Ethnic Irony: The Poetic Parabasis of the Promiscuous Personal Pronoun in Yoko Tawada's "Eine leere Flasche" (A Vacuous Flask)1

For Professor Loisa Nygaard Nach jenen Schussen erwachte ich. . Franz Kafka, "Ein Bericht fur eine Akademie" (302) Circle: Ethnic Abjection Some texts invert the protocol of reading they appear to invite, rewriting the terms of their legibility the moment they appear the most legible. They present themselves as autobiographical, but only to deny the legibility of their first-person narrator as their narrative center of reference. They disclaim the referentiality of their narrative "I" as their principle of unity, as if in a Kantian mode, to declaim of themselves that autobiography "is not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts" (de Man, "Autobiography" 70; emphasis added). They show that the portrait of the autobiographical "self " is sketched neither by its author nor by its narrative first person, but by the act of literary criticism. Nevertheless, some acts of criticism maintain the specter of the autobiographical "self" when reading the figure of the ethnictzed narrative "I." While rigorously distinguishing the first-person narrator from the author as discursive functions of different orders, such acts of criticism still might invest the figure of the ethnicized first-person narrator with a form of causality almost indistinguishable from authorship, namely by making a social collectivity the causal "source" of a narrative. Rather than reading the narrative "I" as a figure of the text, they might choose to read the text as though it were a figuration of the narrative "I," that is, as though the text were an enunciation made by a narrator -whom some acts choose to ethnicize. Whether out of hermeneutic desire for the sensate "other" or cognitive stupor before the illusions of the aesthetic, some acts of criticism bring the textual figure of the ethnicized narrator to life, but only to have it confess the social death that has hitherto defined the social figure of ethnicity. The referential continuity, posited between the poetically textual and the socially contextual figures of ethnicity, appears so unproblematically certain for someacts of criticism that they betray themselves as governed less by reading than by a causal, if circular, law of interpretation stipulating: wherever an ethnic appears writing, its writing appears ethnic. However, in a sense to be considered and questioned in what follows, the sign of ethnicity merely appears to invite a protocol of reading in which the textual figure of ethnicity is to be read in referential continuity with the social figure of ethnicity and hence also as a prosopopoeic sign of the ethnicity that the narrator socially resembles. This protocol of reading is neither uncommon nor unfamiliar, yet is also not without its subtle complexities and its alazoneia. Rey Chow, for instance, calls into question a version of this protocol of reading in her Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Arguing that the "turn toward the self, especially the ethnic self" should be read as a "form of production" (111), Chow reads first-person texts by "ethnically marked writers" (146) as standing in continuity, not with a prior "self," but with a "self" produced under a regime that she calls "coercive mimeticism" (107). 2 Under this regime, "those who are marginal to mainstream Western culture are expected ... to resemble and replicate the very banal preconceptions that have been appended to them, a process in which they are expected to objectify themselves in accordance with the already seen and thus to authenticate the familiar imagings (sic) of them as ethnic" (107). In Chow's account, "coercive mimeticism" compels ethnically marked subjects to perform the ethnicity they are thought to be. Yet, Chow also argues that the performance of ethnic "authenticity" testifies to the opposite of that for which it is valorized by theoretical discourses of "hybridity." Rather than "freedom from the given," Chow claims that first-person essays about "the experience oi actually living as cultural hybrids" testify to a sense of "existential entrapment" in the performance of ethnicity (146; emphasis added). …