The Paris Review's Blog, page 32

Bad Dinner Guest

Photographic print by Frank Scholten, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

I ruined a dinner party ten years ago in Phoenix. Among the guests was a judge who said abortion was an issue that reasonable people could disagree on, and I opened my mouth.

At that time, Richard was teaching at the sprawling university in Tempe. We were at the home of two people we were lucky even talked to us. The woman in the couple was a brilliant sculptor. She built whole cities out of clay, where invisible inhabitants take refuge from the “everlasting no” I often represent. The man was a tenderhearted and sexy archaeologist, who was heading a big fat famous institute on human origins and the kind of primate behavior that accounts for actions like mine. He was, like me, a Jew from the East Coast, and he recognized in me a collegial form of urban unrefinement he liked.

Throwing a dinner party where strangers meet other strangers shares the same risks as social media; wolves and chickens may find themselves seated next to each other. Before the judge said the thing about abortion, I was having a great time talking to his wife, who led the education department of one of the local art museums. The drinks were good. The starters were good. These people knew how to lay a spread.

The hosts had come to our house a few months earlier, and I’d served meat loaf as the main course, and to this day Richard says the meat loaf killed that evening. Something was off in the chemistry of the group. We’d invited another couple we liked, and the couples knew each other. The thing that was off might have been in their history, some kind of disappointment or weariness, or a fleeting, weird energy.

Richard was sure it was the meat loaf. He thought it had seemed lowly to the guests, and this delights me to report, because he might be right, and if so it’s hilarious, because my meat loaf is incredibly delicious. Never mind what’s in it. Thick-cut bacon is involved. Still, an expectation of lavishness and culinary daring might have floated into the minds of the guests before arriving, and all they could think to themselves was, Meat loaf, are you kidding me?

At the dinner party I ruined—not with the meat loaf but with the judge—I wanted never to host another dinner party again. To do it right, the way the potter and the ape specialist were doing it right—with gorgeously roasted meats and vegetables and God knows what was in the salad—to do it right you needed to donate your life to planning, and shopping, and prepping, and cooking, and hosting, and washing up, and returning your house to the state where you have erased all traces of other people. To do it right, only a lot of money could tempt me, and in that case, it would be a job and I wouldn’t have to make people feel comfortable and welcome, whether or not they were interesting.

The other day, a writer interviewed me about female friendship. She wanted to know why some of my friendships had fallen apart. I said it was owing entirely to me. She said why. I said I wasn’t trained to take other people into account, and people get worn out by that aspect of me. She said how, as a woman, did you grow up without being drilled to take other people into account? I said that’s an excellent question, and all I can say is I wasn’t trained to do anything. It was the glory of my growing-up years. Parents let you out to run like a dog, and if you came back, they gave you food. No one cared about me, because they had decided that whatever I would need in life I would figure out how to get it, and they were right. I have to tell you how much I love my parents for forgetting most of the time to tell me how to live.

When the judge said that people of good will could disagree about abortion rights, everyone was seated around the large wooden table. He spoke to the group, and I said, “Yes, it’s an issue people of goodwill can disagree about, like whether the Final Solution was the best way to murder all the Jews of Europe. Other suggestions for murdering all the Jews of Europe could have been entertained.” The judge looked like he had been shot, but not immediately. You know how, in movies, when someone is shot they stand there for a few seconds with a surprised look on their face? The judge didn’t fall down dead, unfortunately. He pushed back his chair, shot up, and shouted that he was leaving. He couldn’t be at the table with a person who could speak to him that way.

Next, things happened with the kind of speed that breaks time into single frames from a surveillance camera. The potter and the ape specialist looked like they were watching a play. The judge motioned to his wife to tell her they were leaving. She looked trapped. The ape specialist asked the judge to calm down and stay. It took some persuading. The judge sat down again, and for a few moments I thought it was interesting that he had changed his course. He talked about what had happened. He was feeling something, and he kept going. He was not a happy sort of person, and he wanted something of me. He was the man at the bar you don’t want to talk to who won’t stop giving you information.

Recently, I watched two documentaries: Regarding Susan Sontag (directed by Nancy Kates) and The Disappearance of Shere Hite (directed by Nicole Newnham). What’s arresting in both films is the way the women believe they owe men their full attention. In the Sontag film, she’s jousting with Norman Mailer at the famous 1971 Town Hall event where Mailer set himself up to debate a panel of notable feminists. Sontag was in the audience, and she speaks to Mailer with a shit-eating expression on her face—fake laughing, playing the part of a good sport, assenting to the preposterous and at the time generally unassailable premise that what Mailer thought about anything was important.

In the Hite film, we see the revolutionary sex researcher appearing on an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, where Oprah thought it was a good idea to have Hite speak about women’s sexuality to an audience consisting entirely of men. Hite is placed in a position where she has to accept the confrontation or be considered weak, insufficiently prepared, or a bad sport. Of course she has to fail, because the setup is exactly the setup of the world she’s trying to change. Women must show that they care what men think about them—and about everything else!—or men will get angry and do what angry men do. What I’ve learned in the subsequent fifty years is that men change if they are going to change the way we all change, not because someone convinces us to see the world differently but because we become bored with being the way we are.

After the judge talked for another twenty minutes, I looked at him as he was looking at me and said, “You’re still taking up all the space in the conversation.” This time when he bolted, he flew out the door and onto the street, calling to his wife to follow. I said to her, “I’ll drive you home if you want to stay.” She shook her head. I never spoke to her again.

What about the potter and the specialist in apes? They said they didn’t know the judge that well and hadn’t known his views on abortion. Had I ruined their evening? Of course I had ruined their evening. Did they care that much? They said they were surprised by nothing I did. From their perspective, to be upset with me would be like expecting the wolf not to eat the chicken in one bite.

 

Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That is Happening, which was long-listed for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes a column for Oldster Magazine and the Everything Is Personal Substack.

Encyclopedia Brown: A Story for My Brother, Philip Seymour Hoffman

Philip, Emily, and their dog, Tess, in the summer of 1990. Photograph by Marilyn O’Connor.

“What do you do with the old magazines when the new issues come out?” I asked the librarian.

“At the end of the year, we donate them to neighborhood schools so kids can cut them up and make collages,” she replied.

Our small public library is relatively new, sparsely filled with only the most popular items: a smattering of pregnancy and parenting books, mostly on sleep training; the latest mystery novels; DVDs on how to build your own she-shed; and a few shelves of history and religion to round it out. We live in a master-planned community filled with parks in a kid-friendly city, so the children’s section is by far the biggest part of the library.

This library is very different from the Rochester Public Library close to where I grew up in New York. I can remember our mom bringing my older brother, Phil, and me to the main branch downtown during school breaks to pass the time. The children’s room was so tucked away you had to crawl through a tiny child-size secret wooden door to get to it. That was my favorite part. The library, which opened in 1936, was massive, dark, and quiet, but inside that small room, there were tall windows where the sun splashed from the Genesee River onto the colorfully illustrated book covers. I wanted to check out dozens of books but knew that my mom would get frustrated trying to find the overdue items missing somewhere in our messy room while late fees piled up.

Phil and I loved reading. We shared a bedroom until our sister went off to college. We had bunk beds; he slept on the bottom. This way, we could each stay up reading with our own flashlight and not disturb the other—though, of course, we found plenty of other reasons to complain about this setup.

Phil loved the Encyclopedia Brown books, and he read a lot of Hardy Boys. He really enjoyed a good mystery, especially if it was funny. He had a lot of favorite movies, but I would say one of his absolute favorites, even as an adult, was The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975), with Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, and Madeline Khan. In one scene, Gene Wilder, playing Sherlock Holmes’s younger brother, Sigerson, is about to meet the foreign secretary, Lord Redcliff. Sigerson walks into the room alone. Checks his fly to be sure it’s closed. Spies a box of chocolates. Puts one in his mouth. He is startled, and spills the box clumsily to the floor. Just as Lord Redcliff walks in, Sigerson decides the best course of action is to hide all the chocolates in his mouth. With his mouth full and chocolate smeared all over his hands and face, he attempts to hide the empty candy box behind his back. Lord Redcliff spends the rest of the scene shuffling back and forth, peeking around to try and see what Sigerson is hiding.

Emily and Phil at seven and nine years old, 1976. Photograph courtesy of Emily Barr.

I could swear that Phil based much of his acting technique on watching Gene Wilder scenes like this over and over as a kid. The physical comedy is subtle in that the main character is unaware of his buffoonery—only the audience is in on the joke. Phil did this a lot: we would know that something was up, but the character himself was often clueless. This was true both of Phil’s comedic scenes and more dramatic ones: Sandy Lyle sharting at the party in Along Came Polly, Scotty J. trying to kiss Mark Wahlberg’s character in Boogie Nights, and the CIA agent Gust Avrakotos smashing the window in Charlie Wilson’s War. All three characters possess the same loud, obnoxious physicality. And then you see it in more nuanced ways, like when the brother in The Savages sneaks a cookie before the support group meeting is over, or when Freddie Miles plucks the piano keys in The Talented Mr. Ripley, or when Truman Capote takes tiny bites from the baby-food jars in Capote. These gestures brought his characters to life, and made us empathize and identify with their excitement, embarrassment, anger, and heartache.

Even now, when I watch Phil playing these parts in films that now capture a distant past, in roles that have become familiar to us, I can see so much of who he was. He was a cuddly person, much more so than me. He loved to sit close on a couch, walk arm in arm down the street, and hug big. We grew up like two hamsters making nests out of blankets and books. We burrowed together, especially when things felt scary or loud. We made up stories that took us away from the chaos of our house and into building forts in the woods, rowing boats together on Keuka Lake, or walking to The Brick Oven to eat pizza by ourselves like we were grown-ups.

And then there were the loud parts. My brother had a lot of loud parts, like his laughter and big gestures of annoyance. The way he would jump up and dance around when teasing you—even after you’d pleaded for him to stop, he just couldn’t help poking fun one last time. He knew it was wrong, but he was going to do it anyway, and laugh until you were laughing too. And then do it again, until you weren’t laughing, because we Hoffmans are not good at knowing how to stop. We know when to stop, we can tell the mood has shifted, but we always take things one step too far.

Shortly after Phil died, I scoured the library shelves for every periodical that even mentioned him. Early in my twenties, I’d begun saving every magazine or newspaper article Phil was ever featured in—at least the ones I knew about. I even had all his interviews on VHS. And here were the final magazine stories detailing his life cut short. At first, I just wanted to be sure I collected all the glowing obituaries reviewing the life and unexpected death of this talented young actor who mesmerized us with his art. But then I became obsessive. Even the weekly TV Guide put his name in the crossword: 15 down, twenty letters, “Oscar overdose.” I added it to my pile.

“So, these magazines will just get cut up by little kids?” I asked the librarian.

“Yes. Or recycled.”

“What if someone wanted to keep them when the library was done with them?”

“We can’t do that. It’s just too hard to keep track of requests like this.”

I didn’t want to read these articles. But I didn’t want children cutting them up in class next year. More importantly, I didn’t want one of my children to be sitting in art class and get handed one of these magazines and open it up to see their uncle Phil.

So I scooped them all up, handed her my library card, and checked them out. I took them home and went up to my room. I hid in the small space between my bed and the dresser with a pair of scissors I’d stolen from my daughter’s backpack. I sat on the floor and cut all the articles and photos of Phil out of each magazine. I tried to make the missing pages look inconspicuous. But there was no way to really hide it, especially when he was on the cover.

Magazine clippings were everywhere. Our lives had been cut into tiny pieces and gobbled up, and we spent a lot of time trying to hide it all away, including from each other. Eventually, I tucked all the clippings into an old cigar box, which I carefully placed up high on a shelf in my closet. I returned the cut-up magazines to the library, slipping them into the book deposit slot and hoping the cameras wouldn’t catch me. I imagined the librarian deciding to read The New Yorker on her lunch break and realizing that someone had ripped out this key, important article from the magazine. I walked home in the snow, thinking about the mystery I’d created for her with the missing pieces and also how Phil would think I was ridiculous for doing all this. He’d wrap his big arm around me, and we would walk a little quicker as the temperature dropped and the sun set lower in the sky. We would talk, like when we were kids, imagining the story of Encyclopedia Brown trying to solve The Case of the Vanishing Actor, which takes place in a library with a small wooden door.

Em and Phil in New York City, fall of 1987.

 

Emily Anne Barr is a pediatric nurse practitioner, a midwife, and a nurse scientist caring for families impacted by HIV. Her writing has appeared in the journal AIDS and in The Perch. When her brother died, his last gift to her was a two-year subscription to The Paris Review; she sent a version of this essay to the magazine earlier this year.

On the Distinctiveness of Writing in China

Yan Lianke at the Salon du Livre, 2010. Photograph by Georges Seguin, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED.

When I talk to non-Chinese readers like yourselves, I often find that you are interested in hearing about what distinguishes me as an author but also what distinguishes my country—and particularly details that go beyond what you see on the television, read about in newspapers, and hear about from tourists.

I know that China’s international reputation is like that of a young upstart from the countryside who has money but lacks culture, education, and knowledge. Of course, in addition to money, this young upstart also has things like despotism and injustice, while lacking democracy and freedom. The result is like a wild man who is loaded with gold bullion but wears shabby clothing, behaves rudely, stinks of bad breath, and never plays by the rules. If an author must write under the oversight of this sort of individual, how should that author evaluate, discuss, and describe him?

To address this question, we will first consider the distinctive conditions faced by contemporary Chinese authors.

I. Light and Shadows Beneath a Half-Open and Half-Closed Window

The entire world knows that China’s economy has recently undergone a process of reform and opening up, whereas the relationship between China’s advanced economic system and its conservative political system is like the fable in which the tortoise beats the hare who stops to take a nap. In the race between China’s economic and political reform, the economy is currently surging ahead while politics stops to take a nap.

