Earticle

Yu, Myong-Ja. “The Uncanny-Mechanism and 『떠오름』(Aloft) by Chang-Rae Lee.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 40.3 (2014): 75-95. From E. Jentsch to S. Freud, several authors have written essays dealing with the uncanny. However, it seems much still remain to be explored, especially its role in the creative activities. This paper is an attempt to illustrate the dynamic function of the uncanny taken as a developmental mechanism. Its main stages observed in this paper are as follows: the first stage of settling of the uncanny affect figure, the second stage of pathological confusion, the third stage of fatal accident and the fourth stage of self-destruction or getting over that tragedy. Here the fatal accident could be overcome by chance, or the subject will survive it if somehow he is physically and mentally strong enough. Likewise, not only will he be able to avoid the self destruction, but realize he lived and went through a sort of fantasy. This opens him the next level of the uncanny-mechanism; After awakening, he now tries to reach out for an upgraded stage of uncanny, namely, the stage of sublimation. This last stage will sometimes be connected to the literary and artistic creations. The ‘double’, ‘deja vu’, and ‘unhomely home’ are frequent themes of those literary creations. Aloft(2004) by Chang-Rae Lee shows a quite subtle form of the uncanny effect evoked by a non- pathological protagonist. Its originality lies in that the author succeeds in presenting the invisible dynamism of the uncanny through the description of the visible elements although the story ends at the stage of the surmounted fatal accident without going much further to get into the stage of sublimation. (Kyungpook National University)

This paper proposes to read Aloft as a ‘subversive’ successor of the suburbia novel tradition. A white middle-class protagonist Jerry Battle, detailed interest in the uniformity of Long Island suburban life, alienation and desire for flight from his reality are some typical characteristics of the suburbia novel. Suburbia novels have been traditionally considered a white-centered genre in that they depict, with sympathy, the alienation and psychological poverty in the midst of material plenty felt and complained of by white middle-class suburban people. Jurca terms this feeling of ‘homeless at home’ as ‘white diaspora’ and criticizes the suburbia novel arguing that it justifies white dominance by converting those privileged people into victims of the suburban system. What makes Aloft a subversive text are its description of suburbs as racialized space and its focus on the oppression and exploitation of racial others by a white male protagonist and its aftermath. Jerry’s selfish retreat from reality and worldly cares, whose metaphor is his occasional flight in his Cessna, is challenged by the muted anger of his Korean wife Daisy’s suicide, the moving-out of his Puerto Rican lover Rita after 20 years of serving his family, and the stubborn denial of treatment for treatable cancer, and eventual death, of his daughter Theresa. Jerry matures after experiencing these crises, and brings all his remaining family into his house and helps them out with their respective difficulties. His active engaging in the ‘battle’ with reality, along with the ‘communication’ and ‘being nice to each other’ performed by Jerry’s newly-formed family, is distinctly different from the prevalent affect of white diaspora in traditional suburbia novels. In conclusion, Aloft takes up the tradition of the suburbia novel to subvert its white-oriented assumptions and explore its new possibilities in a multicultural society.

Building upon his previous two novels (namely, Native Speaker and A Gesture Life), which probed the problematic identity of ethnic minority and the exclusionary logic buttressing it, Chang-rae Lee’s latest work titled Aloft shifts its narrative focus onto a story of a white man’s middle class family thereby bringing to bear its thematic scope on the universal problem of human isolation. As the result, Aloft creates the impression of turning away from the restrictive theme of racial politics and its oppressive measures. This view, however, is a misleading one in so far as it presupposes the naturalized image of ‘family.’ In contrast to the conventional image of family qua minimal organic unit of community, a series of incessant conflicts and power struggle underlie the apparent simplicity of this “family story.” And it is against that conceptual backdrop of conflict-driven communality, the text attempts a more sophisticated problematization of such (post)colonial issues as Orientalism, racism, and gender oppression, wherein Jerry, the protagonist and pater familias, metonymically functions as a stereotypical white colonialist. He intentionally distorts the images of ethnic and gender minorities including his own family members, thereby silencing the voices of alterity from the text, which dramatizes “the battle field” between the oppressive rule of sovereignty and the resistance to it. This study argues that Aloft depicts family as a mirror and microcosm of the social as such, where every subject is, without exception, forced to engage in hegemonic power struggle not only for recognition but for survival.

