Found in Translation: Narratorial Gaps as Subject Formation in Lee and Braddon

When Wen Ho Lee insists that “my first language is math, my second language is Chinese, and my third language is English” he suggests that his “language limitation” causes the “deceptive responses” and “involuntary omissions” that make his testimony unconvincing (254). And yet when Lee felt compelled to reassert his guiltlessness he did so through the very medium that failed to exonerate him in the first place. In her essay, “The Literary Case of Wen Ho Lee,” Colleen Lye affirms that reader ambivalence toward Lee’s memoir “is rendered more acute by the gap between the fluent prose of the narration and Lee’s ungrammatical speech as it appears in the reproduced transcripts of FBI interrogation” (254-5). However, she ignores the double meaning in her assertion that “the insufficiency of a linguistic explanation for his unsatisfactory answering,” which suggests that Lee’s limited English as well as the limitations of English a tool for demonstrating innocence are what disable Lee’s purpose (255). Not only does the memoir rely on his third language, it is this third language communicated through the further filter of a ghostwriter/translator. Whether Lee could comprehend and affirm his the accuracy of his finished memoir in English is an issue that Lye chooses to avoid. The layers of translation inherent in Lee’s memoir invite inquiry about why this text was not produced in Chinese, or even in mathematic expressions. Is the need for translation into English what makes this an Asian-American text, or is that slippage between meaning and representation that Lye identifies as the product of an unreliable and naive narrator what truly forms the Asian American subject?

            Lady Audley’s Secret is not a memoir and its third-person narration does not suggest that it wants to be. However, this text suffers from the same unreliability of narration that makes Lee’s memoir unsuccessful. In almost every installment, a mysterious first-person voice interrupts the action of the story to digest its events. Like Lee’s “gestures of withholding” (255), this narrator’s use of language invites suspicion, admitting that “I doubt very much,” “I do not think,” “I do not say,” “I will admit,” “I should be,” “I do not believe” and “I cannot believe” in the descriptions of the other omniscient narrator (Braddon 43, 49, 289, 309, 362). Even when the first-person narrator appears to translate and elucidate the events depicted earlier, it undermines the reader’s trust in the omniscient details of thought and feeling that the third-person narrator has already supplied. While the introduction of this doubt does bring a mimetic quality to the text, it undermines the text’s authority for subject creation of both character and narrator. If a voice within the text distrusts and refashions the language of the narrator it suggests a separation between the narrator and the “fact” of the narrative that must be filled in. The anxiety to fill in this space becomes acceptable in Braddon’s novel because as a sensation and detective novel discomfort and misgiving are feelings expected in the genre. However, the detection of guilt is the goal of this anxiety, hence the difficulty with a similar anxiety produced in a memoir that seeks to demonstrate innocence. Lye suggests that both Lee’s first-person memoir and Susan Choi’s third-person novelistic interpretation of similar events depict “becoming Asian American through being racialized as a national security threat,” providing a telling parallel to Lady Audley’s Secret’s depiction of becoming a female subject by being detected as a domestic security threat (Lye 251).

The suspicions inherent in the multiple voices of Lady Audley’s Secret are recast as the multiple voices of translation in Lee’s memoir. The reader cannot escape the misgiving that an authentic voice can be filtered without being diluted, which is reiterated in Lye’s question about Lee’s memoir: “Who is the narrator?” (259). The “I” narrator gets the last word in Braddon’s novel, asserting that the mimesis of events based on personal “experience” and a hope that “no one will take objection to my story” (446, italics mine). To whom the story really belongs remains evasive and lost in the gaps of shared narration, just as the mathematical voice and authentic Asian-American perspective remains lost in the space of translation. However, it is within this problematic space of deferred disclosure and multiple untranslatable meanings where these texts suggest the real birth of subject takes place.