1
2011 EALA: Trauma and Literature
Joanne Yoon (Yonsei University)
Remembering a Forgotten War: Witnessing Trauma and Inadvertent Erasures
in Chang-Rae Lee’s The Surrendered
I. Introduction
The Surrendered, the monumental recent novel by Pulitzer-finalist writer
Chang-Rae Lee, is about a girl called June, who, orphaned during the Korean War,
somehow outlives the devastating effects of her past trauma. It is also about Hector,
an American ex-soldier during the Korean War who for his only fault of being strong
survives his memory by living his life in repeated erasure. It is also about an
American woman, Sylvie, a daughter of missionaries, who lives her life in a cursed
inversion of the example of their unconditional giving. It is also about June‟s son,
Nicholas, and the profound silence and re-traumatization of inherited, generational
trauma. Aside from this, the novel could also be read as diasporic fiction, study on
PTSD, orphans and transracial adoption, on subalterns and colonial/neo-colonial pasts.
The novel is primarily, but not singularly about the Korean War, also including the
Russo-Japanese War, and the Battle of Solferino. The locations that form the various
contexts of the novel are multiple, shifting from Korea, to Manchuria, New York,
New Jersey, and finally, to Italy. While the novel seems engaged in a certain
decentering of geography and narrative, 1 in other ways, it takes for granted its
underlying western perspective.
The Surrendered seems to most significantly achieve, on the outset, the
remembering of a war erased and occluded in memory. In summoning back a
repressed specter, The Surrendered necessarily participates in the cultural
(re)production of history and memory. The task here is to explore, how The
Surrendered „remembers‟ and (using Felman and Laub‟s terminology) “witnesses” to
this historical trauma, and yet in other ways ideologically contributes to its own
inadvertent erasures. Thus, while The Surrendered can be read as a narrative
reconstruction of a past that enables “witnessing,” a closer look at passages reveals a
reproduction of orientalism, an endorsing of a stereotype of the Asian other as
1
Caren Irr, in “Toward the World Novel: Genre Shifts in Twenty-First-Century Expatriate Fiction,”
classifies The Surrendered as a new emergent “world novel,” an “exploratory work” of the “perpetual
expatriate or stateless nomad,” of “numbly exhausted placelessness” (672).
2
sentimentalized through the trope of the child, and a privileging of the white,
American/European subject chronicled through a westcentric gaze.
II. Point of Departure: A Forgotten War
The Korean War is well known as the “forgotten war,”2 and through many
other “nonwar epithets of negation” in the American national imaginary (Hwang 24).
Outside of South Korea, the Korean War is not only a war that has not ended, but also
a war whose history has only recently seen the emergence of balanced scholarship.3
International scholars have only recently begun viewing the Korean War as
inextricably tied not just to the international context but also within the current of its
own national history, placing precedence on the colonial period.4 Junghyun Hwang in
his dissertation argues that though the Korean War was by nature „without a name,‟ it
has not so much been forgotten but has always been “present in its marked erasure”
(added emphasis): “ „identified in so many ways that it is possible to argue that it has
never been identified at all.‟”5
The Korean War was quickly forgotten as inconvenient in US history because
of the very nature in which it was not a war for the US to begin with, but a “police
action” (Keene War 5). The displaced and traumatized character of Hector in The
Surrendered is in a way a portrait of US war veterans who were ashamed and
willingly silent about a war in which they were not even legitimately acknowledged
as soldiers (Keene Lost 1098, Halberstam 5). The Korean War is remembered as less
a “Korean” War than as a convenient geographical designation for the battle of
ideologies between the Soviet Union and the United States.6 Hwang describes Korea
2
The Surrendered itself in one passage notes the vague origins of the Korean War: “…maybe not their
[the U.S.] war exactly, but Mao‟s war, or Truman‟s, or someone else‟s; it was a war that from the
beginning had been nobody‟s cross, inciting only mild attacks of patriotism and protest, jingoism and
pacifism, a war both too cold and too hot and that managed to erase fifty thousand of his [Hector‟s]
kind and over a million of theirs [Koreans]” (99).
3
For a comprehensive critical bibliography, particularly the discussion on the origins of the Korean
War, see Millett 190-194.
4
William Stueck earlier in his career focused on the international context and U.S. foreign policy in
Korea (Millett 192), but in Rethinking the Korean War made an important emphasis on the “interaction
of Korean and non-Korean elements,” highlighting especially the “severely circumscribing” effect of
the foreign presence that led to the Korean War while not understating the national tensions (66).
5
“…the „forgotten war,‟ „the war nobody wanted,‟ „Mr. Truman‟s folly,‟ the „wrong war,‟ the
„Communist war,‟ the „Asian war,‟ the „unknown war,‟ the „emphatic War,‟ the „war that never was,‟
the „war before Vietnam,‟ and…„the ignored war‟…” (qtd. Hwang 24).
