Theresa Hak Jyung Cha - A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory

Hak Jyung Cha Theresa, Dictee, Tanam Press, 1982.



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"Dictée is the best-known work of the versatile and important Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictée is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. The elements that unite these women are suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory. The result is a work of power, complexity, and enduring beauty."
"While Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's work of poetry Dictee has received due critical attention (most recently from poet Juliana Spahr), her artist's books and other art works are less well known. Dictee will be re-released this October, along with The Dream of the Audience, a book documenting a travelling exhibition dedicated to the Korean-American Cha (1951-1982). In addition to excellent reproductions of Cha's handbound texts and images from her performances, the book includes essays by Berkeley Art museum curator Constance Lewallen, Whitney Museum of American Art curator Lawrence Rinder and critic and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha." - Publishers Weekly

"Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (NY: Tanam Pres, 1982) is an experiment in autobiography that blends poetry and prose, history and memoir, and reproductions of photographs and documents. Many of Cha’s themes overlap with those found in the work of W.G. Sebald: history, memory, war, cruelty, family.
To the other nations who are not witnesses, who are not subject to the same oppressions, they cannot know. Unfathomable the words, the terminology: enemy, atrocities, conquest, betrayal, invasion, destruction. They exist only in the larger perception of History’s recording, that affirmed, admittedly and unmistakably, one enemy nation has disregarded the humanity of another. Not physical enough. Not to the very flesh and bone, to the core, to the mark, to the point where it is necessary to intervene, even if to invent anew, expressions, for this experience, for this outcome, that does not cease to continue.
To the others, these accounts are about (one more) distant land, like (any other) distant land, without any discernable features in the narrative, (all the same) distant like any other.
But Cha adds additional layers: Catholicism and feminism. Dictee opens with Communion, followed by confession, and it closes with a scene embodying acts of charity (water, medicine, advice) between a woman and a young girl. Overseeing Cha’s enterprise are the nine classical Muses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (memory) who presided over the arts and sciences. Each of Dictee‘s chapters is assigned the name of a Muse. The history that Cha probes is the story of twentieth century Korea (where her family originated): the Occupation by Japan as a result of the Sino-Japanese War; the country’s division into two parts as a result of the Cold War; and the violent student demonstrations of the 1960s.
But Cha’s main concern, it seems to me, is human communication itself. Dictee (the dictation) is structured as an unending struggle to move from inarticulateness to utterance. Words become syllables, sentences become strings of single words, continuity is disrupted. Where, Cha seems to ask, does language become meaning? Parts of the book are written in French and there are many references to the issues of translation and multilingualism.
Dictee is heavily influenced by film theory. It contains abrupt jump cuts, makes powerful use of vantage point, and dwells on the intellectual dichotomy of listening to spoken language while reading sub-titles in a different language. Following the lead of Michel Butor and other French writers of the nouveau roman, Cha sometimes moves into second person in an attempt to obliterate the boundary between reader and subject.
Her movements are already punctuated by the movement of the camera, her pace, her time, her rhythm. You move from the same distance as the visitor, with the same awe, same reticence, the same anticipation. Stationary on the light never still on her bath water, then slowly moving from room to room, through the same lean and open spaces. Her dress hangs on a door, the cloth is of a light background, revealing the surface with a landscape stained with the slightest of hue. Her portrait is not represented in a still photograph, nor in a painting. All along, you see her without actually seeing, actually having seen her. You do not see her. For the moment, you see only her traces.
More than once, as I read Dictee, I was eerily reminded of Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée.
A decade ahead of Sebald, Cha interlaced her text with uncredited news photographs, portraits, reproductions of documents, and even reproductions of what appear to be the handwritten manuscript for the pages of Dictee.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in Korea, but raised in the US. After studying at the University of California, Berkeley, she studied filmmaking and critical theory in Paris. A week after Dictee was published, she was murdered by a stranger on the streets of New York." - Vertigo

