Susan Smith Nash and her stories in the 2009 Big Bridge

[This is a part of a series of interviews of fiction writers who appeared in the last Big Bridge (2009), many of whom are among my favorite fictionistas, and several are close friends. In the name of full disclosure, I do have two stories among them. My motivation in doing this series is to learn more about some stories and writers I admire, and to promote Big Bridge which, along with Jacket and Madhatter's Review, is one of the few web journals that is exploring the possibilities opened by the internet rather than simply transferring print practices to the web.]

"Crystal Skulls"

Where did you come up with a name like Tinguely Querer?

That’s a great question. It’s a blend, based primarily on the Swiss kinetic artist, Jean Tinguely, who built moving sculptures and installations – “nonsense machines” -- often designed to self-destruct.

One of my favorites is his “Tinguelybrunnen” (fountain) in Basel, Switzerland. The moving parts spray water in all directions in a random way. Other parts of the fountain illustrate fruitless efforts (a shoveling machine that shovels nothing / nothingness).

I like the idea of giving the character the name “Tinguely” to resonate with levels of empty action, and also the self-aware self-destruction (or even self-aware deconstruction) of one’s own cognitive processes as one observes and perceives the world around one.

Querer is Spanish for “to love, to desire.” I like the idea that love and/or desire is subverted if one thinks back to Tinguely’s core essence. Also, I like the notion that if one reads “Querer” quickly, one is likely to see “Queer.” The “queer” gaze deconstructs the conventional in society, and undermines the authority structures we are not supposed to question.

I find it interesting that you chose to have the skulls stolen from the British Museum, given Britain's colonial past. You also bring up the Mayans. In what ways is this story exploring the significance and implications of colonialism?

In the story, Tinguely’s identity has been stolen, and she has to steal it back. That parallels the Mayans’ own history – their identity was stolen and partially placed in the British Museum. In essence, they had to steal their identity back. Yet, instead of being a formative, unifying experience, the action of getting one’s identity back makes one even more aware of the self-destruct button in our consciousness – one that finds expression in Jean Tinguely’s machines, and in the Mayan prophecies of the end of the world in 2012.

The skulls stolen from the British Museum turned out to be fake, which problematizes the entire issue of identity – Mayan identity – and the integrity of the predictions of apocalypse in 2012. Are our apocalyptic narratives constructed from fake or faked texts? If so, the issues brought to the surface are quite interesting. If our ancient texts are fakes produced in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, then what we think we know about the past is, in reality, an extension of modernity and the modernist teleology, such as it is.

What are you establishing as the relationship between memory and "branding"?

Branding can be an attempt to recreate oneself in a permanent manner. Consumer products are perceived as the most meaningful markers in a world where one’s experience of life, and one’s very consciousness are tied to commercial products. The way to assure one’s immortality (at least in the sense that people remember you) is to create a durable brand of yourself.

But, the issues become more complicated “between brands” – identity is in flux. The issue is that of erasure – and often deliberate self-erasure in order to re-create oneself. It sounds easy in theory, but in reality, it is not.

Anything else that you would like to add?

Just that I enjoyed the idea of building identity and then deliberately dismantling it, or effacing it by subjecting it to the attendance of a useless (but very busy) machine.

Arroyo

This story alternates narriticules relating self-mutilation with narriticules about technology and love. Do you see a relationship between masochism, or something like it, and technology? between masochism and love?

In each case, people are seeking some sort of truth about the human condition. Whether there is, ultimately, any kind of “truth” is not really settled. There are definitely certain “truths” or, perhaps better said, “realities” – but the truths and realities are multiple, and they are all equally valid. The possibility that all are equally invalid is also a possibility. The “narriticules” ( I love the term!)

I do see a relationship between technology and love. I believe, in my heart of hearts, that technology makes love possible. Human behavior alone is just not enough. It’s necessary to have a neutral intermediary – a bridge, so to speak – to bring together two human beings whose own human natures are so perverse that they inevitably and invariably equate self-torture with love. Big emotions require big pain (or pleasure), I suppose. Left to us, we mess things up.

So, in terms of the narrative itself, it fascinates me to see the kind of technologies that facilitate the coming together of two things. The whip used by the flagellant is definitely a technology – but, it’s something that unites body and soul (in an uncomfortable way), but it does not necessarily unite individuals.

GPS and communication technologies most definitely can unite people, although the technology itself becomes the object of love. .

