The Paris Review's Blog, page 66

On Three Plays

MassDOT salt shed, Sandwich, Massachusetts, November 7, 2013. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In Wallace Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House, a group of former theater collaborators reunite at the bar they once frequented together. They’ve since all gone their separate ways, some making good money in TV; others have cobbled together livings from various odd jobs. But when their sad-sack friend Dick (played by Shawn himself in the New York premiere of the play) arrives late to the party, face bruised and crusted with dried blood, the play reveals its insidious side. At first, Dick acts as if nothing has happened, but then, when pressed, he earnestly explains, “I was beaten, rather recently, by some friends, but you see, I actually enjoyed it very much, in the end. Really, it was great. No—I loved it!” Dick does what just about all the play’s characters will go on to do: compulsively excuse horrible ideas and horrible actions. Act like nothing happened. Act like everyone else is making too big a deal out of something. The play glides along so blithely that its evolution into a genuinely frightening horror story might catch you by surprise. A year after it premiered in New York, the ensemble cast, led by Shawn and Matthew Broderick and directed by Scott Elliott, recorded their performances for the podcast Intercepted. It works beautifully as a radio drama, especially since one of the most perverse and hilarious pleasures of this play is to hear those voices argue so pleasantly and so reasonably in favor of cruelty, as if they’re kindly injecting you with a needle full of poison.

—Lucas Hnath, author of “Old Actress”

I’ve been following the rise of Julia May Jonas since her debut novel, Vladimir, came out last year. When I learned that Jonas had written a new play, Your Own Personal Exegesis, I leaped at the chance to see it at LCT3. Exegesis is a memory play—a reconstruction of the memories of one of the characters, Beatrice (Annie Fang). Set at “Redacted Church in Redacted, New Jersey” in 1996, it follows the church’s youth group, which meets on Friday nights for Bible study, danceathons, and performances of liturgical plays. Beatrice is the group’s youngest member. There’s also Chris (Cole Doman), the “Jock Rebel Sensitive Everything guy”; and Brian (Savidu Geevaratne), who was raised in the church and lusts after Addie (Mia Pak), whose disordered eating causes her to grow lanugo and eventually sprout black wings. Overseeing the group is Reverend Kathy Redacted, or Rev. Kat, as she’s known to her students. Her name and the name of the church, which are literally blacked out on the church bulletins the audience is given as we’re ushered to our seats, are our first clues that something sordid is in the offing. Having read Vladimir, in which the narrator develops a passion for a younger colleague in her department, I expected a similar story of illicit desire. Exegesis is cleverly and precisely structured, beginning with a call to worship followed by an invocation, a reading of the New Testament, a presentation of tithes and offerings, a confession of sins, and so on. At select call-and-response moments, the audience is directed to read aloud from the bulletins in our laps. We complete a circuit of knowledge, and maybe something more. Ultimately, the play’s concern with how an authority figure might wield charismatic power over her charges put me in the mind of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Considering Rev. Kat, Beatrice says, “She frightens me … She say[s] what other people don’t want to hear because they don’t want to hear it.” Others, though, fall for her faster than you can say “benediction.”

—Rhoda Feng

The tone is set for Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, the New Group production of Will Arbery’s new play, directed by Danya Taymor, with a song by David Berman, “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan.” The lyrics describe a “good caretaker” who “salts the stoop and scoops the cat in / tests an icy path for traction.” Set over the course of three perilous winters, Arbery’s play centers around the lives of municipal servants charged with defrosting the frozen roads of Evanston, Illinois—a task they attempt through the insomniac hours in a freight truck bearing a mound of rock salt and a lone heater sparing them from the deadly cold. In the first minute of the play, Peter, one of its four characters, announces his desire to commit suicide. From there, his seemingly pragmatic task—to combat ice with salt—is quickly exposed as a self-protective ritual; the increasingly expensive and ineffective practice becomes the focus for an intimate examination of climate change, the material damage it has caused, and the often futile, ultimately sacrificial measures we all have to take against it. Peter speaks repeatedly of another hopeless tradition that has become central to his life: using the Domino’s pizza tracker for real-time updates on his orders. Arbery brilliantly compresses an existential problem into a funny and frighteningly true fact of everyday American life: the pizza tracker, that instrument by which Peter marks his meals, his days, his time alive, changes nothing—not the pace of arrival nor the pizza itself—but he can’t stop looking at it. It’s coming, says Peter, says Arbery, says Berman, and what can a person do but watch it come?

—Owen Park, reader

An Angle in My Eye: An Interview with Mary Manning

From Ciao!, in issue no. 242 (Winter 2022). Courtesy of Mary Manning and Canada Gallery.

Mary Manning’s portfolio for the Winter issue of the Review documents a summer spent in Italy. Their collages are perfect expressions of the special kind of vision you have on vacation, when everything—pizza receipts, sidewalk seating, wildflowers—looks new and exciting, strangely saturated. Manning’s work not only captures but literally incorporates their world in order to rearrange it, ever so gently, at an angle: in Ciao!, there’s a cantaloupe wrapper and a bag from a pharmacy, plus photographs of their friends, of a Nicola De Maria fresco, and of a performance of a Trisha Brown dance. Manning was born in Alton, Illinois in 1972 and lives in New York City. In 2006, they began sharing digital photographs of their everyday life on their blog alongside scans of objects and links to the work of musicians, filmmakers, writers, and other artists they admire. Today, their work appears in print and on gallery walls across North America. The book Manning was preparing last summer, Grace Is Like New Music, a collection of images spanning ten years of their work, will be published by Canada Gallery in February. We talked about looking at images nonlinearly, as well as Italian graphic design, postmodern choreography, and bags (paper and plastic).

INTERVIEWER

Do you take photos differently when you’re on vacation?

MANNING

Yes. For better, for worse, you’re changed when you’re on vacation. There can be a long stretch of time in New York City where I’m just not in the flow of being inspired. When you travel, you’re plucked out of the sky and plopped down on the other side of a huge body of water. You get off a plane and it’s a shock to be in a different light.

INTERVIEWER

Where were you when you took the photos for this portfolio?

MANNING

The photos and the ephemera are all from a six-week period I spent at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios residency in a smallish town called Spoleto in central Italy, about an hour north of Rome. I’m calling it Rome’s upstate. The sculptor Anna Mahler and the painter Sol LeWitt both lived and worked there. They never met, but their studios were in such insane proximity. The residencies take place primarily in Sol’s studio. The energy of that space was infectious. I was working there while sequencing the photos for my book in these gridded arrangements. When I was done, I laughed, because I didn’t even really think about the connection until then. I thought, Oh my God, this is a vibe. It was like osmosis.

INTERVIEWER

Oh, yes, because of his squares! I was actually going to ask about rectangles, and the geometry of your work. Do you ever make nonrectangular collages?

MANNING

It’s funny. Even with ephemera, it’s rare that I choose to use something oddly shaped. I’ve made several pieces that include butterfly or moth wings. But even then, they always sit in a rectangular shape: a frame or page, for example.

INTERVIEWER

What happens later, in your studio?

MANNING

Much of what I do there is envision arrangements and relationships between images. I have a long table and a magnetic wall. The table is where most of those arrangements happen, and the wall is where larger groupings come together. This process tends to be playful. I might start out by setting a bunch of pictures on a napkin and saying, Well, that looks really cool. And then just sitting with that arrangement, and maybe knowing that I won’t use it but that I’ve come one step closer. Later, maybe the images that were in harmony with one another will stay and the napkin will go. Sometimes using ephemera feels like a trick, a fun kind of device. But I want to find the gentlest version of the arrangement. It’s like letting something seep through a mesh sieve and seeing what stays.

People like to ask me, Why did you put these two things together? But it’s the images and their relationships with one another that tell me where they want to go. I like to allow space for the viewer to come up with their own understanding of the dynamics present in the work, whether it’s the relationships between the ephemera and the photos, or the size of the photos, or the juxtaposition of a blank page with a full page. It’s a funny time in the world of images, especially because of social media, which directs our visual attention in specific, programmed ways. It’s exciting not be told how to look for once. In the three-hundred-page book of my work I just made, there are no titles on any work, no dates, no page numbers. I wanted a reader to open the book and feel like, You can go this way; you can go that way. Choose your own adventure.

INTERVIEWER

When you look at the images in your Paris Review portfolio now, are the memories of those moments still attached for you? Or have they become flattened, so to speak, into the artwork?

MANNING

No. The photos are so personal. Despite what I said about creating mystery and choosing your own adventure, I’m very happy to tell the story behind every photograph.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me some of those.

