The Paris Review's Blog, page 186

The Phone Call

Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments and seasons before her daughter leaves for college. This essay marks the end of the winter series. The column will return again in March, and then again in the summer.

After driving fifty miles on US 380 to McKinney, I take I-75 south toward the Ridgeview exit. I’m on my way to the cemetery, silk red roses in the passenger seat. In three days, it will be three years since my phone rang at nine twenty on a Saturday morning. My mother, telling me my father was gone.

I take a right toward the cemetery and follow the winding path to the tree. I park beside it.

As the first anniversary of my father’s death approached, my mother asked me to put roses on his grave: “I want him to have them for the day.” She wasn’t well enough to do it herself—the cancer, diagnosed not long after his death, had taken its last turn, though we didn’t know it then. When she died, fourteen months after my father, I swiped through the photos on her phone and found his grave, its mound of funeral flowers. He was buried on the first of February, and the dates on the photographs showed she had driven the hour there on the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth. Disbelief, I imagine, and the need to convince herself it was true.

My father died in the hotel room where my parents were staying in McKinney, Texas. A heart attack at eighty-three. He was gone before my mother could get to the phone. He was gone when the paramedics asked him his name. He was gone when the ambulance rushed away, my mother following in their car to the emergency room.

On the second anniversary of my father’s death, last year, my sixteen-year-old daughter, Indie, and I were at my parent’s house for the final time, packing boxes, going through drawers and closets, watching movers load the furniture we wanted before the estate sale. The day came and went.

I cross the grass to the headstone, the one my parents share. This is the first anniversary I have had the chance to really remember—the daze of a drive Indie and I made on 380 East that Saturday morning, the corners we turned in the ER until we found my mother in the doorway watching for us, my father’s body in the room behind her. I kneel down and press my fingertips to the date: January 28, 2017.

Indie’s at work today, so she’ll come to the cemetery by herself tomorrow. I will not write her grief here, only mine.

My father would—get a paper plate and fill it with Nilla wafers, then grab a knife and spread peanut butter on each one; race popsicle sticks with me in the rush of water along the curb after it rained; play his Jerry Lee Lewis albums loud enough to hear while he was in shower; spin our orange VW bug in the mall parking lot when it snowed (“Don’t tell your mother”); recount the entire plot of the movie he had gone to see by himself; prop his feet on the rubber rails of escalators as we descended, one foot on each side; call me whenever Titanic was on TV; follow me to my car every time I left to go back to college to tell me, “Remember why you’re there”; write me letters on yellow legal-pad pages; drive me to downtown Dallas and walk the 5K route while I ran; ask the piano player in Nordstrom to play “La Vie en Rose”; order a waffle, crisp, bacon, crisp; swim laps at dusk while Indie swam beside him.

Every time I visit the cemetery, I talk to my parents. I look at the tree, and I tell them things. But today, after I remove the poinsettias and walk them down to the dumpster, after I set the roses in the vase and arrange them until I can hear my mother saying, “Pretty,” I stand silent. I think about next year when Indie will be at college, and how, then, everyone will be gone.

I won’t mind being alone. I’ve always felt most myself when I’m by myself, but still, Indie will go in seven months, and her leaving will be another loss in a litany of losses. All of them, one after another. The soon of Indie’s leaving trembles like a last train car.

Across the way, a tractor bounces over the grass to dig a new grave.

Three days from now, on January 28, I will wake while it’s still dark, unable to sleep while the rain slows. I’ll turn over and back again, throwing back the covers, feeling dread. Later, I will sit with Indie at the kitchen table and tell her, “It’s as if I woke up and felt that phone call coming again.” And I will glance at the chair where my father always sat when I say, “The body has a memory.” Indie will nod, tell me she woke up in a cold sweat.

I will not tell her that after I left the cemetery, I drove to the Holiday Inn and Suites on I-75. Or that I pulled into the parking lot and drove around the four-story building and figured out there’s only one entrance to the hotel. Or that I parked, one of a few cars in the lot, and looked in every direction, wondering which one my father took on his last walk. I do not tell her how I stared at the automatic double doors of the entrance.

Instead, I will tell her about the popsicle sticks, the way Dad would count to three before we let them go, the way he ran alongside his stick, shouting, “Come on, my guy! Come on, my guy!” The way I laughed and ran with him.

 

Read earlier installments of  The Last Year  here.

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction. Her writing has been recognized by the Best American Essays and appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Longreads, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine.

An Apartment on Uranus

A montage of the solar system, including the Galilean satellites. Image courtesy of NASA. Map pin courtesy of Kilroy 2525 (CC0) on Wikimedia Commons.

As the years passed, I learned to think of dreams as an integral part of life. There are dreams that, because of their sensory intensity, their realism or precisely their lack of realism, deserve to be introduced into autobiography, just as much as events that were actually lived through. Life begins and ends in the unconscious; the actions we carry out while fully lucid are only little islands in an archipelago of dreams. No existence can be completely rendered in its happiness or its madness without taking into account oneiric experiences. It’s Calderón de la Barca’s maxim reversed: it’s not a matter of thinking that life is a dream, but rather of realizing that dreams are also a form of life. It is just as strange to think, like the Egyptians, that dreams are cosmic channels through which the souls of ancestors pass in order to communicate with us, as to claim, as some of the neurosciences do, that dreams are a “cut-and-paste” of elements experienced by the brain during waking life, elements that return in the dream’s REM phase, while our eyes move beneath our eyelids, as if they were watching. Closed and sleeping, eyes continue to see. Therefore, it is more appropriate to say that the human psyche never stops creating and dealing with reality, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in waking life.

Whereas over the course of the past few months my waking life has been, to use the euphemistic Catalan expression, “good, so long as we don’t go into details,” my oneiric life has had the power of a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. During one of my recent dreams, I was talking with the artist Dominique González-Foerster about my problem of geographic dislocation: after years of a nomadic life, it is hard for me to decide on a place to live in the world. While we were having this conversation, we were watching the planets spin slowly in their orbits, as if we were two giant children and the solar system were a Calder mobile. I was explaining to her that, for now, in order to avoid the conflict that the decision entailed, I had rented an apartment on each planet, but that I didn’t spend more than a month on any one of them, and that this situation was economically and physically unsustainable. Probably because she is the creator of the Exotourisme project, Dominique in this dream was an expert on extraterrestrial real-estate management. “If I were you, I’d have an apartment on Mars and I’d keep a pied-à-terre on Saturn,” she was saying, showing a great deal of pragmatism, “but I’d get rid of the Uranus apartment. It’s much too far away.”

Awake, I don’t know much about astronomy; I don’t have the slightest idea of the positions or distances of the different planets in the solar system. But I consulted the Wikipedia page on Uranus: it is in fact one of the most distant planets from Earth. Only Neptune, Pluto, and the dwarf planets Haumea, Makemake, and Eris are farther away. I read that Uranus was the first planet discovered with the help of a telescope, eight years before the French Revolution. With the help of a lens he himself had made, the astronomer and musician William Herschel observed it one night in March in a clear sky, from the garden of his house at 19 New King Street, in the city of Bath. Since he didn’t yet know if it was a huge star or a tailless comet, they say that Herschel called it “Georgium Sidus,” the Georgian Star, to console King George III for the loss of the British colonies in America: England had lost a continent, but the King had gained a planet. Thanks to Uranus, Herschel was able to live on a generous royal pension of two hundred pounds a year. Because of Uranus, he abandoned both music and the city of Bath, where he was a chapel organist and director of public concerts, and settled in Windsor so that the King could be sure of his new conquest by observing it through a telescope. Because of Uranus, they say, Herschel went mad, and spent the rest of his life building the largest telescope of the eighteenth century, which the English called “the monster.” Because of Uranus, they say, Herschel never played the oboe again. He died at the age of eighty-four: the number of years it takes for Uranus to go around the sun. They say that the tube of his telescope was so wide that the family used it as a dining hall at his funeral.

Uranus is what astrophysicists call a “gas giant.” Made up of ice, methane, and ammonia, it is the coldest planet in the solar system, with winds that can exceed nine hundred kilometers per hour. In short, the living conditions are not especially suitable. So Dominique was right: I should leave the Uranus apartment.

But dream functions like a virus. From that night forward, while I’m awake, the sensation of having an apartment on Uranus increases, and I am more and more convinced that the place I should live is over there.

For the Greeks, as for me in this dream, Uranus was the solid roof of the world, the limit of the celestial vault. Uranus was regarded as the house of the gods in many Greek invocation rituals. In mythology, Uranus is the son that Gaia, the Earth, conceived alone, without insemination or coition. Greek mythology is at once a kind of retro sci-fi story anticipating in a do-it-yourself way the technologies of reproduction and bodily transformation that will appear throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; and at the same time a kitschy TV series in which the characters give themselves over to an unimaginable number of relationships outside the law. Thus Gaia married her son Uranus, a Titan often represented in the middle of a cloud of stars, like a sort of Tom of Finland dancing with other muscle-bound guys in a techno club on Mount Olympus. From the incestuous and ultimately not very heterosexual relationships between heaven and earth, the first generation of Titans were born, including Oceanus (Water), Chronos (Time), and Mnemosyne (Memory) … Uranus was both the son of the Earth and the father of all the others. We don’t quite know what Uranus’s problem was, but the truth is that he was not a good father: either he forced his children to remain in Gaia’s womb, or he threw them into Tartarus as soon as they were born. So Gaia convinced one of her children to carry out a contraceptive operation. You can see in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence the representation that Giorgio Vasari made in the sixteenth century of Chronos castrating his father Uranus with a scythe. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, emerged from Uranus’s amputated genital organs … which could imply that love comes from the disjunction of the body’s genital organs, from the displacement and externalization of genital force.

