feed your head

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More than ever before, authors are writing stories featuring authors – whether it’s called autofiction, memoir, metafiction etc. Is this a symptom of a self-obsessed culture? It’s nothing new: James Joyce did it in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), ditto Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar (1963) and Stephen King in Misery (1987). Joyce attacked religion, Plath critiqued patriarchy, and King had fun with addiction and insanity. But today, more readers than ever before are writing – and who doesn’t want to read about their own field? Witness the success of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. And yet authors in general tend to lack agency. Devotion to reading, researching, writing, self-promotion and, for the more practised, teaching, critiquing and public speaking, leaves scant time for action.

Fictional authors narrate two of the most thoughtful works I’ve read lately – Hari Kunzru’s novel, Red Pill (2020), and Carmen Maria Machado’s story, ‘The Resident’, from her debut collection, Her Body and Other Parties (2017). Funnily enough, both tales open with the narrator – a loose parody of their creator – setting out alone for a remote lakeside writers’ retreat. But Kunzru’s Orwellian dystopia contrasts Machado’s gothic horror. And Red Pill’s compartmentalised structure echoes its hero’s mindset, while Machado’s rambling story seems comparatively amorphous. She’s referred to the first version her editor read as a ‘hot mess’, after which she worked on it for weeks at a residency. Kunzru, too, has scored a few residencies, including one at a villa on Lake Wannsee in Berlin, where he found his inspiration for Red Pill. The fictional Deuter Center on the Wannsee awards the unnamed narrator a three-month fellowship to research ‘the construction of the self in lyric poetry’. Yet Red Pill proceeds to deconstruct the self in straightforward prose.

Of course the self is always constructed, because the self is a fiction: one that’s become so central to our culture that any dimming, let alone extinguishing, of it – death, brainwashing, amnesia, madness – is treated as a catastrophe. We disguise death, dread it, seek to postpone it indefinitely, and hide those whose sense of self founders in psych wards and aged-care ghettos, while our attachment to individual selfhood (celebrity etc.) feeds the fake-news frenzy and speeds society’s fragmentation into isolated egos seeking relief online.

Not by chance does the discourse of identity politics rule. Yet the self is such a fragile illusion. Since the publication of In the Dream House, her luminous genre-bending memoir about same-sex domestic abuse, Machado has been hailed as an activist for queer rights, including the right to have wrongdoing recognised. And yet any survivor of abuse knows that violence, overt or covert, fractures the self; a theme both Red Pill and ‘The Resident’ develop in distinctive styles amplified by their respective settings.

In Red Pill the terms of the residency are strict: Deuter Center fellows must waive all rights to privacy, with everything from their living space to online activity monitored. Yet this communal ethos unnerves the introverted narrator, who resorts to solo walks, binge-watches Blue Lives, a bent cop show, and shuns the shared workspace until the director of hospitality warns him he’s breached his contract.

In ‘The Resident’, a former resort at the fictional Devil’s Throat affords writers and artists private studios. But, like Red Pill’s narrator, Ms M is a misfit. When residents share the work they’ve been doing (drawings, sculptures, songs and so on), and she reads from her novel, a singer (who sounds like an inner critic) attacks her: ‘Do you ever worry about writing the-madwoman-in-the-attic story? […] where the female protagonist is utterly batty […] And the mad lesbian, isn’t that a stereotype as well?’ Ms M says the character is just nervous, and it’s her. The singer says, ‘So don’t write about yourself.’ Ms M retorts, ‘Men are permitted to write concealed autobiography, but I cannot do the same? It’s ego if I do it?’ Devil’s Throat isn’t just a sinisterly named setting; it’s the part of Ms M that voices ideas and feelings others find threatening. When the rear half of a rabbit appears outside her cabin, she brings it to the hotel in a tea towel and places it on the dining-room table. Appalled, the singer rages at her. Ms M replies:

It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right… It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much.

Returning for dinner, she learns the singer has left, and a few hours later she leaves too, after throwing her novel notes and laptop into the lake. The story is still a hot mess – like its narrator. But she leaves of her own free will; no one makes her.