From Ciao!, in issue no. 242 (Winter 2022). Courtesy of Mary Manning and Canada Gallery.

 

MANNING

The photo in this one is in the little piazza around the corner from the studio, at the bottom of this very tiny slope. I took it through this narrow walkway in the morning, when it was incredibly bright. And then the brown bag underneath is from a pharmacy or a hardware store. I think it was a hardware store.

INTERVIEWER

They have so many different types of bags in Italy!

MANNING

Yes, and the graphics and the fonts in Italy— they blew my mind. On the right, for example, is a folder from an office supplies store, which was the only art supplies store in town, a completely jam-packed, very sweet mom-and-pop place. The folders there had to be thirty or forty years old, maybe more.

From Ciao!, in issue no. 242 (Winter 2022). Courtesy of Mary Manning and Canada Gallery.

 

INTERVIEWER

The depth perception in all of these spreads is so disorienting. Maybe because there are so many different textures, so many different degrees of three-dimensionality. How do you think about perspective in your work?

MANNING

I think there’s something fun about the kind of zoom or bend you see in these images. When I first started taking photos, I used a digital camera. I was hyperconcentrated on zoom. When I switched to analog, the types of pictures I was taking didn’t change, but the zoom changed—you can’t zoom as easily with an analog camera. I realized, “I have a roll of film, I can only take this shot. I can’t crop it. I’m not interested in doing work on it after the fact. I get what I get.” I had already trained my eye from seven years of taking forty thousand digital images a day. Now, I literally have to use my body to figure out what I want to see in the frame.

I’m not necessarily conscious of trying to knock off the stability of an image, but I do like upsetting the very pristine. Maybe there’s an angle in my eye somewhere. I’m lopsided.

INTERVIEWER

What were you doing in Spoleto when you weren’t taking pictures?

MANNING

I read a lot: the book you see in the portfolio, Goethe’s Italian Journey, which also references Spoleto; a book by Imogen Binnie, Nevada; and a book of Wolfgang Tillmans’s interviews, which are so inspiring. I feel a total affinity for him as a human and for what he’s doing.

INTERVIEWER

Are there particular writers who capture in language something similar to what you do in images?

MANNING

Mostly poets. In poetry, the words are strung together in a way that’s similarly nonlinear but has a logic. For the poet, it might just be that a certain word has to go next. And it’s up to the reader or the listener to figure out what’s happening in that language or that cadence. I love Mary Ruefle, Alice Notley, and Tim Dlugos, for example. But film and dance have a closer relationship to my work. Especially modern dance and postmodern choreography—they have the same kind of feeling I’m trying to convey or experience.

INTERVIEWER

Is that because, in modern dance, the movement is nonlinear? Before, you talked about wanting your audience to navigate your book in a variety of directions.

MANNING

Completely. That summer, while I was at the residency, I saw these amazing films by Michael Blackwood, a filmmaker who spent a lot of time with artists, choreographers, and composers, making portraits of them. In one that I saw—Making Dances: Seven Post-Modern Choreographers—the choreographer Kenneth King described his work like this: “It’s about rhythm … It’s about signals. When you work with open form, you’re proliferating or boiling up more pulses and impulses … remembering that the grid is like an abacus, so that the movements are like pieces of currency or coinage opening up space.” I wrote that down in my notebook. I thought, Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s what I do.

INTERVIEWER

Your work also reminds me a lot of Tumblr or Pinterest.

MANNING

It is a lot like Tumblr in that each collection is a kind of visual catalog, much like the ephemera that you come across in image blogs. The Tumblr era of image sharing and collecting was a huge part of what propelled me to share my work more widely. I started a photo blog in the early aughts, and then I was part of a huge, robust group of other image freaks. There were these image aggregators that would aggregate fifty to two hundred new posts every day from other blogs that you followed. I was constantly pulling images from these archival Tumblrs, blogs that would reshare found images, and then using them on my own blog. I had a website that is still online called Unchanging Window. I would use it like Instagram: I’d post a series of images every day. And there was a page called Other, and that was my version of Tumblr, or like an homage to other Tumblrs. I got a scanner and would scan cool plastic bags that I got. That’s when I realized, Oh, yeah. You’re permitted to take these things from 3D-analog-real-thing world and bring them into 2D-internet world.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a favorite kind of souvenir?

MANNING

Bags. One hundred percent. Paper bags. I love plastic bags, too, but the paper ones really do it for me.

 

Olivia Kan-Sperling is an assistant editor at The Paris Review.

Relentlessness: A Syllabus

Photograph by Sophie Haigney.

In our new Winter issue, Belinda McKeon interviewed Colm Tóibín, the author of ten novels, two books of short stories, and several collections of essays and journalism. “In the autumn of 2000,” he told her, “I taught a course at the New School called Relentlessness, and I chose to teach translations of some ancient Greek texts, and Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Ingmar Bergman, Sylvia Plath. The class was very useful because it gave me a bedrock of theory about what this sort of work was doing. … Once you have that certain authority, you can actually write a plainer prose.” We asked Tóibín for his syllabus from that class, along with a short introduction, as the first in a new series we are launching called Syllabi.

I am interested in texts that are pure voice or deal with difficult experience using a tone that does not offer relief or stop for comfort. Sometimes, the power in the text comes from powerlessness, whether personal or political. Sometimes, death is close or danger beckons or violence is threatened or enacted. Sometimes, there is a sense of real personal risk in the text’s revelations. Sometimes, there is little left to lose. All the time, the tone is incantatory or staccato or filled with melancholy recognitions.

Euripides, Medea

Sophocles, Electra

Sophocles, Antigone

Sylvia Plath, Ariel

Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

Juan Goytisolo, Forbidden Territory

Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Nadine Gordimer, The Late Bourgeois World

Ingmar Bergman, Autumn Sonata

John McGahern, The Barracks

Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, The Turin Horse

Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing

J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron

Béla Bartók, Bluebeard’s Castle

Constance Debré, Love Me Tender

 

Colm Tóibín’s most recent book is The Magician.

In Remembrance of Charles Simic, 1938–2022

A manuscript page from Charles Simic’s “One to Worry About.”

Charles Simic, the former poet Laureate and a giant of life and literature, died Monday at the age of eighty-four. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and countless other accolades, and longtime teacher at the University of New Hampshire, Simic was also a beloved poetry editor of The Review, alongside Meghan O’Rourke, from 2005 to 2008.

Born in 1938, Simic was a prolific writer of both poetry and nonfiction. He wrote often about war-torn Belgrade, where his childhood was overshadowed by the Nazi invasion. (He immigrated to the United States in 1954.) But Simic also pondered the quotidian, mundane, and even miniscule. He liked insects, and told our interviewer in 2005 that he thought ants were “pretty cool.” When he was starting out, he said, he often wrote not for editors but for friends, who enjoyed his “epics about toothpicks and dripping faucets.”

There is long shadow of melancholy in much of his work, in poems like “January” that evoke a world chilled to the bone. But it should be said: He was also very funny! He loved food and life’s pleasures, telling our interviewer, “Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed.”

He had a way of writing individual phrases that are hard to forget, lines that seem to encapsulate something you always knew about life. From his “Promises of Leniency and Forgiveness”:

Incurable romantics marrying eternal grumblers.
Life haunted by its more beautiful sister-life-
Always, always…we had nothing
But the way with words.

Life haunted by its more beautiful sister-life! He had a way with words, and much more than that. He will be missed.

My Rattling Window

My window. Photo by Sophie Haigney.

In our Winter issue, we published Mieko Kanai’s “Tap Water,” a story whose remarkable first sentence spills across more than two pages and describes the interior of the narrator’s new apartment as if it were the architecture of her emotional landscape. Who among us has not resolved to stop obsessing over some small piece of our home, only to fail? Inspired by Kanai’s story, we’re launching a series called Home Improvements, in which writers consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction.

I moved into an attic room in a tall house last March. It is a lovely house on a pretty street. The offer of the room seemed to have fallen into my lap at a time when I needed it badly. It was not too expensive, and it was in a redbrick old-fashioned neighborhood I would come to love; it seemed too good to be true, and it would not in fact last, because the rent would soon go up. But for the time being I even have a little balcony with a view of the highway and of a billboard reading “Kars4Kids.” My room is oddly shaped and small but in a way I like—someone who once stayed there compared it to a ship’s cabin and I thought yes, that’s right, my little cabin.

