Dictee, or Odes to ()
I
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The ( ) sat
In the cedar-limbs.[1]
This is an essay of introductions to a book which is infamously difficult to read. It considers Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee as a lyric using one line as an entry for reading its others: “Inside outside. As if never.”[2] Introduction will be the principal method of reading, as if every introduction knows it could void its own movement of entry. Like writing in Dictee, reading Dictee may imitate the corrosion of knowledge when it asserts itself as knowledge.
Since its publication in 1982 by Tanam Press, encounters with Dictee have continued to espouse feelings of incomprehensibility. A reader comes across language as if the failure to read is not a writer’s struggle for words, but the paradox of one’s eyes in an answerable payment of attention. Dictee has offered a freedom to many English-speakers who do not feel at home in the language. Cathy Park Hong writes of how Cha invents a form for the immigrant’s discomfort with English.[3] Ken Chen encourages us to read Dictee like a ritual one must offer themselves to as a catechumen, rather than to impose an order of knowledge as if one were refracting the light of their own pedagogy through a glass darkly.[4] Anne Anlin Cheng observes how Dictee critiques the very autobiographical form through which it is read for “the reader is not allowed to sentimentalize over a prior “original, native” voice.”[5]
II
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the ( )[6]
This essay reads Cha from the perspectives in Wallace Steven’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird because the English in Dictee places a reader of English within the sphere of every other act of poiesis in the history of this language. The blackbird has been replaced by an absence—the possibility of another word—to imitate the conditions of Cha’s lyric. The essay may only be written such that Steven’s original ordering of stanzas is out of order, and certain stanzas replace other ones. Imitation, mimicry, and mimesis will be central to how the essay observes a scene of language in the atmosphere of the lyric. In the first stanza there are three perspectives: the observer, the mountains, and the only moving thing. Being is a relation between a part and a whole, the eye of the moving absence.
Cha is rumored to have given us a freedom in a form expressing the impossibility of forms as a response to its medium. The rumor of freedom explores the possible returns of a gaze from a moving eye created by the presence of Dictee in the English language. Dictee writes its own future in anticipating itself as an object of interrogation, such that any encounter with it is necessarily a ritual in the present act of reading. The “I” of a lyric may be moving like an eye of absence, but accounting for the snowy mountains extends the movements of a lyric to a writing nation. Cha’s English will be read in a wider context of the English language to move the eyes of the essay towards the stillness among the mountains, against which the eyes of another poem were initially drawn to the only moving thing. From there the essay asks what one absence of an “original, native” voice stranded in English may say of an English-speaking people as a people who are not one people, rather a polyphony of origins and nativities.
III
A ( ) and a ( )
Are one.
A ( ) and a ( ) and a ( )
Are one.[7]
Dictee distrusts every form through which history may revise itself as the “Truth,” which “embraces with it all other abstentions other than itself. Outside Time. Outside Space.”[8] Cheng’s argument for anti-documentary desire in Dictee suggests the book knows something, which the desire for reading may not know. Every form through which history may be revised by another writer who “Parallels other durations” of history fails to express the depth of disaster.[9]
The first conceit of Dictee is that any future sentence desiring to speak of the book already places the writer of that sentence as the eye of a parenthesis. Two parallels of absence endure for one another. Reading is the abstention of a reader, and language remembers the absence inside of itself. The absence inside experiences the duration of language as an outside. The writing in Dictee seems to anticipate all potential knowledge from every future reading as if reading never occurs no matter how many readings take place. Reading is an unending presence “as if never.” Cha writes:
She begins the search the words of equivalence…
Synonym,
simile, metaphor, byword, byname, ghostword,
phantomnation…
There is no future, only the onslaught of time.
Unaccountable, vacuous, amorphous time, towards
Which she is expected to move. Forward. Ahead. And
somehow bypassing the present…
How could
she justify it. Without the visibility of the present.[10]
The second conceit of Dictee is that reading produces a phantom knowledge for every assertion of knowledge it could possibly make. Dictee is the form of a present which perpetually writes into its future the reflection of “never,” to veil from every future the history that is veiled from it. Yet, Dictee is the poiesis of knowing what is veiled from it.[11] Dictee is the form of a present “Without the visibility of the present” which the act of writing bypasses.[12] It is within this condition that the essay is able to read a “Voice of anticipation” in which there is neither a past nor a future, only the oppressive force of time that renders everything formless despite the making of a form in language.[13]
IV
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three ( )[14]
Hugh of Saint Victor wrote, “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.”[15] The line mirrors the stages of learning in Hugh’s meditation, shaped by the triptych of a beginning, middle, and end. One may identify in this triptych a story of language acquisition, not only to tell a past, present, and future, but as a progression within an ideal perception towards a freedom only creatures of language possess. We are all homeless in the language we speak, in so far as living is the task of finding words in a language which belongs to nobody. Though Dickinson wrote “I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you—Nobody— too?” [16] A suspicion for a limit in the act of writing occurs in this awareness of the universal sense of exile, indexed to self-reflection as the medieval theologian wrote his conviction down. Perfection, for this essay, is a state of consciousness in a language one knows as its speaker, reader, and writer. It is an ideal within the exile that was always the case. It is not always the fantasy for which one is liable as proof, should the writer fail to find the words they are looking for. One may strive for the entire world to be foreign in the Wittgensteinian sense that the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world.[17] Perfection is commensurate with that rarest form of self-possession through the absence of an “I” in one’s invention—one, here, possesses the etymology, that which one discovers from within oneself. An ideal perfection may be what Hazlitt spoke of as the objectivity in Shakespeare’s corpus, or the Negative Capability Keats once named in him.[18][19] The idea of perfection is grounded in poiesis in order to ask what the effect of one perfection is on another perfection. Cha believed she could see a language from a perspective only accessible by one forced to learn it. If so, she occupies, as well, something like the view from a parenthetical in English. Belief is not yet knowledge, though this essay seeks to tether its reader to the presence of Cha’s belief in the English language. Her perfection may illuminate for a reader of English another way of seeing the language in which other perfections lie.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The ( ) whistling
Or just after.[20]
To read her book as a lyric is to interrogate the effect of one perfection on another, to re-read the depths of language elsewhere through reading Cha’s own tribunal, created and destroyed in its form as a lyric. If the ideal absence of “I” is one of the greater perfections in poiesis, then, for this essay, let us suppose that the English language has a total of thirteen ways of “looking.” The perspective Cha saw English from revealed to her an obstruction—a limit— to the fullness of her own potential for the ideal absence, by virtue of another absence. If there are thirteen ways of looking in English, perhaps a certain perfection can only look in nine ways, through the muses of an ancestry other than one’s own, through a religious rite other than one’s own. As a lyric, language is a modality of “I,” yet the modality haunting Dictee seems to be an imitation of perfection which satirizes the objectivity of the ideal, because the inhabitation of “I” is the absence of “I.” The “I,” in its utterance, corrodes itself, in the same way that the further one pronounces the nature of their other, the further they may undo the knowledge of that relation which first necessitated the pronouncement.[21] In speaking, one loses the initial fullness of the knowledge that makes an origin of speech. But if the act of knowing enfeebles the form of knowing, then this essay considers how the inaccessibility of knowledge in the act of knowing becomes a form, and perhaps strengthens the knowledge in its reversal of the ability to know. In the case of Dictee the original voice does not exist in order to embrace the condition of knowing, which is that the origin of knowledge ceases to exist. Perhaps this eye of the parenthetical in language sees something the language cannot see while the language “keeps watch” over the difference that “keeps watch” over the language.[22] Cha translates the difference watching over the language she writes in as the oppression and onslaught of time. This raises the question of what happens when language becomes, or is, from the time of acquisition, the interdiction of poiesis to the poet. How does this condition affect the speaker’s relation to truth, and the truth of that relation?
