Embodied Knowledges: Synesthesia and the Archive in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth

Subjects of twentieth-century Western modernity are “in need of archives,” Jacques Derrida writes in Archive Fever (1995). The characteristics of archive fever are numerous: “It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive. . . . It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (91). In other words, symptoms of archive fever include the desire for that which is elusive (“right where it slips away”), as well as nostalgia not for the past in general but for the moment of origination and beginnings. Archive fever seeks knowledge that might secure us ontologically and epistemologically through an encounter with a primary self.

But why are we in need of archives—defined for the purposes of this study not as specific places of documentation but as general “meaning-making system[s] that [allow] for some statements to be enunciated and others to lack intelligibility” (Ferguson)?¹ Certainly, archives are intimately intertwined with our desire to locate ourselves, to make visible the residue of the past as it informs the present, and to make sense of legacies (historical, intellectual, and affective) that intimately inform our sense of ourselves as subjects. Yet archives have been called into question over the past several decades in discourses as wide-ranging as performance, queer, feminist, and postcolonial studies.² Such critical work identifies the archive as a formulation by which the ephemeral and the personal are erased in favor of the enduring and the state-sanctioned. Nevertheless, despite our legitimate suspicions of the way the archive inevitably facilitates the consolidation of authority and the erasure of difference, we cannot leave the archive behind. As Derrida argues, “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation” (4n1). In other words, the archive is at the center of that which we deem the political; it is a way to access power, history, memory, and identity. Therefore, in the face of the archive’s historical enabling of the contrived hegemony of official histories and institutionalized documentation, this essay argues that it nonetheless holds the potential for a revised political engagement for minoritized subjects.

Monique Truong’s novel Bitter in the Mouth (2010) theorizes an understanding of the archive that illuminates the centrality of processes of racialization for subject formation and political representation in the contemporary era of neoliberal multiculturalism. This essay examines Truong’s story of a figure whose bodily difference makes possible a radically embodied archive in order to consider the ways that the archive facilitates, in its production and management of memory and history, a complex negotiation of legacies of violence, trauma, and racial formation. Attending to the novel’s representation of embodiment and sensory experience, the essay attempts to distill the relationship between sensation and regulatory modes of the aesthetic fundamental to processes of contemporary racialization. Registering the curious correlations in the functions of race and the archive in US cultural politics—correlations staged in Truong’s work—this essay seeks to facilitate a rearticulation of difference in our time.

David L. Eng initiates this process in his analysis of Truong’s first novel, reading “the end(s) of race” evidenced in The Book of Salt (2003). Eng suggests that the novel is an “archive of traces” that registers the dialectic of race and freedom (1480). Writing in the context of the ascendance of ostensibly post-identity politics, framed in political discourse as the culmination of narratives of progress and the triumph of color-blindness, Eng explains, “we inhabit a political moment when disparities of race, not to mention gender, sexuality, and class, apparently no longer matter; they neither signify deep structural inequities nor mark profound institutional emergencies” (1479). Yet, as he...