This form of nonheterosexual conception, cited in Plato’s Symposium, was the inspiration for the German lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs to come up with the word Uranian [Urning] in 1864 to designate what he called relations of the “third sex.” In order to explain men’s attraction to other men, Ulrichs, after Plato, cut subjectivity in half, separated the soul from the body, and imagined a combination of souls and bodies that authorized him to reclaim dignity for those who loved against the law. The segmentation of soul and body reproduces in the domain of experience the binary epistemology of sexual difference: there are only two options. Uranians are not, Ulrich writes, sick or criminal, but feminine souls enclosed in masculine bodies attracted to masculine souls.

This is not a bad idea to legitimize a form of love that, at the time, could get you hanged in England or in Prussia, and that, today, remains illegal in seventy-four countries and is subject to the death penalty in thirteen, including Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran, and Qatar; a form of love that constitutes a common motive for violence in family, society, and police in most Western democracies.

Ulrichs does not make this statement as a lawyer or scientist: he is speaking in the first person. He does not say “there are Uranians,” but “I am a Uranian.” He asserts this, in Latin, on August 18, 1867, after having been condemned to prison and after his books have been banned by an assembly of five hundred jurists, members of the German Parliament, and a Bavarian prince—an ideal audience for such confessions. Until then, Ulrichs had hidden behind the pseudonym “Numa Numantius.” But from that day on, he speaks in his own name, he dares to taint the name of his father. In his diary, Ulrichs confesses he was terrified, and that, just before walking onto the stage of the Grand Hall of the Odeon Theater in Munich, he had been thinking about running away, never to return. But he says he suddenly remembered the words of the Swiss writer Heinrich Hössli, who a few years before had defended sodomites (though not, however, speaking in his own name): “Two ways lie before me,” Hössli wrote, “to write this book and expose myself to persecution, or not to write it and be full of guilt until the day I am buried. Of course I have encountered the temptation to stop writing … But before my eyes appeared the images of the persecuted and the wretched prospect of such children who have not yet been born, and I thought of the unhappy mothers at their cradles, rocking their cursed yet innocent children! And then I saw our judges with their eyes blindfolded. Finally, I imagined my gravedigger slipping the cover of my coffin over my cold face. Then, before I submitted, the imperious desire to stand up and defend the oppressed truth possessed me … And so I continued to write with my eyes resolutely averted from those who have worked for my destruction. I do not have to choose between remaining silent or speaking. I say to myself: speak or be judged!”

Ulrichs writes in his journal that the judges and Parliamentarians seated in Munich’s Odeon Hall cried out, as they listened to his speech, like an angry crowd: End the meeting! End the meeting! But he also notes that one or two voices were raised to say: Let him continue! In the midst of a chaotic tumult, the President left the theater, but some Parliamentarians remained. Ulrichs’s voice trembled. They listened.

But what does it mean to speak for those who have been refused access to reason and knowledge, for us who have been regarded as mentally ill? With what voice can we speak? Can the jaguar or the cyborg lend us their voices? To speak is to invent the language of the crossing, to project one’s voice into an interstellar expedition: to translate our difference into the language of the norm; while we continue, in secret, to practice a strange lingo that the law does not understand.

So Ulrichs was the first European citizen to declare publicly that he wanted to have an apartment on Uranus. He was the first mentally ill person, the first sexual criminal to stand up and denounce the categories that labeled him as sexually and criminally diseased.

He did not say, “I am not a sodomite.” On the contrary, he defended the right to practice sodomy between men, calling for a reorganization of the systems of signs, for a change of the political rituals that defined the social recognition of a body as healthy or sick, legal or illegal. He invented a new language and a new scene of enunciation. In each of Ulrichs’s words addressed from Uranus to the Munich jurists resounds the violence generated by the dualist epistemology of the West. The entire universe cut in half and solely in half. Everything is heads or tails in this system of knowledge. We are human or animal. Man or woman. Living or dead. We are the colonizer or the colonized. Living organism or machine. We have been divided by the norm. Cut in half and forced to remain on one side or the other of the rift. What we call “subjectivity” is only the scar that, over the multiplicity of all that we could have been, covers the wound of this fracture. It is over this scar that property, family, and inheritance were founded. Over this scar, names are written and sexual identities asserted.

On May 6, 1868, Karl Maria Kertbeny, an activist and defender of the rights of sexual minorities, sent a handwritten letter to Ulrichs in which for the first time he used the word homosexual to refer to what his friend called “Uranians.” Against the antisodomy law promulgated in Prussia, Kertbeny defended the idea that sexual practices between people of the same sex were as “natural” as the practices of those he calls—also for the first time—“heterosexuals.” For Kertbeny, homosexuality and heterosexuality were just two natural ways of loving. For medical jurisprudence at the end of the nineteenth century, however, homosexuality would be reclassified as a disease, a deviation, and a crime.

I am not speaking of history here. I am speaking to you of your lives, of mine, of today. While the notion of Uranianism has gone somewhat astray in the archives of literature, Kertbeny’s concepts would become authentic biopolitical techniques of dealing with sexuality and reproduction over the course of the twentieth century, to such an extent that most of you continue to use them to refer to your own identity, as if they were descriptive categories. Homosexuality would remain listed until 1975 in Western psychiatric manuals as a sexual disease. This remains a central notion, not only in the discourse of clinical psychology, but also in the political languages of Western democracies.

When the notion of homosexuality disappeared from psychiatric manuals, the notions of intersexuality and transsexuality appear as new pathologies for which medicine, pharmacology, and law suggest remedies. Each body born in a hospital in the West is examined and subjected to the protocols of evaluation of gender normality invented in the fifties in the United States by the doctors John Money and John and Joan Hampson: if the baby’s body does not comply with the visual criteria of sexual difference, it will be submitted to a battery of operations of “sexual reassignment.” In the same way, with a few minor exceptions, neither scientific discourse nor the law in most Western democracies recognizes the possibility of inscribing a body as a member of human society unless it is assigned either masculine or feminine gender. Transsexuality and intersexuality are described as psychosomatic pathologies, and not as the symptoms of the inadequacy of the politico-visual system of sexual differentiation when faced with the complexity of life.

How can you, how can we, organize an entire system of visibility, representation, right of self-determination, and political recognition if we follow such categories? Do you really believe you are male or female, that we are homosexual or heterosexual, intersexed or transsexual? Do these distinctions worry you? Do you trust them? Does the very meaning of your human identity depend on them? If you feel your throat constricting when you hear one of these words, do not silence it. It’s the multiplicity of the cosmos that is trying to pierce through your chest, as if it were the tube of a Herschel telescope.

Let me tell you that homosexuality and heterosexuality do not exist outside of a dualistic, hierarchical epistemology that aims at preserving the domination of the paterfamilias over the reproduction of life. Homosexuality and heterosexuality, intersexuality and transsexuality do not exist outside of a colonial, capitalist epistemology, which privileges the sexual practices of reproduction as a strategy for managing the population and the reproduction of labor, but also the reproduction of the population of consumers. It is capital, not life, that is being reproduced. These categories are the map imposed by authority, not the territory of life. But if homosexuality and heterosexuality, intersexuality and transsexuality, do not exist, then who are we? How do we love? Imagine it.

Then, I remember my dream and I understand that my trans condition is a new form of Uranism. I am not a man and I am not a woman and I am not heterosexual I am not homosexual I am not bisexual. I am a dissident of the sex-gender system. I am the multiplicity of the cosmos trapped in a binary political and epistemological system, shouting in front of you. I am a Uranian confined inside the limits of techno-scientific capitalism.

Like Ulrichs, I am bringing no news from the margins; instead, I bring you a piece of horizon. I come with news of Uranus, which is neither the realm of God nor the sewer. Quite the contrary. I was assigned a female sex at birth. They said I was lesbian. I decided to self-administer regular doses of testosterone. I never thought I was a man. I never thought I was a woman. I was several. I didn’t think of myself as transsexual. I wanted to experiment with testosterone. I love its viscosity, the unpredictability of the changes it causes, the intensity of the emotions it provokes forty-eight hours after taking it. And, if the injections are regular, its ability to undo your identity, to make organic layers of the body emerge that otherwise would have remained invisible. Here as everywhere, what matters is the measure: the dosage, the rhythm of injections, the order of them, the cadence. I wanted to become unrecognizable. I wasn’t asking medical institutions for testosterone as hormone therapy to cure “gender dysphoria.” I wanted to function with testosterone, to experience the intensity of my desire through it, to multiply my faces by metamorphosing my subjectivity, creating a body that was a revolutionary machine. I undid the mask of femininity that society had plastered onto my face until my identity documents became ridiculous, obsolete. Then, with no way out, I agreed to identify myself as a transsexual, as a “mentally ill person,” so that the medico-legal system would acknowledge me as a living human body. I paid with my body for the name I bear.

