Selected Works
Thomas Mar Wee
Table of Contents
Fiction Poetry Essays & Criticism InterviewsFiction
S&M, DND
The Clean Hour
The Winnowing
I return to the day of the threshing. It’s no banner day, not like days the others choose. When the Event unmoored us (a disruption, the scientists said, to our objective notions of temporality), people tended to travel to the notable days of their lives. Weddings, funerals, births. At the beginning, it was popular to return to the day of one’s birth. To witness the crowning. I saw it, and my children’s births, and my grandchildren’s births. But at the end of my life, my birth has lost its novelty.
We no longer measure in years, the word is meaningless, but I’m old, whatever that means. The scientists invented a new way of telling time, since our old methods became useless. They call it the Body Clock. Each heartbeat a tick, inching us towards inevitable collapse.
The day I choose is an ordinary day. October 8th, 1952, Salinas Valley. The heads of wheat curving down, loaded with seeds. A blood-red dawn and me barely fifteen and Pa, still a young man. Tawny, handsome, arteries not yet clotted. The cancer is a thing we won’t catch until years later, when it’s already too late.
On this day it is always October 8th and the perpetual dawn of a harvest morning. The men bring their scythes to the field. My first harvest, riding shotgun alongside Pa. We spend all day working. Pa smokes cheroots and cracks jokes. That evening, we watch our mare give birth to a foal.
Most old men choose to relive their finest moments. Their climaxes, conquests, glories. I have seen those days, but now, at the end of my life, I find myself choosing this one. For its ordinariness, promise, and brimming potential. The scythes swishing, swishing. Each wheat stalk dividing into a thousand infinitesimal moments.
***
Published in Quarto in December 2020
The Photograph
Text available on request.
***
Published in Meridian: The APWT Drunken Boat Anthology of New Writing in December 2020
Poetry
Mourning Rites
From the Book of Rites
I.
When one sees at a distance a coffin with the corpse in it
he should not sing.
When he enters among the mourners
he should not keep his arms stuck out
When eating with others
he should not sigh
When there is a body shrouded and coffined in his village
One should not sing in the lanes
When presenting himself at any mourning rite
he should have a sad countenance
When holding the rope
he should not laugh
When going to a burying-ground
he should not sing
II.
At the mourning rites for a parent, the son occupied the slanting shed
He slept on straw, with a clod of earth for a pillow
He spoke of nothing
except what related to the rites
III.
A son, who had hurried to the mourning rites of his father
bound up his hair in the raised hall
bared his chest
descended to the court
There, he performed his leaping.
The leaping over
he reascended
covered his chest,
and put on his sash
in an apartment to the east
*Author’s Note: The title of this poem is taken from the poem by John Ashberry, “Self-Portrait in A Convex Mirror”. These poems were generated by a computer based off a corpus of around twenty-five poems, written over the course of the years 2016-2021. These poems cover a variety of reoccurring themes including: grief, assimilation, loss, memory, and language. These poems were run into a modified version of Open AI’s natural language processing program GPT-2 and lightly edited. The resulting highly experimental poems, taken as a whole, is a self-portrait of sorts, an auto-poiesis. It is a portrait of the author through the medium of a computer.*
You Pay Homage
you pay homage practitioner to my name
you have paid homage to your family
you have bestowed * 牴 on one
of the Father of the Son
of the Holy Spirit
of the Father of the Son
of the Holy Ghost
of the Father of the Son
of the Holy Name
of the Father of the Son
of the Holy Sacrament
I Sit On A Gallows
Embroiled,
you plead infirmities
in withdrawing out of debt
I sit
on a gallows
square
watching morning's movements
obliterate
the poem
Aid to the forgotten
void theater
Diesel,
watching empty areas
Frisian eyebrow, Sanskrit curls
pale, humped horses.
They wade into river
to learn more
see the fruit of firm gender
appear in public bearing wares
making
your presence taught
that sometimes,
watching its part,
watching flower.)
LEAVE.