Big Big Sky

This one does not seem to be a Tinguely Querer story. How do you determine which stories work in that context?

I like the idea of doing stories that explore the intrusive thoughts that come to one, and to put it in an autobiographical form, even though the story is not autobiographical.

You again juxtapose technology with nature: antelope with windfarm, songbird with car, birds with farm implements, running track, and i-pod. The juxtapositions are interesting because they are not necessarily absolute. The birds, for instance, make a home of the farm equipment.

That’s a great observation about the juxtapositions and the fact that they are not absolutely. I love the idea of putting together unexpected items – not to necessarily draw meaning or to create a metaphor, but to introduce possibilities.

Lily Hoang's CHANGING

I love this novel. Yes, I like this book and I am impressed by it, but more importantly, I love it.

Let me explain: this book is unique, touching, intimate. It almost feels autobiographical, but it is not. On page after page Hoang's riffs on Jack and Jill and other nursery rhymes, on romantic relationships, on cruelty and tenderness, on family, feel so intimate that to not love them would seem inhumane.

Changing, a 2009 Pen America Award Winner, is based on the ancient Chinese uber-text I-Ching or Book of Changes. The book is composed of 64 hexagrams, each one with six stacked horizontal lines. Some lines are composed of just one dash (­—) an­d some are two (--). The unbroken lines are associated with yang, the creative principle, and the broken with yin, the receptive principle.

For our purposes, it is enough to know that these 64 hexagrams refer to combinations of concrete natural phenomena; namely earth, mountain, water, wind, thunder, fire, swamp, and heaven. For each hexagram, the first three lines refer to one of these phenomena and the second three refer to another. (This is how we get the number 64; there are 64 such possible combinations.) Water, as an example, is composed of a broken line followed by a solid line and another broken line, respectively.

To use the I-Ching for divination, you ask a question then randomly pick a number. Studying that hexagram should help you understand your question better. In an appendix at the end of the book, Lily says that she wants the book to be read that way. For all practical purposes, we can assume that the book need not be read sequentially.

Hoang's book is a new translation of the I-Ching. And it works by, for each hexagram, riffing off of its implications for two pages. (i.e. Each chapter is two pages.) A chapter is divided into six blocks of text, three on one page and three on the other. Some of these blocks are broken into two columns and others are completely solid. They correspond to the broken or solid lines in the hexagrams.

To see what Lily does with three hexagrams, go here. Note that there are six text blocks under each hexagram, and that in the book a page break takes place between the third and the fourth ones. Since it is easilly accessible on the net, I will use this excerpt as an example of what happens throughout the book. I will concentrate on the first one, "Obstruction."

The most direct discussion of the hexagram itself is in the text block that begins "This hexagram is not..." Since heaven is the ultimate creative force (with its three solid lines) and earth the ultimate receptive one (with its three broken lines), it would seem that this hexagram would be water. But it is not: it is obstruction or barricade. Hoang imagines the Princess Jill living in a castle behind a moat. Where did this come from? Throughout the book, in every discussion of a hexagram, Lily goes into Jack and Jill at one point. What's more, other nursery rhymes and fairy tales are quoted. So here, Jill is a princess, evoking all sorts of other tales. This quoting while riffing is very similar to what many jazz artists do, who, while soloing, "quote" the melodies of other songs as a playful and generative act.

This riffing and quoting occurs throughout this excerpt and throughout the book. Each chapter is composed of more than six riffs on the title coming from different imagist, allegorical, and conceptual frameworks. For an example of an allegory, look at the text block beginning "That us lovers..." The whole piece is about the narrator's inability to play chess well and, by implication, the lover's "clean" ability. This is an allegory about the narrator's difficulty with bringing intense emotional scenes (what else could the chess game suggest other than arguments, stressful decisions, an inability to be decisive?) to a conclusion. Perhaps they tend to fester.

Other text blocks under this hexagram are equally interesting. If we remember that with the bottom three lines we are dealing with ultimate receptivity, the block beginning "Impossible for the great..." becomes fascinating. It is a paean to the Taoist idea that the insignificant and nonfunctional (the traditional example is of a severely bent tree) will not be hurt. Here we see how crafty and impossible to catch are the small ones. The very nature of ultimate receptivity implies a strength, an ability to take powerful pressure and yet still remain. The total obstruction of the receptive is impossible (and this is also in keeping with the Yin Yang philosophy) no matter how hard anyone tries.