There was only one real problem, which I noticed on my second night sleeping there. The window next to my bed rattled. At first I thought it was typical highway noise, just amplified, but soon it became clear that the glass was flapping, wobbling, shaking. The sound it made was a strange stuttering, occasionally high-pitched, almost verging on whistling. I asked my roommate to talk to the landlord, and the landlord failed, for weeks and then months, to appear. I took a video of the noise in the middle of one sleepless night and sent it to my roommate for validation. He responded, “OMG that’s like a horror film.” The window didn’t rattle all night long, or even every single night—it was intermittent, which made the experience even more strange and like a fever dream, because I would wake up at odd times and then drift back to sleep and then wake up again and in the morning feel like perhaps I was exaggerating the problem to myself. Sometimes for a few days I would think the rattling had resolved itself, but then it would come back, loud as ever. I was not sleeping very much or very well, but my window wasn’t the only reason for this.

In the early summer, I began to talk about my window incessantly, at dinner parties and at bars and at my office. “My life is amazing, except my window won’t stop rattling,” I would say, and then describe the problem in great detail. Someone I was sort of dating offered to come by with tools to try to fix it, but I wouldn’t let him, because it seemed like too big a gesture. The rattling window outlived the short-lived relationship. It became my Achilles’ heel, something I pinpointed as The Problem of My Life. Everything would be fixed if I could fix my window!

Finally the landlord came. He replaced the window, giving it a new frame, natural wood rather than white. There was a plastic covering over the windowpane, which I peeled off to reveal a spotless sheet of glass. That night, I slept soundly and woke up ecstatic, in my new life!

A few weeks later, the window began to rattle again. It was softer this time, but it was unmistakably the same sound. I woke up in the middle of the night dazed and surprised, fell back to sleep with a pillow over my head, and woke up deflated in the morning. There seemed to be no solution for my problem, and the landlord was uninterested in the further evidence of the rattling window. He had done, he felt, all that he could do. It was hard to argue with that, since I couldn’t imagine what else could be done.

I contacted a contractor who told me to call his “window guy” and then I waited two weeks for the window guy to come and inspect it. On the phone he warned me that fixing it was likely going to be expensive, but I told him I was prepared to pay. He showed up one afternoon in November. He looked closely at the window, tested its sides, walked out onto the balcony and pressed on the glass. He studied the fixtures for about three minutes from all angles.

“There is no problem with this window,” he said. “There is nothing wrong with it.”

“But it rattles,” I said. I felt he didn’t believe me, so I showed him the video.

“Maybe you have a ghost,” he suggested, before taking his leave.

About ten days later, the rattling stopped. I waited for it to start again, but for longer than usual, it didn’t. Maybe it’s the weather, I suggested to a friend who had certainly grown bored of my window saga, though the weather had not really changed in a meaningful way. Maybe it’s psychological, he said. Ha ha!

For more than a month, the rattling has not returned, though I half expect it to at any moment. Unfortunately, despite this welcome respite, not all my problems have been fixed.

 

Sophie Haigney is the web editor at The Paris Review.

A Room with History

Door in shadow. Licensed under CCO 2.0.

One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives.

—Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

What is the matter of history through which Dionne Brand offers a guide? This history that arrives in the room with us is not the captor’s history, even as it is a history of captivity. It is not history as the project and handmaiden of Europe, or the plots and stories that create the fatal divide, the caesura between the West and the rest of us, or the self-aggrandizing romance of a nation, or even a narrative with fixed coordinates and a certain arc, no once-upon-a-time, no myths of origin or claims of autochthony. A Map to the Door of No Return is a philosophical meditation on the world created by the arrival of Columbus in the Americas in 1492 and of the Portuguese on the West African coast in the fifteenth century, inaugurating one of the largest forced migrations in history, described euphemistically as “the trade in slaves.” The book is a hybrid of poetry, memoir, theory, and history, and its recursive and nonlinear structure formally enacts the open question of the door and its duration: “nothing is ever over.” As Brand writes, there is no way in, no return, “no ancestry except the black water and the Door of no Return.” The door is less a place than a threshold of the brutal history of capitalist modernity. The door is the end of traceable beginnings and provides a figure for describing the psychic and affective dimensions of black existence in the diaspora.

There is no map to the door, no cartography that could graphically represent its space-time coordinates, because, as Brand observes, the door is not a place, an externality fixed in a particular territory, in an exact epoch or period, but rather the door is knowledge sensed more than acknowledged or fully conscious, it touches us but without fully emerging as an object of cognition. So then how might one write the disaster, the terrible history carried in our gestures, residing in our bodies, marked on our flesh, etched onto our retinas? Is history no more able or capable than the map of yielding an adequate rendering of the door, or, more important, of our lives before the door? Brand writes to intensify this crisis, not to resolve it. After detailing the impossible being of those lodged inside the metaphor, and describing the absent presence, the physical departure and psychic rending that is the door, after perceiving this tear in the world, after reckoning with the ordinary brutality that is its issue, Brand attends to its substrate—time itself in its entangled and durative registers. The durative conveys the character of the continuing, the incomplete, and the ongoing; the durative tense has been described as a tense of vision, in which the writer sees what has happened and describes the action as ongoing and unfolding before their eyes. In A Map to the Door, this durative tense or temporal inhabitation creates a web of dense associations that extends from the West African coast, to the black shoals of Guaya, to the Burnt River, to the dreams of revolution tumbling down a hill in Grenada. These intense zones of feeling, thickets of heartbreak and grief, eruptions of love, radiant moments of ordinariness, small spaces opening inside us, like those pools of red and undulating light in Beloved, engulf those who pass through them, they solicit and threaten to undo us. To encounter the door, to gaze at the Atlantic, to descend into the hold, to make the revolution and witness the counterrevolution, these are Brand’s pools of red light. We pass through these spaces, and all we have lost and the long history of our defeat fill us with a grief that is all but unbearable.

The question arises: how we might exist before the door, before not as an anterior or prior state, but exist in the face of it. A philosophy of time is articulated in a series of queries: “Leaving? To leave? Left?” These words are as heartbreaking as any in the text. Are we still in the hold of the door? Still departing and cast away? Are our lives still framed by it? Leaving—gerund, ongoing, durative condition. A permanent state or an irreparable one? To leave—infinite and anticipated, recurring, to leave again—again is implied, though not explicitly stated.

Left. Gone. Over. Declarative. Deceptive—as if the facts of or the lived experience of blackness could be explained by simple predicates, by past participles—the delusion and the lure of a state over and done with. Brand breaks and deranges this grammar of how we exist in time. How can we have “left” when we are still in the wake? “Language can be deceptive,” Brand replies to such doubts, emphasizing the crisis of how we survive and endure, how we inhabit what is uninhabitable, rather than resolve it.

What language would prove capable of conveying this rupture in history, a rupture in the quality of being confirmed by the routine violence, the predatory extraction, the brutal accumulation, and the ordinary terror of our lives? Life spoken in the “blunt language of brutality, even beauty was brutal.” Yet Map is not a chronicle of brutality or a mere inventory of violence. So how is it able to convey us to the door and yet not break us?

The image repertoire, the sounds of life, whether the ocean or Coltrane, the beautiful assemblage of paragraphs, the composition of its sections and chapters, constitute a way of doing that provides no facile or simple answers, yet allow us to breathe in rooms saturated with history and red light. The distillation of time is a significant dimension of what enables us to endure the hold, yet not be asphyxiated. Even as this history is catastrophic and its damage ongoing, time is malleable and plastic. Brand explodes its continuum in her prose and poetics. Her now is filled with the then and the before and the not yet and the might be. Across her corpus, the acute rendering of what it means to inhabit this man’s world requires a shift of temporal perspective, so that time is on the move, as we are, not confined to the regulation of the clock or reduced to homogenized and empty units of duration and existence, or disposable lifetimes for purposes of accumulation and death. There are the more than and the might be rendered in its fold.

The sense of time—is to be simultaneously free of it/in the face of it/in the hold of it. Brand’s is a historical sensibility that is submarine and troubles the notion of an unfolding chronicle or the very idea that history proper might explain the door, rather than history being what the door has produced and its instrument—the chronicle of our dispossession, a fable of cause and effect, a tale of tragedy and triumph, a Bildung of objects becoming subjects and citizens, of errant and anomalous social formations domesticated and regulated in the family romance. These notes on belonging everywhere warn of the dangers of the origin story and the passport, and in its stead offer catachresis and prophesy rather than solution.

Those in diaspora exist in a place that is no place, inhabit an impossible metaphor. This rift of the Door and the Atlantic cultivates an alternate sense of time and event—as entangled, as compounded and synchronic, recursive and sedimented. This rupture as history, this tear in the world engenders a quality of time, an experience of time, distilled in the fullness of the moment, in the smallness of a gesture. One might say that it operates at another frequency, and one explored in the twenty years of work Brand produced since Map, especially in Ossuaries and The Blue Clerk.