Her freedom from censorship isn’t an option for Red Pill’s more conformist narrator. Though no less defiant in his own mind, he avoids confrontation. After an obnoxious right-winger mocks him – ‘Oho! We have a mystic on our hands!’ – he’s too angry to sleep: ‘I switched to a file of pictures I kept on a thumb drive and masturbated. After a melancholy orgasm I was just as wired as before.’ Alienated from himself as well as from his fellows, cracking up under pervasive surveillance, yet loath to go home a failure, he turns to the cleaner for help. Though initially wary, she meets him at a restaurant, and Red Pill’s second part relates how the Stasi destroyed her selfhood.

In the third part, the narrator retraces the course of his breakdown. At a Berlinale party the night after dinner with the cleaner, he meets the fascist creator of Blue Lives, Anton, who welcomes his interest. But when they adjourn to a Turkish diner, Anton makes mincemeat of him, and visits the Deuter Center the next afternoon with a crony to bait him. Later that day, already unhinged, still talking to Anton in his head, the narrator tries to help two Syrian refugees, a father and daughter he’s seen on the street, but the father misunderstands, and soon police arrive on the scene.

Unlike Ms M, whose instincts tell her when to leave, the narrator is expelled from the Center. But instead of flying home, he first goes to Paris then Scotland, bent on saving the world from Anton (precisely how is never defined). Ironically finding privacy in Anton’s vacant island hut, he fills three children’s notebooks with a prophetic rant:

I wrote about plagues and melting glaciers and drowned cities and millions of people on the move […] about a system that would eventually find itself able to dispense with public politics altogether and put in its place the art of the deal […] about how our senses will begin to fail us. […] Nonhuman agents will have interests and priorities that may not align with ours. […] I described the reduction of my most cherished mysteries to simple algorithmic operations, instructions that could be put on a chip, a disenchantment so total that afterwards, after the shift, it would be impossible even to think back to how it was […] The destruction of culture was only the beginning. Meaning itself would be revealed as an artifact of a period that was slipping away into history. Afterwards, there would only be function.

Manic by his standards but not proof of insanity; still, he’s been seen trespassing, so police again intervene. In Red Pill’s last part, he disowns these predictions and takes his meds, but his pessimism is vindicated when Trump is elected president. Love matters more than individuality, is the message. Like a lot of well-intentioned leftists, he lives in his head, giving Anton an advantage: ‘I’m going to be living rent free in your head from now on.’ His project forgotten and his lack of conviction exposed by those with stronger convictions (or egos), the self-absorbed narrator has woken up to the state of the world, but the novel ends without his waking up to himself. Instead, he’s safely medicated, chastened but unchanged. For all its political savvy, Red Pill lacks psychological depth. And the dialogue between its hero and his nemesis often lacks resonance, serving above all as a vehicle for ideas. What did Kunzru intend?

Machado explores psychological realms where Kunzru seldom ventures, appearing more concerned with the personal than with the wider world. But revelling in quirky subjectivity doesn’t make her project less political. Modelling a way to be, not just telling readers how not to be, she too uses dialogue as an excuse to air ideas:

‘We’re at an artist colony,’ he said. ‘So we’re colonists, right? Like Columbus.’ […] What were we colonizing? Each other’s space? The wilderness? Our own minds? […] Resident suggests a door hatch in the front of your brain, propped open to allow for introspection, and when you enter, you are faced with objects that you’d previously forgotten about. […] In contrast, colonist sounds monstrous, as if you have kicked down the door hatch of your mind and inside you find a strange family eating supper.

Rather than disseminating intel like Kunzru, she seems to be discovering what she wants to say as she goes along. If he’s holding up a mirror to show readers how others might see them, Machado is wielding a beacon in the dark, urging us to face and embrace our demons. Unlike Kunzru, she transmits a sense of wonder. Yet her younger narrator claims insight: ‘I know what you’re thinking, reader’. Kunzru’s midlifer in crisis is progressively revealed as naïve. Disenchantment, or a quest for objectivity, drives Kunzru’s fiction, while warped enchantment makes Machado’s tick. Does this reflect their differing genders (M/F), sexual orientations (straight/queer), birthplaces (UK/US), roots (Anglo-Indian/Austrian-Cuban), or just generations (X/Y)? In the third part of Red Pill, An Apocalypse, the narrator recalls:

As a child… this ‘self’… was the place where I was… As I got older, one thing that never changed was the conviction that exploring its luxurious particularity would keep me busy for the rest of my life, that I would never finish thinking myself through, and… it could never be taken from me. In Berlin, that came to an end.

