Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn
the regrets of an Oxfordshire butler, then Seoul-born Lee can write about an Italian American Long Island contractor full of the failings most amusingly lampooned in thick Tom Wolfe novels.” Ed Park’s headline also compares Lee’s novel to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) and adds, “Now it’s Lee’s turn to upend the ethnic p.o.v. Aloft is a leisurely novel—some laughs, some tears—in the voice of Jerry Battle, Caucasian of Italian descent, fiftysomething part-time travel agent, widowed father of two, recreational Cessna pilot, and former head of the family business, which over time has morphed from masonry to landscaping to a high-end home furnishings outfit.” For both Kagy and Park, Lee’s expansion in range reveals itself in the narrative shift that moves the novel away from an Asian American context and narrator. The comparison with Ishiguro is sound, given that he also penned two novels that are ethnically specific to his Japanese heritage prior to embarking on a set of novels that make little or no reference to that background. Not surprisingly, Lee has admitted to being a fan of Ishiguro.6
Despite such praise for Lee’s imaginative approach to narrative perspective, his novel was simultaneously challenged for its authenticity of voice. In the New York Times, A. O. Scott deems that “Jerry has absorbed some of his daughter’s theory-talk, insouciantly dropping words like ‘modality’ and ‘imbrications’ into his regular-guy diction. Still, this does not quite explain the self-consciously lovely writing-school language through which his consciousness is awkwardly filtered.” Scott’s insistence that Jerry’s linguistic mastery does not match up with his character’s background is repeated in other instances. Tom Kagy writes, “Poet-contractors undoubtedly exist, but having one for a narrator overlays the novel with an uneasy consciousness of Chang-rae Lee the Princeton writing professor.” Here Kagy points out that Jerry’s incredibly lyrical eye does not resonate plausibly with his background as an Italian American landscaping business owner. In a review for the Asian Reporter regarding the narrative perspective, Polo queries, “But is it the voice of the 60-year-old stiff who took over Battle Brothers Brick & Mortar, or that of a 38-year-old graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University and, of course, Duck U”?7 In contrast to Scott, who takes a more New Critical approach to the faltering of authentic voice, Kagy and Polo take aim at Lee’s status as a literature professor. Lee’s occupational experience apparently intrudes on the narration by granting the character abilities and viewpoints he should not necessarily have. Of course, such seemingly disingenuous narrative stylings are moot because the notion of an authentic narrative voice is based to a certain extent on speculative assumptions, and yet the ramifications of these perceived aesthetic incongruities stand out particularly in relation to Lee’s background as a Korean American and Asian American writer. Valerie Ryan asserts, “Lee writes in the voice of the quintessentially American Jerry, Eastern seaboard variety, but waxes about race and ethnicity throughout.” However, Ryan ultimately argues, much in the same vein as Kagy and Polo, that various narrative tracks “are less Jerry-like than Lee-like,” again suggesting that Lee’s authorial voice intrudes on Jerry’s storytelling.
In the passage that generates Polo’s critique of authenticity, Jerry describes his son-in-law Paul and the challenges he faces as an Asian American writer. Jerry explains, “I guess if you put a gun to my head I’d say he writes about The Problem with Being Sort of Himself—namely, the terribly conflicted and complicated state of being Asian and American and thoughtful and male, which would be just dandy in a slightly different culture or society but in this one isn’t the hottest ticket” (74). By including Paul Pyun as a character within the novel, Lee anticipates and invites the leap Polo makes as a reviewer.8 That is, readers will ultimately conflate Paul Pyun with Chang-rae Lee, but Polo takes it a step further by articulating that the inclusion of such a character legitimates the critique that Lee invades the text as a shadow narrator. The strange overlapping of Jerry Battle, Paul Pyun, and Chang-rae Lee exists at the core of a racial authenticity abyss, where Lee’s desire to move outside the Korean American and Asian American paradigm is still challenged based on his ghostly narratorial presence, what Kagy calls an “overlay” of Lee’s voice directly onto Jerry’s. Kagy contends that “Battle’s son-in-law Paul Pyun is the author’s effort at relegating his Asian identity to a conscientious, academic footnote,” but this assertion reduces both the writer’s ability to fictionalize and the ability of the minor character to call attention to larger issues (focused on race, ethnicity, and Asian American identity) that do not necessarily take up as much narrative space as, say, Jerry’s daily ramblings.
