"... I oppose the global project and I believe in another kind of global eccentricism project that comes from within, from the bottom up, that is ‘cooked’ on the streets and that organically emerges out of it. You know, the migrations of people throughout the world; and that kind of global project is almost opposite to the one imposed by the master minds of globalization, right?"
Guillermo Gomez Pena
"And what in the hell did Puccini know about the identity crisis of a Japanese Geisha in Nagasaki in 1904 anyway? What in the hell did he know about butterflies? What in the hell do I know about the identity of a Geisha in Nagasaki in 1904? I am a middle aged white Canadian faggot. I have the ethnicity of a loaf of Wonder Bread. My forefathers are the Man from Glad, Mr. Clean, and Jack Daniels. How on earth do I position myself within a fragmented postmodern narrative about an innocent Geisha and Popeye the American sailor man?"
from Lotus Blossom Speical; Metamorphosis and misidentificaiton in Madama Butterfly by David Bateman
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Butterfly’s Borders: Gender, Geography, Fantasy and Experience in David
Bateman’s Lotus Blossom Special
Larissa Lai
marriage
supposedly belongs to Japanese tradition, at least, in the imagination of the
librettist.
The callous American sailor Pinkerton, eager for a temporary Japanese wife
marries
the naïve, fifteen-year-old Butterfly in a contract that binds them for nine
hundred
and ninety-nine years, “but with the option, at ev’ry month, to cancel the
contract.”
Both are ecstatic at the union, but for Pinkerton, it is a frivolity, while for
Butterfly,
in spite of her relatives’ admonitions, it is deadly serious. The opera’s
tragedy
turns
on the misunderstanding between play and reality. This is indicated in the very
opening
of the opera, with Pinkerton and Goro observing the mobility of the walls of
the
house
in which Pinkerton and Butterfly are to be husband and wife. The walls and
ceiling
“come
and will go, just/ as it may suit your fancy.” Pinkerton calls the house a
“fairy
dwelling,”
which, Goro observes “Springs like a tow’r from nowhere.” Like the fairy
house,
Butterfly, for Pinkerton, is a toy (“the age/ of playthings”) to play with until he
marries
“a real wife from America.” To Butterfly, who, in the logic of the opera,
inhabits
only
the world of play, the marriage is serious and solemn. Those who live in
fairyland
experience
it as “real.” Tellingly, while showing Pinkerton her treasures, she throws
away
her pot of carmine (the stuff of artifice) but keeps the very real dagger her
father
used
to commit suicide at the Mikado’s command some years prior.
The
opera draws a frame around Butterfly, her house, and indeed, Japan itself. It
is
self-aware, but it is not self-reflexive in the sense of seeing it’s
imperialist
misrecognition
of Asian women. It lays the error of reading at Butterfly’s feet. She can
not
see who she is. Pinkerton might be callous, but because he is American (and
real) and
she
is Japanese (and therefore of the imagination), he cannot be expected to stay
with her.
In
the logic of the opera, Butterfly’s tragedy lies in her own misrecognition of
both
herself
and her lover.
Of
course we, as good postcolonial readers think we know better. We understand
that
Madama Butterfly is a racist, imperialist imagining of Asian femininity. In the
context
of American imperialism in Asia, if one thinks of its military bases in the
Phillipines,
or more pointedly Vietnam (which is what makes the newer rendition of the
opera,
Miss Saigon, so appalling) the international political context in which the
opera
circulates
is racist and offensive. The right-on stance of contemporary race politics is
to
read
the opera as a bad Western race fantasy, and move on to produce other, better
representations.
However, in recent years, as myself and others have discussed elsewhere,
the
difficulty of producing “better representations” that do not get consumed in a
newly
Orientalist
way, has shown itself to be difficult if not impossible.
David
Bateman’s performance piece Lotus Blossom Special, then, takes on a
slightly
different strategy. He re-engages the narrative of the opera to show us
something
about
whiteness, masculinity, camp and queer sexuality. In so doing, he reveals that
these
may
in fact be the real subjects of the original opera, and not Asian femininity at
all.
Puccini
may have been more conscious of this than his audiences, if the framing is any
indication.
