
































Abraham FINAL


Edinburgh as a Machine: Reclamation, Resistance, and Formative Fiction 
Jayne Abraham, Stanford ’26. 

Abstract: This essay first identifies Edinburgh by Alexander Chee as a work of formative 
fiction, as defined by Stanford Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization and 
Comparative Literature Joshua Landy. It then explores the stakes of creating a formative novel in 
the literary age of suspicion in which we exist, as well as within the context of the multiplistic 
expectations that readers place upon Asian American writers. This essay ultimately positions 
Edinburgh as a reclamation of the novel for Alexander Chee, who faced unique expectations with 
the externally attached title of the “first gay Korean American novelist.” 



Introduction 
 In 2001, Alexander Chee published his debut novel Edinburgh, giving him the title of the 
first gay Korean American novelist. Edinburgh is a semi-autobiographical fiction about Fee, a 
gay Korean American boy who ascends through his adolescence while grappling with the sexual 
abuse he and his peers were subjected to at the hands of their all-boys choir director, Big Eric. 
Chee’s work is a devastating, evocative narrative that is adorned in stunning prose mediated by 
structural and stylistic ambiguity. In his 2018 essay “The Autobiography of My Novel,” Chee 
writes that in order for Edinburgh to tell an effective story, specifically about victims of sexual 
abuse, he “would have to construct a machine that moved readers along, anticipating and 
defeating their possible objections by taking them by another route – one that would surprise 
them.” Extending this sentiment to Edinburgh as a whole, this imperative then invites readers to 
think of Edinburgh as formative rather than informative – as a machine.  

In this essay, I will first prove that Edinburgh is a work of formative fiction, as defined by 
Stanford Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization and Comparative Literature 
Joshua Landy. I will then situate Edinburgh within a literary age of suspicion, wherein the 
critical reader approaches literary works in pursuit of a deeper, seemingly hidden meaning, and 
the fiction writer bears the burden of meaningfulness when creating a piece. This discussion will 
lead me to posit alternative modes of reading that aspire toward alternative reading experiences 
— for example, prioritizing immersion within a fiction over investigation of a fiction. I will then 
explain how the burden of meaningfulness is compounded with the burden of authentic 
representation for Alexander Chee as a gay Korean American writer. Finally, I will arrive at a 
discussion of the stakes of creating a formative novel, a machine, within the context of the 
unique set of expectations thrusted upon Alexander Chee when writing Edinburgh. 

Edinburgh as a formative fiction 
 In his 2012 essay “Formative Fictions: Imaginative Literature and the Training of 
Capacities,” Joshua Landy defines formative fictions as literary works that seek to train rather 
than to teach. What formative fictions require, then, is a focus on what texts do rather than what 
they say — making them distinct from informative fictions (Landy, 2012, p. 183). In this way, 
formative fictions become “machines that assist us in becoming who we are” (Landy, 2012, p. 
176). Formative fictions are also characterized by their gradual temporality and the fact that they 
tend to be reread. Additionally, the introduction of new elements in formative fictions — whether 
through plot development or changes in perspective — causes readers to constantly revise their 
hypotheses about how the work will unfold. With a concrete definition of what formative fictions 
are and what they do, how does Edinburgh function as a work of formative fiction? 

Gradual Temporality 
 One distinct element of Edinburgh is the pace of its plot development and the effect this 
has on how readers experience the book. The plot progresses slowly through the first two 
sections after the prologue of the novel, “Songs of the Fireflies” and “January’s Cathedral,” 
before significantly picking up speed in roughly the last 50 pages. The plot of the first section 



