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Redux: Some Timeworn, Worm-Eaten Piece of Paper

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

László Krasznahorkai. Photo: Nina Subin. Courtesy of New Directions.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating our long and fruitful shared history with New Directions with a special bundle: until the end of January, subscribe and receive a year’s worth of issues along with three novels by László Krasznahorkai, Fernanda Melchor, and Enrique Vila-Matas. Read on for László Krasznahorkai’s Art of Fiction interview, Fernanda Melchor’s “They Called Her the Witch” (an excerpt from her novel Hurricane Season), and Enrique Vila-Matas’s Art of Fiction interview.

 

László Krasznahorkai, The Art of Fiction No. 240
Issue no. 225 (Summer 2018)

The power of the word is, for me, the only way to get closer to this hidden reality. Everyone is a fictional person and, at the same time, a real person. I belong to the fictive world and to the real world—I’m there in both empires. You too. And everyone in this restaurant. And also this object and everything we can perceive and also things we can’t perceive, because we know that with our five senses, some part of reality is imperceptible. I’m not being esoteric. Reality is so important to me that I always want to be aware of every possibility.

 

Fernanda Melchor. Photo courtesy of New Directions.

 

They Called Her the Witch
By Fernanda Melchor
Issue no. 231 (Winter 2019)

They called her the Witch, the same as her mother; the Girl Witch when she first started trading in curses and cures, and then, when she wound up alone, the year of the landslide, simply the Witch. If she’d had another name, scrawled on some timeworn, worm-eaten piece of paper maybe, buried at the back of one of those wardrobes that the older crone crammed full of plastic bags and filthy rags, locks of hair, bones, rotten leftovers, if at some point she’d been given a first name and last name like everyone else in town, well, no one had ever known it, not even the women who visited the house each Friday had ever heard her called anything else.

 

Enrique Vila-Matas. Photo: © Olivier Roller.

 

Enrique Vila-Matas, The Art of Fiction No. 247
Issue no. 234 (Fall 2020)

That quality comes from some writers’ facility for what we might call perception, the art of perceiving what’s going to happen. It’s a skill, an art, that we see very acutely in Kafka, for example . . . Literature is a mirror with the capacity, like some clocks, to run ahead of time. But we mustn’t mistake perception for prophecy itself.

 

If you enjoyed the above, make sure to subscribe to this special bundle! In addition to a year’s worth of The Paris Review, you’ll receive Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, by László Krasznahorkai; Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchor; and Mac’s Problem, by Enrique Vila-Matas—all for $99. Note: This offer is available only in the United States and Canada.

Eccentricity as Feminism

Leonora Carrington. Photo: Emerico “Chiki” Weisz. Courtesy of New York Review Books.

The first time I read Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, I knew nothing about its author, so I had the incredible experience of coming to this short novel in a state of innocence. I was wholly unaware, for instance, that Carrington had been a painter, that she spent most of her life as an expat in Mexico, and that in her youth she had been in a relationship with Max Ernst, one of the greatest surrealists. But the anarchic tone and perverse nature of this little book made a powerful impression, one that has never left me.

There are two qualities in fiction that I find particularly astonishing and moving: open-endedness and wild metaphysics.

The first quality is structural. Open-ended books intentionally leave themes and ideas unrestricted, rendering them a little blurred. They grant us wonderful space for making our own surmises, for seeking associations, for thinking and interpreting. This interpretive process is a source of great intellectual pleasure, and it also acts as a friendly nudge toward further prospecting. Books of this sort have no theses, but they arouse questions that would not have occurred to us otherwise.

To my mind, the second quality, wild metaphysics, touches on a very serious question: Why do we read novels in the first place? Inevitably among the many true responses will be: We read novels to gain a broader perspective on everything that happens to people on Earth. Our own experience is too small, our beings too helpless, to make sense of the complexity and enormity of the universe; we desire to see life up close, to get a glimpse of the existences of others. Do we have anything in common with them? Are they anything like us? We are seeking a shared communal order, each of us a stitch in a piece of knitted fabric. In short, we expect novels to put forward certain hypotheses that might tell us what’s what. And banal as it might sound, this is a metaphysical question: On what principles does the world operate?

I think that this, in fact, is exactly where the difference—so hotly debated in my own literary era—lies between so-called genre and non-genre fiction. The true genre novel presents us with recognizable perspectives, using a ready-made world that has familiar philosophical parameters. The non-genre novel aims to establish its own rules for the created universe, sketching its own epistemological maps. And this is the case whether the book is a love story, a murder mystery, or the tale of an expedition to another galaxy.

The Hearing Trumpet eludes all categorization. From its first sentence on, it presents an internally coherent cosmos governed by self-generated laws. In doing so it passes disturbing comment on things we never stop to question.

*

In the patriarchal order, on reaching old age a woman becomes an even greater bother than she was when young. Just as patriarchal societies think up and organize thousands of norms, rules, codes, and forms of oppression to keep young women in line, they treat old women (who have lost their alluring erotic power) with a similar degree of suspicion and aversion. While maintaining a semblance of sympathy, members of such societies endlessly dwell on the former beauty of older women with a certain covert satisfaction, pondering the effects of the passage of time. Further marginalization is achieved by pushing them into social nonexistence; they are often financially impoverished and stripped of any influence. They become, instead, inferior creatures of no concern whatsoever to others; society does little more than tolerate them and provide them (rather reluctantly) with some sort of care.

This is the status of Marian Leatherby, the ancient narrator of The Hearing Trumpet, as the novel opens. She is full of life but hard of hearing. And she is doubly excluded—first as a woman, then as an old woman. Essential to her character is a quality she shares with the novel as a whole: eccentricity (eccentricity being one of the modes allowed to an old woman when she’s not playing the role of a kindhearted granny). Indeed, casting a deaf old woman in the role of narrator, heroine, and governing spirit, and populating a book with a group of odd old ladies, indicates from the start that this novel will be a highly eccentric, radical affair.

Things that are eccentric are by definition “outside the center”—outside long-established norms and all things regarded as self-evident, on the beaten path. To be eccentric is to view the world from a completely different perspective, one that is both provincial and marginal—pushed aside, to the fringes—and at the same time revelatory and revolutionary.

The Institute, or care home, where Marian is sent by her family, is run by Dr. and Mrs. Gambit. It, too, is eccentric, comprising a series of bizarre dwellings—shaped like a toadstool, a Swiss chalet, an Egyptian mummy, a boot, a lighthouse—impossible and absurd, straight out of a Bosch painting or some oneiric funfair. But here eccentricity can be seen as emblematic of the oppressive, patronizing, and infantilizing attitude we take toward old people. The word gambit is derived from the Italian word gambetto, literally “little leg,” which also turns up in the phrase dare il gambetto—to trip up, or to plot against. The Gambits are the hypocritical, pretentious representatives of an equally hypocritical society, and their methods are summed up by the expression “for their own good.” The Gambits always know what is proper and healthy for their wards, submitting them to an ill-defined psycho-pedagogical doctrine not unlike the one embraced by followers of Rudolf Steiner. The most comical example of this ideology are the “Movements,” perhaps a nod to the Gurdjieff movements, that the old ladies are obliged to perform on a daily basis.

The Gambits’ mission involves constant observation and judgment of their residents, another feature of the vague, quasi-religious concept of self-perfection bordering on sadism with which they indoctrinate their charges. As Dr. Gambit tells Marian:

Reports in your particular case show the following list of interior impurities: Greed, Insincerity, Egoism, Laziness and Vanity. At the top of the list Greed, signifying a dominating passion. You cannot overcome so many psychic deformities in a short space of time. You are not alone as victim of your degenerate habits, everyone has faults, here we seek to observe these faults and finally to dissolve them under the light of Objective Observation, Consciousness.

The fact that You Have Been Chosen to join this community should give you enough stimulation to face your own vices bravely and seek to diminish their hold over you.

Behind the Gambits’ beneficence lies a quite specific economic motive. Yes, the Gambits make money from the old people they claim to perfect. In fact, they do not operate out of a sense of mission at all but in order to make a living. In invoking the sin of Greed, Carrington reminds us of the deeply hypocritical connections between religious institutions and economics.

Another of the novel’s eccentrics is Carmella, the heroine’s great friend, said to have been inspired by Carrington’s old friend and fellow painter Remedios Varo. Carmella has been allowed to retain some influence in the world because she is a rich old woman, and there’s nothing people respect as much as money and those who possess it. As a result, Carmella enjoys unquestioned power to make things happen. Her appearances at the dreary Institute are dramatic; her ideas are absolute, steered not by reason but by imagination and a different way of thinking. In her character eccentricity is elevated to the rank of Goddesshood.

*

In the early sixties and into the seventies, Leonora Carrington was active in the women’s liberation movement in Mexico. She was notorious for designing a poster depicting Adam and Eve offering an apple to each other. Similarly, in The Hearing Trumpet, Carrington reclaims and inverts traditional, foundational stories, in the process creating one of the most original feminist texts ever written. The book contains the quintessence of feminism in a narrative that is subversive and surrealist in its invocation of an unconventional metaphysical order. The Hearing Trumpet forthrightly introduces eccentricity into the feminist debate as a perspective that’s a legitimate alternative to the patriarchal one: whatever is eccentric is Goddess-like in spirit.

In our age, the Goddess was expelled from the center long ago by her “Sterile Brothers” (as Carrington calls them); her kingdom is now in the provinces of perception. Nevertheless, the Goddess will always be present wherever the binaries—either/or, native/foreigner, black/white—beloved by the Sterile Brothers are exposed as limited. Theirs is the simplest and crudest way of organizing a complicated world, of achieving power over it. By their logic, to fit a too-tall patient to a too-short bed, one should cut off his feet, not seek a longer bed.

I consider Goddesshood to be womanhood deepened and expanded by the manifold treasures of culture and nature. The Goddess is a powerful archetype, and her very existence is pure provocation to a patriarchal structure. No wonder that in many parts of the world women are made to cover their faces and bodies. Women’s physiology—which would seem to be the most natural thing in the world, like their corporeality—is always a problem, something not to be discussed. Civilizations might be described by the mechanisms they have invented and implemented to control Goddesshood.

When womanhood demands what it is owed—recognition of its strength and power, of its very Goddesshood—it is banished to the cellar, imprisoned in the dungeon. Deprived of contact with consciousness, it loses its ability to speak and can only “murmur”—as the Grail murmurs in The Hearing Trumpet. It becomes imprecise and blurred. It is unable (or unwilling) to use the awkward, refined patriarchal diction, essayistic flights, virtuoso sentences, and nonchalant musings on art so prized by the arbiters of culture, high above the dungeon of the despondent Goddess. Its language is coarse and irreverent, not at all adapted to people’s typical perceptions but wild, laughable, eccentric, untamed. It is often perceived as incomprehensible, and as a result it is sometimes judged as kitsch. Kitschy and lacking taste—a charge that is so often flung at women. Apparently Joseph Conrad said that the best criterion for the quality of a book is that women don’t like it—because women can only like bad literature. Well, I have to admit that I like what Conrad wrote very much. Sincerely.

All right. So be it. Kitsch is our ocean. All those cyclical processes, menstruations, and recurrent migraines. Mumbo jumbo, healing herbs, and infantile trust in the power of nature. An unhealthy love of animals, sentimentality, the feeding of stray cats. Being overprotective, poking one’s nose into everything. All those flowers in little pots, all those little gardens, the hollyhocks, the rags, the lace, the stitching, the knitting, the romance novels, the soap operas, “women’s literature,” “emotionality,” the accusation of mental weakness that has been pressed on us for centuries. The reservoir of misogynist scripts is immense and seemingly bottomless. In modern times, in a thoroughly patriarchal world, we can only talk about the Goddess ironically, winking like the Abbess in the painting that hangs in the Gambits’ dining room, and with a hidden smirk, half serious, half mocking. Having been actively displaced and ridiculed for thousands of years she can only express herself in this covert way. It’s worth pondering how many subjects related to women’s experience have been marginalized, derided, ridiculed, or altogether displaced. For hundreds of years women have been raised within misogynist, patriarchal religions that openly discriminate against them to some degree. They take part in cultures that are never fully theirs, or that are even in outright opposition to them. From youth, women are drip-fed doctrines that position them as inferior, weaker, less capable, or in some other way handicapped. They grow up in a mist of ubiquitous misogyny, often veiled and not fully self-aware, which is intrinsic to culture, language, images, interpersonal relations, history, and economics. It is only in the last few decades that the real story of women, marginalized into near nonexistence, has patiently tried to break free. And when it emerges into the appropriated world, it can find itself at a loss for words.