This last revelation might have greater impact if he’d shown more self-awareness; if the narrator, a subtly incisive assemblage of clichés about academics, had the guts to push past the shallows of his personality. But then Kunzru’s timely warning might not reach his target audience: well-educated leftist intellectuals.

fictive speculation

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The place of art in Western culture, along with the role of its makers, is changing. What once partook of the sacred, or at least gestured in its direction, is now no more than bourgeois entertainment. And ever since postmodernism (+ marketing) broadened art’s definition, painting (like etching, sketching etc.) has grown ever more anachronistic – a quaintly dated response to 21st-century existence. Yet even as the institution of art transforms beyond recognition, gender inequality persists (if less so for painters than, say, filmmakers). And this issue lies at the heart of some fine, recent fiction about female visual artists.

As a young art student living in a garret, I used to borrow art monographs from the library, and each life story gave the colour plates an extra dimension. Yet fiction based on the lives of famous artists, however famous the author (Somerset Maugham, Patrick White etc.), didn’t excite me. Not so, fiction based on other historical figures, and the more heretical, the better – Michèle Roberts’s The Wild Girl (1984), the Gospel according to Mary Magdalene, is still a revelation today. But the artists I loved worked miracles I’d witnessed with my own eyes, and the unadorned hard facts of their lives inspired me.

A fictional biography is quite a different beast. Compared to a novel about a subject with a true history, a mock-documentation of a subject who never existed would seem to offer limitless possibility – which Virginia Woolf inventively fulfilled, spanning generations in Orlando (1928), a gender-bending tribute to her lover, Vita Sackville-West. Novelists who’ve done the genre justice this century include Siri Hustvedt and Ruby J Murray. Yet, as fictive biographies of made-up dead female artists, Hustvedt’s The Blazing World (2014) and Murray’s The Biographer’s Lover (2018) could hardly be farther apart.

For starters, Hustvedt’s subject, Harriet Burden, makes her mark on the New York art world while hiding behind the identities of three different men, then lives long enough to see her work acclaimed, but not as hers. Worlds away, Murray’s earthier subject withdraws to paint in suburban obscurity after sustained exclusion from the male-dominated Oz art scene; Edna Cranmer finds fame under her own name but only after her death. A wealthy, well-read urbanite, Burden creates deeply personal conceptual multimedia installations, a far cry from Cranmer, a realist tackling broad social themes on large canvases.

And it’s not just Hustvedt’s and Murray’s subjects that contrast so starkly. These authors – one an eminent feminist academic, the other an early-career novelist and journalist – employ very different forms. While Burden’s biographer keeps a low profile in The Blazing World, Cranmer’s biographer is central; her actions drive the plot of The Biographer’s Lover. Hustvedt constructs The Blazing World as a multi-authored portrait, including a couple of interviews, introduced and footnoted by a genderless editor; Murray gives us all the pleasures of a conventional novel, with chapters about her unnamed, unknown biographer’s journey – from loose idea to major publication – alternating with shorter chapters on Cranmer.

Unlike Hustvedt’s erudite editor (and professor of aesthetics), the hard-up narrator of Murray’s page-turner faces commercial temptation. And her subject, keeping faith with her social realist vision, defies tradition as it pertains to gender, not to painting. Yet Hustvedt can afford to demand more of readers – some of whom have struggled to suspend disbelief, keep track of all the characters, and wade through art-historical references. Her experimental form fits Burden’s controversial work, the masculinity of which, in both scale and scope, proves so convincing that when Burden finally comes clean and claims credit, no-one believes her.

Discrimination becomes more visible in the context of history, assisting reflection on present-day inequities. Yet the question of why, despite feminism, more female artists aren’t recognised remains fertile ground for speculation. According to these novels, lack of talent, commitment and grand ambition isn’t the problem. So what gives?

While both novels transcend reductiveness, Murray’s Cranmer seems to lack the classically male selfishness that Drusilla Modjeska unpacks in her magisterial Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999). In fact, that book, with its gripping biographies of the overlooked Stella Bowen and the self-effacing Grace Cossington Smith, could well have inspired or energised Murray’s project – though as a grandniece of Arthur Boyd, she must have long since done her homework.

