Names of the Origins in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée: Khora and Dao

초록

This paper aims to explore relations among life and art in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée via an overarching form of constellation. After discussing how Dictée has been reviewed in Asian American studies, I propose a third way to overcome the traditional directions of scholarship, cultural studies and avant-garde poetics. This third way uses Benjamin’s idea of constellation. Adopting ‘constellation’ to find ideas over the fragmentary forms and Cha’s diasporic life, this paper first analyzes picture images in Dictée to trace the voices from ossified victims, mostly Korean women, in history. In turn, this paper delves into deep origins hidden under unfathomable “name” as pure language to communicate with history and reified beings. Names of Greek goddess such as Demeter and Persephone and the myth of this mother-and-daughter relationship function as a device to find Irigaray’s forgotten female ancestry and Khora as the origin in Dictée. Khora as a name of female sexuality also becomes what Julia Kristeva calls semiotic chora from formalistic perspective. This Khora as the origin of female sexuality and ancestry as well as unnameable name of relations among spaces in which chaos of victims occur corresponds with another name of the origin in the East, namely Dao(道). Before the end of this paper, I explore a possible connectivity between Khora in the West and Dao in the East within the constellation of Dictée.

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