The Face of the Past: Memory and Forgetting in the Bonesetter's Daughter

Chung-Hsiung Lai

《小說與戲劇》 17期 (2007/03) Pp. 93-112

並列摘要

The aim of this paper is to offer a Nietzschean reading of The Bonesetter's Daughter in terms of memory and forgetting. My main contention is, instead of attempting to recover the authentic face of the past, Asian American writers must take a pragmatic and strategic stance to create what Nietzsche calls an ”art-life style” of history-artistically combining ”forgetting” and ”remembering”-to serve and engender their lives here and now. Accordingly, Amy Tan's fourth novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter, filled with historical complexity constructed by memory and forgetting in terms of the mother-daughter relation in three generations, can be seen as an art-life creation of the author (and the narrator) as an ethical response to the haunting face of the past in her particular Asian-immigrant context in the States. I will, through comparison, explore Nietzsche's ideas of forgetting and memory and Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's Daughter with the analysis of one opening up the possibilities of the other. That is, the face of past will be critically examined in relation to Nietzsche's theory and Tan's novel.

並列關鍵字

past ； face ； Amy Tan ； Nietzsche ； forgetting ； memory ； The Bonesetter's Daughter

參考文獻

Baudrillard, Jean(1994).Simulacra and Simulation.New York:U of Michigan P.

Baudrillard, Jean(1994).The Illusion of the end.Cambridge:Polity Press.

Benjamin, Walter,Harry Zohn (Trans.)(1968).Illuminations.New York:Schocken Books.

Deleuze, Gilles,Paul Patton (Trans.)(1994).Difference and Repetition.New York:Columbia UP.

Foucault, Michel,C. Gordon (Ed.)(1980).Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977.New York:Harvester Wheatsheaf.