revolves around Fee and the other choir members’ experiences with Big Eric’s sexual abuse, as 
well as around Fee’s relationship to Peter and exploration of his sexuality. But when the truth 
about Big Eric comes out and he eventually goes to jail — a seemingly conclusive plot point in 
the Big Eric story arc — readers continue into the second section and engage with the resounding 
effects of Big Eric’s imprisonment. Readers delve deeper, and deeper still into Fee’s psyche as he 
watches the boys in his choir die by suicide. As Fee progresses through his later teenage and 
college years, readers watch him bear the burden of survivor’s guilt while exploring his sexuality 
and dealing with the loss of Peter, his first love. “January’s Cathedral” reveals the depths of Fee’s 
depression and the complexity of his relationships to various men, ending in a deeply euphoric 
sexual experience with the David brothers. After the first two sections, though readers may feel 
closer to Fee, they lack a concrete conception of the plot progression, as the narrative seems to 
prioritize character development over a consistent plot up until this point. It is in the third 
section, “And Night’s Black Sleep Upon the Eyes,” that Chee invokes a change in perspective 
with the introduction of Warden, the boy with whom Fee will eventually engage in an 
inappropriate sexual relationship. Though readers can intuitively sense that the introduction of a 
new perspective often indicates plot advancement, it is not until the fourth and final section, 
“Blue,” that Edinburgh’s plot truly accelerates. In the last 50 or so pages, readers are returned to 
Fee’s perspective as he relays facets of his adult life with astounding speed, advancing through 
his first encounter and subsequent relationship with Bridey and his choice to move back home to 
Maine for a job. It is within these last pages that Fee begins his relationship with Warden, abuses 
it, and finds out that Warden is Big Eric’s son. Warden then kills Big Eric and Fee and Warden 
attempt to run away together, before Fee leaves him in a hotel and reunites with Bridey — all 
within roughly the last dozen pages. With the most substantial portion of its action occurring at 
the very end, Edinburgh is certainly gradual in pace. The first two sections allow readers to get to 
know Fee in the ways Chee will let them, before clueing readers into a new plot point with 
Warden in the third section, and accelerating the action in the fourth and final section. In “The 
Autobiography of My Novel,” Chee relays his process when constructing the plot. In his pursuit 
of creating the formative machine that is Edinburgh, Chee claims that “[readers] would want to 
grasp for something familiar amid it all. Plot could do this.” In this way, Chee gives readers 
something to “grasp for” by eventually invoking a distinct plot, but Chee is not so fast in doing 
so, establishing a gradual temporality within Edinburgh — a fundamental tenet of formative 
fictions. 

Rereading 
Formative fictions tend to reward reading and rereading, and Edinburgh is no exception. 

In part due to its gradual plot development, Edinburgh creates completely different reading 
experiences upon a second or third reading and/or upon reflection. Additionally, as a narrator, 
Fee occupies an ambiguous temporal location. Edinburgh is written in present tense, but it is 
clear that Fee is located somewhere in the future in his telling of events, as evidenced by 
statements such as: “The survivor gets to tell the story. Have you figured out who survives yet?” 
(Chee, 2001, p. 92). Therefore, Edinburgh’s gradual plot development and Fee’s ambiguous 
temporal location work in tandem to create a different effect upon rereading. This effect can be 
demonstrated through a close reading of the following quote: “Love melts all our murder. As 



much as it makes it. Love melted me. Peter, it could only have been you” (Chee, 2001, p. 52). At 
this point in the narrative, readers are aware of Fee’s devastating experiences of sexual abuse as 
well as his all-consuming love for Peter. Upon first read, then, this quote feels like a boy’s 
innocent, maybe even naive, proclamation of his capacity to romantically love just one person. 
However, at a much later point in the narrative, it becomes clear that it is Fee’s unhealthy 
preservation of the image of Peter that ultimately leads him to engage in an inappropriate sexual 
relationship with Warden — in part, if not in whole, due to his resemblance to Peter. Therefore, 
upon reflection, this quote loses the innocence by which it was initially characterized. 
Additionally, recognizing Fee’s ambiguous temporal location in the future, this quote can 
function as a sort of justification of Fee’s unthinkable actions. The idea that “love melts all our 
murder” suggests that love trumps all, even when it can have negative consequences — “as much 
as it makes it.” If Fee is speaking from the future, after his inappropriate relationship with 
Warden, then saying that “it could only have been” Peter relays Fee’s unhealthy obsession with 
the past and with Peter. As readers’ relationship to Fee evolves with the introduction of new 
information and perspectives, an informed rereading of this quote absolves its initial innocence 
and solidifies the reality that, for Fee, Peter would remain “the one” as he progresses through 
adulthood. This experience of gaining greater consciousness upon rereading and reflecting 
further speaks to Edinburgh’s status as a formative novel. 