Remember: “Truth embraces with it all other abstentions other than itself. Outside Time. Outside Space.”[23] Truth is apophatic in its accumulation, and yet it is cataphatic as tautology. Francis Bacon wrote that Truth “onely doth judge itself”; one may partake in the circle of Truth’s self-knowledge by turning “upon the Poles of Truth.”[24] In the last section named Polymnia, Sacred Poetry, Cha writes: “Tenth, a circle within a circle, a series of concentric circles.”[25] Dictee is a series of concentric circles, and this essay draws a few diameters: between the frontispiece that features the Hangul alphabet, and the final written scene in English before the closing photograph; between the epigraph for words in the optative mood, ascribed to Sappho, and Cha’s last remark on words in a finality with no citation; between the listing of the nine muses and the line that names a tenth, a circle within a circle; between the first instance of translation from French to English in which the writer imitates the rules of punctuation, and the last instance of translation, where ten phrases in Mandarin are transliterated in English.[26]
If one perfection may access only nine ways of all the thirteen ways to look in English, then Dictee argues that the tenth way of looking, which it is deprived of, is itself, circling within itself to look at English. The act of dictation that transpires the nine ways of seeing is the tenth way of seeing which the medium of the nine ways obstructs from the writer. Dictee asserts this tenth way through both the presence of Sappho, considered a tenth muse formed by Cha as her epigraph, and a tenth kind of prayer to the nine recitations it refers to in the form of distances spoken through dictation.[27] Of the distances Cha expresses through English, Dictee narrates the overarching distance on the plane of a catechism which by the penultimate section Terpsichore, Choral Dance, ends “apart from the congregation.”[28]
VI
When the ( ) flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.[29]
To borrow a phrase from Bonaventure, the origin of a dictation is the center that is everywhere, and circumference nowhere. The tenth way of seeing is the voice Dictee hears in its dictation; the voice begins at the beginning of language acquisition in the pages leading up to the first section Clio, the Muse of History.[30] But along a circle, there is no beginning; language acquisition endures as an origin without origin. A voice is the origin of a dictation, and in Dictee, the voice does not exist in at least three ways. Cheng reads from Cha’s first scene of mimicking speech that a speech injunction is the very condition of speaking.[31] The voice does not exist in so far as it is not free to exist. It does not exist in so far as the origin of the voice is dead relative to the speaker, who is already absent from their perspective in a language, and it does not exist in so far as it is already silent relative to a new silence mirrored in the act of reading.[32] Reading is an imitation of the origin’s death in its repetition of the first silence in the words that recurs in reading. The first silence cannot be revived even if the words are spoken out loud by a new voice.[33] Though, Cha writes as if to return “To the very first death,” to the nonexistent voice:[34]
She returns to word. She returns to word,
Its silence. If only once. Once inside. Moving.[35]
“Diseuse,” a name for a female performer of monologues, precedes the nine sections named after the muses that coincide with the nine-day period of Catholic prayer.[36] It is followed by the first invocation of the Muse, a translation exercise between French and English, a second invocation, a narration of a Catholic Mass interposed by further directions to translate paragraphs of English into French, with allusions to Cha’s years attending Convent of the Sacred Heart High School. Translation from one language to another interposes the space of religious conversion and sets in motion their parallels through the rest of the book. The evidence of language and belief in medias res of conversion culminates in the phrase: “And it begins.”[37] The form of Dictee preserves its beginning as the stage of language acquisition, and names an end for that stage as a beginning for the remainder of one’s time with language.
VII
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three ( )[38]
Dictee begins with acquisition and ends with a scene in which a child asks her mother to raise her up to a window. The tenth way of looking begins with acquisition, and ends with a narration between no particular child or mother:
to the window the child looking
above too high above her view the glass between
some image a blur now darks and greys mere
shadows lingering above her vision her head tilted
back as far as it can go.[39]
Along the circle between the scene of acquisition and the scene of narration, however, is Cha’s direct address to her own mother in the section Calliope, Epic Poetry. It is an explicit reference to the history of Japanese colonialism in Korea which Dictee otherwise refuses to represent:
You did not want to see. You cannot see anymore.
What they do. To the land and to the people. As long
as the land is not your own. Until it will be again.
Your father left and your mother left as the others.
You suffer the knowledge of having to leave. Of
having left. But your MAH-UHM, spirit has not left.