By making the decision to construct my subjectivity with testosterone, the way the shaman constructs his with plants, I take on the negativity of my time, a negativity I am forced to represent and against which I can fight only from this paradoxical incarnation, which is to be a trans man in the twenty-first century, a feminist bearing the name of a man in the #MeToo movement, an atheist of the hetero-patriarchal system turned into a consumer of the pharmacopornographic industry. My existence as a trans man constitutes at once the acme of the sexual ancien régime and the beginning of its collapse, the climax of its normative progression and the signal of a proliferation still to come.

I have come to talk to you—to you and to the dead, or rather, to those who live as if they were already dead—but I have come especially to talk to the cursed, innocent children who are yet to be born. Uranians are the survivors of a systematic, political attempt at infanticide: we have survived the attempt to kill in us, while we were not yet adults, and while we could not defend ourselves, the radical multiplicity of life and the desire to change the names of all things. Are you dead? Will they be born tomorrow? I congratulate you, belatedly or in advance.

I bring you news of the crossing, which is the realm of neither God nor the sewer. Quite the contrary. Do not be afraid, do not be excited, I have not come to explain anything morbid. I have not come to tell you what a transsexual is, or how to change your sex, or at what precise instant a transition is good or bad. Because none of that would be true, no truer than the ray of afternoon sun falling on a certain spot on the planet and changing according to the place from which it is seen. No truer than that the slow orbit described by Uranus as it revolves above the Earth is yellow. I cannot tell you everything that goes on when you take testosterone, or what that does in your body. Take the trouble to administer the necessary doses of knowledge to yourself, as many as your taste for risk allows you.

I have not come for that. As my indigenous Chilean mother Pedro Lemebel said, I do not know why I come, but I am here. In this Uranian apartment that overlooks the gardens of Athens. And I’ll stay a while. At the crossroads. Because intersection is the only place that exists. There are no opposite shores. We are always at the crossing of paths. And it is from this crossroad that I address you, like the monster who has learned the language of humans.

I no longer need, like Ulrichs, to assert that I am a masculine soul enclosed in a woman’s body. I have no soul and no body. I have an apartment on Uranus, which certainly places me far from most earthlings, but not so far that you can’t come see me. Even if only in dream …

—Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell

 

Paul B. Preciado is a writer, philosopher, curator, and one of the leading thinkers in the study of gender and sexual politics. He is the author of Pornotopia, for which he was awarded the Sade Prize in France, and other books. He lives in Paris and is Associated Philosopher to the Centre Pompidou.

Charlotte Mandell is an American literary translator. She has translated many works of poetry, fiction, and philosophy from French to English, including work by Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Jules Verne, Guy de Maupassant, Marcel Proust, Maurice Blanchot, Antoine de Baecque, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Jean-Luc Nancy, Matias Énard, and Jonathan Littell.

Excerpted from An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing , by Paul B. Preciado, translated by Charlotte Mandell. Reprinted with permission from Semiotext(e), distributed by The MIT Press. Copyright 2020.

Comics as Poetry

In his column, Line Readings, Ivan Brunetti begins with a close read of a single comics unit—a panel, a page, or a spread—and expands outward to encompass the history of comics, and the world as a whole. 

Comics are often likened to short stories and novels, or (more improbably) animated films, but in a sense they are also a kind of poetry, an incantation beckoning us to enter their world. The simplicity of their superficial concision can reveal surprising density, layers, and multivalence. In a poem, lines might form and fill a stanza, which literally means “room”; and so it is with comics, where panels could likewise be thought of as stanzas. Rows, columns, and/or stair-steps of panels, in turn, structure a page (or an entire story) of comics and give it its particular cadence. Even the simplest grid tattoos its rhythmic structure onto the page.

The one-page story “Jump Shot” by Lynda Barry (1988), an installment of her comic strip series Ernie Pook’s Comeek, comprises, to put it into the simplest, crudest terms, a large square box subdivided into four smaller square boxes. Inside each box is a view into one room, containing just one character, a young girl, in successive moments. This is as elemental as comics get: one character in one space, in one continuous action, spanning just a few panels, all housed within an evenly sectioned grid. However, even an element contains vast inner spaces and subatomic particles elusively whizzing and whirring within it, and this seemingly simple strip is, in fact, quite complex and nuanced. While the name of the young girl is not mentioned here, we nonetheless are invited to see what she sees, imagine what she imagines, and feel what she feels. And amazingly, we do.

How is this accomplished in just four panels? Before we begin reading the strip, we visually absorb the entire story as a whole, and there isn’t much in the way of action: two somewhat static panels, one close-up, and only one panel showing movement. At first glance, it all appears very … small. But is it?

Panel 1: We see a girl looking out a window, indicated with the gestural drawing of curtains, sash, and sill; we also see a hint of a tree and a house in the distance, and the dense hatches suggest that it is night. From the girl’s pose, we can discern that she is rapt with attention, and we readers are likewise tantalized. We, too, want to see what is outside that window. The girl faces to the right, mirroring the direction in which we are reading the strip, and so our eyes effortlessly follow her eyes. We connect the caption box with the character (it hovers above her head, like a thought) and as we read it, we understand that the narrator is the young girl. We are whooshed into the scene.

Breaking it down: “The teenager name of Richard” is in kid-speak, implying that the narrator is a kid younger than a teenager. We know exactly the who, what, when, and where: the girl is in her bedroom, observing Richard, late at night, shooting baskets alone on the corner, specifically, “our” corner. This is how kids would refer to their own block, but the “our” also suggests—gently, conspiratorially—that we readers are also kids living on this same block. The use of the second person (“you can watch”) is a further invitation to the reader to be a direct participant in the story, not a mere spectator. Note that we “can” watch him, another invitation; we are not actually forced to watch, as he does not exist as a drawing in the story. The words and the girl’s body language are what allow us to imagine that we, with her, are watching Richard. This first panel jam-packs an impressive amount of narrative detail: the setting, characters, and point of view are established with economy, authenticity, subtlety, originality, and grace.

Panel 2:  Having clearly established the scene, the artist is able to shift and vary the visuals in this panel, which differs from the others in several respects: it offers a close-up view of the character lying down, she faces up and not left, and her eyes are closed; she and we are going inward. Moreover, this is the lightest panel, the other panels getting darker and darker as the night progresses, indicated with ever-heavier hatching in the final two panels. The thinnest lines appear here in panel 2, cascading in a soft, enveloping glissando of hatches, the overall effect being that this is the most “internal” of the four panels, the girl lost in revelry. The language becomes more poetic as well, with onomatopoeia (“ping ping”) and the synaesthetic blending of movement and sound (we “hear” the walking, running, and throwing). A stunning choice by the artist: the girl, and we readers, never see this “perfect hook shot” but are left to imagine it. The words do not illustrate the picture; rather, they create empathy by merging our mind’s eye with the girl’s.

Panel 3: Now our eye has to shift diagonally down and to the left. Some sleight of hand occurs during that brief transition: the word “you” disappears from the narration. The dividing wall between reader and narrative has disappeared. We have been transported and are “there,” fully present, experiencing this specific moment, with this character, in this room. The rush of expressive verbs in the caption is ideally suited to this, the most active panel. The girl’s arms flail wildly, imitatively trying to keep pace with the quickly moving Richard. Again, we do not need to see Richard, because both the energetic hatches and playful words sketch him in for us: for example, the sequence/block of words “bounce, bounce, bounce, stop” even resembles, e.e. cummings style, the very action it describes. Indeed, this caption is a torrent of pure poetry, rendered in the rich, unpredictable language of children: “the fast no-sound,” the insertion of the word “pause,” the underlined “wham-wham,” the funny whispered swear at the end.

Panel 4: This final panel in some ways recalls the first: a midshot of the character looking out the window, this time with hands instead of arms perched on the sill, but the reader is slightly closer to her. The unusual objective-case-gerundive construction (I don’t pretend to be a grammarian) continues: “him whispering” from the previous panel is followed by “him jumping” and then builds to “him jumping high and turning.” We conclude with some charmingly hyperbolic math (“a thousand million bugs”) and the ecstatic repetition of “wild, wild, wild.” This panel feels silent, otherworldly: Richard has transformed into a being of swirling energy, at one with nature.

In this self-contained short comic, the girl is under Richard’s spell, and we are under Lynda Barry’s spell. We need not have lived this exact moment; we have likely had similar moments of immersive intensity burned into our memory. The artist conjures, with humor and without fuss, a heightened awareness, an internal response to the external world, and a shared experience. Moreover, the drawing hand is always visible, in its movement, so the linework is never neutral, not even in the panel borders, reinforcing a sense of intimacy and vulnerability.