The Ancestors of China
placed the seed of a plump being
Grows ——
pale anchored like the rest of
the earth’s
floors
amid cornflowers
rising,
watching the fields
watching dawn
watching the sky
watching dawn
watching from the East
the Father
Hearts arise
Suddenly,
from the Father
From the Father,
Hearts come
From the Mother,
Evening is about to begin
Light matures
Suddenly,
from the Father,
Approach.
Our very being
adapted for living
technocephaly.
Our haphazard
structure [feuds]
three
momentarily
closed-books
can we even begin ?
could we possibly
could we?
could it ever occur
ever
ever itself
null collection
of little
momentarily rippling ripples
notes
howling breath
ale breathless
contemplates the Problem of Evil
Beside you, a plump being
Grows ——
pregnant
of clear, sight
Grows,
we learn
how
makes sense
is broken
can
an adequate
fertile
small
void
I climb
to the top
of the Everglades
among the Father
among the Mother
of the Holy Spirit
Deva Eveland: Could you describe in more detail how the GPT-2 program transformed the original writing?
Thomas Wee: GPT is a highly advanced piece of Natural Language Processing software developed by OpenAI that allows a computer to generate highly human-like strings of text. I was using GPT-2 for this project, although a newer more sophisticated version, GPT-3 has already been developed. The software is basically a “black box” unless you have an extensive background in computer science. Luckily, for people like me with only a basic grasp of computer science, people have built programs that let you manipulate GPT without having to work directly with its innards. With GPT, you can give it any body of text and it will “learn” the characteristics of the writing and eventually be able to mimic it with a high degree of accuracy. It obviously has a lot of limitations, which I discovered when attempting to have it write prose in another part of the project, but the results it can produce are, I think, already incredibly generative and interesting.
For this project, I trained the computer on about forty pages of poetry and had it generate several lines or stanzas at a time. The resulting “poems” are not merely modifications of the originals, but “original” creations by the computer. As a result, I hesitate to call these poems mere “transformations” of the originals. Although this is up for debate, I’d argue that these poems are original compositions by the computer inspired by the language, style, and syntax of my original poems.
DE: You say your experiment has resulted in a self-portrait. How is it more of a self-portrait than if the original poems had not been modified? What is it about the process that created such a result?
TW: As a poet, my style is autobiographical, so the poems that constituted the source material for the GPT-2 program are drawn heavily from my own lived experience. The poems themselves could be considered miniature self-portraits, slivers of reflected images of my life. Put through the computer, the result was a startling “refraction” of these images. It was honestly uncanny and a bit disturbing to read a computer that had been trained to mimic my writing. The experience was unique and very hard to describe.
The resulting poems generated by the computer, I think, feel more like spontaneous self-portraits than the original, more labored, intentionally composed poems. I guess I’d describe these computer-generated poems, in keeping with the theme, as being candid self-portraits. Since composing them, I find them to be more revealing and, interestingly enough, “authentic” than my original poems. Reading these poems is a bit like hearing your own voice on a recording, or seeing a photograph taken of the back of your head.
***
Critical Accompaniment:
A Mechanical Turk at the Poet’s Desk
It is impossible to discuss Thomas Wee’s collection of AI-generated poems without roving into an area which is usually quite forbidden to the critic; that is, the act of creation itself. Poets are notoriously inarticulate about where and how inspiration strikes, and most, excepting the dubious crowd of poet-professors that Philip Larkin bemoaned, tend to respond to questions about their “process” with sighs of despair. But in the cyborg poems of Thomas Wee, process is the thing. The question becomes less “what and how does this mean?” and more “how did this come to mean anything at all?”
Wee himself offers something like an artist’s statement in an image prepended to the poems. Here is depicted a famous 18th century illusion, the Mechanical Turk, which was said to be a complex automaton capable of playing an almost perfect game of chess. In its time the Turk was enormously popular, and numbered among its opponents such illustrious figures as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Eventually, however, its trick was revealed. Cleverly hidden inside the Turk was a small chess-master, and it was he who made the moves imputed to the automaton. The clockwork was all for show. It is perhaps telling that Wee’s diagram is an incorrect rendering of the Turk’s inner workings, probably devised by a would-be debunker. In reality, the human operator of the Turk never left his box.