The synchronic inhabitation of multiple presents defines embodied experience; sometimes it is the knowledge of the flesh, or a mode of perception and cognition that precedes language and the matter of identity, at least as it is marked and explicit. One example, a thirteen-year-old girl standing at the top of her street surveys the world that has made her:

I remember standing at the top of the street to my house when I was thirteen thinking, I will leave here and never return, I am not going to live here. Already the books in my mind were read, already I was forgetting faces and names.

The moment she proves able to name definitively, or to conceive, her street and her house, no longer as taken-for-granted atmosphere, as the environment simply there, but as the place of her worlding, she is solidly lodged in the postlapsarian. The girl experiences and perceives time in this separation from and falling away of world. This rupture and temporal implosion are conveyed by Brand’s distinctive narration, narration that eschews narrative in troubling the distinction between prose and poetry, in flitting across centuries, so in one moment we exist in a room with William Bosman on the Slave Coast, and in another are on a hilltop with Maurice Bishop on a small island replete with the promise of breaking the door, of freeing us from its hold. Map’s recursive and diffuse structure is an open-ended assemblage. Brand, like Denise Ferreira da Silva, is trying to unthink the world. She, too, questions: “How to release [the world] from the procedures and tools that presume everything that exists or happens is an expression of the human?” Before the thirteen-year-old knows what she knows, she feels and perceives that universal time is as much a sign of the damaged world as the general misery, the scarred face, the damaged limbs, the violated daughters, the tragic men brawling on the beach trying to destroy each other.

Is this how time unfolds—as the forgetting of all the things that are and were dear to us and that we cannot recall? The small space opening again and again. Is this anticipated loss, ready and waiting, another mark of the door and its terrible endowment, this ready drift toward oblivion, the ability to forget everyone, like the boy Douglass calling his mother a stranger, no longer remembering her face and having to learn again what a mother is, and as a grown man, negating the negated maternal function and wanting still to provide that boy-child with a mother; or Baby Suggs, with eight children gone and all she can remember of the firstborn is “how she loved the burned bottom of bread”? This thirteen-year-old suspended at the top of the street names her world and loses her belonging in the same breath. This acuity of detail and regard, while deftly attending to the magnitude of absence and oblivion, is Map’s achievement.

Now, in its fullness, can only be described inadequately with a series of placeholders: entangled, incomplete, manifold, a vessel of each and every moment, a now of the all and the everything. This time saturates the circumstantial account, and in this regard Brand’s maps and notes, her inventories, her verbless grammars of description, her archives of verso pages, her odes and nomenclatures are for the time being, for the meantime, for us in our dire need and in our beautiful terribleness, for these notes to belonging articulate our becoming and our existence in the catastrophe, in the ship’s hold and in the enclosure of the cognitive scheme, in the map and in the ledger, in the columns of credits and debits, and as well, and too, and also, and necessarily, and inescapably in and as the possibility of an opening to something else, in and as the contestation of the given, in and as the always escapes and the possibilities afforded by drifting and detour. Brand offers us a way-making to nowhere.

The girl stands at the top of the street, but the street is already a ghost. “I never returned to that street. The house with the hibiscus fence and the butterflies hovering over zinnias.” Is perception most acute precisely at the very moment when everything to which one has belonged falls away? Is this why “the mother country” is most sweet in the mouth of those gone, missing, left, taken, exiled? Is the moment one recognizes a home as the home the very same moment in which you lose it, like that girl floating at the top of the street recognizing all that she loves, and simultaneously being overwhelmed by the knowledge that she is destined to leave it, and that knowledge is tantamount to loss itself? Is that, too, knowledge of the door? Is nonbelonging the price of this regard, this perception that breaks her and breaks her away from what has been atmosphere and environment?

She will return to that street again and again, but only in imagination.

When I was nine and coming home one day, my street changed just as I stood at the top of it and I knew I would never live there again or all my life. The thought altered the afternoon and my life and after that I was in a hurry to leave. There was another consciousness waiting for a little girl to grow up and think future thoughts, waiting for some years to pass and some obligatory life to be lived until I would arrive here. When I was nine I left myself and entered myself.

In Verso Four of The Blue Clerk, Brand returns to that street, in an exquisite narration of time enfolding, not unfolding, but time held, embraced, doubled over, enveloped, clasped in one’s arms, cleaved, gathered, like a garment to be wrapped up in, to be in the surround of time, and in turn, to clasp, to circle, to encompass, to carry, to surrender to its hold. Time is like flesh folding back onto itself, like a trap or an enclosure, like a caress or an act of tenderness, like the door holding on to us and never letting us go.

 

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America; Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 . She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Literature. She is University Professor at Columbia University.

This essay is adapted from an afterword to the forthcoming reissue of Brand’s The Map to the Door of No Return.

Only Style Survives: On Chateaubriand

Horned adder. Marius Burger, via Wikimedia Commons.

I lie in bed until the voice says Get up and live, then I put on my slippers and read my usual ten pages of Chateaubriand over breakfast. Why Chateaubriand? Because it is an impossibly long book, and long out of fashion, because Baudelaire claimed him, in a letter to Sainte-Beuve, as the father of dandyism, because Proust heard in Chateaubriand’s style the fragile echoing call of an owl in the woods at night, because the book I want to write seems to me as impossible. My spiritual fidelity is to the school of lapsed fashions. It is Chateaubriand’s tomb that I discover in my halting French—his memoirs from beyond the tomb, published posthumously, which I bought in four fat pocketbook volumes, inexpensive but with well-glued bindings and thorough footnotes, in a bookshop on the Rue de Bretagne. I now believe I turned up that street in unconscious attraction to its name: Chateaubriand’s birthplace is Saint-Malo, Brittany. The evocative mystery of a name means everything to him, as it did to Proust—a name, like a two-note birdcall from the woods, is the smallest signature of style.

I compile an undisciplined index on the flyleaf of the first volume as I read it, as a future aid to memory but also for the private pleasure of watching this crooked list accrue in its variously colored inks. On page 336 he haughtily refers to Rousseau as a kind of cobbler or a schoolmaster. His praise for Lord Byron receives an entire chapter in the twelfth book. As a boy he learns about love from the Latin poets: he voluptuously reads Lucretius in bed at night, by the light of stolen candles, and I think of Lucy Hutchinson’s 1653 English translation of the then-forbidden De rerum natura, in which she describes how a lad’s nocturnal emission “wett / the shining Babylonian coverlett.” Chateaubriand’s own boyhood coverlet was almost certainly of coarse manufacture; his father’s version of domestic economy in their moldering château was Spartan, inadvertently preparing the writer for his future exile and penury. An aficionado of exile, four times he mentions the troubadours in the first volume. Of all the items I have noted in my index, the one with the most entries is tomb. This shouldn’t surprise: everyone dies. Entire languages violently disappear. There’s not a place on earth, he says, that’s tombless. It is to him the most fascinating subject. He sees America, where he traveled at length during the Terror of the French Revolution, as nothing but the tomb of the great Indigenous nations reduced to ruin by Europe. On page 493, he describes how at Niagara Falls he heard an Iroquois girl named Mila sing a song about the beautiful pattern of the adder’s skin; as she sings, he realizes that he already knows the song, which was recorded, he says, in an essay by Montaigne, who had heard a different Iroquois girl sing it two centuries before in Rouen. I am enchanted by this incredible story, so I look further, and learn the adder song has a spurious linkage. The girl at Niagara Falls could not have sung the song cited by Montaigne, who writes in his 1580 account “Of Cannibals” that it was sung by a captive Tupinambá girl from Brazil, in the Tupi language. So am I to believe Chateaubriand when he says that he has handled the decomposed skull of Marie Antoinette? It is he who identified the remains of the guillotined queen, he claims, which had been thrown perfunctorily into a collective pit. He knew her, he says, by means of the set of the teeth in the jawbone; at Versailles, in his youth, he had been familiar with the Queen’s wide smile.

In July of 1791, alone in the forest near Albany, seeking, as he explained, the Northwest Passage, and believing himself to be in a primordial embrace with Nature, Chateaubriand heard the sound of a fiddle in the woods. He approached the surprising music to discover in a clearing a French dancing master in a powdered wig, apple-green suit, and lace jabot and cuffs, playing a tune for a group of twenty bare-torsoed, feather-wearing, dancing Iroquois men. These were the first Indigenous people the young exile had ever met. The fiddler’s tune, “Madelon Friquet,” had been a popular French fairground song. French dancing masters were then common in America, the notes inform me, having been displaced and there being no further call for them during the revolution. A faintly comedic melancholy is this book’s mother tongue.

