Jolene Patricia Brown
Word Count: 1225
Dr. J. Marx
ENL 159
30 January 2010
The Problem of Identity
In the novel Portrait With Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked, Vladislavic gives the reader an exhilarating and surprisingly thorough view of the city from the perspective of one man. This single perspective manages to give a panoramic view of Johannesberg; it can be considered an argument against what LaTour presents in his work Paris:Invisible City when he argues against the ability to capture all of Paris. Despite their difference, Vladislavic and LaTour both present problems of personal identity in ways that are relevant in any social environment be it Paris or Johannesberg, urban or suburban. The problem of personal identity is complicated because identity is determined by perspective: one can know who they are and convince others of who they are, but in society the individual means nothing without validation from the constructs that determine a person's social identity. LaTour describes it best: “Either I really see and I see nothing; or I see nothing directly, I look at a trace and I begin to really see, I gradually become someone” (11). These problems are framed in both texts in such a way as to change with the perspective with which it is presented and such changes can manipulate the environment within the text giving the reader the illusion of security (or insecurity) that Vladislavic and LaTour explore within their writings.
Vladislavic frames identity in terms of keys and their relationship to security. The presence of keys in the novel is one that signals security be it personal or material but in one instance keys are shown as proof of insecurity:
...she takes out her bunch [of keys] and shows us the mysterious black key... At first, there are tipsy jokes about alien abductions and love nests, but soon their conversation turns serious. It's an unsettling idea, already people are fidgeting in their pockets, where their own keys are beginning to weigh more heavy...Dave suggests that someone might have put it there with a more serious purpose, to provoke some thought about security. Or rather insecurity. Less a practical joke than an object lesson. (142-143)
Keys are sources of power because they can lock up objects, such as steering wheels and houses, and people, such as criminals. This unsettling feeling of having an extra key on a ring reminds the individual that even their own keys might betray them to unfamiliar new routes of identity. The problem with the unknown key is the potential it brings with it; with each new key a new trace, as LaTour would call it, is unlocked for the user and those traces might lead to a danger that the user may not even be able to imagine. By placing the reader into this scene where keys suddenly pose a threat to the person the perspective now shifts and the setting is no longer one of security and instead replaced with suspicion of those things that normally bring security and with that a question of identity.
The individual in Vladislavic's novel is defined by their keys:
She fans them out with her forefinger, flips over the immobilizer jack for the car, takes another shot. They shame me now, lying there like keys to my psyche, a feeler gauge for every insecurity...I have threaded them on to the rings with their profiles facing in the same direction, like a dressed file of soldiers. Their noses and chins familiar to my fingertips, I can find them in the dark. (115-116)
The narrator in the above passage notes the insecurity that his keys represent to an outsider who does not understand the security those keys bring him. The keys can be both secure and insecure—or even both—depending on the way in which the text is interpreted by the reader. The individuality of the characters stems not from the person—the body—of the character but by their connections in the world. This is what is so important about the keys; they give the individual access to those things that make him who he is: his home, mailbox, car, safe, important documents, houses of his relatives and friends, his job. They are “a dressed file of soldiers” protecting the identity of the owner by granting him access to it. A known key is a source of power and security bringing to the user a sense of control in a world that does not allow him any control but an unknown key does not allow the user that power and instead robs him of the one thing he might claim: knowledge of his links to the world around him, thereby leading him to question the basis of his own identity.
LaTour is very interested in those things that make a whole and in terms of identity, it is only obtained through the links of an individual to the world around him. A person might believe he knows who he is but identity can only be determined by the documents our society uses it to grant it to us (LaTour 17). Identity is not who we think we are nor is it who others tell us we are. Our identity is a determined network of social constructs which give depth to our physical existence by granting us a social existence. It is still more than that:
As soon as we follow the shifting representation of the social we find offices, corridors, instruments, files, rows, alignments, teams, vans, precautions, watchfulness, attention, warnings—not Society. By tracking the token of the social it's as if we never met the two venerable figures of good sense: the actor and the system, the individual and its context. We don't even discover something that might fall in-between the two, a sort of dialectic or hybrid. No, we find ourselves following a movement that bears no relation to either the individual actor or the social context. (17)
The individual is not an individual without the context within which is exists; the context does not exist without the individual to give it meaning: the two things that give us identity are mutually dependent on one another for meaning and though they can be thought of separately they cannot be separated without destroying both parts.
What might seem a clever joke can quickly take the form of something more ominous, just as a few questions from an authority figure can quickly make one question their very own identity: “No matter how convincing we are about our own existence, we receive our identity via another alignment of circulating documents” LaTour writes shortly after his scenario of a traffic officer questioning a mysterious individual (16). Identity is not defined by one, two, or even three claims of existence. Instead it is the connections that one makes with the world in which he lives that gives depth to his identity but also validation by Society. The word society is capitalized here to represent the institution of society itself: it is not just the connections we make in our small inner-circles of family, friends and neighbors, it is the Society of all connections we make networked with those connections ours tie into, and still more connections that those make, creating the network in which society can thrive. With only one small change in perspective however, these same connections can undermine themselves, such as Vladislavic's mysterious key.
Works Cited
LaTour, Bruno and Emilie Hermant. Paris: Invisible City. Trans. Liz Carey-Libbrecht. 2006. Online.
Vladislavic, Ivan. Portrait With Keys: The City of Johannesberg Unlocked. New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, Inc., 2009. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment