Fifteen Questions: Annabel L. Kim on Subjectivity, Scatology, and Garfield

Annabel L. Kim is the Chair and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: One of the themes in your book “Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions” is existing as subjectivities without subjecthood. What does it mean to be “subjective without subjecthood?”

ALK: Being a subject is something that is not necessarily a positive thing. In fact, for me personally, I think subjecthood is terrible. What is subjecthood? It is the state of being defined by external forces. It’s what makes you identifiable as a particular kind of subject. The most common kinds of subjecthood are identity markers, like sex, sexuality, ability, race, class, etc.

Subjectivity without subjecthood is a state where you’re yourself, but free from all of the rather overwhelming pressure that comes with all the norms and forces that shape you into being a subject. A subject is a social entity. If you were just alone in the world as the last person, it wouldn’t really make sense to think of yourself as a subject.

FM: How did you first become interested in French literature and feminist theory?

ALK: French was a lifeline for me. My parents, they’re immigrants from South Korea. They immigrated in the 80s. I grew up in the Bay Area, California. Even growing up in a pretty Asian-heavy area and going to school with lots of other Asians, I still couldn’t shake this kind of conception of Americanness as being something that was not Korean. I was the stereotypical immigrant child who was ashamed of my stinky food and wanted nothing more than to have Lunchables, even though my mom was going to great efforts to make these elaborate Korean food. I just wanted Lunchables because I wanted to assimilate into what I thought was Americanness, which was very much mapped onto whiteness.

Korean was the only language I spoke at home until I started going to school. Once English entered into the picture, it very quickly took over.

My sense of why that happened — I really did lose a lot of my Korean — is that it was a consequence of me wanting to be as American as possible.

I felt a profound sense of guilt, and English was the only kind of real language that I had that I could operate fully in. Thinking and conducting all of my life in English was a constant reminder of my betrayal of my roots.

I could choose between French and Spanish. My older sister had chosen French, and I was like, “I’m just going to be like my older sister.”

Once I got enough French to start to be able to actually understand things, to consume cultural objects, etc., there was a moment where a light just came off. I was just like, “Language is just pure potential for communication, expression. French — this language — has nothing to do with me.” So I was able to experience things, to take in the world without my identity, my own weirdness about being Korean, etcetera, getting in the way. That was such a freeing experience. French has saved my life, has carved out a space for me in which I can think and reflect and experience things and react to things without it having to send me back to my identitarian guilt.

FM: Outside of your literary career, you’re interested in minimalist art, and you studied Art History as an undergrad. How does your love of art inform how you interpret or understand literature?

ALK: It really doesn’t. I actually have aphantasia. I’m not visual. The inside of my head is just absent of any kind of visual content.

For me, the two things are completely separate. The visual is cut off from the textual.

FM: We’ve also heard that you’re very into cats. Do you have a favorite cat character from any novel or film?

ALK: I’m going to have to go with Garfield. To me, that is the cultural cat. Garfield was the first cat I got to know, and I will always love Garfield. I don’t know if your generation still grows up with Garfield as a reference. Garfield was where it was at.

FM: You teach a class on French dystopias. What differences do you notice between French dystopian literature and English dystopian literature?

ALK: I don’t think that there are any particularly salient national differences. If I think about the dystopian reading I’ve done in English versus the dystopian reading I’ve done in French, I don’t think that there’s that much of a difference in terms of sensibility. Similar themes come up, similar questions are being raised. Obviously, if dystopian work in French is set in France, the context is going to be different. The basic operations of a dystopian work, I feel like that’s universal. The bad place — that's everywhere.

FM: On your website, you write that you advise doctoral students interested in working with “literature as theory rather than through theory.” What does it mean for literature to be a kind of theory?

ALK: For me, that means that literature is itself a producer of concepts. Fiction, for instance, is one of the hardest-thinking kinds of objects that we have. It is such a rich conceptual tool because it is a microcosm of the world itself that you can just hold in your hand, and use it to pry at and interrogate so many different things. You can use a novel to think about virtually any kind of question, to produce concepts about anything. But, I think a lot of people are like, “It’s fiction, it’s a story.” So they don’t take its kind of conceptual heft particularly seriously, which is totally opposite to how people receive theory.

Theory often becomes the center of the way you’re thinking, and then you just slot in some object that will illustrate the theory. Whereas for me, I feel like when I read the literature, the concepts that it can produce — again, it’s such a malleable and plastic and expansive world in itself — often can’t be reduced to a certain type of theory. The world is complicated. Whatever you find in a novel is also going to be complicated.

Using literature as theory allows you to start with the world and then to arrive at a conceptual conclusion, which might surprise you. I never know what a novel is going to produce for me conceptually until I read it. The beautiful thing about literature is that a text is inexhaustible. If I read a novel once and I’m able to use it to conceptualize a certain type of thing, if I go back to it from a different context, I'll be able to use it to produce a completely different set of ideas. Don’t subjugate literature to theory by making it just an illustration. Let the literature actually speak for itself, and then bring it into conversation with the theory by putting them on an equal conceptual footing.

FM: You translated Céline Minard’s “Plasmas” from French to English. What are some of the unexpected difficulties of translating literature?

ALK: Céline Minard is a very particular kind of writer. She creates a lot of neologisms, but she also uses so much technical and specialized vocabulary.