*

Leonora Carrington recognizes this subversive, eccentric position of womanhood. In both her painting and her writing she has a marvelous way of subscribing to André Breton’s belief in the need to align art with alchemy or occultism. She makes liberal use of our European esoteric imaginarium, while avoiding the pompous solemnity that often accompanies it.

The Hearing Trumpet is a hermetic text; it refers to things that are hidden, displaced, and forgotten. In order to be fully interpreted it requires from the reader a certain familiarity with its allusions, even as it mocks this sort of competence by pulling all sorts of striking and astonishing tales from its trunk of wonders.

The Abbess’s winking eye should be immortalized on every future cover of this book; it should become its hallmark, as should Marian’s deafness. Together they comprise a set of instructions for approaching the novel. At the very beginning of the book, Carmella gives Marian a hearing trumpet, which miraculously allows her to be selective about what she hears. The winking eye is telling us to place everything in inverted commas and to trust the “as if ” on which myth and literature rely. From here on we shall follow after Leonora like this—with one eye winking, mischievously, kitschily, taking everything that she serves up to us at face value.

And she serves up a lot—the book is a true carnival. At the moment the Winking Abbess is identified as Doña Rosalinda Alvarez Cruz della Cueva from El Convento de Santa Barbara de Tartarus—onto the stage of The Hearing Trumpet steps the Goddess. From this point on, the borders between reality and fantasy, the solemn and the absurd, the sublime and the ridiculous dissolve into the surrealist tissue of the novel. History opalesces with pastiche, and the book meanders down multiplying paths of references to esoteric pop-cultural texts, stories about the Holy Grail, the Knights Templar, and Mary Magdalene, and to a whole host of alternative histories of mankind that folk strains of religions have been playing with for a long time.

The story of the Winking Abbess is the story of the Holy Cup containing the elixir of life, which has been stolen from its rightful owner, the Goddess (who appears here under various guises), by “sterile” monks and hidden by the Templars in the cellar of their monastery. Only a woman is capable of extricating this genuine treasure, though the Templars do not seem to know this. Generally speaking, the chief adversary of both the Winking Abbess Doña Rosalinda and Marian Leatherby is Christianity—for the former it is represented by the Templar order and the ruthless bishops, and for the latter by an oppressive New Age Christian mentality of pointless self-denial and external control.

The tale of Doña Rosalinda’s mission to rescue the Grail is a series of fantastical and unexpected adventures. It is at the same time a story of repossession, of an anti-Crusade that restores the correct order in a fraudulently appropriated world. In this story within the story, Carrington produces a wonderfully comical parody mimicking those mysterious texts found in jars in the desert, such as the discovery at Nag Hammadi in 1945, which undoubtedly reinvigorated the religious imagination of secularized twentieth-century man. She makes copious reference to figures and names from the Gnostic treatises, including the Pistis Sophia.

The curious and patient reader will detect some surprisingly erudite references not only to Gnosticism but to esoteric religious syncretism of all sorts, both ancient and contemporary. Such a reader will take note of the name of our abbess: Doña Rosalinda della Cueva (from the cave), Abbess of the Convent of Saint Barbara of Tartarus, is associated (fittingly in the light of her further adventures) with the mysterious, powerful figure of Barbarus or Barbelo, who resides in—naturally!—“the depths of Pleroma” (to use the Gnostic term mentioned in the Apocryphon of John). Barbelo is the first creative force, hers is the womb of the world, she is the prototype for the Shekhinah and Sophia in one. She appears as a bearded female figure, the Mother-Father, and as Anthropos, the first hermaphrodite. As if in answer, Carrington seeds The Hearing Trumpet with characters of fluid gender—a bearded woman, a cross-dresser, a transsexual. Amid the several bizarre figures of earthly provenance in the book the reader will also find the character Taliessin, a figure taken straight from Welsh mythology. He is the Goddess’s messenger and the first man to be endowed with the gift of prophecy; here we meet him as an immortal postman.

What’s more, The Hearing Trumpet is a thoroughly surreal work, written oneirically—in other words, quite devoid of consistency or strong connections between cause and effect. There is certainly no gun hanging on the wall here, so there’s no reason to expect it to go off in the final scene. Things happen rather as they do in a dream, with sequences of events emerging subtly, arising from remote associations. When she is first mentioned, the sister of Marian’s friend Marlborough is a cripple; later it is suggested that she has two heads, and when she finally appears at the end of the book, she is neither a cripple nor two-headed, she simply has the head of a wolf! This kind of alternative causality doesn’t detract from our experience of the book one bit; instead it illustrates the process by which Carrington produced the novel, layering successive ideas, one on top of the other. As the narrative self corrects, it is a sheer pleasure to follow the mysterious flow of the unfolding story.

*

In old age a person becomes eccentric. This appears to be a natural law of development, once adapting to society is no longer essential, and the paths of the individual and the community start to diverge. Perhaps old age is actually the only time in life when we can finally be ourselves, without worrying about the demands of others or conforming to the social norms that we have been constantly instructed to follow. At last the adolescent obligation to belong to one group or another ceases to apply.

That is why the philosophy of eccentricity expressed in The Hearing Trumpet is connected with age. It can be treated as a special message from the old to the young, going against the current of time. We must do eccentric things. Where everyone is doing This, we must do That. While the whole center is noisily establishing its order, we shall remain on the periphery—we won’t let ourselves be drawn into the center, we shall ignore it and surpass it.

Thus eccentricity is posited as a spontaneous, joyful rebellion against everything that’s established and regarded as normal and self-evident. It is a challenge flung in the face of conformity and hypocrisy.

Ultimately, The Hearing Trumpet is a book that brings great delight. Let us enjoy the opportunity to share in this wild tale about an old lady who couldn’t go to Lapland, so Lapland had to come to her.

—Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

 

Olga Tokarczuk is the author of nine novels and three short story collections. Her novel Flights won the 2018 International Booker Prize, and she is the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones is the 2018 winner of the Transatlantyk Award for the most outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad. She has translated works by several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and writers of reportage, as well as crime fiction, poetry, and children’s books. She is a mentor for the Emerging Translator Mentorship Program and former cochair of the Translators Association of the United Kingdom.

From The Hearing Trumpet , by Leonora Carrington, published by New York Review Books this month. Copyright © 2021 by Olga Tokarczuk; translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Staff Picks: Land Mines, Laugh Tracks, and Ladies in Satin

Joan Didion. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe.

Joan Didion’s Let Me Tell You What I Mean had me from the title: words can be hair-trigger things, to deploy them is to find oneself surrounded somehow by land mines, and despite the best of efforts and intentions, what one meant seems almost never to come through cleanly. So how does Joan Didion do it? Her words are still weapons, but the diamond-encrusted kind, as beautiful as they are deadly, and, more important, they are entirely at her command. Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of essays spanning essentially the last third of the twentieth century, is a tiny jewel box of a book, and you could read it for the prose alone—no one places a so like Joan Didion—but the real magic is that she pulls it off: she tells you what she means, and every injury is on purpose. There is a generosity to that, I think, and it feels like a gift just to understand what someone else meant even if one cannot hope to return the favor. —Hasan Altaf 

Saturday Night Clive was a TV show that aired in the UK in the late eighties. Each week, for an hour or so, the presenter played short video clips, introduced out of context to make whoever was on-screen look like a bit of an idiot. The format was, even then, pretty tired. There was a laugh track, and there were also, I think, scripted interviews—some were sort of serious, but most were played for laughs. It wasn’t a good show, though in those days there were only four TV channels, so a show didn’t need to be good for it to be part of your Saturday night and the cultural background of your childhood. The Clive of the show’s title, however, is the talented poet, gifted memoirist, respected literary critic, and kind-of-annoying broadcaster Clive James, and this was my introduction to him. I’m sure this was the case for most of my generation. And so growing up, I never really thought to read his books. It wasn’t until 2011, when James’s health first started to fail—and the newspapers started to write nice things about him—that I became aware of him as a literary figure. James died in 2019, but I’m glad I got to read bits of his work while he was still alive, especially his later poems. It was good to know that he was still writing, and still trying to work out life and his relationships, while you were reading that later stuff. Last weekend, though, I read about James’s early years in Unreliable Memoirs, his account of growing up in Australia. As a kid, he sounds like a nightmare, but James is a wonderful teller of stories and a hilarious observer of the solipsism of childhood. I should have read it sooner, of course, but I was bemused when I first encountered him. His loving though long-suffering mother, it seems, felt likewise. —Robin Jones

 

Alexander Lernet-Holenia. Photo: United States Information Agency. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Count Luna, the 1955 novel by Alexander Lernet-Holenia (translated from the German in 1956 by Jane B. Greene and recently reissued by New Directions), begins with a man named Alexander Jessiersky disappearing into Roman catacombs, on the search for two priests and on the run from the law. The second chapter picks up with Jessiersky’s nobleman ancestor losing his title to the Austrian Empire’s reclamation of East Galicia in the early nineteenth century. The paternal lineage tying the two together reveals all the emotional inheritance that leads to Jessiersky’s inadvertent role in sending a man named Count Luna to a Nazi concentration camp. Count Luna becomes an obsession for Jessiersky (who believes the Count still alive), driving him to dark corners of the mind and the countryside, only to end up, yes, in ancient subterranean graves. At turns thrilling, understated, and outright strange, this novel gives in energetic spades a complex, ugly portrait of nobility and power. —Lauren Kane

This week, the sun came out for the first time in four years. So what’s the perfect soundtrack? For me, it’s been M. Ward’s latest record, Think of Spring. This is his second full-length in a year, following the gorgeous Migration Stories, which features a full band and lots of studio fanciness. Think of Spring is a solo affair, just Ward and his acoustic plus some hardly noticeable overdubbing for texture, all of it recorded at home during the pandemic on a TASCAM four-track. It’s also a covers album, Ward’s version of Billie Holiday’s classic Lady in Satin. These are familiar jazz standards, though you likely won’t recognize them—Ward has given each tune a new country twang, flattening the melodies and substituting his fingerpicking for Holiday’s orchestral backing. Think of Spring is a quiet, mellow record, good for listening to while you stare absentmindedly out the window. Why this album now? Because these songs are all about lost love and the bittersweet joy of remembering; they’re all kinds of ambivalent, pushing and pulling at the heartstrings that Ward plucks so gently. They’re in the same mood as me: grieving and hopeful. —Craig Morgan Teicher

Mac’s Problem, by Enrique Vila-Matas, came out in Spanish several years ago and appeared in Margaret Jull Costa and Sophie Hughes’s English translation in 2019, but reading it now feels very appropriate. In this strange Groundhog Day of a time, wherein each day feels a lot like the last, Mac, with his hair-trigger paranoia and his great enthusiasm, makes for a welcome compatriot. During this January of the pandemic, many of us stay at home all day, perhaps only leaving the house to take the same routes within our neighborhood for essentials. We set goals for ourselves about better futures (New Year’s resolutions, postpandemic plans) and give side-eye to strange characters (where is that person’s mask?!). Enter Mac: Our protagonist has lost his job as a lawyer and so spends all day kicking around the house, making the most of his time in his home office (there is a lot of gazing out the window). He has set about starting a diary (does anyone else’s New Year’s resolution involve better documentation of ideas?) and falls into a rabbit hole of improving his neighbor’s flawed and forgotten early novel. Mac’s routes through his Barcelona neighborhood felt a lot like my own footpaths through Alphabet City. There is even a neighborhood foe, found in a nefarious nephew; side-eye ensues. Perhaps most important, Mac’s indefatigable hope was buoying—it made me ready to bear a bit more of these Groundhog Day days. But don’t wait until February 2 to pick up Mac’s Problem: you have only until January 31 to get the novel as part of the The Paris Review’s subscription bundle with New Directions—available here. —Emily Nemens

 

Enrique Vila-Matas. Photo courtesy of New Directions.

