Passion, Plainness, Allegory: Frank Chin, American Literary Tradition, and the Question of Style

Abstract

The Chinese American writer Frank Chin owes his current status as a margin-alized figure in Asian American Studies not only to his anti-feminist vitriolics, but also to his writing style. Judged by common contemporary standards, Chin’s novels appear dis-jointed and crude: He routinely puts blunt, didactic statements from his essays into his characters’ mouths without even trying to give them any literary embellishment; yet at the same time all these doctrine-like, straightforward, and obviously instructional passages are infused with complex hints at ancient myths, and his competently lecturing pro-tagonists are prone to irritating sudden irrational outbursts of emotion. This article pro-poses that these peculiarities of Chin’s style - a combination of passion, plainness, and allegory - do not necessarily have to be seen as literary weaknesses; they can also be interpreted as a radical employment of strategies that helped form an important strain within the American literary tradition: the strategies that the first distinctly American writers (the plain, passionate, and allegorical Puritans) used. Viewed in this light, Frank Chin seems much less of an ‘outsider’ than before