Hustvedt rewards readers who aren’t deterred by complexity, presenting Burden in her own words, as well as through diverse narrators. The character who emerges is not just a victim of a sexist establishment, but angry, embittered and unwittingly self-sabotaging. Fuelled by vengeful fantasies, her scheme to make fools of critics backfires when a cruel and enigmatic man takes advantage of her. Someone more self-aware might have seen it coming, yet it feels unfair.

How can women artists – challenged by hormones, breeding, parenting, caring, home duties, the glass ceiling, the gender pay gap etc. – spare the time or energy to indulge in the self-defeating behaviours that men who succeed often seem to get away with?

That Burden and Cranmer accomplish so much, and on such a large scale, as mature artists, yet still fail to take their rightful place on the cultural stage reflects the reality that most women, no matter how worthy their work, grow ever more invisible with age. It’s easy to think of exceptions – Georgia O’Keeffe? Louise Bourgeois? Margaret Olley? – because being exceptional tends, by definition, to make an impression. In contrast, Frida Kahlo, pop cultural darling of the selfie era, with her exotic face emblazoned on carry bags, coffee cups, cushions etc., is celebrated as much for her looks and style as for her paintings, having died at 47 – not quite too old to be objectified.

Name three more famous female artists, preferably living, over 50…

The Weird is Out

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Just over halfway through Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014), the first volume of an eco-sci-fi thriller trilogy, the biologist narrator, while exploring a derelict lighthouse within a fatally altered coastal wilderness, stumbles on a vast cache of her predecessors’ research:

The journals and other materials formed a moldering pile about twelve feet high and sixteen feet wide that in places near the bottom had clearly turned to compost, the paper rotting away. […] I would have to lower myself down into the midden by means of the ladder nailed to the lip of the trapdoor and trudge through a collapsing garbage hill of disintegrating pulp to uncover anything at all (p. 111).

This sounded to me uncannily like an editor facing a massive slush pile. And then I read VanderMeer on co-editing an anthology of weird tales with his sci-fi and fantasy editor wife Ann: ‘The experience changed me fundamentally, in ways I’m only now beginning to understand.’ Like the expedition members in Annihilation who never come back from Area X, because all of them either die or undergo a mysterious transformation?

To return to the biologist, below the lantern room in the lighthouse:

I made some initial rules, as if that would help. I ignored journals that appeared to be written in a shorthand and did not try to decipher those that appeared to be in code. I also started out reading some journals straight through and then decided to force myself to skim. But sampling was sometimes worse. I came across pages that described unspeakable acts that I still cannot bring myself to set down in words (p.113).

It’s as if VanderMeer, taking us on a journey into the uncanny, wants to acknowledge his sources; to implicate them in an ecology of ideas. Yet to limit analysis to a genre context (Fantasy? Horror? New Weird?) is to miss the wealth of possible analogies: techno-digital, sociopolitical, psycho-spiritual… take your pick. VanderMeer seems enchanted by the zone where science meets the inexplicable. Referring to Bruno Schulz’s work, among others, in a piece on weird writers, he says: ‘So it joins the mulch, the thick substrate, that at some point manifests in one’s own stories, biography rising in altered form indistinguishable from fiction …’ And the moss-festooned cypress swamps in Annihilation evoked the southern states for me before I learned where VanderMeer lives: this love letter to North Florida provides a vivid setting from which he can more plausibly transport us to unknown regions — just as The Metamorphosis (1915), though surreally weird, is anchored in the mundane facts of Kafka’s experience. Apparently, the entire narrative of Annihilation forms the unnamed biologist’s unique contribution to an ongoing secret government investigation:

Can you really imagine what it was like in those first moments, peering down into that dark space, and seeing that? Perhaps you can. Perhaps you’re staring at it now (p. 106).

She’s writing a journal for the researchers who she assumes will succeed her. Yet maybe she’s also addressing the readers of other stories that cross the border between the ordinary and the supernatural? Of course it’s unbelievable that this orchestrated account, despite the fact that VanderMeer wrote it with bad bronchitis in just five weeks, could have been penned by anyone during the course of a risky wilderness mission involving continual traumatic stress. No, the timely flashbacks, measured tone and deftly managed suspense point to professional feedback and shrewd editing. Yet such is the genre reader’s need to suspend disbelief.