So: where is man in the machine? Some observations about the technique of the poems are in order here.
1) The words chosen are often robust simples (“pregnant”, “gallows”, “void”), “literary” peculiarities (“Frisian”, “stethos”, “LECEANCE”), or common formulae, usually of religious connotation (“of the Father…”, “An out and out”, “or is this merely”).
2) Repetition figures prominently, often of set phrases with the noun replaced by a close synonym or antonym. Hence: “of the Father / of the Son / of the Holy [Ghost/Name/Sacrament]”, or “watching the fields / watching dawn / watching the sky / watching dawn”. These repetitions tend to continue until an appropriately “unstable” phrase is reached, at which point they transition into other repetitions. Viz. “watching from the East” inaugurates “the Father” as a motif, etc. This procedure might be thought of as a transition between different “states” of repetition.
3) Transitions from line to line—or more precisely, between different states of repetition—do not maintain the tense or conjugation structures of the previous state, viz. “An out and out flirtation / of men / disguising” or “The Ancestors of China / placed the seed of a plump being / Grows—.” Within states of repetition structures are generally maintained.
4) Each new state of repetition takes into account the foregoing lines, and weighs word choice based on association with the material found there. The phrase “Evening is about to begin / Light matures” derives from the earlier usages of “dawn” “the sky” etc.
5) The poem must be arrested or it will never end.
The purpose of this list is not to step into the role of the Turk’s would-be debunker. Rather, it is to observe that there is something very brilliant and strange happening in these poems that has little or nothing to do with their apparent content. In fact, the more closely any given poem of Wee’s resembles a traditionally successful poem—as in the case of “The Catch of the Free Naked Reproductive Nation,” the most lucid, funny, and complete of the bunch—the more this brilliant quality is obscured.
What is really interesting in these poems is the way in which they function as a “self-portrait,” though not in the sense that Wee seems to take them. Some of Wee’s interests and qualities certainly come through unobstructed, and perhaps even enhanced by their lack of purposiveness, but a more fundamental portrait is being sketched beneath. That portrait is of the associative principle of man.
This is that notoriously unspeakable faculty that a poet calls upon when he sits down to work. In Wee’s poems, we see a kind of mimicry of that faculty. This mimicry is revealing precisely to the extent that it fails. Just as we see a perverse reflection of our appetites in the ape that has been taught to smoke, we see in Wee’s poems a kind of groping towards our own highest aspirations. The principles of their functioning outlined above hold true for many poems, even those written by human hands. That they can be elaborated clearly is a mark in their favor, and an indication of how much is left to be done. All poetry forms a map of the artist’s face. The day great poetry is written by a machine is the day we will have succeeded in forming a map of the artist himself.
—Jack Calder
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
I climb daily
in the crater of language
Desiring sentences that are like
shafts of light
cutting through densest fog
Words hard & razor sharp
like iron — hot from the anvil.
Instead, I worry my molars
gargling phonemes, I spit
blood and call it
Speech, acting
(and all of us the poorest players)
Silence is always an option — yes
But muteness its own kind of speech
And most of us do not have
The fortitude for silence
So instead each day
we confront
the muck of conversation.
I pull on my boots,
and wade in
to dip my net
into the Great Stream of Utterances
Each poet has considered silence.
Has weighed the blank page
And all its implications
Only to chose our thinest, paltriest
Language. Returning to it, at first, like the jilted lover
(with reluctance)
but eventually greeting it
with inky lips:
Each word written— a joyous refusal
(Quotations from John Cage’s “Lecture On Nothing” (1959)
“We need a structure,
so we can see
We are nowhere”
Inside this fertile blankness [ ]
a plump being
grows
{the space inside a wheel:
how it turns }
on a clear day at the gallery
I gingerly dip
a toe
(In Milk River)
touching, briefly an eclipse
of all thought
Approach,
if you look close enough
you can almost hear it hum.
