Melancholy of Race

Melancholy of Race summary: Through readings of Flower Drum Song, The Woman Warrior, M. Butterfly, Invisible Man, Dictée and Twilight: Lost Angeles, 1992, Cheng constructs a theory of racial melancholy, which expands upon Freud by exploring the melancholic relationship of loss and exclusion to possession, assimilation, fantasy and hypochondria.

Passage for close reading: “The internalization of cultural origins as subjective or ontological origins indicates a path to theorize the act of hearing a story, how a story enters us, structures us” (89).

This passage occurs toward the center of the chapter “A Fable of Exquisite Corpses,” in a section where Cheng has been addressing the complex of plaints and losses surrounding the mother and daughter dyad of Woman Warrior. The daughter, as an adult, seeks a “ghost-free” country (88) as a direct complaint against the mother's ghost stories that have haunted her childhood, while Cheng assets that this very complaint unites the two women over a common grief, a loss that the mother chiefly mourns, while the daughter melancholically, and hypochondriacally, repeats that grief, resurrecting the ghosts through her very plea to be rid of them. Cheng argues that the daughter's complaint is actually filed “not on behalf of the mother, but as mother in a kind of endocryptic repetition” (88), a repetition that functions, in part, on the level of the text's complicated and complicit temporality, where the daughter’s childhood and adult recollections and often indistinguishable from each other and from recollections of and from the mother. For Cheng, the “contextual conflation” (88) makes possible cultural transmission of any sort, in that this confusion of voices and temporalities allows the mother to introject into her own loss into the daughter as a kind of alien subjectivity, as the ghost in the machine. I would like to look more closely at the dynamics of these porous bodies, and how a relationship is constructed across the gap of endocryptic functioning.

The sentence immediately preceding this one refers to the mother's attempt to assimilate the daughter into a culture that is not immediately personally meaningful to the latter, so that the focus remains closely tied to the text of the novel in question. This sentence, then, marks a sudden shift to generalized and institutionalized language. The first word of the sentence, in the phrase “internalization of cultural origins,” turns an adjective into a verb into a noun, effectively enacting in miniature the contextual and temporal conflations that Cheng works through in the preceding passages. The generalizing language, and pluralized form, of “cultural origins,” however, moves this conflation away from the singularity of the text, into a condition of possibility for any and potentially all cultural exchange.

“Origins” as the object of the prepositional phrase and hence the object becoming internalized, are here both ontological and subjective. The origin of subjectivity in particular is reminiscent of Lacan's mirror stage, where subjectivity is originated at the moment of self-awareness and self-vision, with the caveat that the self viewed in the mirror is always an embodiment of anticipation, a figure instantiating an asymptotic relationship that looks forward to a state of perfect control that is always already lost to one. This origin is itself temporally complicated, looking both forward to the perfect moment of control and backwards to the Edenic boundedness that is already fantasmic before it is actualized. Yet the “origins” in this sentence are further complicated, both by the temporal and grammatical layers entombing the word “internal” and by the temporal complication of the mother-figure inserting within the daughter, as though it were already extant, a cultural program that is always already asymptotic and contingent, while the abruptly impersonal tone of this sentence universalizes that impossibility of a pure origin t anyone.

The internalization of one kind of origins as another constructs a shifting complex of three impossible-to-locate centralities: the origin of culture, the origin of one's ontological or subjective self, and the situation of those origins internally. If this internalization is cryptic, so too is the path out: the trio of origins align to form a “path to theorize the act of hearing a story, how a story enters us, structures us” (89). “Hearing” a story, as opposed to reading or even writing one, creates the image of the listener as a child figure who needs the guidance of an adult reader to guide their affective responses through a story's structure, an act which becomes doubly receptive through both the ears and the imagination. Through this verb, the reader of Cheng's text, who has been able to insert their own cultural introjection into this impersonal sentence, takes on the place of the daughter from Woman Warrior, listening to a story that constructs both temporality and culture within them.

If we must be structured as children in order to accept this internalizing story, the story itself also, seemingly, structures the listener/reader as adult. The last two phrases of this sentence shift abruptly from the impersonal, universalizing tone of the early sections to an intensely personal—and plural—intimacy. The verb phrase “enters us” makes the story an active, penetrative agent, inserting itself in a sort of sexual paradigm into our bodies. If the earlier part of the sentence allowed a reader to insert themselves into its rhetoric thanks to its generality, the “us” here forces the reader to personalize and literalize that relationship, suddenly making this story, both Woman Warrior and Cheng's own text, force themselves intimately upon our bodies in an act of constructing a cultural identity of which we may not be a part. In this way, the final verb phrases shift the reader, the recipient of cultural assimilation, into a position both as sexual object and maternal figure. If the story “enters” our, and the narrator's “vulnerably porous” (89) bodies, that very porousness incorporates spaces that the story can “structure” much in the way that a fetus changes the structures, chemistry, responses and function of the maternal body. Here, then, the story inserted within the body becomes an exquisite corpse, in the sense of incorporated cultural memories that cannot be assimilated, but also a sexualized and generative actualization of the relationship between generations, structured through the penetrative power of story.