VanderMeer, though, offers vistas beyond the seductions of genre. Fans of escapist fantasy/horror may find themselves disoriented. Early on in the expedition, while exploring an inverted lighthouse (a tower-like structure descending into the ground), the narrator inhales some unidentified fungal spores, from whence her senses become increasingly heightened. VanderMeer denies ever having tried magic mushrooms (his substances of choice seem to be red wine and cannabis), but I found the progressive alteration of the biologist’s state reminiscent of trips taken when young, amid natural settings, during which I felt as if I’d been plunged into a fungal perspective: humans and plants alike radiated auras, all sounds cocooned me in symphonic unity, and colours pulsed with psychedelic intensity. Would VanderMeer like to expand the reader’s mind to the extent that other, possibly subtler, forms of consciousness can enter?

Contemporary philosopher Timothy Morton, with whom VanderMeer’s work strikes a chord, says of Area X: ‘It’s like the more you look at something – looking doesn’t necessarily demystify things.’ Which segues into their discussing porosity, and Morton continues:

… there’s this idea that we all live in these totally shrink-wrapped worlds with this very strong inside/outside distinction. It’s obviously ecologically quite toxic, and I think in contemporary philosophy, there’s generally a trend where the distinction between inside and outside has become very thin and very rigid.

Like many weird writers (from China Miéville to Haruki Murakami), VanderMeer dwells on the threat of contamination, on how the known self might get tainted, overtaken, cloned, irrevocably changed. His narrator isn’t a character with whom most readers would care to identify: ‘If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish (pp. 192–3).’

An initial side effect of inhaling alien spores, though, which the biologist wisely keeps to herself, is immunity to the group leader’s hypnotic suggestions. Is VanderMeer hinting that the surrender of rigid ego boundaries might offer unexpected benefits?

Gonzo Girl

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sharp-objects

‘Domestic Noir’ is nothing new, just a rebranding of an old genre – one with which the author of Gone Girl (2012) has long been familiar: Gillian Flynn’s bestselling if less stellar debut, Sharp Objects (2006), is a stylish crime thriller too.

Psychologically fragile and hiding a shameful secret, Camille Preaker (the main female characters sport icky or ironic names, like mom Adora and half-sister Amity), is assigned under protest to cover a story about a serial killer of girls (i.e. female children, not women) in her former hometown.

Not the most original concept. So what compelled me to read on? I’m tired of genre tropes and trappings, and though its dialogue’s snappy, Flynn’s first novel isn’t as complex as her twisted breakout Gone Girl. Still, I crave the sort of subversiveness that energises both works, a transgressive tendency some feminists have condemned. Flynn’s not afraid to make women look bad. And Camille’s rich mom’s a prime suspect (at least for Detective Richard Willis, Sharp Objects’ #1 romantic interest). So to signify her wickedness, Flynn gives her a pig farm. For readers too naïve re pork and bacon production to judge Adora, Camille reports:

Most sows are inseminated, brood after brood, till their bodies give way and they go to slaughter. […] Pigs are extremely smart, sociable creatures, and this forced assembly-line intimacy makes the nursing sows want to die. Which, as soon as they dry up, they do.

Even the idea of this practice I find repulsive. But the sight of it actually does something to you, makes you less human. Like watching a rape and saying nothing (p. 159).

And Camille’s 13-year-old half-sister likes to watch: ‘But that violent streak—the tantrum, the smacking of her friend, and now this ugliness. A penchant for doing and seeing nasty things (p. 161).’

Cruelty to animals goes with inhumanity, at least from an intersectional perspective. And ditto, in the small-town milieu Flynn skewers, so there’s no shortage of suspects:

Back in high school, he saved the hooves of all the deer he killed, always had the latest pair in his pocket, and would pull them out and tap drumbeats with them on whatever hard surface was available. I always felt like it was the dead deer’s Morse code, a delayed mayday from tomorrow’s venison (p. 170).

Her empathy for deer doesn’t stop Camille eating steak with Richard. Yet eating meat doesn’t stop her critiquing it: ‘All those milk-fed, hog-fed, beef-fed early years. All those extra hormones we put in our livestock. We’ll be seeing toddlers with tits before long (p. 181).’ The latter could also be read as a comment on her half-sister’s precocity.