In contrast to China’s economic tortoise, its political hare has not merely slowed down or stopped; it has even turned around and headed back whence it came. For instance, in discussing China’s freedom of expression and ideological emancipation, people sometimes refer to the nation’s prison house of language—and even if it is not technically a prison, it is at the very least a cage. Although the nation’s economic window is either open or in the process of being opened and its political window is either closed or in the process of being closed, its culture looks around in confusion at the resulting play of light and shadows. The nation’s literature—which is to say, authors’ writings—is also stuck in this intermediary zone. Meanwhile, the billion-plus Chinese people who gather beneath these windows to breathe and survive find that the brightness and warmth here are unpredictable; consequently, their souls, spirits, and hearts become increasingly variable, decadent, and dark.

For the past several decades, China has demonstrated that the success of a planned economy lies not so much in the planning of the economy itself but rather in the planning of people’s hearts. The ultimate objective of economic planning is not economic prosperity itself but rather control over the national and political aspects of people’s souls. In a market economy, the market includes not only the economy proper but also people’s souls and the freedom that must be banished for the sake of economic development. Because of the needs of power and politics, people’s freedom cannot strictly follow the rise and fall of the economy. When the economic window is open, the political window will be closed, and ideological power will be concentrated. People’s spirits will resemble a patch of grass struggling to grow in the intermittently light and dark area beneath these partially open and partially closed windows. Because there is insufficient light and irregular wind here (although it is certainly not the case that there is no light or wind at all), when this patch of grass manages to glimpse some light and wind, it will fight to secure them, and otherwise it will gasp and struggle in their absence.

This is the situation in contemporary China. The economic window is open and the political window is closed, and culture wanders in the intermediate zone between the two. Contemporary literature approaches the flourishing economy as though hugging a fireball and approaches the ubiquitous politics of contemporary reality as though embracing an enormous chunk of ice.

Politics expects that you write about the existence of that hot, bright, and visible so-called positive energy while also attending to the existence of that which, on the surface, appears to be a form of negative energy—including a reality that either cannot be seen or else doesn’t even exist. In this intermediate zone, all Chinese, including children from preschool forward (but excluding infants, who are of course innocent and pure), are influenced by what they see and hear. For instance, children all know that teachers will respond favorably if they are offered gifts. Meanwhile, if an old man collapses in the street, it is only natural that bystanders will help him, but when the old man responds by accusing the bystanders of having knocked him down and demands compensation from them, this becomes a special kind of incident—a legal case. Given that the frequency of these sorts of incidents has recently increased, we cannot help but suspect that these apparent victims must hold darkness in their hearts. Accordingly, now if someone collapses or is hit by a car, passersby will often hurry away as though they haven’t seen anything, and although we may find this situation unreasonable, at least we can understand it. This illustrates how, in contemporary China, people’s souls have become numb and dark.

What is bred under the open window of the economy is capital, desire, and evil, and what is bred under the closed window of politics is corruption, greed, and contempt for others. People’s hearts become deformed, distorted, and absurd. If an author wants to realistically describe people’s deepest souls, this is his God-given responsibility, and if the author gives this up, he will no longer have any need to exist. Meanwhile, the people who control when, how, and to what extent the two windows should be open or shut also control authors’ pens and remind them what they can and can’t write. These people constantly remind authors that the light of one person’s heart has positive energy and should be discussed in detail, but the darkness of another person’s heart cannot be discussed because such a conversation might touch on the underlying reason why their heart is dark in the first place.

Meanwhile, for the sake of their survival, honor, and status, the authors living under these partially open and partially closed windows (and under the supervision of the people overseeing the windows) must adopt one of the following three writing methods.

First, there is writing that welcomes light. When you see and obtain light, you write to welcome it. The more you write about light, the brighter your writing will become, and the more prestige and status will illuminate your life—the same way that sunlight shines into your room when you open a window in the morning.

Second, there is writing that borrows light. People who write to borrow light are all talented Chinese authors with a certain degree of conscience and wisdom. Because these authors are unwilling to write to welcome light but are also unwilling to give up their internal artistic sentiment, they have no choice but to borrow light from others. As a result, they always have a feeling of guilty gratitude and don’t attempt to explore the reality behind that half-closed window. They know that behind that window there lies the greatest truth, but because they have borrowed light, they resemble someone who—after using someone else’s tools or eating someone else’s food—naturally won’t excavate the foundations of that other person’s house. Therefore, these authors reach a tacit agreement that they will remain in the boundary zone between light and darkness and will use an artistic balance to complete a “literary idea” that belongs to both regions.

Third, there is writing that transcends light to reach the truth of darkness. This kind of writing is risky because you not only betray light after transcending it but also betray all the authors and works positioned in the intermediary zone between light and darkness. Furthermore, everything located in the light and at its margins is visible, whereas the truth of that darkness remains invisible and can only be felt. Therefore, your writing is not something everyone can recognize, and instead it leads people to doubt, argue, and spurn. This is also why writing that transcends light to reach darkness, and which proceeds from the illuminated window to the area beneath the dark window—this kind of writing requires not only courage but also talent and creativity. You need to know that the closed window is truth but that the open window is also truth. If you hope to perceive truth and existence in darkness, you must also see truth and existence in light. The question you should most care about involves not only the joy and propitiousness that people experience in the light together and the way they gasp and struggle in darkness, but also the anxiety they experience in the boundary zone between these two sets of windows.

II. The Unregulated Expansion of the Censorship System

When it comes to literature, a censorship system is like a cruel father admonishing his disobedient child. China’s authors are as familiar with the nation’s censorship system as a frequently beaten child knows the rules of his father’s anger—and it is as though every author who has memory and experience knows the system as intimately as they know the palm of their own hand.

China’s literary censorship system can be divided into three levels.

1. The national censorship system. For literary works, national censorship is a kind of ideological trial that involves a set of policies, rules, and regulations derived from ideology’s service to the regime. Although all laws and regulations are determined by individuals, their impetus and implementation ultimately relies on the nation’s reputation. Following a lengthy series of meetings and notifications, virtually every department and individual in contemporary China responsible for culture, news, literature, and art with ideological implications can consciously grasp censorship’s policies and framework, its bottom line, and its outer margins. They understand what can and can’t be written, what can be addressed in a vague fashion (like the Cultural Revolution) and what definitely cannot be mentioned at all (like June Fourth). However, what really leaves authors at a loss is the censorship operators: the individuals who implement specific cultural provisions on behalf of the Party.

2. Censorship operators. The censorship regime includes an array of different types of institutions that help implement literary policies. At the top level, these include the Central Propaganda Department, the General Administration of Press and Publication, and other high level departments; at the middle level, they include provincial-level institutions; and at the bottom level, they include specific journals and presses.

Two dominant characteristics of contemporary China’s censorship system include the abuse of power on one hand and publishers’ increased caution and expanded self-censorship on the other. Publishers were originally the most direct drivers of the publishing industry and of grassroots culture, but now that censorship has become stricter and bans have become more and more common, censorship operators are increasingly required to attend not only to a work’s subject matter but even to the use of specific “sensitive” words. As a result, it is very common for publishers and editors themselves to be examined, interrogated, suspended, and transferred.

Censorship operators frequently adopt a policy of punishing one author to serve as an example to others, following the logic that if you are bitten by a snake one morning, you will remain terrified of ropes for years to come. Accordingly, publishing organizations have become censorship operators on the principle that “all citizens are soldiers.” After a manuscript arrives, the first thing editors consider is not the work’s artistic or market value but whether it is sensitive and whether the author has attracted the attention of the higher-ups. In this way, editors become the book’s first censors. The publisher’s second, third, and final round reviewers serve not only as the manuscript’s artistic referees but also as its political censors. In the case of works that have artistic value but also carry a certain degree of risk, the publisher may extend the review process and allow the National Press and Publication Administration to make the final call.

3. Self-censorship. The national censorship system uses power and policies that supervene the letter of the law to call for the implementation and oversight of the censorship operation. Over time, however, this sort of operation ultimately succeeds in encouraging a process of self-censorship on the part of the authors themselves. If censorship operation is a kind of power and oppression, then authors’ self-censorship is simultaneously conscious, unwitting, and reflexive.

Like many works, my own Dream of Ding Village underwent a process of self-censorship. I have already discussed this process at length elsewhere, but what I would like to add here relates to the conscious and reflexive nature of this process. The harm it causes is far greater than the processes of censorship, editing, and banning that people can see—because it involves literary elements that are excised before they are even born. Like a fetus that is subject to One Child policy family-planning restrictions, these elements can disappear before they even have a chance to appear in the first place. Before they have even become a fetus, they are consciously and reflexively “planned” out of existence.

III. The Advantages and Disadvantages of the Professional Writers’ System

China’s professional writers’ system is the most distinctive feature of the nation’s socialist literature regime, in which power is used to standardize literature, thought, and art. This kind of administrative system is possible only in socialist countries, and it features the Chinese Writers’ Association, which offers a means of nurturing and managing authors’ thought, behavior, and writing (other art forms such as film, television, drama, painting, calligraphy, and folk art are overseen by the China Literature and Art Federation). The greatest advantage of the Chinese Writers’ Association is that it ensures that many talented authors won’t have to worry about basic living requirements and other practical considerations and instead can devote themselves to their writing. Instead of a salon system, writers’ associations use organizational and activity methods to discuss, pursue, and expand literature. However, because the basic objective of the professional author system is not artistic freedom and advancement but rather the management, regulation, and control of authors’ writing, thought, and imagination, the potential advantages of the professional author system are mostly lost. There is only a minority of authors who, working within this collective system, manage to preserve the independence of their writing and their literary personality.

Today, roughly 80 percent of Chinese authors who are middle-aged or older belong to these sorts of professional organizations. Young authors born in the eighties and nineties and new internet authors are rapidly being incorporated into this “unity” through membership in professional organizations such as the Chinese Writers’ Association and other national organizations (including the National Congress of Writers and the National Congress of Young Creative Writers), the literary prize system (including the Mao Dun Prize and the Lu Xun Prize), and other means of honoring works. Through a process of assimilation, cultivation, and transformation, authors first become “a member of the team,” then they gradually accept an assessment of literary value that is lacking in independent personality, and finally the system achieves its objective of preventing them from producing works that possess independence, freedom, and thought.

One of the greatest disadvantages of the professional author system is that it makes writers lazy and inclined to lose their creativity. Professional authors under this system receive the same compensation whether or not they actually work, and they achieve the same outcome whether or not they actually create anything. It has been thirty years since the beginning of the reform and opening-up campaign, and the market economy is now society’s most powerful force. However, professional authors can go for years without writing anything yet still draw a monthly salary from the Ministry of Treasury and Finance. This means that they could potentially write nothing at all and instead spend every day chatting, attending meetings, and participating in other activities. Many authors initially produce works bursting with talent when they start writing in their spare time, but their output decreases once they are incorporated into this professional author system. The issue is not that those authors stop writing because they have become detached from reality and their feelings but rather that the professional writer system encourages people’s inherent laziness, which in turn may dull their sensitivity, diligence, talent, and creativity.

Writing is a very solitary and lonely endeavor. However, the professional author system is essentially concerned with the collectivization, nationalization, and politicization of individual writing. The unification of thought, topics, and, when possible, artistic expression—all of this has the effect of collectivizing individual creation. From its initial publication, Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum has offered a model for China’s policy on literature and art, and to this day it remains an important guide for ideology and for professional authors’ writing, speech, and action. For several decades, there has been considerable study of the origins of this speech and for whom it was intended, but essentially it sought to remove the religious sentiments that were in the service of the heart and soul. The text encouraged authors to abandon their individual religious sentiments and instead become members of a collective under a unified leadership and management. The result was to make literature eager to serve power and politics, as well as the Party and the Party’s needs.

If, as an author, you hope to maintain a certain amount of stability in your life, you’ll need to enter the ranks of professional authors. In doing so, your deep thought will have to undergo a process of collectivization, politicization, and nationalization. You’ll have to recognize the regulations that policies and power apply to your writing, and how the publication process has, over the past several decades, cultivated readers’ values. You will therefore transition from an individual into a collective. This is the system’s most effective chain for managing thought. Once you become a link in this chain, your literary perspective, worldview, and even views on life and value will lose their independence and individuality.

“Work within the system, but think outside the system.” This saying captures an attitude held by many institutional staff and Chinese intellectuals. Many professional authors give lip service to this phrase, but very few adhere to it in their writing. An author’s job is to write, and his speech and actions are his work. Meanwhile, his company is the Chinese Writers’ Association, and his bosses are political leaders and the Party that represents the people. This kind of system—in which I raise and educate you—is naturally for the purpose of having you work (write) for me. The system is not designed to encourage you to be independent, to be free, or to develop an unorthodox and unrestrained self-imagining.

To put it simply, the basic objective of the Chinese Writers’ Association is to transform writers into Party authors. Before the reform and opening-up campaign, all writers accepted the objective of becoming Party authors. Afterward, following writers’ pursuit of artistic independence, the term “Party author” continued to be invoked in periodicals and at conferences, but it began to fade in many writers’ hearts. Although the basic objective of the Chinese Writers’ Association did not change, its methods did. From a compulsory and oppressive system, it shifted to one that emphasized education and inducements. It used traditional methods of meetings and study, together with a process of issuing awards and cultivating literary values, to achieve its objective of transforming authors into Party authors, together with an arrangement that emphasized the “freedom of pure art” and not a work’s independent character.

The professional author system does not reject freedom of expression, but neither does it actively promote authorial independence. This system allows you to be a writer who is not a Party author, but it does not permit you to produce writings that are neither what the government calls “main melody” nor “positive energy” works. You can explore endlessly when it comes to your works’ language and form, but this exploration cannot extend to the works’ social content—including contemporary people, thought, soul, and sharp social contradictions. When it comes to artistic form, your thought can be independent, but when it comes to content, you are not allowed to think independently. If you disobey, your works will be rejected, censored, and derided, but if you obey, your works will be praised, promoted, and rewarded. In this way, a new standard for assessing literary value is established.

