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The Pathos of Temporality in Mid-20Th Century Asian American Fiction

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The Pathos of Temporality in Mid-20Th Century Asian American Fiction THE PATHOS OF TEMPORALITY IN MID-20TH CENTURY ASIAN AMERICAN FICTION A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH by Sarah C. Gardam May 2018 Examining Committee Members: Sue-Im Lee, Advisory Chair, English Department Sheldon Brivic, English Department Alan Singer, English Department Laura Levitt, Religion Department ii ABSTRACT Lack of understanding regarding the role that temporality-pathos plays in Asian American literature leads scholars to misread many textual passages as deviations from the implied authors’ political critiques. This dissertation invites scholars to recognize temporality-focused passages in Younghill Kang’s East Goes West, Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, and John Okada’s No-No Boy, as part of a pathos formula developed by avant-garde Asian American writers to resist systemic alienations experienced by Asian Americans by diagnosing and treating America’s empathy gap. I find that each of pathae examined – the pathos of finitude, the pathos of idealism, and the pathos of confusion – appears in each of the major primary texts discussed, and that these pathae not only invite similitude-based empathy from a wide readership, but also prompt, via multiple methods, the expansion of empathy. First, the authors use these pathae diagnostically: the pathos of finitude makes visible American imperialism’s destruction of prior ways of life; the pathos of idealism exposes the falsity of the futures promised by liberalism; and the pathos of confusion counters the destructive nationalisms that fractured the era. Second, the authors use these temporality pathae to identify the instrumentalist reasoning underlying these capitalist ideologies and to show how they stunt American empathy. Third, the authors deploy formal and thematic complexities that cultivate empathy-generating faculties of mind and cultivate alternative forms of reasoning. iii DEDICATION To those who have lost their hours and labored in vain. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank my supportive family and friends, particularly my mother and father, Louise and Richard Gardam, my aunt Mary Jane Junge and my uncle Bergen Junge, my grandmother Annabel Junge and my grandfather Bill Junge, and my friends Michelle Martin and Philip Mahoney, all of whom have helped me get by over the last few years as I finished this project. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………i DEDICATION………………………………………………………………...…………ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………...……...iii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: THE PATHOS OF TEMPORALITY IN MID-20TH CENTURY ASIAN AMERICAN FICTION...….…………………………………….…………1 2. MODERNIST FINITUDE AND TEMPORAL PARADOX IN YOUNGHILL KANG’S EAST GOES WEST…………………………………………….………..54 3. RECONSIDERING PATHOS AND IDEALISM IN AMERICA IS IN THE HEART: CARLOS BULOSAN’S MICROPOLITICAL CRITIQUE OF CAPITALIST LIBERALISM………………………………………………….….92 4. HEALING THE CONFUSED PRESENT THROUGH SYMPATHETIC REASONING IN JOHN OKADA’S NO-NO BOY………………………....……126 5. CONCLUSION…………………………….…………………………………….....154 REFERENCES CITED………………………………………………………………..162 ENDNOTES…………………………………………………………………………..186 CHAPTER 1 THE PATHOS OF TEMPORALITY IN MID-20TH CENTURY ASIAN AMERICAN FICTION Scholarship on Asian American literature tends to evaluate texts’ meaningful communications of suffering – their pathos – in terms of their realistic depiction and critique of Asian Americans’ oppression. These interventions advance knowledge of Asian American history and expose the ugly faces of U.S. imperialism, neoliberalism, racism/ethnic nationalism, and the exploitative capitalist system these ideologies justify. In recent decades, an increasing number of scholars also have begun to explore less realism-based methods of political resistance performed by under-analyzed aesthetic features of Asian American texts.i My project illuminates one such neglected feature: a preoccupation with modern temporality which manifests both thematically and formally in several major mid-20th century Asian American narratives. Drawing on the work of American empathy theorists such as William James and Candice Clark and pathos theorists such as Martha Nussbaum and Robert Buch, I define pathos in general as a temporal process of making and communicating meaning around pain. Whereas suffering refers to physical and psychological anguish, the term pathos includes both the rhetorical means (temporality-related words, images, thematics) and the durational process (connecting rhetoric to meanings shareable by the reader) by which that anguish is communicated. The cognitive empathy invited by these texts’ complex uses of temporality rhetoric is temporality-dependent – an outcome of durational learning processes described and prompted in these narratives. In other words, pathos, unlike rhetoric, points to the multivalence of these texts’ engagements of temporality. 