You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's exquisite Dictée (1982), an experimental, at times phantasmagoric, and definitely elusive meditative narrative that features the painful losses of mainly resilient Korean women as well as those of Korea herself (especially during the years of the Japanese takeover, ), may be designated a Kristevan novel. For one thing it makes a point of traversing Christianity by presenting religious themes in order to italicize the “sacredness” of intimate revolt, working-through, and mourning, on both the personal and national levels. Reversing the Catholic Mystery of the Incarnation, Dictée reflects Julia Kristeva's notion that the sacred entails a psychoanalytic process in which flesh becomes Word; and if psychoanalytic forgiveness is the transformation of pain into meaning, as Kristeva redefines it, the novel also enacts this process through its metamorphosis of flesh to Word.
Kristeva explains in Intimate Revolt that psychoanalysis involves “analytical interpretation [that] emerges as a secular version of forgiveness, in which [there is] not just a suspension of judgment but a giving of meaning, beyond judgment” (Kristeva, 2002, p. 12). The bestowing of meaning onto the subject's suffering results initially in a “dead time” in which the subject refuses the interpretation, but subsequently “an elational hallucination” or “moment of grace” takes place “that signals … the analysand's rebirth” (Kristeva, 2002, p. 36). The analyst “forgives” the analysand through a process that essentially involves the transformation of suffering, trauma, the flesh-unarticulated to articulation, meaning, or the Word. Kristeva's is a sacred that enables the movement of the timeless into time and hence a new start through intimate revolt.
Cha's art is clearly conversant with psychoanalytic thinkers tied to continental philosophy. By collating Cha with Kristeva