The Affect of Anxiety: Focusing on Don Lee’s Novels

Abstract

This paper explores the affect of anxiety represented in Don Lee’s Country of Origin and Yellow. As Sigmund Freud presented in 1926, anxiety comes from the ego as a reaction to a situation of danger. In other words, it is the ego which sends a signal of anxiety telling a dangerous situation has been approached. Therefore, the presence of anxiety signifies that the ego is doing its job of a defense mechanism. Futhermore, the anxiety as a sign of desire, as Jacques Lacan points out, is closely related not only with desire but also the real, object a. This means that the object a is to be considered as the cause of desire and the object of anxiety. The protagonists of Don Lee’s novels desire what is believed to be social goods, and they situated themselves outside of ‘an affect community’ as ‘affect aliens’. As a result, Danny and Kenzo among others suffer from obsessional neurosis and anxiety neurosis. But as Lacan puts it, a man’s desire is the desire of the Other, and his desire can not be filled without a fantasy. In Dean’s case, however, he acknowledges the Other’s otherness, which is the object a, and transformed the affect of anxiety into the burgeoning possibility of subjectivity. Thus, reading Don Lee’s novels through the perspective of the affect of anxiety led to a new way of understanding the protagonists and their home town, Rosarita Bay. As an affect community, Rosarita Bay can be a place of drift full of unfastened and metabolized affect.