The Year of Grinding Teeth

Photo: © JRP Studio / Adobe Stock.

There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

—Matthew 8:12

I woke up with dried blood on my lips. This was the first sign that something was wrong. It was March, the month that everything was wrong. Outside my kitchen window the sky was gray, still cold, Brooklyn-bleak. I had just left my marriage, and at nights I drank wine in bed and listened to podcasts so that I wouldn’t have to sit with my thoughts. I hadn’t noticed anything strange when I got out of bed, not even the slight taste of iron in my mouth. It came together when I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror while the coffee boiled on the stove. My lips and every tooth in my mouth were caked in a gluey, rust-brown film of blood. There was no cut on my lip. My gums were healthy. But I had neck pain and back pain and shoulder pain, a tension headache, a lump on my lip. I had been grinding my teeth, and I had ground so hard that I’d made myself bleed.

The next day we were all fired. The bookstore where I’d worked for six years had been told to shut, as had all nonessential businesses in New York City. The writers festival for which I was due to travel back to Australia was canceled. From bed I did an interview with a journalist in London about climate change in contemporary literature and tried to stay calm. The grocery store was out of nearly everything, the subway was empty, no masks or hand sanitizer were to be found. The call came out from the mayor’s office. Shelter in place.

“Shelter in place.” But I wasn’t sure where my “place” was meant to be. I was already in a state of transition and flux. I had a flight booked to Sydney. I took it. That week ushered in the two constants of my life this past year: displacement, teeth grinding.

*

Ever since I entered adulthood I have periodically experienced dreams in which all the teeth fall out of my head. The dreams have different contexts, different narrative through-lines, but the physical experience is always the same: the teeth begin to wobble, I push them around with my tongue as I once could my loose baby teeth, and slowly, and then quite quickly, they begin to drop into my mouth like so many rotten fruits. I wake up from these dreams panting and unnerved. I push my tongue against my teeth, relieved they’re all still there.

When I was a child my father read a lot of Jung, performed tarot readings, named his cat Freud. So I grew up with the idea that dreams mean something, that they manifest the concerns of the wakeful mind. I have learned to pay attention to them. Teeth dreams are common. Just about everyone has them at some point or another.

What do they mean? Artemidorus, the author of antiquity’s first dream manual, believed that the mouth personifies the household and each tooth signifies a particular person or object. Freud associated teeth dreams with masturbation and castration, and Jung surmised that they represent fear of childbirth and growing older. Cirlot, in his dictionary of symbols, emphasizes a Gnostic interpretation wherein the teeth represent battlements, “the wall and the fortifications of the inner man.” Cirlot’s is my preferred interpretation, the one that feels right for me. My mouth is the trap of my words, the place where I take in the world when I breathe and eat and kiss. Crumbling teeth mean crumbling borders. Security gone. The battlements fallen. Contemporary research has suggested that teeth dreams generally occur during an episode of teeth grinding.

Teeth grinding, more properly known as bruxism, is the grating, clenching, and gnashing of teeth. You might unconsciously clench your teeth when you’re awake, and you may grind and gnash in your sleep. I do both. It can screw up your mouth and jaw. It can give you facial pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, headaches, earaches, aches in general. It can flatten down your teeth, stripping the enamel away to expose the sensitive brown dentin beneath. It can wear down the muscles and tendons in your jaw to the point that the entire joint begins to deteriorate.

Nobody seems to know why. All we know is that bruxism is related to stress, and the more troubled you are in your waking life, the more it will manifest itself in your teeth. This past September, a dentist wrote in the New York Times that in six weeks she had seen more patients with tooth fractures than in the previous six years. The stress of being alive in 2020 activated the deepest, most primal fear mechanisms. “All that tension,” she wrote, “goes straight to the teeth.”

*

In Australia, my teeth grinding accelerated. The shape of my two front teeth changed very quickly. Suddenly a noticeable dent was carved into what had previously been a straight surface. The pain in my neck and shoulders was constant. A lump formed on my lower lip. I discovered it was a mucocele, a cyst caused by adjacent teeth inflicting chronic trauma on the flesh of my mouth. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing to myself in my sleep, but whatever it was, it was bad.

I had bad dreams. I would often wake up screaming in the middle of the night. But usually the nightmares were not about my teeth. Sometimes they were about somebody dying, or somebody leaving. More often than not they were about my home: burglary, the house on fire, a prowler in the bedroom, a malevolent presence slinking up the driveway. It didn’t take a psychoanalyst or a manual to figure out that the dreams were about security.

When I first arrived in Australia I slept in my mother’s house in Sydney. For the next four months, I moved between five houses in four cities. I had left one home behind and was trying to set up a new one with my boyfriend, however provisional that home might be.

After a few months, my boyfriend reported that in my sleep I made strange clicking sounds: snapping, scraping, biting the air. At first he tried to shake me awake when he heard me grinding, but we soon stopped with that. If he didn’t let me grind, I would never sleep. Some afternoons I would take a nap on the sofa and wake up to see him sitting nearby, watching me, worried. I had begun to grind my teeth when I napped.

Most days, though, I was fine. I worked as best I could. I taught. I wrote. I exercised. I cooked long meals. I wasn’t very good at keeping in touch, and I wasn’t operating at full capacity, or even half capacity, but I was managing. It was at night that it all came out.

None of this seemed especially remarkable. Everyone’s bodies seemed to manifest the crisis differently. My mother, healthy well into her sixties, suddenly had high blood pressure. My boyfriend’s fingernails lost their cuticles, the skin on his hands went papery, and his fingerprints disappeared from every finger but one. My friends reported radiating back pain and shaking hands. I was teaching a class about the literature of the body, and each week we came together over the internet. We talked about movement, when our movement had been curtailed. We talked about eating, when eating had become fraught and stressful as well as comforting. We talked about illness, when so many of us were witnessing those around us fall ill, worrying about falling ill, and experiencing symptoms that either made us suspect we ourselves were infected or pointed to a problem unknown. My students reported dry eyes, an inability to move the head to one side, stomach pains. For me, it nearly always came back to my teeth.

*

“The insides of your cheeks,” the dentist said, “are pure scar tissue.” This was in Sydney, once dental offices had tentatively reopened in July. I hadn’t seen a dentist in years, because in New York I could never afford to. In just about every country with government-subsidized health care, dentistry is not included. It was cheaper in Australia, but not cheap. Dental procedures like fillings or crowns are often considered cosmetic procedures, even when the choice between a filling and no filling can mean keeping a tooth or losing it. Teeth—strong, straight, white teeth—reflect one’s ability to pay for them.

I didn’t know how I’d pay, but the grinding needed to be addressed. The dentist made a mold of my teeth with a kind of blue foam I bit into. The mold was sent to a specialist, and I returned to the dentist a week later to receive a plastic splint that fits precisely over the teeth in my upper jaw. There was nothing yet to be done about the unevenness of my front teeth. “If I repair the front teeth now,” the dentist said, “you’ll grind the repair right off in your sleep.” I would need to wait a year, after which he estimated that he’d be able to see slight indentations or marks in the splint where I had ground into its surface, and then he would know how serious the grinding was, what the prospect of repair might be.

Marks appeared in the splint after six weeks. There is now a visible dent in the plastic near my two front teeth, and wear at the back of the molars.

The other problem, the dentist detected, was that at the age of thirty my wisdom teeth had finally come in. The grinding might have helped them along, but at any rate they needed to come out. All four of them.

*

To have my wisdom teeth taken out I needed first to have an X-ray of my jaw. I was sent to an oral radiologist on the top floor of a building on Sydney’s Macquarie Street. There were wide, open views of Sydney Harbour, from the Bridge to the Opera House. I bit down on a piece of plastic while a machine rotated around my head and spewed radiation into my skull, and I pondered Sydney through the windows.

Teeth and bones are the only things left of us when we’re gone. Our houses and homes will be broken up and dispersed, our possessions will disintegrate, our coffins will break up, our cities will fall. The Sydney Harbour Tunnel that runs beneath the water might remain, but the Sydney Harbour Bridge probably won’t. The plastics in the sea will stay. So will the traces of nuclear waste. But if there are traces of our bodies they will be teeth and bones.

The French paleontologist George Cuvier said, “Show me your teeth and I will tell you who you are.”

Every day of our childhoods is fossilized during tooth formation, leaving information about our diet and traumatic life events, as detailed as tree rings. In our early twenties the growing stops, and from that point our lives can be read through the damage—the cavities, the wear from eating and biting, the changes to plaque, cementum, the receding gums. Acidic air can make teeth erode, heavy metals like cadmium and lead that leach into drinking water and food supplies and get into the structures of the body.

So in my teeth they will find traces of the chemicals I have breathed and the foods I have eaten. They will see enormous wear, from constant grinding. If a paleontologist digs up my bones, what they will be able to know about my experience of the world is “stress.” Whatever else living in unprecedented times does to us, it leaves traces behind in our bodies, even if we never fell ill.

You sometimes hear about bodies found in remote places, so decomposed they can only be identified by their dental records. This has always made me uneasy. I knew that no dentist had ever taken a record of my teeth as an adult. It was not until I had my mouth X-rayed in Sydney, not until a mold was taken of my broken mouth, that I knew there would be definitive records. Good, I found myself thinking as the radiologist pointed to the four impacted wisdom teeth growing slantwise in my skull. Now somebody will be able to find me when I’m gone.

*

General anesthetic is unpleasant. It dulls pain, but it also creates a disagreeable distortion in time. When I had my wisdom teeth out I went under and woke up without the sensation of time passing. A breathing tube was extracted. I coughed, calling for a tissue, and then yelled when I blew my nose into it, finding that what came out was blood. Blood in my mouth and blood in my nose, blood flowing down the back of my throat. Later, I went to the bathroom and saw myself in the mirror. There was brown blood dried into the cracks of my chapped lips and scarlet blood trickling out of my mouth. The oral surgeon had injected a local anesthetic into my jaw to numb the pain after surgery, and so I couldn’t feel the blood on my chin. A few days later I went back to New York. To properly start a life with my boyfriend I needed first to clear out the apartment I’d left so abruptly in March. It had been sitting precisely the way I’d left it, empty. A book was still splayed out on the arm of a chair.

For days and then weeks in New York, I packed up my home. I made myself smoothies and drank a lot of wine. Liquids only. My mouth was still healing, and I was worried about a condition called dry socket where the blood clots are dislodged and the jawbone is exposed after surgery, a condition both painful and expensive to resolve. They were lonely weeks. I packed alone, everything I owned, dividing up possessions, dismantling a home.

The first night back I was so afraid of disturbing the blood clots in my mouth that I didn’t wear my splint. But I had a nightmare, a losing-my-teeth nightmare. When I woke up shouting in the empty bed there was blood all over my lips, blood on the pillowcase and sheets. I hadn’t dislodged the blood clots, but I had been grinding in my sleep, I had drawn blood from my mouth for the second time in a year, and every night afterward I had to carefully insert the splint so that I wouldn’t do it again.

*

There’s no resolution, not really, just time passing. Everything is still in flux, everything in transition, but I’ve found a place to hold onto, and I’m holding on. I do not have nightmares anymore. No more teeth dreams. No more blood. But I still grind my teeth in bed at night in my new apartment, so I wear the splint. When I forget, my boyfriend hears me click. It’s a sound somewhere between a squeak and a scrape, like heavy furniture being pushed across polished floors, like a tin box of marbles, shaken, like what it is: bone on bone.

Battlements, Cirlot says of teeth. “The fortifications of the inner man.” It is hard to feel your fortifications crumble. Hard when you are meant to shelter in place but find yourself asking, What place? Which shelter? What do I have, and where will I go, and what will be left of me when I’m gone?

 

Madeleine Watts’s fiction and essays have appeared in The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, The White Review, and Literary Hub, among others. Originally from Sydney, Australia, she has been based in New York since 2013. Her debut novel, The Inland Sea, is available now from Catapult.

Insane Places

On Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet.