This study tries to view Korean American novelists in the perspective of hybrid culture. Korean English literature scholars tended to concentrate on the problems of Korean immigrants’ exclusion and alienation by main stream American society or the problem of their identity through Korean American novels. However, the perspectives that scrutinize into problems of domination/assimilation or of identity in Korean American novel is being doubted through the complex reality of hybrid culture. The perspective of hybridity required in the fast changing modern times questions positions that consider identity as being fixed or pure. The perspective of hybridity is an effort to explain the Korean American novels’ complexity which is difficult for clear ethical evaluations to do within the opposition of resistance/ assimilation. This study evaluates Suki Kim and Chang-rae Lee as the representative Korean American novelists who intensely face with the ongoing American hybrid society. This study examines how the two novelists look upon the ethnic minorities’ and racial problems differently from general ethnic writers and achieve significant narrative developments. Examining The Interpreter and her articles in American newspapers and magazines, we see how aspects of Suki Kim’s performative subject can be characterized as ‘addressing to the American mainstream society as a immigrant.’ Chang-rae Lee has transcended the title of Korean American novelist and already established as a prominent modern American novelist. Aspects of Chang-rae Lee’s performative subject is exhibited in how he is striving in the difficult search for mutual understanding within the hybrid culture through Native Speaker and Aloft. This study also deals with the self consciousness and ethical demands of Suki Kim and Chang-rae Lee who rely on Korea and the life of the Korean immigrant as their asset.

창래 리(Chang-rae Lee)의 장편소설 ≪가족(Aloft)≫(2004)은 인종적문화적 혼종화 현상이 보편화되는 시대에 다인종다문화 가족의 특성을 보여주고, 개인성이 강조되는 현대사회에서 보편적인 가족의 의미를 탐색한다. 미국사회의 다인종다문화 가족에서 백인남성은 가족의 중심축을 이루며, 이민족 출신의 유색인 여성은 주변화된다. 부계를 잇는 남성들은 경제적(도구적) 역할을 감당하며, 가족의 연대성 못지않게 개인적인 자유를 구가하는 반면, 이들 유색인 여성들은 가족 내 역할이 사회적(표현적)인 것으로 제한되며, 개인성보다는 연대성을 강요받는다. 혼종적 가족구성이 특징인 미국 내 이민자 가계구성은 성별, 인종별로 성층화되어 있다. 특히 인종차보다는 성차가 가족 구성원 간의 성층화에 있어 보다 규정적인 것으로 나타난다. 그럼에도 불구하고 창래 리의 ≪가족≫이 제시한 현대사회의 가족의 의미는 개인이 갖는 잠재적 가능성과 실재 자신의 형편없음 사이의 무한한 격차, 그것을 끝내 참아주고, 자신의 가능성을 끝까지 믿어주고 기다려주는 존재라는 데 있다. 이주민처럼 존재전이의 과정 중에 있는 사람들의 경우, 가족의 의미는 보다 강조되고 보수화되는 경향도 감지된다.

“Aloft”(2004) by Chang-rae Lee shows us the meaning of a family in the modern society and how to blend cultural differences and racial discrimination in the American families which their personalities are emphasized. The white men occupy a core position. They make a living with a family business and exercise a privilege in order for the men to be free. On the other hand, colored women from other countries take care of household affairs. America filled with various immigrants forces non-white women to give up their liberty. They are not deserved to express their liberty and own desire. The conservative American society has a tendency to compel the women to do with the sense of common bonds as a member of the family. On the other words, the value of family members in modern society on the American main stream in "Aloft" is the only thing that endures and waits to be narrowing the gap between the real existence and ideal existence to be realized personal potential energy. So that everybody should love their family.