Chateaubriand says that the pleasures of youth revisited in memory are ruins seen by torchlight. I don’t know whether I’m the ruin or the torch.

Montaigne was dead at fifty-nine—kidneys; Baudelaire at forty-six—syphilis, probably. Rousseau died at sixty-six of causes unconnected to his lifelong urethral malformation, described so exhaustively and enticingly by Starobinski; Lord Byron died of fever at the age of thirty-six in the Greek War of Independence in 1824, the year of Baudelaire’s birth. After a final visit to his mistress, Madame Récamier, he by then blind and she paralytic, Chateaubriand died at the age of seventy-nine, in 1848, the year of the third revolution and its failure and of Baudelaire’s grand political disillusionment.

The attribution of causation to human behavior is generally a work of fantasy. Birds will speak the last human words, Chateaubriand says. Each one of us is the last witness of something—some custom, habit, way of speaking, economy, some lapsed mode of life. He says only style survives.

 

You can read an excerpt from the first volume of Chateaubriand’s memoirs online here, and an excerpt from the recently published second volume here. 

Lisa Robertson is the translator of “Pos de chantar m’es pres talenz,” a poem by William IX of Aquitaine in our Winter 2022 issue. Her most recent book of poetry is Boat.

The Written World and the Unwritten World

Atelier of the Boxes, ivory writing tablet and lid (Medieval, between 1340 and 1360, northern France). Walters Art Museum, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I belong to that portion of humanity—a minority on the planetary scale but a majority I think among my public—that spends a large part of its waking hours in a special world, a world made up of horizontal lines where the words follow one another one at a time, where every sentence and every paragraph occupies its set place: a world that can be very rich, maybe even richer than the nonwritten one, but that requires me to make a special adjustment to situate myself in it. When I leave the written world to find my place in the other, in what we usually call the world, made up of three dimensions and five senses, populated by billions of our kind, that to me is equivalent every time to repeating the trauma of birth, giving the shape of intelligible reality to a set of confused sensations, and choosing a strategy for confronting the unexpected without being destroyed.

This new birth is always accompanied by special rites that signify the entrance into a different life: for example, the rite of putting on my glasses, since I’m nearsighted and read without glasses, while for the farsighted majority the opposite rite is imposed, that is, of taking off the glasses used for reading.

Every rite of passage corresponds to a change in mental attitude. When I read, every sentence has to be readily understood, at least in its literal meaning, and has to enable me to formulate an opinion: what I’ve read is true or false, right or wrong, pleasant or unpleasant. In ordinary life, on the other hand, there are always countless circumstances that escape my understanding, from the most general to the most banal: I often find myself facing situations in which I wouldn’t know how to express an opinion, in which I prefer to suspend judgment.

While I wait for the unwritten world to become clear to my eyes, there is always within reach a written page that I can dive back into. I hasten to do that, with the greatest satisfaction: there at least, even if I understand only a small part of the whole, I can cultivate the illusion of keeping everything under control.

I think that in my youth, too, things went that way, but at the time I had the illusion that the written world and the unwritten world illuminated one another; that the experiences of life and the experiences of reading were in some way complementary, and every step forward in one field corresponded to a step forward in the other. Today I can say that I know much more about the written world than I once did: within books, experience is always possible, but its reach doesn’t extend beyond the blank margin of the page. Instead, what happens in the world that surrounds me never stops surprising me, frightening me, disorienting me. I’ve witnessed many changes in my lifetime, in the vast world, in society, and many changes in myself, too, and yet I can’t predict anything, not for myself or for the people I know, and even less regarding the future of the human race. I couldn’t predict the future relations between the sexes, between the generations, future developments of society, of cities and nations, what type of peace there will be or what type of war, what significance money will have, which of the objects in daily use will disappear and which appear as new, what sort of vehicles and machines will be used, what the future of the sea will be, of rivers, animals, plants. I know very well that I share this ignorance with those who, on the contrary, claim to know: economists, sociologists, politicians. But the fact that I am not alone gives me no comfort.

I take some comfort in the thought that literature has always understood something more than other disciplines, but this reminds me that the ancients saw in letters a school of wisdom, and I realize how unattainable every idea of wisdom is today.

At this point you will ask: If you say that your true world is the written page, if only there do you feel at ease, why do you want to leave it, why do you want to venture into this vast world that you are unable to master? The answer is simple: To write. Because I’m a writer. What is expected of me is that I look around and capture some rapid images of what’s happening, then return and, bent over my desk, resume work. In order to restart my factory of words I have to get new fuel from the wells of the unwritten.

But let’s take a closer look at how things stand. Is that really how it happens? The principal philosophical currents of the moment say: No, none of this is true. The mind of the writer is obsessed by the contrasting positions of two philosophical currents. The first says: The world doesn’t exist; only language exists. The second says: Common language has no meaning; the world is ineffable.

For the first, the materiality of language is raised above a world of shadows; for the second, it’s the world that looms as a mute stone sphinx over a desert of words, like sand carried by the wind. The first current’s main sources have come from Paris over the past twenty-five years; the second has been flowing from Vienna since the start of the century and has passed through various changes, regaining general acceptance in recent years in Italy as well. Both philosophies have strong arguments on their side. Both represent a challenge for the writer: the first requires the use of a language that responds only to itself, to its internal laws; the second, the use of a language that can face up to the silence of the world. Both exert on me their fascination and their influence. That means that I end up not following either, that I don’t believe in either. What do I believe in, then?

Let’s see for a moment if I can take advantage of this difficult situation. First of all, if we feel so intensely the incompatibility between the written and the not written, it’s because we’re much more aware of what the written world is: we can’t forget even for a second that it’s a world made of words, used according to the techniques and strategies proper to language, according to the special systems in which meanings and the relations between meanings are organized. We are aware that when a story is told to us (and almost all written texts tell a story, even a philosophical essay, even a corporation balance sheet, even a cooking recipe), this story is set in motion by a mechanism similar to the mechanisms of every other story.

This is a big step forward: we’re now able to avoid a lot of confusion between what is linguistic and what isn’t, and so we can see clearly the relationship between the two worlds.

All that’s left is to cross-check, and verify that the external world is always there and doesn’t depend on words, rather, is not reducible to words, and that no language, no writing can deplete it. I have only to turn my back on the words deposited in books, plunge into the world outside, hoping to reach the heart of silence, the true silence full of meaning … but how to get there?

Some, in order to have contact with the world outside, simply buy the newspaper every morning. I am not so naive. I know that from the papers I get a reading of the world made by others, or, rather, made by an anonymous machine, expert in choosing from the infinite dust of events those which can be sifted out as “news.”

Others, to escape the grip of the written world, turn on the television. But I know that all the images, even those most directly drawn from life, are part of a constructed story, like the ones in the newspapers. So I won’t buy the newspaper, I won’t turn on the television but will confine myself to going out for a walk.

But everything I see on the city streets already has its place in the context of homogenized information. This world I see, which is usually recognized as the world, appears to my eyes—mostly, anyway—already conquered, colonized by words, a world covered by a thick crust of discourses. The facts of our life are already classified, judged, commented on, even before they happen. We live in a world where everything is read even before it starts to exist.

Not only everything we see but our very eyes are saturated with written language. Over the centuries the habit of reading has transformed Homo sapiens into Homo legens, but this Homo legens isn’t necessarily wiser than before. The man who didn’t read knew how to see and hear many things that we no longer perceive: the tracks of the beasts he hunted, the signs of the approach of rain or wind. He knew the time of day from the shadow of a tree, the time of night by the distance of the stars above the horizon. And as for the heard, smelled, tasted, touched, his superiority to us can’t be doubted.

Having said this, I had better clarify that I didn’t come here to propose a return to illiteracy in order to recover the knowledge of Paleolithic tribes. I regret all we may have lost, but I never forget that the gains are greater than the losses. What I’m trying to understand is what we can do today.

*

I have to mention the particular difficulties I encounter as an Italian in both my relations with the world and my relations with language, that is, as a writer from a country that is continuously frustrating to those who try to understand it. Italy is a country where many mysterious things happen, which are every day widely discussed and commented on but never solved; where every event hides a secret plot, which is a secret and remains a secret; where no story comes to an end because the beginning is unknown, but between beginning and end we can enjoy an infinity of details. Italy is a country where society experiences very rapid changes, even in habits, in behavior: so rapid that we can’t tell what direction we’re moving in, and every new fact disappears, sunk by an avalanche of complaints and warnings of degradation and catastrophe, or by declarations of satisfaction with our traditional ability to get by and survive.