Camille’s as critical as she’s pretty. And for all her apparent fragility, she rejects paternalism, however well meant or PC on the surface. Over dinner, Richard probes for a local history of violence, and she recalls how, at a party, some boys had sex with a drunken 13-year-old. She doesn’t say that girl was herself but when Richard calls it rape, she says: “You’re sexist. I’m so sick of liberal lefty men practicing sexual discrimination under the guise of protecting women against sexual discrimination (p. 176).”

A sometimes frustratingly passive character (Flynn’s no slave to genre rules), Camille nonetheless provokes eventual resolution through her continued if ambivalent presence. In contrast to a recent domestic noir sensation, The Girl on the Train (in which active if interchangeable characters travel where the plot takes them, with routine stops at standard stations), character drives Sharp Objects’ narrative. Camille might be romantically challenged, but as a character she’s fleshed out, down to the placement of (spoiler alert) the words carved into her skin: she self-harms.

And through the course of the story, this habit reflects unflatteringly on not just her family and one of her lovers but also the culture at large. Here, as in Gone Girl, ideas appear to interest Flynn more than genre tics, and the metaphor of inscribing skin (a stock trope when killers cut their victims), adds a layer more typical of literary fiction.

Flynn’s looseness re genre conventions extends to her debut’s denouement. With the plot’s unravelling, or obligatory tying up, more or less summarised, an action revealing Camille’s state of mind assumes greater importance. Denied a happy ending, she’s left with a dawning awareness of how real care or parenting might feel.

‘I had a dream.’

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the vegetarianIt’s easy to read Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, a novel in which a woman goes vegan (and beyond), scandalising her family and disrupting her marriage, as a critique of repressive patriarchal Korean culture. But to stop there, with a sigh of relief at our relative freedom to eat as we please, would be to do Han’s masterpiece an injustice.

Haunted by violent dreams, the reticent Yeong-hye shuns meat, mortifying her husband, while her father tries to force-feed her. At this point, in the first of three linked novellas, it’s easy to empathise or even identify with her resistance; not hard to understand why she’d slash her wrist. And when, in the second part, she has sex with the artist husband of her sister, it’s easy to see his besotted objectification of her as an improvement on her cold-blooded businessman husband’s rape.

But in the third part, when Yeong-hye renounces all food, if not sunlight, having begun to identify with trees, some so-far-sympathetic readers may feel distanced, and interpret Yeong-hye’s subversive acts as symptoms. And madness is one of the novel’s main themes, but it’s not confined to Yeong-hye. Though she rates diagnoses of ‘anorexia nervosa’ and ‘schizophrenia’, the story still stands as an indictment of brutal Korean – and Western – society.

Some feminists or vegans, prone to literal reading, might feel betrayed that Yeong-hye succumbs to delusion, finally rejecting her own humanity. But it’s easy to misread characters (or creatures) if they don’t speak, or not in ways we understand. Which possibly makes it easier to compartmentalise compassion and, for instance, shun animal exploitation through ‘veganism’ than to renounce the ego, and know kinship with plants, not just animals.

Late in the novel, accused by Yeong-hye of being the same as psych-ward staff, her sister, In-hye, yells, ‘I’m acting like this because I’m afraid you’re going to die!’ After a silence, Yeong-hye asks, ‘Why, is it such a bad thing to die?’

No fate is worse than death from the perspective of the ego, which madness, by definition, unseats. But don’t all spiritual practices exist to free us from the ego’s prison – practices that represent the antithesis of today’s cult of the self? That Han, now 45, was ‘a very ardent Buddhist’ in her twenties comes as no surprise. And for critic Laura Miller, ‘the novel transmits a feeling of great stillness’.

Readers perplexed by the ambiguous ending might question Han’s intentions, and critics’ labels – fable, parable, allegory etc. – offer answers. But despite all analyses, the story retains rare power to haunt.

‘Buddhism is looking at things very clearly, without any preconceptions,’ Han says. ‘I don’t have religion any more, but that’s what I try to do in my writing.’

Besides Ourselves

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Beside OurselvesIn Karen Joy Fowler’s ingenious novel about the ill-defined line between human and animal nature, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013), one character is wanted by the FBI for blowing up research labs after freeing the caged animals.