The byline is listed as 1988, but the action could be taking place in 1968 or 1998, yesterday or tomorrow, or at the very moment of reading. Drawings are time-consuming to produce and thus inevitably show us a form of “then,” but through the ineffable magic of cartooning (or, more effably put, through drawings arranged in a deliberate sequence), the audience is lured in and transported to a “now.” The specificity of language, mood, and sensation leads us to assume that this comic might be a re-created memory, or at least partially rooted in a memory, an adult convincingly tapping into their childhood while simultaneously allowing us to tap into ours. Part of Barry’s genius is that she found the porous center wall between autobiography and fiction (what she has humorously but accurately termed “autobiofictionagraphy”). One might roughly imagine a Venn diagram with “literature” as the overlap between two larger twin circles, autobiography and fiction. Now imagine two eggs, over easy, and a fork joyfully breaking them up, letting the yolks run where they may, until we have a gooey, delicious mess: Barry’s process is the swipe of toast that soaks it all up.

The four-panel strip is the classic format of daily funnies, employed countless times to the point of generic-ness: ubiquitous, invisible. Setup, development, repetition, then punch line. Bounce, bounce, bounce, stop. All the better if the stop is somewhere unexpected. Someone like Ernie Bushmiller (artist of Nancy), the quintessential comics technician, precisionist supreme, could wring something surreal from this basic formula by revealing the strangeness latent within mundanity. We are grounded by rigidity, repetition, and predictability, and then we are just as quickly disarmed. Charles Schulz eventually modified this formula with his strip Peanuts, forging a more complex variation: setup, development, punch line, and in the final panel, a lingering existential continuation, essentially serving as a second (if sometimes melancholy) punch line. The strip from September 1, 1960, exemplifies how much story, characterization, and emotion can be uncoiled from the cartoon shorthand of doodle, balloon, and squiggle.

Ernie Pook’s Comeek was drawn by Barry from 1979–2008, and at its peak appeared in seventy alternative (typically weekly) newspapers nationwide. Along the way, the strip has been collected into books (The Greatest of Marlys is an essential volume, reissued in 2016 by Drawn & Quarterly, who is now publishing Barry’s ouvre, including her newest work). It’s impossible to list here Barry’s multitude of projects, which span memoir, graphic novel, regular ol’ novel, playwriting, radio, public speaking, creative workshops, teaching, and several innovative drawn-written-collaged pedagogical guides. She was deservedly awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019.

In the early part of the previous century, comic strips were one of the main selling points of newspapers. At midcentury, weekly/alternative papers allowed cartoonists to address adult concerns more directly and frankly. In 1956, Jules Feiffer began his hugely influential satirical strip (Feiffer) for the Village Voice, the first book collection of which, Sick Sick Sick, has a wonderfully rhythmic title. Feiffer dispensed with drawing panel borders, simply implying the grid’s presence; no small feat, as the phantom grid structure is always clear. Lynda Barry’s work often appeared alongside that of her friend and contemporary, Matt Groening, who might use one panel, nine, or fifty, alternating between minimalism and maximalism. The constraints of working within a finite space (paper also being a finite resource) could be liberating: cartoonists such as Mark Alan Stamaty condensed and concentrated content while experimenting riotously with structure.

Alas, many newspapers, including weekly papers, have disappeared, and others have largely (and pragmatically) migrated online. Comics may once have been rabbit holes located on finite, tactile newsprint pages, but today we spend most of our time peering through black holes anyway: infinitely deep, interlinked screens. Will print-based static compositions eventually become a quaint thing of the past? Will a new form emerge in their wake?

Barry has often cited Bil Keane’s comic strip The Family Circus as a refuge, beacon, and inspiration. As a child, she could escape into its small, circular, ink-on-paper world, where there existed a more functional, stable existence, a welcoming place to belong and perhaps feel a little less weird, less judged. Barry bestows upon all of us, readers and artists alike, a similar gift. This is from her most recent book, Making Comics: “Stories that lend themselves to comics can be found in a certain kind of remembering I sometimes call an image. It’s a sort of living snapshot, the kind of memory you can turn around in.” I am reminded of her strip “Motion Picture” (also from 1988, also worthy of an article), wherein a magnifying glass lightly shaken over an old photo creates an undulating picture, and “time can secretly come back to life.”

 

 

Ivan Brunetti is a professor at Columbia College Chicago, the author of Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice and Comics: Easy as ABC, and the editor of both volumes of An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories. His drawings occasionally appear in the New Yorker, among other publications.

The Other Billy Collins

William Collins (1721-1759)

Let me tell you something. The eighteenth century was just straight up not a good time for poetry. Of course, there are exceptions; we’re talking about a hundred years (or, if you’re in graduate school, we’re talking about 160 years). Still, the principle is essentially sound. 1700–1800: bad poetry.

Well, “bad.” Better say unreadable. Some inventive genius could probably set up a pay schedule where the big eighteenth-century poets get their fair share of huffin’-and-puffin’ adjectives. But adjectives aside, the desire to read the stuff is small, vanishingly small.

It wasn’t a bad century for prose. Swift, Fielding, Sterne, Johnson, Gibbon, Boswell. Or zoom in close: Have you ever looked at Elizabeth Carter’s translation of Epictetus? Or Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters? Anybody today’d be damn proud to be compared to any of those cats. Whereas, if somebody compares your poetry to that of Thomas Gray, you are being made fun of.

So why in the world do I read eighteenth-century poetry. Am I a pervert? Do I like things that should not be liked? Answer: I’m no different from you, when it comes to taste. The difference between us is I’m interested in escaping my own perspective as to what’s good and bad in poetry. I want to know what in the world those wigged heads saw in Shenstone, Young, Akenside, Lyttleton…

You don’t care about that. You don’t have a whole lot of time for poetry in the first place, let alone stuff nobody’s read in 150 years. Unless … maybe you’re a little bit like me, after all? Maybe you’re afraid the poetry that you yourself are writing—though esteemed and popular now—will one day be a prompt for baffled speculation. “What in the world did those fapoons in the twenty-first century think poetry was for anyway?”

Perhaps you’ve done your turn as poet laureate, and your thoughts are turning to the long view. Are you Collins? Are you going to be Collins?

*

William Collins—“Poor Collins” to his contemporaries. 1721–59: dead, completely incapacitated and insane, at thirty-seven. Author of two tiny books: Persian Eclogues (1742), and Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects (1746, though dated ’47). Book #1, written before the poet was twenty; book #2, before he was twenty-five.

He could read many languages. He went to Oxford. He had a lot of big plans, all his life. He knew some famous people: David Garrick, the actor; James Thomson, the poet. And Dr. Samuel frickin’ Johnson. But Collins never married, and he never got a taste of his coming immortality. Alas, his stuff was not widely read ’til years after his death.

What is his stuff like. Well … mostly turgid and ucky, allegorical. He loves to get down on his knees and pray to … Peace. Or Simplicity. Or other abstractions. There are almost no people in his poems—not even him, usually. The only, only thing a modern reader can get off on is the froo-froo diction/syntax.

If you have any kind of taste for lines like—

With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies…

(Sidney)

or

…that night-wandering, pale, and watery star…

(Marlowe)

or

Not only through the lenient air this change delicious breathes…

(Thomson)

—then you are medically certain to like at least a little bit of Collins. For example, look at a couple choice bits from probably his most famous poem (“Ode to Evening”). Here’s the first line (and then some):

If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song may hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear…

(By “Eve” he means evening, not Adam’s girlfriend. “Oaten stop” means, like, a shepherd’s flute or something.)

Now go a little bit further down in the same poem:

For when thy folding star arising shows

His paly circlet, at his warning lamp

The fragrant Hours, and elves

Who slept in flowers the day,

And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge

And sheds the freshening dew, and, lovelier still,

The Pensive Pleasures sweet,

Prepare thy shadowy car.

C’mon, that’s hot. If Collins’s poems were full to bursting with lines like the above, you could bet at least a few weirdos would read him through, from time to time. But the poems are not really like that—not enough. So.

Mainly you get a lot of stuff like this classic anthology piece, Collins’s shortest poem, which I give entire:

Ode, Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746

How sleep the brave, who sink to rest

By all our country’s wishes blest!

When Spring, with dewy fingers cold,

Returns to deck their hallowed mould,

She there shall dress a sweeter sod

Than Fancy’s feet have ever trod.

 

By fairy hands their knell is rung,

By forms unseen their dirge is sung;

There Honour comes, a pilgrim grey,

To bless the turf that wraps their clay,

And Freedom shall awhile repair

To dwell a weeping hermit there!

Nothing wrong with that. It’s good. “Wraps his clay.” But it’s so emphatically normal—impersonal, marmoreal (if I’m using that word correctly), austere. Maybe kinda Roman? I dunno. Anyhow, I’m saying it’s hard to get excited.

*

Let’s pause and look at a poem by a dead American poet, Karl Shapiro. There’s another reputation upon which the sun has gone down—for reasons that will be obvious in a minute.

The poem is unusual in that it figures people from northern India as guardians of culture—a respectable enough manner of being in the world, but one with which the poet sees himself as having broken.

You Call These Poems?

In Hyderabad, city of blinding marble palaces,

White marble university,

A plaything of the Nazim, I read some poetry

By William Carlos Williams, American.

And the educated and the suave Hindus

And the well-dressed Moslems said,

“You call those things poems?

Are those things poems?”

 

For years I used to write poems myself

That pleased the Moslems and Hindus of culture,

Telling poems in iambic pentameter,

With a masculine inversion in the second foot,

Frozen poems with an ice-pick at the core,

And lots of allusions from other people’s books.