So the stories we can tell are marked on the one hand by a sense of the unknown and on the other by a need for structure, for carefully drawn lines, for harmony and geometry; this is our way of reacting to the shifting sands we feel under our feet.

As for language, it has been stricken by a kind of plague. Italian is becoming an increasingly abstract, artificial, ambiguous language; the simplest things are never said directly, concrete nouns are rarely used. This epidemic first infected politicians, bureaucrats, intellectuals, then became more general, as the larger masses increasingly acquired political and intellectual awareness. The writer’s task is to fight this plague, ensure the survival of a direct, concrete language, but the problem is that everyday language, until yesterday the living source that writers could resort to, can no longer avoid infection.

In other words, I believe that we Italians are in the ideal situation to link our current difficulty in writing novels to general reflections on language and the world.

An important international tendency in our century’s culture, what we call the phenomenological approach in philosophy and the alienation effect in literature, drives us to break the screen of words and concepts and see the world as if it were appearing to our gaze for the first time. Good, now I will try to make my mind blank, and look at the landscape with a gaze free of every cultural precedent. What happens? Our life is programmed for reading, and I realize that I am trying to read the landscape, the meadow, the waves of the sea. This programming doesn’t mean that our eyes are obliged to follow an instinctive horizontal movement from left to right, then to the left a little lower down, and so on. (Obviously I’m speaking about eyes programmed to read Western pages; Japanese eyes are used to a vertical program.) More than an optical exercise, reading is a process that involves mind and eyes together, a process of abstraction or, rather, an extraction of concreteness by means of abstract operations, like recognizing distinc tive marks, shattering everything we see into tiny pieces, rearranging them into meaningful segments, discovering around us regularities, differences, recurrences, singularities, substitutions, redundancies.

The comparison between the world and a book has had a long history starting in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. What language is the book of the world written in? According to Galileo, it’s the language of mathematics and geometry, a language of absolute exactitude. Can we read the world of today in this way? Maybe, if we’re talking about the extremely distant: galaxies, quasars, supernovas. But as for our daily world, it seems to us written, rather, as in a mosaic of languages, like a wall covered with graffiti, writings traced one on top of the other, a palimpsest whose parchment has been scratched and rewritten many times, a collage by Schwitters, a layering of alphabets, of diverse citations, of slang terms, of flickering characters like those which appear on a computer screen.

Should we be trying to achieve an imitation of this language of the world? Some of the most important writers of our century have done that: we can find examples in the Cantos of Ezra Pound, or in Joyce, or in some dizzying passages of Gadda, who is always tempted by his obsession with connecting every detail to the entire universe.

But is imitation really the right way? I started from the irreconcilable difference between the written world and the unwritten world; if their two languages merge, my argument crumbles. The true challenge for a writer is to speak of the intricate tangle of our situation using a language so seemingly transparent that it creates a sense of hallucination, as Kafka did.

*

Perhaps the first step in renewing a relationship between language and world is the simplest: fix attention on an ordinary object, the most banal and familiar, and describe it minutely, as if it were the newest and most interesting thing in the universe.

One of the lessons we can take from modern poetry is to invest all our attention, all our love for detail, in something very far from any human image: an object or plant or animal in which we can identify our sense of reality, our morality, our I, as William Carlos Williams did with a cyclamen, Marianne Moore with a nautilus, Eugenio Montale with an eel.

In France, ever since Francis Ponge began to write prose poems on humble objects like a piece of soap or a piece of coal, the problem of the “thing in itself” has continued to mark literary projects, through Sartre and Camus, to reach its ultimate expression in the description of a quarter of a tomato by Robbe-Grillet. But I don’t think the last word has been said yet. In Germany recently, Peter Handke wrote a novel based entirely on landscapes. And in Italy, too, what some of the new writers I’ve read lately have in common is a visual approach.

My interest in descriptions is also due to the fact that my most recent book, Palomar, includes a lot of descriptions. I try to work so that the description becomes a story, yet remains description. In each of these brief stories, a character thinks only on the basis of what he sees and is suspicious of any thoughts that come to him by other routes. My problem in writing this book was that I have never been what is called an observer; so the first operation I had to perform was to focus my attention on something and then describe it, or rather do the two things at the same time, because, not being an observer, if for example I observe an iguana at the zoo and I don’t immediately write down everything I’ve seen, I forget it.

I have to say that most of the books I’ve written and those I have it in mind to write originate in the idea that writing such a book seemed impossible to me. When I’m convinced that a certain type of book is completely beyond the capacities of my temperament and my technical skills, I sit down at my desk and start writing it.

That’s what happened with my novel If on a winter’s night a traveler: I began by imagining all the types of novel that I will never write; then I tried to write them, to evoke in myself the creative energy of ten different imaginary novelists.

Another book I’m writing talks about the five senses, to demonstrate that modern man has lost the use of them. My problem in writing this book is that my sense of smell isn’t very developed, I lack auditory attention, I’m not a gourmet, my tactile sensitivity is approximate, and I’m nearsighted. For each of the five senses I have to make an effort that allows me to master a range of sensations and nuances. I don’t know if I’ll succeed, but in this case as in the others my goal is not so much to make a book as to change myself, which I think should be the goal of every human undertaking.

You may object that you prefer books that convey a true experience, fully grasped. Well, so do I. But in my experience the motivation to write is always connected to the lack of something we would like to know and possess, something that escapes us. And since I am well acquainted with that type of motivation, it seems to me that I can also recognize it in the great writers whose voices seem to reach us from the peak of an absolute experience. What they convey is a sense of the approach to the experience, rather than a sense of the experience achieved; their secret is in knowing how to keep the force of desire intact.

In a certain sense, I believe that we always write about something we don’t know: we write to make it possible for the unwritten world to express itself through us. At the moment my attention shifts from the regular order of the written lines and follows the mobile complexity that no sentence can contain or use up, I feel close to understanding that from the other side of the words, from the silent side, something is trying to emerge, to signify through language, like tapping on a prison wall.

 

From a paper read at New York University as the James Lecture at the Institute for the Humanities on March 30, 1983, in a new translation from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, to be published in a collection of Calvino’s essays, The Written World and the Unwritten World, by Mariner Classics in January 2023.

The novels of Italo Calvino (1923–1985) include Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, and The Baron in the Trees. He also published numerous collections of fiction, folktales, criticism, and essays. 

Ann Goldstein has translated widely from Italian, including the works of Elena Ferrante, Primo Levi, Alessandro Baricco, and others.

Nightmares of a Shopaholic

Shoes near Covent Garden. Licensed under CCO 2.0.

I’ve never been married, and I’ve bought my wedding dress.

It was a skin-melting summer day. K. and I were going to this perfect vintage store, we have to go, I really want to take you. But she couldn’t remember its name, or whether it was off Columbus or Amsterdam, so we kept stumbling into these half blocks, asphalt shimmering under our sweating shoes.

Suddenly, sure as a homing pigeon, she wheeled around a corner to a gated sliver of silver and pressed an anonymous black button. Then K. pressed her hand to the double-barred iron door, and it yielded.

The store was a riot of color. Every corner had multiple layers of stuff, so you couldn’t put your eye down on one thing without it landing on five more: golden silk handkerchiefs, tallboy cabinets draped with ropy silken tassels, iridescent velvet slippers, a bristly thick, glossy black, lancelet fur capelet, gumdrop earrings that might have been rhinestones or Tiffany. The accessories had their own accessories: there were opera glasses with an eyeglasses chain on which dangled an opera-glasses charm. My molars ached.

Oh! K.’s feathery exclamation snapped my vision into focus toward a dress form. The dress was white with the faintest tinge of seafoam green, beaded and stiff through the torso and then releasing into a tulle storm cloud that gathered barometric pressure above the ground at thigh height.

It was the worst dress.

This dress is amazing, said K. It’s so good. It would look so good on you.

I swallowed. So good, I parroted.

The shopkeeper’s ears flared up. I don’t know who made it, she said, but it’s in totally perfect condition. I think it could have been custom. She flicked her eyes along my body like a tape measure. You’d fit it perfectly.

No changing room, so I wriggled out of my tee and lost my shorts under the dress. K. and the shopkeeper whirled around me, zipping up the boning in one swoop like peeling a clementine in a single long perfect spiral. The dress cinched me and its skirt fell toward my knees, its marshmallow thunder hovering above the rug’s nap.

The saleswoman made all sorts of low squawks. K. cocked her head.

Yes, she cooed. Amazing on you. It’s perfect.

