1. Tell us a bit about the essay you wrote for JNT.
My contribution, “Impossible Identities: An Exploration of Character and Storyworld in Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown,” looks at the ways that Yu’s novel uses unnatural narrative techniques to connect our understanding of narrative with our understanding of lived experience. The novel, which mostly reads as if it were a screenplay or script, details the experience of Willis Wu, his family, and fellow Asian immigrants who work as extras for a Law and Order-style television show titled Black and White. In this fictional context, the characters are not recognized as individuals: they are always only seen as the roles they play, even when they are ostensibly not in character. This process creates impossible identities because there is no space permitted where individuality and intelligibility might coexist. What is particularly noteworthy here is that Yu’s formal experimentation with characterization and storyworlds reflects actual experience: because scripts and roles determine what makes one culturally intelligible, marginalized individuals find themselves trapped in the characterizations and contexts that define them, showing that an attention to form and character can provide crucial insights into our larger understanding of individuals as well. I argue that, by experimenting with types of characterization and narrative levels that are impossible on a mimetic level while also prompting a mimetic reading that sees these characters as individuals with real experiences in the storyworld, Yu aids readers in understanding the extent of damage caused by stereotypes and the biases behind cultural intelligibility.
2. What inspired you to research this topic?
I have been working for some time now with texts that challenge the limits of narrative and the ways those limits might provide particularly poignant reflections on human experience. The methods by which narratives play with and push the limits of form have long interested me because of the capacity of form itself to provide insights into our experiences, especially those that are not deemed “normal.” My interest in a new understanding of mimesis does not pit the unnatural and mimesis against each other but instead tries to expand the concept of mimesis to account for experimentations in form. This led me to an interest in what I call the “poetics of association.” At the same time, after reading and teaching Yu’s Interior Chinatown, I was struck by the powerful blurring of the lines between fiction and reality in a way that parallels actual experience and the similarly blurry lines therein. The novel illustrates what I’ve been trying to talk about in ingenious ways.
3. What was the most exciting thing about this project for you? And has your research on this topic changed the way you see the world today?
Yu’s novel is deceptively complex and trying to articulate how it works posed a particularly instructive challenge. I feel that trying to work through how the novel reflects on the experiences of marginalized individuals and communities and how Yu plays skillfully with narrative components that shouldn’t work but do reveals not just the limits of narrative but also its possibilities. His ability to create impossible and stereotyped characters who simultaneously prompt mimetic engagement on a deep level challenges my thinking in new ways and I appreciate the novel greatly for it. Researching unnatural narratives continually reminds me of the power of narrative simultaneously to challenge assumptions and to create connections and understandings.
4. What’s next for you?
My next project builds on my research and understanding of experimental narrative, but it does so specifically in the context of unconventionally literalized representations of the self as multiple (especially in works that use the second person voice and/or other formal devices to complicate the telling as well as the told). In this context, and in keeping with my earlier work, I am engaged in exploring how form helps us to understand experience and identity more deeply—that is, how techniques like multiple selves and the formal experiments that sometimes accompany their representation provide both new understandings of narrative conventions and open up new and associated understandings of being.