2 My project identifies and describes three major forms of modernist pathos which express some of modernity’s most defining attitudes toward the past, the present, and the future: a past-oriented pathos of finitude, a future-oriented pathos of idealism, and a present-oriented pathos of confusion. In brief, the modern pathos of finitude depicts the past mythically, grieving idyllic past temporalities fractured by modernity, whereas the pathos of idealism involves imaginative escapes into seemingly timeless, idealized realms, such as utopian futures, as a way of coping with the jarring modern present. Lastly, the pathos of confusion expresses the dissonance of multiple, conflicting ideologies and temporalities in the modern present. These three popular expressions of modern alienation in terms of temporal experience pervade much late-19th to mid-20th century literature and philosophy. I posit that Korean American novelist Younghill Kang’s use of modern temporality pathos as a frame for communicating suffering in East Goes West (1937) inspired several other mid-century Asian American men writers to use similar pathos. Closely examining Kang’s novel and two additional texts – Carlos Bulosan’s 1946 autofictional America is in the Heart, and John Okada’s 1957 novel, No-No Boy, I explore how each of the modern temporality pathae just mentioned is politically repurposed in mid-century Asian American literature. In short, the pathos of finitude is used to register and grieve the damage of American imperialism, the pathos of idealism, to expose the lies of American liberalism, and the pathos of confusion to counter the divisiveness of 20th century nationalisms. I argue that each of these forms of pathos resists, on four levels, the alienations mid-20th century Asian Americans experienced in the modern present. Each form of pathos elicits similitude-based empathic concern; 3 diagnoses the instrumentalist reasoning underlying America’s lack of empathy for its marginalized members; highlights the resulting oppressions and their compounding of Asian Americans’ temporal alienation; and encourages an empathy-expanding form of reasoning that counters instrumentality. I suspect that Asian American writers turned to temporality-themed modern pathos formulae because they saw temporality rhetoric’s potential for such versatile uses. Through the four functions just mentioned, temporality rhetoric allowed these writers to emphasize the relatability, the seriousness, and the unfairness of the depicted suffering of Asian Americans in these texts – emphases which prove necessary for eliciting compassion in the context of an American culture plagued by empathy-stunting perceptual shortcuts.ii Although general Western forms of modern temporality pathos tend to posit the losses incurred by the linear march of time itself as the cause of suffering, the temporal experiences I am calling “modern” are not at all universal or inevitable, but rather, are consequences of the widespread denaturalization, commodification, and acceleration of time from the late-19th to the mid-20th century, a period of increasingly rapid technological, economic, and geopolitical change. Although much 19th century popular discourse optimistically touted modernity’s arrival as a time of liberation from the backward past, modernity theorists from Karl Marx to Max Weber to Emile Durkheim to Georg Simmel to Ulrich Beck to Hermann Lubbe have theorized a variety of profound alienations that characterize the era.iii German scholar Hartmut Rosa, summarizing early Marx, explains, “the capitalist mode of production resulted in man’s fivefold alienation from his actions (work), from his products (things), from nature, from other human beings (the social world) and, finally, from him- or herself” (83). While alienation is 4 ultimately an unstable concept, Rosa argues that the profoundly alienating effects of social acceleration demonstrably render the modern world “silent, cold, indifferent, or even repulsive” for many moderns (100). Rosa declares this “‘silencing’ of the world, the ‘deafness’ in the relationship between self and world”, as “the most persistent and most threatening concern in all the diagnoses of ‘pathology’ that we find in critical social analyses of modernity” (100). What Reinhart Koselleck calls the “denaturalization” of temporality plays a central role in this alienation, for technology, capitalism, and other social acceleration factors have increasingly separated human beings from nature’s organic temporalities (104). In Koselleck’s words, “We are dealing with a long-term process of increasing acts
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