"By now, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE has become a postmodern classic. What makes DICTEE idiosyncratic, unforgettable,is its variance, its slipperiness. It has the acute proclivity to dissipate, both physically on the page, as well as connotatively. At times, the text acts as both prose and poetry; its liminality becomes interwoven into a book that functions like the structuralist films Cha was influenced by. Physically thumb thru DICTEE and it even looks like a structuralist film. The length of text varies, with interjected moments of white (blank pages) and images (photographs, documents, diagrams). A fragmented jaggedness makes the book a visceral experience.
The use of space is important in Cha’s work: blank pages in DICTEE deliberate, as they often act as the moment of transition. A blank page separates each section of the antinovella — named after eight Greek muses and one fabricated muse — “Ellitere” — which Cha translates as “lyric poetry”.
Space is indelibly a part of written language–it’s place/moment on the page creates a turn, where at first a word is referential, then transforms into an object, a reproduction, as words often do in a poem: “...the poem, like every other form of art, is an object, an object that in itself formally presents its case and its meaning by the very form it assumes.” It’s no surprise that Stephen Mallarmé was an early influence on Cha’s work:
It is conceivable that her introduction to unconventional typographic
design which becomes a constant in her work, was through Mallarmé’s
long poem “Un Coup de Des.”
Cha was a filmmaker by training. I believe she was interested in the work of structuralist filmmakers because their films were grounded on using disruptions as moments that made the film’s process of making visible–that is, structuralism was interested in examining the very nature of film and the aesthetics, at times, the very tools, that went into making a film. Christian Metz, a pioneer of structuralist film theory wrote, “...Cinema has a certain configuration, certain fixed structures and figures, which deserve to be studied directly.” The dismantling of a film, then, was important because films gave the “...impression of reality...They spontaneously appeal to [one’s] sense of belief...They speak to us with the accents of true evidence...” To structuralists, the purpose of a film is not to create a suspension of disbelief through seamlessly fabricated narratives. Instead, it is possible to create meaning by revealing a film’s mode of production. No doubt, this curiosity and responsibility as an artist to distinguish production from product displays a strong Marxist tenet.
In the early nineties, when DICTEE became established as a familiar text on syllabi for courses (post-colonialism, feminism, poetry, art, philosophy, film), the tendency was for literary critics to understand the text as strongly autobiographical. For critics like Elaine Kim, it was a definitive text that articulated unknown, marginalized identities. Kim’s essay regarding Cha’s work focused on Cha’s personal disruptive history as making possible the creation DICTEE. It’s easy to see how critique regarding DICTEE might veer this way. The University of California Press, which recently relaunched DICTEE, replaced the original cover of an ambiguous landscape (which Cha, most likely, had meticulously planned) with the photograph of Cha’s mother in her youth (which was also originally, and still is, reproduced in the text). The book also includes individual identities–Cha’s mother, Jeanne d’Arc (a photograph of Renee Falconetti from Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc), and Yu Guan Soon (a young Korean revolutionary).
Yet Cha was not invested in particular identities: she was interested in how identities were created. Her general interest in process, rather than product/being, contextualizes her interest in structuralism films. Identities are also configurations. To understand DICTEE as strictly autobiography is too simple; it undermines Cha’s intentions and overshadows her training as a structuralist film maker. If films were illusionary and could at best, represent an impression of reality, couldn’t the written word behave the same? DICTEE tends to reject symbolic representations and strikes up a similar sense of seeing as Objectivist poetry:
[Objectivist poetry] entail[ed] the construction of aesthetic objects in such a way
that the conditions of desire are themselves dramatized and forced to take
responsibility for their productions.
Which brings me back to DICTEE’’s proclivity to dissipate. Part of its slippery variance comes from the text’s dissociative nature: once words articulate something–the validity of an identity, for example–the following text contradicts the certainty of this representation. Any description is merely simulacrum, yet Cha strays away from the nihilism that defines post-modern art. A reader/viewer finds meaning in the simulacrum by investigating how the simulacrum is reproduced. In this way, Cha was also interested in articulating the trace: “The content of my work has been the realization of the imprint, the inscription etched from the experience of leaving.” Structuralism’s tendency to reveal process, then, could be interpreted as the studying of a trace: trace means to etch, but it also means to investigate development to the point of origin.
Cha includes a section of the book describing the actions of a young Korean revolutionary by the name of Yu Guan Soon. The text’s function as “history” is emphasized as it is included in the section “Clio” (history). Yet the following text simultaneously illuminates other functions of the text, which then problematizes the meaning of essentialist history:
This document is transmitted through, by the same
means, the same channel without distinction the
content is delivered in the same style: the word. The
image.
There is an implied disparity between the word and what it represents. One way that Cha might have sought to relieve this disparity was to display that the ultimate “truth” of the word could only be taken for value thru its appearance - the word as a physical presentation (rather than representation). The value of the word is in its identification, rather than its identity. Cha, then, does not disparage one’s desire to document (the subjects she chose to write about says a great deal about her own politics and what were important to her). Rather, she chooses to shift the reader’s focus towards another way of seeing:
Why resurrect it all now... To extract each
fragment by each fragment from the word from the
image another word another image the reply that will
not repeat history in oblivion.
DICTEE’s variance illuminates the problems of categorizing text by rejecting categorization (Is it autobiography or critique of autobiography? Does it, at times, function as language poetry or is it experimental prose? What of its documentary proclivities?). Its rejection of categorization also places significance in the lens/framework/assumptions of the reader/viewer, and its variance is suggestive of how intersections could also act definitively." - Cristiana Baik

