“ ‘A new rule for the imagination’: Rewriting Modernism in Bone"

In this essay, I resort to the tools of textual and narratological analysis--in the wider sense that Mieke Bal gives to narratology as “critical science” rather than as mere inventory of narrative devices--and read Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone with emphasis on its formal structure and imagery, as critics have been wont to do in reading those canonical masterpieces of the twentieth century to which, in my view, Bone more closely resembles. In particular, I analyze its retrospective narrative structure and its use of what Roland Barthes called a “hermeneutic code” (i.e., the primacy of a cognitive quest rather than a quest for identity); its multiple, fragmented versions of the core story, and the aesthetic and ideological implications of such multiplicity and fragmentation (which, to my mind, unsettle linearity and genealogies both at the textual level and as regards the issues of identity and ethnicity); its use of language and imagery in ways that, while retaining a deep cultural resonance and representativeness, deviate from those more customary to the Asian American novel and look to modern and postmodern textuality and metatextuality. By investigating the novel’s complex set of identifications and disidentifications with the Asian American autobiographical tradition on the one hand and the mainstream modernist aesthetics of selection and control on the other hand, I highlight Ng’s effective anti-essentialistic rewriting of the (Chinese) American novel as an open, multilayered, and contested literary field.