"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.