Never shall have and never shall will. Not now. Not
even now. It is burned into your ever-present
memory. Memory less. Because it is not in the past. It
cannot be. Not in the least of all pasts. It burns. Fire
alight enflame.”[40] (45)
What does a writer desire language to imitate? Cha uses the elements of water, fire, earth, and air as metaphors for language acquisition. Water symbolizes the act of poiesis. Stone symbolizes the English language. Fire symbolizes the desire of the poet. Cha writes:
Water inhabits the stone, conducts absorption of im-
plantation from the exterior. In tones, the inscrip-
tions resonate the atmosphere of the column, repeat-
ing over the same sounds, distinct words. Other
melodies, whole, suspended between song and speech
in still the silence.
Water on the surface of the stone captures the light
In motion and appeals for entry. All is entreat to stir
Inside the mass weight of the stone.
Render voices to meet the weight of stone with
weight of voices.[41]
Perhaps the writer desires language to imitate what words themselves cannot confess to time in her knowledge that she cannot make a confession in the language. The water on the surface of the stone is the fantasy in the act of writing that one could write over the interdiction of poiesis, and that such a writing would reflect the light, at the very least to imitate the unspeakable light of the fire. Water is the chosen symbol for poiesis because it is the opposite element of fire. The pain of speech is that the act of poiesis is an element which may extinguish the desire for poiesis. Cha writes:
hives of stone by hand each by each harbor the gold
and reflect the white of the rays. There is no one
inside the pane and the glass between.[42]
To reiterate, a circle has no beginning by nature of its form. One asks what the repetitions that mask the absence of an origin are for if language acquisition is drawn on the same plane as an indistinguishable mark along a circle of infinite marks. Why does the writer proceed to write if the desire is impossible to fulfill? Dictee preserves acquisition in its form because the act of writing is the repetition of acquisition. “Diseuse” is a play on the nature of a monologue; the form preserving acquisition is a performance written for one speaker which may be repeated as many times as the speaker may speak. The speaker is performing by definition of the kind of word that makes them a speaker. “Diseuse” is a metaphor for how one’s acquisition of a language faces a kind of theatre composed of every other speaker in the language. Dictee recognizes that from one perspective the theatre may be, or at least appears, empty, if the language itself is an interdiction of poiesis to the poet.[43]
[Write on the play of Diseuse].
One speaks “as if never” to have spoken but a series of concentric circles in Dictee ends apart from the congregation. Monologuing creates distance, and these distances are both the cause of lament, and a renunciation of the voice’s death. The concentric circles are the tombs of the voice which is the center each circle shares. The voice is the originating motion that dictated the form we name a circle. The motion goes nowhere because it is the repetition of its own everywhere, yet it finishes elsewhere. Every circling of a circle partakes in the congregation of the form. The repetition ends apart from the sameness of the congregation because in the act of finding words one repeats the congregation of acquiring language. The writing ends always at a distance from the stage of acquisition, which is the real moment in time a writer desires to return to and revise, while they are forced to move forward with the onslaught of time. The disaster of writing is how repetition expresses two desires. Repetition desires to return to an origin that, as Cheng notes, if one tries to identify with it, one enters into an infinite regression, but repetition also desires to be elsewhere from the language in which the act of writing occurs.[44] To be apart is, in fact, to be within. One repeats the origin without origin in a repetition that is not the same through gradations named, and thus measured by the distance between a circle within the last circle drawn: “Inside outside. As if never.” Cha writes:
Further and further inside, the certitude of absence.
Elsewhere. Other than. Succession of occurrences be-
fore the partition. Away.[45]
The observer of this scene in language is a simile of three minds and three absences. An ideal perfection is the act of writing which monopolizes the nature of a circle within a circle for a greater magnitude of potential readings in the language. In the ideal absence of an “I,” a perfection is greater for preserving a greater volume of meanings. A lesser perfection is stranded by the language inside of itself. It cannot access every way of looking in the language, yet still hosts its own look for words. The triumph of concentric circles for one writer in the ideal perfection of absence shares the same motion of the infinite regression another writer lives as they endure their own absence in the language. Cheng notices how Cha implies language acquisition is in fact “linguistic invasion”; the consequences of writing in English due to the history of the language are ontological. [46] They are rooted in the political and material history that Dictee begins from yet refuses to reiterate through its own acts of repetition. Cheng insists, however, for a reading of the speech lesson that will not reduce Dictee to a political universal; the argument is not merely that the effect of a colonial language on a colonized speaker is the fact that speaking is always an appropriation.[47] This essay looks to the possibilities of language from a “lesser” perfection in the knowledge that the politicization of the voice is prior to its absence. If language is a coercive occupation, as Cheng writes, the tenth way of looking is also an answer from the perspective of the writer; the act of writing is a coercive force in the attempt to occupy the language through poesis.[48] By way of re-introducing Dictee, this essay simultaneously acknowledges that speech may always be appropriation in this condition of English, yet it also contains a potential for more.