I find myself having to expand my own kind of lexicon in English. The translation experience was, “Wow, I really don’t know English.” It was a nice reminder of just how much language there is. Language that we have and we know is just a drop in the bucket.

FM: Your book, “Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature”, studies the use of fecal matter in 20th and 21st-century French literature. How did you decide to write a book on fecal matter, of all things?

ALK: In my classes, I teach a lot of canonical French texts and authors. One of my courses was a fairly canonical set of texts. I just kind of randomly put them together. As I was teaching that semester, I was like, “Oh, there’s a lot about poop in here.” I was always attuned to it and wanted to talk about it. But, the constant reaction that I would get from my students was, “What are you talking about? You seem like a weird poop maniac. What do you mean there’s poop in the book?” I would be like, “Turn to this page,” and there’s a whole two-page sequence that’s dedicated to riotous defecation.

It kept happening, and it happened over the course of multiple courses.

There’s an inability for people to see and absorb what they’re actually reading. It was like my students and my colleagues, too, had fecal blindness, and I was gifted with a special fecal sight, which I think has a lot to do with my Koreanness. Korean culture is very much not repressed when it comes to the scatological. There’s a toilet museum in Korea. Growing up, people would often just talk very openly about their bowel movements as a sign of their health, etc. I didn’t have that ingrained taboo about fecality.

I was like, “Well, I’m the only one who can see this. So let me dig into why that might be there.”

FM: In your opinion, what’s the value of talking about literary subjects that might make us uncomfortable, such as fecal matter?

ALK: I’m not necessarily somebody who’s just like, “I want to break taboos. I just want to be a provocateur.” That’s not particularly interesting to me. I think usually there is a reason why something is taboo or is not a subject of conversation. More often than not, looking at the thing that has been passed under taboo yields important and essential insights about who we are as people. What I argue in “Cacaphonies” is that what fecality is a sign of is a conviction of an undeniable universality that ties all humans together. Fecality is something that levels differences.

FM: You’ve been a vegan for almost two decades. What’s the best place for vegan food in Harvard Square?

ALK: Unfortunately, a lot of the restaurants, if they have vegan options, will just usually be subtracting things or forgetting protein. So you’ll go and eat some kind of salad, and then leave feeling hungry. But there is a place that’s not exactly in Harvard Square — it's near the quad. It’s called Forage. They’re not a vegan restaurant — they’re a farm-to-table restaurant — but they are amazing at doing vegan food. It’s not about subtracting things and leaving things out, but about conceiving of the food from a vegan origin point.

FM: Your upcoming book, “Ought to Fiction”, will discuss French autofiction and exofiction. Autofiction, as you’ve noted, is often critiqued as a narcissistic and navel-gazing genre. But autofiction continues to be popular in both French and English literature — what do you think drives our interest in writing and consuming autofiction?

ALK: I think a lot of it is voyeurism—the parasocial element—like, “I’m reading something, but I can now find stuff about the author.” Then you get to animate them in your head and imagine this person that you can find a picture of, this person whose voice is on YouTube somewhere, and stage them in your own mind. There is something kind of very seductive about knowing that something is real. Especially now in a moment where social media has become reality, if you come across something that is real — that seems precious in an era where everything has become virtual.

There’s that kind of intimacy that comes from knowing that something has really happened, that you feel like somebody is revealing themself to you. In a moment where everyone is so performative and where it’s so difficult to be kind of authentic and vulnerable, I think the promise of the authentic and the real is quite appealing. I understand it, but it doesn’t appeal to me.

FM: You’re a Dua Lipa fan. Do you ever listen to Dua Lipa while you draft your books?

ALK: I have a shout out to Dua Lipa in the acknowledgments of “Cacaphonies”, because that was the soundtrack for writing that book. When it comes to writing, I have to sort of train myself to become a Pavlovian subject where if I associate a certain song or album with writing, it makes it a lot easier to write.

Right now, my it’s-time-to-write song is a K-pop song by aespa, “Thirsty.”

FM: Growing up, what were some of your favorite novels?

ALK: I went through an Ayn Rand phase. I really liked “The Fountainhead.” I liked Hermann Hesse. I read “Demian” and “Siddhartha.” I read “Siddhartha” outside, sitting next to the dog house because we had an outdoor dog growing up. I liked “Lolita,” even though the first time I read it I was in seventh grade and I didn’t understand any of the sexual metaphors. And, reading Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” was just a revelation to me.

FM: You have done research on Monique Wittig, a French author and theorist who coined the phrase “heterosexual contract.” What do you think she brought to French literature in her time?

ALK:

Did she coin the term heterosexual contract? I don’t know that she did. That would be something that we would have to double check.

What she brought to French literature was a bazooka. It was explosive. She blew it up. What she did was cannibalize or appropriate the French canon, which is one of the most heteronormative sites. She lesbianized it, she decentered straightness from within a canon that had absolutely centered straightness for centuries.

FM: You’re a professor at Harvard, but you completed your graduate education at Yale. Are you rooting for Harvard or Yale on game days?

ALK: You’re speaking to someone who was my college mascot and left halfway through a football game because I got bored. So, I don’t really care. But, when I first got to Harvard, I was still on my Yale business. I would go to the MAC gym wearing my Yale shirt. I wanted people to know that I wasn’t “Harvard,” not like so many people. I wanted to mark my difference somehow. Now I’m just, “Yeah, Harvard.”

—Magazine Editor-at-Large Vivian W. Rong can be reached at vivian.rong@thecrimson.com.