In 1973, the psychologist David Rosenhan published a paper in the journal Science called “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” The paper was based on an experiment he had conducted, sometimes called the Thud Experiment, designed to interrogate how we distinguish the sane from the insane, if in fact sanity and insanity are distinguishable states. Rosenhan arranged to have eight “pseudopatients” seek voluntary admission to a psychiatric hospital. The instigating complaint was of auditory hallucinations: the patients claimed to hear voices saying the words empty, hollow, and thud. All eight were admitted into psychiatric wards, most with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Once in the wards, the patients experienced some initial anxiety—they hadn’t expected to get in so easily—but then proceeded to act normally. Rosenhan writes:

The pseudopatient, very much as a true psychiatric patient, entered a hospital with no foreknowledge of when he would be discharged. Each was told that he would have to get out by his own devices, essentially by convincing the staff that he was sane. The psychological stresses associated with hospitalization were considerable, and all but one of the pseudopatients desired to be discharged almost immediately after being admitted. They were, therefore, motivated not only to behave sanely, but to be paragons of cooperation.

When asked how they were feeling, the patients all said they felt fine and were no longer hearing any voices. But they continued to be treated as though they were schizophrenic. They were kept in the hospital for an average of nineteen days (one for fifty-two days), and when they were eventually discharged, it was under the assumption of “remission.”

Rosenhan (who was himself one of the pseudopatients) came to the conclusion that “we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals.” You could say that the staff were prone to overdiagnosis, that the structure of the institution creates a hammer/nail relation between doctor and patient—or you could say that the structure of the institution creates the conditions for insanity. Rosenhan claimed that, in a hospital setting, “the normal are not detectably sane.” So were they all mad, as in Wonderland? (“ ‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice. ‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’ ”) (It must be noted that the validity of the study, and indeed most studies, has been called into question.)

The surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington was once, during World War II, institutionalized against her will. Max Ernst, her partner (if that is the right word—they were living together, though he was married to someone else—Wikipedia uses “lover,” which does not sound objective), had been captured by the Nazis. His art was considered degenerate. It seems fair to say that Carrington temporarily lost her mind—war is an insane place. Sickened by injustice, she drank orange blossom water to make herself vomit, to purge herself of the “brutal ineptitude of society”; she saw her stomach as “a mirror” of the world. The sequence of events, by her own account, is confusing, but she managed to escape with two friends from France to Madrid and ended up in an asylum in Santander, a town on the northern coast of Spain.

Down Below, written in 1943, is Carrington’s brief memoir of this period. The doctor was injecting her with Cardiazol, a.k.a. “convulsive therapy,” a drug that induces seizures. Carrington described the occurrence of the first injection as “the most terrible and blackest day in my life”— “How can I write this when I’m afraid to think about it?” (I’m reminded of Sylvia Plath’s first experience with electroshock therapy, which was so physically and psychologically painful for her that she swore to kill herself before undergoing it again.) For ten minutes, Carrington suffered “the Great Epileptic Ailment”: “I was convulsed, pitiably hideous, I grimaced and my grimaces were repeated all over my body.” Afterward, as some kind of antidote, she asked for lemons and “swallowed them with their rinds.” An article on the history of Cardiazol treatment in British mental hospitals, by the researcher Niall McCrae, asks, “What made Cardiazol work—or appear to work?” He suggests that “the intense fear experienced during treatment—the major reason for abandoning Cardiazol in favour of electroshock—was therapeutically advantageous”—that patients, in other words, could be scared sane, which is possibly true. But in the short term, the drug only made Carrington behave more insanely. She became convinced that these “purifying tortures” would help her attain “Absolute Knowledge,” which she needed to unite the cosmos and save the world. It seems the treatments for madness quite often have madness as a side effect.

Carrington’s biography, a friend informs me, is rife with conflicting and erroneous information—perhaps inevitable for a darling of the surrealist movement. André Breton seemed almost jealous of Carrington’s “voyage to the other side of reason,” as Marina Warner puts it in her introduction to Down Below—as if madness were a career achievement. A version of Carrington’s episode in the sanatorium also found its way into a novel, The Hearing Trumpet, written in the fifties or early sixties. But it’s not lightly fictionalized autobiography along the lines of The Bell Jar. Here the experience is transformed into something more fabulist, and much more interesting than the memoir. In the novel, delusions of grandeur become real powers.

The Hearing Trumpet’s first sentence reveals the inciting incident, or perhaps the inciting object, the magic charm that sets events in motion: “When Carmella gave me the present of the hearing trumpet she may have foreseen some of the consequences.” Carmella is Marian Leatherby’s prescient, resourceful friend; Marian is a ninety-two-year-old Englishwoman living in Spain with her son Galahad and his family, who, she has noticed, have ceased to find her worthwhile. Because of her deafness, or perhaps just because she is old, they treat her like vermin or a ghost, as though she were fully insensate or already dead; she enters through the back of the house like a dog. The maid, Rosina, “seems generally opposed to the rest of humanity,” and yet they get along: “I do not believe that she puts me in a human category so our relationship is not disagreeable.” The hearing trumpet, “a fine specimen of its kind,” “exceptionally pretty, being encrusted with silver and mother o’pearl,” is a bit of a monkey’s-paw gift. “Your life will be changed,” Carmella promises—but not necessarily for the better.

Hearing trumpets, an early, analog form of hearing aid, can be quite effective, and Marian’s is, to a frightful degree: “What I had always heard as a thin shriek went through my head like the bellow of an angry bull.” Carmella asks if Marian can hear her: “Indeed I could, it was terrifying.” The impairment had been, in a way, a gift of its own, shielding Marian from the worst of humanity, and her family’s own cruelty. At Carmella’s urging, Marian uses the instrument to spy on her family, and overhears them plotting to put her away. “Your mother has been a constant anxiety to us for the past twenty years,” Muriel, her daughter-in-law, says; their son Robert is less kind: “She’s a drooling sack of decomposing flesh.” They are sure she’ll be “better off in a home,” if not “better off dead,” and in any case unlikely to “even notice the change.”

Marian lowers the hearing trumpet and concedes, to herself, that she may be senile—“but what does senile mean?” The institution where they want to send her, Santa Brigida, run by “the Well of Light Brotherhood,” “sounds more terrifying than death itself”—and yet she has her own ideas about her right to exist (“I consider that I am still a useful member of society”); she is not ready to die and in fact her own mother is still alive, in good health though “getting old”! Marian dreams of going to Lapland, stopping to visit her mother on the way, then spending the rest of her days in the snow among “dogs, woolly dogs.” She doesn’t fight her family’s decision. “Nothing I can say will change your opinion,” she says. “You are right from your own point of view.” She concedes the relativity of reality. Galahad assures her this is for her own good and that she won’t be lonely. “I am never lonely, Galahad,” she replies. “Or rather I never suffer from loneliness. I suffer much from the idea that my loneliness might be taken away from me.”

Because “one has to be very careful what one takes when one goes away forever,” Marian decides to pack “as if I were going to Lapland.” (In 1940, before leaving Saint-Martin for Spain, Carrington “spent the whole night carefully sorting the things I intended taking along with me.” Later, these effects took on talismanic importance: “My red-and-black refill pencil (leadless) was Intelligence … A box of Tabu powder with a lid, half grey and half black, meant eclipse, complex, vanity, taboo, love.”) Marian feels “too preoccupied” to sleep, but then, “sleeping and waking are not quite as distinctive as they used to be.” Day dreaming and night dreaming blur into each other, as in the hypnagogic visions, or near-hallucinations, some people see when they’re falling asleep (Carrington was among them). The next day, Galahad and Muriel drive Marian to Santa Brigida, which is not quite the prison complex that Marian and Carmella had envisioned but “a castle, surrounded by various pavilions with incongruous shapes”:

Pixielike dwellings shaped like toadstools, Swiss chalets, railway carriages, one or two ordinary bungalows, something shaped like a boot, another like what I took to be an outsize Egyptian mummy. It was all so very strange that I for once doubted the accuracy of my observation.

That “for once” is perplexing, because Marian frequently calls into question the accuracy of her observations. Not long after she overhears her daughter-in-law say “she doesn’t have any idea where she is,” which is plainly untrue, she goes into a waking reverie, in her own backyard while, “strangely enough,” also in England, “under a lilac bush.” She knows she is not in England—“I am inventing all this and it is about to disappear”—still, it is England she sees. She speaks of the “fancies” that keep her amused during “sleepless nights,” since “old people do not sleep much.” Or is she sleeping and dreaming all the time? Her room at the institution has trompe l’oeil furniture: a “painted wardrobe” on the wall, “an open window with a curtain fluttering in the breeze, or rather it would have fluttered if it were a real curtain.” Real? All fictive furniture is fake, but this novel has real fake furniture and fake fake furniture. Here the novelist seems to be poking holes and peeking through the text. Sleeping and waking are fluid, as are reality and fiction (or reality and surreality).

Can Marian be trusted? Can Carrington? I’ve heard it said that “all narrators are unreliable,” but the narrator of a memoir is unreliable in a way that the narrator of a novel never is. In Down Below, Carrington writes, of her own behavior, “I did not remember any of this.” We can’t know what happened, we can’t distinguish between the sanity and the insanity in Santander. But in Santa Brigida? Despite her age and infirmities, her bouts of imaginative dozing, as the events of The Hearing Trumpet get more fantastical, I choose to believe that Marian’s version of events is real. What she sees (and hears) in the world of this novel is what actually “happens”: she’s introduced to the bizarre, cultish logic of the institution’s doctrine, “Inner Christianity”; she meets the other residents (or patients, or inmates) and gets wind of their underground schemes; she wonders after the source of a painting of a winking nun, a “leering abbess,” hung across from her place at the dining table; she is given, by a woman named Christabel Burns, a tract about the figure, the whole of which appears as a text within the text (from pages 90 to 126, almost twenty percent of the novel); she witnesses Natacha Gonzalez and Vera Van Tocht making a poisoned batch of fudge, which Maude Wilkins mistakenly eats, dying in the process; she climbs a ladder to peer into Maude’s room through a skylight, and sees the naked corpse of not a woman but a man (cock and balls helpfully illustrated, in one of a number of drawings by Carrington’s son in the book); she joins the other women, all but Natacha and Vera and Maude, in a hunger strike, since eating no longer seems safe. This is survivable only because Carmella has snuck in some port and chocolate biscuits, which the ladies ration and share at night, by the bee pond, where they meet in a sort of witches’ sabbath and trance out in a “weird dance” that seems normal to them at the time.

As Christabel beats her tom-tom and chants, a cloud rises from the pond, “an enormous bumble bee as big as a sheep.” Marian reflects: “All this may have been a collective hallucination although nobody has yet explained to me what a collective hallucination actually means.” What distinguishes hallucination from reality, the fake reality from the real reality, in a surrealist novel? If we believe anything, why not believe this? The weather turns cold, quite cold for Spain—“so cold that hoarfrost glittered over the garden every morning.” The agèd women are underfed and have no fur coats, yet Marian is happy. Because they’re not eating, they can no longer be forced to work in the kitchen. Suddenly they are free. The earth’s polarity is literally shifting. The sun stops rising; day merges into night; they stop using the word day. Marian’s life has changed, certainly. “The sparkling white frost brought a strange joy into my heart, and I thought about Lapland.” Because she could not go to Lapland, Lapland came to her.

On the next-to-last page of The Hearing Trumpet, Marian says, “This is the end of my tale. I have set it all down faithfully and without exaggeration either poetic or otherwise.” It reminds me of a moment in the 1810 German novella Michael Kohlhaas, by Heinrich von Kleist, an aside from the almost invisible narrator, in preface to a strikingly unlikely coincidence: “Just as verisimilitude and fact are not always perfectly aligned, something happened next that we will report, but permit readers who prefer to doubt it to doubt.” We may doubt it, but would we? And why? I love when a piece of fiction insists that it’s true. Inside itself, it always is.

 

Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays and The Word Pretty.

Home

Photo: © Abi Olayiwola / Adobe Stock.

Let me show you my home. It is the subterranean water body of my mother. I drift in her voice and amniotic fluid. When she steps into the light, I am in the light. When her sun sets, my sun sets. As she moves, I move. I somersault, dive, kick, poke, remind her I am inside her, becoming. Through our placenta, I taste her blood, mingled with Aleppo pepper and mint.