"Theresa Cha's Dictee opens in multiple and successive moments before entering into the first realm of History. The initial words of Sappho: May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve not only invoke the presence of an ancient, Western, female literary tradition, but also establish the resounding undercurrent of the text as a whole: that of the intricate connection between human body and textual body, spoken voice and written voice, visual expression and verbal expression, and the eroticism of a language possessed. Yet Dictee maintains a problematic relationship with the bodies of a particular history and ethnic-gender identity; through the text Cha seeks at once to expose the gaps of a history recorded and the lacks of an identity represented, as well as to reveal the necessary inadequacy of the textual body of Dictee itself to account for and to embody an experience, a history, and an identity that does not cease to continue.
In juxtaposing the recognition of history's recording as Not physical enough. Not to the very flesh and bone, to the core, to the mark with the contradictory claim that this experience, this outcome [do] not cease to continue, Cha gestures towards the reclamation not of a fixed center but of a continually shifting core process that is inherently and paradoxically tied to the containment of the physical body yet also to the fluidity of its rhythms. Dictee itself thus emerges as the record of a continual process, or a book that works self-consciously to bring its own textuality (its own materiality, its own body and its voice) to the surface.
The way in which Cha evokes the fluid interactivity between textual and human bodies appears poignantly in Dictee's second extended passage, the prose-poem, "Diseuse." Midway through the poem:
She waits inside the pause. Inside her. Now. This very moment. Now. She takes rapidly the air, in gulfs, in preparation for the distances to come. The pause ends.
The syntactical stops and starts, or the overriding pulse of the sentences, creates the rhythm of sexual excitement and anticipation. This occurs through the movement from fragment (This very moment) to monosyllabic breath (Now) to complete and complex sentence (She takes rapidly the air, in gulfs, in preparation for the distances to come), back to a simple phrase (The pause ends). Anticipation, breath, hold, release before resolution. The pause ends. The contracting and expanding pulse of the poem as a whole (from moments of fragmentation, bits torn from words, to those of fluidity, absorb it spill it flood) works to encompass and articulate the natural rhythms and pleasures of the body. Overall, "Diseuse" presents the subject "she" who reclaims and puts to use the voice that ultimately will allow the speaker to recast the fissures of a fragmentary record, or an identity of gender, of ethnicity, of nation." - Laralynn Weiss

