woman in Polotzk, had I
had eyes to see the likeness. (78)
The medieval aspects of life in the Pale trapped its residents in strictly defined roles, and
had Antin continued to live there, she too would have been pigeonholed. As a Jewish
girl in the Russian ghetto, she would have had few opportunities for education and few
choices in her future. The community would have determined her role, just as sobriquets
were determined socially, often communally. “Family names existed only in official
documents, such as passports,” she explains. “Among my neighbors in Polotzk were
Yankel the Wig-maker, Mulye the Blind, Moshe the Six-fingered” (36). Had she stayed in
Polotzk, Antin might have become “Mashke the Short,” but the move to America
recreates her as “Mary Antin.” “I felt important to answer to such a dignified title,” she
writes. “It was just like America that even plain people should wear their surnames on
week days” (150). Whereas popular nicknames were bestowed based on one
distinguishing feature, and locked the bearer into a role that may or may not have been
flattering, Antin’s American name did not limit the possibilities of her identity.
While the move to America opens possibilities for Antin, the knowledge of how
to achieve these possibilities is not always easy to obtain. Because her parents are also
new immigrants, and unfamiliar with the culture they now live in, they are no longer

27
reliable role models for their children. Instead, both parents and children must look
elsewhere for instruction, and the new immigrant “is corrected, admonished, and
laughed at, whether by interested friends or the most indifferent strangers; and his
American experience is thus begun. The process is spontaneous on all sides, like the
education of the child by the family circle” (143). Others now dispense parental wisdom;
mothers and fathers model the lifestyle of the old world, and children must look
elsewhere if they are to learn how to be American adults. The parents, on the other
hand, “in their bewilderment and uncertainty, [...] needs must trust us children to learn
from such models as the tenements afforded. More than this, they must step down from
their role of parental authority, and take the law from their children’s mouths; for they
had no other means of finding out what was good American form” (213). Immigrant
parents were repudiated in favor of the new culture, but it’s important to note that
Americanization has as much to do with the process as the result; that is, without
parents as reliable models, members of the younger generation were forced to forge
their own way, by necessity. It was up to them to determine for themselves how to
behave and what to become. “Native” Americans are not exempt from this picking and
choosing among the values of peers; “if we are to be different from our fathers and also
different from the white marble gods they found in Plutarch or the grizzly patriarchs
they chose from the Bible, then we must imitate contemporaries” (Sayre 155). Sayre cites
Scott Fitzgerald, John Adams and even the famously “self-made” Benjamin Franklin as
examples of this phenomenon (156), which is not necessarily limited to those new to
American culture. Each generation, as Tocqueville suggested, reinvents itself.
INTER CAECOS REGNAT LUSCUS.
It’s no wonder, then, that adolescence and immigration are so closely linked in
Eva Hoffman’s memoir Life in Translation. A Polish Jew transplanted in 1959 to Canada
and then to the United States, she comments that her experiences are in some ways

28
uncannily similar to those of Antin, although context has made some changes. “A
hundred years ago, I [too] might have felt the benefits of a steady, self-assured ego, the
sturdy energy of forward movement, and the excitement of being swept up into a
greater national purpose. But I have come to a different America, and instead of a
central ethos, I have been given the blessings and the terrors of multiplicity” (164). While
Antin tells a “success story,” Hoffman focuses on the hardships of a change of
hemispheres during adolescence.
She describes her alienation: “Inside its elaborate packaging, my body is stiff,
sulky, wary. When I’m with my peers, who come by crinolines, lipstick, cars, and self-
confidence naturally, my gestures show that I’m here provisionally, by their grace, that I
don’t rightfully belong” (110). Hoffman blames her discomfort on her membership in an
outsider culture, but it also has to do with the pains of growing to adulthood – few
adolescents are fully comfortable with themselves, regardless of whether they’ve
immigrated. Still, her difficulty serves to illustrate the similarity of adolescence and
immigration, which is the separation from the parents’ lifestyle.
Hoffman sees herself as a misfit, but, she writes, “perhaps it is my [...] cherishing
of uncertainty as the only truth that is, after all, the best measure of my assimilation;
perhaps it is in my misfittings that I fit. Perhaps a successful immigrant is an
exaggerated version of the native. From now on, I’ll be made, like a mosaic, of fragments
– and my consciousness of them. It is only in that observing consciousness that I remain,
after all, an immigrant” (164). In a country of individualists, everyone is in some way a
misfit, and intentionally so. “If we are all other […] then we may also explore the
otherness in ourselves, which is the theme of many American autobiographical
conversion stories” (Sollors 31). Hoffman, as an “exaggerated native,” is simply highly
conscious of this culturewide emphasis on distinctiveness and separation, thanks to the
double adolescence that separated her both from Poland and from her parents.