From E. Jentsch to S. Freud, several authors have written essays dealing with the uncanny. However, it seems much still remain to be explored, especially its role in the creative activities. This paper is an attempt to illustrate the dynamic function of the uncanny taken as a developmental mechanism. Its main stages observed in this paper are as follows: the first stage of settling of the uncanny affect figure, the second stage of pathological confusion, the third stage of fatal accident and the fourth stage of self-destruction or getting over that tragedy. Here the fatal accident could be overcome by chance, or the subject will survive it if somehow he is physically and mentally strong enough. Likewise, not only will he be able to avoid the self destruction, but realize he lived and went through a sort of fantasy. This opens him the next level of the uncanny-mechanism; After awakening, he now tries to reach out for an upgraded stage of uncanny, namely, the stage of sublimation. This last stage will sometimes be connected to the literary and artistic creations. The ‘double’, ‘deja vu’, and ‘unhomely home’ are frequent themes of those literary creations. Aloft(2004) by Chang-Rae Lee shows a quite subtle form of the uncanny effect evoked by a non-pathological protagonist. Its originality lies in that the author succeeds in presenting the invisible dynamism of the uncanny through the description of the visible elements although the story ends at the stage of the surmounted fatal accident without going much further to get into the stage of sublimation.

Chang-rae Lee’s first two novels, Native Speaker (1995) and A Gesture Life (1999), explicitly deal with the complex psychology of an Asian American man straddling two continents and two cultures. Native Speaker foregrounds the political aspect of Asian American experiences. Its main character, John Kwang, is an ethnic politician who not only seeks a particular voice for his own community but also wants to speak for American people as a whole. Lee employs a trope of visibility and invisibility for figuring ethnic specificity and white universalism, by contrasting the hypervisible “color” of the minority subject with the standard whiteness unnoticed. Although his third novel, Aloft (2004), delves into the mindscape of a white male living in Long Island suburbs, race is still the major issue. Lee questions the permeable white universality, as opposed to other races’ differences examined in the previous works. In Aloft, whiteness is self-consciously observed from the perspective of a wealthy Italian American, Jerry Battle. Unfortunately, Lee’s interrogation of whiteness is only half successful, since the white male patriarchy is ultimately upheld by the symbolic sacrifice of racial minorities. Jerry achieves redemption in exchange for the victimization of Korean Americans and Hispanic Americans. Both Native Speaker and Aloft illuminate the individuals’ response to the multiethnic and multicultural U.S. society, one from the perspective of a minority subject struggling with ethnic particularism, and the other from the perspective of a white male recognizing his whiteness no more universal. A comparison of the two novels brings to attention the limits of identity politics, while suggesting a changing viewpoint in exploration of race and ethnicity, with more emphasis on how race is perceived by both whites and nonwhites.

In the late 20th century, postmodernism applied to many fields such as art, literature, philosophy and literary criticism. The difference between modernism and postmodernism is that the latter is skeptical about a universal truth which applies to all categories including race, gender, culture and so on. Postmodernism values the relative truth according to each person and 'diversity' is a highly valued term. Respecting diversity in society has led to multiculturalism and individualism and promoted a sense of isolation. In Aloft, Changrae Lee, the successful Asian American writer, focuses on the sense of isolation, which is a universal problem in modern individualized society, instead of dealing with Asian American themes. The protagonist, Jerry Battle who is of Italian descent, is a responsible and successful person but he doesn't want to be involved in other people's lives, including his family members and close friends. However, as the serious problems Jerry's son, daughter and his father face are revealed, Jerry realizes the family has a relationship problem. Each one, including Jerry himself, has a border other people cannot cross and will not let anyone, even their father, venture within their borders. Jerry found out the problem and he tries to rebuild the relationship. He decides to open his borders and tries to communicate with the others through conversation. Jerry’s attempt to build a strong relationship is symbolized as 'flight' or 'travel'. Finally, the relationship is recovered and he gathers all people in his house. Aloft breaks through the boundaries of Asian American literature with this universal theme, which can be applied to all the people in 20th century. In addition, even though the white American is the main protagonist, Changrae Lee touches race and gender issues artfully in this work. As an Asian American writer, Changrae Lee tries to cross the border of Asian American literature as well as the isolated individual in modern society and suggests a solution to the solidarity that exists between a person with another within, society and further generations through communication.

