The Foreigner is (Still) Kitsch

Lily Hoang started a discussion with a quote from Caroline Bergvall, and then it turned into a discussion about "the foreigner is kitsch."

What I like about Gretchen Henderson's comments is that she brings in Bakhtin's ideas of monoglossia and heteroglossia. Monoglossia is of course an illusion that must be maintained against the forces of heteroglossia. That is where the lyric poem tends to function: to maintain the illusion of language purity, authenticity.

It is this authenticity that modern art/poetry/culture has used to define itself; and it is kitsch it has defined itself against. Modern art is authentic; the inauthentic is kitsch. Kitsch is generally associated with mass-produced items (and in fact the term is created in a response to mass production, to the excess it creates). However, it's not a stable term (lots of things can be kitsch), it's a way of dismissing things (not just mass-produced items) as "cheap" or inauthentic. In Greenberg (and many others) kitsch is associated with crossing borders, with the foreign, with the "seductive." For Greenberg (and Bobby Baird pointed this out as well on this blog) kitsch also included the loss of the autonomous artwork.

It struck me as strange that Lily objected to being called an "Asian-American" writer and just wanted to be "American." But behind that dislike is perhaps the sense that the hyphen has been turned into a kitsch item, something not quite high culture, something that lets the social into the pristine realm of the authentic.

I like Lily's quote from Bergvall:
"For many bicultural artists and writers, the processes of identity and of writing acquisition go hand in hand with aspects of cultural belonging and the way this articulates their lived body and speaking voice. When the writer’s cultural and social body accommodates two or three languages and/or cultures, their inscriptive narratives and poetics are necessarily at a break from a monolingual textual body-type and a nationally defined writing culture. It is often accompanied by a propensity towards open-forms and mixed genres, remains dubious and questioning of defining terms, can be resistant of exile or immigrant narratives and their inward longing for a traditionalist past where identities are firmly locked in place, rather than in play."

It seems important here that the traditional "immigrant narratives" are about looking back etc - they are kitsch. This kitsch idea of immigrant hides the more interesting idea that Bergvall forwards, the violence that is not hyphenated. And I think the traditional idea of immigrant narratives covers up the way immigrant language denaturalizes "the native", makes the native strange, shows the illusoriness of the "monoglossic" (this is of course why I object to Ron Silliman objecting to foreigners translating foreign literature - he distrusts their lack of native "ear" - I distrust his idea of native).

I wrote a book called Pilot in which I tried to write an "immigrant" narrative that would entail the violence of languages and bodies that are involved in immigration. It's based on translations in various directions (from english to english to swedish to english etc), resulting - I hope - in a kind of immigrant-like language, an always foreign, inauthentic language. When I read it (I can only speak for myself) out loud the result is a kind of artificial language that sounds perhaps made on archaic recording equipment or perhaps spoken by an immigrant. The source texts were things like birthing manuals, poems (Dickinson, Scalapino etc) and Cronenberg's "Videodrome" (an already foreign sounding neologism, a movie that is very video, a story about seeing one's girlfriend on a broadcast of her death), and the Internet. Pilot is of course someone flying from one place to another,but it's also the pilot episode of a show. What's interesting about the pilot episode (for example the Twin Peaks pilot episode) is that it's the origin of the story, but it seems mostly to be slightly off, things haven't been worked out yet, actors are different, the script is a little different. It's both origin and fake copy.

I would also add that queer theory has influenced me a great deal in my thinking about foreigness and kitsch.