IV. A Coping Mechanism When Faced with Extraordinary Circumstances

Faced with China’s current contradictory environment, which features a relatively open market economy and a relatively closed political system—an environment that is neither extreme left, like the Cultural Revolution, nor fully democratic, free, and balanced—authors have the possibility of enjoying independent thought and imagination, while also encountering enormous obstacles of identification and seduction. They have adopted a variety of different responses to this predicament.

One response has been to behave submissively, prioritize profitable writing, and treat literary talent as a condition for honor, status, and profit. This kind of response is very common among Chinese authors, for whom well being and material security rationalize an exchange wherein authors take the position: “I’ll do my best on behalf of your main melody and positive energy, if in return you help improve my life by offering me cars, houses, reimbursement slips, prizes, and official positions” (positions like the director or deputy director of China’s various writers’ associations). The Chinese people have always contended that food security is an issue of paramount importance, and as soon as literature and life are united, all writing for the purpose of flattery, prestige, material benefit, and honor becomes legitimizedA second possible response has been to escape, resulting in a literature that is very deserving of respect. “Everything I do is for the sake of literature itself ”—this attitude involves reducing literature to a kind of ivory tower, or using the ivory tower’s reputation to distance oneself from the chaos of power, mainstream culture, and social complexity. In this way, one can sit alone in one’s study or stroll through the peach blossom garden, using writing as a shelter and Zhuangzi’s withdrawal as a model while enjoying a peaceful life and writing process. Even if one is not in one’s study or garden every day, and even if one enters secular life and social reality every day, one’s writing may still be characterized by a pattern of avoidance, escape, and a pursuit of “purity.” This is not merely an attitude; it is also a method and an entire worldview. It is a position that many contemporary Chinese authors adopt, despite possessing independent ideas, goals, and talents. It is also precisely the distanced, diligent quality of these works that enriches the existence and status of contemporary Chinese literature. Although these authors may not have much “I think, therefore I am” independence, however their writing possesses qualities and objectives associated with independence. They represent Chinese literature’s nucleus while ensuring its survival.

A third response has been adopted by writers who hope to preserve independent thought in their work while at the same time maintaining their status as independent authors. These authors dare to confront humanity’s predicament, to confront writing itself, and to confront literature’s position in contemporary reality, while also daring to confront the position of people and reality within literature. These writers do not seek to become independent by adopting the attitude of a provocateur; instead they use their position as authors to stand before reality while observing and reflecting on everything within that same reality. Without attempting to avoid anything, they instead display the greatest possible concern and love for contemporary China’s absurd, complex, and surging existence, as well as for the contemporary predicament in which people find themselves. They don’t imagine that literature will change anything overnight, but instead they focus on what literature might leave in this gap between history and the present. Their literature speaks not only to the present but also to life and to the world.

Among the most important Chinese works from recent years that examine reality we could cite Jia Pingwa’s The Shaanxi Opera and Old Kiln, Wang Anyi’s Age of Enlightenment, Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and Frog, Yu Hua’s Brothers, Liu Zhenyun’s Someone to Talk To, Su Tong’s The Boat to Redemption, and Ge Fei’s Spring Comes to the South, together with several more recent works that I read as I was preparing this manuscript, including Han Shaogong’s Book of Days and Nights, Su Tong’s Shadow of the Hunter, Jia Pingwa’s The Lantern Bearer, and Yu Hua’s The Seventh Day. Although these works are not necessarily the most emblematic of Chinese literature, or even of the oeuvre of their individual authors, each work nevertheless illustrates how its author abandoned a distanced attitude to investigate history and contemporary reality, and on the people who cannot avoid contemporary society’s absurdities. This clearly demonstrates that what these authors are pursuing is not only artistic completeness but also individual independence.

The individual independence and artistic completeness may not announce the arrival of a great era of true literature, but at least it foretells Chinese literature’s possible rise.

 

Adapted from Yan Lianke’s Sound and Silence: My Experience with China and Literature, translated by Carlos Rojas, to be published by Duke University Press next week.

Yan Lianke is the author of Discovering Fiction, Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, and many other books. He is the recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize and a two-time finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, and teaches at Beijing’s Renmin University and at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Carlos Rojas is a professor of modern Chinese cultural studies at Duke University and the translator of several of Yan Lianke’s novels.

In Warsaw

The End of Dinner, Jules-Alexandre Grün, 1913. Public domain.

In our new Spring issue, we published the short story “The Beautiful Salmon” by Joanna Kavenna. It features one of the most disastrous-sounding dinner parties I’ve ever read about in fiction, which is a meaningful distinction; it is also very funny at times and slightly surreal and imbued with a kind of offbeat philosophical bent. “People often talk about learning experiences and, in the days after the salmon-based fiasco, I wondered about this,” the narrator says, at the end of the story. And it’s a good question: What do we learn from an experience like this? Anything at all? “The Beautiful Salmon” made me think of dinner parties I’d attended or hosted—ones that had gone well and ones that had gone quite poorly and ones that had gone just fine, so that they mostly escaped my memory except for the specific dish or the offhand comment that has stuck with me for years. The significance of these moments, when we’re sharing meals with a group of people, often with a certain sense of occasion, have a particular type of comedy and drama that is often hard to distill or decipher. And so I asked some writers we admire to write short essays on dinner parties they remembered, often long after the dishes were removed from the sink.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

Irresolute, no, shivering, I was waiting—lingering—outside the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which I had not yet seen beyond the entrance hall and the large auditorium, in which I’d just attended an event honoring the Swedish writer Lars Gustafsson, who had died a few months before. (The only real names in this story are the names of the dead.) The event, conducted in Polish and Swedish, was unintelligible to me, but my understanding was not a priority: it was one of the few invitations I’d received since moving to Warsaw two months before, and I accepted all of them, catholic in my pursuit of a real life. So far I had only an apartment, a rhythm of groceries and laundry, early mornings at a desk, and daily trips by tram to a cold classroom for language lessons. Technically, we hadn’t yet passed from autumn to winter, but it was as cold as any winter in New York. Lingering there, hoping to catch sight of someone I’d already met, specifically the woman who had invited me, I was wearing a blue wool coat, several years old and oversize in such a way that I looked tubular. But its bright, almost azure hue might draw attention in the swirl of black.

In the middle of this event, a string quartet had performed several songs—études by Chopin, I learned from the program—and I’d realized that for me, and perhaps for no one else in the audience, the music and the words were exactly the same. Both signified nothing except sound. And, still lingering, now concluding that I should probably just walk to the tram stop and give up on the idea of any continuation of the evening, I thought that this, the event, but also my daily life in a country in which I spoke approximately five hundred words of the language, was the closest I’d ever get to actually remembering childhood before language, when people must have talked all the time around me without my comprehending words as words.

Then Anna, the host, was touching my elbow, laughing at something someone else was saying, and then, in English, her usual (I would learn) tumble of thoughts, including thanks for coming, wasn’t it lovely, so moving, and finally that precious if terrifying prospect: invitation to a dinner, not far away, at the apartment of someone I should meet. He appeared as if from thin air, like Mephistopheles, to introduce himself—Michał—and bow slightly over our clasped hands, a courtly gesture I felt the urge to imitate. American poet, Anna said somewhere nearby, repeating it in Polish, amerykańską poetką, to identify—perhaps to justify—me.

Very casual, this dinner, Anna had said somewhere in the rush, while typing the address into my phone. Still, I stopped at a Carrefour Express for a bottle of wine, hoping a gift would alleviate the feeling of being a party crasher, like the narrator at the beginning of Susan Sontag’s novel In America, the opening scene of which takes place at a dinner party at an unnamed hotel in Warsaw that I would later recognize as the Hotel Bristol, but not yet. Sontag’s narrator, an actual party crasher, also does not speak Polish, though she’s much less troubled by both of those facts than I was.

The apartment door opened onto a long hall lined by art—actual art, not prints—and then my cylindrical coat was taken by someone hired to take a coat and disappeared, and then I was ushered by someone hired to usher through a large doorway to the right into a large room, holding still more art. Someone hired to pass trays of food offered me a demitasse of gazpacho, a word I did recognize. Someone hired to pass drinks handed me a cocktail after saying some words I didn’t recognize. It had gin, I thought, and rosemary. I stuffed the supermarket wine deeper inside my oversize bag. It would be worse to produce that bottle than to come empty-handed. I did the gazpacho like a shot, in order to place it on another tray as soon as possible, and I set my bag beside, or slightly behind, a potted plant, something large and leafy I couldn’t name—the inability to name things becoming my central characteristic—just in time, as Anna found me again and pulled me into a group. American poet, again, amerykańską poetką. She explained that I didn’t have Polish—this is how the Poles always talked about languages when speaking English: as things that one could possess—but, she turned to me, you have French, of course? I did not—my Americanness—and graciously, swiftly, she covered her surprise.

The group included an English writer, unembarrassed by his lack of Polish, perhaps because he was English, perhaps because he had French and Italian to draw on; a famous Polish writer and editor, and democratic hero, because of his past imprisonments, who spoke Polish and German; and the Polish writer, perennial name on the Ladbrokes Nobel list, Adam Zagajewski, who spoke gently in all of his languages, which I believe included Polish, English, German, and French, but perhaps Italian as well. Surnames ending in ski or ska, I’d just learned in my elementary Polish class, indicated (a perhaps distant) Russian origin, and were declined not as nouns but as adjectives, a fact that flashed through my mind as we were introduced, so that the first thing I said to him—that I admired his poetry—emerged a beat late, as if I hadn’t remembered who he was and what he’d done.

Kind as it was of Anna to call me a poet, I didn’t yet feel able to claim the title. At that point, I’d published two or three poems in journals that hardly anyone in America had heard of and certainly no one in Poland. My book? I answered. That’s why I’m here, to write it. The sentence sounded like a lie, which is how it felt, too. And, though that did not clarify anything for anyone, even me, they nodded. So, the English writer said, Latin American? The famous writer and editor disappeared, and the apartment’s owner, Michał, appeared to usher us to the table, a long table like those I’d seen in films, where, by accident or some courteous pity, I ended up between the English writer and Adam, who sat next to Michał and across from Anna.

The conversation flowed in and out of Polish and French, with some English interludes when someone would turn and offer me a slice of it. They were talking about Józef Czapski now; did I know Czapski? I didn’t. Oh, I should, I must, but he wasn’t much translated into English, sadly, though when—the optimism didn’t belong to me—I had Polish, I must read Czapski, who was also a great painter, a great man, not in the way of Great Men but in the way of true genius, and kindness, too. Adam had met him in Paris, I think he said, when Czapski was very old and Adam young—like you, he said, a young poet.

It is several years since this dinner, and I remember best the taste of persimmons soaked in muscadet, and the kindness of a famous man to someone who would admit to being young, but only hesitantly to being a poet. I remember, too, suddenly understanding the term old world, I a creature of the new, because it seemed I had stepped into a scene I’d only ever read about, in which people spoke in several languages about art and history and music and politics, too, unavoidably. And so the transatlantic travel I had recently done telescoped, in the shimmer of my wineglass, into the farthest journey of my life, from a childhood of lonesome reading in rural Ohio to this room that occupied the present and also the past, and which, apparently, would be my future, at least for a little while. This did not seem like an arrival, however, nor did it seem like a triumph. Embarrassment suffused me, at everything I hadn’t read, and everything I didn’t have: books, languages, knowledge. But then, again—and perhaps it was the excellent wine that definitely did not originate in a supermarket, which I was drinking too fast, from nerves—I thought of being a child, of that sense, when learning to read, of everything I didn’t know as something to be chased and caught, back when I was shameless. That had been the real beginning of my life, though I had no words for it then, only the feeling of unbounded possibility, and at that dinner table, something like that feeling pierced my humiliation, and it came to me how lucky I was to have the chance at such humiliation, and the glimpse of knowledge yet to be caught, still to be chased, and although I still don’t have perfect French or perfect Polish, far from it, I have read some Józef Czapski, and I can attest that he is as much as I was promised. “You can hope,” Sontag’s narrator says at her dinner party, “that you have found yourself among largehearted people, passion is a beautiful thing, and so is understanding, the coming to understand something, which is a passion, which is a journey, too.” And so I had.

 

Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist. Her debut collection of poetry is Grand Tour. 

“Throwing Yourself Into the Dark”: A Conversation with Anne Carson

Anne Carson. Photograph by Peter Smith.

Anne Carson and I met on Zoom last October, in the brick-red sitting room of her apartment in Reykjavik, the city where she and her husband, Robert Currie, have spent time each year since 2008. A theatrical set piece painted by Ragnar Kjartansson leaned against the wall. Out the window: the ocean and Iceland’s barren expanse. “America seems so cluttered, vegetatively,” Carson said. “Trees everywhere, plants all over the place, flowers. Here it’s just empty. There’s lava, there’s the sea. There’s just lines. Empty space.”

Empty space is one of Carson’s creative playgrounds. “Lecture on the History of Skywriting”—the centerpiece of her latest collection, Wrong Norma—is narrated by the sky, or space itself personified. Formally, where other Sappho translators have filled the gaps between the ancient poet’s fragments, Carson’s If Not, Winter marks the negative space with brackets, emphasizing that lines and stanzas have been lost to history. Carson has often explored absence-as-presence: Eros the Bittersweet argues that desire comes from lack, while Nox, an elegy for her late brother, Michael, mourns the final absence of someone who had long been missing from her life.

We were there to talk about Wrong Norma, Carson’s first original work in seven years, which she called “a collection of disparate pieces, not a coherent thing with a throughline or themes or a way you have to read it.” But images, phrases, and ideas recur: bread, blood, pebbles, a fox, lawyers, a heart of darkness, John Cage, the word wrong, and various flavors of wrongness, for example. “I don’t have much to say,” Carson remarked. Yet over a pair of hour-long conversations, we found plenty to talk about.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about the “wrongness” in the title of Wrong Norma.