I.
noun.
From the Latin, columba
meaning “dove”
In Chinese, naguta
“a pagoda-of-bones”
this dovecote
| with its | lattice-work of shelves |
pockmarked by urns
one recalls:
the dome of the Pantheon
Borges and his infinite library
in its sheltering arms
porous, permeating, perforated
like skin under a microscope
or a chestnut
its dark, brawny husk
guarding the tender flesh
there’s a word in Chinese
yiwu (遺物): “leftover”
something discarded & remaindered
which we
embalm with associations
maunder with meanings
these few, worthless things
the deceased
have forgotten
left behind:
[too worn shoes,
a dozen, burnished coins
a pair of cracked
spectacles]
if I have anything like Religion
it might be
Etymology
for I enjoy nothing more
than the opening up of words
dismantling
their little boxes
and, like a well
peering down
into them.
II.
In this
budding grove I sit
on a mossy, lover’s bench
under an aged sycamore
on some decomposing, Irish estate
amid cornflowers
my presence disrupts
a tendentious stillness
With one careless movement
I startle them
their cries echo
from so many
small places
suddenly,
a gust of wind lifts
the ground swells
a shroud of white,
rippling, brilliant
momentarily blots the sun
Generation Loss
This poem was written in English and translated into Chinese using an online translation program. The result was translated back into English. This process was repeated three times.
V.1:
Definition:
“The loss of quality between successive copies, usually associated with magnetic audio and video media.”
My great grandfather
Left his family in Guangdong Port of entry: unknown
We have distant relatives in Canada, perhaps he emigrated there
One Family legend says that he and his wife came together. Another story says they came separately, and that he left her in China, waiting.
In the version where they come together, they arrive in California, buy a train ticket for as Far East as they can afford.
It takes them to Wichita, a tiny dot on the white plains of Kansas.
My grandfather came to this country Illegally. Under an assumed identity.
The term for the many Chinese men who came with false papers is “Paper Son” Sometime during this translation
Our names were trans placed
My middle name, which can mean horse indicates that my ancestors likely raised horses My last name is a fiction, a false signifier
an invention of bureaucracy
My father was born in Wichita, KS..
He spoke Chinese at home and English at school. He competed with his four brothers
At night in their shared bedroom they played mental chess, the board and its pieces A figment of their collective imagination
He learned English by watching television And listening to the soundtracks to musicals Hello Dolly, Singing in the Rain,
He and his brothers spoke Chinese at a middle school level. A fragmented, diasporic Chinese
My father died three years after I was born
He died without leaving me the inheritance of
Even his tattered language
Growing up,
I ask my uncles to transcribe him to me I ask my mother to recreate him for me A set of letters he wrote on his deathbed, Which I rediscovered at 18
Our only correspondence
My Chinese is only the faintest memory A weak link in the chain of signifiers
A corrupted image
the last layer of the family palimpsest
V.2:
definition:
“The quality loss between successive copies is usually related to magnetic audio and video media.”
My great grandfather
Leave family in Guangdong Port of entry: unknown
We have distant relatives in Canada, maybe he immigrated there
A family legend said he got together with his wife. Another story says that they were separated and he left her in China and waited.
In the version where they came together, they arrived in California and bought train tickets as far as possible.
They took them to Wichita, a small spot on the white plains of Kansas.
My grandfather came to this country illegal. Under the assumed identity.
For many Chinese men with forged documents, the term is “paper son” At some point in the translation process
Our name was transferred
My middle name may mean horse, which indicates that my ancestors may have raised horses My last name is fictitious, false representation
The invention of bureaucracy
My father was born in Wichita, Kansas.
He speaks Chinese at home and English at school. He competes with his four brothers
In the shared bedroom at night, they played the mind chess, the board and its pieces Their collective imagination
He learns English by watching TV
And listen to the soundtrack of the musical Hello Dolly, singing in the rain,
He and his brother speak Chinese in middle school. Fragmented Chinese
My father died three years after my birth
He died without leaving my legacy
Even his broken language
growing up,
I asked uncle to copy it to me
I want my mother to be born again for me A set of letters he wrote before his death, I rediscovered when I was 18
Our only counterpart
My Chinese is just the lightest memory Weak link in the indicator chain
Image corruption
The last floor of the family
V.3:
Definition.
