(the) American (Novel of)

102 Tina Chanter
of Song-Hee, whose passion for cooking and food extends to eating
her neighbor. “Food,” says Kristeva, “becomes abject only if it is a
border between two distinct entities or territories. A boundary between
nature and culture, between the human and the non-human.” She
continues, “The fact remains nevertheless that all food is liable to
defile. . . . Food is the oral object (the abject) that sets up archaic relationships
between the human being and the other, its mother, who
wields a power that is as vital as it is fierce.” 8
The film shows how one woman is so intent on having others eat
the food she obsessively prepares that she is willing to kill, and how
another woman is so traumatized by the sexual abuse of her past that
her body cannot tolerate the incorporation of anything. Song-Hee’s
threat of “I’ll kill you—you have to eat” (I’ll kill you if you don’t eat)
turns into Yoon-Hee’s desire to disintegrate, and becomes “I’ll kill you,
and I’ll eat you.” Song-Hee’s attempt to eat a world including people
and dogs to which she otherwise is unable to relate coincides in this
instance with the only way in which Yoon-Hee has learned to express
her desire, which is to die.
The realism of narrative subsides into a kind of stylized formalism.
We are held at arms length from immersion in and identification with
the characters because of their sheer idiosyncrasy. Song-Hee’s industrial
kitchen and complete fascination with food is presented in a way that
distances us, rather than drawing us in. As she watches the spinach being
pulverized by her food processor with the same mute, fascinated absorption
we usually reserve for Hollywood cinema, the displacements
are multiple. The camera work lovingly caresses food as art as she puts
everything she has into the food she makes and is no longer capable
of sustaining any relationship unless it consists of, or is bound up with,
appreciation of her food. How far is what entertains or mesmerizes us
a product of our gendered normality or abnormality? How far are the
food issues that the two central characters display representative of more
generalized feminized positions? How far is the production of femininity
bound up with rejection or identification with the mother? To take
in food in the place of love, or to refuse food as a way of protecting
oneself from the trauma of violation, to become overweight or anorexic
are both ways of recalibrating one’s relation to the maternal, the figure
who is supposed to provide both protection and food.
Murder, says Kristeva, “the violence that threatens the living being,
and not just society,” is one of the elements that previously reli-