That’s the whole poem. But see, it’s 2020. By this point, we’re all trained to spot the old trick: let the peoples of the East stand for some standard, ambivalence-causing human trait—in this case, canon mongering and the tyrannies of formal poetry. The objection is obvious: ya don’t have to go to Hyderabad to encounter canon mongering. England, in the eighteenth century, was, emphatically, Shapiro’s India. England was Song Dynasty China … was Babylon the Great … and it still is … and so are we.

On the other hand, the thing I like about Shapiro’s poem is he purposely gives Indians a lot of credit. A frozen poem with an ice pick in the center? That actually sounds pretty cool. And indeed it brings us back to Collins—with him you need a little help seeing the ice pick.

*

Ever heard of Lonsdale—Roger Lonsdale? If you have any investment in eighteenth-century studies, you will have encountered the name. According to Wikipedia, he’s still out there somewhere, chewing bread. Must be in eighties.

That guy knew more about eighteenth-century poetry than you know about your own life. Witness his supremo-supremo edition of Collins, 1969:

That engraving on the cover is Collins, age fourteen, looking like an illustration out of a 19th-century hygiene pamphlet, warning against the dangers of masturbation.

In the above book, every page is half poetry, half footnotes. For every single line, Lonsdale shows you a-whence Collins pilfered it. Milton’s “Nativity Ode,” Spenser’s Fairie Queene, Pope’s Essay on Man. If Collins lifts a construction, Lonsdale spots it, cites it, explains it—nothing gets by him. And he did it without computers, and he wasn’t even thirty-five when the book came out. I don’t understand how it’s possible for this book to exist.

I remember well, 2002 or 2003, the wild rumor had just reached me and John Maki at the University of Chicago that Lonsdale was about to release an edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets in four volumes, from Oxford University Press. Excitement at that level comes but once or twice in a lifetime.

You don’t understand! Lonsdale doing the Lives of the Poets is literally better than the poets themselves coming back to life and explaining their poems. ’Cuz they don’t know what’s important; Lonsdale does.

And yet. To read Collins in the ’69 version, stopping every second like that, is, well, madness. Maybe you have to, once. But if you want to give Collins a fighting chance you need to get a hold of a facsimile of the original Odes and read ’em straight off into a voice recorder. Takes forty minutes; I just did it, this week. Then you play it back when you’re doing your copperplate calligraphy. You start to develop preferences… “Ode on the Passions”—overrated. “The Manners. An Ode”—interesting! And so on.

*

Speaking of Johnson, here’s a notorious paragraph from his “Life of Collins” (1781):

To what I have formerly said of his writings may be added, that his diction was often harsh, unskilfully laboured, and injudiciously selected. He affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival; and he puts his words out of the common order, seeming to think, with some later candidates for fame, that not to write prose is certainly to write poetry. His lines commonly are of slow motion, clogged and impeded with clusters of consonants. As men are often esteemed who cannot be loved, so the poetry of Collins may sometimes extort praise when it gives little pleasure.

When Sir Egerton Brydges read that for the first time, as a young man, he shat the bed with rage. Fifty years later he was still so mad he wrote an essay (thirty-one pages in the copy I have), basically saying Johnson had no soul, no feelings, and that Collins compares favorably to virtually every other poet who ever lived, including Aeschylus and Euripides. I’m exaggerating only slightly. The critic really does come off unhinged, reminding me of Walter Bronson’s comment (1898), excusing the ecstasy of one of Collins’s early reviewers: “If this is not criticism, at least it is rapture.”

Just the same, Johnson’s strictures will seem justified to most modern enquirers. He often felt his contemporaries went too far with the decorations, and he was no fan of far-fetched diction like “oaten stop.” In this way, Johnson’s seems like a now-a-go-go mentality; Collins and Egerton seem like fossils. But how can these pre-Romantics seem superannuated, while the Supreme Dictator of Augustan Everything seem like us??

Answer: Because we are everybody, and everybody is us. And this is why we must go on reading forbidding poetry.

We are Hyperboreans: nothing must be forbidden to us.

 

Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas. His second book is Try Never. He is a correspondent for the Daily.

Yasmin Ahmad’s Multicultural Malaysia

In Tash Aw’s column, Freeze Frame, he explores his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema. In this installment , Yasmin Ahmad’s Orked trilogy.

Still from Yasmin Ahmad’s Mukhsin (2007)

In the heart of the old town in Ipoh, Malaysia’s third largest city, a cluster of colonial-era shophouses has been saved from destruction and, over the last decade or so, reincarnated as a hipster enclave. Boutique hotels with concrete and plywood interiors and cafés serving single origin coffee sit next to kopitiam, the traditional eating houses of Malaysia. It’s a beguiling cocktail of history, modernity, and multiculturalism that seems to perfectly embody the youthful energy of the country. Nestled in a back lane in one of the most touristy parts of town is a small crowdfunded museum dedicated to the work of the filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad, who, at the peak of her powers in 2009, died from complications arising from a stroke. In the first decade of the new millennium, she had made six feature-length films in the space of six years. She was only fifty-one when she died.

A picturesque city with a heavily ethnic-Chinese, largely Cantonese-speaking population, Ipoh is the setting for two of Ahmad’s most loved films, Sepet (2004) and its sequel, Gubra (2006). (A prequel, 2007’s Mukhsin, is set in a rural town a hundred miles south). Away from the frenetic and sometimes overwhelming rhythms of life in Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh is the perfect place to understand why Ahmad’s films left such an indelible mark on the emotional consciousness of many Malaysians. Its leafy middle-class suburbs blend happily into a compact city center whose architecture—less a victim of rampant real estate development than in other major cities—reflects the country’s rich mixture of ethnicities with their distinct languages and cultures. Here, the effects of Malaysia’s racial politics still feel secondary to the easy harmony of everyday life.

The three films that make up the loose trilogy revolve around a young woman called Orked and her quest for love, identity, and independence. Ethnically Malay, religiously Muslim, Orked has—according to her Malay friends—an unhealthy interest in Chinese people and culture, by which they mean Chinese Malaysians, who account for the country’s largest minority, rather than anyone from the mainland. Orked idolizes Takeshi Kaneshiro, the Japanese Taiwanese screen idol, and has watched Fallen Angels several times over. With her wisecracking friend Lin, she goes to the street market one day to buy more of his films, and at the counterfeit DVD stall, she meets a young Chinese vendor, Jason. It is love at first sight.

Wrapped in the framework of a comic teen melodrama is a constantly unsettling examination of race and class distinctions in Malaysia. Watching these films again, in a country made increasingly anxious by the politicization of racial differences, I’m reminded of the confrontational quality of Ahmad’s films, of the uncomfortable nature of hearing the same things delivered on screen that people say in real life. The casual racism that Malaysians live with on a daily basis takes on a distinctly threatening tone when captured on film, even if the film purports to be a teen romance.

Sepet is the Malay word for “slit-eyed,” a term that Orked’s ethnic-Malay friends use to describe Jason and other Chinese characters, so we know from the outset that the two young lovers have a tough time ahead of them. But this is more than just a formulaic story of Montagues and Capulets: in a country like Malaysia, Ahmad’s portrayal of innocent interracial love represents a challenge to the official narrative of nationality and belonging. I was six years old when I first heard the expression Cina babi (Chinese pig); balik Tongsan (go back to China) followed soon after. At first I thought that these things were being said to a random passerby from Beijing; I had no idea they related to me. By the time I understood fully what they meant, the idea of being Chinese, and somehow distanced from the idea of Malaysian-ness, had become so much a part of myself that I thought about it as little as I did the birthmark on face. And yet, at the same time, I felt fully embedded in Malaysian life—in its cultures, languages, and history. What was I to do with this split personality? Listen to the official narrative that had me down as a migrant, or guest, or carry on living life as any ordinary Malaysian? Watching Ahmad’s films for the first time, I felt as though the dichotomy that was me, and so many other Malaysians, was finally being articulated on screen.

It’s unclear how much of Ahmad’s films are autobiographical, but it’s not hard to imagine that the intensely intimate portrait of Orked and Jason’s cross-cultural union was influenced by Ahmad’s own marriage to a Chinese Malaysian man. So much of Sepet is built upon a detailed exploration of Malaysia’s nuances of language and identity—a portrayal that fully inhabits the minority position. Jason, whose Chinese name is Siao Loong, moves in a world of petty gangsters, the type of Chinese triads who frequent pool halls and seedy nightclubs. Like him, his friends are working class, primarily Cantonese- or Hokkien-speaking, although Jason himself is well versed in formal Mandarin. But his mother comes from the old ethnic-Chinese, Malay-speaking Peranakan communities of the Straits Settlements, so she and Jason do not communicate in the same language. Orked’s family, meanwhile, live in a tidy detached house in a pleasant suburb, and switch comfortably between Malay and English, the lingua franca of the Malaysian middle classes. Unusually for a Malay, she speaks some Cantonese, and is comfortable enough in her skin to use it openly, without fear of being thought to be a traitor to her race.