이 논문은 자아성찰적 사유가 위기에 처하게 된 상황을 근대 인간이라는 근대적 정체성 범주 구성과의 연관 속에서 점검한다. 스스로를 바라보는 반성적 행위의 핵심은 누구를 어떻게 바라보느냐라는 방법론적 문제라기보다는 ‘바라본다’라는 감각과 인식의 문제이다. 수전 벅모스는 근대 인간이 우뚝 선 팔루스로 상상된 과정에 감각의 마비, 느낌의 제거가 필연적으로 수반되었다고 논의하면서 감각 그 자체에 대한 재사유를 촉구한다. 창래 리의 소설 『어로프트』는 자기가 자기를 바라보는 시선･관점을 핵심 주제로 제시하면서 특히 정체성 정치의 나르시시즘이 극에 다다른 미국이라는 사회를 배경으로 자아성찰이라는 인식행위와 서사담론의 의미를 탐구한다. 이 소설에서 주인공 제리는 전형적인 미국백인으로서 경비행기를 타고 하늘로 올라 백인중산층이 주류로서 만들어 온 미국이라는 국가의 구성을 위에서 관조하고 바라본다. 그런데 제리의 위로부터의 시선은 단순히 군림하고 통제하는 전지적 시점만은 아니다. 창래 리는 이 소설에서 패럴랙스적 시선의 복잡한 효과를 만들어내고 있으며 이를 통해 대상을 균열된 인식과 불안정한 기호가 되게끔 유도한다. 또한 반성적 사유란 결국 고통이라는 감각을 기꺼이 받아들이고 붕괴의 흔적을 쓰다듬는 자기결단적 행위이며 이런 행위를 통해 위로의 추락이라는 역설을 올라타고 어느 하나로 모아지지 않는 복잡한 시선으로 스스로를 성찰하고자 한다.

This paper examines the crisis of humanistic critical inquiry in terms of the epistemic situation in which self??reflection become increasingly impossible. The problem lies not in how to see or what to see but in a more fundamental issue of seeing itself. As Susan Buck??Morss argues, modern man has been constructed based on the paradox of castration: modern man stands as a phallus only due to the removal of embarrassingly unpredictable sense. Chang??rae Lee’s novel Aloft explores the meaning of self??perception and self??narrating in the context of a narcissistic Phallic American society. The perspective in the novel does not simply stay as a all??encompassing, bird’s??eye view, celebrating American triumphalist narrative, articulating the complex effects of seeing as suggested in Zizek’s “parallax view.” Perspectives are not absorbed or assimilated into a modern, national, universal seeing; instead, they create ceaseless and irreconcilable differences, thus leading us to the fragmented, incomprehensible understanding about America. He also shows that a self??reflecting perspective requires the decision to restore the capability to feel through self??inflicted pain. Such a decision makes it possible to capture, even momentarily, the ungraspable existence of ‘us’ by the impossible gesture of upward falling.

This paper proposes to read Aloft as a ‘subversive’ successor of the suburbia novel tradition. A white middle-class protagonist Jerry Battle, detailed interest in the uniformity of Long Island suburban life, alienation and desire for flight from his reality are some typical characteristics of the suburbia novel. Suburbia novels have been traditionally considered a white-centered genre in that they depict, with sympathy, the alienation and psychological poverty in the midst of material plenty felt and complained of by white middle-class suburban people. Jurca terms this feeling of ‘homeless at home’ as ‘white diaspora’ and criticizes the suburbia novel arguing that it justifies white dominance by converting those privileged people into victims of the suburban system. What makes Aloft a subversive text are its description of suburbs as racialized space and its focus on the oppression and exploitation of racial others by a white male protagonist and its aftermath. Jerry’s selfish retreat from reality and worldly cares, whose metaphor is his occasional flight in his Cessna, is challenged by the muted anger of his Korean wife Daisy’s suicide, the moving-out of his Puerto Rican lover Rita after 20 years of serving his family, and the stubborn denial of treatment for treatable cancer, and eventual death, of his daughter Theresa. Jerry matures after experiencing these crises, and brings all his remaining family into his house and helps them out with their respective difficulties. His active engaging in the ‘battle’ with reality, along with the ‘communication’ and ‘being nice to each other’ performed by Jerry’s newly-formed family, is distinctly different from the prevalent affect of white diaspora in traditional suburbia novels. In conclusion, Aloft takes up the tradition of the suburbia novel to subvert its white-oriented assumptions and explore its new possibilities in a multicultural society.