I felt the boning cut into me and felt nothing at all.

I’m serious, said K. This could be your wedding dress.

I floated above my body and watched it: a ballerina in a music box, two legs fused on one foot.

Oh my God, I can see it, said K. I could see it too. A blurry man in a tuxedo; K. behind me in garnet and gold. The dress whiter than white, backlit in seafoam, the way lights in a dentist’s office are white because they’re against a cold-hot fluorescent background.

$750, more than a month of my first rent.

That’s actually a really good price, K. said, sotto voce. You have to get it. Her pale eyes narrowed.

I–. I can’t. I shot my eyes down. I really, literally can’t, I muttered, I mean I only have a debit card and I don’t have that much money on there right now.

K. tossed her hair around her face. I’ll pay for it now, she said. You’ll pay me back.

It’s your wedding dress, she said. We found your wedding dress. It’s so perfect!

***

In 2000, the English writer Madeleine Sophie Wickham, who also wrote novels with names like The Tennis Party and Cocktails for Three, published her first book under the moniker Sophie Kinsella: The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic. In 2001, the book was released in the U.S. as Confessions of a Shopaholic. Shopaholic was a bestseller on both sides of the pond, and Kinsella became queen of what was then the relatively newly coined yet age-old genre of chick lit.

Chick lit, according to Stephanie Harzewski’s Chick Lit and Postfeminism, originated at Princeton in the eighties as a derogatory nickname for the material Elaine Showalter taught in a course called Feminist Literary Tradition (think “Rocks for Jocks” or “Stars for Stoners”). In 1995, Cris Mazza and Jeffrey DeShell’s edited anthology Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction reclaimed the term, with a shiny new hyphen, as a descriptor of experimental stories by women which had gone under the radar in the dick-centric avant-garde. The anthology featured pieces like Carole Maso’s “Sappho Sings the World Ecstatic”—a love affair fantasia between Sappho and Maya Deren partially narrated as a film script—and Kim Addonizio’s “Reading,” a Thomas Bernhard–esque metafictional monologue inside the mind of a woman hurtling through hallucinatorily vivid adventures while lying sick in bed, reading.

By Y2K, chick lit had lost its hyphen and its edge. It was now used widely to describe smooth-brain books with girlish narrators who certainly weren’t interrogating their relationship to the feminist literary tradition. Chick lit novels featured kooky, klutzy, adorable characters who squeezed into bandage dresses and salivated over Jimmy Choos; they prattled on in a hectic present tense. Think Bridget Jones’s Diary, think Sex and the City; think straight white women lusting after Louboutins and mediocre men.

Confessions of a Shopaholic follows the escapades of Becky Bloomwood, the titular addict, who acquires more and more stuff and plays increasingly herculean games of chicken with credit card companies. A film version of Confessions of a Shopaholic was released in 2009. The adaptation actually isn’t bad—New York’s department stores sparkle, the costuming by Patricia Field (of Sex and the City fame) is superb; indeed the Guardian defended Confessions in 2021, observing that “at its core, the film is attempting to comment on financial responsibility and more generally, what it looks like to screw up in your 20s.” But the timing of the release, in the middle of a global recession, was tone-deaf, and the film landed with a wet-balloon thud.

The Shopaholic books, though, continue to get written. Kinsella’s Shopaholic series is infinitely iterative—Confessions of a Shopaholic, Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, Shopaholic Ties the Knot, et cetera—with the same pattern. Like Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp, our Bex covets stuff, buys stuff, undergoes some sort of rollicking plot twist; hilarity ensues, Becky almost goes over the brink of financial despair, and finally, she triumphs.

Becky has no interest in atoning for her sins. Taken together, the books are an iridescent portrait of addiction. As debt piles around her, Becky responds by ostriching into bags and boots, embracing a deeply troubled core fantasy: no matter what happens, she’ll always be able to shop her way out of it.

Confessions is supposed to provide the reader with bubblegum pleasure, but when I read it, I get knots of anxiety in my stomach, like I’ve just chewed two packs straight through. My breath gets shallow, my chest constricts. I’m not nervous for Becky. I’m nervous for myself.

***

“Silly novels by Lady Novelists,” wrote George Eliot in 1856, “are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them—the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic.” Special scorn went to the “mind-and-millinery” breed: the heroine always the “ideal woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces,” attracting the male with her whimsy. Eliot prognosticated the dangers of the chick lit novel: it all seems light and breezy, yet its addictiveness insidiously inscribes the woman as a whimsical accessory.

Perhaps ironically, though inevitably, Eliot is also the best at describing the allure of objects and the magical hold they can have on heroines. She pokes fun at covetous creatures, but she also skewers those who claim to be above stuff. My very favorite moment in Middlemarch, George Eliot’s perfect 1871 novel about an English Midland town in the mid-1830s,happens at the beginning of Book One. Celia and Dorothea, the sisters Brooke, open their mother’s jewelry casket for the first time since her death. Dorothea pretends to pooh-pooh the finery, prompting Celia to coo over her sister, fawning over how gorgeous Dorothea would look in the jewels. When Celia puts them on, they’re mere rocks. But when Dorothea dons them, wearing jewelry becomes a transcendent experience: “ ‘They are lovely,’ said Dorothea, slipping the ring and bracelet on her finely-turned finger and wrist, and holding them towards the window on a level with her eyes. All the while her thought was trying to justify her delight in the colours by merging them in her mystic religious joy.” Adornment isn’t selfish, Dorothea selfishly decides: it’s an efflorescence of how special you are.

Yet shopping novels also provide their heroines with an edge: acquiring goods gives them ambition, and they form visions of themselves as they climb the capitalist ladder. Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, from 1883, is the first department-store novel, telling the story of a young shopgirl, Denise Baudu, and her rise through the ranks at a thinly veiled interpretation of the iconic Bon Marché in Paris. The department store becomes a fantasy site, a place where women envision alternate versions of themselves. In midcentury novels like Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything, secretaries visit the department store during their lunch hours to dream about the kind of person they’ll be in this lipstick, with that bag.

In the shopping act that triggers the events of Confessions, the first in the Shopaholic series, Becky spies a sale sign in a shop window and sees her scarf. “Oh God, yes. I remember this one. It’s made of silky velvet, overprinted in a paler blue and dotted with iridescent beads. As I stare at it, I can feel little invisible strings, silently tugging me toward it. I have to touch it. I have to wear it.” It’s like Dorothea’s jewels, which have a certain magpie magic: Becky didn’t know that she was missing this object in her life before she chose to walk into the shop, but now that she’s here, the entire course of her life has been retrofitted to lead her toward it. And once Becky sees the scarf, she’s in a postlapsarian world. Even though she didn’t even know of the scarf’s existence before, she is now possessed to possess it.

***

There’s a subplot of Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, book two of the series, that almost makes economic sense: Becky gets hired as a personal shopper at Barneys. The department store job seems like a potentially perfect sublimation of her desires: Becky gets to conjure up fantasy lives, but through the credit cards of others.

I need you to come to Barneys with me, said K. I need you to tell me I should buy this coat.

Sueded leather on one side, rabbit fur on the other, midnight blue.

What do you think, said K. She removed it as if in a trance, turning it outside in, its surface switching in a mesmerizingly slow spiral from leather to fur, like a lava lamp. With the leather side out, the coat floated around her.

Where will you wear it, I asked, which was wrong, since it provoked a withering glare. Everywhere, she snapped. That’s the thing. I’ll just wear it everywhere. It’ll just be my coat.

I looked at the price tag and looked away.

I need it, said K. You know I have these events, like, it’s cold in the city. Also it’s really cold. Also it’s actually two coats, like, I would actually wear it both ways, so it’s actually a great price, said K., sotto voce, as though making a confession, giving me a deep secret.

What do you think, said K., no but what do you really think.

It’s a great coat, I said.

No but what do you really think, said K. An endless labyrinth of stuff, mirrors instead of windows, a bright fluorescent glare instead of time.

You look amazing, ticked out of my mouth like a receipt.

***

Becky loves leading herself toward temptation. And her powers of rationalization are so strong that the world animates itself around her to urge her into purchase mode. One scene finds Becky in a convent, coveting the garish stained glass window, when she spies a gift shop. The nun spies Becky and makes her move. “ ‘Don’t think of it as shopping,’ she says at last. ‘Think of it as making a donation.’ She leans forward. ‘You donate the money––and we give you a little something in return. You couldn’t really count it as shopping at all. More … an act of charity.’ ” How could we blame Becky when the devil on her shoulder coos to her in the voice of a literal nun?