6
In the words of one scholar, Korea “serve[d] both as a living laboratory for technologies of
domination and as a site of contestation over the United States‟ fantasy of itself as a nation of saviors”
(Cho 7).
3
within this hegemonic framework, as Kristeva‟s abject, a threat of instability and
disruption as a repressed Cold War specter (9).
Conversely, Seung-Hee Jeon, an affiliated scholar at the Korea Institute at
Harvard, in an essay describes how South Korea itself adopted the western Manichean
historiography of the Cold War, and has selectively remembered and erased the
memory of the war for their own purpose of post-war nation-building, fostering
“aggressive anticommunist attitudes” through media and educational institutions
(624). That the Korean War has not really ended, or never „legitimately‟ began,
erased and forgotten even before its own historicity, literally corresponds to the notion
of trauma as, in the words of Dori Laub (MD), an “event that could not and did not
proceed through to its completion, has no ending, attained no closure, and
therefore…continues into the present and is current in every respect” (Laub 69). That
Korea‟s trauma is still present, despite politically „remembering‟ according to a logics
of erasure, forms the basis of departure for an analysis of The Surrendered.
III. The Narrative as Testimonial Process: Trauma and Witnessing
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, in their authoritative work, Testimony:
Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, describe the
Holocaust and the Second World War as a watershed event that represents a crisis in
history and literature because of the impossibility in our present of integrating and
responding to the catastrophic events (Caruth Introduction 1). The “unspeakability”
and “inarticulability” of the large and small historical traumas that are passed down
and inherited, is symptomatic of an event that, in Cathy Caruth‟s words, “possesses”
the survivor, while the event remains fully unpossessable (Caruth 5). It is an
“entrapment in a fate that cannot be known, cannot be told, but can only be repeated”
(Felman & Laub 69). This, however, can be “undone” through a “…process of
constructing a narrative, of reconstructing a history and essentially, of reexternalizing the event…transfer[ring] it to another outside oneself and then take[ing]
it back again, inside” (emphases original).
If narrative itself functions as a process of „making sense‟ of trauma through
the reconstruction and reformulation of the past, The Surrendered can be read as a
reconstructive narrative that performs the notion of trauma as an “event” or “advent”
(Felman & Laub 14). The highly complex, discontinuous, and fragmented nature of
the narrative can be read as piecing together a shattered past, subjectivity, and
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memory itself. In this sense, there is a strong emphasis on the cohering and reparative
aspects of narrative. June and Hector seem to form a “testimonial” relationship
through which they witness their trauma to each other and to themselves.7 The novel
witnesses to their dialectical relationship that establishes “further link[s] in the
testimonial chain” (Felman & Laub 71).
Seemingly facilitating this narrative, the heterodiegetic, third-person
omniscient narrator could be viewed as a listener and “enabler” of a testimonial
process.8 According to Laub, the listener, comparable to a narrator, must be “both
unobtrusive, nondirective, and yet imminently present, active, in the lead” (71). While
the narrator takes on the role of witness and listener, also interpellating the reader
likewise, one could argue that Felman and Laub overestimate and are overly
optimistic about the “unobtrusiveness” of the listener (narrator). This nonpositionality is fabricated on the premise, that because the novel‟s traumatized others
are divested of the ability to speak, they require the narrator‟s speaking on their behalf.
Indeed, in many places the narrator is all but unobtrusive. As a result, while June is
depicted as a traumatized, deliberately self-repressed character, her silence is reinscribed. The narrator in effect calls into question the politics of textual construction.
In this sense, the erotography of the narrative may be worth further analysis as to how
the narrator „seduces‟ the reader into a partial reading of the novel.
The bodies and corporealities of trauma in The Surrendered are perhaps the
only aspects that speak for themselves. June and Sylvie‟s diseased and dying bodies
are allegorical of the socio-political bodies ravaged by invasions, wars, colonialism,
the dividing of a country in two. Their bodies bear the wounds of inflicted, and
pathologically self-inflicted, violence, historical, gendered and colonial. Their bodies
are also the manifestations of the repressed trauma and suffering that is continuously
relived in the present. In contrast, Hector‟s body is the exaggerated opposite of the
traumatized body; surreally invincible, resilient, heroically endowed: “It was amazing,
but through all the battles and firefights and skirmishes, he‟d never been seriously
injured….his wounds always healed with miraculous swiftness, as if his corporal self
existed apart from everything else in a bounding, lapsing time” (113). His
7
Dori Laub‟s notion of witnessing is a process that essentially “reconstitutes the internal „thou‟” within
the speaker: reclaiming one‟s past is the experience of restoring within oneself an “internal witness”
(Felman & Laub 85).
8
Laub describes the testimonial process as a “contract between two people,” with emphasis on the role
of the listener or interviewer, as the “enabler” of testimony (Laub 70).