Building upon his previous two novels (namely, Native Speaker and A Gesture Life), which probed the problematic identity of ethnic minority and the exclusionary logic buttressing it, Chang-rae Lee’s latest work titled Aloft shifts its narrative focus onto a story of a white man’s middle class family thereby bringing to bear its thematic scope on the universal problem of human isolation. As the result, Aloft creates the impression of turning away from the restrictive theme of racial politics and its oppressive measures. This view, however, is a misleading one in so far as it presupposes the naturalized image of ‘family.’ In contrast to the conventional image of family qua minimal organic unit of community, a series of incessant conflicts and power struggle underlie the apparent simplicity of this “family story.” And it is against that conceptual backdrop of conflict-driven communality, the text attempts a more sophisticated problematization of such (post)colonial issues as Orientalism, racism, and gender oppression, wherein Jerry, the protagonist and pater familias, metonymically functions as a stereotypical white colonialist. He intentionally distorts the images of ethnic and gender minorities including his own family members, thereby silencing the voices of alterity from the text, which dramatizes “the battle field” between the oppressive rule of sovereignty and the resistance to it. This study argues that Aloft depicts family as a mirror and microcosm of the social as such, where every subject is, without exception, forced to engage in hegemonic power struggle not only for recognition but for survival.

Chang-rae Lee’s third novel Aloft has contributed to its author’s newly granted title as a writer who deals with the “universal” as opposed to particular, ethnic concerns. This paper argues that Aloft does represent the “universal,” not with regard to its white male protagonist Jerry Battle, but with regard to its calls for facing one’s family as the “absolutely other” as Emmanuel Levinas would define it. Jerry “declines the Real” when he encounters familial difficulties of which the beginning was the relationship with his late wife Daisy Han, who came to him as the destitute, denuded “face” of the other. It is, however, the additional death of the other that fundamentally disturbs Jerry’s “being” and changes his attitude towards his family and life. His daughter Theresa, disease stricken, sacrifices herself for her unborn baby, so she calls him to face the present of his family and the past related to Daisy’s death. Theresa’s substitutive death beyond Jerry’s knowledge and understanding ultimately invests him with the one responsible for the other, the subject “response-able” to the other’s order of “Thou shalt not kill.” A Levinasian way of reading Aloft will call its readers to face their family as a neighbor who needs their care and responsibility, and a persecutor who even demands their taken-for-granted place at home.

This paper studies ethnicity, gender, and their relations in Chang-rae Lee's third novel Aloft where the ethnic writer narrates through a white male protagonist, Jerry Battle. The Battles, an American middle-class family of Italian ancestry, have successfully run a family business, which is a symbol of its owners' patriarchal position. Their landscaping business is gender-specific as it involves sexual exchanges between the Battle men and their lady customers and is race-bound as it takes place in the suburbs where whites outnumber ethnic minorities. The Battle men are white patriarchs, and their relationship with their wives portrays ethnic and gender relations of the wider society. Especially, Jerry's relationship with his Korean wife Daisy and with his Puerto Rican girlfriend Rita reveals the prevailing Orientalist view in the American mainstream society. Daisy as a non-threatening other is characterized by non-language, sex, and madness. Similarly, Rita embodies Virgin Mary, whose sexuality and procreation are controlled by male power, and a colony that is conquered and dominated by white colonists. Jerry's hybrid daughter Theresa, however, challenges these asymmetrical ethnic and gender relations when she interferes with his narrative. She is a narrative device that problematizes the first-person narrator and suggests a counter-narrative that changes his attitude towards his family and life. Ultimately, she is a non-patriarchal successor of the Battle family, who challenges the status quo of ethnic and gender relations of the American society.