In the long text block beginning "Memory of the city..." Lily works the notion of water and rain as obstruction once again. Using conjunctions, repetition, and agrammatical structures she causes us to plunge down the text block like heavy rainwater. And it ends with the rye comment "before we're real stuck." The playfulness in this section is quite typical. There is a bouyancy to this novel in spite of its many tragic elements: cancer, growing old, homophobia, racism, breaking from family, and so on.

The playfulness, perhaps, comes from the the conception or intuition that animates the novel, the use of the I-Ching— coupled with the wildly free, agrammatical style. What's more, the play seems inexhaustible. Each chapter could be discussed for hours in terms of how Lily is riffing off of the hexagram. In the sections of the hexagram "Obstruction," she deals with memory, fear, sadness, definitions, Heaven, Earth, small vs. great, family, translating, allegory, and housing. All in two pages!

What's more, this intricately textured novel is not dense. There is so much room to breathe, so much tenderness — the mother lying next to a sick little girl and asking her to give the illness to the mother, and the little girl not wanting to get her mother sick; lovers hearing "how sounds move in groups to our ears"; & Jill walking "into a forest & there she sang with rabbits & birds & a very charming prince overheard melody. And there is tremendous pain — cancer and chemotherapy, racist comments aimed at the little girl and her parents, love affairs breaking apart, a young man almost completely rejected by his family because of being a homosexual. Each of these, returned to again and again under different hexagrams, causes us to read each text block in at least two ways: one in relation to the hexagram it is under, and the other to the other text blocks under different hexagrams that deal with the same issue.

I love this novel because of its tenderness, its playfulness, its ability to look at some of the most horrible aspects of experience yet not despair. To read this novel and inhabit its world is to feel that almost anything can happen, and it might be horrible. It also might be beautiful. But in that very randomness is the possibility for a a spaciousness and openness that is the source of endurance, perseverance, play, and good fortune.

More Questions About Bhabha's Work

An important essay in The Location of Culture is entitled "Commitment to Theory." In it, Bhabha concerns himself with the practical political gain that can come from writing theory. He wonders if a pamphlet written about and espousing a justified strike would be more effective than theory. Not surprisingly, he argues that we need both. I am interested in the technical complexities of his argument. I have some comments. 1. He seems to make a dichotomy between, on the one hand, artistically and theoretically radical work and, on the other, political pamphleteering. But there are so many types of "discourse" in between, especially a number of different types and levels of journalism. From a practical perspective, leftist journalism might do more for the strike than the theory. Babha's argument is that the pamphleteering and the journalism will inevitably reinstate notions of the self and other that valorizes the oppressed over the oppressor. This understandable, but wrong headed, attempt to "solve" these issues is politically naîve. "Must the project of our liberationist aesthetics be forever part of a totalizing utopian vision of Being and History that seeks to transcend the contradictions and ambivalences that constitute the very structure of human subjectivity and its systems of cultural representation?" (29) Bhabha clearly articulates what theory and radical culture can do that nothing else is able to do — namely, critique deeply enough to understand oppositions rather than taking one side or the other in a simplistic fashion. He also claims that "the very structure of human subjectivity" and, we will learn, culture, is full of tension, assertion, and doubling. The choice between political alternatives might be easy, but dreaming that the victory of your side will lead to a future that transcends the contradictions inherent in the complexities of both our cultures and ourselves is foolhardy.

But Bhabha does not answer this: what good is this deep critique if so few people are aware of it? The best answer I know for this question comes from the American Poetry scholar Alan Golding. In From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), he notes that we shouldn't think of the political value of radical culture outside of the specific, empirical places where these critiques take place. Namely, they are part and parcel of the life of college and university life, and so often around these institutions are towns and cities of a bent that is much more open to radical culture. In short, I believe that the value of theory needs to be measured empirically, not just theoretically. I find Golding's argument a convincing one. Perhaps thinking about our work in terms of the local will help. And, to a degree, this dovetails neatly with some of Bhabha's own thoughts about the importance of thinking "the Other" within our local communities and within our own selves.

2. "Radical critique .. within the political process becomes double-edged. It makes us aware that our political referents and priorities — the people,the community, class struggle, anti-racist, gender difference, the assertion of an anti-imperialist, black or third perspective — are not there in some primordial, naturalistic sense... They make sense as they come to be constructed in the discourses of feminism or Marxism or the Third Cinema or whatever" (38).