“The loss of quality between successive copies is usually associated with magnetic audio and video media.”
My great-grandfather.
Leave your family in Guangdong. Port of entry: unknown
We have distant relatives in Canada. Maybe he’s emigrated to Canada.
One family legend says that he and his wife were together. Another story says that they separated and he left her waiting in China.
In the version they came together, they went to California and bought train tickets as far as they could.
They took them to Wichita, a small place on the white plains of Kansas.
My grandfather came to this country. It’s illegal. Under a fake identity.
For many Chinese men with fake IDs, it’s “pieces of paper.” At some point in the translation process
Our names have been moved.
signi • fication
After Deleuze
what’s in a name? —
[the ghosts of ancestors, immigration, flight] buried in the encrusted syllables
of imperfect transliteration
Diaspora & Dispersal, or let’s call it entropy:
culture neutered+naturalized
(read: ANESTHETIZED)
to a grey death
[if my family gave me a Chinese name it was never written down]
call it genealogy,
traced through the contours of your tongue
as it dribbles
out
dactyls // spondees // syllables
twitching out my name which you
whisper into my spine
hold it in your lips and feel it rise
somewhere in your gullet,bristling,
near the sternum.
A viscous sound / a raised fist
like Adam, you point and name things
making word flesh
someone said
that the body is our first language
the fetus in the womb, a floating signifier
Or maybe to be seen
the same, nearly, as hearing your name
spoken by the beloved
(transcendence, signified)
the effect of being held, momentarily naked&warm, in the lover’s mouth
Speech Acts
“whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” — Ludwig Wittgenstein
I climb daily
in the crater of language
Desiring sentences that are like
shafts of light
cutting through densest fog
Words hard & razor sharp
like iron — hot from the anvil.
Instead, I worry my molars
gargling phonemes, I spit
blood and call it
Speech, acting
(and all of us the poorest players)
Silence is always an option — yes
But muteness its own kind of speech
And most of us do not have
The fortitude for silence
So instead each day
we confront
the muck of conversation.
I pull on my boots,
and wade in
to dip my net
into the Great Stream of Utterances
Each poet has considered silence.
Has weighed the blank page
And all its implications
Only to chose our thinest, paltriest
Language. Returning to it, at first, like the jilted lover
(with reluctance)
but eventually greeting it
with inky lips:
Each word written— a joyous refusal
Stagecraft
(noun) Def:
A definition OR
an evasive maneuver
a defiant assertion OR
an attempt at the continuous
,,,elision,,,
of oneself
I perform
mostly to an audience of one
because, unfortunately:
[ ] requires an audience.
I explicate myself
“ I perform ” “ gyrations ” to the “ public ”
linguistic stripteases draped in velour
bending my tongue in contortionist knots
I make ambiguity
quiver
like a dancer in the cage
beckoning mocking imploring
like onstage at the Globe
the air:
(horse manure, unwashed souls, chloroform, dung)
I stand
getting pelted by roses and occasionally
spat upon
by groundlings in the pit
if someone transitions in a forest:
is it still a transition?
is the univocal, uni-vocal affirmation
of oneself —
ululations in an open field
a voice shaking the trees
— enough?
could [gender] just be a poem
written to the wind?
A Flat Circle
We too often speak of a person’s transition as a series of static, singular events:
The Surgery
The Coming Out
The First Regiment of Hormones
This obscures the reality of transitioning as a prolonged, sustained act.
A continuous reimagining of the self.
Similarly, people mark the changes in seasons with arbitrary events:
The First Snow (the beginning of winter)
The First Thaw (the beginning of spring)
In doing so, they neglect the fact that it was already winter, already spring. That somewhere along the way, through infinitesimal gradations, the seasons had shifted, gone unnoticed by the casual observer.
