Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear Pursues the Individual Behind the Icon
In Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, she tells of how the polar bear’s snow-white color arises from the space between translucent hairs and black skin. It should come as little surprise that those megafaunas in the Arctic have hair not at all like that of the white plush dolls we make of them. Like much of the book, her description of the “hypnotically shimmering particles of light” distinguishes the polar bear from the simple icon we’ve derived. Defamiliarized, Tawada’s three unique polar bears are free to subvert our assumptions and thus break away from insignia to become individuals.
Each of Tawada’s three polar bears — the unnamed grandmother; the mother, Tosca; and the son, Knut — gains unexpected fame. Organized like a triptych, Memoirs of a Polar Bear is composed of three novella-length sections, each with a different bear as its protagonist. The grandmother opens the book with her account of life in the USSR, where she gains unexpected celebrity after the publication of her autobiography. The second section follows the daughter, Tosca, who becomes a circus star when she performs the “Kiss of Death” with her human tamer. The book closes with Knut’s story, which is based on the famous real life polar bear from the Berlin Zoo.
Though famous, each polar bear combats constant isolation and disillusionment. The grandmother has such a miserable life in the USSR that she decides to flee to West Berlin. In her new city, the editors are slightly kinder, but they reproach her efforts to write in German and command she use her own language. They refuse the grandmother’s hopes for assimilation, and leave her isolated from a common language.
The question of the proper language is built into the book itself. Unwitting or not, the grandmother’s story of immigration echoes Tawada’s, who lives in Germany but is originally from Japan. Though the English comes to us by way of Susan Bernofsky’s dexterous translation of the German, the German is itself a translation of Tawada’s original Japanese, which she herself translated from Japanese to German. The prose we read is far removed from our author’s native tongue.
For the editors in Memoirs, the polar bear’s value lies in her exotic image, which they use for their own gain and which would be ruined by her easy assimilation into German. By excluding her and asking her to write in a native language she doesn’t know exists, the editors make the grandmother into a transient figure, a migrant whose perennial displacement from any community leaves her painfully alone.
This displacement lingers in Tosca and Knut as well, but in them it results more from their celebrity and inherent otherness than from relocation. Tawada’s clever framing and her elastic voice make both their sections appear to be written from an outsider’s perspective, which allows us to read as though from our usual vantage point, as humans studying the objects. Only once we’ve settled into each of their sections does Tawada disarm us by revealing the bears as the narrators.
Innocent to the narrator’s identity, in the early parts we can read Tosca’s and Knut’s sections and assume their perspectives, but Tawada resists closing the gap between reader and subject altogether. In unveiling the polar bears as the narrators, Tawada simultaneously gives us more reason to respect the creatures and opens a space between us and them.
The third-person voice from early in Knut’s section allows us to view him as an object that we might comprehend. With our human eyes, we might see all there is of him, see the white and know it as only one color. But the revelation that the third-person voice comes from his innocence brings to light our own ignorance.
Until a sun bear pokes fun at him, Knut doesn’t realize people use the pronoun ‘I’ to refer to themselves. The ‘Knut’ we’ve been reading comes from the voice of a baby polar bear who knows no better. His shift to first-person marks his move toward a determined identity. “Clearing my throat,” he says,” I spoke the word ‘I’ for the first time: ‘I am Knut, in case you don’t know,’” and so he breaks away from a pure external self and begins to develop an internal psychology. He is no longer only what others see and say about him.
Unfortunately, Knut’s development of a private self incites in him a crisis of isolation. Like his ancestors, he is visible but not known. Tosca has her trainer, Barbara, and Knut has his caretakers, Matthias and Christian, but each is fundamentally alone. Blindly, all the humans think they grasp the polar bears in their entirety.
Surrounded by preening fans, Knut is aware of the “billions of worried eyes” on him and knows he’s become a symbol. “If I had died,” he says, “the greenhouse gases in the sky would have formed a giant, steel-hard layer that would have lowered itself upon the city like a lid on a pot…At the North Pole, all the ice floes would have melted, the polar bears would have drowned, and the green meadows would have vanished beneath the rising sea.” Knut rejects this reductive symbolism, “It sounds like a heroic tale, but I was nothing more than a helpless creature. I lay there, pathetic as a skinned rabbit.”
Though the fans and media espouse a love for the polar bears, Tawada suggests theirs is a narcissistic empathy used to bolster their prejudices rather than to expand their perspectives. Since polar bears cannot cry — another of Tawada’s great tidbits — the grandmother wonders why they titled her autobiography “Thunderous Applause for My Tears,” and her editor responds, “It’s not you who should be shedding tears, it’s the reader.” While her experience of a tearless pain might enlighten the audience, the editor, and ultimately the readers, subjugate her experience to gratify themselves. The audience reads the bears accounts or sees them, cries, and thinks it’s empathizing with them, but it’s only asserting its own self onto the image of the bear.
Even in their most intimate relationships, the polar bears must grapple with this disparity between their selves and their images. Rather than cherish the irredeemable space between them and the bears, the humans gloss over the fundamental differences that might allow for two equals to encounter and change one another. Knut’s caretaker, Matthias, tries to compliment the bear by recounting a story he’d heard about a North Pole explorer who spoke of the “emptiness he found in the polar bear’s eyes.” Matthias claims the explorer was wrong and says, “Your eyes aren’t empty mirrors — you reflect human beings.”
Matthias’s narcissistic empathy erases Knut’s individuality to make room for his human reflection. This rightfully angers Knut. Matthias and other humans don’t see the bears for what they might be, intelligent and fascinating individuals. Instead they use lazy similes to make sense of them. The bears are like mirrors or sausages or humans, but never themselves. The caricatured images and paraphernalia drawn from the megafauna receive more attention than the individuals, and they flatten the peculiarities of each bear.
Tawada’s sly, complex protagonists work to counter our desire to flatten. Her flexible voice, aided by Bernosky’s alacritous English translation, builds them into valent, dynamic characters and shuffles us along psyches that are neither human nor polar bear but somewhere in between. Tawada’s maneuvers in style and narrative construct the necessary allure so that she both entraps us in these strange creatures’ minds while making clear we can never experience the world as they do, we can only ever appreciate them from a distance. In her charming polar bears she doesn’t give us something to own, comprehend, or appropriate, but what is all the more worthwhile: individuals to wrestle with.