CARSON

When people ask me, “How are Canadians different from Americans?” I say, “Canadians have one characteristic: they’re polite, but wrong.” All the time, polite but wrong.

“Wrong” I put in the title because, well, because of the Canadian thing. And also, something you always feel in academic life is that you’re wrong or on the verge of being wrong and you have to worry about that, because everything is so judgmental and hierarchical. Getting tenure depends on XYZ being “not wrong” every time you speak. So it’s kind of a mentality I was interested in disabling.

It’s something Simone Weil says in an essay she has about contradiction, because people find contradiction in philosophical texts so perplexing, and she specializes in contradiction. She says it’s a useful mental event, because it loosens the mind. And once you can loosen, you can go on to think other things or wider things or the things underneath where you were. It’s just suddenly a different landscape. And that loosening, I think, is what wrongness allows in.

I could talk about wrongness tomorrow and say an entirely other thing. A person is a prism, you know, and concepts just flash from this to that from day to day.

INTERVIEWER

As I read Eros the Bittersweet, I was thinking about the adage that friends and lovers “speak the same language.” I don’t know if that’s true—it seems more like everyone speaks their own individual language, and there’s this constant act of translation happening in relationships.

CARSON

I don’t think anybody ever knows what another person means when they speak, frankly. It’s more than translation, it’s just throwing yourself into the dark. Language is so very, very personal, private. Weird. I guess you could think of it as translation, that seems like a kind of euphemistic metaphor. It’s probably a lot more hopeless than that. But the effort of speaking as a human is the effort to get past that hopelessness with every sentence.

INTERVIEWER

That seems similar to the idea that the way that one language expresses an idea might never fully translate to another. What happens in that space you inhabit as a translator, between the original work and the translation?

CARSON

I think of it as a ditch, a ditch between two roads or countries. It’s always been interesting for me, the state of mind that the translator arrives at, where they have two languages simultaneously on their brain-screen. And they’re saying something not quite equivalent and they both keep on floating there. Some writers—Emily Dickinson would be the outstanding example—make use of that ditch within their own language. So she’s not translating from another language. She’s translating herself. She writes certain lines and words and then crosses them out and puts another word in, or writes the third word on the side, or turns the paper over and makes another version of the whole thing. And it all exists together as the poem. It’s just a really weird state of mind, to have all that floating, and have it be, have it constitute the poem in its entirety—in its untidy, unresolved entirety.

In translation, this arises in a different way, because you have a text, and it has perhaps certain obvious errors in it. And then you have variant readings at the bottom of the page, which are ideas that different scholars have had over the years to make a better reading where it seems wrong. So you get, again, these possibilities floating in your mind, for the same thing, but different. And they’re all kind of there together constituting the poem. I’ve never known what to do with that. It’s a beautiful event to have the poem in Greek with various readings in English underneath it, and to have all that floating as possibilities for what the guy really said.

I can’t communicate the beauty of that most of the time on a page in a book, or in something called “a translation of x.” There’s no format for that. You can do it sort of on a computer with links and whatnot, side text. But basically nobody wants to be bothered with reading all those links, and it doesn’t feel the same. As a scholar, when you’re looking at the page itself with the language and the variants, and it all floats in your mind, it’s just an extraordinary experience. Incommunicable, I think, in its finer aspects.

Interior from Wrong Norma.

INTERVIEWER

What about the act of creating something from scratch? Is that experience similarly spatial?

CARSON

I think about it as something that arrives in the mind, and then gets dealt with if it’s interesting. It’s more like a following of something, like a fox runs across your backyard and you decide to follow it and see if you can get to where the fox lives. It’s just following a track.

INTERVIEWER

The fox is one of the mysteries of Wrong Norma. Did he have a fixed meaning or feeling as you wrote about him, or would it change every day?

CARSON

I don’t know where that fox came from. I was writing the liner notes for the LP of Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors, and I was drawing at the same time. The fox appeared in the drawing, and he was such a great fox, I thought, “I’ve got to put that fox in somewhere,” so I put it into the Visitors piece. It was just an accidental fox that arrived by himself and then seemed to need to be dealt with.

INTERVIEWER

How do you access your most creative headspace?

CARSON

Sometimes, what I end up writing about is just the way the light is. And there seems to be some kind of contract that’s already in place between me and the light to say—in this notebook, which no one will ever read—what the light is like today, to get exactly the right words. I don’t know what that contract is. But it seems to underlie all the other writing.

After the light, we could talk about my mother or what I’m having for dinner or Proust’s theory of translation. But the important thing is over. The light was the important thing. It remains a mystery to me why that’s the case, or where that contract came from.

INTERVIEWER

In the piece “Snow,” you write about a premonition featuring the night clerk at the hotel where you stayed the week before your mother passed away. Is that something that happens to you often?

CARSON

Once it did. In Greek myth, the god Hermes is called the psychopomp, which means that when somebody is about to die, he goes to them and leads their soul to the underworld. So I kind of categorized the bellhop in the hotel as that guy. But when Currie and I were going to his father’s funeral, we picked up a hitchhiker in the middle of Michigan, nowhere. God knows where he came from, because it’s just empty landscape and then this guy, on the side of the road, in a really clean blue suit. He had a blue suit and a blue shirt. He was really starched-looking, and he got into the car and the car suddenly smelled like laundry, he was that clean. We tried to talk to him, and he didn’t want to talk. He was going to some public library on the side of the road three towns down, but he wouldn’t describe who he was. And then we let him out of the car at the library and went on our way. That guy was a psychopomp, because we didn’t know Currie’s dad was dead yet. Or, he wasn’t dead yet. He died the same day. We figured that guy was the sign that somebody’s going to the other world. So it does happen. I wouldn’t say often.

INTERVIEWER

For a long time, you and Currie co-taught a class on artistic collaboration at NYU called “The Egocircus.” What sorts of exercises would you do with your students?

CARSON

“Burn something, use the ash” was one of the prompts. “Improve a hotel” was another. We sometimes gave them just three words like “sailing, butter, death.” And then they would make things. It wasn’t that we disallowed writing entirely—they always did come up with writing—but we encouraged them to use other skills. They were always discovering things they could do that they didn’t know they could do.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any non-writing skills that are part of your writing process?

CARSON

Drawing and painting. I’ll put swimming in. Tidying up, I’m a good tidier.

Interior from Wrong Norma.

INTERVIEWER

How does swimming figure into your writing?

CARSON

It keeps me from being morose and crabby. Sometimes I think in the pool. Usually it’s a bad idea. The ideas you have in the pool are like the ideas you have in a dream, where you get this sentence that answers all questions you’ve ever had about reality and you get up groggily and write it down, and in the morning, it looks like “let’s buy bananas” or something completely irrelevant. Plus, I like water. Some people just need to be near water.

INTERVIEWER

You and Currie are fans of John Cage, who talks about eliminating the ego from art. I’m still thinking about the John Cage epigraph that appears in your 2016 collection Float—“Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.”

CARSON

That pertains to writers because they tend to have an accumulated store of memories and choices, which they call their autobiography, and then they just recycle that endlessly as they’re writing. You’ve just got to get out of that.

INTERVIEWER

In the writing world, particularly in and around M.F.A. programs, there’s a lot of discussion around things like “character” and “perspective,” the mechanics of narrative. Do you think about “craft” in these terms?

CARSON

Never. I don’t think about it. I think people should just quit that stuff. Just think about something and follow it down to where it gets true.

INTERVIEWER

I worry that—in America at least—the act of critical thinking is being devalued from a cultural perspective. Do you notice that as a thinker or teacher?

CARSON

That’s part of the thing that made me start thinking about hesitation. The last few years I was teaching, I was teaching ancient Greek part of the time and writing part of the time. And the ancient Greek method when I was in school was to look at the ancient Greek text and locate the words that are unknown and look them up in a lexicon. And then find out what it means and write it down. Looking up things in a lexicon is a process that takes time. And it has an interval in it of something like reverie, something like suspended thought because it’s not no thought because you have a question about a word and you attain that as you go through the pages looking for the right definition, but you’re not arrived yet at the thought. It’s a different kind of time, and a different kind of mentality than you have anywhere else in the day. It’s very valuable, because things happen in your thinking and in your feeling about the words in that interval. I call that a hesitation.

Nowadays people have the whole text on their computer, they come to a word they don’t know, they hit a button and instantly the word is supplied to them by whatever lexicon has been loaded into the computer. Usually the computer chooses the meaning of the word relevant to the passage and gives that, so you don’t even get the history of the word and a chance to float around among its possible other senses.

That interval being lost makes a whole difference to how you regard languages. It rests your brain on the way to thinking because you’re not quite thinking yet. It’s an absent presence in a way, but it’s not the cloud of unknowing that mystics talk about when they say that God is nothing and you have to say nothing about God because saying something about God makes God particular and limited. It’s not that—it’s on the way to knowing, so it’s suspended in a sort of trust. I regret the loss of that.

Interior from Wrong Norma.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that our experience of time has something to do with the way that we pay attention? Do you think that someone who reads a lot would experience time differently from someone looking at screens all day?

CARSON

 That seems to imply judgment. I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that we seek out ways to make time stop. That only happens in moments of total attention, which is why we pursue them. I suppose that can happen when you watch a movie on Netflix. Or when you’re deep in the midst of composing your best poem. Either of them can provide a focus of attention that you can enter, disappear into. My only interest in dealing with time is to find ways to make it stop. Because when it doesn’t stop, you’re in boredom.

You’re watching it go by, and there’s nothing happening in it enough to fill it. Enough to take you away from misery. I don’t find much of a middle ground between boredom and whatever the other thing is … immortality, I guess. Forgetting time.

To be out of time, to be in that other state, is completely fun. So fun that you forget worrying about time.

INTERVIEWER

Do you spend hours at a time in that state?

CARSON

Minutes maybe, if I’m lucky.

 

Kate Dwyer is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in the New York Times and many other outlets.

Prescribing Creativity: The Meta-Diaries of Marion Milner

Marion Milner, The Angry Parrot. All images from Marion Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint (Routledge, 2010), reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group.

“Before the problem of the creative artist,” Freud famously declared in an essay on Russian literature, “analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.” Our creative potential—as it is expressed in the most ordinary dream or jokes, or in the extraordinary compositions of great artists—has always been a vital theme in psychoanalysis, but it has also been an elusive one. Freud himself, although he was interested in art and literature, knew he was better at diagnosing sources of suffering than sources of inspiration. People in mental pain, whether from depression, obsession, or panic attacks, may present similar symptoms, but everyone is creative in her own way. Creativity is difficult enough to describe, let alone prescribe.

Born in London in 1900, Marion Milner was part of a group of British psychoanalysts who put creativity at the center of their theory and practice. Her friend and colleague D. W. Winnicott, for instance, considered it the analyst’s role to encourage patients’ capacity for creative and playful living, rather than to interpret the hidden meanings of their psyche. Another member of this group, the extraordinarily learned Masud Khan, insisted on the relevance of literature to any psychological knowledge. What makes Milner distinctive, however, is that she approached her therapeutic project by way of her own creative explorations in literature and visual art. She began her career as a writer and an amateur artist while working a more conventional day job as an industrial and educational psychologist, and she did not train in Freudian psychoanalysis until she was well into midlife. But it was by bringing the perspective of the creative artist to her practice of psychoanalysis (and not the other way around) that she came to offer lasting insight.

Milner’s earliest writings stem from her feeling, as she put it in her first book, that she was—despite her cultured life, promising career, and many friends—“shut away from whatever might be real in living.” She responded by way of an “experiment” in finding a “way by which each person could find out for himself what he was like, not by reading what other people thought he ought to be, but directly, as directly as knowing the sky is blue and how an apple tastes, not needing anyone to tell him.”

Since 1926, Milner had been writing diaries in which she recorded her impressions of life in ways that seem ordinary enough. She would, for example, note seeing “a little boy in a sailor suit dancing and skipping by himself on his way to look at the sea lions,” or reflect, “I realized how untrustworthy I am in personal relationships … always agreeing with the person present.” But in the thirties Milner turned her diaries, as a sort of raw material, into her first books, which were published as essayistic reflections about her diaries: A Life of One’s Own (1934) and An Experiment in Leisure (1937). In them she invented something new and a genre of her own: a diary about a diary, or what the critic Hugh Haughton has called a “meta-diary.” Contemporaries like W. H. Auden responded with enthusiasm.

In these books, Milner begins her experiments in a familiar idiom of self-help. She attempts to list her life’s ambitions (today we might call this process “manifesting”) only to discover that, upon articulation, her goals inevitably devolve into “Sunday paperish” clichés like “plumbing the depths of human experience” or “drinking life to the dregs.” Not only are these amorphous aims impossible to accomplish, but Milner is “rather puzzled to find that the straightforward statement of the facts” of what matters to her “completely destroyed all sense of its importance.” What is remarkable about Milner’s writing—and makes it, I think, a landmark in the literature of self-discovery—is that it possesses the courage of its lack of convictions.