Let me show you my home. It is a city on the Indian Ocean. The fishermen drag their dhows onto white sand at dawn to unload the night’s tilapia, squid, and snapper. At dusk, they disappear back into the blue.

Under the shade of a thatched umbrella, I slurp from a straw in a coconut while my father plays soccer with the boys who sell them. We have been here all day, blackening. Tomorrow monsoon season might start, later than in years past. But tonight, live music at Oyster Bay. Women and palm trees will sway and rustle. For me, mishkaki—skewered chicken and goat with chili and lime. For my father, nyama choma and beer. On the drive home, we will ride in the back of a pickup. We will pass the Aga Khan mosque and the Lutheran church. The smell of bougainvillea and jacaranda trees will come rushing at us on the wind.

Let me show you my home. It is my father’s embrace. Strong biceps press into my rib cage, firm hands on my back. My feet are lifted off the floor. I fly, without fear, over my father’s head. I know he will hold me up until I land in sheets. “See you in the morning,” he says, and I have no reason, yet, not to believe him.

Let me show you my home. It is a country cottage with a red door. In the spring, bluebells carpet the earth beneath the surrounding forest of oak trees. Even on sunny Sundays, just in case, Auntie Harriet makes us wear our Wellington boots and yellow anoraks. We pick wild blackberries along the Cuckoo Trail and stop to smell the daffodils. Sometimes, a shepherd and his sheep are crossing. He whistles and the sheep baaa their way to be auctioned at the market.

This used to be a rope-making town, a supplier to yachters, sailors, and hangmen in all of Britain and her colonies. There is still a rope factory, but there are no hangmen. There is a library where we go after school to read Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl.

Let me show you my home. It is built on seven hills. It is eternal: ruins but not ruined, aged but vivacious.

Look around when you walk. Everywhere there is writing on the wall. SPQR is carved into stone (Senatus Populusque Romanus, or “The Senate and People of Rome”). Next to it is an alternative series of words to make up the acronym, likely spray-painted by a visiting Milanese or Neapolitan: Sono Porci Questi Romani (“They’re pigs, these Romans”).

My classmates ride skateboards into the metro to tag their names in the tunnels. I prefer to ride my bicycle along Via Appia. Among the tombs, I hop off. Grass grows between ancient flagstones. Above: pine trees. Below: catacombs. Let’s raise a Pellegrino toast to the dead, and to the still growing.

Let me show you my home. “Would you like chicken or beef?” ask the attendants. We are all wrapped in matching gray blankets. Our feet nest in matching gray socks. The air recirculates. Outside the cool glass, clouds grow heavy. There will be turbulence while we sleep. When we wake, croissants and jam and fresh starts. But tonight my home is a jet-propelled cabin in the sky. My home is moving away and moving toward. On the screen, a dotted line charts our course.

Let me show you my home. Can you smell the eucalyptus? Can you smell the roasting coffee? We make some of the best in the world. The women grind it with their pestles and roast it, making sure to waft the sweet earth of it into your nostrils.

During the Epiphany, we go to Lalibela to watch pilgrims reenact the baptism of Christ. Priests parade in robes of rich velvet. They wave incense. Drums and bells fill the air and lead us to the Fasilides Baths.

In the shantytowns, there is no running water. At our house in the UN compound, we boil cholera out of everything. But today, rich and poor, young and old, faithful Christians and faithless travelers, will jump in with whoops and squawks, and be renewed. Anabel and I hold our breath, hold hands until the splash.

Let me show you my home. It is a family that used to be five and is now four. We are built of love and hurt and rage and silences. We have not yet found the right material with which to patch the roof, to stop the absence from trickling in.

Let me show you my home. Many of the streets have no names or multiple names, but not to worry. You will learn to tell your motorcycle taxi driver to make a left at the mango tree or right at the rolex stand. A rolex is not a watch. It is chapati with eggs, onion, and tomatoes. You won’t have much use for watches anyway. Time moves differently here. We meet in Kabalagala for waragi and wolokosso (loose talk). Join us. As the proverb goes, where they eat flies, eat them.

Let me show you my home. It is my grandmother’s porch. We sit here all day and people stop by to say hello and to watch Nana argue with the house girl.

“Are you thirsty?” Nana asks. “I’m thirsty but Afua, useless girl, keeps forgetting to bring my drink.”

“Would you like some water, Ma?” asks Auntie Freda.

“Did I urinate in your bed? Why am I being punished?” Nana bristles.

“She wants a beer,” I explain. “When she says she’s thirsty, it means she wants a beer. I’ll get it. I could use one, too.”

“Finally,” says Nana, “a real Jantuah.”

Jantuah is her maiden name. It is also her highest compliment. She has never called me a Jantuah before: “American,” “sort of Arab,” her “precious half-caste granddaughter,” but never a Jantuah. Everyone laughs at what was, to them, just typical Nana. But I can barely contain my glee.

In the kitchen, I help myself to a handful of kelewele. Then, two cold beers in hand, I go to claim my seat on the porch.

Let me show you my home. The glass and steel grow up and out: towers, sprawl. This city is ever-changing. We must keep moving to keep up. This is why we do not sleep.

You can find me at the bar with a book. The bartender knows my name. He knows my drink. He has read the book I’m reading. He is a poet.

For years, my bedroom had no windows. The cracks in my bathroom grew slimy mushrooms that smelled like chlorine. It was what I could afford. In that apartment, I dreamed of skylights and potted plants. Now my window looks down on a courtyard I don’t have access to. It is filled with the garbage that can’t be put on the street to be picked up till Thursday.

Any day now, I will make a living. Until then, I pay what I can at the Metropolitan Museum and look forward, all week, to bottomless mimosas at brunch.

Let me show you my home. It is a border. It is the outer edge of both sides. It is where they drew the line. They drew the line right through me. I would like to file a territorial dispute.

Let me show you my home. It is a live fault. The fault is in my body.

Let me show you my home. It is a blue chair. I sought asylum here. I marked my application temporary. For myself, I am writing reconstruction, not elegy.

Look into my eyes. See my glowing skin. My pores are open. I am made of the earth, flesh, ocean, blood, and bone of all the places I tried to belong to and all the people I long for. I am pieces. I am whole. I am home.

 

Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urban planner. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her lyric essay So Devilish a Fire won the Atlas Review chapbook contest. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times, the Washington Post’s The Lily, The Literary Review, Electric Literature, Epiphany, Catapult, and others. Owusu grew up in Rome, Addis Ababa, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Kumasi, and London. She is an associate director at Living Cities, an economic racial justice organization, and teaches creative nonfiction at the Mountainview M.F.A. program. Aftershocks is her first book.

From Aftershocks: A Memoir , by Nadia Owusu. Copyright © 2021 by Nadia Owusu. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

More Primitive, More Sensual, More Obscene

Jacques Gautier d’Agoty, anatomical plate, 1773

Last spring, as leaves unrolled to catch the light, the American writer Melissa Febos took to social media vowing to drop the word “seminal” from her lexicon of praise, because “why should formative, ground-breaking things evoke semen?” The post caught my eye. Febos put out a playful call for female-centered alternatives to seminal, sourced in women’s pleasure zones, and I joined the gaggle of respondents who offered a string of high-spirited replies. Because it made me laugh and picture cartoonish ideas budding, ballooning out, then floating off like soap bubbles, I suggested boobissimo. But the coinages that really sang to me announced themselves with more poetry: clitoral, oveal, vulvate, luteal, lacteal, hysteral, gyntastic. Here were terms that evoked dark and brooding spaces­: undergrowth, caverns, grottos, hidden streams, the richly symbolic unconscious, places where things might be synthesized from organic mulch and unusual elements might combine, becoming impressed with secret shapes before oozing forth from the gloaming. There was something messy and uncontainable about these words, so unlike the clean linearity we associate with sprouting seeds.

Febos clearly had politics on her mind. She wanted to kvetch about the way maleness is always and everywhere universalized, not least when encoding creative achievement. It is the seed, not the egg, that implants ideas in our heads and suggests vistas pregnant with possibility. It is the seed (or inspiration) that counts, even when the most promising ideas need to gestate before they can bloom, or incubate, or marinate: that is, sit for a time in a stew of nutrient-rich fluids. Her post made me think of the way maleness aggrandizes itself, arrogates territory to itself, then others the things it discards. It made me think of those early modern theories of reproduction that imagined microscopic homunculi folded up inside every spermatozoa, the egg conscripted only to provide food and shelter.

Although the terms Febos crowdsourced were contrived to make a point, the same way herstory makes a point, they hit my ears just so, setting off a chain of satisfying little tingles all along the neural axis that links visceral sensations to head and heart. I have been thinking a lot lately, you see, about the codependence of language, body, and self, the way each constitutes the other and the inescapable sense it makes to acknowledge that where we speak from and who we speak for is bound up with our experience not just as historical beings, but as material beings. I have been thinking about this in ways that run explicitly counter to all my old commitments, ever since having my uterus and ovaries removed six years ago. At the time, I hoped the surgery would free me, and it did, from the daily drag generated by my fibroid-mangled organs, which had a way of stopping me in my tracks, paralyzed with pain, and from the different kind of drag that came from living with the bleak specter of ovarian cancer. With my organs gone I moved more lightly through the world.

But I was unprepared for the toxic shock of sudden menopause that caused my body to snag up like a choked machine, gears rattling, rivets loosening and popping off, red lights flashing at the controls. It was as if one set of problems (compromising, but nevertheless known) had been elbowed aside only to make room for a new and entirely foreign set, more onerous than the ones they had replaced. Instantly I swung into firefighting mode, determined to combat the rage, tearfulness, severe depression, insomnia, night sweats, fatigue, and memory loss that arrived out of nowhere to assail me, failing to see that all the while I was so intent on putting out the flames, the ground was giving way elsewhere. Something more nebulous was happening to me. My center of gravity was shifting, or migrating, my sense of self, dissolving: the person I’d always been was morphing into who knows what.

I wandered about the world queasily off-balance. Out and about on basic errands in my neighborhood, I’d be so high on a sense of unreality as to be practically levitating; and because language is expressive of our material condition, not just the seemingly free-floating thoughts “inside” our heads, my command of that suffered, too. In the weeks after my surgery, I may as well have been a hologram. I’d speak to people only to be looked through and unheard.

A range of interesting speech impediments took hold. Where once I communicated fluently, without giving the mechanism a second thought, I now kept stalling, lapsed and confused. Words flew from my brain and dissipated upward like a flock of birds. Nouns, in particular, kept disappearing.

This broken link between word and object mattered. When you name things you acquaint yourself with the world, rescribing it daily via a ritual “Hello again.” More importantly, you constitute who you are to yourself. You affirm that you’re the kind of person who notices this or appreciates that, has an affinity for this and an aversion to that, who arrives at an understanding of their particular interiority through calibrating the temperature between inside and out. Noun-mute, I had a hangdog feeling of being locked out of my own mind. The place I was speaking from was the void.

Now and again, I surprised myself with what did come out of my mouth. I’d say pencils instead of flowers, substitute wallet for fridge. If my husband shot me a look of concern I’d brush it off, joking that my brain appeared to be hung up on morphological resemblances. Yet too often sentences that began well, with clear intention, would lose direction and peter out or else freeze abruptly, midway between the starting line and the finish. Too many times, talking to someone at home, at work, socially, my mouth would open and nothing at all would come out. People looked at me expectantly and in apology I’d shrug. I figured this was what dementia must feel like from the inside. But given that trauma is by definition unspeakable, I can’t help but wonder now if my problems with language weren’t masking something else.

*

In all its varied symptomology, menopause put me on intimate terms with what Virginia Woolf, writing about the perspective-shifting properties of illness, called “the daily drama of the body.” Its histrionics demanded notice.

Menopause asked that I pay closer attention to bodily experience almost minute by minute, because with each bodily dip and lurch, each hormonal spike and roundabout, every shiver and sweat that wrenched my guts, a new filter was placed between my reality and that of the larger world. As Woolf described: “Meaning comes to us sensually first, by way of the palate and the nostrils, like some queer odour.” But because this proximal knowing—raw, experiential, strangely insistent—so fully absorbs us as it twists our existence around the new co-ordinates of illness, “the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea.”

