Subjecting Sentences: Syntax and Power in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Sophia D'Urso

doi:10.52214/meliora.v1i2.8725

Abstract

Ocean Vuong’s semi-autobiographical novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous opens as a letter to the narrator, Little Dog’s, mother—it is a letter she’ll never be able to read, as she is illiterate in both her Vietnamese mother tongue and the limited English she has learned following her immigration to America. Little Dog, having learned both languages, resists the rigidity of their respective, repressive syntaxes; if syntax functions as ideology—as an imagined set of rules and processes which govern a structure of sentences within a language and, in turn, the subjected bodies which are interpellated by the literal and subsequently constructed Subject of such sentences—then Little Dog opposes such ideology by subverting the hierarchical Subject/subject relationships created within the subject/object sentence structure. Rather than align with Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist argument towards language as based in such hierarchical binary oppositions, Little Dog searches for a new language—one that can truly act as a bridge, rather than a border—often intentionally breaking prosaic form and grammar rules in an effort to unearth it.

Highlights

Ocean Vuong’s semi-autobiographical novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous opens as a rewritten letter from the young Vietnamese American protagonist, Little Dog, to his illiterate mother, Rose—an endeavor to reach her through the words on the page or, as Vuong himself refers to the novel’s form, an “attempt to see if language can really be a bridge as it often aspired to be” (“Inside the Book”: Ocean Vuong 0:23-0:28)
Little Dog reflects upon learning English syntax during his early education, calling attention to how he was taught to adhere to the prescriptive grammar of the hierarchical sentence according to Barthes: “it implies subjections, subordinations, internal relations”—a “hunter” and a “prey” (Barthes 15; Vuong 2)
By deviating from syntax within On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong resists the hierarchical structures produced by language and, in doing so, opposes the power dynamic created by binary, non-intersectional understandings of sexuality, gender, and race

Summary

The Subjecting Syntax of American Masculinity

Saussure utilizes the example of gender within his “Course in General Linguistics” to illustrate that “in language there are only differences without positive terms” (Saussure 121):. The masculine signified is the Subject of the hierarchical sentence, interpellating everything else as its concrete object through syntax and (re)producing the oppositional language structure in place: the gun-wielding “You” kills the poem; the “I” hammers the paragraph, crushes it, shuts it down—it “wrestles” with the muse; the “We” smashes the competition; the “state” is a battleground state, its residents casualties; the “man” knocks ‘em dead (Althusser 55) In this way, the masculine Subject positions itself as the subject of the sentence in binary opposition to the object of the sentence, utilizing words with aggressive valences to make obvious its control over the subject which it hails. By rejecting the notion of the subaltern body as a signifier of “human” and only recognizing and reproducing the subjectivity of “White, African American, or Mexican” signifiers through legislature, the syntax of American masculinity (that which positions the repressive masculine Subject as the subject of Texas law’s sentences) speaks over and erases subaltern bodies—it destroys them

The Need for Another Language

A Radical Resistance of Binary Language