Asked in an interview what she thinks of animal rights–inspired crimes, Fowler says: ‘I believe in science and medical research.’ And it’s the politically correct response in today’s social climate – implying that some studies (experiments) are necessary for human health (presumably conducted ‘humanely’, though of course that’s relative). But Fowler’s probing novel hints at deep ambivalence. And it’s underpinned, if not at all burdened, by her extensive research.

As with the orang-utan in Monkey’s Uncle (1994), a novel about insanity by the late, great Jenny Diski, it’s relevant that Fowler’s simian character is female. Like Diski’s fiction, Fowler’s tends to feature nonconformist women. Given the overlap, now and historically, between exploitation of animals and oppression of women (and non-whites and the poor), why don’t we see more such inventive animal advocacy novels?

Could part of the problem be that animals can’t speak English, write books and essays, or use social media? Instead, humans speak for them, in cartoons, ads etc., reducing them to comics or corporate puppets. Meanwhile, scientists pick their brains, literally, and we eat their flesh (often disguised by euphemisms, processing, batter, sauce or whatever). A few humans speak for them in an attempt to awaken our empathy. Yet the rhetoric of animal libbers can easily be ignored unless their activism rates as news – an excuse for pro-corporate governments to tighten repressive laws.

One of the greatest gifts of a novel (if sometimes underrated in a market favouring entertainment) is the space for readers to empathise or even identify with the other, rather than with the character who most resembles them. Fiction remains one way to reach a wide audience not just through the habitually defensive, separative intellect, but by engaging the more inclusive, compassionate imagination.

Instead of speaking for animals, a common children’s book strategy, Fowler lets readers fill in the gaps. As the human narrator, Rosemary, tries to make sense of her childhood, we learn quite a bit about Fern, her twin, before we know she’s a chimp. (No wonder Rosemary can’t keep her hands to herself, and relates vertically, as well as horizontally, to the world.)

Kafka’s short story ‘A Report for an Academy’ – about an ape who escapes his cage by mimicking human behaviours, and written after Kafka had become a vegetarian – supplies all the epigraphs throughout Fowler’s novel. In his thoughtful Overland article ‘Carrion Call’, Thomas Wilson asks why the vegetarian reading of texts is ignored, compared to postmodern, post-colonial and feminist readings, when all of these share social justice concerns. And Fowler acknowledges this intersectionality:

If we can’t bear to look at what we are doing, then we shouldn’t be doing it. Of course, this precept reaches far beyond our relationship with our fellow animals into our politics, our environmental policies, our wars, and our prisons. A lot of what the animal rights activists do is simply make us look. I’m all in favor of that.

Talking Tense

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About WritingWhy do so few fiction-writing handbooks even mention tense, let alone treat it in depth? One exception is Samuel R Delany’s About Writing (2005). An expert on technique, he talks tense to an interviewer. ‘The simple present has only a single, distanced tone’ in his opinion. But ditto, past tense used by those asleep to its scope. And why not use both? Back in the mid-19th century, we find the popular Dickens employing present tense at strategic points. And by the late 20th century, with conventions changing exponentially, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) is so inventive, who cares about tense switches? Yet, compare its first and last sentences:

I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.

And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

I forget when I first read a novel written in present tense, or its title. Yet I know the experience excited me. It still can. If some of my favourite fictions stick to past tense, they push other envelopes. And some of my favourites use present at least part of the time. According to Delany, it’s ‘purely artificial’. With fiction, though, what isn’t? In theory, nothing but past tense would work for, say, memoir. Yet the present narration (with past flashbacks) of Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) is one of its least radical features. (Unlike hordes that have followed suit, often with a feeling of: If I could relive this now, here’s how I’d do it.)

For novelists whose plot reveals itself as they type, the story (before any edits) may be unfolding in the present – as for readers who identify with characters. Present tense mimics the immediacy of film or TV. One reason TV viewing tends to feel so much more passive than reading is that, unless you resort to pause or rewind, the medium drags you forward, thwarting reflection. And the sense conveyed by present tense that the action’s happening as you read generates suspense: what happens next?