Abandoning her prefabricated aims for the future, Milner’s meta-diaries turn instead to the wayward movement of her thoughts in the present. She experiments with a kind of free writing, abandoning herself to the randomness of unplanned associative thought: “Whenever I felt the clutch of anxiety … whenever I felt a flood of inferiority lest I should never be able to reach the good I was aiming at, I tried a ritual sacrifice of all my plans and strivings.” Attending now to the thoughts that come when she is not directing her mind, Milner is startled to discover them leading her to preoccupations she never knew she had. “Led by a curious remote sense of intimacy” in certain “scrappy observations,” she follows chains of association to fantastic, gothic visions, which call to mind “Pan, the Devil, the elder gods, fertility rites, dark ceremonies in forests.” Milner comments, “These tricks of my imagination puzzled me … I was not given to dreaming of fabulous happenings, I had not read fairy tales for years and stories of fantasy written for adults rather bored me. But it seemed I only had to scratch the surface of my thinking in order to slip through to mythological levels.” In the process, she begins to wonder if she is a different sort of person than she had thought: someone with a “darker instinct.” But if this were so, then what, Milner wonders,

was I to do about it? The implications seemed a little awkward. Was I to hunt for a present-day company of devil worshippers and join their ranks? But I knew by the sense of intimacy in all these ideas that it was not a matter to be put lightly aside; if I had set out determined to find the meaning of what was most interesting, then I must face this question.

It is in wondering, with a kind of earnest irony, why she doesn’t become a Satanist that Milner makes progress. If devil worshippers know one thing, it is to whom they are paying their addresses. The very tone of Milner’s writing, on the other hand—a combination of the cheerfully brisk and practical with an openness to truly strange and eccentric experience (she sometimes sounds like Alice in Wonderland)—derives from her commitment to tolerating her own more dark or violent affects without too quickly resolving or explaining them through an external authority.

Indeed, it is for the same reasons she does not become a “devil worshipper,” Milner notes, that she does not become an academic. Of her fascination with mythologies and rituals, she remarks, “At one point I had taken the interest quite literally and seriously thought of becoming an anthropologist … But I was learning now not to be quite so simple-minded about interests.” If she is to find her sense of “what is real in living,” then she needs to find not some particular facts or data about life but expertise in how she handles, and allows to herself to be led by, her own unwitting preoccupations. She finds they lead her to moods and horizons: orientations in which “new possibilities” are “lit up.” Her diary books are close descriptions of this leading and the mental movements by which she finds her interest shifting “from what to do with my life to how to look at it.” She turns from following psychological guides to life to the more ambiguous lessons of art and literature (her diaries are full of literary quotation) and invents a practice of reading as a way of making something, not only learning something. Through this process, Milner becomes determined to collect a personal repertoire of images and texts—a repertoire opposed to conformity with what she calls the “mass-produced” desires and images of advertising, political propaganda, and Hollywood.

***

Marion Milner, Summer Morning.

In seeking images that mean something to her, Milner widens the media in which she conducts her search. In 1950 she describes “a most surprising discovery”:

that it was possible at times to produce drawings or sketches in an entirely different way … of letting hand and eye do exactly what pleased them without any conscious working to a preconceived intention. This discovery had at first been so disconcerting that I had tried to forget all about it … it threatened one’s sense of oneself as a more or less known entity.”

Milner turns from looking at her written diaries to the records of some doodles she had made to accompany them. She had not found them, or had not wanted to find them, significant before; now she finds in the borderline of word and image a new arena for describing her experience of boundaries—between self and other, the mind and body, the body and the world—and for imagining how those boundaries might be negotiated. She is compelled to understand her experiments in drawing and painting as a form of “visual reflection on the basic problems of living,” which are “intimately connected … with the problems of creativity and creative process.” It is the visual exploration of these “basic problems,” by which she means nothing less than learning how to be in the world, in vital and creative relation to it, that leads her to what became in her lifetime her best-known book, On Not Being Able to Paint.

Like her earlier meta-diaries, this book, published in 1950, records her drawings—both from much earlier in her life and those produced over the course of writing the book—as well as her commentary on them. She frames the book as a story of what happened when she attempted to teach herself drawing from scratch. She finds not only that her more purposeful, representative attempts at art fail at realism, but that their failures contain hints and gleams of other interests of which she had been unaware. She attempts a peaceful scene of trees on the South Downs of Sussex, for example, only to find in its unruly lines a blazing heath fire, while an expansive beech tree as she draws it becomes, through her surprisingly cramped and aggressive lines, more like a “snowy crag, blasted by a raging storm.”

Milner had not meant the lines of her sketch to veer away from what they were supposed to represent. But drawings inadequate to their conscious purposes are revealed to express unthought emotion. In following the thread of this discovery, On Not Being Able to Paint takes as its subject drawings that are ever more abstract and associative. From the marks her hand makes on the paper, Milner realizes her inner life is refracting her sensible perception of the outer world more powerfully than she had imagined was possible: “Surely it was a very active and headstrong kind of reflection, it could apparently elaborate on its external prototype as freely as Alice’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’ world did.” Her sketches are revealed to be portals to another world: signs taken for Wonderland.

Marion Milner, Summer Beeches.

 ***

On Not Being Able to Paint cannot really be summarized: the path—and prose—by which Milner leads her reader through her exploration of mark-making is inextricable from the book’s psychological insight. One has to read it for oneself. But it is possible to trace the book’s influence on the distinctive therapeutic practice through which Milner helped her patients as well as herself. A good example is found in the case of “Simon,” a boy of eleven who had been “remarkably interested and successful” at school between the ages of four and six but was now unhappy and “at times totally unable to get himself to school at all.” From the toys in Milner’s consulting room, Simon created a game in which “all the toys had been set out in the form of a village, full of people and animals; the boy would then bomb the village by dropping balls of burning paper upon it, my role being to play the part of the villagers, and try to save all the toys from actual destruction. The rules of the game were such that this was often very difficult.”

At first Milner tries to explain Simon’s play and his setting her to a demoralizing task as his attempt to compensate for the disempowerment of children by parents. Simon, she notes, had lived through the Blitz—so the mastering of a historical trauma is also at stake. “When talking to me,” Milner records in her 1952 paper on the case, “The Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation,” he adopted a “particularly bullying tone.” Whether it is his father or the Führer who is in the background here, Simon appears to want to be the one to try on what Milner calls the “dictatorship attitude” for once.

The problem is that Milner’s interpretations are no use. They keep her in a relation of competition with Simon about who is in the right and who has the upper hand. In response, Simon’s “aggression did not seem to lessen and I was sometimes in despair at its quite implacable quality.” Milner comes to wonder if her attention to explaining Simon’s play has blinded her to seeing it as the practice of a creative art, with toys as the medium, just as paper and ink had been her own. Attending to Simon’s play in this way, says Milner, raises “the whole question of beauty appearing in analysis,” a subject that had until then “not been much discussed” in psychoanalytic writing. Milner goes on:

In trying to understand all that this boy was trying to show me I had to take into account the fact that at times there was a quality to his play that I can only describe as beautiful—occasions where it was he who did the stage managing and it was my imagination that caught fire. It was in fact play with light and fire. He would close the shutters of the room and insist that it be lit only by candle light, sometimes a dozen candles arranged in patterns, or all grouped together in a solid block … In fact, all this type of play had a dramatic ritual quality … And this effect was all the more striking because this boy’s conscious interests were entirely conventional for his age; he was absorbed in Meccano and model railways.

In inventing such rituals, Simon is making the images and mythologies he needs. His playing with fire is here not a symbol for something else. It is just that: playing with fire. Milner holds off analysis for a moment in order to appreciate Simon’s creativity. In doing so, she comes to understand therapeutic practice as not only a task of interpretation, but the provision of a designated time—a medium—for everyday art. This understanding proves of use to Simon, who changes his mode of relation to Milner, becoming absorbed instead of captious. She helps Simon toward the same process she had come to value for herself: that “dialogue” between thought and “chalk, charcoal, paint.”

It is in finding his way to a creative use of the world around him, Milner comments, that Simon becomes able to keep his sense of the future alive. He goes back to school and is able to learn again. (He would become a distinguished scientist.) “I think that it is significant,” says Milner, “that, near the end of his analysis, this boy told me … he would give me a papier-mâché chemical clock,” and she suggests that “the malleability of the papier-mâché provided him with a way of expressing how he felt about part of the curative factor in his analysis.” Only through his practice of creative expression could he come to “accept the real qualities of externality, objective time standing as the chief representative of these.” Her writings show us how our feeling for the future is maintained through (as she puts it in another paper) our “sensual experience.” Milner found psychoanalytic writing familiar with painful inhibition. She wanted to make room in it for creative exultation too—what she called “the yell of joy.”

 

David Russell is associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he teaches nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, and on the essay, the history of criticism, and psychoanalysis. He is the author of Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain and of Marion Milner: On Creativity, forthcoming in June 2024.

“We’re Never Alone”

Tobias Wolff at the Spring Revel in 2024.

The Review was thrilled this year to honor Tobias Wolff with the Hadada Award, our annual prize for lifetime achievement in literature. At this year’s Spring Revel on April 2, Wolff spoke to a gathering of writers, artists, and friends. We are pleased to publish his remarks here.

When Lady Astor was breathing her last, a large group of family and friends gathered around the bed to see her off. Just before she departed this life, she snapped awake and looked around and said, “Is this my birthday, or am I dying?”

Well, don’t tell me.

The scene here bears some resemblances to hers. I look out and see my dear wife, Catherine, and my oldest and best friends, and others who’ve come into our life in later years, even as I still vividly recall the laughing, never-to-be-forgotten faces of two beloved friends who left our company too soon, George Crile and Edward McIlvain. I have been lucky, blessed, really, in family and friendship, and in too many other ways to describe here.

The Irish painter John Yeats, the poet’s father, described the making of art as the social act of a solitary person. Actually, he said “a solitary man.” They talked like that then. Anyway, I nodded in recognition when I came across that line. Maybe Hemingway could write in a crowded café, but I and the other artists and writers I’ve known have had to be shut away somewhere, out of the human stream, to get our work done. Yet as the years have frosted and mowed this head of mine, I have come to a different understanding of the situation. You may have retreated to your attic studio, you may even have pulled up the ladder behind you, but you were not alone. Never.

Case in point:

When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher became exasperated with my mulish refusal to learn cursive. I liked to print my words, so that they looked like the ones in the books I read. Finally, Mrs. Post sent me home with a note to my mother, telling her that I would not be allowed to return to school until I learned to write in cursive. My mother did not need this complication. She was raising me alone, in a small apartment above a garage, working on her feet all day at a Dairy Queen. By the time she got home and finished making dinner she was ready to put those aching feet up and lean back with a book. Now she had to spend her evenings teaching me how to … well, write.

This is how she did it: she started with the “quick brown fox,” and when that became unbearably tedious she chose passages from the books I’d borrowed from the library: Lassie Come-Home; Old Yeller; Jack London’s White Fang and Call of the Wild; Lad: A Dog, or another volume of Albert Payson Terhune’s many-volumed testaments to his love of collies. You see a pattern here. I wanted a dog. So: passage chosen, my mother adjusted the pencil just so in my fingers, then put her hand on mine and guided hand and pencil over the page, copying the chosen passage in her beautiful script that I could never duplicate, though damned if I didn’t finally learn to stitch letters together, and make recognizable if unlovely words and sentences, until I was allowed back into the classroom. And to this day, when I write in longhand, I sometimes stop and remember those nights, and the feeling of my mother’s hand on mine. 

Some years later I received a scholarship—preposterously undeserved, but that’s another story—to a rigorous boarding school in Pennsylvania. I spent the summer before school began with my brother Geoffrey. We had not seen each other in six years. He had just graduated summa cum laude in English from Princeton, and was shocked to discover that I couldn’t write an essay, not really. I’d been skating by in a rural high school in Washington State, the classrooms full, the teachers overwhelmed. Late as the day was, my brother took my education in hand. He assigned books for me to read, and essays to write on those books while he was at work, and then he went over my essays when he got home. He was both demanding and kind, his red pencil unsparing but also, often enough, encouraging. So did this young man with plans of his own give his summer nights to his little brother, hoping to get him launched with some hope of success. In this way his hand joined my mother’s hand on mine, helping me make words, helping me make a life.

I could go on. Each of us here tonight has known something like what I describe. We are all the beneficiaries of others’ gifts of knowledge and talent, patience and time. And those gifts never stop coming, not as long as we can read a book—for a book is made of just those gifts.

As I said, we’re never alone.

Sherlock’s Double: At William Gillette’s Castle

Photograph courtesy of the author.

Anyone can lay a funerary GIF at one of the 238 million virtual tombstones at findagrave.com. A rose JPEG accompanied by the words “im sorry the world did not treat you well” is laid on Kafka’s grave page amidst various uploaded photos of tombstones; “Your statue was unveiled in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol today,” reads a post for Willa Cather. Someone leaves an update on Federico Fellini’s page that tonight they “will watch La Strada in your memory.” Many of these messages seem to have come after a pilgrimage to a physical site. They read like confirmations of an encounter: as though their writers, unsatisfied with what they’d found in the material realm, had taken to virtual channels to yoke a final closeness with the dead.

The playwright and actor William Gillette’s online grave is littered with notes from recent visitors to his house museum, updating him on his property: “Interesting man, a shame he did not have children to enjoy the castle and train ride,” or “when i vist [sic] i always notice something … deer in your yard, the fawn was nursing from its mother.” Another: “Went to your home today… You would be proud that it is in impeccable order.”

Gillette Castle lies up a coily road in East Haddam, Connecticut. I visit on the first hot day of May. An elaborate stone pathway leads me from the parking lot to a gray, cobbly estate that overlooks the Connecticut River. A rabbit passes the entrance sign and disappears into the forest.

I live nearby, and have developed a chronic wandering habit in my final semester at divinity school. The more direct and pursuant my inquiries of God have become, the greater my conflictual desire to roam has grown. Perhaps my proclivity to wander is a symptom of my frustration with the jigsaw splodge of academia, or of my desire for a single, quiet path of pilgrimage. It has become increasingly apparent to me that one of the key tenets of the spiritual life was imitation: of Christ, of the saints. And so, rather serendipitously, I show up to this castle made by a man whose life was defined so completely by imitation.