Issues of Malay-majority privilege are freely expressed in Sepet. Orked scores less well than Jason on their public exams, but wins a scholarship nonetheless, while his life appears to be consigned to street hustling and teenage parenthood. Although the film attempts to be unromantic in its depiction of ethnic-Chinese—witness Jason’s unpleasant on-again-off-again Chinese girlfriend and her exploitative gangster brother—its sympathies lie overwhelmingly in favor of the country’s minorities. Ahmad’s Chinese Malaysians do not come from the famous old-money families; they are the struggling and sometimes desperate people who make up the majority of the Chinese population in Malaysia.

By the time we next see Orked in Gubra, she has become even more aware of how questions of race and religion intertwine with those of gender. The conversation is not just about how to negotiate the endlessly sticky question of racial plurality, but how to live as a modern woman in a society that is itself facing existential questions. Orked is now married to an older man, with whom she appears to share a privileged, playful life, filled with foreign travel and nice restaurants. But it turns out that her husband is having an affair with another woman, and Orked’s deep-seated anxieties about being trapped in a marriage that robs her of her independence soon surface. She runs into Alan, Jason’s older brother, recently returned to Ipoh from Singapore following a divorce, and they start to hang out. Maybe she sees something of Jason in Alan, maybe she is seeking an escape route from a marriage on the rocks—whatever the case, Orked rediscovers her wit and youthful joie de vivre. She discovers a sense of resolve, too, and refuses to accept the role of the traditional wealthy Malay Muslim wife, who turns a blind eye to her husband’s infidelities in return for a comfortable lifestyle. Elsewhere in the film, in a completely parallel storyline that never intersects with Orked’s, Temah, a prostitute with a son born out of wedlock, learns that she is HIV positive. She is badly versed in the Quran but eventually befriends Mas, the local muezzin’s wife, from whom she receives spiritual guidance.

In Ahmad’s films, women battle menacing male figures who threaten them with physical or emotional violent. Sexually and emotionally liberated—in Gubra, there are some outrageous conversations about the male anatomy, delivered with such a lightness of touch that they pass almost unnoticed—the women are bound by a sense of shared intelligence and resilience, and they skillfully navigate through a system that often seems to leave them no room to maneuver.

Above all, the women in Ahmad’s films talk. They talk across racial and gender divides, about anything at all, but mainly about race and gender. And in this constant, probing conversation, some of the most memorable lines in Malaysian cinema are born. Accused by her friends of only liking Chinese guys, Orked says, “Who cares when someone likes that other person because of their race? It’s when they hate them that’s the problem.” Singing along to Cantonese pop songs in Alan’s beat-up truck, she rejoices in the multilingual, multicultural nature of Malaysia and compares it favorably to her experience of living in England and France, with their dominance of a single national language and culture. Alan agrees, but cautions against sentimentalism, summing up his own experience: “Sometimes it feels like being in love with someone who doesn’t love you back,” he says. He’s talking about Malaysia, of course, but in a world that feels increasingly fractured, he could be talking about many other countries.

Watching Yasmin Ahmad’s films and much-loved commercials (touching stories of people reaching across racial boundaries, made for Petronas, the state oil and gas company, to celebrate Malaysia’s major festivals) a decade after they were made, I’m struck by how her vision of happy multiculturalism often feels at odds with the deepening narrative of a country wracked by disputes over majority privilege, and a generally divisive political rhetoric. Today, this seemingly innocent optimism seems to carry a harder edge: it is not just a rosy celebration of crosscultural relationships, but an insistence that pluralism is the only fulfilling way of life.

 

Read earlier installments of  Freeze Frame  here.

Tash Aw’s most recent novel is We The Survivors.

The Elena Ferrante in My Head

Tudor Washington Collins, Woman standing on rock looking out to sea, 1949, silver gelatin dry plate. Courtesy of Auckland Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...)).

Elena Ferrante is a fictional character, one of my favorites: a disembodied person in my head, a mind inside my mind. She occupies a large, elastic space in there, in the same neighborhood with a lot of my real friends and mentors and everyone else with whom I have ever seriously corresponded, even though she’s never written anything that’s strictly just for me. She’s one of my Lilas: a sometimes-close, sometimes-distant friend and rival, who keeps winning by being smarter.

It’s easy for me, as a reader of Ferrante and as a writer and friend to writers myself, to imagine the woman who wrote Ferrante’s books confiding her secret in me. The novels are already a confidence shared intimately with every reader, no two exchanges alike. It’s also easy because this author has shielded her name, body, and biography from public knowledge, but not her persona, which coheres across the letters and interviews collected in Frantumaglia and in her weekly column for the Guardian. The persona is visible even in the novels themselves, which share so many features and preoccupations.

Though the human writer remains invisible—“I believe that books, once they have been written, have no need of their authors,” she told her publisher Sandra Ozzola in 1991—Ferrante does seem to want to be known in this other way, as the implied author or authorial persona who has something to teach us about reading narrative. The Neapolitan Novels, after all, invite us to think a great deal about authorship, as well as fiction writing and its relationship to life, within the figure of their narrator, the writer Elena Greco. In one of the tetralogy’s many reflexive scenes, near the beginning of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Gigliola tells a newly published Lenù:

“I read your book, it’s wonderful, how brave you were to write those things.”

I stiffened.

“What things?”

“The things you do on the beach.”

“I don’t do them, the character does.”

“Yes, but you wrote them really well, Lenù, just the way it happens, with the same filthiness. They are secrets that you know only if you’re a woman.”

Gigliola here stands in for many contemporary readers who have no trouble with the paradox of most referential fiction: this happened and it did not happen. She knows Lenù’s novel is fiction, just as Ferrante fans know the Neapolitan Novels are fiction, but she also knows it derives at least some of its power from its relationship to real-world truth. Lenù generally depicts Gigliola, the wife of Michele Solara, as coarse and materialistic, not someone whose aesthetic opinion she’d much respect—and in fact, Gigliola’s comment is typical of the naive readers novelists love to complain about, the kind who, however admiringly, conflate verisimilitude with reality. But Gigliola is also right: Lenù did do the things her fictional character does on the beach.

Reading this, it’s hard not to feel that Ferrante is toying with us. Is she hinting at the truth of her own fictions, “the secrets you only know if you’re a woman”—and if you’re an author? Is she making an ironic joke about the author-reader relationship in general? Or, wait, is she merely invoking the idea of authorial secrets to create a plausible fiction, since everyone knows writers draw from life and have all sorts of feelings about that process and its consequences? I have to admit this uncertainty is part of my pleasure, or unpleasure, as my friend Sarah would say. The ambiguity such moments generate—and the impossibility of ever learning Ferrante’s secrets—keeps these novels open to multiple readings, not to mention rereadings, which invariably involve my own particular construction of Elena Ferrante, a someone and a no one at once.

Though all of Ferrante’s novels have been published under her pseudonym, and all are narrated by educated, Neapolitan-born women telling personal, apparently unmediated stories, the Neapolitan Novels, more than any previous work, seem to invite the reader’s invention of an author. It is her longest work, the only one I would call a life narrative, and, most significantly, the only one to be narrated by an Elena, a name Ferrante long ago gave herself and still claims as “the name that I feel is most mine.” This Elena, moreover, is not just any educated, Neapolitan woman. She is the novelist-theorist Elena Greco, who gets entangled in all sorts of writerly problems over the course of her life and whose writing is the novels, as well as an active agent in their intricate plots.

Surely this is autofiction, not as Serge Doubrovsky first defined it, “fiction of strictly real events or facts,” but as Gérard Genette understands it: an “intentionally contradictory pact” in which an author, through a fictionalized version of herself, seems to tell a true story, but doesn’t. Most autofiction trades on the understanding that the author is just playing, or just theorizing, and not really revealing herself, but Ferrante’s work invites the opposite reading. In giving us two author characters, one inside the text and one outside, who share a given name and birthplace, she tempts us to understand her as an author who fictionalizes her own life story, not by aggrandizing it but by hiding. This, combined with the confessional narration of experiences many readers recognize as “just the way it happens,” suggests that crucial, dangerous aspects of this story existed in life before they found their way into fiction. Even readers versed in Barthes—“who speaks (in the narrative) is not who writes (in real life) and who writes is not who is”—can easily imagine a translation from the real Ferrante to the fictional Greco, a writer who has a private life to protect but who cannot seem to write about anything but herself and the people she knows.

Ferrante lends some support to this theory in Frantumaglia, where she describes her desire for “absolute creative freedom” and to be “sincere to the point where it’s unbearable,” while simultaneously acknowledging the challenges these desires pose, both personally and artistically: “It seems to me that making a clear separation between what we are in life and what we are when we write helps keep self-censorship at bay.” In other words, she has to invent a self, free from personal bonds, if she’s going to write anything good. Yet in her quest for sincerity, she is also careful to distinguish between literary truth and biographical truth:

Writing that is inadequate can falsify the most honest biographical truths. Literary truth isn’t founded on any autobiographical or journalistic or legal agreement … Literary truth is the truth released exclusively by words used well, and it is realized entirely in the words that formulate it.

