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“Bringing out Roland Barthes in Tawada Yōko”

J. Keith Vincent

(English manuscript for an article published in Japanese, as

「クィア作家としての多和田葉子」

『ユーリイカ)』２００４年十月号)

“[This is] a problem for all of us:…How to become a nomad and an immigrant and

a gypsy in relation to one’s own language?”1

Rereading, Mistranslating, and Writing with Tawada

As I sit down to write about Tawada Yōko, an author about whom I am more

inclined to write something like an homage than a “critical” essay, I am assailed by a

problem familiar to me, but made all the more so by her work. One way to say it would

be (without in any sense comparing myself to her) that her works inspire me to write

with her rather than to write about her, to keep on writing on top of, underneath, after,

and before her. To write with her in that blissfully unsettling space among languages,

between texts, and even between letters that her works never fail to call forth for the

reader. In this sense, her texts are among the most “writerly” (to borrow a term from

Roland Barthes) of any writer I know. Here on my desk I have a little stack of her books,

some in Japanese, some in English, some in German, and some in two or more of these

1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka : Toward a Minor Literature, Theory and History of

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languages at once. At the same time I have a number of other texts that I am led back

to or towards, that I want to reread when I read hers, in what turns out to be a kind of

promiscuous proliferation of words.

Being in New York and under a deadline, I don’t have access to the “originals” or

even the “standard translations” of most of these texts. So I have decided to translate

some of them myself, or with the help of friends, (most particularly Kitamaru Yûji, without

whom this text never would have made it into Japanese) producing new originals, or

sometimes the first original for texts that remain rightly indifferent to any such sense of

authenticity. In the course of such an exercise I run the risk of committing what are

conventionally called “mistranslations” which might lead us into wholly unanticipated or

unintended directions. But then I am comforted (as I can only hope the reader is) by

Tawada’s words.

“You can’t take a trip without the suitcase that is mistranslation. But mistranslations and

correct translations do not stand opposed to each other like lies and the truth; they are

both “translations” and trips. We might even go so far as to say the difference is more a

matter of shades of color. 2

Queer Texts and the Art of Lying

Tawada’s insistence (and ability) to write in this dizzying “space between

languages,” where every translation is a mistranslation and every language is foreign, is 2 「誤訳という荷物を背負わずに旅はできない。しかし、誤訳と正しい訳が、嘘と真実のように対立しているのではなく、両方とも「訳」であり旅であり、大袈裟に言えば、色合いだけが違う

かもしれない。」Yoko Tawada, Ekusofonii: Bogo No Soto E Deru Tabi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003). 129.

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what makes her work queer for me, in a sense that I hope to clarify in what is to follow.

But first off, I should say that what I mean by “queer” has much more to do with form

than content, with a certain kind of practice of reading and writing, and very little to do

with identity.

Falling frequently as she does through the gaps between national languages

(what Barthes calls “encratic”3 languages, those “official” languages of discipline and

power) makes Tawada aware of a fundamental but often disavowed aspect of language

itself, literary or otherwise. It is not about communication. In speech this fact is

occluded by the fortuitous temporal and spatial coincidence of what in linguistics is called

the enunciating subject with the grammatical subject of the sentence. In what is

imagined as the “communicational setting” the sentence as it is uttered is understood to

emanate from the “person” (shutai) who utters it, thus “expressing” its “subjectivity.” This

understanding is what makes speech seem more “authentic,” “expressive,” and “natural”

than writing. This, of course, is only an ideological fiction that we will deal with later. The

true character of language is better exemplified in the practice of writing, where the

enunciated is separated in space and time from the fictive person (ninshō) who is

presumed retroactively to have written it and thus acquires subjectivity only as an effect

of this retroactive movement. Strictly speaking, the enunciated, once it is written

becomes a disembodied sentence or voice, freed from the pen or the mouth of the

person who produced it, sometimes migrating into other bodies (like that of the narrator

of Tawada’s story “The Bath” when the voices of the businessmen “began to talk using

my mouth (17), or when, repeating Xander’s words, she “felt that my tongue was starting

to belong to him (28).” In other cases, it just floats free like the voice of the “novel” we

3 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (London: Cape, 1976). 40.

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hear about in “Ein Gast”4 and which the narrator wants to “lock behind the bars of the

printed letters (180),”5 as if to restore by force the coincidence of the subject (shutai)

and the subject of enunciation (shugo) or what Ann Banfield calls, using a slightly

different terminolgy, the “speaker” and the “self.”