5
invincibility is a curse, his body a parody of the heroic code. His body is an inverse
expression of the traumatic “split subjectivity” (of June‟s, for example) in the ability
to integrate and articulate. Furthermore, Hector, an embodiment of immortality,
repeatedly described through images of erasure and displacement, and June thus
emerge as dialectically opposed, but in the end as complementary, characters through
whom the novel will perform its testimonial process.
The second half of the novel turns to focus on June and Hector‟s journey to
Italy. Scenes of the past are interwoven into the present to show the exchange that
occurs between them, spoken and unspoken. Each character becomes a witness to the
trauma in the other and within themselves, paralleled in the narrator‟s witness to the
reader. Through this, June‟s final wish to impart to Hector a knowledge that will free
him will also bind him to a responsibility: the knowledge of her son that she kept
hidden, but also the knowledge that June never finds out, that Nicholas has long died.
The process of meeting Nicholas‟ imposter enacts a curious change in Hector.
After he finds out Nicholas died long ago, he finds himself unable to speak to June
because she has not simply disclosed to him the fact of his being a father, but the
discovery of his son‟s death has now bound him to a responsibility to protect June.
Ultimately, June and Nicholas become the reason why Hector will remember. In
particular, the experience of witnessing June‟s strength, “awed by the way she could
push herself, ignore her obvious wretchedness, and apply herself like a tool” (301), in
the end, “[breaks] open a fear in his chest: [he admits] here, about to perish, was
surely the strongest person he had ever known” (451). What unfolds in these chapters
is what Laub calls the “dialogical process of…[the] reconciliation of two worlds—the
one that was brutally destroyed and the one that is…” (91), as well as “a repossession
of the act of witnessing”:
The testimony is, therefore, the process by which the narrator (the survivor)
reclaims his position as a witness… (Laub 85)
V. The Gaze and Inadvertent Erasures
Insofar as June and Hector are concerned, The Surrendered can be read as the
initiation of a dialectical process of, as well as repossession of, the act of listening and
witnessing. Problems abound in the novel, however, particularly in the recording of
the histories of war. Some of the objects with which the narrator views and records
these events betray sentimentalization through a westcentric gaze. The focus of
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chapter one is in recording scene by scene the tragic flight and deaths of June‟s family
members. The actual beginning of the novel is several pages into chapter one, a
flashback scene of the abduction of June‟s father and brother, and the eventual deaths
of her mother and sister. By nesting the beginning within the middle of the chapter,
June‟s tragic past happens quickly enough that one does not register the disaster of the
event until after the moving conversation with June and her injured younger brother
before she abandons him. In the third chapter, Hector encounters a boy, a prisoner
captured during the first wave of battle against the Communists. 9 The passage
describes the painful delay of the boy‟s death, his torture at the hands of an American
soldier, Zelenko (a revealingly Slavic/Eastern European name), while Hector looks on
helplessly, delegated to kill the prisoner but clearly unable to. The chapter ends with
the boy‟s self-immolation, having relieved Hector of the crime by snatching his
grenade and waiting for Hector to gain a safe enough distance.
In a similar and different way to these chapters, the chapters that deal with
Sylvie‟s war trauma, whose family is brutally tortured, raped, and killed, this time
fails to deal critically with mythicization of the white subject (not excluding the
preservation of Hector‟s innocence in chapter three), inadvertently leading to a
privileging of the white characters. The white characters here suffer according to the
same logics as the Korean prisoner who suffers at the hands of Zelenko in chapter
three. While it may seem subversive that chapters seven and eight feature a reversal of
racial roles, where white characters are tortured at the hands of the Japanese other, the
Japanese soldiers are merely reproduced as the evil other, while the white characters
die martyr-like mythicized deaths.10 It may even be argued that the atrocity chronicled
in these chapters that take place at the physical center of the novel, retrospectively
effaces the novel‟s opening tragic history of the Korean War, which by way of
framing, lends Sylvie‟s past its deeper sense of tragedy. In effect this confuses, or
even substitutes, the past to be reclaimed. Other white characters such as Jackie
Brennan, Hector‟s father, who in one scene, at a bar denounces, sage-like even though
drunk, a demonizing of the “rat Japs” who bombed Pearl Harbor (62), and Sylvie‟s
9
It seems to not have yet been noted by reviewers that this prisoner is June‟s older brother, Ji-Hoon.
There is just enough evidence in chapter one as well as chapter three to infer this.
10
The scene of Francis Binet, June‟s father‟s death invokes sacred language: “…Sylvie was crying as
well, suddenly remembering now what her mother always told her, that mercy was the only true
deliverance. There was nothing more exaltedly human, more beautiful to behold. And a great searing
rush of love seemed at once to cleave her and bind her back up, a love…too, for Benjamin Li…whom
she could see only as her father just did, as the one wanting of mercy most of all.” (209)
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past lover, ex-serviceman, Jim,11 are strangely ambivalently mythicized through their
fallenness.