But biographical truth requires qualification, too. When asked by Paolo Di Stefano for Corriere della Sera, “how autobiographical is the story of Elena [Greco]?” Ferrante replies, in her characteristically direct yet elusive manner, “If by autobiography you mean drawing on one’s own experience to feed an invented story, almost entirely. If instead you’re asking whether I’m telling my own personal story, not at all.” In another interview, with Deborah Orr for The Gentlewoman, she argues for a yet more flexible understanding of autobiography, which she frames in terms of process rather than results. She adopts an autobiographical persona, she says, not to tell her own personal story but because it offers surer footing on the path to literary truth: “Using the name Elena helped only to reinforce the truth of the story I was telling … The fictional treatment of biographical material—a treatment that for me is essential—is full of traps. Saying ‘Elena’ has helped to tie myself down to the truth.”

If we take her at her word here, Ferrante’s autofiction harks back to older understandings of the autobiographical novel—works like David Copperfield, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and À la recherche du temps perdu—that are nominally fictional but draw heavily on their authors’ lives and lived experiences. The difference, of course, is the pseudonym. Dickens, Joyce, and Proust all published under their personal names, as do most autofictionists, from Doubrovsky to Sheila Heti. Ferrante refuses to do this, and the choice produces all kinds of ripple effects in her work, inviting us to consider the moral and technical limits of autobiographical writing and especially of autofiction, a genre drenched in cynicism but founded on claims to sincerity.

The choice also protects her. She gets to live entirely in her readers’ minds on the page and entirely in her own life off of it. How, I wonder enviously, was the woman who writes as Elena Ferrante so much smarter than me about this? For me, it’s already too late. There is already a novel out there, written by my legal name, with my picture on the back as a certificate of authenticity and a face to blame if the book disappoints. I could start over as a pseudonym—every day I’m tempted—but I can’t ignore the nagging sense that it’s harder to erase an existing presence than it is to be invisible from the start.

I’m sometimes annoyed that the writer of Elena Ferrante’s novels figured out how to avoid this trap, and I didn’t. But mostly I’m just grateful that she did. In creating Elena Ferrante “entirely in the words that formulate” her, she has helped me, as no other writer or theorist has, to recognize the fantasy of the author that the reader develops in the reading of a book. And this author, in my fantasy, sets traps for narrator and reader alike as a way of identifying and avoiding them herself.

 

Read Elena Ferrante’s Art of Fiction interview.

Katherine Hill is assistant professor of English at Adelphi University. She is the author of the novels The Violet Hour (2013) and A Short Move (2020).

Excerpted from The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism . © 2020 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

Redux: I Lost the Time of Day about Three Weeks Ago

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.

Elizabeth Bishop. Photo: Alice Helen Methfessel. Courtesy of Frank Bidart.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about the art of losing. Read on for Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Poetry interview, Hebe Uhart’s short story “Coordination,” and Terry Stokes’s poem “Losing the Time of Day.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast.

 

Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Poetry No. 27

Issue no. 80 (Summer 1981)

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever had any poems that were gifts? Poems that seemed to write themselves?

BISHOP

Oh, yes. Once in a while it happens. I wanted to write a villanelle all my life but I never could. I’d start them but for some reason I never could finish them. And one day I couldn’t believe it—it was like writing a letter.

 

 

Coordination

By Hebe Uhart

Issue no. 228 (Spring 2019)

We were gathered in a small conference room at the book fair. A lot of people were there. To my right, a very elderly writer was reading an excruciatingly long story. She kept pausing because she kept losing her place on the page. She had the voice of a convalescent—no, it was more like the voice of someone who had lived alone in a cave for a long time without speaking to a soul. I would have offered to read the story for her, but her handwriting was so cryptic that only she could make sense of it.

 

 

Losing the Time of Day

By Terry Stokes

Issue no. 145 (Winter 1997)

I lost the time of day about three weeks ago

right after the siesta in the trembling rain,

right after the blue dream in the saffron forest,

right after the day of purple spotlights

in the auburn bathroom of pain …

 

If you like what you read, get a year of The Paris Review—four new issues, plus instant access to everything we’ve ever published.

The Artist’s Hypothesis

The artist Jack Whitten, who died in 2018, approached his practice with the curiosity of a scientist and the playfulness of a jazz musician. Many of his paintings are the result of a careful aesthetic hypothesis unleashed upon the canvas and then transformed by improvisation. The works at the center of “Jack Whitten. Transitional Space. A Drawing Survey.” (on view at Hauser & Wirth through April 4) display a delightful agnosticism regarding medium and material. In one, he splashes a paper collage with calligrapher’s ink and acrylic paint; in another, he seems to conjure the farthest reaches of space on a single sheet of blotter. A selection of images from the show appears below.

Jack Whitten, Space Flower #9, 2006, acrylic, pastel, and powdered Mylar on rice paper, 7 1/4 x 8 1/4″. © Jack Whitten Estate. Courtesy the Jack Whitten Estate and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.

 

Jack Whitten, Vertical Landscape #3, 1967, watercolor and pencil on paper, 22 5/8 x 22 1/4″. © Jack Whitten Estate. Courtesy the Jack Whitten Estate and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.

 

Jack Whitten, Geometric Collusion #1, 1981, acrylic, pastel, and compressed charcoal on Rives paper, 26 x 19″. © Jack Whitten Estate. Courtesy the Jack Whitten Estate and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.

 

Jack Whitten, Broken Grid VIII, 1996, sumi ink and acrylic on paper collage, 11 1/4 x 15″. © Jack Whitten Estate. Courtesy the Jack Whitten Estate and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.

 

Jack Whitten, King’s Garden #6, 1968, watercolor on paper, 22 1/2 x 31″. © Jack Whitten Estate. Courtesy the Jack Whitten Estate and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.

 

Jack Whitten, Study For Atopolis E, 2014, acrylic on blotter, 18 1/4 x 13″. © Jack Whitten Estate. Courtesy the Jack Whitten Estate and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.

 

All images from “Jack Whitten. Transitional Space. A Drawing Survey.,” on view at Hauser & Wirth through April 4.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Make Money from Again

It began with a simple longing, born in the humid 105 degree Austin summer: I just want to wear clothes that do not touch my body. Like most desires, it was transgressive. I had been watching a lot of Project Runway in the afternoons, when my dissertation writing abilities abandoned me to the air conditioned dim. The designers and judges were all about “showcasing a woman’s figure,” or “showing off her curves,” which were usually close to nonexistent. These were the hallmarks of good clothing design for women in the early 2000s and 2010s, and for the most part they still are. I wanted the exact opposite: a large simple shape to swim around in. Something that could catch a gust of air beneath it like a personal parachute. Something that breathed for me when I couldn’t catch my breath.

I was by no means the only writer, nor the only grad student, to be soothed by the show. Its emphasis on criticism was cathartic, sequestered as I was in literary criticism, in the critiques of my advisers—my own panel of judges. And I was trying to figure out my own writing apart from grad school, essays and research that didn’t fit the pattern of the academic article. Tim Gunn’s presence in my life that year was a godsend. He wasn’t my mentor, he was my guardian angel.

I began to research my desire for billowing, formless clothes and found a designer in Japan called Arts & Science that was doing something close, calling it “genderless clothing.” Freshly out of the closet as a lesbian, the gender-blurring potential of clothes called to me. I ventured to a fabric store that had in its windows a series of full-length wedding gowns and bought my first pattern, along with two or three yards of navy blue linen and small black buttons. I had learned to sew in home arts in the seventh grade, where my first garment was a pair of pink flannel boxer shorts with snoozing ducks on them, and had started making haphazard quilts in subsequent years, usually leaving them unfinished. Clothes were intimidating by comparison. So many seams and rules. Darts! My grandmother was a seamstress; she made wedding gowns for real people and expertly tailored Barbie clothes for me, all styled like it was still the seventies: ochres and russets and tweeds. My mom had always sewn, making alterations and mending my torn clothes, sewing the ribbons into my pointe shoes with fishing line. Sewing must be in my bones somewhere.

I enlisted the help of a coworker who made all her own clothes— lined skirt suits à la Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday —and who had previously worked as a milliner making hats in New Orleans. She invited me over to the house that she owned, further proof that she had skills I could learn from. We traced and pinned and cut on her floor, knocking back beers and talking through the tweaks I was already planning to make to the pattern: no darts, for starters, and a tab collar, and a straight waistline instead of a cinched one. My first ever pattern and I was undoing it as I went. The dress took weeks longer than I expected and I forgot to add a pocket on the left side, but, wonky seams aside, it was perfect. It was the exact dress I would have bought, if it existed.

Soon enough I stopped buying patterns all together. Too restrictive, too fixed on creating some new shape for a woman to sculpt or smoosh herself into. The patterns were heteropatriarchy on paper, the very idea of “flattering” shapes a form of captivity. The politics of clothes began to reveal themselves as I examined garments in stores. Women’s clothes, even in the same store, were more expensive than men’s! They were made with cheaper materials! (Hello, modal!) They had stupidly tiny, useless pockets. Men’s clothing patterns were designed to comfortably fit the body; women’s were designed to transform the body into something else. I wandered over to the men’s side of the store, only to be treated like a lost child, an embarrassment to the sales staff. Still, I came away with some men’s button-downs in 100% cotton—no stretch, for chrissakes.