“In communication,” Banfield writes, “SELF is realized morphologically by the

same form used for SPEAKER…Hence in speech, I masks the dual role it plays and

unites expression and communication. It is because SELF is defined independently of

speaker [in writing] that the former can be realized as a non-first person, either

synchronically or at some moment in the history of language. What is required to bring

this about is (i) the elimination of the first person and (ii) the absence of a second

person…The sentence of narration per se remains as what is left over after subjectivity

has been removed.” 6

The narrator’s uncertainty, in “The Guest” as to the identity of the “owner” of the

woman’s voice that speaks the novel is a startling dramatization of this narration emptied

of subjectivity. “I wasn’t interested,” she (or it) tells us, “in the person who had written

4 The title itself suggests both the spatial and temporal provisionality of the coincidence betweent the enunciating speaker and the enunciated self. 5 The status of the voice, of course, is crucial to the ideology of the novel which produces it. I will touch more on this later, but for now I refer to Bette London’s formulation of the problem. “Integrity of voice…” she writes, “is not the modern novel’s given—or even its supreme achievement; it is the question the novel sets itself. For the fiction of the early twentieth century…voice represents the site of a struggle articulated on a number of fronts: between competing voices, competing individualities; between political power…between artistic innovation and narrative’s conventional authorities” Bette Lynn London, The Appropriated Voice : Narrative Authority in Conrad, Forster, and Woolf (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). 5

6 Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences : Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). 234. Banfield’s notion of the “non-first person” is very close to what Kamei Hideo calls the 「遊牧的半話者」that characterized the works of Higuchi Ichiyô. The lack of quotation marks to separate the narration from discourse also echoes this effect. See below on the same absence of quotation marks in “Ein Gast.” Hideo Kamei, Kansei No Henkaku (Tokyo: Kôdansha, 1983).

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this boring novel.”7 We see the same dynamic in the fact that the narrator of “The Bath,”

despite her hard-won understanding of the first and second person in German, tells us

that, “Xander and I always stayed on third person terms.”8 To make things more

complicated, however, this statement turns out not to be true entirely, at least not in the

English text (which is the only one I have available). Xander and the narrator refer each

other as “you” and “I” quite often both before and after this assertion. But perhaps this is

just an effect of the translation into English.

7 Yoko Tawada, "A Guest," Where Europe Begins (Tokyo: New Directions, 2002). 186. Further references will be given in the text. References are to the English edition unless otherwise noted. The German edition is Yoko Tawada, Ein Gast (Tuebingen: Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 1993). The two stories I will discuss mostly in what follows are, like most of Tawada’s texts, more like dreams than short stories or novels, making it quite difficult, if not somewhat pointless, to summarize them. But to give the reader some idea of what goes on I offer the following. “The Bath,” originally written (although not yet published) in Japanese, is included in Where Europe Begins in English translation by Yumi Selden. It centers (if it has a center…) around the relationship between the narrator and a German man named “Xander,”who teaches the narrator German and photographs her, among other things. In the beginning of the story the narrator works as an interpreter but eventually her tongue is eaten by a fish, she forgets the letters of the alphabet, and does not show up in the photographs Xander takes of her. Several women in the story including the narrator morph into fish at various points and their scales are flayed mercilessly by a succession of cooks, often turning into meals for men. The narrator’s skin become transparent toward the end and she seems to melt into the sea or the bath as the boundaries between her skin and the outer world dissolve. “Ein Gast” was originally written in German and appears in Where Europe Begins as “A Guest” in Susan Bernofsky’s translation. The narrator here goes to a flea market where she purchases what she thinks is a novel with the title written in a circle on the cover. She takes it home only to discover that it is actually a box containing cassette tapes. On the tapes is a woman’s voice reading what seems to be the contents of the novel. Even after the narrator switches off the cassette player the voice keeps playing inside her head. She puts an ad in the newspaper offering one hundred marks for anyone who has the original novel, hoping she can contain the voice behind the bars of the printed letters. A student named Simon shows up at her home with the novel, says she may read it but that he can’t sell it to her. In the later part of the story the narrator’s neighbor who claims to be called “Z” convinces her to help him in a business scheme in which they remove the voices of other people who have lodged in women’s bodies. The narrator’s body serves as the receptacle for these disembodied voices, for which she is paid one hundred, and later two hundred marks each. She is trying to write on a typewriter for most of the story but all she produces are random lists of words with the first letters removed or cut in the middle around the letter “Z.” Typing these headless and broken words relaxes her. 8 Yoko Tawada, "The Bath," Where Europe Begins (New York: New Directions, 2002). 28. Further references will be given in the text.