William Gillette looked exactly like Sherlock Holmes—a tall man with a smoking pipe and cape—or, rather, Sherlock, as we imagine him, looks like William Gillette. “The careers of the master detective, Sherlock Holmes, and the master actor-playwright, William Gillette, are inextricably combined,” writes Ruth Berman in A Case of Double Identity. Gillette is best known for adapting Sir Conan Doyle’s stories to the stage, then later playing and perfecting the part of Holmes in more than a thousand performances. “Elementary, my dear Watson” was adapted from a line of Gillette’s. The deerstalker hat was his invention. Gillette’s embodied adaptation was so successful that playbill images of Gillette became source images for subsequent book editions of Sherlock Holmes. Certain covers bear Gillette’s exact likeness. Gillette became Sherlock; Sherlock became Gillette.

Before the two became one, Gillette was a moderately popular playwright and actor from Hartford, Connecticut. An inventor as well, Gillette created a machine that perfectly emulated the sound of a horse’s hooves “approaching, departing, or passing at a gallop, trot, or any other desired gait,” as a way to heighten the realism of the stage. Much of his acclaim was thanks to two Civil War plays, Held By the Enemy (1886) and Secret Service (1895), written after his beloved wife, the actress Helen Nichols, passed away from a burst appendix at twenty-eight. Gillette withdrew to the woods. He never remarried, and spent six years away from public life.

Meanwhile, Sherlock Holmes was dead. Sir Conan Doyle had killed him off in “The Final Problem,” when he falls into a gorge in Switzerland. Doyle himself wished to resurrect Holmes for the stage, but neither he nor other playwrights were able to get it right. It was Doyle’s agent who eventually recommended Gillette for the project. When the two men met in 1899, Gillette showed up dressed as his interpretation of Holmes and examined Doyle with a magnifying glass.

***

At the castle, which is open to the public for tours and surrounded by hiking trails, my tour group consists of eight children and three mothers, who at first regard me with enthusiasm, joking that I’ve joined a group of monsters. “Oh please, you go,” one mother insists, so I spill ahead, peering at the corners of the wooden staircase. The tour guide notes that Gillette owned fifteen cats. The children gasp. I inspect a Japanese tea set.

“Gillette was very concerned with what other people thought of him,” says the tour guide, pointing to a window that is actually a mirror, an apparatus that allowed for Gillette to see how his guests would act when he left the room. When peering into its reflection from the second-floor master bedroom, I can see what is happening downstairs at the bar—a boy in a Dartmouth sweatshirt stares into his phone while his date, dressed in velour, takes selfies. Stalin, too, had an intricate surveillance system in his home, in order to know who to kill, and though Gillette’s motives were less ideological,  this self-surveilling house appears as an uncanny reflection of a person fully curled in upon themselves. Like a dog resembles its owner, a house can begin to mirror the neuroses of its inhabitants. “It is my business to know what other people don’t know,” Holmes declared in the story “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.”

I pass what looks like a wooden dagger hanging from the ceiling, which I later learn is a fire-extinguishing device. In Viktor Shklovsky’s essay on “Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery Story,” he stresses that Doyle never follows the dictum of Chekhov’s gun. Instead, “The gun that hangs on the wall does not fire. Another gun shoots instead.” The same logic applies to Gillette’s castle. Some of what you see becomes something else. Dead-end staircases, trick furniture, and intricate lock systems abound. Near the main entrance is a secret door that leads from his office so he could “escape unwanted guests.” The castle is thoroughly adorned with furniture pieces with double meanings, trick latches, reflections and deflections. Gillette even refused the word castle and often referred to it as “the pile of rocks.”

Gillette rarely did interviews, didn’t keep a journal, and kept most of his life secret—a pattern of behavior especially fitting for a man whose craft involved the grafting of much of his self into another man’s fiction. Walking through the great hall of the castle, made from white oak, I begin to feel that I am inhabiting an intercessory space between the man and his character; a place where a problem, puzzle, or personality was in the process of being worked out. Perhaps all houses serve this secondary function, an exercise in holding together what is meaningful; like Gillette, we sometimes prefer to obscure this process even to ourselves, in labyrinthine corridors and secret passageways.

The children at the end of the tour complain that they want to eat hot dogs, and I’m confronted with an unexpected emptiness. Perhaps I’d come to the castle expecting to glean something of Gillette, but I find him impossible to extract from the character who eclipsed him. Perhaps I’d secretly hoped for evidence that Gillette had returned to himself again, in the privacy of his own home. And maybe he had—after all, a man is not his materials. I think of the anonymous people who wander their digital way to findagrave.com in order to update Gillette on his estate. When they do so, do they imagine him as a man who spent his life on the stage, practicing his lines? Or do they imagine a detective in his silk robe and violin?

 

 

Nicolette Polek is the author of Bitter Water Opera and Imaginary Museums. 

The Rejection Plot

Print from Trouble, by Bruce Charlesworth, a portfolio which appeared in The Paris Review in the magazine’s Fall 1985 issue.

Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers no obstacles to surmount, milestones to mark, rituals to observe. If a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs—the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief—rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with. If the romance plot sets up an enticing question—Will they or won’t they?—the rejection plot spoils everything upfront: they won’t. There the story stalls; but, strangely, continues. Even with no hope of requital, desire can persist, even intensify, with no guarantee of ending. The lack of happening is the tragedy.

Rejection isn’t the same as heartbreak, which entails a past acceptance. A rejection implies that you don’t even warrant a try. From the reject’s perspective, the reciprocity of heartbreak looks pretty appealing. And if you’re going to suffer, it may as well be exciting. Who would choose the flat desolation of rejection over rough-and-tumble drama, especially if they end the same way? The cliché—tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all—is comforting to the heartbroken, but damning to the rejected. No matter how unpleasant or unequal, a breakup is at least something you share with someone else. Rejection makes only one reject. “Unrequited love does not die,” writes Elle Newmark in The Book of Unholy Mischief, “it’s only beaten down to a secret place where it hides, curled and wounded. For some unfortunates, it turns bitter and mean, and those who come after pay the price for the hurt done by the one who came before.” A story that begins with closure can never end.

The basic plot of rejection is simple. First comes the yearning, where “by the successive inventions of his desires, his regrets, his disappointments, and his projects, the lover constructs an entire novel around a woman he does not know,” as Proust writes. Eventually you make a proposition and are declined. You may try again, but only the same happens—nothing.

What science has to say about rejection is mostly what everyone already knows: it’s real and it hurts. In an fMRI study researcher Naomi Eisenberger demonstrated that being rejected lights up the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that deals with physical pain, with a corresponding release of dopamine and cortisol. The social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Dawn Dhavale’s study “Two Sides of Romantic Rejection,” typical of much writing in their field, spells out common sense to a point of absurd rigor (they note that “it is better to be intelligent and beautiful than stupid and ugly”). They define romantic rejection as a situation in which “a person refuses the romantic advances of another, ignores / avoids or is repulsed by someone who is romantically interested in them, or unilaterally ends an existing relationship.” The measure of rejection is the “discrepancy between desired and perceived relational evaluation,” which is “the degree to which a person regards his or her relationship with another individual as valuable, important, or close”—in other words, you want your relationship to matter to the other person more than it does. Certain categories of people are more likely to be rejected: those considered “dangerous, having little to offer, as exploitative, or rejecting of us.” And the leading cause of rejection, they argue, is hypergamy: desiring people more desirable than oneself.

Most notably, they observe that “the culture has not provided them with good, effective scripts for rejecting love,” causing them to experience “a pervasive sense of scriptlessness.” Rejectors have their prefab lines (“It’s not you, it’s me,” “I’m not dating right now,” “We’re not a good match”), but rejects don’t. What is there to say, after all?

To whatever extent the mind is a part of nature, it too abhors a vacuum. Just as infatuation drives you to project intimate fantasies onto strangers, the blank slate of rejection, the lack of a script ,invites you to devise an elaborate narrative about why you were rejected, and what that says about you. But even stronger than the temptation to dwell in the past (what might have happened) or dread the future (what won’t be) is the urge to wallow in an eternal present. Your life can’t move forward, so it moves sideways, to a parallel reality. At parties you imagine the date you didn’t bring, then go home to share your bed with a ghost. Absence becomes the realest thing in your world. So the true rejection plot is the one the reject devises in the absence of a plot.

***

Narrative is a way of giving not only shape and coherence to chaos, but progress and closure; its absence creates a feeling of endless languishing. For this reason one often sees rejection described as halting time, as Miss Havisham orders every clock stopped at the precise minute she was left at the altar, wallows in her moldering wedding clothes, and makes Estella and Pip reenact the romance that ended with her stood up at the altar. (“I sometimes have sick fancies,” she tells Pip, “and I have a sick fancy that I want to see some play.”) In Cut Loose, Helen Fisher quotes an anonymous eighth-century Japanese poet who writes, “My longing has no time when it ceases”; the men of Papua New Guinea’s Sepik River province who’ve had their marriage offers rejected compose songs describing the marriages that could have been.

In this way, the true object of your fixation may not be your rejector, but rather the fantasy devised in the process of yearning. The perfection of this fantasy makes it hard to give up. (Proust: “What is necessary is the risk—which may even be the object to which passion in its fretfulness tries to cling, rather than to a person—of an impossibility.”) Your secret hope is to become Pygmalion, convinced that your desire can somehow be made real through sheer agonizing persistence. Pygmalion, it’s worth remembering, is disgusted by real women (“dismayed by the numerous defects / of character Nature had given the feminine spirit, / stayed as a bachelor, having no female companion”) and only loves the one he creates by his own hand.

Devotion—putting someone in an exalted position, as Pygmalion places Galatea, on a literal pedestal—feels like empathy, in their shared sense of understanding someone deeply, but is actually the opposite. When wishful thinking becomes confused with reality, the real person vanishes, as does the entire world around that person. The thing you’ve been denied is always perfect. In “To a Magazine,” Mary Ruefle writes, “the rejected know another knowledge—that if they were not rejected, heaven would descend upon the earth in earthly dreams […] The rejected know if they were nonrejected a clear cerulean blue would be the result, an endless love ever dissolving in more endless love.” For all their power over the nature of your imagined reality, it can feel as if the rejector is a divinity of sorts—Borges writes, “To fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible god,” noting also that Beatrice had rejected Dante in life (“Infinitely Beatrice existed for Dante; Dante existed very little, perhaps not at all, for Beatrice. Our piety, our veneration cause us to forget that pitiful inharmony, which was unforgettable for Dante”). And so in his own poem he makes Beatrice the immortal docent of Heaven, a place he doesn’t belong. One is only rejected from Heaven, never Hell.

***

The rejection plot usually peters out, as over time the wound becomes less interesting and meaningful. But this isn’t always the case; what if they change their mind? What if you can help them change their mind? Such hope is often toxic, but not always unwarranted. Everyone has heard of a case where someone’s ill-advised, ethically dubious persistence paid off—He just wore me down!—which means you can never fully convince yourself that any rejection is truly final. (“In a surprising minority of cases,” write Baumeister and Dhavale in their study on rejection, “stalkers eventually become the romantic partners of the people they have stalked.”)

And so another way of answering rejection is to be willfully oblivious: to reject rejection, through sheer gumption or delusion. Pride and Prejudice is full of rejections issued and ignored, preemptive and rescinded. When the arrogant Mr. Collins receives Elizabeth’s firm refusal of his marriage proposal, he tells her:

“I am not now to learn,” replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave of the hand, “that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favour; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second or even a third time. I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long.”

He later adds, “As I must, therefore, conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females.”

Not taking the hint is a strategy of attrition; keeping the proposition on the table indefinitely, you hope, will increase your odds. Since you can’t just switch off your feelings for someone, you hold out for the unlikely reversal, even at the expense of your well-being. The fact that this is possible (which is not to say wise, ethical, or appropriate) permits the reject to believe against all evidence that a mistake has been made, that everything could work out if enough of an effort is made. The reject haggles, disputes, demands to know why, tries to poke holes in something that isn’t an argument, until eventually he turns into something uglier: the creep. For its ability to repulse and coerce, creepiness can be a strange form of power, one perhaps even unsought by the one who wields it, since it can feel more like powerlessness. But no one said power always feels good.

***

One of the oddest stories of rejection in the internet age was authored spontaneously by dozens of people. Known informally as “The Saga of Denko,” it began in 2011 with a post on the anonymous Japanese message board 2channel (#OP is the original poster, and #2ch are his responders):

[Help!] The Girl I Like Won’t Respond to My Emails (´·ω·`)

#OP

There’s this girl I’ve had feelings for since high school, and now we’re in college together. We’ll call her Denko.

Once we hit second year, we went out drinking, and I worked up the courage to exchange numbers.

We started out talking often, but she hasn’t answered me in three days now.

I’m getting depressed just thinking that Denko might be sick, or that something happened to her… (´･ω･`)

Please, somebody give me some advice.

At first the reactions #OP gets range from earnest to mocking, until he reveals that he has been emailing her six hundred times a day with no response, at which point the board begins heckling him; #OP keeps asking for advice anyway. Across five threads totaling over 18,000 words in the English translation, #OP reveals himself by turns to be a guilelessly deluded, obsessive stalker. Convinced that Denko secretly likes him but won’t admit it, he interprets everything as encouragement, never questioning his own motives or Denko’s interest. By his own account, he begins calling her at home, then visiting her house to look for her. When she emails him to tell him to stop emailing her, and threatens to call the police, he wonders if she’s testing him, or if her mother put her up to it.

From this point on, the community’s tone shifts from jeering to morbid fascination: several try to egg him on further, suggesting he keep trying, or stuff thirty hamsters in a box and send them to her. Some try in good faith to shout above the noise and get him to see his own delusion, or convince him of Denko’s obvious lack of interest; in others, it’s less clear whether he’s being mocked, or defended by someone equally deluded:

#2ch

Screw you guys. OP’s persistence should be COMMENDED.

Sending massive amounts of emails out of worry!

Buying clothes to improve his appearance!

And I say try even harder!

