Recollection Cartography: The Structuralist Sound-Image as Phenomenological Device in "The Rupture Tense"
Traversing time and space through polyphonic experimental verse, Jenny Xie’s The Rupture Tense conjures the liminal abyss of diasporic yearning, meditating on intracorporeal tensions between belonging and detachment by dissecting language, memory, history, and loss. Xie’s construction of kaleidoscopic long form poems subvert the lyrical epic to alchemize a “memory map” of phenomenological orientation and disorientation invoked by an interconnected network of Saussarian “sound-images.” The synergetic autonomous voices of the subjects and speakers of The Rupture Tense act as sentient poetic ghosts, echoes of ancestral trauma, resilience, and community soliloquizing “intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” By tracing the intersection of the personal and the political within her aching compositions, Xie actively employs recollection cartography through experimental poetry as a vehicle of survival, resistance, and elegy.
The Rupture Tense opens with a dismembered linear narrative, Controlled Exposure, a septet centralizing the revolutionary photography of Li Zhensheng. Xie aims to “reinscribe” each surviving photograph “with motion and the creases of time” by revisiting Zhensheng’s artifacts in verse, speaking to rebellion art as a vehicle of transcendence past the constructs of totalitarian rule, offering escape by rebirthing the dead “each time one of Li’s photographs is viewed,” as “the image is ingested and inwardly concealed.” Xie reflects on Zhensheng’s bestowal of agency to victims of oppression by “hunting the realm of the unsayable with his camera lens, directing it toward the furnace of the living,” conserving his subject’s memory and centralizing said subject’s gaze, as they “peer back at us from their positions and see, anchored in our eyes, a way out.” Xie accesses that “realm of the unsayable” through her Red Puncta quintet, vignettes that offer closer examinations of individual photographs, named after Roland Barthes’ “punctum,” defined as the “quality of a photograph that disturbs the border between image and viewer.” The puncta “makes itself felt precisely because it refuses to make itself known, conveying meaning that cannot be assimilated into a familiar frame,” a sensory encounter Xie emulates by concentrating on “negative space” and “forgetting’s lining.” Xie reflects on the omnipresent awareness of loss, meditating on excruciating collective inquisition by those “who are made and unmade/ by the dark mass of the unseen.” Xie’s experimental verse reaches across voids to access “the sweat of the unsayable” in flickering visceral “moments when we feel history pulling from behind / the eyes the mouth hooked / But the remainder of this life / is still millions of kilometers away from being born,” effectively rupturing the distinctions between past, present, and future tenses, penetrating the dissonance of punctuated identity.
As Xie archivally eulogizes Zhensheng in Memory Soldier, she encapsulates Asian diasporic disorientation and orientation fabricated in the dual asylum of Zhensheng’s photography and Xie’s verse, extending Zhensheng’s impact past death by detailing that “with the passage out of life, memory-images spill over an / unarticulated margin, dragged across from the warm retinal / currents of those who remain.” Xie’s inclusion of the “memory-image” sonically alludes to Structuralist theory of the Saussarian “sound-image,” a linguistic sign defined as “a double entity, one formed by the associating of two terms… a concept and a sound-image… The linguistic sign is then a two-sided entity...The two elements are intimately united, and each recalls the other.” The “concept,” alternatively referred to as “the signified,” and the “sound-image” as “the signifier,” exist in conversation with one another. For instance, in Xie’s Stereoscope series she “plays with the mechanism of the stereoscope, a viewing device that creates depth of vision through the juxtaposition of two separate images,” to capture the multifaceted voices of her relatives, specifically, those relatives that witnessed the Chinese Cultural Revolution, providing another perspective to expand her Red Puncta and Memory Soldier poems. The stereoscope poems transform into a literary manifestation of the stereoscope itself, allowing the stereoscope in verse to represent a complete “sound-image” subtly containing both “the signified” and “the signifier” within her intentional verse. In 1977 Stereoscope she details the rippling effects of her ancestor’s trauma by describing two images, the first in which her relative “reached for the severance” during a suicide attempt, while on the opposing stanza, formally mirroring the first, Xie reflects that “a memory at the surface could pinch/ at a deeper one, until it inflamed.” Within the “sound-image” of 1977 Stereoscope, another “sound-image” nestles, that of memory, irrevocably linked to the succession of memories evoked upon each recollection.
Furthermore, if one applies Sara Ahmed’s theory of Queer Phenomenology to The Rupture Tense, the infinite “sound-images” summoned within Xie’s experimental verse transfigure into “orientation devices,” which serve as “anchoring points” that “gather on the ground” while simultaneously “[creating] a ground upon which [the speaker] can gather.” As Ahmed writes,
If orientations are as much about feeling at home as they are about finding our way, then it becomes important to consider how ‘finding our way’ involves what we would call ‘homing devices.’ Migration could be described as a process of disorientation and reorientation…[This creates] what we could call a ‘migrant orientation.’ This orientation might be described as the lived experience of falling at least two directions: toward a home that has been lost, and to a place that is not yet home.
Xie’s poems utilizes “the needlepoint of language / which makes thought visible,” by “pulling at the root of consciousness” to serve as orientation devices to the speaker, author, and reader, simultaneously to create a weblike “memory-map” of “starting point[s] for orientation…from which the world unfolds.” Xie emulates “the migrant orientation” by “[tracing] the ragged line / where one country joins / with another by torturous stitches,” dissecting “the years of living two lives, two kinds of speech, two kinds of silences” whispered in a “hush [that] is at a pitch that one can / only make [out] collectively.” Xie’s calcification that “all stitching of narrative alienates” expertly utilizes Ahmed’s theory that “in order to become orientated, you might suppose that we might first experience disorientation.”