Introduction of new elements 
 Another distinct facet of Edinburgh is Chee’s commitment to temporarily withholding 
information and then revealing it later on in the narrative, causing readers to constantly revise 
their hypotheses regarding the conclusion of the novel. The most salient example of Chee’s 
manipulation of access to information is Peter’s letter to Fee. After Peter lights himself on fire 
and dies, Fee possesses two physical mementos of Peter: a photo and a letter. It is not until the 
final section of the novel, when Fee is an adult working at Warden’s school, that this letter is 
revealed. Up until this point, if readers have not forgotten that Fee possesses these physical 
mementos of Peter, they are left to guess what the contents of this letter are. When the contents 
of the letter are revealed, new insight is gained that has the potential to alter readers’ perceptions 
of Fee and their hypotheses about how the rest of the novel will unfold. Additionally, multiplistic 
interpretations of the contents of the letter itself are possible, creating several potential paths to 
the conclusion of Edinburgh, depending on readers’ interpretations. The last few lines of the 
letter explicitly open themselves up to at least two interpretations: “And so I want you to be 
happy for me, that this is better for me. That I found what I needed. I know you won’t be. But it’s 
the last thing I want. You happy” (Chee, 2001, p. 210). Beyond the lingering, devastating effect 
of Peter’s sentiment that he could only find solace in death, Peter’s claim that the last thing he 
wants is Fee happy has an unsettling effect. On one end, this could mean that Peter’s dying wish 
is Fee’s happiness, or it could mean that literally the last thing Peter wants is Fee’s happiness, 
meaning he does not want Fee to be happy at all. The ambiguity of these lines and the letter as a 
whole allows readers to understand why it has haunted Fee for all these years. Additionally, 
readers’ interpretations of this letter affect their perceptions of Fee as character and his 
relationship to Peter. With access to new information, readers also get to decide the symbolic 
significance of Fee getting rid of the past; they get to decide if Fee is capable of doing away with 



the past and is successful in this moment, or not. In this way, Chee’s choice to reveal Peter’s 
devastating last words and disrupt readers’ perceptions of Fee at this point in the narrative is yet 
another facet of Edinburgh’s operation as a formative work.  
 Through its gradual temporality, differing interpretations upon rereading, and 
introduction of new elements throughout the entire narrative, Edinburgh functions as a formative 
fiction. These three elements of Edinburgh work in tandem to create a distinct reading 
experience. As the story builds gradually, readers are given access to new information that alters 
their interpretations of the narrative. They experience delayed gratification in the last 50 pages of 
the book through the increased action and accelerated progression of the plot. However, the 
extent to which readers are gratified is based on their attention to elements of Edinburgh. What 
readers decide to make of Edinburgh’s gradual pace, Fee’s ambiguous temporal location, and the 
information that Chee withholds and then gives them access to invites them to engage in the 
construction of Edinburgh’s narrative, making a passive reading nearly impossible. Chee 
facilitates a complex relationship between readers and Fee by giving them Fee’s perspective, but 
ultimately revealing his narrative unreliability, clueing readers into this early on through Fee’s 
ambiguous temporal location. Readers’ perceptions of Fee, as coaxed through Edinburgh’s 
gradual temporality, inform their interpretations of Edinburgh — Chee manipulates readers’ 
ability to trust their narrator and interpret the information he chooses to share. Fulfilling the 
qualifications of a formative novel, Edinburgh invites readers into the active construction of the 
narrative, beckoning them to pay attention and constantly revise their conclusions. But why does 
it matter that Edinburgh is a work of formative fiction? 