That is not to suggest, however, that the potential for more promises more. The further inside one looks for words, drawing a circle within another circle, the more certain one may become of the absence at the center of what one is looking for, a center repeated by every act of looking. Every look is a “Succession of occurrences” which precedes the making of language. Occurrences name the pinning of one’s perception between the instances of repetition in knowing what a word means; they are elongated by Cha’s referrals to a “pause,” which she plays with through her use, re-use, dis-use, and imitation of punctuation, but which she also names: “Begins imperceptibly, near-perceptible.”[49]
The writer is not entirely conscious of these occurrences in the act of writing. Every act of looking for words contains an absence which the finding of a word necessarily succeeds in order for poiesis to begin. Occurrences are elsewhere from the writer, an absence “Other than” what is absent. They are “Elsewhere” from the circle of the writer’s knowledge that is able to become visible in the language. Simultaneously, the “Elsewhere” is a phantom knowledge from where one creates meaning in the language. They create the knowledge Dictee writes within, a knowledge of imprisonment that creates the form in which the speaker of a language may also recognize their freedom. Cha writes:
She makes complete her duration. As others have
Made complete theirs: rendered incessant, obsessive
myth, rendered immortal, their acts without the
leisure to examine whether the parts false the parts
real according to History’s revision.[50]
Dictee writes in the awareness and lament of other perfections. The book expresses a knowledge of other acts of poiesis stranded in the English language forced to bear the stature of perfection, which is known in the act of reading from the very knowledge inaccessible to Dictee derived in gradations from all thirteen ways of looking. Poiesis is to make complete one’s duration, to become a perfection in a language with a history of perfections that would never know the onslaught of their future company, just as Cha’s act of writing endures the onslaught of time:
Parallels other durations, oblivious to the delib-
erate brilliance of its own time, mortal, deliberate
marking. Oblivious to itself.[51]
The act of poiesis stranded in the language may appear oblivious to the very limits that would make evident how the language is an interdiction. However, the poet may know how her poiesis appears even if the poiesis cannot itself acknowledge what the poet knows. The movement of Dictee desires that “Elsewhere” as much as it refuses its measures. An act of reference—“Other than”— becomes knowledge without a referent. Perhaps the occurrences are phantoms; the poet still finds words even if their language is an interdiction because they have already acquired the language. To have found words is not a triumph over interdiction. Language is behind the back of every consciousness and belongs to no one.[52] Language as interdiction is both the condition, and the likeness, of the lyric “I” in Dictee whose inhabitation of and absence in the language are the same act, a form of knowing in which the further one asserts the form—the more circles one draws inside the last circle drawn—the less one knows if the interdiction ever was: “Inside outside. As if never.” To speak further inside is an act of thought coming outside which is then no longer within the speaker’s knowledge.[53] Thus, an interdiction cannot be truly spoken of until after the death of the poet as a later origin for the reader’s intuition. If a living poet who has not yet made complete their duration speaks of their own interdiction—that is, if one narrates the absence of poiesis in the language from their own view of the language— they are still a part of the congregation, and only appear to be speaking from elsewhere. They defer from ever speaking apart from the congregation by maintaining the illusion of freedom through a speech “as if” it could assume the place of an elsewhere. They are not yet seeing the language from the perspective that the language cannot see itself from, because this perspective may only be claimed in the act of poiesis from within, not from elsewhere. The lyric “I” of Dictee knows this, which is why the original, native voice is inaccessible by nature of its form. A poet also imitates an absence of origin with the language that incites their desire for an origin, because the language is the substance of desire producing a phantom of interdiction. The nature of interdiction as a phantom does not prove the interdiction does not exist. It is possible that the interdiction and the phantom of interdiction coexist. Occurrences succeed “be-fore the partition” because words are found, but the words are “Away.” Acquisition, as a repetition of difference through the act of writing, is the relation which Cha names “other than,” an act of reference without a referent. If Dictee anticipates the failure of reading, it also protects the nature of reading by rendering it “As if never.” The words defining a Diseuse as a Diseuse are “Away,” for the act of writing looking at the language seeks the impossible turn “Away” of a speaker who necessarily faces all other speakers in the language.
The poet’s sense of relation to the truth may be dictated by the circular movement of acquisition. She cannot write outside of the first circle. Dictee is a consequence of that possibility, but the book does not face itself by pretending that the writer does not desire to write. Although the original, native voice is absent, the first circle would also be Cha’s knowledge of origin for her own voice. One looking from the eye of a parenthesis in the language to which her poetics have migrated may see what the language cannot see precisely because of a self-knowledge that cannot be spoken. But she can imitate the impossibility of speech in the language to repeat the inaccessible, and thus, unrepeatable origin. She is a performer from the beginning as a writer and a reader. As a writer she faces the partition which she must puncture through to make her poiesis visible. The English in Dictee places not only any reader of the book, but the writer herself as a reader of herself inside the history of the language relative to other acts of poiesis.
The occurrences before the partition of language as seen from another act of poiesis are inaccessible to her. She may read the words of a greater perfection, words that are, also, “Away,” relative to what is inaccessible from her perspective: the origin of the other perfection. From her knowledge of her own intent, her reading of a greater perfection may reproduce her intent as a form of knowledge derived from someone else’s choice in words. The recognition is evidence that the knowledge is outside, belonging to no one. The fact that language belongs to no one would seem like an equality of speech. Yet, due to the onslaught of time, the interdiction one cannot speak of in the language is always a possibility. Facing the language as the writer with a phantom knowledge of the same intent, and a phantom knowledge that one’s perfection is compromised, words may turn away from the writer “be-fore the partition,” and even once they are found. Rather than seeing words from a place in consort with the language to translate reality into mimesis, words may become “Unfathomable.”[54] The negation of fathom is additive for the meaning of the word is more often employed as an unfulfilled condition than for its meaning. Cha writes from the tenth way of looking: “You remain dismembered with the belief that magnolia blooms white even on seemingly dead branches and you wait.”[55] Belief produces the phantom of interdiction, and yet the belief does not prove the absence of knowledge that the interdiction is real. As time makes its formless advances, Cha writes:
Dead words. Dead tongue. From disuse. Buried in
Time’s memory. Unemployed. Unspoken. History.
Past. Let the one who is diseuse, one who is mother
Who waits nine days and nine nights be found.
Restore memory. Let the one who is diseuse, one
who is daughter restore spring with her each ap-
pearance from beneath the earth.
