Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Quantum State of Language

The distinction between an image and an ikon, I think, lies at the heart of this novel. An image traps the gaze in its uniqueness, or unexpectedness, or beauty, or even its horror. But an ikon is meant to generate and entirely different sort of experience, one that goes beyond the object being looked at. As such, an ikon exists in two states simultaneously, both as a presence and as the mark of an absence, that is, of a transcendent reality. Or to put it more simply: appearance and meaning.

And so, it seems to me, language as well as art exists in a similar quantum state of uncertainty. It is ‘there’ as a statement, a question, or a command. And yet it is also transcendent in its power to suggest a reality far beyond whatever is being said or written. While language itself may be objective, therefore, the reality created by language is entirely subjective; that is, its reception depends upon all the prior experiences of the hearer or reader.

Kitamura makes the distinction between image and ikon clear in several ways - in her protagonist’s appreciation of 17th century painting, in her assessment of casual relationships, and even in those relationships that are not so casual. Most significantly, the distinction is obviously crucial to her work as a translator in the International Court of Justice. She recognises that her job is one of ikon not image. She,of course, must provide precise and consistent translations for court proceedings; but she also feels obliged to provide subtle indications of pace, emotion, and cultural background into the way she translates.

This doesn’t mean the translations she provides are ‘better’ except in the sense that they are more iconic. They point to something else beyond the words themselves, perhaps to the reality of the suffering being described or to the real person behind the courtroom mask of the accused and witnesses. Interestingly, while she is engaged in this task, this being a living ikon, she herself has no understanding of the totality of what she is saying. It’s as if she enters a sort of trance during which she is continuously making linguistic judgments and what exists for her are only these word by word, phrase by phrase judgments. She has no memory of the representations, the images if you like, of what she has translated.

Kitamura also seems to signal her intention by dissolving the distinction between direct and indirect speech. Dialogue emerges from rapportage without warning and without quotation marks. First person mixes with third person grammar. Who is speaking becomes slightly confusing. This conforms with the experience of her protagonist: “As I looked down at the witness, it prickled through me, the strangeness of speaking her words for her, the wrongness of using this I that was hers and not mine, this word that was not sufficiently capacious.” It also conforms with the state of language itself, something that is really indeterminate, not because it is vague but because it is simultaneously true and false.

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