On a closer critical reading, the question remains whether the narrator
succeeds in witnessing to the various erased histories. The second generational, or
diasporic, reader in particular, will question the removed distance of the narrator. The
remembering of the Korean War here begs the unanswered question of „whose‟
history is being remembered. The gaze here could be likened to the Foucauldian
clinical gaze, the totalizing gaze of a “speaking eye” (115), which is operative in
Henri Dunant‟s memoir, Memories of Solferino, a memoir central to The Surrendered.
The memoir is a plainspoken chronicling of the countless disfigurations,
dismemberments, diseases, and infections of the suffering wounded of the Battle of
Solferino (1859), considered one of the disastrous wars the world had seen (Dunant
105). Through chronicling the bloodshed, the memoir aims to inform, educate, and
recruit voluntary organization for the caring of the war wounded. In order to do so, it
heroicizes the charitable, humanitarian, and philanthropic.12 It is based on the premise
that future wars are inevitable, and is an appeal to people of all status and vocation
(125). One may argue the novel uses Dunant‟s memoir as a leverage to cater to
popular anti-sentiments of war, though consequently it participates in a myth of
universalism, which appears to decenter the novel, but in fact reinscribes
westcentrism in the guise of global humanitarianism and transnationalism.
In addition, the trope of the child13 sentimentalizes and further orientalizes the
history recalled. The trope of the child is as ambivalent and problematic as it is central
to The Surrendered, a novel that for a significant portion takes place in post-war
Korea in an orphanage and is about the entirely erased historical trauma of displaced
and abandoned orphans after the Korean War. However, the history of Korean
orphans and international adoption is also a history of American paternalism,
constructed in the American media at that time as disguised humanitarianism that
11
“overtly slung with the weight of time, but to her he wasn‟t a pitiable sight, rather as if he had been
stitched with one of the marred but still beautiful bolts, this forlorn cape, and could no longer take it
off” (215)
12
“How gently and patiently the people of Brescia now sacrificed themselves, for those who had made
such sacrifices for them and for their country, in order to deliver them from foreign domination!” (97),
also Florence Nightingale (120).
13
Bill Ashcroft, in “ „Primitive and Wingless‟: The Colonial Subject As Child” has dealt extensively
with the persistent recurring trope of the child in colonial history as disguised orientalism, imperialism,
and abjection, still present today “masked by globalization and the indiscriminate, transnational
character of neo-colonialism” (45).
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exploited the “Korean waif” as “object of sentimental attachment and rescue” (Kim
Adopted 45). The system of adoption was imperialism in the guise of sentimentalized
Christian humanitarianism.
The representation of the orphan in The Surrendered is neither critical of let
alone mentions the way orphans were constructed and portrayed in American media.
The scenes of orphans isolated and alone at the orphanage, particularly of Min, whose
foot is accidentally injured by Hector and as a result becomes less preferable in the
adoption process, are poignantly depicted but in the end, become mere reproductions
of spectacles of suffering. The Surrendered’s general lack of critical engagement with
the problem of US (neo)imperialism not only reproduces the exploitation of the trope
of the child, but results in further erasure of the history of its others. In this sense, the
world of the other remains “locked in a period of childhood” that “imbues the
negation of colonial history with the possibility of an adulthood which will never
come in any form other than an image of the West” (Ashcroft 42). The purpose of
post-orientalist discourse, to expose and transform tropes constituted by imperialist
discourse, is found wanting in The Surrendered.
V. Conclusion
The Surrendered is a testimony to personal and inherited histories and trauma,
and a commemoration not just of victims of war, but of those who are subject to the
unsparing force of history that threatens to incapacitate, debilitate, and render forever
silent. June seems to be Dori Laub‟s “asserter of life,”
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a demythicized,
unsentimentalized parody of the diseased, subjugated body of the other, who by sheer
force of self-agency, by obliging Hector with one final wish to help her, helps to
change him. Yet cultural imperialism and neo-colonialism are in a sense reproduced
intact in the guise of globalization and transnationalism, which in effect, effaces the
historical specificity of its various traumas and the sites of memory for historically
subjugated others. This renders The Surrendered as, at best, a humanitarian project
like Dunant‟s memoir that, like a “vanishing mediator” whose mission is to “operate
change,” merely operates the “ „illusion‟ of change” (Debrix 205). The ultimate aim
of resistance, of “discursive reclamation” (52) is only mythically achieved.
14
“survivors, as asserters of life out of the very disintegration and deflation of the old culture,
unwittingly embody a cultural shock value [sic] that has not yet been assimilated…of which we have
yet to understand” (Felman & Laub 74).
9
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