The ink spills thickest before it runs dry before it
stops writing at all.[56]
VIII
The ( ) whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.[57]
Cha was looking for her first circle. She was “looking for the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue.”[58] The voice, the origin of dictation, looks for itself along the tenth way of seeing. The voice does not exist, like an absence inhabiting the wind, a small part of a pantomime. To repeat Cha’s trick with a Greek root: pantomimos, imitator of all. A writer can imitate the wind to find words. The gesture is absence itself. One may be tempted to locate in the absence a Platonic ideal for the roots in her search, to define the nature of the tongue by how forms are born upon the tongue. Looking for the roots of a language is a speech act of memory confined in the history of one’s acquisition and repetition of the language. Cha’s search is an interrogation of the mimetic faculty, a reply to the conditions of mimesis from where a poet first knows her language. A speaker perceives themselves to be “inside” the knowledge of a language, and “outside” by virtue of knowing the language, but what qualifies this relation to language, “Inside outside,” is as if the language never was, or the speaker never was. The condition for the speaker’s existence is as if the relation to her medium never was. To be “as if never” is still a speech act of habituation outside of time, and from within time. “Time’s memory” is the act of poiesis which a later act experiences as its own particular onslaught of time, and this is why a writer is stranded in the language.[59] The making of “never” illuminates the condition of language “Inside outside,” yet “as if never” only represents a desire.[60] It cannot be a full representation because the language is an interdiction to poiesis for the poet, yet within this representation the consciousness may partake in a poiesis that would otherwise be inaccessible. Cha writes:
She says to herself if she were able to write she
could continue to live. Says to herself if she
would write without ceasing. To herself if by
writing she could abolish real time. She would
live. If she could display it before her and be-
come its voyeur.[61]
[Write here of the significance of tense.]
A desire to prevent the conditions of speech is to prevent what happens on the tongue, which forms the cause for speech, and gives the cause an ability to speak for itself. What happens is the condition of knowing the tongue one’s in charge of. One may speak one tongue against oneself through the phantom knowledge of other perfections. The writer stranded in a language may react to the condition of writing by effacing themselves, electing to perform aphasia, rather than to perform her monologue. One may overhear many tongues within the jurisdiction of one’s own in such a manner that the most powerful response is silence. Even in the freedom to think for oneself comprehension of an inside and an outside may be compromised.
Cha’s search for the root may be cast as a prevention, yet prevention is still a gambit for the artist, regardless of what conditions the life of the writer. In any case, it is usually a stage closer to the desire to speak. As the motion of circles in Dictee show, the desire for prevention is the desire to be able to write. The roots of language create memory before and after they are born, and in the moment of birth, they create something too. To look for them before their nativity initiates a dialogue with the origin of speech which speech cannot itself begin. It is likely that a writer of any diaspora living with English knows this issue, yet the reasonable answer is to write with the issue out of mind, even if one is consciously writing as the voyeur of their language. Cha writes:
Of the event that occurs once and only once.
Imagination harbors the desire of the object to
unlimited répétition at each point from the
beginning to the middle to the end.
Rehearses the desire repeatedly, In preparation.
Of the final performance.[62]
The structure of colonial mimicry theorized by Homi Bhabha, and further examined by Cheng, may offer a homology for these questions of language in Dictee. In “On Mimicry and Man,” Bhabha proposes that a colonial force desires the colonized subject to imitate itself in order to make visible its power.[63] Mimicry “repeats rather than re-presents,” yet it results in a representation of difference, a mask faithful to the mottled scenery which first forced it into being. The mask of sameness conceals no essence, neither a presence, nor an identity beneath it, though the presence of the mask itself is “a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite.”[64] The efficacy of mimicry, as it betrays its originating desire, is its production of this difference. Colonial mimicry’s fantasy is its own presence which is “Inside outside. As if never.”[65] However, Cheng notices an irony in Bhabha’s assertion of irony. Despite the fact that there is no essence beneath the mask, hidden in the theory of colonial mimicry itself is the fantasy of an original identity. This dilemma of both the theory, and its argument, resemble the ideality of a word which exists independent of any consciousness, any utterance of the word itself. [66] To theorize on colonial mimicry—to theorize on history—asserts the fantasy for an original identity, even in the face of the absence beneath the mimicry of the other, and even as one names a real effect of authority visualizing power. Cheng’s observation of the fantasy of origin in Bhabha’s theory subjects the theory to the same struggle that a poet stranded in the English language may face. The fantasy in language from the perspective of a writer replicates the structure of colonial mimicry. The ideality of a word in the English language is the fantasy of the writer stranded in the language. The essence beneath the act of writing, which is the repetition of acquisition, does not exist, like the voice, the origin of dictation that is absent. Cha writes:
Narrative shifts, discovers variation. Each obser-
vance prisoner of yet another observance, the illusion
of variation hidden in yet another odor yet another
shrouding, disguised, superimposed upon. Upon the
nakedness. Nakedness as ordinary as common with
all nakedness of all others before and all others to
come. Like birth like death. Unlike birth, unlike
death, this redeemed through a future and a past
through own memory and presumes a separate con-
clusion.[67]
To write about this condition in the language parallels the desire to perceive the meter of a line one cannot comprehend. Writing in this parallel, between a reality and the hazards of mimesis conditioned by knowledge of the language, is one of many questions Cha raises in Dictee.
If a writer naturalizes to the language, the language also naturalizes to the writer. While the writer may not have any birthright to conventions, the language is a convention the writer is born into. The conventions themselves do not have to know of birthright. That is part of their appeal, and an illusion of equality they may tease in the face of the writer. If naturalization occurs to both the language and the writer, how does one go about being born? If the necessity for a word is a real necessity from where one reaps a way to their life, then there is, also, an unspoken necessity within language for the word mirroring the writer’s desire of a word that may not exist. The word that may not exist is on the plane of a writer’s belief, parallel to the ideality of the word independent of each utterance of the word on the plane of knowledge where the writer stands with the language behind her consciousness.
Thus, this essay asks: What is an English-speaking people, and what is it to write within the knowledge of this question? What, then, is an English-reading people? Dictee is a book composed of Greek, Latin, French, Mandarin, and English, with the notable absence of Korean, the mother tongue. There are a few exceptions to the absence, although each exception is its own absence. The frontispiece is a photograph from a coal mine in Japan with Korean inscribed on a wall as negative space in print. To print, in this case, is to create and decontextualize the sign in the same act. The translation is, “Mother/I miss you/I am hungry/I want to go home.”[68] If the Hangul alphabet is the subtraction of black ink, then it is also a phantom expressing each page. The words of the other languages are printed on these phantoms. To reiterate, this essay reads Dictee as an active coercion in the English language in dialogue with the occupation of English in Cha. Such a dynamic between the languages mimics their relationship in the consciousness of one who may share Cha’s exile, a citizen of one nation, native to another, yet citizen and native of neither. The questions around English, then, are not a deferral or subordination of the other languages in the text for the sake of English. Rather, they are trojan horses of poiesis entering a time of English, while they face the phantom space of a mother tongue.