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In any case, Tawada makes perfectly clear her mistrust of communication in her

recent collection of essays, titled Ekusofonii.

Once people learn how to communicate that’s all they do (139). I suppose there’s

nothing wrong with that but language has more wondrous powers than that. A

momentary liberation through play from language as a tool to transmit information lets us

touch language itself (160). 9

While this “liberation from communication” in its association with ‘play’ and its

provisional quality might seem to deviate perilously from what in the tradition of the I-

novel is thought to be the authentic self (not to mention “true love”), it is perhaps more

productive to see it as opening us up to the “other” in all his or her radical difference from

ourselves, with the potential to lead either a more profound communion or a frightened

retreat into the SELF. For me this is most beautifully rendered in the instability of the

names of Tawada’s characters. “Xander” whose name remains unspeakable because it

starts with an “X”10 never quite comes together as a “person” (is he a photographer or a

German teacher?) 11 Like “Z” in “The Guest” he would seem to stand in for nothing less

than the Symbolic itself. Xander gives things their names just as “Z” liberates women

from the voices that haunt them, returning them to their “true” selves. And yet however

much Xander and Z may seem to wield the arbitrary, castrating power (more on this 9 「人はコミュニケーションできるようになってしまったら、コミュニケーションばかりしてしまう（１３９）。」それはそれで良いことだが、言語にはもっとふしぎな力がある。」そして、

「意味の伝達の道具として言葉を使う習慣から、遊びによって一時的に解放されることによって、

言葉そのものに触ることができる（１６０）。」 10 “I didn’t know how to pronounce the ‘X’ in ‘Xander.’ Since it was the first letter of his name, I couldn’t begin to speak at all.” 9. 11 Reading this, I was immediately reminded of my advisor in graduate school whose name was “Anderer.”

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later) of language in the Symbolic realm, they also sit on the site of its collapse into pure

signs without referents. These two opposing tendencies are both contained in the “X”

that starts Xander’s name as an algebraic variable, leaving us in a state of deferral and

indecision. If “X=durchein” we get “durcheinander,” suggesting an interpenetration of

voices and subjectivities. If “X=mitein,” we get “miteinander,” where two discreet

individuals are simply adjacent to each other, maintaining their mutual personhood and

integrity.

The “play” that Tawada says is possible when we liberate ourselves from the

instrumentality of language starts to sound a lot like what S. Y. Kuroda, in another

critique of the communicational fallacy, calls “lying.”

“It might be added in passing,” writes Kuroda, “that there is some essential

similarity between lying and communicational narration. By lying one creates (or tries to

create) a false reality. But one also creates at the same time a false communicational

setting in which the addressor is one’s alter ego. One who lies pretends to be the alter-

ego he creates. This alter-ego is the addressor in the created communicational setting.

The lie is discovered when this pretence breaks down (Kuroda “Foundations” 129).12

The logical conclusion of this argument is that language, once we use it, is

always a lie. And this is a fact that Tawada celebrates rather than bewails. The pretence

of language to truth and the integrity of the subject is dismantled on virtually every page

of Tawada’s texts. This is one important way in which her texts are queer.

The Narcissism of Nationality

12 S. Y. Kuroda, "Reflections on the Foundation of Narrative Theory," Pragmatics of Language and Literature, ed. Teun A. van Dijk (North Holland Publishing, 1976). 129.

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Perhaps it goes without saying that Tawada’s texts disrupt the notion not just of

language-as-communication, but of the “national language” as well. Naoki Sakai has

provided us with a useful delineation of the way in which the “figure” of a national

language or mother tongue does not exist as an experiential object but is constituted

through a form of narcissistic desire.

Sakai writes, “One’s own language neither precedes nor succeeds a foreign

language; both come into being at the same time—that is one’s own language is always

a foreign language for a foreign language, and the self-referential relationship to one’s

own language always assumes the schema of cofiguration. This is why the self-

referentiality to one’s own language necessarily comprises the desire to be seen from

the viewpoint of a foreign language. The reason for which self-referentiality in fact can

never free itself from the transferential desire to see from another’s position is, thus,

already outlined in the schema of cofiguration.”13

Oscar Wilde of course knew this long ago when he pointed out in “The Decay of

Lying” that “The whole of Japan is a pure invention.”14 And Tawada no less eloquently

“translates” this insight by way of the strange relationship between the narrator of “The

Bath” and Xander. By forestalling the distinction between the first and second person,

between “you” and “I,” the text highlights Xander’s narcissistic attempt to make the

narrator into a “Japanese” and thus reaffirm his own national identity and that of others.

