Kelroy/Kristeva/Muoi

Today I read the first fifty pages of Kelroy, a novel written by Rebecca Rush and published in 1812. http://books.google.com/books/about/Kelroy.html?id=ZHKYQgAACAAJ. Republished as part of OUP’s Early American Women Writers series, in her Foreword, Cathy Davidson describes Kelroy as representing the “dark underside of sentimentalism,” while Dana Nelson, in her Introduction, writes that the novel “exposes a social system that limits the physical, educational, professional, and economic aspirations of women.” In this regard, it’s striking that the novel’s main villain is female. Mrs. Hammond, having been left in financially straitened circumstances by the unexpected death of her husband, and being too old to make another advantageous marriage, realizes that her two daughters are her best chance of recovering her fortunes and ensuring that she spends the rest of her life in comfort. Accordingly, she trains both daughters carefully in the social graces that will make them attractive and valuable commodities on the marriage market. Although the novel may be critical of Mrs. Hammond’s selfishness and her purely instrumental attitude toward her children, at no point is it suggested that she is inaccurate in her assessment of the values of the society of which she is a part. In this regard, Kelroy’s cynical assessment of early republican American culture is of great interest to a contemporary audience.

I also read the first fifty pages of Julia Kristeva’s 2009 book, This Incredible Need to Believe (originally published as Bisogno di credere: Un punto di vista laico in 2006). http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14784-2/this-incredible-need-to-believe. A combination of an extended interview and shorter occasional pieces, this book is physically slighter than many of Kristeva’s other works, but is no less ambitious. Her focus is on “the need to believe,” which Kristeva describes as “that narcotic that makes living easier, for—happy infantile and amorous trauma—it is the foundation of our capacity to be…speaking beings.” Kristeva elaborates on the foundational status of this need to believe, which we might also call faith, in order to achieve several related goals, including establishing a resistance to both nihilism and religious fundamentalism, as well as a qualified defense of religion, which, as Kristeva puts it, unlike Freud, she refuses to dismiss as an illusion. As thought-provoking as ever, for me the most striking moment of this first section of the book comes when her interviewer asks Kristeva to comment about youth riots in the suburban ghettos/banlieues of France. While acknowledging the social and political problems that motivate the riots, Kristeva insists that “the delinquency of ‘disadvantaged teens’ reveals a more radical phase of nihilism.” Not surprisingly, Kristeva prefers to grapple with the meaning of the riots as a primarily psychic rather than a material phenomenon and in doing so she reveals both the characteristic strengths and the limits of her approach.

I also watched Muoi: The Legend of a Portrait, a 2007 South Korean/Vietnamese horror film directed by Kim Tae-kyeong. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cPh3ocypJY. Apart from its historical importance (it’s the first horror film produced in Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War), this film owes a great deal to the vogue for supernatural horror vengeance stories popular in both Japanese and Korean cinema since the late 1990s. Yun-hee, a South Korean writer, travels to Vietnam to see her old friend Seo-yeon, who has promised to tell her about a local Vietnamese legend involving a girl named Muoi and her haunted portrait. Once she arrives in Vietnam, Yun-hee finds herself caught in a trap set by Seo-yeon, who wants revenge not only on Yun-hee (who has ruined Seo-yeon’s reputation by writing about her in Yun-hee’s best-selling book) but also on Yun-hee’s friends, who were responsible for filming Seo-yeon’s gang-rape some years before. This plot will sound familiar to fans of the genre, but two things set it apart: the first is its Vietnamese setting and its exploration of Korean-Vietnamese relations, and the second is the fact that Yun-hee is initially attracted to the Muoi legend because she is desperate to write another best-selling book and doesn’t really care who she hurts in order to do it. This self-conscious commentary about the eagerness of potential audiences to consume stories of other’s misfortunes gives a layer of spectatorial discomfort to the watching of this film that is missing from many other examples of the genre.