29
For Vivian Gornick, a second-generation Russian Jew, separation from the
parents (and especially, for her, the mother) is the essential issue, and in her memoir
Fierce Attachments, it is framed in terms of immigration. Early in the work, Gornick’s
mother recalls a former upstairs neighbor named Cessa. “Want[ing] to be modern,”
Cessa cut off her long hair, meeting with punishment from her father and husband (5).
Gornick’s mother recalls, “‘I say to her, “Cessa, tell your father this is America, Cessa,
America. You’re a free woman.” She looks at me and she says to me, “What do you
mean, tell my father this is America? He was born in Brooklyn”’” (5-6). Being American,
Gornick’s mother suggests, entitles people to throw off their parents’ old traditions and
make their own choices. Cessa’s response highlights the continuing problem of
separation from the parents; even though her father was born in Brooklyn and the
family is officially American, she is not exempt from this process. Being American
means not that Cessa, or anyone, can or should follow the “American” lives of her
parents, but that it is up to her to negotiate between the life her parents prefer and the
life she would like to live.
Cessa’s problem is escaping from a patriarchal system, but Gornick’s problem
throughout Fierce Attachments is her connection to her mother. One typical dilemma
Gornick exemplifies is that the greater opportunity available for each new generation
necessarily creates a separation between parent and child. This is particularly true of
education, which parents typically value and want for their children but which, Gornick
shows in discussing her years at the City College of New York, drives a wedge between
them. “Benign in intent, only a passport to the promised land, City of course was the
real invader,” she writes.
I lived among my people but I was no longer one of them. I think this was true
for most of us at City College. We still used the subways, still walked the familiar
streets between classes, still returned to the neighborhood each night, talked to
our high-school friends, and went to sleep in our own beds. But secretly we had
begun to live in a world inside our heads where we read talked thought in a way
that separated us from our parents, the life of the house and that of the street. We

30
had been initiated, had learned the difference between hidden and expressed
thought. This made us subversives in our own homes. (105)
Education is an almost unquestioned value, prized for its potential to help
people “get ahead,” but the flip side of this, typically unrecognized until it happens, is
that if the child is getting ahead, the parent is being left behind. This is true of Gornick’s
family; she recalls that her mother “hadn’t understood that going to school meant I
would start thinking: coherently and out loud. She was taken by violent surprise. [...] I
had never before spoken a word she didn’t know” (108).
Interestingly, Gornick links the ideas of individuation and creativity, her ability
to write. In a session with her analyst, she describes her creativity as a narrow rectangle
under intense outside pressure. “Why only that small bit of good writing inside a
narrow space, and all around the rhetoric of panic and breathlessness,” the analyst asks.
“That rectangle, I finally explained. It’s a fugitive, a subversive, an illegal immigrant in
the country of my being. It has no civil rights. It’s always on the run. [...] I can’t
naturalize the immigrant” (190). Gornick’s rectangle of creativity is a rectangle of
personal space, and it is “on the run” because of her fierce yet not always healthy
connection to her mother. When the analyst asks why she can’t “naturalize the
immigrant,” Gornick pictures her mother, “her face soft, weak, sadly intelligent. She
leaned forward intently. She was as interested in the question as I. But I remained mute.
I had no answer” (191). The idea of immigration is here the idea of separation and
individuation, finding a distinction from the mother while maintaining some
connection. In order to create, to produce something unique, Gornick must learn to
stand apart from her mother, “immigrating” from the culture of her family to one of her
own making.
The work’s central struggle, that between mother and daughter over the
daughter’s life, reaches only an ambivalent conclusion. The book closes after an
argument, when

31
My mother breaks the silence. In a voice remarkably free of emotion -- a voice
detached, curious, only wanting information -- she says to me, “Why don’t you
go already? Why don’t you walk away from my life? I’m not stopping you.”
I see the light, I hear the street. I’m half in, half out.
“I know you’re not, Ma.” (204)
In terms of immigration, the scene dramatizes the desire both to let go of and hold on to
what might literally be called here the mother culture. The mixed feelings here are a
moving and fitting conclusion to the content of Fierce Attachments, but in a larger
context, I would suggest that the question may be closer to settled than this ending
suggests, and that Gornick really is at least partially detached from her mother. In The
Situation and the Story, Gornick describes the shaping of experience that takes place in
writing a memoir, emphasizing the need to put space between the self and the subject.
“In fact,” she writes, “without detachment there can be no story” (12). Two connections
to ethnic autobiography may be made here. First is that minority groups have a natural
perspective of detachment, since they must negotiate life within a larger culture that is
not their own. Hoffman writes that “it is only in that observing consciousness that I
remain, after all, an immigrant” (164) -- her “misfittings” give her a sharp perception of
the culture around her, and the ability to write clearly about it. Second is that the process
of immigration or naturalization is necessarily a detachment, and furthermore, this is a
creative process. Probably no American is more archetypal than the “self-made” man or
woman, and assimilation is a re-envisioning and remaking of the self.
Furthermore, the act of writing an autobiography is its own kind of “self-
making,” sculpting raw material into a coherent story with a distinct (and usually
upward) trajectory. Autobiography is the act of self-creation on paper. In writing Fierce
Attachments, Gornick recalls, she had to “pull back -- way back -- from these people and
these events to find the place where the story could draw a deep breath,” and from this
distance, she realized that “this point of view could only emerge from a narrator who
was me and at the same time not me” (22). This included rejecting a diary she had