Parodic references to the narcissistic transferential desire that founds national identity

abound in “The Bath.” “Can’t you look more Japanese? This is for a travel poster (9)”

Xander says as he photographs the narrator. When she doesn’t appear in any of the 13 Naoki Sakai, Nihon Shiso to Iu Mondai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1997). 62. (59 in Translation and Subjectivity). 14 Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying," The Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. Galley Press (1987). 927.

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photographs he tells her “It’s all because you don’t have a strong enough sense of

yourself as Japanese.” Indeed—“When his face appeared where the camera had been,

it looked very much like my own (11).” And her mother complains, “You’re starting to

have one of those faces like Japanese people in American movies (44).”

If one’s “own” language, according to Sakai, comes into existence at the same

time as the foreign language, this would be homologous to the Oedipal process by

which, according to Freud, the Ego comes into being in the passage from auto—

eroticism to narcissism, through separation from the mother . Learning to distinguish

ourselves from the mother is the way we consolidate our “I” in antagonistic relation to

“you.” It is not surprising then, that Xander has a visceral abhorrence for “warm milk,”

not to mention the matricidal impulse of “Z” in “The Guest.” And yet Tawada’s female

narrators (assuming we can consider them female) consistently oppose this Oedipal

imperative. The narrator of “A Guest” counter’s Z’s suggestion that his patient kill off her

mother’s voice by recommending that she sleep with it instead, “That would be incest in

its most beautiful form (205).” And the narrator of “The Bath,” uses mother’s milk as

moisturizer (7). In this way Tawada’s texts problematize the inextricable tie between the

nationalization and the gendering of the self—not just by destabilizing gender, but by

resisting the self altogether. In the following passage this comes with a fair dose of faux

naiveté.

When asked, “Are you Japanese?” I would answer, “Yes, you are Japanese.” The trick

in this game was to change ‘you’ into ‘I,’ but I didn’t yet realize it.”

The “game” here is clearly opposed to the “playing” with language that Tawada

praises elsewhere as a liberation from language-as-tool. Unlike that “asobi,” this game

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is no fun, and the narrator doesn’t want to play. “Xander laughed like a bursting balloon.

I didn’t laugh. I repeated all of Xander’s words, but not his laugh (28).” She continues,

as we have seen, to use the third person. Other examples of this resistance to the idea

of the mother tongue as a given are to be found throughout Tawada’s text: there is the

blithe way in which the narrator of “A Guest” describes purchasing a typewriter so that

she can write articles in Japanese (199), the narrator of “The Bath’s” inability as a child

to use the first-person gendered pronoun watashi, using her name in the third-person

instead (16-17) , and, in light of that, this striking passage from the same story.

“Okaasan, watashi yo [Mom, it’s me].”

“I hadn’t spoken Japanese for a long time. In the word okaasan I met my old self,

and when I said watashi I felt as though I were my own simultaneous interpreter (42).”

In their resistance to linguistic interpellation by the nation and normative

configurations of gender, Tawada’s texts are queer too.

The Voice of the Novel

Tawada does not write novels. Like Sôseki in his most interesting moments,15

she writes against the novel genre. Which is to say that her works remind us that the

novel is in fact a genre, rather than the all inclusive genre-to-end-all-genres that critics

since Tsubouchi Shoyo and Bakhtin have understood it to be. “Faced with the problem

15 I am thinking of the wonderful scene in Kusamakura where Soseki parodically links the reading of novels from beginning to end with falling in love. This (hetero)sexualizing function of novelistic narrative was already prescribed by Shoyo in his “Theory of the Novel,” where he claimed that the novel’s proper theme was 男おなごの情話の如き.

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of the novel,” Bakhtin writes, “genre theory must submit to a radical restructuring

(324)…the novel is, by its very nature, not canonic. It is plasticity itself, it is a genre that

is ever questing, ever examining itself and subjecting its established forms to

review…Therefore the novelization of other genres implies their liberation from all that

serves as a brake on their unique development, from all that would change them along

with the novel into some sort of stylization of forms that have outlived themselves (330-

331).”16

Quite at odds with Bakhtin’s enthusiasm for the novel, which sounds here

perilously close to a paean to a kind of imperializing modernization, globalization, as well

as heterosexualization,17 the narrator of “A Guest” harbors a deep ambivalence toward

the novel. “I was filled with hatred for the word ‘novel’ (195)” she says. “I kept returning

to the voice of the novel and wasn’t really sure whether or not I wanted to escape from it