Or to put it into geometrical terms:
A circle is made up of infinite points.
To isolate the beginning of someone’s transition is to attempt to find one point on the circle, a
seam, where the circle begins and ends.
The yellow settee
(2018)
After Gertrude Stein
Fragment of her great-grandmother’s lost Lebanon. With curling feet & diasporic stains. Threadbare, we unlost it each evening. We sat and unfolded our legs double decker. Summer stank when We sweated the other. Breathless at the firstness of things. Dangling we were on the edge of shifting questions. Enthralled with ifs and with rarer because. Blushing at the nakedness of the sentence. The slow striptease of the mind. Fetid July up drifted her ever-present question of sex. Licking at our windows. But always enough for me was the talking. The embrace of that fleeting speculative We.
Pomegranate
like some puckered fruit,
a pomegranate perhaps
this unreliable
receptacle which we
douse daily rinsing
dimpled flesh
in this daily stream
we call Life.
(how could we possibly expect it to hold it all?)
each memory
dislodges
another.
a seed. a pit.
Rattle like
teeth Spat
into the sink
I dreamed writing
might stymie this
Drip.
so I wrote a temporary repair
each day frantically
duck-taping my vessel
bursting as waters
rising each day
plugging.
a hole. a word.
I found I succeeded
only in ( false )replication
the coating of deadflesh
[in deaderwords]
I became a master
of taxidermy.
we have been equipped
with so many
ways of Forgetting
in the garden of St. John
this time of year with its
multicolored silences
makes me think of my Father
[who dies each spring]
on Amsterdam leaves conspire
on the pavement a haphazard mosaic
makes light music in
the chanting wind
fall — a form of forgetting
in the garden of St. John the Divine
a peacock
admires itself
contemplates the Problem of Evil
recites the Nicene Creed
I believe in one LORD
Jesus Christ, the Only
Begotten Son
of God born of the Father
before all ages
God from God Light from Light
I awaken to bells dripping
from morning’s pipette
each one a golden lozenge
outside of the deli I see a man
who looks JUST like my Father
who looks like the image of my Father
who looks like how I imagined my Father
who looks like someone’s image of the Father
…consubstantial with the Father
through him
all things were made
under the portico, in the rain
on the steps of the cathedral
you teach me the names of the saints
HE will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end
I run his name over my lips
my tongue a well-worn rosary
Intoning Intoning Intoning
Essays & Criticism
An Artistic Inheritance: George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research
CULTUREBOT
June 2025
“What do we carry? What do we inherit?”
On one of the first hot, humid nights this spring, I entered the packed Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research’s intimate loft space on Huron Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn for a preview of the revival of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s three-act play, You Can’t Take It With You directed by Katie Devin Orenstein.
Together with Emma Hart, who plays Essie, the two are bringing “You Can’t Take It With You” back to the stage with a production that feels both respectful of its source material and refreshed for a new audience. Emma Hart, one of three producers of the play, happens to be the granddaughter of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Moss Hart. She and Orenstein met through a series of fortuitous chance encounters, and a creative partnership quickly bloomed. “I graduated undergrad in 2023 and kept bumping into her,” Orenstein recalls, “Back in November, I was in a pinch and needed an actor fast. Emma stepped in and saved the day, and she was brilliant. Around that time, she mentioned this project and asked if I had anything lined up. As soon as she told me about it, I said yes. It wasn’t just ‘Hey, want to direct a play?’—it was more like, ‘Here’s something sacred to my family. Will you help bring it to life?’ It felt like being invited to a Passover seder. A huge honor. My task was to live up to that.” Hart comes from a long lineage of artists involved in theatre. Her father, Christopher Hart, has been intimately involved in the Broadway revivals of Kaufman and Hart’s work, and through her family, Essie grew up immersed in the New York theater world. On many levels, the restaging of this play is an intergenerational reckoning.