I target these book reviewers because they focus on the “real” at the expense of the metaphorical significance that Paul Pyun plays in the novel. Ed Park writes that Paul Pyun is Lee’s “wry self-critique, not without longing,” and while this description is accurate to a certain extent, the dilemma that Paul opens up as a writer is experienced not only by Chang-rae Lee but by Asian American artists more generally. In an interview with Terry Hong, Lee admits, “[Paul is] someone I wrote to make fun of myself and to make fun of the image of the ‘Asian American writer’ working out his anxieties”; Paul exists simultaneously as a “self-critique” and as a reference to a larger discourse (“Flying Aloft” 23). These “anxieties” are perhaps related to the native-informant status of the Asian American writer, what Jerry calls “The Problem with Being Sort of Himself,” but this rather murky predicament hinges on the phrase “sort of,” denoting “not fully.” Can an Asian American writer not fully be him- or herself, at least in relation to race and ethnicity? The reading practices and responses to the book suggest that this challenge still exists despite the fact that Aloft has been so widely and positively reviewed.
The limits of authenticity for Lee do not lie in the fact that he is Asian American and therefore cannot try to imagine what it would be like to be Italian American. Scott’s seemingly more insular (read: New Critical) review is probably the one that Lee himself would have most appreciated, as Scott is suspicious of Jerry’s voice but does not link it to Lee’s background, as Kagy and Polo do. Kagy’s and Polo’s critiques are speculative at best and do not address the foundational issue related to how literary characters are constructed. Scott relates how Jerry’s professor daughter fails to be a convincing source of Jerry’s scholarly knowledge, but in Lee’s own estimation, Jerry’s characterization belies another impulse. In an interview with Kenneth Quan, Lee admits that Jerry is not a “realistic portrayal” but explains his choice for Jerry’s unique storytelling skills: “It’s an articulation of what I think a person like Jerry thinks and feels and wants to feel and that’s why I wrote it the way I wrote it because he has the same kind of feel and reach and depth that anyone else has. One of my first ideas was what kind of language should he have—then I thought I’ve met a lot of Italian-American guys who have a lot of learning and lot of depth and sensitivity.” Lee flouts mimeticism as a model for character creation, but more than that, he directs his construction to challenge stereotypical conceptions of Italian Americans. In other words, there is a rhetorical impulse behind Jerry’s linguistic idiosyncrasies that cannot be simply justified through the explanation that Lee’s voice invades Jerry’s. Although there is an obvious disarticulation between the author and the narrator-protagonist, not only on the ethnoracial level but also with regard to occupational difference, some reviews continually refer to Lee’s spectral presence in the novel, without more directly engaging the meaning produced by the specificities of narratorial identity and voice. Analyzing character construction rather than discerning authenticity, then, might be directed toward thinking about, for instance, what giving Jerry such a voice does to our understanding of the novel and how he views the fictional world he inhabits.
If we bracket Lee’s background as both a creative-writing professor and a Korean American, how do we read Jerry’s incredibly imaginative and lyrically inflected observations? If we take his authenticity of voice as a concern, where does Jerry’s voice, rather than Lee’s intrusion, fail us? If we accept Lee’s thesis that such sensitivity in Jerry’s character reflects a larger consciousness that flouts stereotypes and assumptions, then how do we investigate the nature of racial difference as it appears in Jerry’s storytelling? Such questions animate my reading of Aloft, in which I consider the nature of inferential racism at play within the novel, a form of subtle prejudice made explicit through Lee’s use of refracted narration.
Refracting