What definitions or modes of thinking are possible for the epithet of a people if the people are not one people? What is the speaking that animates English into this attribute? Are these definitions capable of being more than an inequality of truths? Strictly, and so, with risk, widely, it wonders about the presence of a language as a people who were never of one persona, neither one populace, nor one mass of original tongues inculcating their inventions of foreign tongues with the faces of their mother. English, like Cha, is not only dislocated from its geographical origin but separated from the fantasy of belonging to one nation, or the history between any two. What if a mother tongue is not only the tongue your mother spoke, or the tongue you would have known by an altered history of migration, but the language you have no choice but to know? There are slightly more familiar questions at play here: do you know a language if the reason you know it is because you must speak it? Is that knowledge but a fragment of language in the conditions of power shaping the necessity from where your ability to speak defines a personhood? Is that knowledge inaccessible to one who desires to speak it, or one born closer to its history? What is the difference between a necessity of speech in the mother tongue, and a necessity of speech arising in the language one migrates into? How do the conditions of knowing a language effect the nature of a choice, the reading of its pasts, the legitimacy of its future?
IX
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the ( )
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.[69]
This essay plays with the presence of Greek in Dictee. Since Cha uses the motif of stone to symbolize the English language, the essay positions its eyes from English where the soul in the myth of Phaedrus looks upon a form of Beauty. The condition of asking these questions is as if English were the himeros, those particles composing the stream which pours into the eyes of the soul, regrowing a soul’s wings.[70] For one writing in an English-speaking world, the desire to write becomes self-conscious of its place in the same Western tradition inherited by Cha, which she undertook with her own discourse of ambivalence. An outdated theory of perception in which particles compose the line of sight serves as a metaphor for a not yet dated English, as if the language itself were the particles of the self-conscious desire to speak, the himeros between writers and readers that makes a present visible. Cha’s use of the Earth coincides with the antiphonies of fire and water, desire and poiesis:
Earth is dark. Darker. Earth is a blue-black stone
Upon which moisture settles evenly, flawlessly. Dust
the stone with a fine powder. Earth is dark, a blue-
black substance, moisture and dust rise in a mist. Veil
of dust smoke between sky and earth’s boundaries.
The scene raises another question in the wake of Plato’s myth. What if the writer loves the language? That is, what if the writer loves the ideal absence of a greater perfection, the blue-black stone upon which moisture settles evenly, even if, in the same language, water may only reflect, and their poiesis may, perhaps, only imitate relative to a higher making? The “I” of the writer stranded in English is composed of the same himeros as the ideal absence of “I.” Two questions stand within this question of the writer’s love. What happens to the structural necessity of death in the “I am” if the possibility of the living voice is absent, in an absence which is distinct from the universal exile of each speaker in a language?[71] What happens to this structure when the voice loves the very condition that renders it impossible to be a presence?
Death occurs before the utterance, and the one who died is also the origin of the utterance. Dictee knows a certain kind of beauty in the English language is impossible for the writer. A certain flesh and blood will never know a natural “death” in the language. Rather, they are fixed into the onslaught of time by an image, elected to represent a history that can never know them, and a representation that can never fully represent the history. Cha writes:
Some will not know age. Some not age. Time stops.
Time will stop for some. For them especially. Eternal
Time. No age. Time fixes for some. Their image,
the memory of them is not given to deterioration, unlike
the captured image that extracts from the soul pre-
cisely by reproducing, multiplying itself. Their coun-
tenance evokes not the hallowed beauty, beauty from
seasonal decay, evokes not the inevitable, not death,
but the dy-ing.[72]
To reiterate, everyone is homeless in language, but certain forms of homelessness may obstruct the perfection of exile through the ideal absence of the “I,” which another act of poiesis may desire to fulfill. This is how a desire to speak arises always particular to each time of desire, and the desire for the time of exile in language. Dictee plays with its own desires. The act of writing is the repetition of acquisition through different forms of speech. One circle within the circles of Dictee is an allegory for language acquisition beginning the last section Polymnia, Sacred Poetry that precedes the scene between no particular child and mother. This essay reads the scene as an allegory because it is possible these questions can only be answered through allegory. Cha writes of a memory belonging to a young woman drinking from a well. She sees an older woman from a distance. Both are wearing a white kerchief. Perhaps they are the same woman. A girl stares at her future self through the heat rising from the earth, the dust rising from the stone of language:
From a distance the figure outlines the movement,
its economy, without extraneous motions from the
well to the jar. The repetition of lowering the bucket
into the well, an adept gesture that comes to her with-
out a thought given to it, she performs it with preci-
sion and speed.
…
Approaching the well, the sound becomes audible.
The wooden bucket hitting the sides echoes inside the
well before it falls into the water. Earth is hollow.
Beneath.
In the allegory Earth is hollow. There may be a time in the language, a state of mind like the ideal absence in the perfection of poiesis, in which a writer, though stranded, sees through the interdiction. What was initially an infinite regression of fantasy may recover a real echo in the language through a future poiesis. Perhaps the poet who came from afar may draw water from the well directly beneath the language she has migrated into. Perhaps, Cha says, there is an act of poiesis to come that hollows the language. The counter act of coercion may be a union of thought and language that is not preceded by a succession of occurrences in a phantom knowledge. The phantom is rather audible as a word, and thus, no longer a phantom.
X
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the ( ) is involved
In what I know.[73]
Dictee is the form of absence “involved” in what the English reader may know in the English language. The book is a blueprint for how the perspective of a writer looking at the language repeats the desire of colonial mimicry. Cha invents both the words and their origin by attributing her epigraph to Sappho: “May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.”[74]
Shelley Sunn Wong observes how the presence of Sappho partakes in Cha’s overwriting of the epic tradition with the lyric as she invents the word “Elitere” for the Muse of lyric poetry, a word that Wong notes to come from neither Greek nor Latin, neither East nor West.[75] Thus, the assertion of a lyric is itself an origin without origin. The epic gives form to the immortality of a nation, while a lyric is a fragment of an absolute past, adrift in the temporality of one voice.[76] By parodying the use of an epigraph, Dictee intimates that the freedom attributed to a lyric is still a form of “writing on,” onto the surface of language which narrates the epic of nationhood. The lyric is, thus, not supplanting the epic at all. The lyric and epic are interdictions of form within the form, which imitates the condition of language as an interdiction, as if to evade the corrosive effect of knowledge once it asserts itself as knowledge.