32
written at the time of the events described in Fierce Attachments. “The writing was
soaked in a kind of girlish self-pity -- ‘alone again!’ -- that I found odious” (22). To write
her memoir, Gornick rejected the “alone again!” that was a recorded part of herself in
order to create a distinct persona and a coherently crafted book.
QUE NOCENT, SAEPE DOCENT.
Fictionalization is only one step from the “detached” persona of the author of
autobiography, and I want to turn now to the idea of Americanization in more markedly
fictional works. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong documents major strands of the criticism of The
Woman Warrior, noting that “a number of Chinese-American critics have repeatedly
denounced The Woman Warrior, questioning its autobiographic status, its authenticity,
its representativeness, and thereby Kingston’s personal integrity” (248). These concerns
are related; Wong cites one critic who states baldly that if Kingston does not describe
Chinese life with documentary accuracy and fidelity (that is, if she fictionalizes), then
she does not give readers a true picture of Chinese-American culture -- in short, that she
is not suitably representative of her ethnic group. Critiquing The Woman Warrior, Ya-jie
Zhang writes that the work “did not appeal to me when I read it for the first time,
because the stories in it seemed somewhat twisted, Chinese perhaps in origin but not
really Chinese any more, full of Immigrant autobiographics” (17). Zhang, reading the
work as a Chinese, finds various points that do not match her picture of Chinese culture,
from the retelling of the Hua Mu Lan story to Kingston’s use of the word “ghosts.” She
is able to accept and appreciate the text only when she understands it as “Chinese-
American” rather than “Chinese.” What I want to focus on here is Zhang’s identification
of the imagination as specifically American. Born in California, Kingston could hardly
be expected to have the perspective of one born and raised in China, and so the work is
necessarily “Chinese-American” in this way. However, Zhang does not say that The
Woman Warrior is full of Chinese-Immigrant autobiographics; instead she implies that

33
the imaginative qualities of the book are dependent on the American side of this scale.
Anyone who has Chinese heritage but lives outside China might be said to have to
imagine China in order to write about it, but it somehow sounds different to suppose
that a Chinese-Canadian person would have to use “Canadian imagination” to write a
book like The Woman Warrior.
Immigrant autobiographics, I would suggest, has an aggressive quality that
Zhang is commenting on here. Whereas Jade Snow Wong accounts for her third-person
autobiography by explaining that, “even written in English, an ‘I’ book by a Chinese
would seem outrageously immodest to anyone raised in the spirit of Chinese propriety”
(xiii), the American side of Kingston’s imagination not only allows her to write an “I”
book but also to consider that “I,” its perceptions and imaginations, more important
than the “real world” of verifiable facts. Seeing things as they could be rather than as
they are seems an essential part of Immigrant autobiographics. It may not be a
coincidence that Benjamin Franklin is famous both as an autobiographer and as an
inventor; both of these qualities imply shaping the world rather than submitting to it,
and these two qualities seem to fuse in creating the archetypal American, particularly
since Franklin’s autobiography makes famous the concept of self-invention.
Probably the most well-known American literary self-creation from the world of
fiction, rather than autobiography, is Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. As a novel, the
work is able to depict the paradigmatic self-created American while dramatizing the
tragedy of that self-creation. When the former James Gatz of North Dakota is reborn as
Jay Gatsby, he is descended from no one but himself. “His parents were shiftless and
unsuccessful farm people,” Nick Carraway notes. “His imagination had never really
accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long
Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself” (104). Gatsby has, in a very real
way, imagined himself into being. Furthermore, he has done so with a distinctly
Immigrant autobiographics; it’s peculiarly American to imagine yourself rich and