"Not all books are easy to read, and it would be a dull world in which all books were. The assessment of whether to continue struggling through a difficult book is tricky: maybe it will all come together in the end – but will the satisfaction of seeing an uncertain resolution outweigh the pain of getting there?
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée presents us with such problems by the bucketload. The work starts unpromisingly, but eponymously, with a passage of French dictation: full stops and inverted commas all spelt out. Then the dictation is translated into English. A small mistranslation is neither here nor there, but what are the two paragraphs there for?
We continue into the next section, three pages entitled “Diseuse”.
“She mimicks the speaking. That might resemble speech. (Anything at all.) Bared noise, groan, bits torn from words,” the section commences.
The words continue, individually meaningful, but collectively a bit of a puzzle.
Now, maybe, we are due for a proper start to the work: recalling the first line of Homer’s Odyssey, Cha writes “O Muse, Tell me the story” – divine help is summoned to help structure the narrative. But before assistance can arrive, we get more puzzling words: fragments of French school exercises interspersed with a Lenten recitation from the Catholic Catechism.
And finally the first Muse appears, Clio, the muse of History, who tells a disjointed story of Korea under the early years of Japanese domination in the first decades of the 20th century. The remaining eight Muses each have a different angles and approaches. We have poems, hand-written letters, strange outpourings, random photographs. Occasionally we can grasp real events, such as the student protests in the early 1960s. But more often than not we are lost in a fog of words.
Turning to the back cover for guidance, we find the following copy:
 classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictée is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha’s mother (Hyung Soon Huo, a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. The element that unites these women is suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory. The result is a work of power, complexity, and enduring beauty.
Even with that additional guidance, the book is difficult to grasp and remains out of reach.
Undoubtedly, Dictée is experimental and innovative. It is also complex, multi-faceted, and fragmentary. Further, Cha’s wrestling with the language can sometimes produce moments of poetry.
But the end result is totally unreadable." - Philip Gowman

"Okay, this is the second time I've read this unusual memoir, but I can't say I feel like I fully understood it this time either. Sadly, the blurb on the back of the book helped quite a bit, since it explained that each section is about a different person -- historical figures, family members, etc. This is one of the most unusual aspects of the memoir...that it isn't actually entirely about the author. It's about her mother, Joan of Arc, Yu Guan Soon, Greek goddesses, and herself. Of course, this is part of why I'm still struggling to understand it -- it's a memoir told through the stories of several women, and then there's the inclusion of poetry. Well, not only poetry. Poetry, letters (typed, handwritten, you name it), photographs, prose, different languages (Chinese and/or Korean calligraphy, French, English, Latin) -- it's more than just pastiche, it's downright collage-like.
Right, so the writing itself. It's not straightforward...it's very fragmented and also "experimental" (if I can use that word to describe her use of language). Cha likes to take words that are typically written as one word (like "anything") and split them with a large space (to become "any thing"). The effect is really surprising -- I wouldn't have thought this would have made a noticeable or significant difference, but it really did. Whenever I came across a word like that, I found myself pausing over it and really thinking about its meaning. She also plays a lot with form. For instance, there's an entire "chapter" told half on the left page, half on the right page. It's hard to explain, but basically there are two voices, and one of them is stuck on the left page while the other is stuck on the right page. Anytime there's writing on the left side, the right side is blank. Once the left side stops, the right side starts. It's one of the most interesting methods for writing a dialogue (or dialogue-like stuff) I've ever seen.
Cha's method of telling her story by including the stories of others reminds me of the way that Oskar (from Günter Grass' The Tin Drum) and Saleem (from Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children) both believe that in order to tell one's own story, one must first tell the stories of one's ancestors. While Oskar and Saleem are both fictional characters, Cha's narrative is founded on a similar premise and effectively uses it to communicate key aspects of Cha's life. Instead of focusing on significant events from her life, as most autobiographers do, Cha focuses on mental and emotional states; this is not to say that the memoir is completely devoid of significant events, as it's not, but that its primary focus lies elsewhere...on a more internal plane.
Someday, I hope to understand Cha's memoir with more confidence, but for now I'll have to live with impressions that are sometimes vague and sometimes less vague." - Anne Jansen