Remember that green malachite dress I have, said K. She’d made me go with her to Barneys to buy it—a different Barneys than the fur coat one.

K. showed me the pop-up announcement online—it’s this amazing designer, she used to be a model, she said. The pop-up popped up that Tuesday and I went, without telling her, with my newly opened midnight blue credit card. I bought the label’s oversized blazer and pretended it was on sale. I put it on with my miniskirt and it was great.

On my birthday, I didn’t have any money left, not even on the navy card, and I put on the blazer with my miniskirt.

Where did you get that.

My heart stopped. I didn’t have to say anything.

Why did you go without telling me when I was the one who told you about the pop-up, she said. That’s really weird. I could feel her pale eyes boring into me.

I stood up too quickly and got dizzy, everything in front of me swirling into navy stars.

It’s okay, she said. It’s just really weird. You knew I wanted to go and then you went without me and then you didn’t tell me.

She sighed.

It’s okay, she said. Also it looks great.

I wore it that day and never again.

***

Chick lit, as a term, provoked its own backlash after getting overused. By 2012, Kinsella herself had abandoned the descriptor—“I say I write romantic comedies, cos that’s what they are,” she told the Guardian. But its heroines are thriving, and shopping. Emilys in Paris are bedecked in Patricia Field textures-on-textures (argyle on tartan on diamante). The Selling Sunset glamazons are strutting through the Los Angeles real estate market in sixteen-inch stilettos. Fashion’s narrative pendulum swings to the Christy Dawn boho eco-friendly ultrasustainable or the neo-neon pop-punk plastic princess; chick lit is here for both of these shoppable moments. And even if heteronormative romance is nominally still the scaffold in many shopping narratives, the men that populate today’s chick lit are significantly less important than the relationships between women––the camaraderie and rivalry they entail, and, frequently, both at once.

We should all have a best friend like Becky’s roommate, Suze, who is always her first emotional and financial backstop. Suze has access to magical family money and charges Becky for rent only whatever she can pay each month, or nothing at all. Suze is immune to the afflictions of shopping herself, but she’s a gifted rationalizer for Becky, a magic mirror who chirps in glee at every spree.

K. taught me how to shop, but unlike Suze, she loved to shop for herself, too.

When K. and I walked into our perfect store, which sold unmarked SoHo-labyrinth-clogcore, the saleswoman was wearing this pair of pants. High-waisted, a paper-bag waist, pleated so they looked buckled. Strawberry-brown tweed. They’re this incredible company, the woman said, everything they make is one size fits all.

We looked at each other.

This is kind of weird, right, K. said. Usually stuff is for one of us or the other, and it’s easy to tell which, right? But I actually think we should both try these on, for totally different reasons.

They looked great on her, gave her this hourglass silhouette she liked. I put them on and they made my waist look like nothing at all, which I liked. She bought them. I didn’t. We walked around the block. You have to buy them, she said. I’m going to buy them, I said. They were under five hundred dollars, and I had seven hundred or so, but the end of the month’s payday was in two days’ time, so that was fine. I went back. I wore them the next day, then never again.

Some things I never even wore. I put the wedding dress in a cardboard box and wrote in marker wedding dress. The Sharpie’s petroleum–wet dog stink made my head throb. Every time I moved apartments, I stashed it someplace I didn’t have to see: an overhead closet; an underbed bin; once, in the bathroom.

 

***

Becky Bloomwood will always come out on top. Her greatest weakness—compulsive consumption—is also her greatest strength. The Shopaholic series turns the spiral of addiction and unspools it into a magically successful thread. It’s like Chutes and Ladders, but the very chute that shot you to the bottom is the same one that will rocket you far higher than where any ladder-climbing could have gotten you in the first place. Instead of hitting rock bottom on a bender, Becky nosedives into a thousand-thread-count pillowy landing pad. This is terrible from many perspectives, but it’s fantastic as fiction. The Shopaholic formula is a perpetual motion machine.

Barneys has gone bankrupt, that vintage store is closed, those sample sales have vanished. The last time I moved apartments, in the trauma of stairs to truck to truck to stairs, when I took the wedding-dress box from under the bed, I made sure the movers lost it. K. and I don’t speak anymore.

But I’m not done with my fantasy lives. That trench coat, this architectural lamp, these glasses, will change my life. The wonderful and horrible seduction of the Shopaholic series is the way it constantly re-ups of the dream of no consequences. The high-camp fluffy romance of consumption may be dated, but what feels all too present is the sheer terror of the infinite hall of mirrors of rationalizing a purchase. Each is the very last one, and the very best—until the next.

 

Becky will be fine. I don’t know what I’ll be.

 

 

 

Adrienne Raphel is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them. Her latest collection of poetry, Our Dark Academia, was published by Rescue Press.

On Mel Bochner and Sophie Calle

Mel Bochner, Bochner, Die, 2004, acrylic and oil on canvas, 60 x 80″. Courtesy of the artist and Peter Freeman, Inc., New York.

I have had a few of Mel Bochner’s slogans stuck in my head ever since I visited Peter Freeman Gallery to see a exhibition of his work, Seldom or Never Seen 2004–2022. Bochner—a conceptual artist known for his colorful, text-based paintings—first rose to prominence with a 1966 show called Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art. How good a title is that? (The show included a fabricator’s bill from Donald Judd.) The same cheeky spirit inflects his retrospective at Peter Freeman. Most of the works are text-based, brightly colored, and employ a cartoonish Comic Sans–esque font. In one, against a bubblegum-pink background (pictured above), he spells out clichés for death, which get more and more Looney Tunes as they go on: “Die, decease, expire … give up the ghost, go west, go belly up … screw the pooch, sink into oblivion.” On other canvases, the text is literally filler—white melting into blue, with the words blah, blah, blah dripping into nonsense. Bochner is playing with language, having a way with words, flickering between the register of the cliché and all the possibilities clichés can offer. It’s all a lot of fun. My very favorites are a canvas with writing so thin and light it appears to be in pencil, and one on which is written the perfect joke-warning, which I have since passed along to others: “Don’t make me laugh.”

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

Recently, after once again experiencing the bad behavior of a man—boring in the nature of its badness though nevertheless dispiriting—I once again turned to Take Care of Yourself, by the French artist Sophie Calle. The work was first exhibited as a multiroom installation at the 2007 Venice Biennale that incorporated photos, paintings, drawings, video, audio, and text. The project began when Calle received a breakup email from a man anonymized in the work as “X,” with the titular sign-off. “It was almost as if [the email] hadn’t been meant for me,” Calle wrote. So she shared the email with 106 women (107 participants, if you include a parrot who clawed apart a printed copy of the email), enlisting them in an endeavor reminiscent of a group chat’s collaborative evisceration and consolation in response to such situations. She asked that the women “analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it. Dissect it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me. Answer for me.”

And they did, using their skills as, among other things, tarot readers, Talmudic exegetes, psychiatrists, puppeteers, clowns, anthropologists, cartoonists, magicians, ikebana masters, mothers (such as Calle’s own), et cetera. An editor critiques the email’s convoluted syntax and obfuscatory language, which frames the man as a victim of his own nature and of Calle’s prohibition of infidelity. A lawyer analyzes it as a broken contract. A diva sings it as an aria. A poet reconfigures its language. The collection of responses is a masterpiece of women not only talking back but transforming what they’re talking to. It’s hilarious, over-the-top, and magical.

Take Care of Yourself was also published as a (glossy, pink) book. I received it from a man who said, not entirely approvingly, “This seems like something you would do.” I hope so. Calle wrenches the story away from the man who breaks up with her—and away from the randomness of event itself. Life becomes a story she’s telling, not just something she’s living through.

The man who signed off “prenez soin de vous” is Grégoire Bouillier, writer of The Mystery Guest, a memoir about being invited to a stranger’s birthday party by a woman who had broken his heart. This stranger was Sophie Calle. Later, he told The Brooklyn Rail that Calle “believes in the genius of the artist while I pay attention to the genius of life.” She wants to control, he implies, while he wants to observe. But if life sometimes behaves like a novel, why not start trying to write life for yourself?

By the end—of the text thread, the exhibition, the book—the impression left is not of messy sentences or tortured narcissism, but of creative bounty and feminine solidarity. The work takes its name from X’s farewell: “Take care of yourself.” The phrase, as multiple interpreters point out, implies a second clause: “Because I will no longer take care of you.” Calle’s experiment shows there’s another, sublime possibility for the aftermath: in your lowest and loneliest moments, others will understand for you, answer for you—take care of you.

—Elisa Gonzalez, author of two poems in issue no. 240 (Summer 2022)