I’ve noticed that readers who hate present tense, and many do, tend to be older – as if their habituation to past tense was entrenched before present begins to infiltrate literature. As if it’s an irritant to their sensibilities. (Perhaps not unlike pre-distressed denim to mine? In a culture where each fad is geared to wear out by the time the next comes around, the irony of new clothes that look ripe for use as paint rags seems lost on most buyers. Is our decadence part of our blind spot?)

Delany complains that ‘circa seventy percent of all literary fiction submissions are written in the present tense’, and ‘Today, the present tense has become the easy sign of the literary.’ Since then (1998), for many, it’s become automatic. But the web equalises all content time-wise (if not in other ways that count) – whatever you can define in search-engine-friendly terms is here now.

Delany again: ‘When, as an artist, you’re doing what most other artists are doing, chances run high you’re doing something wrong.’ Agreed – or why value originality? But some of what even groundbreaking artists do gets taken for granted. No doubt resistance reared its head when painters first ditched wood panels for canvas. Maybe present tense is turning into the new background?

Otherness

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Under_the_SkinWhy is it that a human who can’t bear to watch an animal die, let alone be the agent of its death, should feel comfortable, and think nothing of, consuming animal flesh? Isn’t this a form of self-deception?

Michel Faber’s luminous first novel, Under the Skin (published in 2000, but I’ve only lately found it), messes with the reader’s head by juxtaposing such contradictions. He employs slyly deceptive means to achieve maximum impact, lulling the reader into feeling sympathy for his heroine Isserley. We can relate to the strangeness she finds around her as a foreigner, driving up and down the Scottish Highlands. Who hasn’t felt like an alien on visiting some faraway country or even a culturally unfamiliar if not-so-distant suburb? So, when at length we’re shown the fate of the hitchhikers Isserley’s been picking up, men to whose thoughts we’ve however briefly been privy, her inhuman attitude toward them – revealed by the glare of a torch at night – comes as a kick in the guts.

And here comes a spoiler (it’s 13 years since this fiercely original thriller came out, yet it remains topical, screaming to be thought and talked about): we’ve been set up to identify with an extraterrestrial alien who, it emerges in due course, views humans as food; in other words, someone just like us, who’s exploiting another species cold-bloodedly.

I’ve struggled to analyse why I found the concept of hunting then gunning down these escaped, naked, castrated, massively fattened ‘vodsels’ so shocking. And did I mention their tongues have been cut out? The monstrous plight of these men – so obscenely obese, they can’t climb or run (a condition now rife, no force-feeding needed, in the West) – made me shudder. Despite their anonymity from Isserley’s perspective, I remembered the hitchers with their personal histories. And even had these fugitives been cows, geese or pigs (none of whose flesh I eat), I would have felt excruciating empathy for them. But I think that, for all its realism, the power of this pivotal scene derives from Isserley’s eerie lack of empathy, conveyed via defamiliarisation; to her the tortured, mutilated humans are utterly other.

When compared to Under the Skin – a sustained, often lyrical, feat of imagination – much worthy writing on the theme of animal ethics and corporate atrocities begins to look stodgily rhetorical or academic at best. How does Faber enable the reader’s suspension of disbelief? He maintains a delicate balance between edgy suspense and character development; by the time the plot’s sci-fi underpinning begins to show through, the reader feels as invested in Isserley as if she were human.

Post-

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Monkey's UncleOne of my all-time favourite writers of fiction is Jenny Diski. Who else has so ingeniously and variously mined the terrain of madness? In her ambitious and wickedly funny 1994 novel Monkey’s Uncle, perimenopausal Charlotte – a socialist feminist genetic technician – descends à la Alice in Wonderland to a curiously lucid dream world where she meets, among others, Marx, Freud and Darwin.

Karl, Sigmund and Charles (as these old men are introduced by Jenny, a witty, floral-frocked orang-utan also based on a historical ape) have cast long shadows on Charlotte’s prospects. And this trio loomed over my more recent stint at uni – a rather less lucid dream world I emerged from not just with a post-grad degree but a substantial degree of bemusement. For instance, why are post-Freudians pushed and post-Jungians wholly overlooked by the local literary academy? I could second-guess the secular leftist answer to that. But the halls of learning reveal conservatism: third-wave Jungian thought can be radical (as in going to the root or origin; innovative). Which seems to me to be a vital function of good fiction – it’s a medium of discovery (for the writer as much as the reader), not just a well-crafted vehicle geared to trends in publishing.