“Mother, you are eighteen years old. You were born in Yong Jung, Manchuria and this is where you now live. You are not Chinese. You are Korean . . . You live in a village where other Korean exiles live. Same as you. Refugees. Immigrants. Exiles. Farther away from the land that is your own. Not your own any longer.” – An excerpt from Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Theresa Cha’s autobiography, Dictee, is widely used in art history, women’s studies and ethnic studies classes, but relatively few have actually seen her work until now. Many know of her death at the hands of a stranger — a serial rapist who worked as a security guard — who raped her and beat her to death. Dictee was published posthumously just weeks after the 33-year-old’s murder in 1982.
“The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982),” an austerely beautiful and constrained exhibit of works by the Korean American artist, opened last week at the Henry Art Gallery on the University of Washington campus.
This is the second stop for the exhibit, which was originally put together for the Berkeley Art Museum. A major exhibit with many supporters including The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Korea Foundation, it is the first major public exploration of the Korean American artist considered by some to have been a pioneer in conceptual and performing art.
Cha’s body of work consists of video, film, recordings of performances, documentation, mail art, works on paper and three-dimensional pieces some might call sculpture or multimedia.
Henry Art Gallery’s Robin Held, the curator, however, calls works like “Surplus Novel, 1980,” a hand-sized porcelain jar holding thread and typewritten paper, “hybridities.” They’re words with elements from different languages or combinations of unlike or unrelated things, she explains.
Indeed, Cha was an artist of language. She imaged sounds on film and video and carefully arranged words using French, English or Korean, of all which she spoke fluently.
Moving from video to video or lifting up the headphones from their neat museum saddles, the listener hears her whisper repeatedly that she wants to discover what being was/is before the word is made/spoken. Cha wanted to understand herself and her audience as they experienced, listened, watched and heard her work.
Glimpses of this process are available in the 1975 work “A Ble Wail,” found at the Henry. The 28 photographs are hung as stills in the current exhibit, but were performed originally at a University of California at Berkeley gallery. She said in an unpublished manuscript, “I want to be the dream of the audience.” The performance was done behind a scrim using the sounds of ripping paper and small percussion instruments. The room is full of candles. One performer, Cha, is dressed in a full-length robe.
In another piece, Cha calls the audience a “distant relative.”
In part because the youthful Cha died so suddenly, and partly because of the profound level of the artist’s own journey of self-exploration, we leave the exhibit with more questions than when we started. As with other artists in that period, Cha was deeply involved in not only making art but also defining the artist and the audience experience. For her, the artist wasn’t only a performer, but also a shaman.
“The artist’s path is close to that of an alchemist in that his/her path is that of a medium … His/her vision belongs to an altering, of material, and of perception. Through this attempt, the perception of the audience has the possibility of being altered …,” she wrote.
Born in 1951 in Korea, she moved with her family to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1964. She received four degrees in comparative literature and art from UC Berkeley. She also studied in France with important film theorists of the day.
Cha did not tell stories in a linear way. She was instead fascinated with image as pure image, words as singular words and the uncertainty of memory. And it is in memory that she explored her Korean heritage — not as a personal tale but as objective material often told in the third person. She explored being Korean as an aspect of self from a psychological point of view.
By utilizing her own psyche to examine the immigrant experience, she has become important not only to Asian students but to many seeking to understand themselves beyond ordinary linguistic constraints.
Her art has been called transformative because she defined the understanding of space so carefully, as shown in the 1978 videos “Mouth to Mouth” and “Passages Payages,” rather than the space itself.
A transformational quality elevates “Dream of the Audience” beyond the sounds resonating through the aural world of the gallery and the aging newsprint of her works on paper, seeping gently into our awareness. Cha’s voice resonates universally because she embraced what was alien in both a political and emotional sense in order to find redemption." - Ann-Marie Stillion

A COMMENTARY ON THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA’S DICTÉE by Michael Stone-Richards (pdf)

Mediation and Authenticity in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée by Natalie Catasús (pdf)
Rewriting Hesiod, revisioning Korea: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee as a subversive Hesiodic Catalogue of Women by Kun Jong Lee