Hedonistic Responsibility: Pain, Pleasure, Experiment, and Empathy in Lily Hoang's Parabola

Abstract

Hedonistic Responsibility:Pain, Pleasure, Experiment, and Empathy in Lily Hoang's Parabola Michele Janette (bio) "it is again a scary sort of fun to be led and led astray by Lily Hoang." —Anna Joy Springer When Anna Joy Springer says that there is a "scary sort of fun" to be found in turning oneself over to the authorial guidance of Lily Hoang, she captures two emotional poles that operate through Hoang's work: the scary and the fun. This essay traces from those poles two arcs through Hoang's first novel, Parabola. One arc explores the affectively difficult terrain of racial exoticization and sexual assault, and the other reconceives the affective pleasures of the practice of reading. Intervening in a social order that consumes narratives of difference as commodities and in a literary critical culture that separates aesthetic experimentalism from sociopolitical critique, Hoang writes an Asian American experimental novel that resists racialized consumption and mimetic coercion. In a society where representations of rape serve as entertaining spectacles and plot engines for hypermasculinity, Hoang writes sexual assault in ways that not only center the survivor's point of view but allow that survivor her own complicated, even voyeuristic and invasive, acts. Hoang breaks the safety of the fourth wall between reader and story, preempting exploitative consumption of exoticized identity or spectacularized sexual violence to engage more responsibly with such representations. Through aesthetic forms that instead prompt direct affective and intellectual interaction [End Page 75] with her audience, she draws readers into pain and makes them endure hostility, not vicariously through a protagonist avatar but actively through the practice of interactive reading. Yet just as the novel's chapter structure is parabolically balanced, so too is it affectively double, offering innovative, interactive pleasures as well. It is a fun book, but not in an easy way. Its pleasures are intellectually demanding, procedurally unfamiliar, formally experimental. I argue that it configures pleasure as rigorous intellectualism and interactive discovery. Parabola exceeds its own geometric frame, producing not just arcing symmetry but rhyzomatic wandering and palimpsestic rediscovery. Not just leading us, Hoang pushes us toward a reading practice that rewires the circuitry of pleasure, adjusting our habitus from escape, exploitation, and teleology to dwelling, connection, and flanerie—toward hedonistic responsibility. Hoang's is a deliberately radical reinhabiting of form and revolution of ideology. Replacing teleological reading conventions with invitations to wander and dally, Parabola includes interactive quizzes and games. "[I]f you're bored by my writing [and] the book in general," says Hoang, "you can take a break [and] do a word search" (Hoang, "Interview"). The text meanders through astronomical and mathematical history; mythologies of the Bible, Kabbalah, Greek pantheon, I Ching, and palmistry; and invocations of dozens of historical figures, from Carl Jung to Hbranus Maurus to August Kekulé. It shifts narrative voice among its characters and occasionally directly addresses its readers. It sketches characters through the medications they take. It produces one chapter by blacking out 95 percent of the text of a prior chapter. Other chapters include botanical classifications, equations, modular narratives, graphs, and collages. In choosing to explode paradigms by embracing constraints and rendering them newly generative, Hoang claims to have been influenced most heavily by the French OuLiPo (Hoang, "Re: Parabola and Dictee?" 2015). In a typically interactive and invitational explanation, Hoang delineates OuLiPo as follows: [H]ere's the simple version of OuLiPo: The OuLiPo is a group of writers and mathematicians who believe that writing reaches its truest potential when constraints are put on the writer during the process of writing. A few obvious examples: Perec wrote a novel without using the [End Page 76] letter e. In French. The OuLiPo came up with all sorts of constraints, whether lipograms, palindromes, N+7, or so on. You can look these up, if you want. ("Constrain me") Click for larger view View full resolution Images from Parabola. 1. Ironically, Hoang's embrace of avant-garde experimentalism and a French lineage for her work reflects in part the pressures she experiences particularly as an Asian American woman writer. Tokenism and thematic prescription are pressures and fears she has faced. In her latest (nonfiction) work, she chronicles her former husband...