XI
At the sight of ( )
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.[77]
Cheng recounts how recollecting memory and collecting objects of potential memory become indiscernible acts in Dictee.[78] Words which are expressive of memory may be only indications of history, citations without a trace of origin. To own a disaster necessarily forces language into description as a memory; the act of writing the reality between a disaster and oneself abstracts the disaster.[79] The condition of disasters that Cheng detects in Dictee makes the writer and the reader equal in their parallel relations to the writing. These two relations to the writing are not unlike the relation between a speaker and listener, or the writer and the reader. The speaker’s discourse manifests a lived experience for a listener through the physical act of mediation, and this physical act of mediation is, itself, like the speaker. Speech sanctions the meaning or the “subjective side of [the speaker’s] experience, his consciousness, the acts by which in particular he endows sense to the signs,’ which is not “immediately and originarily present” to the listener who experiences those signs as a lived-experience independent of that original and inaccessible meaning.[80] If the form of Dictee is a critique of its form, the act of poiesis employs language as a critique of writing while desiring to write over the condition of the language. Each language in Dictee is both a memory and a citation in the book, as mediums self-conscious of their distances. These distances are the condition of a lyric which hosts the contestation for any writer of a diaspora inflecting their voice in English, their own or their ghosts’, in solitude or in polyphony.
XII
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For ( ).[81]
This essay on Dictee refers to other writers in the English language to interrogate the motions of desire between reading and writing in a sphere of many voices. Can you really love a language without knowing its faces, the ideal perfections in the language, and if you cannot, what is the nature of this kinship? What is the province within experience remembered only through the language, created by one’s own mediation?
What spurs you to find words, and haunts their use upon you, when your own words turn out not to be yours, as you had considered them in your stead, is that your children, or someone else’s children, will speak and hear a new English all over again, even among the same words. Your own wrestling alloys a choice of words with a rightful element of the inviolable, from where you might be confined to a vanishing point always posterior to the line of sight for meaning you thought to have earned.
You know there is another line-of-sight posterior to you still, since you are that sight for another, omitting parts of speech for the modest sum of tongues with, perhaps, your own mother and father who might speak profusely in another “Elsewhere” of English. To reiterate:
Further and further inside, the certitude of absence.
Elsewhere. Other than. Succession of occurrences be-
fore the partition. Away.[82]
A modest sum of one’s tongue is an iteration of Cha’s search for the root of language. A modest sum in English parallels the real modesty of one’s mother tongue, should one remain an infant in that timeline of speech that never truly begins. The writer speaks English in the knowledge that if they were not an English-speaker, time never progressed. That is, so far, the time of your being human is made of English. One may begin a new time if they leave this language for another and vow to never speak English again. When Cha writes that “Some will not know age,” she is also referring to herself.[83] Let us consider the possibility that even if you know other languages, and perhaps, know them with a greater love, you still cannot entirely evade certain conditions English may pose.
XIII
The river is moving.
The ( ) must be flying.[84]
There is a new English every day so long as there is a child who will come to speak it. You might feel free if you’re writing of literatures between other tongues, but freedom is more than feeling. Much of the world, before it is made visible in language, or written into consciousness, is how one faces the other writers in the language while one seeks the perfect form of their speech within the traditions of that language. When you read your own words, you cannot entirely know them. In Dictee, the significance of the disaster which cannot be grasped in description, the constant descriptions of speech itself, the narration of speech in the form of a lyric, reflect this knowledge. Dictee knows if the writer cannot claim to know what they know, they may reflect it in the form of writing the unknowable.
Is there another way through the tenth way? The power of Cha’s negative capability leaves the question flayed open. Like Cha, the essay writes from a moving eye towards stillness, the fantasy of an absence kept safe in the past tense of a language, in order to say it knows it cannot know, for it would rather “take the call” of language: [85]
Takes it at once. Her
voice is as if she holds this receiver for the very first
time. This foreign instrument that carries the very
sounds to the words. The very words.
…
All had been prepared. All had been rehearsed
beforehand. To the pause, over and over in her mind.
The brief pause in the beginning before she would say
yes.[86]
Acknowledgements (as written on April 21st, 2025)
I thank Professor Cormack who gave me the keys to the structure for this paper. Although it was not the original plan, I have learned there is no origin, and from many people: I thank Professor Heller-Roazen for the introduction to mimesis; Professor Nunokawa for knowing where I was; Professor Anderson for her notes in the first stages; Professor Brodsky for her teachings; Professor Cheng for all of her writings. I thank Armando for his patience, belief, and for taking the time to read a draft or two with me. I thank Katie for sharing her Dictee; I thank Lauren, Julia, and Lynn for their serendipity and presence.
Bibliography
Bacon, Francis. “Of Truth,” The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 342.
Bhabha, Homi, “On Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October, Vol.
28, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis, Spring 1984, 125-133. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable778467.
Brodsky, Claudia. “Dialectics and Difference.” 26 Feb. 2025, Princeton University, New Jersey.
Lecture.
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. Berkley: University of California, 2001.
Chen, Ken. “The Stakes of Dictee: An introduction to a famously difficult work.” The Yale
Review, 1 Sept. 2022, https://yalereview.org/article/chen-dictee-introduction-cha.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race. Oxford: Oxford University, Press, 2000.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. “Memory and Anti-Documentary Desire in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s
Dictée,” MELUS, Vol. 23, No. 4, Theory, Culture and Criticism, Winter 1998, 119-133. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/467831.
Derrida, Jacques. Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s
Phenomenology. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2011.