“Landscape of life” is just right. Its connotation of painterly remove perfectly captures how, when ill (or menopausal), we’re estranged from the world beyond our sickbed. Turned inward, we have to contend with an immediate reality prone to kaleidoscopic collapse, or sudden reconfiguring: once familiar, its shapes, textures, and smells (that “queer odour”) grow alien. No wonder Woolf called for a new language—“more primitive, more sensual, more obscene”—for describing where we speak from when we find ourselves in this altered state. We need, she insisted, to “speculate carnally.”

Woolf’s endless struggles with nervous fatigue and what we might now call manic depression are well known. She suffered multiple breakdowns, often following the completion of a book, as if the process of writing it was what kept her sane. The year before she wrote her short essay “On Being Ill,” she’d fallen down in a faint at her sister’s house in Charleston. She’d been overworking, as usual, and though she couldn’t admit it to herself, she was “a little used up & riding on a flat tire.” The faint led to many months of illness, debilitating headaches, and rest cures. She felt weak, then melancholy. She wanted to begin To the Lighthouse, said she had “a whole novel in my head,” but she was forbidden by her doctors from writing. Then T. S. Eliot commissioned her to write an essay for The New Criterion and “On Being Ill” was the piece she submitted. He was less than enthusiastic about it, which naturally sent Woolf into fresh spasms of anxious self-doubt. She worried about her “wordiness” and the “feebleness” of her writing.

Woolf’s essay bears all the hallmarks of having been written in the heat of the lived moment, with the feverish urgency of a patient wanting the particulars of their condition to be better understood. There is constant reference to the body throughout, to its intrusiveness, its insistence on being heard, its animal wants. In illness, the body dominates our existence: it is at once tuning fork and transmitter, the principal medium through which experience resonates through us. Perhaps this explains why, for Woolf, the ill are so lawless—unlike “the army of the upright.” Subject to the wiles of a body that ails, and yet wants, the ill become rash, willful, and contrary; they spurn sympathy, wallow in sensation. Their critical faculties, responsibilities, and good sense desert them, and into the vacuum “other tastes assert themselves: sudden, fitful, intense.”

I am ashamed to say that I came late to Woolf’s fiery essay, after having given a book-length account of my own menopause as an embodied experience. I wrote it as I lived it—as an embodied woman, come into the inheritance of aging. It was a passion project, something I had to write, and full of carnal speculation, and it was turned down by every major publishing house; when my proposal was doing the rounds back in 2014, no one seemed able to muster an appetite for such corporeal reckoning with womanhood. Then again, before crashing headlong into menopause, neither could I. Looking back over my earliest efforts in nonfiction, I see that I wrote cerebral books that willfully trespassed into areas with a distinct masculinist pedigree. They concerned end-time religious cults, the space age, and Middle Eastern geopolitics. The minded body—my minded body—didn’t get a look in.

I do not subscribe to simple binaries that insist “this is female” and “this is male.” Never have. But every feminist knows that male cultures and male hegemonies are not in the habit of announcing themselves as male. They just are. They are what we have; what we are asked to accept is the way the world is. If you put your neck out as a woman and give voice to female experience, or travel against the grain of patriarchal norms, you risk marginalizing yourself. But I wish to do something a little different here. I wish to denounce my own former (and, at the time, unconscious) collusion.

My first book about millennial end-time cults was an act of ventriloquism. The words I mouthed in it were not mine, the posturing was borrowed. In scope and tone, the book was crafted to engage a critical-professional class of reader largely made up of men—the assumption being that if you write like a man, then maybe men will read you. But I wasn’t really writing at all. I was channeling. Much of the time I worked on the project, various “style bibles” sat on my desk, beside my computer, most of them by Gore Vidal, whose orotund, word-clever sentences I sought to emulate, and when it wasn’t Vidal, I modeled my thinking on Frank Kermode, Oliver Sacks, or Richard Holmes, men with evident status and to whose authority I deferred, every one of them now a Dead White Man.

Deferring, demurring, apologizing, explaining themselves: this is what women do when they intrude on male territory. Did I think these “intellectual giants,” or their successors, would beckon me into the fold of their unremarked privilege? Offer me a matey pat on the back as they pressed forward to open doors? Did I think they might review me, or use my book in the classroom? I did not. Yet at some fundamental level I believed that if I cloaked myself in a masculine aura I might somehow pass for the real thing.

Proof of concept aside there’s practically nothing about that book on cults I’d defend as authentic. I wish to be precise here, because the very qualities it aspires to are those I now repudiate in my work. Where to begin? The book pretends to expertise—and not in a humble way that acknowledges due diligence by the research, but with a brash swagger that today makes me cringe. It aspires to comprehensiveness, that is, to a lofty generality and off-handed sweep. It is too loud (in places), at times pompous, and it wears its puffed-up learning like chest-borne medals. It is a piece of performance art; a strut in literary drag. If I listen in close enough, trying to catch what lives between the lines of my book, all I can hear is the wind blowing through empty space—a howl of under-confidence.

I know now—indeed, I knew then—how to think differently. I knew that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I’d traveled back and forth pondering the merits and demerits of an écriture féminine. I was all too aware of the feminist thought police, who, if you didn’t renounce the patriarchy at every turn, accused you of being self-hating. I even had role models to look toward: Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, Julia Blackburn, women writers who managed to “pass” without compromising themselves. And still I wrote like a man. It is not that second-wave feminism offered no alternative ways to be and write and dream, but the options available did not come made-to-measure for every feminist fit. The politics of difference, in particular, hinged on a relentless separatism that forever dragged women back to the body, enchained them to it, in ways that were the opposite of liberating, at least for me.

It is difficult for me to recapture now, as a woman who has always gravitated toward cerebral things, my horror of biological essentialism. When politicized at university in the mid-’80s, it was Wollstonecraft’s rights-based politics that I clutched to my chest, not rediscovered ancient goddesses, fertility cults, and white witches, those shades of old female power from which I instinctively recoiled for bringing back to me my ancestral Baghdadi bubbas whose bony grip I imagined extending from beyond the grave to claim me. I found wimmin whimsical, while the righteous feminism, symbolized by the buzz-cut, bulldozing lesbians who strode across campus felt to me needlessly tyrannical. I joined a consciousness-raising group where I cried each week and railed against my disciplinarian father, but there I was made to feel bad for being femme and for sleeping with men. Also for using tampons—slated as just more evidence of self-hate since they mimicked the penetrative prerogative of the penis (others, more self-aware than I, preferred moon cups­, or so they said).

Mostly, I resented the way any kind of “feminine” logic was anchored in women’s flesh, which became the ground soil for flourishing dualisms: women were “naturally” more peaceful, men aggressive; women listened, men opined; and while men gazed, women submitted to being seen, then shaped themselves into what men wanted to see. “If women ruled the world, they wouldn’t have made such a hash of things.” This was the antiwar cry of the day, heard everywhere. And so it went. I can’t have been the only feminist in my generation concealing a knee-jerk repugnance toward everything Greenham Common.

Or indeed, a distaste for the high-flown French feminist philosophy that situated female subjectivity in the groin. With my troublesome gynecology, problematic even in youth, I sought escape into the pain-free and unbloodied immateriality of the pure (and as it turned out, male-colonized) mind. I had no time for theorists such as Luce Irigaray, who seemed to think it was a good thing if a woman’s voice, her thinking, her female jouissance, was essentially vaginal. “In her end is her beginning,” wrote Irigaray in This Sex Which Is Not One, picturing a female subjectivity that perpetually revolves around itself, its edges never ending, lips always touching, and at its center, a nothing.

It is not uncommon these days to hear women castigate themselves for internalizing male judgement—see Claire Vaye Watkins’s essay “On Pandering” or Olivia Sudjic’s Exposure. So many of us have allowed a male judge or jury or godlike father the right to enthrone themselves inside our heads. But I also have a righteous second-waver kicking ass inside my head, perpetually telling me how to be a better feminist. She doesn’t shave, or even wash much: she’s not a pleaser. She slobs around the house in her dressing gown for much of the day, grazes at the fridge door, neglects her family’s needs, her mothering duties and her daughterly duties, and justifies all of it in the cause of furthering women’s interests. This is the feminist who wins the day when I am writing and I don’t always like her. But she has earned the platform because for a long time she pushed back when the miniature judges strutted about, tut-tutting at my failings.

Looking back now, I can’t quite believe she wasn’t more vocal back in the days when I was man-aping. Especially since I never stopped identifying as a feminist. And especially since feminism itself was widely regarded at the new century’s dawn as an artifact of the seventies, quaint as hot pants or glitter-framed specs, while the girl power of the nineties looked like little more than a marketing ploy. Still, my sweaty, snarly, stompy avatar was ready to bring me back to myself when I was lost. Emptied out by menopause, my sentences thwarted, she reminded me that I could not, after all, escape biology. Even if it was not exactly a female biology I was now reckoning with, but rather a nonbiology or mirror-image biology, one that substituted a set of curious absences for the politically (oftentimes physically) bothersome presence of femaleness.

It bears repeating that if aging brought with it an unexpected inheritance of undreamed of and unwanted experiences—which, with only the old repertoire to hand, I had no language to frame—it also placed me beyond reproductive life, if not in fact beyond the body. I was now on nodding terms with the barren woman, the bitter woman, the empty vessel, the widow, and the crone, all of them singular types who converged upon an archetype almost as repugnant to feminists as to anyone else: the spent woman, the woman whose purpose is no longer evident, whose use value has expired. The woman whose very existence requires justifying. It represents (I represent) the stony ground on which nothing ever seeds. In fact, you can scatter any amount of seed upon this ground and nothing seminal will ever take root. What kind of subjectivity dwells in this desert terrain?

I hadn’t a clue. But I hadn’t a choice either. If I was going to give adequate testimony of menopause then I would have to write from inside of this altered state, rerouting my thinking via a body consciousness that had broken free of rules and rhythms and gone rogue. Instead of pretending that there was no crisis of the self I would write directly into the crisis, attending closely to my anomalous symptomology and sticking fast with that feeling of being unmoored. Here was a manner of self-witnessing that, oddly enough, already had correlates in other guises. The outsider looking in, the ingénue delivering dispatches from the frontline, the anthropological participant-observer, the existential voyager: all of these tropes fit with my field-noting agenda.

One thing was clear: the male voice I had earlier ventriloquized, with its unitary, forward-pointing, linear intent, wasn’t going to cut it when it came to exploring my traumatized state of lack (hormonal lack, the absence of a reproductive identity, the profoundly alienating experience of sleep deprivation). It was too assertive to dwell inside the gaps of broken language and explore the silences therein, or brave the void and bring absence into presence.

Just as you can feel enlarged by giving things away, you can build confidence, in writerly terms, by being humble. I don’t mean posing as humble, hedging everything you say with possibly and perhaps. I mean actually reveling in not knowing. I mean interrupting yourself and entertaining contrariness, letting your thoughts wander then circle back upon themselves, trail off and fragment. For me, it was a liberation to let it all hang out, put it all on the page. And that went for the body, too, in all its menopausal, aging complexity.

Like Woolf, I had been forced to acknowledge that at every turn “the body intervenes,” but does not define us. It exposes us, blindsides us, pleads with us, pleasures, pains, arouses, and depresses us, sways our judgement and shapes our sense of self. Which is to say our bodily self-consciousness has a hand in forming our subjectivity. Writers can heed it or not, though I find I’m increasingly drawn to those who do—Adrienne Rich, Maggie Nelson, Carmen Maria Machado, and many others. The point is that in pain or grief, love, rage, or illness, in hormonal extremes or sleepless desperation, the body gifts us a window onto the world that changes what we see by virtue of shifting how we see it.