In other words, any object we want to fight for, is always already created by being represented and nurtured within an ideological framework. What this means is profound: there can never be total victory. One side can never vanquish the other because it needs the other side of the dichotomy in order for it to be constructed as a political position. Anti-racism comes not because there is objective racism, but because racism has been defined as problematic by a discourse. One of Babha's favorite words is "agonistic," which means struggle but is also the root of "agony." He would never put it this simply, but to be human means to be permanently in political struggle. It is part of our condition. "The pure avenging angel speaking the truth of a radical ... pure oppositionality" (38) will never arrive and will certainly never succeed.

This is not so much pessimism as it is an attempt to rigorously define how politics works — namely, through our own chosen representations. Having a discourse that does this helps us to know what we can hope for. And it shows us how much control we have over our political representations, which is a lot, but not total.

I have yet to look at critiques of Bhabha's position, but I imagine that these reflections must create real opposition. Someone may say that, for instance, anti-racism is not the result of a representation, but the result of painful experience. Anti-racism, in this view, results from nothing other than the treatment of real people, not from representation. Bhabha would respond, I think, that racism is bad, but it is bad because it has been represented as such. This representation can never be total, so the avenging angel of anti-racism probably can never vanquish it all. Or, if something approaching totality comes about, there will be other issues that come to be represented as problems in "the hybrid moment of political change" (41). "There is no first or final act of revolutionary social (or socialist) transformation" (45).

To make clearer the level at which his critique takes place, namely, in the difference between cultural diversity and cultural difference. "Cultural diversity is an epistemological object — culture as an object of empirical knowledge — whereas cultural difference is the process of the enunciation of culture as 'knowledgeable,' authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification" (49-50). Cultural diversity leads to a static view of cultures as self-contained and relativistic, that which is represented rather than that which is part of representation.

Cultural difference, on the other hand, "problematizes the binary division of past and present, tradition and modernity, at the level of cultural representation and its authoritative address" (51). Instead of relativism we get 'enunciation'. Enunciation seems to be the communicative act that cannot fully represent, that there is a slippage. Cultural objects are always already represented, but the structure of any representation, since it is artificial and not natural, is to not fully grasp what it is it's representing. In the words of Jacques Derrida, whom Bhabha quotes, différance is the name given for this slippage at the level of representation.

So, in any culture, an enunciative act is always already contentious, partial, and ambivalent. Bhabha gives the example of how a native intellectual looking for a return to a mythic tradition will be disappointed when they enunciate themselves in part by engaging in "Western forms of information technology, language, dress" (55). Bhabha argues that the past is always a representation, based partly on our desires for it, and that we cannot force it on the present.

When I was in college an anthropology professor of mine described an incident that occurred when he was studying the Kru, an African tribe. He was observing a woman cooking a dish, and he was dutifully taking everything down that she was doing. Then she picked up a can of tuna, opened it, and put it in. My professor remarked that it wasn't a "true" Kru dish. She became quite angry. "It is so an authentic Kru dish," she said.

Questions About Homi Bhabha's Work

After reading the preface and introduction to The Location of Culture, the following remarks and questions occur to me. Some of them probably stem from my not knowing his theory completely, and some might stem from interesting interstices in his thought:

1. If culture is to be conceived as performative, then it would seem to be overwhelmingly in the present. That said, the past certainly opens us onto the present, but Bhabha emphasizes how art renews and refigures the past. If this is the case, then origins and roots are chimera: we can not hope to get back to them, and any attempt to do so becomes dangerous because it has a tendency to essentialize group identity, which opens the door to social inequality between groups.

2. Bhabha seems to be negating the very possibility of identity based on a historic trajectory. It seems that performativity creates the past. This may be a difficult pill to swallow for some 'minoritarian', to use Bhabha's phrase, cultures.

3. Bhabha himself asks an interesting question: "Can the perplexity of the of the unhomely, intrapersonal world lead to an international theme" (17)? I am not sure what he is getting at with this. What is the distinction between 'international' and 'universal' or 'transcendental'? I am sure there is one, but I am not sure what form it takes.

4. A periphery needs a center. Otherwise it's not a periphery; it's just space. If the unhomely margin is the location of the most important and exciting art, what is happening at the center? Something must be occurring there, otherwise the periphery would have no meaning. Bhabha does bring up a canonical white man, Henry James, to help illustrate unhomeliness, but just because Jame is in some ways at the center does not mean that in this instance he is. If art and culture are performative, even alert white men, at times, sense the need to stretch into the periphery in order to create art.

