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Michael Jauchen’s “A Little About Us:” in Noö Journal 9 seems to begin as reflection of the absurdity of group identity. “We hate tartar sauce” expresses a strong emotion about a trivial subject and thus is reminiscent of the woman who, early in Milan Kundera’s Immortality, declares her adamant feelings about the appropriate temperature for showers in an effort to assert her identity, though here it is only about excluding most people who are not the speaker, rather than everybody. A few sentences later, the statement “[a]t least we’ve got the right hang ups with Huckleberry Finn” implies that these “hang ups” are correct precisely because they belong to the group: no other reasoning for them being correct is provided, nor are the “hang ups” named to allow for consideration.

The reader, one presumes, must be one of them, not us, since “we” surely know our own “hang ups”. (Then again, perhaps not: to say one has some things correct without really knowing what those things are, precisely because they are the ones that belong to the group would be the height of absurdity and groupthink.)

Both of these examples could be interpreted as the use of the royal we, though there is no reason they need to be seen this way, and a line in between (“We’re a city taken over by musicals.”) clearly requires the plural interpretation. An important shift occurs a few sentences further along, however. When the speaker says, “we don’t want to complain, but selling bathroom supplies to mid-range grocery stores is not what we had in mind”, the we is most likely to be the royal we: one individual complains about one crummy job.

The next line leaps back to certain group identity (“Chicago! Chicago! Let’s go to Chicago!”); this is followed by sentences in which we sometimes seems most likely to refer to a group, sometimes to an individual, and sometimes is wholly ambiguous. The relationship this suggests between individual and group identity this suggests is left to the reader to decide. Personally, I see it as one of a weak personal identity struggling to assert itself through even trivial identification with a city and perhaps with other groups.

Related posts:

1. Respecting Identity
2. One-Poem Review: J Michael Wahlgren’s Mercury
3. Rwanda: Identity and Memorials
4. Karen Kelsay’s The Parrot Fish in Willows Wept Review
5. Tim Botta in absent magazine 2
6. The Painful Egocentricity of the Center
7. Amy King’s Men by the Lips of Women
8. DJ Dolack’s “Oh I Don’t Know, Fit Me Already” and the Language of Classified Ads
9. One-Poem Review: Kim Addonizio’s For You
10. Naming Names: Wearing

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