Dickinson, Emily. “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Poetry Foundation, 1998,
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1647321/im-nobody-who-are-you.
Hazlitt, William. Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays. Project Gutenberg, 29 Jan. 2011,
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5085/pg5085-images.html.
Hong, Cathy Park. “Portrait of an Artist.” Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian
Condition. London: Profile Books, 2020.
Hugh of St. Victor. The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, 101.
Keats, John. “[On Negative Capability: Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21, ?27 December
1817],” Seletions from Keats’s Letters. Poetry Foundation, 13 Oct. 2009, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69384/selections-from-keatss-letters.
Plato. Phaedrus. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995, 251B-252A.
Stevens, Wallace. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Poetry Foundation, 1954,
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45236/thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-a-blackbird.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Edition 8, London: Routledge, 1960,
Proposition 5.6, 149.
Wong, Shelley Sunn. “Unnaming the Same: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee,” Writing Self,
Writing Nation, Berkley: Third Woman Press, 1994.
[1] Stevens, Wallace. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Poetry Foundation, 1954, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45236/thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-a-blackbird. Lines 50-54.
[2] Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. Berkley: University of California, 2001, 125-6.
[3] Hong, Cathy Park. “Portrait of an Artist.” Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition. London: Profile Books, 2020, 154-5.
[4] Chen, Ken. “The Stakes of Dictee: An introduction to a famously difficult work.” The Yale Review, 1 Sept. 2022, https://yalereview.org/article/chen-dictee-introduction-cha.
[5] Cheng, Anne Anlin. “Memory and Anti-Documentary Desire in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée,” MELUS, Vol. 23, No. 4, Theory, Culture and Criticism, Winter 1998, 119-20. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/467831.
[6] Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Lines 1-3.
[7] Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Lines 9-12.
[8] Cha, Dictee, 125-6.
[9] Cha, Dictee, 28.
[10] Cha, Dictee, 140.
[11] Cha, Dictee, 126.
[12] Cha, Dictee, 140.
[13] Cha, Dictee, 139.
[14] Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Lines 4-6.
[15] Hugh of St. Victor. The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, 101.
[16] Dickinson, Emily. “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Poetry Foundation, 1998, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1647321/im-nobody-who-are-you. Lines 1-2.
[17] Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Edition 8, London: Routledge, 1960, Proposition 5.6, 149.
[18] Hazlitt, William. Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays. Project Gutenberg, 29 Jan. 2011, 17.
[19] Keats, John. “[On Negative Capability: Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21, ?27 December 1817],” Seletions from Keats’s Letters. Poetry Foundation, 13 Oct. 2009, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69384/selections-from-keatss-letters.
[20] Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Lines 13-17.
[21] Brodsky, Claudia. “Dialectics and Difference.” 26 Feb. 2025, Princeton University, New Jersey. Lecture.
[22] Derrida, Jacques. Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2011, 11.
[23] Cha, Dictee, 28.
[24] Bacon, Francis. “Of Truth,” The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 342.
[25] Cha, Dictee, 175.
[26] Cha, Dictee, 1, 154, 173, 175, 177.
[27] Cha, Dictee, 13-19.
[28] Cha, Dictee, 155.
[29] Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Lines 35-37.
[30] Cha, Dictee, 23.
[31] Cheng, Anne Anlin. “History in/Against the Fragment,” The Melancholy of Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 162.
[32] Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon, 32-3.
[33] Cha, Dictee, X.
[34] Cha, Dictee, 151.
[35] Cha, Dictee, 151.
[36] Cha, Dictee, 3-5.
[37] Cha, Dictee, 19.
[38] Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Lines 4-6.
[39] Cha, Dictee, 179.
[40] Cha, Dictee, 45.
[41] Cha, Dictee, 162.
[42] Cha, Dictee, 179.
[43] Cha, Dictee, 149.
[44] Cheng, “History in/Against the Fragment,” 162.
[45] Cha, Dictee, 131.
[46] Cheng, “History in/Against the Fragment,” 162.
[47] Cheng, “History in/Against the Fragment,” 162.
[48] Cheng, “History in/Against the Fragment,” 162.
[49] Cha, Dictee, 5.
[50] Cha, Dictee, 28.
[51] Cha, Dictee, 28.
[52] Brodsky, “Dialectics and Difference.” 26 Feb. 2025, Lecture.
[53] Brodsky, “Dialectics and Difference.” 26 Feb. 2025, Lecture.
[54] Cha, Dictee, 32.
[55] Cha, Dictee, 155.
[56] Cha, Dictee, 133.
[57] Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Lines 7-8.
[58] Chen, “The Stakes of Dictee.”
[59] Cha, Dictee, 133.
[60] Cha, Dictee, 133.
[61] Cha, Dictee, 141.
[62] Cha, Dictee, 144-5.
[63] Bhabha, Homi, “On Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October, Vol. 28, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis, Spring 1984, 126. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable778467.
[64] Bhabha, “On Mimicry and Man,” 127.
[65] Cheng, Anne Anlin. “Fantasy’s Repulsion and Investment,” The Melancholy of Race. Oxford: Oxford University, Press, 2000, 122.
[66] Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon, 5.
[67] Cha, Dictee, 144-5.
[68] Wong, Shelley Sunn. “Unnaming the Same: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee,” Writing Self, Writing Nation, Berkley: Third Woman Press, 1994, 107.
[69] Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Lines 18-24.
[70] Plato. Phaedrus. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995, 251B-252A.
[71] Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon, 11-3.
[72] Cha, Dictee, 37.
[73] Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Lines 30-34.
[74] Cha, Dictee, i.
[75] Wong, “Unnaming the Same,” 116.
[76] Wong, “Unnaming the Same,” 116.
[77] Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Lines 38-41.
[78] Cheng, “Memory and Anti-Documentary Desire,” 119-20.
[79] Cheng, “Memory and Anti-Documentary Desire,” 130.
[80] Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon, 32-3.
[81] Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Lines 42-47.
[82] Cha, Dictee, 131.
[83] Cha, Dictee, 37.
[84] Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Lines 48-49.
[85] Cha, Dictee, 139.
[86] Cha, Dictee, 139.