(170).” At one point she engages in a kind of non- or pre-genital sex with the voice of

the novel that allows her to “regress” before language (and possibly gender). For hours,

we read, “I allowed it to caress me…, my belly, the soles of my feet, my nose, breasts,

fingertips, thighs….I didn’t have to formulate a single sentence, and was able to

transform myself into pure tactile sensation, a sense of touch without language. Not only

spoken language, but body language as well had become superfluous. I felt liberated

from the gaze of others as well, for it was a voice without eyes (177).” Even without

taking a clue from the homophonic association of “eyes” with “I’s” in the English

translation I think it’s clear to see how this passage suggests an escape from the gaze-

16 Michael McKeon, Theory of the Novel : A Historical Approach (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 17 I am reminded here of the tendency of some people to refer to what they call the “gay lifestyle” as opposed to what heterosexuals have (presumable just a life??)-- a kind of echoing of the way the all-embracing novel turns all other genres into ‘some kind of stylization of forms that have outlived themselves.”

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centered, transferential narcissim of identity discussed earlier. The voice, we heard just

a few lines before, doesn’t have ears either ”I never understood what it wanted from me,

if it wanted anything at all. Nor could I ask it any questions, since it couldn’t hear.” No

demand, no desire, just pleasure.

The resonance with the work of Roland Barthes is extraordinary here. Of the

voice of the castrato La Zambinella in S/Z, and implicitly of the voice in general that

transcends sex he writes, “The voice is a diffusion, an insinuation, it passes over the

entire surface of the body, the skin; and being a passage, an abolition of limitations,

classes, names…it possesses a special hallucinatory power. Music, therefore, has an

effect utterly different from sight; it can effect orgasm…” 18 . And again Tawada from

“The Bath,” “When I stuttered all the extra vowels felt like singing, and it felt good to

speak that way (17).” And yet, on another occasion she wants, as we have seen, to lock

the voice of the novel back up in its book, “behind the bars of the printed letters (180).”

How, one wonders, can the “voice” of the novel be so sexy (if sometimes a bit annoying)

and the novel itself so boring and restrictive? “How nice it would have been if the voice

hadn’t belonged to a novel. I couldn’t understand why it had picked something so boring

to attach itself to (200).”19

“Ideological systems are fictions,” Barthes reminds us, they are “novels—but

classical novels, packed with plots, crises, good and evil characters (the novelistic is

another thing entirely: a simple unstructured contour, a dissemination of forms, maya).”20

And in S/Z he defines the “writerly” (the term I used earlier to describe Tawada’s texts)

18 Roland Barthes and Honoré de Balzac, S/Z, [1st American ed. (New York,: Hill and Wang, 1974). 110 19 The German text uses the much more suggestive term “Klangkörper” (音体) for what in English is “something…to attach itself to.” See p. 68 in the German edition. 20 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. 27

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as “the novelistic without the novel”21 But just as the writerly is always haunted by the

readerly, the novelistic by the novel, it is never possible to avoid the overlapping of these

categories, in Barthes or elsewhere. I would argue, though, that Tawada’s works are

close to what Barthes might have written had he survived to write a novel of his own. In

any case, the inevitable tension between these two forms of writing and reading practice

goes a long way towards explaining the ambivalence of Tawada’s narrator in “Ein Gast”

towards the novel. “Why couldn’t I take pleasure in this voice? (160)”

Two Kinds of Fetishes

Of course the ‘novel’ in “Ein Gast” is also a book, a fetish object.

When the narrator finds the material traces of former readers on the books at the flea

market we find a telling oscillation between “book” and “novel.” The German reads, “Die

Hefte können deshalb niemals ihre Leser vergessen, aber die Leser wissen

wahrscheinlich nichts mehr über den Inhalt dieser Romane.” The books (Hefte) as

material objects retain the greasy traces of their readers, but as “novels” (Romane) with

abstracted “content” they are forgotten (or no longer known) by their readers. The

confusion inherent in this distinction, reflective of the narrator’s ambivalence toward the

novel, is made apparent in the English translation, where both the “Hefte” and the

“Romane” become “books.” “The books can never forget their readers, though the

readers have no doubt forgotten all about the books contents. (152)” The same

confusion appears later in a much more explicit invocation of the novel as an object of

consumption, where the narrator expresses frustration that books have to be called

“novels” or “stories” or “poems” in order to put them on the market, “to decide on the size 21 Barthes and Balzac, S/Z. 5.