Homi Bhabha - The Location of Culture

Those of you who have been following this blog for a time know that I posted regularly on Nathaniel Mackey's poetry series "Song of the Andoumboulou" until about four months ago. I am going to begin discussing this series again soon, but I seem to be taking a bit of a detour. I find that Homi Bhabha in his theorizing about culture hits upon many of the thoughts, themes, and insights that Mackey has been exploring for the last 30 years. Bringing them together seems like a fascinating idea. I will read Bhabha through Mackey, and vice versa. Where one stops and the other begins may sometimes be obscured, but that is the way both men conceive of culture: its fluidity prevents any solidified or calcified identity formation.

Bhabha begins his book in a curious fashion: he discusses his autobiography. He was born and raised in Bombay as a middle class Parsi — "a member of a small Zoroastrian-Persian minority in a predominantly Hindu ad Muslim context. Years later, I ask myself what it would be like to live without the unresolved tensions between cultures and countries that have become the narrative of my life, and the defining characteristic of my work" (x).

Later in the Preface he distinguishes between two types of discourses of globalization. One is multiculturalism and it believes, implicitly or explicitly, in the essential differences of cultures and nations, and works to represent each in as fair and equal a manner as possible. Bhabha adds, sarcastically, "so long as they produce healthy profit margins."

The second one Bhabha terms a "vernacular cosmopolitanism which measures global progress from the minoritarian perspective." It "takes the view that the commitment to a 'right to difference in equality' as a process of constituting emergent groups and affiliations has less to do with the affirmation or authentication of origins and 'identities' and more to do with political practices and ethical choices...It represents a political process that works towards the goals of democratic rule, rather than simply acknowledging already constituted 'marginal' political entities or identities" (xviii).

The essentialist believes that differences are the result of separate origins and essences that need to be respected and retained. This ends, according to Bhabha, in social inequality. If people are conceived of as different, then there are easy excuses for explaining why they do not share in a country's wealth. Vernacular cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, assumes that all cultural formations and identities are always already morphing and changing. There are no 'origins' to return to because the contemporary minoritarian cultures are responding to current political situations, even if they consider themselves to be retaining a past purity. Better to work toward a shared goal of "difference in equality" than the politically unpalatable multiculturalism and its belief in stagnant cultural identities.

In the introduction, Bhabha elaborates on his dynamic view of cultures by emphasizing that they are performative, always in the making. He also emphasizes that these performances take place in liminal places, in gaps and boundaries between ethnocentric, often colonial powers, and minoritarian ones. They can also take place among and between various minoritarian cultures. For Bhabha, the center is precisely where the least important and exciting cultural performances are taking place: he prefers "intervention emerging in the cultural interstices that introduces creative invention into existence" (12).

The moment of performance is an "unhomely" one, haunted and uneasy. That is because it is moving out into the previously never articulated or experienced, and attempting an articulation. In doing so the work of art moves the culture ever so slightly. What was previously unsayable becomes sayable, and it provides links and bridges to what had previously seemed other. Unhomeliness is not the feeling of being bereft outside your culture with nothing else to hold onto, it is the feeling of being outside your culture with the possibility of forging something between cultures while being in dialogue with the past.

It is important to note that artists are not in complete control of this whole event. They may initiate the action, but they cannot control the outcome. How cultures respond to the new artistic performance is, perhaps (and here I am speculating), part of the unhomeliness of the working artist; it is part of the estrangement.

As an aside, what most impressed me about Bhabha in these early portions of the book, is the evident respect he has for writers and visual artists. Bhabha is not a critic who puts himself above artists, who feels he can translate what they were really doing. He mentions how reading Naipul taught him some things that he used to develop theory. He did this by reading against the grain of Naipul's conservativism, but reading his novels got him thinking in valuable ways. He also displays tremendous respect for Toni Morrison and, surprisingly perhaps, Henry James.

This is in keeping with the way I view Mackey's "Song of the Andoumboulou": it is also culturally heterogeneous, also full of fluidity and skeptical of returning to a pure past, and it is highly respectful of musicians, in addition to writers. What's interesting is that Mackey was, I think, broaching these topics 20 years before Bhabha. I would not be surprised if Bhabha himself agrees that theory often comes late, that the unhomeliness felt by artists is part and parcel of their opening cultural locations that can later be theorized.

More later.