Audre Lorde, so passionate about and precise in using language, so committed to its world-creating potential, celebrated the notion of feeling our way into knowledge rather than thinking ourselves into it. She understood that the body knows, and that this knowing, calling on skin and gut and nerves, ears, eyes, and tongue, is individual and particular, not categorically gendered. I like to think of this knowing as a “somatic sensibility,” and these days I actively cultivate it. Not just because it gifts us a sensory idiom (“more primitive, more sensual, more obscene,” just as Woolf envisaged) but because it carves out a place for writing that jars, disrupts, and disorientates, just like the experiences it inscribes. I can’t think of anything more radically feminist than to return to the body, not as an acted upon thing, or a passively gendered substrate, but as an agent, and to use it to cross-question what it is to be female.

 

A version of this essay appears in Trauma: Writing about Art and Mental Health (Dodo Ink, 2021).  Marina Benjamin’s most recent books, The Middlepause (Catapult/Scribe 2016) and Insomnia (Catapult/Scribe 2018) were published in the UK, U.S., and Australia, and translated into eight languages. Marina works as a senior editor at Aeon magazine. In 2020, she edited Garden Among Fires: A lockdown anthology, published by Dodo Ink. 

Charm and How to Come By It

The following is Dubravka Ugrešić’s preface to Damion Searls’s new translation of Marshlands , by André Gide, published earlier this month by New York Review Books.

André Gide, 1893. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Why a preface?

Prefaces usually offer the reader a guide to the book before them; they say a few words about the book’s author and place the book in its historical or contemporary literary context. In the pre-Internet age this was a job entrusted to literary experts. Today, with the assistance of the Internet, expertise is no longer considered necessary. I confess, I myself am no expert, arbiter, or competent interpreter of André Gide’s work. I am here merely as a literary interloper and I see it as my task to respond to two questions:

How did this little French book come to be translated into English?Why did I once love this book, do I love it still today, and if I have loved it, why do I think others will?

*

Literature as Seduction

I made the acquaintance of Damion Searls—who has translated Marshlands into English—in 1998 at a literary event in Vienna. Our encounter was fleeting and superficial. Four years later, when he was on a Fulbright, Damion turned up in Amsterdam. This was our chance to spend more time together.

True book lovers—writers, critics, translators, publishers, and readers—can be identified (or at least I identify them!) by the way they allow themselves to be “seduced” by books. If the art of the word, meaning literature, is a form of interhuman communication, then “seduction” is one of the forms this communication takes. Literary seduction doesn’t know or respect age, nor national, ethnic, racial, gender, or cultural boundaries. Yet finding a true friend, a book lover, is a true rarity.

In Isaac Babel’s story “In the Basement,” the narrator is a poor secondary-school student (the young Babel) from the Odessa Jewish ghetto who seeks to enchant Mark Borgman, a young man of his own age, by reciting Shakespeare to him, and in the end Shakespeare’s verses serve as a smoke screen behind which Babel tries, and fails, to hide the penury, brutality, and tragicomedy of his real-life environment, so different from Borgman’s.

Thrilled by the discovery that they share the same passions, book lovers, peacock-like, fan their verbal feathers. It just so happened that I mentioned Marshlands to Damion, and probably said along the way that it is my favorite book, which was certainly not true then, nor is it now. There is no one single favorite book for a bona fide lover of literature.

Be that as it may, I slipped the quote “Tityrus smiled” into Pose for Prose, my first book of stories, as if it were one of those ritual Christmas loafs or cakes with a ducat baked in it for good luck. There is also a line in Lend Me Your Character, a collection of stories, that hints at my romance with Marshlands. Writer–book lovers aim to seduce their readers and listeners with books by other writers, the ones who seduced them as readers. Some among them will hide their literary “affairs” and eradicate all trace, while others will openly flaunt them, and yet others (ah, human frailty!) will fabricate theirs. Many aren’t even aware of their literary “affairs.” The Attic, a short novel by the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš, is strikingly reminiscent of Marshlands. Perhaps Kiš succumbed briefly to youthful literary transgressions and fell gloriously victim to literary seduction.

*

The Workers’ Library

There are many details I never would have recalled had I not come back to revisit this novel. I realized, for instance, that I don’t have a copy of the actual book of Marshlands in my Amsterdam home library. Instead, what I found was a tattered photocopy of an age-old Yugoslav edition. The paper of the photocopy is coarse to the touch, you can’t find this grade of paper anymore; the translation is awful, which only contributes to the charm that radiates from the little book; the stamp on the first page of the book shows it was borrowed from the Workers’ Library in Zagreb. The Workers’ Library, I should say, is long gone, as are workers, and workers’ culture, nor is there any of the respect for workers that socialist society so earnestly promoted. Over many of the pages of the Yugoslav edition of Marshlands slinks the faded stamp of the Workers’ Library, which, along with the text of Marshlands and the reader’s sense of playfulness, gives an additional fillip to the read. This is particularly true of the dialogue between the narrator and his friends, which repeats several times and in several versions throughout the book …

“So!” he said. “Hard at work?”

“I am writing Marshlands,” I replied.

“What’s that?”

“A book.”

“Will I like it?”

“No.”

“Too intellectual?”

“Too boring.”

“Why write it then?”

“If I don’t, who will?”

“I see, more personal confessions.”

“Hardly any.”

“Well what’s it about then?”

At the end of the book we find: “Table of the Most Remarkable Sentences in Marshlands.” The list is very modest.

Page 9. “ ‘So!’ he said. ‘Hard at work?’ ”

Page 80. “ ‘Once you take up an idea, you have to carry it through to the end.’ ”

Then follows a page on which space has been left blank. It is meant for the reader. (“Given the prevalence of personal preferences, we leave the job of completing this page to each individual reader.”) And here, in the empty space, denying readers the chance to introduce their own favorite sentence, an unknown librarian stamped the wavery Workers’ Library stamp. And so it was that the anonymous librarian inadvertently added yet another possible interpretation to Marshlands.

Gide’s Marshlands was published in 1895, while Goncharov’s novel Oblomov came out in 1859. (Might this truncated numerical palindrome, 59/95, have brought the two books into some sort of “fateful” link?) Marshlands could be a short French version of the Russian Oblomov. Oblomov is a Russian nobleman, a person who prefers his bed to the challenges of real life. Gide’s narrator in Marshlands is a writer whose qualms about writing persist for an unhealthily long time (“Marshlands is the story of someone who does not understand life, who writhes and worries for having believed in anything except the one thing needful”), leaving the reader to wonder whether this work is a small-scale French take on Oblomov.

Imagine for a moment an American edition of Marcel Proust through which sprints a stamp advertising Coca-Cola, or a Chinese edition of Walt Whitman through which creep the sayings of Mao Zedong. Whatever the case, the detail with the Workers’ Library stamp is not why I have been carrying this tattered photocopy of Marshlands with me my whole life. As I have moved around the world I have left behind many important books. So why did this unsightly photocopy settle down in my Amsterdam library? I don’t know, nor will I ever know.

As far as translator Damion Searls is concerned, apparently he chose as his favorite the sentence “Once you take up an idea, you have to carry it through to the end,” by adding his translation of Marshlands to the long list of his published translations, nearly two decades after our conversation.

*

Canonical and “Wild” Literature

When I was first a student of comparative literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science in Zagreb, Marshlands was one of my favorite books. The ducats, the quotes I baked into my early books of prose, make that abundantly clear. Why wasn’t I more prudent? With sharper intellectual acumen? I could have spiked my text with quotes from more respectable writers, like James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, or J. L. Borges. The last of these, Borges, was the fad of my literary generation, mainly among the boys. The boys dashed onto the pitch of the Croatian literature of the day as if they were a soccer team with J. L. Borges as their coach, and dubbed themselves the Croatian Borges Boys, drawing the attention of the literary community. Indeed, they played in one or two lackluster literary championships and then quickly succumbed to the domestic variety of commercial genre literature. At the time (in the seventies), among the various Yugoslav cultural centers, at least as far as literary taste and trends go, the differences were far greater then than they are now, postwar, when the writers’ communities are part of entirely separate, distinct countries. The globalized literary marketplace tends to homogenize literary taste, and in this, by and large, it succeeds.

*

The Belgrade literary world, or at least one small part of it, developed a taste at one time for outlandish characters and narrators, for outsiders, malcontents on the fringes of society, “fools,” “wild people.” The filmmaker Dušan Makavejev dedicated his movie Innocence Unprotected (1968) to Dragoljub Aleksić, a gymnast who made a movie about himself at the beginning of World War II. The narrator of the novel My Family’s Role in the World Revolution (1969), by Bora Ćosić, is a young boy who looks at the world around him with the disconcerting eyes of a child. Milovan Danojlić wrote Kako je Dobrislav protrčao kroz Jugoslaviju (How Dobrislav Ran Across Yugoslavia, 1977) about an amateur writer who travels through Yugoslavia, selling his amateur books. Not only is the novel filled with touching sympathy for “colleagues,” it blurs the lines between “established” and “unestablished” writers. Moma Dimić wrote Šumski građanin (Forest Citizen), a documentary novel about a similar protagonist, a flesh-and-blood person, an outsider, a renegade, a “fool,” while the cult Yugoslav film director Slobodan Šijan made the film How I Was Systematically Destroyed by an Idiot (1983) based on Dimić’s novel. Only at a time such as this could Stanoje Ćebić, a metalworker by training, author of the book Zašto sam postao vo (Why I Became an Ox), become a media star, albeit briefly. Ćebić also appeared in Kolt 15 GAP, a unique documentary about himself.

Today, the atmosphere that existed in the individual cultural circles of those days is difficult to access and all but defies translation, even in the very locations where it ruled. If the “cultural products” of those years haven’t been completely consigned to oblivion as nonrepresentative, at least they have been sidelined to the niche of cultural excess. Reception for “outlandish” protagonists and their authentic voices was not a cynical pastime of the privileged in culture; instead, it was an assault on the canon, on the personalities of the authors who had been enthroned as the “fathers,” the omniscient moral, intellectual, and aesthetic arbiters, the writers of pompous national works with pompous literary heroes, thereby constructing an unwritten literary norm. This was, of course, a blow to the authority of the then-ruling aesthetic values by rendering them ridiculous. So there you have it: Marshlands, the book André Gide himself described as a sotie, resonated with my newly awakened aesthetic receptiveness for the minor, the fringe, the anticanonic, the outsider, and the subversive.

Why am I bothering the reader with obscure data from a literary provincial backwater? But doesn’t Marshlands itself come to the American market from the obscure backwaters of Europe? There isn’t just one reader out there in the world. Among readers there are those intrigued by obscure data. These details expose a hidden dynamic within the national literatures, which is of little interest to those penning national literary histories. These details furthermore disclose the ways books travel through the world literary field. World literature doesn’t always move along the regular routes anointed books travel from point A to point B. World literature also exists thanks in part to the chaos of traffic when one travels to New York via Baghdad, Barcelona (not the one in Spain, but the one in Venezuela!), Singapore, and Kiev … True, there is more traffic today than ever, so books from Barangaroo find their way to New York, yet at the same time the pathways are more “set” in terms of traffic; the mighty literary marketplace plays the role of literary traffic control. This is why, right now in Barcelona, Singapore, Kiev, and New York, readers are reading the same titles, which have been translated into the local languages. This “totalitarian” constellation is being sabotaged by book lovers, bookworms. Led by their passion for books, writers, translators, readers, editors, and the many others who take part in this act of literary sabotage tunnel their way using secret underground passageways, excavate displaced values, dust off forgotten books. Their passion is their mission.

*

Charm and How to Come By It

André Gide is one of the preeminent authors of European Modernism. He was a prolific writer, whose novels (The Immoralist, The Counterfeiters, The Vatican Cellars or Lafcadio’s Adventures, The Pastoral Symphony) and many other texts are firmly built into the canon of French and world literature. And the fact that Gide’s varied opus was honored by the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947 also figures into this.

Yet Marshlands seems to have broken away from Gide’s significant literary opus. Maybe the author himself pushed Marshlands to break away by describing it as a sotie, the old carnival genre, a street-fair farce, a Feast of Fools. We should add that Marshlands is not the only sotie Gide wrote. The brief description that qualifies Marshlands as a satire of Parisian salon literary life at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century is not entirely inaccurate.

But Marshlands is more than that.