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of the print run, the target audience, marketing strategies, and price (199-200).” But in

the German text we have “Roman,” “Erzählband,” and “Gedichtband,” (68)” where the

last two are much more explicitly objects rather than assemblages of words.

But one thing that remains constant in both the German and English texts is the

personification of the books themselves, who “cannot forget.” This marks the books as

fetishes in the Marxist sense, that of the commodity fetish. “A commodity is therefore a

mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to

them as an objective character, stamped upon the product of labor…In order, therefore,

to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regoins of the religious

world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings

endowed with, and entering into relations both with one another and the human

race…So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call

the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are

produced as commodities .”22

If the Marxian commodity fetish is an object come to life, the Freudian fetish

oscillates between idea and object. Freud famously called it “both a substitute for and a

memorial to the missing maternal penis,”23 an object that both evokes the dread of

castration and makes possible its disavowal. It doesn’t take much interpretation to read

this into the extraordinary scene in “Ein Gast” where Simon tells the narrator why he

can’t sell her the book that contains the novel whose voice she can’t get out of her head.

It bears the greasy trace of his lost middle finger (181).24 He read the novel, we read,

22 McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 436. 23 Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism (1927)," trans. James Strachey, Sigmund Freud Collected Papers: Volume V, Miscellaneous Papers, 188-1938, ed. James Strachey, vol. 37, The International Psychoanalytic Library (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957). 24 Not to belabor the point, but the fact that it is middle finger that is missing is significant. This is, after all, the finger whose presence makes it possible to say “Fuck You.” Was it discomfort with

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before he lost the finger in an accident at the factory where he worked. As a commodity

fetish the book stands as a reminder and a talisman against the dehumanizing

(castrating) labor that goes into the production of commodities. Interestingly, the book

becomes a fetish object for Simon only after the accident. Before that “he read the

novel.” Simon may have forgotten the novel, but he can’t part with the book. In this

sense, the book also serves as a Freudian fetish, that which shields him from the

knowledge of his own symbolic castration. The narrator, on the other hand, can’t seem

to read the book at all. She “recognized the individual letters, but couldn’t make words

out of them (183).” (More on this later).

But Simon and his book disappear inexplicably at some point in the story and his

place is taken over by the mysterious neighbor, called “Z,” although “Z” is not really his

name (190). Wearing a shirt that is the same color (red) as the book and the novel

(appearing here in the same sentence for the first time), Z seems to personify their

fusion. He is, after all the one who will use his “powerful voice (201)” and “silent stares

(207)” to cut errant voices out of women’s bodies and throw them in the “garbage can

(206)” that is the narrator’s body.

S/Z

It is at this point that I can’t help thinking that Tawada has rewritten Barthes’ S/Z.

The title of Barthes’ book refers to a man named “Sarrasine” from a short story by Balzac

this that caused the English translator to translate “Mittelfinger” the second time it is used in German simply as “finger?” Or just a stylistic avoidance of redundancy? (One might also note by contrast that the middle finger is very different from the little finger of the yakuza, whose absence as a sign of a homosocial bond connotes something much more threatening. As Barthes points out, the figure of castration is first introduced in Balzac’s “Sarrasine” (of which S/Z is the ultimate close reading) by the image of a M. de Jaucourt whose fingers are closed in the door of a closet as he spies on the beautiful Countess De Lanty. Barthes and Balzac, S/Z. 223.

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with the same title. Born with a surname in the feminine form (Sarrasine), his paternity is

threatened (as it always is) by the fear of emasculation and castration. According to the

logic of compulsory heterosexuality, he shores up this anxiety by loving women and thus

confirming his difference from them. In Barthes’s paraphrasing, “I am justified in loving

her because she is beautiful, and if I love her (I who cannot be mistaken), it is because

she is a woman(144).” And, I would add, “This is what makes me a man.” But when

Sarrasine unwittingly falls in love with a castrato called “La Zambinella” and

subsequently discovers that s/he is not “in fact” a woman, his world is turned upside

down and what Barthes’ calls “pandemic castration (202)” is unleashed in the text. “For

me,” cries Sarrasine, “you have wiped women from the earth.” As he contemplates his

own castration in the now horrifying, sexless figure of La Zambinella, the “Z” that begins

her name migrates to the middle of his (just where it is, Barthes’ notes, in the name of

Balzac), to make it the masculine form--ironically rendering his masculinity nothing more

than the name of his father.25

At the risk of drowning the reader in quotations, here is a little more Barthes:

“Z is the letter of mutilation: phonetically, Z stings like a chastising lash, an avenging

insect; graphically, cast slantwise by the hand across the blank register of the page,

amid the curves of the alphabet, it cuts, slashes…it is the initial of castration…Further, S

and Z are in a relation of graphological inversion: the same letter seen from the other

25 Freud’s psychotic Dr. Schreber, suffering from “compulsive thinking” writes, “I meet a person I know by the name of Schneider [meaning tailor, or literally ‘cutter’]. Seeing him the thought automatically arises ‘This man’s name is Schneider’ or ‘This is Mr. Schneider.’ With it ‘But why’ or ‘Why because’ also resounds in my nerves. In ordinary human contact the answer would probably be ‘Why! What a silly question, the man’s name is simply Schneider.’ But my nerves were unable or almost unable to behave like this…My nerves perhaps answer first: Well, the man’s name is Schneider because his father was also called Schneider. But this trivial answer does not really pacify my nerves. Another chain of thoughts starts about why the giving of names was introduced at all among different peoples…” Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (New York: New York Review Books, 2000). 209.

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side of the mirror. Sarrasine contemplates in La Zambinella his own castration (106-

107).”

In my reading, the “broken words” (like Barthes’ “broken text”26 that the narrator

leaves us with at the end of “Ein Gast”—like “Schmut z ig,” Un z ip,” “Wur z eln,” Hori z

on” coming a few pages after headless, “Z”-less words in Chapter 9: “one,” “erbrechen,”

“ed,” and “eit” make for a dazzling rewrite, or rereading of Barthes and Bal z ac. If the

broken words that still remind us of the filthy (schmut-zig) unzipped (unzip-ped) figure

both roots (Wur z eln) and hori-z-ons through a castration (Z) always already inside us,

the headless, blissful zone where time (Z-eit) is destroyed (z-erbrechen) and castration

(Z) lopped off may nonetheless bring us back to Z-ed. And doesn’t she give us an

S(imon) and a Z as well?

And yet, while Balzac’s “classic” novella comes to its closure with the horror of

castration, with Zambinella revealed as the “false singer”27 Tawada’s text (like Barthes’)

avoids its contagion by diffusing it in language, precisely by chopping words up into

letters. This means that in Tawada’s work it is not characters or “people” who speak (or

sing for that matter), it is language itself. “Ein Gast,” like all of Tawada’s stories, eschews

the kind of characterization that would communicate and construct persons and subjects

who develop over time. This is inextricably related to the fact that her texts seem to take

place in a kind of mythic—or otogizoshi [fairy-tale] -like time.28 As Barthes would have it,

26 Barthes and Balzac, S/Z. 14. 27 Barthes and Balzac, S/Z. 188. 28 Bakhtin writes: “The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic." M. M. Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 84-85.

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and “The person is no more than a collection of semes”29 and “The writerly text is a

perpetual present.”30

Queer Forms

On a formal level, this resistance to characterization and linear time is

accomplished in a striking manner by the complete absence of quotation marks in “Ein

Gast,” except where they are used to point to words themselves, such as “Ethnologie,”

“Salz,” or “Lippen.” “The quotation,” as Susan Stewart has taught us, “ serves to lend the

original an authenticity it itself has lost to a surrounding context.” 31 The absence of

quotation marks, by contrast, would serve to undermine the authenticity of the original,

freeing the voice from the self or character who is only retroactively created as the

“person” who uttered it. As the dialogue and narration merge on the page, we are never

quite sure “who is speaking.” To return again to Barthes, “The more indeterminate the

origin of the statement, the more plural the text…in the classic text the majority of

utterances are assigned an origin, we can identify their parentage, who is

speaking…however, it may happen that …the voice gets lost, as though it had leaked

out through a hole in the discourse.” 41. The first time Simon speaks to the narrator,

“His lips kept moving after he had finished his sentence (181).”

The German text does not indent paragraphs either, which makes the story look

more like a poem on the page, stressing the spatial over the temporal, and tending to

make the text into more of a (z)one than a (Z)ug, or even a Z ig z ag. Rather than a

29 Barthes and Balzac, S/Z. 191. 30 Barthes and Balzac, S/Z. 5. 31 Susan Stewart, On Longing : Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 1st paperback ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 19.

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succession of discreet paragraphs, we have blocks of text that seem reluctant to

separate themselves from each other. The fluidity between narration and dialogue

made possible by the absence of quotation marks is thus intensified by tendency of

paragraphs themselves to flow together.

I would argue that it is these formal characteristics of “Ein Gast” that make

possible what can only be called the queer sexuality that suffuses all of Tawada’s texts.