Send 1000 emails a day!

Girls love men who worry about them!

#2ch

I know I’D hate you.

#2ch

Serious post here.

If you don’t get a reply after three times, stop.

If she’s making excuses about work and busyness, she really doesn’t like you.

She’s only not saying it because she thinks it would hurt you.

Denko getting 600 emails from a guy who isn’t even her boyfriend is no doubt going to scare her.

But she’s probably a nice girl if she isn’t admitting it.

There are people out there who just can’t be blunt.

So stop it, please.

#2ch

Even from a boyfriend, 600 emails in three days is scary.

#OP maintains his obliviousness, acknowledging the bullying replies with polite befuddlement, and he eventually shares an email that he sends to Denko:

#OP

Subject: This Is How I Feel

Contents:

I’m sorry for making you worry.

I would never consider killing or raping you, Denko, so don’t worry. Is that what you thought I would do?

Now, I want you to take what I’m saying seriously.

I really, truly love you, Denko.

I think I would be willing to die for you, Denko.

I’ve always been trying to ensure your happiness first.

And I don’t think my feelings for you will ever change.

It’s very unfortunate things got like this right after we started dating, but we can start over.

That would be great, wouldn’t it?

Remember what I said when I confessed to you?

I still feel the way I did back then…

After nearly a month of these posts, OP signs off, the end of his saga inconclusive. As it often goes with internet folklore, the story’s provenance has become disputed. It’s not clear whether #OP was as guileless as he acted—the story’s coherence, and his willingness to ignore and carry on against overwhelming opprobrium, is highly suspect, and the post’s translator also unearthed a post from three weeks earlier by someone who used the same “(´･ω･`)” kaomoji, claiming that he’d sent six hundred emails to see if his crush was safe after an earthquake. It’s also possible #OP posed as some of his own hecklers.

Suppose this is the case—that it was a social experiment, a fictional story designed to elucidate something about rejection communally. Ordinarily the goal of trolling is to either make people angry, expose their gullibility, or draw out their ugly qualities. But mixed in with the trolls are attempts to communicate or commiserate with the hapless #OP; rather than ragebait, he managed to make empathybait, curiositybait. Here we are, contemplating him now. Can attention be a form of acceptance?

***

There may be no good way to accept rejection, but there are many terrible ways, and frustration often makes a turn toward anger. A 2015 article in The Cut, “Is There Any Right Way to Reject a Guy?,” describes an incident with Ben Schoen, the former host of a popular Harry Potter podcast. It began with Schoen sending flirtatious Twitter DMs to the BuzzFeed writer Grace Spelman; when Spelman didn’t reply, he took to Facebook (where seven years earlier, as a fourteen-year-old Harry Potter fan, Spelman had added him as a friend) and sent her a series of DMs:

Grace you do a remarkable job of making your personality shine through online

It’s hyperactively beautiful

And you seem really introspective

So what I’m saying here is you wanna get married at one of those drive thru places

If you can’t handle such spontaneity I understand how I might be getting ahead of myself

I’m starting a new podcast I would love for you to listen and if you like it I would love having you on an episode

You had me when you posted that Kendrick Lamar vid

That’s when I realized you are probably definitely a special soul (aka “the one”)

That smile emoji was unintentionally creepy

It’s interesting to observe how, consciously or not, the messages are crafted to preempt rejection. Though obviously motivated by sincere attraction, they move from over-the-top flattery (“hyperactively beautiful”) to facetious flirtation (“wanna get married”) that is intended to soften the pitch, so it can be played off as a joke if it fails. He then nods at the possibility of rejection (“I might be getting ahead of myself”), while implying that the only reason she might reject him is because she “can’t handle such spontaneity”—her fault, not his. The proposition is garnished with a career opportunity, followed by more hyperbolic flattery and self-deprecation.

Spelman let Schoen down easy, leavening her response with the type of exclamation points one might use in a work email: “Hi Ben! Thank you for the kind words but I actually have a boyfriend! Hope you stay well!” She then unfriended him on Facebook and blocked him on Twitter.

Soon after, Schoen flung insults at Spelman publicly on Twitter:

just bc you work at Buzzfeed doesn’t mean you’re good. Good luck finding meaning in all that garbage you call content

and u don’t even have the fortitude to tell me to fuck off? You have 10,000 followers bc of a good profile pic + listicles

the way you ghosted me was immature and insulting. I Messaged you to make u laugh nothing more

before you 86 someone maybe you should use your intellect and see if the person could be useful to your career?

it’s funny. You delete me off Facebook when I was about to offer you a job at a company in NY that pays at least double  

In the reverse-polarity of rejection, every quality he previously flattered her for is now wielded against her. If before she was “beautiful,” now she is nothing but “a good profile pic.” Her introspection is recast as rude and immature; having once praised her online content, now he uses it to trivialize her. He accuses her of lacking the “fortitude” to reject him properly, even though clearly stating your unavailability is a classically proper rejection. Any implication that his podcast offer was a veiled quid pro quo is now made explicit as a playground taunt: I was gonna give you something cool, but now I’m not gonna.

In the article, Spelman assessed Schoen’s response frankly: “You can’t win in these types of situations. Even if you are polite in your rejection, they’ll demand that you tell them WHY you did it. It’s just a mixture of entitlement and the fragility of the ego.” True enough; the demand for an explanation stems from a hope that the rejector can be somehow proven wrong. But except in rare cases of misunderstanding—the Mr. Darcy kind, far rarer than any reject would like to believe—the rejector is always right. If someone isn’t attracted to you, that’s neither their choice nor your business. And however convinced you may be that someone would be happier if they accepted your affections, their happiness is still their prerogative, and they aren’t obligated to let you prove otherwise. In fact, nobody is obligated to love anybody; it isn’t even possible to put anyone under those obligations, and as convenient as it would be if love were rational, it has no criterion other than whether it is felt. Love, we must repeat, is a matter of taste, and so cannot be disputed.

***

In Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior (1982), Judith Martin offers a pragmatic path to solace:

The rejectee’s first duty (and only available pleasure) is to turn down any such offer [of consolation or friendship]. One ought to reply, as the Republican Party is said to have done to Mr. Nixon when he offered to help with the 1976 election, “Thank you, but I think you’ve done enough already.”

The smartest thing a dumped one can do is to get out of sight, or at least to hide all traces of misery. This is not easy to do, but it is one of those rare instances in which the hardest work brings the greatest chance of success.

Success, in this case, must be defined as making the other person suffer as much as oneself … Such suffering is never caused by see-how-miserable-you-made-me-feel. It is caused, as the rejectee ought to know, by the realization that a person who used to love you doesn’t any longer. Thus, the proper behavior for someone whose heart is breaking is to be cheerful, not pained; ungrudgingly forgiving, not accusing; busy, not free to be comforted; mysterious, not willing to talk the situation over; absent, not obviously alone or overdoing attentions to others.

Here Martin plays the astute friend who, to avoid condescending to you, doesn’t try to minimize your pain. Instead she validates your desire for revenge, framing your rejector’s suffering as the “only available pleasure.” It’s a shame, then, her basic assumption—that rejectors suffer most when you move on—is plainly untrue. Rejectors, obviously, want you to forgive and forget, fast. Which means if you really wanted to make them suffer, you’d apply yourself single-mindedly to “see-how-miserable-you-made-me-feel.”

So while the classy, healthy, and ethical thing to do is move on, what would truly please you, following Martin’s logic, is revenge. As we’re told that you can only hurt the ones you love, the capacity to wound even furnishes proof of that love. Certainly this comes at the cost of their affection, but what can they do, reject you again? This might explain why, in lieu of love, certain desperates will fashion from rejection a different plot. They seek a bond that—like the idealized, imagined love they’ve lost—is exclusive and permanent: the bond of death, which has its own cliché: If I can’t have you, nobody will.

***

In the revenge plot, both in literature and life, a woman’s life is often forfeit. Roderigo, turned down by Desdemona, and Iago, passed over for a promotion, conspire to manipulate Othello into murdering Desdemona. Phaedra, spurned by Hippolytus, kills herself and frames him for it, leading to his death. In The Brothers Karamazov, Elder Zosima tells the story of a friend who in his youth killed a woman who rejected him, got away with it, and only years later confesses his crime. Even when Goethe’s Werther takes his own life after being rejected by Charlotte and the Weimar nobility, it’s mentioned in passing that “Charlotte’s life was despaired of.” (Not just hers—the book spawned an outbreak of real-world copycat suicides.)

Hannah Arendt called loneliness “the common ground for terror”—the double entendre being common. An analysis of fifteen mass shootings between 1995 and 2001 found that at least six perpetrators had “experienced a recent romantic rejection”; 97 percent of all 197 American mass shootings since 1966 were committed by men, and 46 percent of mass shootings between 2015 to 2022 targeted current or former romantic partners or family members. In The Bully Society, Jessie Klein writes that “in at least twenty-three school shootings, the perpetrators’ stated motives related to relationship stresses: rejection, jealousy, a desire to protect girls, or frustration or perceived failure with girls,” suggesting that the killers considered “their responses more understandable and perhaps even justified.” The mass shooters George Sodini, George Hennard, Marc Lépine, and Elliot Rodger all explicitly cited their rejection by, and hatred of, women as their casus belli; the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-hui Cho had been reported for stalking female students; the Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza wrote an essay about “why females are inherently selfish.” The Columbine shooter Eric Harris had been turned down by a girl he’d asked to prom three days before the massacre; high schoolers Luke Woodham, Michael Carneal, Kip Kinkel, Andrew Wurst, Mitchell Johnson, and Jaylen Fryberg also retaliated against rejections. Six-year-old Dedrick Owens shot a girl his own age after she rejected him for a kiss.

How does something as immaterial as rejection enlarge and solidify in the mind, until murder seems like a fair response? Perhaps because, while rejection itself can be light, the intensity of the feelings it evokes is not, fueled by the reject’s limitless counterfactual imaginings. Since its outcomes are total, the intentions behind them feel equally total, so “I don’t like you in that way” is heard as “I despise you.” When a rejection gets construed as an attack, the temptation is to fight back, accuse them of assuming the worst about you, repay the insult, or demean the rejector to invalidate their rejection. You assume they have dismissed you out of active hatred, even though rejections can happen out of fleeting mood, circumstance, indecision, busyness, romantic orientation, or forgetfulness. Even when they do dislike you, it’s not always personal; as in cases of bigotry, it can stem from the rejector’s shortcomings rather than your own. (Sometimes, though, the problem really is you.)

The blankness of the rejection plot may be the crux. It feels absurd to be so undone by nothing; only by reconceiving your rejection as a top-tier catastrophe, a special torment with life-or-death stakes, does the suffering feel proportionate. So neglect becomes crucifixion, wound-licking is justice, disrespect is death, and rejection by one is rejection by all. By causing real suffering and death, the killer wants to assert the reality and intensity of the pain it emerged from. And since rejection lacks its own narrative, it co-opts others—not just their plot, but their style. To quote another famously heartsick homicidaire, you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style—and you can count on a mass killer for an overwrought one. The killers’ fantasies of revenge dwarf even their actual deeds. In his manifesto, Elliot Rodger envisions “a fair and pure world” in which women are rounded up in concentration camps and “deliberately starved to death.” In his videos he declares that he will turn everyone into “mountains of skulls and rivers of blood,” just as Seung-hui Cho announces that he will cause “millions of deaths and millions of gallons of blood on the streets.”

It used to be that the bogeyman of popular imagination was the serial killer, whose archetype was often surprisingly charming or sociable: Ted Bundy, Paul Knowles (the “Casanova Killer”), John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer; or their fictional progeny, the compassionate Dexter Morgan, erudite Hannibal Lecter, smoldering Paul Spector. With something like a diabolical humanism, this archetype kills for pleasure, relishing each one. These have been supplanted by the newer archetype of the mass shooter, or parallel killer—an antisocial reject who wants to get it all out at once, acting out of imagined justice rather than pleasure. In their parallel worlds, all is permitted and possible, and the reject is god. Seung-hui Cho: “I die, like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the Weak and Defenseless people.” (Cho also told his roommate that he had a girlfriend from outer space named Jelly.) Elliot Rodger: “I’ll be a god, exacting my retribution on all those who deserve it.” Describing himself as “one who always loved fantasy and magic, and who always wished that such things were real,” Rodger was a fan of The Secret, a superstitious self-help book about getting things you want, like Pygmalion, simply by wanting them hard enough.

In 2015, a bow-tie designer named Tyrell Shaw went on a daylong spree in Manhattan, striking Asian women in the face with a blunt object in four separate incidents, before hanging himself. “I’ve been rejected by Women my entire life,” his blog begins. “I never agreed with violence, but I knew the only way I could overcome that sense of rejection-would start by assaulting the women that carelessly rejected me.” (But he had propositioned them just as carelessly: elsewhere he claimed to have complimented a hundred Asian women in one day, listing the exact time of each compliment.) “I realized that I would have to use violence in order get the response that I desire,” he later continued. “By starting an independent civil war where I will hit over a million Asian Women in the face with a stick will change history.”

The delusion of consequence, and of one’s vengeance serving a higher purpose, speaks to the malleability of the rejection plot: it feels very bad, so it can’t mean nothing, and since you want it to mean something, and it could mean anything, it’s got to mean everything. Because the rejection plot has no closure of its own, the thoughts and desires can only be discharged by forcing something to happen. And so a new script emerges for others to act out, achieving deadly closure. Shooters explicitly copying Elliot Rodger include Christopher Harper-Mercer, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, Alek Minassian, and Keshav Bhide, who, a month after Rodger’s massacre, declared on YouTube: “I am the next Elliot Rodger and guess what I’ll do the right thing this time.”