Writing and reading in a literary age of suspicion 
 As Joshua Landy notes in his aforementioned essay, there exists a reigning logic that 
fictions are designed to give readers “useful advice” (Landy, 2012, p. 170). In other words, 
readers approach fictional works seeking to gain something by excavating a deeper, hidden 
meaning that they perceive is embedded within a literary text. Landy’s essay is situated within 
the larger context of the idea that we exist in a literary age of suspicion. Eve Kosofsky 
Sedgwick’s seminal chapter on paranoid reading from her book Touching Feeling situates us 
within this era of paranoid, suspicious reading. Sedgwick posits that readers approach literary 
texts with a hermeneutics of suspicion (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 124); that is, readers possess a sense 
of paranoia that is anticipatory, reflective, and mimetic when engaging in literary criticism. Due 
to their paranoia, the reader then creates a burden of meaningfulness for the writer, as the reader 
expects that their attention and analysis will be rewarded with some greater, concrete message or 
meaning. 

Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus expand on this concept in “Surface Reading: An 
Introduction” by complicating the normative method of “symptomatic reading,” a mode of 
reading informed by paranoia that encourages readers to interpret texts under the assumption that 
their meanings are hidden and must be extracted. Best and Marcus instead speak to the liberating 
nature of “surface reading,” a mode of reading that encourages attentiveness and immersion 
within a text as opposed to investigation. Adding yet another layer of nuance to the concept of 
surface reading, Heather Love identifies an alternative mode of reading that is akin to surface 
reading while in conversation with psychologist and sociologist Erving Goffman in “Close but 



not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn.” Love adds nuance to the idea of surface 
reading by contending with how identity intercepts readers’ inclination to participate in an 
incessant pursuit of deeper meaning. Goffman argues in favor of a valorization of experience 
over identity, refusing to “[divide human activity] into realms of authentic action and stereotyped 
or conventional behavior…For him, there is no more authentic reality to get to…” (Love, 2010, 
p. 381).  

Readers’ inclination to engage in symptomatic readings and distinguish between 
authentic and stereotyped or conventional behavior is particularly prevalent when discussing 
Edinburgh. It is important to acknowledge the fraught title of the “first gay Korean American 
novelist” that Alexander Chee possesses, as specifically related to expectations and pressures in 
Edinburgh’s writing and publication process. In an interview with Min Hyoung Song included in 
his book The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing as an Asian American, Chee says, 
“Who wants to be valued just for what you are, as opposed to what you have to say? That’s 
disgusting…No artist likes to be told what to write” (Song, 2003, p. 62). Song then asks Chee if 
writing under the label of “Asian American” makes him feel as though he is being told what to 
write. Chee responds, “Not even ‘almost.’ It’s most certainly within this category that you’re 
expected to have Asian American characters…” (Song, 2003, p. 62). Focusing specifically on 
Asian American writers, the burden of meaningfulness is compounded by an external obligation 
to relay an authentic, representative experience in literature that is in line with normative 
conceptions of Asian American identity. But what exactly constitutes these normative 
conceptions of Asian Americanness? 

Expectation and the Asian American author 
 In the essay “Korean Enough: Alexander Chee on New Korean American Fiction” 
published in Guernica Magazine in 2008, Chee explicitly identifies the dizzying expectations he 
feels subjected to under the title of “Korean American” author: “Is it a Korean American novel 
because there’s kimchi, or is it a Korean American novel because it’s informed by someone who 
grew up with even a distant sense of Han?” Continuing, Chee expresses the complex, 
contradictory questions Asian American writers, and more specifically Korean American writers 
must contend with:  

We worry if they will “chink” the book up, put chopsticks and teacups on the cover, or 
dragons, or an Asian woman…Will we be accused of trying to “make the book 
marketable” if there’s Asian content? Will we be branded as sell outs if there’s not 
“enough” Korean content? And if we write work that isn’t what people expect of us, of 
our brand, will we find an audience, or even be allowed to find an audience? (Chee, 
2008). 