34
famous in New York while your parents are mediocre in the Midwest, and peculiarly
American (or Franklinesque) to attempt this goal by laying out a program of self-
improvement like the young James Gatz’s:
No wasting time at Shafters or (a name, indecipherable)
No more smokeing [sic] or chewing
Bath every other day
Read one improving book or magazine per week (181-82)
Gatsby’s father, displaying this list to Nick when he arrives in New York for the
funeral, takes great pride in it, and in his son’s self-improvement, even while admitting
that “we was broke up when he run off from home” (181). What Mr. Gatz does not see is
the cause of his son’s death, the faith in imagination and in the future to the exclusion of
an understanding of reality and the past. It is this split from the past that produces
maladaptation: “Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners,” Nick
says, “and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly
unadaptable to Eastern life” (184).
MELODRAMAS OF INDIVIDUATION & CONSOLIDATION
With this prototypical fictionalization of the American experience in mind, I
want to consider what immigrant autobiographics might mean in two recent novels
concerned with ethnicity and assimilation in America -- Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker
and Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone.
The epigraph Lee has chosen comes from Walt Whitman, and the rest of the
work has moments of similarity to the poet. When protagonist Henry Park, working
undercover at the office of politician John Kwang, takes over Kwang’s ggeh, he also
inhabits a Whitmanesque personality. Henry becomes “a complier of lives” (279),
collecting family information and the amount each has contributed to the money club,
and listing it all on a spreadsheet.

35
I am remembering every last piece of them. Whether I wish it or not, I possess
them, their spouses and children, their jobs and money and life. And the more I
see and remember the more their story is the same. The story is mine. How I
come by plane, come by boat. Come climbing over a fence. When I get here, I
work. I work for the day I will finally work for myself. I work so hard that one
day I end up forgetting the person I am. I forget my wife, my son. Now, too, I
have lost my old mother tongue. And I forget the ancestral graves I have left on a
hillside of a faraway land, the loneliest stones that each year go unblessed. (279)
Henry identifies with, embraces, even embodies the mass of people who have led
lives he recognizes and understands, and this identification with the masses is the
source of Lee’s identification with the all-embracing American poet. Sayre’s explication
of Whitman illuminates this connection. America, he explains, is an idea, and one that
the poet accepted willingly. “The paradoxes of America […] were to be his personal
paradoxes as well. He would share in all the success and suffering of the nation as a
whole. He would emulate America, and he would become the ideal common man (also
a paradox) whom other Americans could imitate, remember, and one day celebrate.”
(160).
Lee’s Henry Park, in his undercover operations, has a similarly inclusive
personality. Assimilation has given him a familiarity with the business of being multiple
people at once, and this familiarity facilitates his assumption of different roles and
personae on different assignments. “I had always thought that I could be anyone,
perhaps several anyones at once,” Henry muses. “Dennis Hoagland and his private firm
had conveniently appeared at the right time, offering the perfect vocation for the person
I was [...]. For that I felt indebted to him for life. I found a sanction from our work, for I
thought I had finally found my truest place in the culture” (127). Henry’s job requires
him to build new personalities from the ground up; he writes fictions (or “legends,” as
they are called in his line of work) and then embodies them. “The legend was something
each of us wrote out in preparation for any assignment. It was an extraordinarily
extensive ‘story’ of who we were, an autobiography as such, often evolving to develop
even the minutiae of life experience, countless facts and figures, though it also required a

36
truthful ontological bearing, a certain presence of character” (22). Like autobiographers
and like Whitman, Henry writes himself into different roles as the occasion demands.
REPETITIO EST MATER STUDIORUM.
In “The Sleepers,” Whitman writes, “I am the actor, the actress, the voter, the
politician, / The emigrant and the exile, the criminal that stood in the box, / He who has
been famous and he who shall be famous after to-day, / The stammerer, the well-form’d
person, the wasted or feeble person” (340), and Henry, in various ways, has a similarly
inclusive personality. Lee’s epigraph to Native Speaker, however, comes from a later,
less optimistic section of the same poem. “I turn but do not extricate myself, / Confused,
a past-reading, another, / but with darkness yet.” This moment of stasis and confusion
demonstrates the problems and complications of, to use Sayre’s terms, sharing the
paradoxes of America. Any American Everyman must by nature have moments of
schizophrenia.
Furthermore, both Native Speaker and Bone exemplify the ways in which “the
track of generations [is] effaced” (Tocqueville 194). In Bone, Leila describes Grandpa
Leong’s “makeshift” funeral: “If Grandpa Leong had been a family man, he might have
had real tears, a grieving wife draped in muslin, the fabric weaving around her like
burnt skin” (82). Particularly for the Chinese, a funeral should consist of much grief and
much ceremony, in respect for ancestors and for tradition. Most important of all was the
ultimate disposition of the remains. “Hopefully – and there was hope if there were
children – when his children were grown and making their own money, they’d dig up
his bones, pack them in a clay pot, send them – no, accompany them – back to the home
village for a proper burial” (82). But all of this depends on a family, and Grandpa Leong
is not so lucky. When Leon, his son and Leila’s stepfather, decides to visit his grave, he
cannot find it in the cemetery. Leila takes his background information – American and
Chinese names, village, birth and death dates – to the Hoy Sun Ning Yung Benevolent

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