***

There is one other surefire way to end a story that doesn’t progress, and that is to stop reading it (or writing it). Those who feel patronized by hope, have had enough of languishing, and don’t err into vengeance, may contemplate opting out of love altogether. But when being loved is ubiquitously understood as the sine qua non of fulfillment, no one gives it up willingly. The problem is, we like love, we love to yearn, we cherish the hope and payoff of grand ambitions realized, we want to want to want. A hero is not supposed to quit.

The parallel killer is a descendant of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man: an outcast narcissistically reveling in self-laceration and offense, rejected by society. We may pity him, but we can only root for him insofar as we relate to his feelings.

Do other scripts exist? Is there a plot in which the reject is somehow heroic, by dint of his rejection? We see some novels where the protagonists forebear their loneliness with admirable lightness, like Mildred Lathbury in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, who suffers the condescension of her married peers with self-deprecating charm—though this is undercut by the fact that in later novels, she winds up married.

Another novel begins with the same premises but arrives at different conclusions—its protagonist is a lonely, isolated wretch awash in self-pity, living a plotless life in which nothing ever happens:

Others have someone who is devoted to them. I’ve never had someone who even considered devoting themselves to me. That is for others: me, they just treat decently.

I recognize in myself the capacity to arouse respect but not affection. Unfortunately I’ve done nothing that in itself justifies that initial respect and so no one has ever managed to fully respect me either.

In him we recognize the reject’s self-loathing and resentment:

Other people of lesser intelligence are in fact much stronger than me. They are better than I am at carving out their lives amongst other people, more skilled at administering their intelligence. I have all the necessary qualities to influence others but not the art with which to do so, nor even the will to want to do so.

His preference for fiction over reality:

I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people, with that metaphysical absurdity known as “flesh and blood.”

Frustration with his stagnant, meaningless life:

I’ve done nothing nor will I ever do anything useful to justify my existence. The part of my life not wasted in thinking up confused interpretations of nothing at all, has been spent making prose poems out of the incommunicable feelings I use to make the unknown universe my own. Both objectively and subjectively speaking, I’m sick of myself. I’m sick of everything, and of everything about everything.

Hope? What have I got to hope for? The only promise the day holds for me is that it will just be another day with a fixed course to run and a conclusion.

Lamenting about his Godless existence:

No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the right path. In the depths of my dreams no Apollo or Athena appeared to me to enlighten my soul.

Framing his desire as a matter of mortal consequence:

It’s enough for me to want something for that thing to die. My destiny, however, is not powerful enough to prove deadly to just anything. It has the unfortunate disadvantage of being deadly to only those things I want.

He even calls his writings “confessions,” as if being rejected is a state of sin or crime. This is Bernardo Soares, one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, in his posthumous and unedited novel The Book of Disquiet. Presented as diary entries, the faceless office drone Soares is capable of deep perception, gentleness, and self-knowledge, but is no less a reject, with all its hallmarks. He lives an airless life with a deep relationship to fantasy (“In my case the two realities I attend to have equal weight”), and he’s prone to cosmically grandiose proclamations about himself, though with a self-effacing twist: “I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am the center that exists only because every circle has one … I am the center of everything surrounded by the great nothing.”

Unlike Miss Havisham, Mr. Collins, #OP, or Roderigo—unlike Sodini, Cho, or Rodger—Soares not only radically accepts his condition but aestheticizes it. For him the blankness of rejection is a canvas: “Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything. If I were somebody, I wouldn’t be able to.” While a bookkeeper could imagine himself as anyone, he argues, the King of England can’t, because “his reality limits what he can feel.” Instead of trying to bring his parallel life in line with his real one, he rejects both: “I reject life because it is a prison sentence, I reject dreams as being a vulgar form of escape.” His conviction is that the world’s beauty and perfection are located in its very unattainability. His parallel world stays parallel, because if he were not rejected, if he got what he wanted, perfection wouldn’t exist at all, and life would mean less: “We worship perfection because we can’t have it; if we had it, we would reject it.”

What one might call heroic is Soares’s success in finding a different perspective on the dogma of love. And not with the kind of delusional spite that degrades love, but actually appreciates it:

It is not love itself but the outskirts of love that matter … The sublimation of love illuminates the phenomena of love much more clearly than the actual experience of it. There are some very wise virgins in the world. Action has its compensations but it confuses the matter. To possess is to be possessed and therefore to lose oneself.

This idea that love can only be truly appreciated from the outside may feel like sour grapes, like the purest cope, but where does that feeling come from? Of course everyone wants love; still, consider how often lovers say their beloved completes them, and they can’t live without them, and so on. If the price of love is losing yourself in another, then accepting unrequital is a special kind of self-knowledge, one that does not pretend that acceptance comes with any greater reward. Even if everyone would prefer the fulfillments of love, that doesn’t negate the virtue of its absence. Whether you wanted this virtue or not.

 

Tony Tulathimutte is the author of Private Citizens. Rejection is forthcoming in September 2024. He is the founder of CRIT, a writing class in Brooklyn. His story “Ahegao” appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of The Paris Review.

Hands

Photograph by Edna Winti. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0 Deed.

I am prepared. I have had my will drawn and notarized. I’ve given away old books from my library that I will never read again. I’ve gotten rid of porno magazines and cock rings, things that would be difficult or compromising for my beloved to discard. Mother has all my baby pictures I stole. I have paid for my cremation. I carry a pocket full of change to give to panhandlers. My elementary catechism has returned; those who help the lowliest …

Marcus says he just doesn’t understand me sometimes, says he has dreams for us, a home we will build together, but it seems to him I’m giving parts of my life away. I sit quietly at the deli booth, staring at my unfinished sandwich. It is rare now for me to be hungry; the bones in my face have become more distinct. It is when I don’t respond that he gets annoyed, but I can’t help it. I don’t want to change his feelings or argue the probabilities. I don’t believe I have long; my blood has turned against me, there is no one here to heal me. The sunlight from the window pours heavily onto his face, rugged and aged. Myself, I have to stay away from the sun; my face discolors from all the medications I take.

Marcus has become quiet, maybe brooding. I hear a knock on the window next to me. It is a tall man, very dark and in a ragged black suit. He points with a dirty finger at the tray that holds my half-eaten sandwich, then brings his fingers to his mouth. I nod my head. Marcus hates when I do stuff like that, and he barks, “Why’d you do that? Why can’t you just save it for later?”

The man comes to our table, pulls the tray closer to him, unwraps the sandwich from the paper. Marcus leans back far away. The man is intimidating, his form towers over us. I want to tell him to take it away, but he just stands there and eats. Finally, Marcus says, “There’s an empty table over there!” The man gives thanks and then asks for the rest of my drink, which I refuse because I know it would piss Marcus off since he bought lunch. Marcus and I are silent for the rest of his lunch break.

It has become a ritual of sorts, to have lunch on Thursday with Marcus at his work. Sometimes I am too early, or I can see that he is busy with a client. The nursery is very dense and serene, and as he walks through it, he is in total command, like a god in his Eden. The customers are rapt at his every word on how to take care of the plant, what it is suited for, what it will look like in a year, two years. This is one of the reasons I love him, his ability to nurture. It is like he knows the secrets of life and wants to share them with me. I don’t want to be seen at his work.

This is a way I show him my love. My face looks too haggard. I have strange discolorations on my forehead and chest. I look as if I am going to die soon. I don’t want any rumors started about Marcus and me at his work. I don’t want him having to answer difficult questions about his friend. I can imagine his soiled hands clenching.

When I am early, or he’s busy, I go sit at this small Catholic church across the street. The parking lot is usually empty and there’s a porch by the rectory, which I go sit on. The Father has looked at me before through his window and knows that I am just there to wait.

Often when I am there, a large Mexican woman comes by. She carries paper bags from Pic ’n’ Save. Over the brims of the bags, plastic-and-silk flowers stick out. Some weeks they are all blue, others purple, still others pink and red. The woman has taken to nodding at me, “Como ’sta?”

One day, with a smile on my face, I said, “Merci.” She gave me a look and then I knew I’d made a mistake. “Bien, bien, señora!”

She laughed and said, “Ay.”

French has always come easier to me. I’m sure she thinks I’m some sort of pocho, like an Oreo, brown on the outside, white on the inside.

The large woman usually wears something that my grandmother would wear, a kind of flowery smock so she won’t get dirty. She decorates the statue of Mary that stands in the corner of the parking lot, under a large, sturdy eucalyptus tree. On holidays, she’s put out plastic jack-o’-lanterns, Styrofoam snowmen at Mary’s feet, and always lots and lots of fake flowers. Marcus has often told me that he’d give me some perennials, other flowering plants to give to the woman, but I think she wouldn’t want them. I think she loves the fake flowers’ everlasting quality. She does it as a devotion, and when she finishes, she prays, her knees on the cement, her head bowed down, hands pressed together. I’ve told Marcus it is like she has her own form of serenity, that she sees beauty over life, or that she sees her actions as more important than presenting living things.

The most notable thing about the Mary statue is that she has no hands.

Being at the rectory alone makes me think of death. Would I do it to myself if I got really ill? What if I start losing my mind? What if I start looking like more of a freak than I already do and people start staring? What if it becomes too painful for Marcus to be with me?

My upbringing haunts me, like a shadow of the tree. I was taught that I could never go to heaven if I killed myself, that even the most ill cannot do that, because life is a gift we must fully use or otherwise appear ungrateful. My archbishop taught me that. My parents had set up those meetings with Archbishop Mahoney because they didn’t know what to do with me, and they were afraid a doctor would lock me up in an institution. When I was twelve, I had already tried pills I got at school and from my father’s medicine cabinet. The paramedic who revived me cried openly, said he’d never seen a young boy try such a thing. Worse yet, my parents were horrified when they came out to the garage and saw lit stacks of newspaper, soaked with lighter fluid, surrounding me. Parts of my arms and legs were burned severely and today I carry those scars. No one ever understood why I would become so quiet, disappear into my parents’ closet for hours in the dark. Sometimes I would torture my pets, make the other children on our block cry. Still the only feeling I have now is guilt, and when I think of myself, I think I’ve wasted my life. All I remember fully though is a sound, the rush of air igniting.

I figure the hands of Mary must have broken off during an earthquake, or maybe due to vandals. There’s a bronze plaque that reads, “I have no hands but yours.”

The day I read that, the Mexican woman had come up behind me quietly and placed her hand on my shoulder. She started speaking Spanish much too quickly for me to understand. When she figured out I didn’t speak Spanish well enough, she switched over to a slow English. “My name es Yoli, Yolanda.”

It was my turn to say, “Como ’sta?”

There was a gentleness in her voice. “I see you here all the time?” I told her I was waiting for a friend. “Oh, you can help me though?” She pulled out a small hand rake and said, “Weeds.”

I got on my knees with a chuckle and started raking out the weeds that had grown in the flower bed. Eventually, my hands began to ache from the exertion. It was very quiet work.

She changed the vases and put blue flowers and then some calla lilies in the glass containers. I told her how Marcus worked at the nursery across the street and said that I could give her some flowers and other plants if she wanted. I told her maybe some small ivy around the edges would be nice. She smiled and said, “Gracias.”

I started to notice the meditative quality of working this soil, how there was something like a warm charge I received from the earth, that I became more spirit than being. And like the wind flittering through the eucalyptus tree, it felt like she was speaking to me telepathically.

“My son used to do this every Thursday, before I took over.” I stopped what I was doing. “He loved real plants, fussed over this small garden. The Father mentioned often how devoted Tulio was, how his love was an example to all of us. I was so proud of him.” On Yoli’s face, I saw a pride I wished my own parents could give me. “The women of the church would surround me and praise me for raising such a fine young man. But nobody saw how lonely he was. How he would drink in my kitchen till he passed out crying, ‘Mama, Mama.’ ”

I turned back to my work, flustered because I knew how he needed to create beauty in his life. “When the earthquake came,” she said, “and the hands of Mary broke, he wanted the church to have it fixed, but Father said, ‘No, it is more symbolic this way.’ Tulio could not understand; it was like the Mother of God was a real person to him and needed to be healed.”

I huffed, thinking of my own life. She turned her face away from me. “Everyone was surprised that day. I wasn’t. They came to my house, the Father, women of the church. I could tell they had been crying. They said, ‘Yoli, don’t cry but you have to see your son, you have to come with us.’ Tulio had said he was going to trim down the tree over Mary, that the boughs were too low, so off he’d gone with the ladder and some rope.”

The shade of the tree covered us both as she spoke. “Mary stands so far away from the street no one noticed Tulio stringing up the rope, pushing himself off the ladder. When I saw him, it seemed the air gently rocked him back and forth, his feet nearly touched the head of Mary. It was many days before I cried. Somehow, I knew it was all my fault.”

I wanted to ask her why, but I knew. Tulio saw no life ahead, and simply creating these altars was not enough. He was a man who wanted to heal and to be healed.

Marcus came at that moment, asked me to see a ficus tree he wanted to bring home. All I could say to Yoli was, “I’m sorry, so sorry.” Marcus was proud of the ficus he had picked for me; it looked sturdy, the roots unbound. Near the trees were shelves with pots and ceramic figures of cherubs and gargoyles. I noticed that a few of the cherubs’ arms were broken, parts of the wings missing. I could see myself grinding the arms down just to the hands and I started contemplating whether I should use glue or plaster, maybe cement.

I couldn’t tell if it was an act of creation or violence against the church. Maybe both. In my mind I saw what Tulio must have looked like. His smile must have been dazzling.

I picked up the broken arm and asked Marcus if I could possibly have this and another hand. Marcus shrugged his shoulders, questioned me, Do I want the tree or what? I kissed him lightly on the mouth, surrounded by the lushness of the nursery. He looked embarrassed in his paradise.

 

Gil Cuadros (1962–1996) was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1987 and channeled his experiences into the acclaimed collection City of God, published by City Lights in 1994. “Hands” is excerpted from My Body Is Paper: Stories and Poems, a previously unpublished body of work forthcoming from City Lights in June.