Here, we observe how normative conceptions of Asian American identity influence and trouble 
writers of Asian descent. Stereotypical conceptions of what it means to be Asian American choke 
Asian American writers’ abilities to authentically express themselves in their works. How does 
Chee’s mixed racial identity fit into normative conceptions of Korean American identity? 
Additionally, how does queerness fit into these conceptions? Does it? Further, what does it mean 



to write a literary work when one’s identity precedes one’s writing? In one way or another, these 
are questions Chee had to confront when writing Edinburgh. In “The Autobiography of My 
Novel,” Chee identifies the weight of such expectations as specifically related to his process of 
writing Edinburgh:  

I was supposed to both invent characters from whole cloth and tattoo my biography onto 
each of them. The absurdity of casting my every story in half-Korean gay characters 
alone made me rebel. I think every writer with a noncanonical background, or even a 
canonical one, faces this at some point. 

Note here Chee’s use of the word rebel. Under the crushing burdens of meaningfulness and 
authenticity, Chee chose to rebel, creating the formative machine, that is Edinburgh — rejecting 
all expectations and doing what a writer does best: telling a story. 

Conclusion 
 Put simply, it matters that Edinburgh is a formative novel because it radically rejects 
expectations placed upon Asian American writers. In an age of literary suspicion, Edinburgh 
beckons readers to reject symptomatic reading and immerse themselves in a story that demands 
their attention and active engagement. Edinburgh is not wholly representative of any purported 
notion of gay Korean American identity, nor is it wholly representative of Asian American 
identity — and it does not seek to be. In this way, meaning does not lie where readers want to 
find it, and this sentiment is also reflected in the publication process of Edinburgh. In “The 
Autobiography of My Novel,” Chee writes, “Editors didn’t seem to know if it should be sold as a 
gay novel or an Asian American novel. There was no coming-out story in it, and while the main 
character was the son of an immigrant, immigration played no part in the story.” When asked by 
his agent what kind of novel Edinburgh is, Chee replied, “It’s a novel…I wrote a novel” (Chee, 
2018). And so Edinburgh is a sort of reclamation — of art, of expression. It is a formative work; 
it is a machine. Edinburgh is Chee’s way of rejecting the externally attached title of the “first gay 
Korean American novelist.” Subverting the suffocating expectations that are a symptom of our 
literary age of suspicion, refusing to present a normative image of Asian American identity, 
Edinburgh is, above all else, a novel — and Alexander Chee, a novelist. 



References 

Best, S., & Marcus, S. (2009). Surface Reading: An Introduction. Representations, 108(1), 1–21.   
https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.1. 
Chee, A. (2001). Edinburgh. Welcome Rain Publishers. 
Chee, A. (2008). Korean Enough: Alexander Chee on New Korean American Fiction.   
Guernica. https://www.guernicamag.com/korean_enough_new_korean_ameri/. 
Chee, A. (2018). The Autobiography of My Novel. How To Write An Autobiographical Novel:   
Essays. Mariner Books. 
Landy, J. (2012). Formative Fictions: Imaginative Literature and the Training of the Capacities.   
Poetics Today, (33(2), 169–205. Duke University Press.       
 https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article/33/2/169/21097/Formative-Fictions-Ima 
 ginative-Literature-and-the. 
Love, H. (2010). Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn. New Literary   
History, 41(2), 371–391. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40983827. 
Sedgwick, E. K. (2002). 4. Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid,   
You Probably Think This Essay Is About You. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy,   
Performativity, 123–152. Duke University Press. 
Song, M. H. (2003). The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American.    
Duke University Press.  