They are queer not because they contain “gay” or “lesbian” or “bisexual” characters,

whose sexuality would be understood to anchor their personhood, but precisely because

they resist such a conflation of self with sexuality, otherwise known as “identity.” By

constantly diverting our attention from what the words are “saying” to how they look on

the page, how they sound, or what letters they are made of, her texts make it impossible

to pin anyone down, to bring narrative closure. Tawada’s texts simply refuse “To have

done with all the rest” (as Jane Austen once wrote in her “own” seldom heard voice,

breaking out of omniscient narration to put her foot down when one of her narratives

threatened to spin out of control.) 32 I cite the following famous passage from Proust,

who knew very well the horrors of being fixed with a spoiled identity, as an illustration of

what Tawada doesn’t do. It is the scene when the narrator finally realizes that the Baron

de Charlus “is” a “sodomite.” Note the way he describes the Baron not as a human

being, but as a “creature,” dropping him out of gender like the castrato La Zambinella;

how what once seemed random happenings suddenly line up into a self-evident

narrative “in the proper order”; and finally, how broken words repair themselves to mean

one thing and one thing only.

32 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1998). 312. For a fascinating queer reading of Austen’s narrative strategies see D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or, the Secret of Style (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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“Now that the abstraction had been materialized, this creature , understood at last, had at once lost its capacity to remain invisible, and the transmutation of M. de Charlus into a new person was so complete that not only the contrasts in his face and his voice, but, in retrospect, even the ups and downs in his relationship with me, all that up until now had appeared incoherent to my mind, became intelligible, showed itself to be self-evident, just as a sentence that had presented no meaning for as long as it remained broken up into letters arranged at random, expresses, if the characters find themselves restored to their rightful order, a thought we will not again be able to forget.”33

One could cite many more examples from Proust where language breaks down

rather than reconsolidates itself as it does here, in the linguistic idiosyncrasies of

Francoise the cook (much like that of Kinoko in Tawada’s “Spores”)34 or the inexplicably

hilarious irregularities of punctuation in the letters of Aimé the hotel manager. The latter

case is particularly interesting for our purposes since it comes in the letter where the

narrator is at last offered “proof” that his now dead lover Albertine was cheating on him

with other women. Even as the sentences here work as a devastating confirmation of

what the jealous narrator has long suspected: that she is a lesbian, a “Gomorrahn,”

Aimé’s bizarre and hilarious confusion of quotation marks with parentheses seems to

undermine that certainty by derailing the attribution of voice and subverting the

hierarchies of information. This way of breaking up, or breaking through the surface of

the text reminds me of Tawada too.35

The Navel of the Dream

33 Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London: Penguin Books, 2002). 18. 34 Yoko Tawada, "Spores," Where Europe Begins (New York: New Directions, 2002). Further references given in the text. 35 See Marcel Proust, Ushinawareta Toki Wo Motomete Shoyakuhan, trans. Michihiko Suzuki, vol. III (Tokyo: 2002). 206-207.

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I digress. I could go on, but not without a sense of discomfort at continuing to

“interpret” Tawada’s texts. For what I have been arguing (by interpreting?) all along is

that they resist intepretation. There is a sense of violence in meaning, symbolized most

memorably for me in the scene in “The Bath” where the chef takes a knife to the

narrator’s back to strip off her scales. “The scales flew into the air like cherry blossom

petals, and my skin burned (40).” Violence, but the (sadistic) thrill of understanding too,

when the scales fall from our eyes.

But I will end. (As Barthes says, “The professor is someone who finishes his

sentences.”)36 I will end with Kinoko , from “Spores,” whose name means mushroom,

but who doesn’t know how to write it and whose mutilation of language reminds us again

that it is not about communication. Language, like Kinoko, is “afflailed (79).” She

“dishears (67)” rather than “mishears.” And she finds situations “lamendacious (77).” I

have no idea what these words are in the Japanese text, but I don’t much care. Even if I

did, at this point I would resist interpreting them, because I’m afraid that might take the

pleasure out of their meaning-free humor. Sometimes (and often in Tawada’s text)

interpretation fails and we lose the thread. But in the process we are freed from

interpretation as well. From the tyranny of “character,” of “sexual identity,” and of the

kind of narrative that puts them all in order. The enigmatic and slightly funny figure of

Kinoko reminds me, finally, of my favorite passage in Freud, where he describes the

limits of the interpretation of dreams.

“This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. Indeed, the dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot in general but remain without closure, spinning out on all sides into the web-like fabric of our thoughts.

36 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. 50.

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It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out its mycelium.”37

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