A Kind of Mechanized Urban Decadence: On Johannes Göransson’s Pilot

Johannes Göransson’s Pilot (“Johann the Carousel Horse”), written in nearly equal parts English and Swedish, is a curiously named book.  The “Pilot” to which the title makes reference remains obscure, and the subtitle doesn’t (at first) seem to be of much help either. The poem entitled “Johann the carousel horse” is left blank. It appears to have a counterpart-poem, written in Swedish, called “Johannes Karusesellen,” but this leaves any Anglophone intent on puzzling out what to make of the book’s title stuck pondering the half-comprehensible Swedish of Johannes Karussellen.

In a sense though, this Case of the Missing Carousel Horse acts as a signpost for how to read this book: paying careful attention to the “other language” in this bilingual collection offers enormous rewards, even for those of us (most of us) without a lick of Swedish.

When I say you don’t really need to know Swedish to engage with the Swedish poems, I really do mean it. Take the first few lines of “Mjukstycket om att skära” (Google renders this as “Smooth passage of the cut”) and its English counterpart “A soft cut about spasms:”

Vi lär oss blindskrift
skriver ett brev till
presidenten grisar ut
retoriken detta är lyxkött

We learn braille
write a letter to
the president pig
out rhetoric this
is luxury meats

It doesn’t take much in the way of language-learning chops to get from “Vi lär oss blindskrift” to “We learn (us) braille (blindscript),” and in the process of puzzling this out the Swedish comes to look like English in a fun-house mirror, and vice versa. But these poems don’t ultimately behave the way poems in “translation” are supposed to behave, each facing the other quietly from either end of the recto / verso divide like Korean soldiers at the DMZ.

The Swedish and English poems in Pilot do much more than simply mirror each other. Swedish poems cross-pollinate with English poems and vice versa, such that adjacent poems behave less like mirror-images and more like pairs of chromosomes: counterpart poems don’t so much reflect each other so much as copulate. English poems take Swedish titles, poems in both languages borrow freely from the lexicon of the other, and the English poems, at least, seem to have been “infected” by some of the linguistic habits of the Swedish. The relentlessly concussive rhythm of these poems, appropriate to a book that concerns itself so frequently with “pounding,” “banging” and “cramming,” is aided in part by Göransson’s fondness for smuggling in Swedish-style compound neologisms into the English poems — see such poem titles as “Pig the losangelessoft mouth” or “Throughthronged and expensive.”

Ultimately the poems resulting from this all of this linguistic meiosis make for a swirling “carousel” of repeated phrases, motifs, and images, simultaneously evoking fecundity, decay, sexuality, violence and a kind of mechanized urban decadence. If that sounds like a lot, it is, but it’s really all there, over and over again. To pick an arbitrary example:

Technological transcendence

The shellshock will pearl
apart megaphones as tourist
catastrophies bang
on hospital dance floor
while los angeles
confetties in front
crameras hurt
in front the imperial
imagery depict a wound
seduction of a part
that cannot bloat

The poems in Pilot return again and again to these motifs, all of which (decay, death, sex, fecundity, urban decadence) represent or enact states of transition. Pilot lingers in these throbbing transitional spaces, just as it lingers in the space between English and Swedish, turning each poem into a kind of orgiastic, bilingual  “Threshold party,” unleashing and enacting a set of processes equally and invested in procreation and necrosis. Pilot is a living carousel, a linguistic swarm, a “losangelessoft” explosion of pearls, meat, and television; it is, finally, a bass-heavy “Exaggeration music” fit for the times in which we live.

"The Symptoms of Language Made Useless"

When Johannes Göransson contacted me to see if I wanted a review copy of entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate, I kinda freaked out. For a while, I have followed Johannes’s group blog Montevidayo with great interest. Being primarily a prose writer, I get frustrated by how most fiction writers talk about form and content as fully separate things, and how this separation seems to wind up associating the political only with content, and never with aesthetics. But Montevidayo’s contributors seem to take the politicization of aesthetics and the aestheticization of politics as a given, and are already engaged in an advanced conversation about the relationship between art and “otherness.” But although I received, read and devoured my review copy of entrance to a colonial pageant months ago, I’ve remained too terrified to write a proper review. My own theory background is mostly in social movement theory, not art and lit theory, and I’ve been worried I would not be literate enough to engage Johannes’s ideas at the level they deserve (for a really sharp analysis of the book, I highly recommend Nick Demske’s review).

In her book Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, feminist scholar Anne McClintock examines colonial explorers’ use of fetish objects -- spears, rifles, helmets, leather -- to assert their domination over the unfamiliar landscape they fear will engulf them. In entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate, it’s too late, we are already engulged. Johannes presents many of the familiar symbols and images of colonialism and nation-building -- there are horses, a colonel, “innocent” children -- but presents them corrupted, perverse, refusing to function in service to any sort of narratively or ideologically coherent agenda. In Johannes’s sentences, all language, like all nations, is always already forged, contaminated.

In his critical writing, Johannes is a big advocate for an aesthetics that embraces kitsch, excess, surface, and other modes or qualities dismissed by many purveyors of “true” art. All art, he argues, is counterfeit, and he is more interested in what he has called “the dynamics of softness and the rabble” than the so-called “natural” and “authentic.” As I have explored my own interest in aesthetics that aggressively embrace surface over interiority, Johannes’s writing has inspired me. Johannes’s relationship to surface is shaped in part by his experiences as an immigrant; he sees the immigrant as a destabilizing, unnatural figure, as inherently kitsch. In my own texts and performances, I have begun using sequins, pop songs, fashion and glamour to explore gender, desire and authorship as unstable and counterfeit. I think this may have something to do with why, out of all the bloggers at Big Other (the group blog for which I am a contributor), Johannes sent me a review copy, and also why I have felt too intimidated to write a proper review.

entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate lays out in in great detail stage directions for a performance that is deliberately unperformable. Yet when I flip through my copy of the book, which has now taken up residence on the shelf beside my desk, what I find is a performance already in progress, perhaps the ultimate realization of language’s performative potential. For me, this book is now a go-to resource, an open idea file of images and sentences that are simultaneously hilarious, delightful and discomfiting. It is a book I will continually return to, that has already influenced my own writing and thinking and will continue to do so.