| Saturday, December 1, 2007 12:52PM | | | | The Yau Identity | Posted By: Laura Mullen
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| Tags: John Yau, The Bourne Identity, |
He was affable, and stared into space when he wasn’t drinking coffee, but when I saw him from only a few feet away I realized what an effort you had to make--blindly, so to speak, in the darkness of the body--in order to look always the same to others and to yourself. Jean Genet
No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. Ralph Ellison
a mia mi nori typo et? Rosa Salazar
“I Was Born...”
Open on a body surrendered to a motion not its own, seen from below, afloat on the agitated surface of murky blue water filling the movie screen. It isn’t the start of Sunset Boulevard, though this image is engaged with that movie’s literally fluid history: here we’re not in the movie star’s stagnant pool but under the churning surface of an ocean at night. Ending as beginning (again), these wilder waters (in Doug Liman’s film of Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity) resurrect a weirder hero: fished up out of the troubled Mediterranean with nothing to go on but what’s been forced into what Genet calls “the darkness of the body,” literally under the skin (where the number of his Swiss bank account resides), is an amnesiac, protean protagonist who has no secure sense of inhabiting any of his possible subject positions, a secret agent whose Agency is a secret from himself, whose bourn or goal is self-knowledge, and whose long, violent ‘mission’ ends in the discovery that he’s the bad guy. While that’s not so rarely where the western quest for truth winds up, the images we encounter in this version--watching someone walk into the American Embassy as a citizen, and fight their way out minutes later as a criminal, for instance--can help crystallize the identity issues we’ve inherited from Modernism and the pedagogical problems they continue--ever more urgently--to pose. When the hero’s epiphanic self-recognition at his bank is removed with his safety-deposit box’s false bottom and the camera frames one all-too-comprehensible item, a gun, resting on a vertiginous wealth of other possibilities (other passports, other currencies) a terribly fragile instant of tentative certainty is lost forever--and something closer to an actual vision of who we are now is gained. The illusion that the stable (read reliable) “I” fell under attack by Postmodernism or Deconstruction or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, fals to acknowledge that our former social understandings have been destabilized by specific historical events: we’re too involved with each other, financially for starters, to go on enacting--and dying for--a nostalgia for former, costly, clarities. Like it or not, we’ve gone multinational. But this complexity or perplexity of both our own identity (now) and our relations with others remains an urgent challenge ill-addressed by a well-intentioned “multiculturalism” whose emphasis is on telling “other” stories--in forms we already recognize. The question, then (or one of many) becomes how to--given Modernism’s engagement with race, gender, and nationality (and the translation of this engagement into our concern for “diversity”)--give our students a realistically complicated sense of the problems and potential of Postmodern identity as it takes shape in language. Which is where poetry comes in. For while poetry, as Auden noted, “makes nothing happen,” looking into its “way of happening” is an opportunity to reflect on the cost of prejudice as well as one of our best chances for an encounter with otherness. Certainly, in its reception history, and in its style as well as its substance, John Yau’s poetry--for its range of genres, relentlessly experimental character, and complicated entanglement with “identity politics”--is exemplary for the way it keeps presenting its often puzzled readers with the dazzling vision under the false bottom of every box, or category, we thought was safe.
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