Writing against the grain: the cross-over genres of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, China Men, and The Fifth Book of Peace/Geleneksel formlarm disinda yazmak: Maxine Hong Kingston'in The Woman Warrior, China Men, ve The Fifth Book of Peace Adli Eserlerinin Capraz Gecisli Turleri

Interactions, Fall, 2007 by Silvia Schultermandl

Abstract: This paper interrogates Kingston's use of multiple narrative discourses that, by fusing elements of fiction and non-fiction, transgress genre conventions in ways that no other contemporary American writer has accomplished. Reading Kingston's innovative books with the sole emphasis on the parameters "gender" and "ethnicity" runs the risk of essentializing her and her work. What I focus on in this paper is Kingston's composition of texts that challenge the status quo of genre normativity and that raise issues about how we read and classify literature in general. I argue that Kingston's intervention of cross-over genres, that is the conglomeration of fictional identity narratives, historicity and ethnography, and her attention to local (Chinese, American, Chinese American) and global political and social issues forces the readers to read against the grain of conventional forms of the novel, the memoir, and the autobiography.

Keywords: genre theory, genre transgressions, canonicity, Asian American literature.

Bu makale, Kingston'in kurgusal olan ve olmayan unsurlari ic ice gecirerek tur geleneklerini daha once hicbir cagdas Amerikan yazarinin basaramadigi sekilde bozarak coklu anlatimsal soylemler kullanmasini incelemektedir. Kingston'in yenilikci kitaplarini sadece "toplumsal cinsiyet rolleri" ve "etnik ozellikler" parametreleriyle okumak onu ve eserini temel sinirlar icine hapsetme riskini dogurur. Makalenin odak noktasi, Kingston'in tur kuralciligi statukosuna meydan okuyan ve genel olarak edebiyati nasil okuyup siniflandirdigimiz sorularini gundeme getiren metinleridir. Kingston'in capraz gecisli turlere mudahalesi--yani kurgusal kimlik anlatilarinin, tarihselligin ve etnografyanin birlestirilmesi--ve yerel (Cinli, Amerikali, Cinli-Amerikali) ve kuresel siyasi/sosyal meselelere olan ilgisi, okuru roman, ani ve otobiyografi turlerinin geleneksel formlarinin disina cikarak okumaya zorlar.

Anahtar Kelimler: tur kurami, turlerin sinirlarinin asilmasi, kanon, Asyali-Amerikali Edebiyati

Since the publication of her memoir The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston has been known as a writer who continuously challenges genre normativity: in The Woman Warrior, her assumption of both individual and collective narrative discourses about the present, past, and future modalities of her Chinese American identity have put to test the conventional scope of ethnographic literary and cultural analyses; in her biography China Men (1980), Kingston's insertion of long sections of historical accounts of the early wave of immigrant Chinese American into the fictionalized narration of her father's life in the US fuses fiction and biography with historiography; and finally, in her most recent memoir The Fifth Book of Peace (2003), her assembly of different genres, ranging from an autobiographical piece on the genesis of that book and a biography of Wittman Ah Sing, a fictional character of her novel Tripmaster Monkey, to another piece of life writing that offers advice on how to cope with and use one's creative energy in times of political warfare, defies all rules of genre conventions. Both Kingston's autobiographical and fictional writing resists classifications as mere "memoirs" or "novels" as these terms fail to imply the originality of Kingston's forms of life writing.

Recent criticism on life writing has turned away from such analyses that center on a text's contents, i.e. on its representations of race, ethnicity, nationhood, class, gender and sexuality, and has emphasized the formal construction along with the performative possibilities of a text. As Rosalia Baena asserts, "to analyze how authors engage differently with the autobiographical mode is to ask questions about the very nature and textures of narratives and the ways that these function in process of selfformation and self-representation" (216). Baena makes a clear point not to overemphasize the "ethnic" or "gender" identity of an author and the assigned identity of his or her text, a practice which, she agrees, precludes a more in-depth investigation of the formal and literary qualities of a text for the sake of an analysis of its cultural peculiarities. Janice Kulyk Keefer's definition of the "transcultural" comes to mind here and its implied incentive that the dominant culture "becomes part of a larger, looser structure within which literary texts which foreground the experience of 'minority' as opposed to 'dominant' groups both represent themselves and are received as representative, even pragmatic forms for an entire social formation, and not just for the ethnic or racial group with which the text's author is associated" (265).

I interrogate in this paper Kingston's use of multiple narrative discourses that, by fusing elements of fiction and non-fiction, transgress genre conventions in ways that no other contemporary American writer has accomplished. I argue that Kingston's intervention of cross-over genres, that is the conglomeration of fictional identity narratives, historicity and ethnography, and her attention to local (Chinese, American, Chinese American) and global political and social issues forces the readers to read outside of conventional genre categories. One of the main challenges this poses to the reader is the confrontation with a blurred line between fact and fiction. Because Kingston writes against the grain of genre normativity, the reader constantly needs to judge to what extent the change in genre also impacts the implied function of the overall text.