Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface was a hit: it spent twelve weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It also charted in the UK on The Sunday Times bestseller list, no doubt helping it to win the fiction prize at the British Book Awards in 2024.
It tells the story of Juniper Song Hayward, an author of one novel whose successes are few. She is envious of Athena Liu, a friend, and somehow conspires to publish Liu’s next novel under her own name after Athena has (fortuitously for June) died.
The book, The Last Front, is a major success for June, but the guilt of her crime follows her throughout the novel. She craves celebrity, but is not cautious enough in her flirtations with fame. Inevitably, she crashes to earth.
Speeding through celebrity
Part of the reason that June is envious of Athena is because of the celebrity following she has. June complains that ‘even just learning that Athena’s signing a six-figure option deal with Netflix means that I’ll be derailed for days, unable to focus on my own work, mired by shame and self-disgust every time I see one of her books in a bookstore display’.1
For June, the attraction to writing quality literature is, in part, the public acknowledgement of her genius. Without that, authoring novels is noble but unfulfilling: ‘Keep your eyes on your own paper, they say. But that’s hard to do when everyone else’s papers are flapping constantly in your face.’ (p. 9)
She needs to write. She needs to publish. She needs to become a celebrity. She needs ‘[t]o be told, from the beginning, that [her] book will become a success’ (p. 59).
However, one major problem with celebrity is the way that fame is evanescent, fleeting. We know that from the cliché, ‘fifteen minutes of fame’. Many people have. Most of them barely last the fifteen minutes.
The speed with which celebrity burns out tallies with theories of accelerating speed in the modern world. For Paul Virilio, founder of a set of theories he calls ‘dromology’—‘the study and analysis of the impact of the increasing speed of transport and communications on the development of land-use’2—the world has become modern through a thirst for speed.
That dromocratic principle applies to Yellowface. For instance, June ‘hadn’t realized that even if you capture the entire literary world in the palm of your hand, it can still forget about you in the blink of an eye’ (p. 193).
This passage shows that not only celebrity’s lifecycle is short, but so too is infamy. If only June can hold out until she negativity disappears, she can likely find her way back to the top.
The vacuous simulacra
At one point June quotes Athena calling herself ‘hyperreal’. ‘Back then’, continues June, ‘it was still cool to quote [Jean] Baudrillard as if you’d read him in full’ (p. 68). Baudrillard was a theorist of postmodernism, and his most famous ideas were about the concept of ‘simulacra’.
As I detailed in my post about Stephen Sexton’s debut poetry collection, the term ‘simulacra’ comes from Jean Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation (1981), where he describes how a simulacrum is a copy without an original. A simulation, by contrast, is a copy where we can easily find the original it simulates.
Simulacra not only destabilise the relationship between the consumer/reader/watcher/observer and the object because we might expect to find an original version of this story, for instance, but discover empty vacuity instead. For Baudrillard, we now live in a world where simulacra precede simulation.
That is, we are more likely to find copies without originals, than we are to find copies with originals.
Baudrillard calls this the hyperreal, and says it typifies postmodernism. This is what Athena is referring to in the passage above when she is talking about some airbrushed photos of her.
A couple of pages later, June herself wants to become a simulacrum. Looking at her own new profile pictures, she notes that ‘I look like someone who could write a book about Chinese laborers in World War I and do it justice. I look like Juniper Song’ (p. 70).
It’s precisely this idea that she, only now, looks like herself, that proves that June is working within the logic of the simulacrum, of the hyperreal.
Past it?
On the one hand modern speed; and on the other hand postmodernist simulacra.
It looks like, in her satire of the publishing industry and in her complaint about the recent phenomenon of cancelling people who cause offence, Kuang is able to be ‘on point’.
However, aren’t these ideas rather old and dated by now? Virilio started writing about dromology in the 1970s; Baudrillard wrote Simulation and Simulacra in the early 1980s.
Postmodernism was big then; but is it important now?
In that post about Sexton’s poetry, I described how we might think of it as post-postmodernist—what we might also call metamodernist. It had used the playful tropes of postmodernism, but rejected postmodernism’s empty nihilism.
However, Yellowface thrives in these contortions of truthfulness. There are strategies for nested truths—how June can organise her guilt into a ‘she said, he said’ deflection, in which, as she tells her reader, ‘we’ll all get dragged down in the mud’ of truth (p. 319).
Which is why I wonder whether Yellowface, as engaging as it was, did feel a bit dated—a bit past it.
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