Season after season of Project Runway played in the background as I sewed, with Harvey Weinstein’s prominent producer credit blissfully unnoticed. My navy linen dress with matte black buttons down the front was soon joined by a cobalt ikat high-waist skirt (elastic, a forgiving waistband at any height), a black speckled cotton gauze “bag dress,” as I called it, which for the rest of the summer I never took off and eventually remade in green so that I could do laundry. Sewing gave me time to think, to process, to give in to an activity that had an actual, physical end product. It saved me. I don’t think I could have finished my dissertation without it, an early lesson about the relationship between work and nonwork: I can’t do one without the other. When I started making caftans, my friends started making requests. After graduating, my partner and I moved to Santa Fe to start radically new lives, refusing to be tethered to any institution or traditional job, which meant I was underemployed, coaching high schoolers on their college essays and grading papers for a living. I needed extra cash and I loved to sew. Naturally, I thought the logical next step was to put my hobby to work as a side hustle. Like any millennial worth her salt, I began designing a free website. A dream is just an idea without a website, a web platform I could not afford reminded me during podcast commercial breaks. I called my fledgling business Agnes, a cross between Agnes Varda and Agnes Martin, two of my longtime idols. I should have taken note that neither of them, to my knowledge, ever started a business.

We were living in a one-room, two-and-a-half-story loft that used to be our landlord’s French tapestry studio, so the sewing energy was strong. I perched in a nook on the second floor and sewed through the afternoons as orders trickled in. I made oversize kimonos with dolman sleeves, caftans, bag dresses, wraps. I ordered fabric from India, from small retailers, from big corporate goblins like fabric.com. Having long ago abandoned patterns, I cut my own, taking measurements from each customer and designing the garment to fit their body. The measurements alone made it clear that bodies are unruly, their shapes unpredictable. I printed an Agnes label onto sheets of white fabric, which I cut by hand and sewed into each piece when it was done.

As my friends told their friends, the orders increased, and by Christmas I was drowning. People were ordering six kimonos at a time. I was only one person, and I was a fairly tired person at that. I collapsed into fear naps regularly, panicked about getting garments finished in time. I began to make mistakes, cutting a hole in the side of my sister-in-law’s birthday dress, bleeding on a kimono after nicking myself with a pin. When an editing job came along I took it, sensing a chance to escape the entrepreneurial prison I’d fashioned for myself. For months after I didn’t sew at all, having come to fear the process that once brought me such freedom and excitement. I’d taken something I loved to do, something that garnered flow, and turned it into a product. I’d only been doing what I’d been told to do since I was born: find something you love and make money from it. And it was all absolutely wrong.

I still buy fabric in my travels and give myself new projects: a wool smock dress is next, and a mustard jumpsuit that I might wear on my book tour, if I finish it in time. And I continue to follow fabric stores and pattern makers, saving Instagram photos of tunics and coats alongside recipes. But I’m only sewing for myself, and occasionally for my partner, and I do it on my own timeline. Some projects take months, and that’s fine. My hobbies need space to be unproductive, useless, aimless. My life needs fewer transactional components, not more. I still love to wear something that doesn’t hug my “curves” or cling or cinch or pull or constrict. I love to feel flamboyantly embodied, swaddled in fabric. The clothes I make for myself are containers that let me take up as much space as I like in this cold, constricting world. When I recently found a few seasons of Project Runway that I’d missed, I got sucked back in. This time, I was even more disturbed by the way the judges and designers manhandled their models, plucking at their bodies, sewing or even gluing them into clothes. The latest season finally brought in models of different shapes and sizes, a move Tim Gunn heartily supported, and many of the designers were outraged at having to work with the reality of an incongruous body. I found myself longing for the soft, warm bubble of the tent on The Great British Baking Show, where everyone roots for everyone else. I love to bake, and for a long time I thought I should be a baker. I’m happy to know, now, that I’ll never do that to myself.

 

Jenn Shapland is the author of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, out next week from Tin House Books

Literary Paper Dolls: Sula

Illustrations © Jenny Kroik

When I was a girl, I had a friend.

Some years I used honorifics and some years she was my only friend and there was no need. There was a high school classmate of ours who, for a while, thought we were the same person, and there was another who thought we were lovers. I’ve told the story of the end of that friendship so many times that it has almost lost meaning. At first, telling the story stretched out all the space between us that hadn’t been there before. Then, it just began to collapse it.

One time, our senior year, I told the story to another girl in the winter darkness of my suburban street. Her car was sporty. The parking brake was a pedal by her feet. When I told the story she lifted one long leg and smashed that parking break to the floor.

The parking brake and the totality of being a teenager made me think it was a good story—a high school band put it in a song. From time to time, in the fifteen or so years since, I’ve taken that story out again and held it up to the light. Frances Ha appeared on the scene, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, Lady Bird, Conversations with Friends, all stories about female friendship and its fucking sharp points. I recognized elements of myself in each of them, and it quieted all that teenage rage. I was not the only girl to have her heart broken by her best friend. But I hadn’t yet read Sula.

Toni Morrison is a writer who doesn’t write to teach a lesson, as she has said, but Sula taught me one anyway. Sula seems to be about dependence: womanhood’s dependence on motherhood, a mother’s dependence on her children, a woman on her lover’s attention. But it also about the way a friendship—a very close one—is a relationship built out of desire, independent from all rules.

The novel blooms and blooms: the grandmothers behind the two mothers behind their daughters. It’s the story of life in one black neighborhood, the Bottom, in rural Ohio from 1895 to 1965. In 1922, Sula and Nel find each other: “Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on.” One day, a game they are playing leaves a boy drowned in the river. The secret, held in the sanctity of friendship, becomes part of their inseparable bond. When the girls grow up, Nel marries and Sula leaves town for college and whatever else she can find. “Had she paints or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendously curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and reoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. Like any artist without no art form, she became dangerous.” Nel, meanwhile, settles into the expectation of the town. Unfulfilled and fabulous, Sula returns. She arrives arranged in a sophisticated traveling costume the likes of which the town has never seen. She retires, eventually, to a plain yellow dress but the point is made. Sula has journeyed beyond the Bottom and this new version of her has no use for the town’s careful social codes. The rumors swirl, about how she is never ill, about how she comes to church without underwear.

She returns for Nel, but the arithmetic of best-friendship comes out wrong. “She had clung to Nel as both the self and the other only to discover that she and Nel were not one and the same thing.”  Sula learns her terrible lesson two ways: first, she sleeps with Nel’s husband, thinking their friendship is stronger than her curiosity. It isn’t. Then, alone for perhaps the first time, she develops an attachment to a man who wants none. This final break doesn’t kill her, but something does. She is dead—less than four pages later.

Perhaps she was dead to Nel and could therefore live no longer. Perhaps there is a tiny sliver of bitter revenge in Sula’s death. Or perhaps she has to die for Nel to realize the truth about friendship. To learn the lesson that the impossible female friend will always be held in the impossible balance. Only on her deathbed can Sula speak with full honesty: “If we were such good friends, how come you couldn’t get over it?” It takes Nel twenty-five years, but she finally hears Sula—hears her loud and clear and wonders, really wonders, what the answer is.

If friendship is all we say it is, if friendship in girlhood is the mingling of two souls, companionship that no adult, no lover, can ever match, then how can any transgression be unforgivable? Why isn’t the friendship sovereign over all possible faults? All these years later, I’m still wondering, “How come I couldn’t get over it?”

*

The purple dress:

On a particularly fateful day in her twelfth year, Sula wears a purple and white dress with a belt. Later in the book, the grammar of memory gets confused, the words mingle and redistribute, and it is as if Nel were the one wearing the dress, “Standing on the riverbank in a purple-and-white dress, Sula swinging Chicken Little around.”

The return:

Sula’s return to the Bottom after her time away is one of literature’s most stylish entrances. “She was dressed in a manner that was as close to a movie star as anyone would ever see. A black crepe dress splashed with pink and yellow zinnias, foxtails, a black felt that with the veil of net lowered over one eye.”

The red leather case:

Morrison carefully catalogues each item Sula has with her when she arrives back in town, including “a red leather traveling case, so small, so charming—no one has seen anything like it ever before, including the mayor’s wife and the music teacher, both of whom had been to Rome.”

The yellow dress:

Within just a few days of returning, Sula has settled into “wearing a plain yellow dress the same way her mother, Hannah, had worn those too-big house dresses—with a distance, an absence of a relationship to clothes which emphasized everything the fabric covered.” There is an easy dichotomy to draw between women who want attire to complement their figures and women who want their figures to defy their clothing. When rumors begin to circulate that Sula wears no underwear to church, it is inevitable. No apparel can contain her body.

The foxtails:

Just as my friend and I were beginning to drift apart, I arrived late at a party where she had been for some time. Knowing the host well, I let myself in and went to hang my coat. There were a variety of other coats already, many I knew well, the gathering was small, the guests were intimates. And yet there on the pegs was a coat I didn’t recognize. It was casually lavish, I remember it being furred, though maybe it wasn’t. I remember it being dark. It had to be my friend’s coat, and yet it was a piece of her I didn’t know.

Click here to download your very own printable Sula paper doll

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Julia Berick is a writer who lives in New York. She works at The Paris Review.

Jenny Kroik is an illustrator and painter. She has created covers for The New Yorker, and made illustrations for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Penguin Random House, and more.