It is a book that broke away, in a sense, from the opus of its author. We could easily proclaim Marshlands a genre-bending book and add it to the family of slim satirical novels about artists, which were published later, whether or not they were inspired by Gide. Two of these, for instance, are The Works and Days of Svistonov (1929), by Konstantin Vaginov, and Life and Work of the Composer Foltýn (1939), by Karel Čapek. In all of them dwells Tityrus, who “sits careless in the shade.”

Yet Marshlands is more than that.

I’m guessing that André Gide didn’t stop to think whether Marshlands would outlive him. This is a role he’d intended for his other, more important books. It would be hard to imagine that this slim volume could become Gide’s trademark work. The possibility for this, however, remains open. For, who knows, maybe with Marshlands Gide laid the explosives under his canonic work, so others would do so after his death. (“I like every book to include its own refutation, but hidden. It should not sit atop its idea, afraid to look it in the face. I like it to include what denies it, to self-destruct.”)

Yet Marshlands is so much more than that.

Some books travel, others stay in place. Some end up coated in the dust of oblivion, others are always read and reread, though despite this they remain snared in their time like flies in amber. Then there are the rare breakaway books that abandon their author, home, context, time, books with wanderlust that slip almost illegally across borders, move from place to place, from one random reader to another. What is it in them that makes them so eternally appealing? Wherein lies the secret of their stamina? Why can Marshlands so readily be seen as an exemplar of literary postmodernism? And while we might find some acclaimed contemporary writers easy to place in the nineteenth century, not so much, perhaps, by what they have chosen to write about as by the way they went about the writing, Marshlands is a surprisingly youthful book. If we were to assign another author’s name to it and claim it was the debut novel of one of our contemporaries, few readers would spot the switch.

No, Marshlands is more than that.

What sets Marshlands apart from so many other books is the elusive quality it has, something novels (and people) rarely possess. That quality is charm. Some books seduce us with their importance, others with their pomposity, yet others with their impressive reach, or tense narration, or pertinence. Every author knows, or seems to know, which of these is his or her strength. Readers know, or seem to know, their literary tastes.

So what would literary charm be?

Reading Marshlands again, after so many years, I was reminded of another book that erased its author and his intentions to remain inscribed in the history of literature as a “serious” author. The author is A. A. Milne, and his masterpieces are Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. Quite possibly, the literary destiny of an exceptional book derives from a mistake. (“No one seems to understand that, having done a thing, what one wants is precisely to do something else.”) Although Milne’s book clearly is written for children, its most numerous and devoted readers are adult book lovers. Hamlet? Raskolnikov? Leopold Bloom? Where on the list of celebrated literary characters can we find Eeyore?! Eeyore, the woeful donkey from Winnie-the-Pooh, is one of my favorite literary figures. Eeyore ends up tailless and homeless. Eeyore is an outcast, a skeptic, a would-be philosopher, a grouch (or a loser, as we’d say today). Eeyore is a serious literary character whose tears touch the readers’ empathy and spark laughter. The narrator of Marshlands is a woeful writer (a loser, as we’d say today) who keeps a diary of his life (or, better said, his absence of a life) and works on his novel, which also happens to have the title Marshlands. The friends who surround him are reminiscent of Milne’s stuffed-animal characters, and the narrator of Marshlands is strikingly reminiscent of Eeyore. (“We are an indefinite mix of laughter and melancholy, like a partly cloudy day. Having cried just once, our laughter is not believed; having joked just once, we are no longer taken seriously.”)

But, nevertheless, isn’t Marshlands more than that?

To be honest, I don’t know. But I do know that now is the time for me to retreat. I realize that by seeking the same sort of literary attention for the character of Raskolnikov as for the characters of the self-named writer in Marshlands and Eeyore in all his plushness, I am undermining the established hierarchy and raising questions about my own literary credibility. In other words, I’m sawing through the branch I’m sitting on. So now it’s up to you, dear reader, to negotiate this for yourself and judge whether or not the literary coordinates I have offered can be of help. Happy reading!

—Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać

 

Dubravka Ugrešić is the author of seven works of fiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, and six collections of essays. Her most recent book is The Age of Skin: Essays. In 2016 she received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for her body of work.

Ellen Elias-Bursać translates fiction and nonfiction from the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. Her translation of David Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer was given the 2006 ALTA National Translation Award. Her book Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of-War was given the Mary Zirin Prize in 2015. She is the president of the American Literary Translators Association.

From Marshlands , by André Gide, translated from the French by Damion Searls, published by New York Review Books this month. Copyright © 2021 by Dubravka Ugrešić; translation by Ellen Elias-Bursać.

Redux: Her Ticking Wrist

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Kazuo Ishiguro. Photo: Frankie Fouganthin. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...), via Wikimedia Commons.

This week at The Paris Review, the clock is ticking. Read on for Kazuo Ishiguro’s Art of Fiction interview, Tess Gallagher’s short story “The Leper,” and Mary Jo Bang’s poem “Mystery at Manor Close.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full sixty-seven-year digital archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!).

 

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction No. 196
Issue no. 184 (Spring 2008)

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a writing routine?

ISHIGURO

I usually write from ten o’clock in the morning until about six o’clock. I try not to attend to emails or telephone calls until about four o’clock.

 

Photo: CGP Grey. via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...), via Wikimedia Commons.

 

The Leper
By Tess Gallagher
Issue no. 96 (Summer 1985)

But today, just as we began to settle into the relative comfort of this routine, the phone rang. It was my friend Jerome, a sculptor. He is a man who treads an uneasy path between fear and despair, and someone who could ill afford to be calling me at two o’clock in the afternoon on a weekday when telephone rates are at their peak.

 

Photo: Illymarry. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...), via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Mystery at Manor Close
By Mary Jo Bang
Issue no. 186 (Fall 2008)

—Quickly Brenda stepped aside and tripped up the Biology Mistress.

She puts her ticking wrist to her ear and hears a house
Full of Tock from the clock that is lacking a stem.
On the face it says Mickey and Mouse.
(All of which comes from within.)

She makes a wish: that the Heather who left her
In stormy weather will find herself
In the mire of desires that cannot be easily realized.
To your health, she says, and sticks out her foot

To feel the fire in its place …

 

And to read more from the Paris Review archives, make sure to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-seven years’ worth of archives. Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!).

Reading the Artifacts After the Capitol Riot

Portrait of Dalip Singh Saud by Jon R. Friedman (Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives)

As curators search the Capitol Building, cataloging and repairing the damage done by the January 6 riot, I read for news of a painting of Dalip Singh Saund that I saw two years ago when I visited Washington. On the landing of the East Grand Staircase, the portrait’s richly marbled frame is adorned with symbols of Saund’s immigration, education, and career. A plaque below the painting commemorates his historic election as the “First Asian American in Congress”—he represented California from 1957 to 1963. As reports emerge of how mob vandalism targeted, in particular, certain racialized objects within the U.S. Capitol, we need to reckon with the artifacts within its walls.

Images from the January 6 riot make clear the white supremacist terms upon which entry into the U.S. Capitol is premised. While these scenes are new and unprecedented, they are not an aberration. Those who make a study of U.S. empire, enslavement, genocide, segregation, and voter suppression know that the Capitol represents the illusion of democracy. To the extent that the rioters stand for antidemocratic, fascist, and racist principles, it is not surprising to see them inside the Capitol Building. They are a feature of the system. This is their house, and they write on its walls with impunity.

People of color have learned to navigate the terms and conditions of power in the United States. The complexity of this negotiation is what drew me as a literary critic to Saund’s life and work, and to his character in particular. He has remarkable ideological appeal. After his election, Saund was deployed as a prototype of model minority and audiences around the world were regaled with the news of his unlikely election, even as the civil rights struggle gained momentum and the Little Rock crisis came under international scrutiny. More recently, politicians as vastly different as Bobby Jindal and Barack Obama have extolled the figure of Saund in a tradition of heroic individualism and upward mobility. Such deployments of Saund do troubling cultural work, for they promulgate the ideology of the American dream while obscuring racist economic and social structures that constrain the majority of minorities, immigrants, and other working-class people.

One gray chilly morning in 2019, I met Felicia Wivchar inside the south entrance to the Capitol Building to see the portrait. The Office of Art and Archives for the U.S. House of Representatives, where Wivchar works as associate curator, commissioned artist Jon Friedman to paint the portrait, and installed it in 2007. Though the painting is not large, it is captivating.

Portrait of Dalip Singh Saud by Jon R. Friedman (Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives)

Luminaries such as Mahatma Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln appear in the frame, along with maps, flags, and monuments that serve to chart Saund’s triumphal journey from Punjab to California to Washington. Symbols of the “East” become progressively Western from top to bottom, as an oxcart gives way to a tractor and the Sikh khanda is succeeded by the University of California seal. The painting recruits Saund (and its viewers) to the American dream. It captures a fantasy of racial assimilation, one that solicits immigrants to the United States; a fantasy that the January 6 riot throws into sharp relief. Saund’s racial difference appears to be incorporated into the United States: his turbaned image along the border is overshadowed by the much larger image of him at the center, his hair cut close and his body enveloped in Western clothes. Despite his visibly dark appearance, his suit and tie seem to fit like a second skin, as if to suggest, dubiously, that the mantle of Americanization can be assumed as easily as new clothes.

It is impossible for me not to admire Saund, who beat all odds to enter the inner sanctum of U.S. government. The portrait transmits a sense of belonging to me. It evokes a personal connection to Saund, with whom I share some of the tropes and touchstones of the immigrant’s journey. He was born in Chhajjalwaddi, not far from where my maternal grandparents lived in a high-walled compound in Amritsar, flanked by narrow gullies, where my grandmother called across to her neighbors as she watched for my grandfather bicycling home, their unshorn hair marking their adherence to a faith Saund also shared.

The catalog of Saund’s successes during a period of racial violence and nativist turmoil is impressively long. After immigrating to the United States in 1920, he studied agriculture and mathematics at U.C. Berkeley. He then moved to the Imperial Valley and became a successful businessman. He campaigned for people of South Asian descent to be allowed to become naturalized citizens, and nearly as soon as it was possible, in 1949, became one himself. He served as a county judge for a time (an election he won twice, after his first win was thrown out because he had been a citizen for less than a year), then went on to beat the considerably more wealthy, well-connected, and renowned aviator and businesswoman Jacqueline Cochran in a nationally publicized congressional campaign. His 1960 autobiography, Congressman from India, lays out his complex and thoughtful political program, committed to a range of social issues from farm subsidies, veterans’ rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and civil rights reform to transnational collaboration and global self-determination.

So far, Saund’s portrait does not appear to be among the artifacts damaged on January 6. News points to racialized targets of vandalism: a photograph of the Dalai Lama was removed, a scroll bearing Chinese characters was ripped up. In fixating on these items, the rioters acted to erase the complex symbology of the Capitol, which has always been more of a bricolage than official histories allow. We know that Black slaves helped build the Capitol. Now Black and Brown workers are scouring it clean. Blanche Kelso Bruce, Shirley Chisholm, Kika de la Garza, and Henry Barbosa González are some of the Black and Brown politicians featured in the Capitol’s art collection, not to mention Black and Indigenous abolitionists, activists, educators, and visionaries like Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Chief Standing Bear, Sojourner Truth, and Sarah Winnemucca. Their legacy is by no means uniform. They span the political spectrum and have varied ideological investments, as Saund’s intermediary role as model minority indicates. Without them, however, the edifice of U.S. democracy as we know it is inconceivable, especially insofar as we honor their push for representative government and their opposition to legislated inequality, racism, and genocide.

As Capitol workers right furniture, repair windows, and remove debris, preservationists are contemplating whether and how to register the marks of last week’s violence. Restoration will not suffice insofar as what is being restored is a status quo that is intolerable to the majority of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and working-class people in the United States and the Global South. In recent months, activist movements including Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, immigrants’ rights, and Indigenous environmental defense have shown us that truly representative government is the work of many hands. The January 6 riot calls us to discover this work within the Capitol Building itself. To read the artifacts is to understand how people of color hold and reshape power, to ask what it means to restore when we must instead rebuild.

 

Swati Rana is assistant professor of English at U.C. Santa Barbara. Her book, Race Characters: Ethnic Literature and the Figure of the American Dream, was recently published by University of North Carolina.