Inside BTCR there was the air of an early summer party: the door to the fire escape was open to let in the breeze, and a makeshift bar sold Modelos and seltzer. I had attended Matthew Gasda’s production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in January and now, last winter’s Russian dacha was transformed into a haphazard, idiosyncratically decorated 1930s Upper West Side apartment: A small bugle horn pinned to a wall, lace doilies on the furniture, a mask of Karl Marx, a vase with live goldfish swimming. Otherwise, the production design was stripped back. There is a refreshing informality at this venue, in part necessitated by the space itself. You have to walk through a kitchen to get to your seat, and there are no curtains separating the stage from the house: I was able to watch as a trio of actors—Emma Hart, Tomias Robinson, and Jakov Schwartzberg—warmed up in front of us, clustered around the piano singing. On the choice of venue, Emma Hart says, “We chose BCTR partly because the space already felt like a living room—it’s what the play needs. We didn’t have to build a whole set. And it adds a homey, welcoming atmosphere.”
*
Set during the Depression, in 1936, “You Can’t Take It With You” largely follows the eccentric Sycamore family, led by the benign, lovable patriarch, “Grandpa,” played by Tony Triano. His daughter, Penny Sycamore (played by Catherine Lloyd Burns), is a playwright and mother to Essie and Alice. Essie is an aspiring, hopelessly naive ballerina. Alice, the younger daughter and the most “grounded” so to speak of the family, is a sort of Jane Bennett in the Sycamore clan. At the start of the play, she has found a promising new beau, Tony Kirby the boss’ son, at her office. The play roughly follows the arc of their courtship, and the central conflict is the classic dynamic of star-crossed lovers: Alice and Tony’s families could not be more different. Tony’s parents, portrayed by Steve Schroko and Colleen Werthmann, are nearly caricatures of the patrician upper class–stodgy and uptight, with traditional values. Alice, though she loves her family, fears that her and Tony’s love is doomed due to the foundational incompatibility of their families. She delays their families’ meeting for as long as she can, but when they eventually do meet, everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. A comedy of errors ensues, culminating in a raid on the apartment by the FBI. Despite Alice’s best efforts, the Sycamore family’s eccentricity is put on full display, and there’s no going back. The play’s central questions emerge: Will Alice and Tony’s romance survive the gulf of difference that separates their families? And who will Alice choose, her family, or Tony?
More than just differing lifestyles, Alice and Tony’s families represent two drastically opposed attitudes towards money, and, in particular, a person’s relationship to making money. Grandpa, we learn, has largely opted out of the capitalist grind. His primary occupations are taking care of his snakes and attending commencement ceremonies. Tony’s father, Mr. Kirby, on the other hand, is a poster child of the successful capitalist, and he wants his son to follow the same path. On paper, Mr. Kirby seems successful and fulfilled, but when probed by Grandpa and others, cracks beneath the surface are quickly revealed. Grandpa, while not a productive member of society by any stretch of the imagination (for one thing, he hasn’t paid any income tax, his entire life), claims to be at peace and happy, and by the end of the play, we are inclined to believe him.
In offering these two opposed points of view, the play explores how class impacts our romantic relationships. This topic is especially relevant today, at a moment when so much media displays a preoccupation with money and how it impacts relationships (A few examples that come to mind: Emma Cline’s novel The Guest, the television series “White Lotus,” and articles like this one in The Cut.) By exploring the different ways that class intersects with romance with such candor and humor, the play feels both ahead of its time and utterly contemporary.
The play’s contemporary is spark is no doubt a result in part of the edits Orenstein has made to the original script. Consulting a 1964 published edition of the script, I was surprised to find that Orenstein’s production is remarkably faithful; it surprised me how many of the lines remained unchanged. The script has received some necessary updates. Some of the more painfully dated lines, particularly certain stereotypical bits of dialogue and casual racism of the period, have been, understandably, removed: “There were moments,” Orenstein says, “especially around race, where I had to think hard about what would land with a modern audience. Our job was to keep the original intent while making it resonant now.”
Part of the reason the play feels so current is that we are, whether we are conscious or not, living in an artistic and entertainment landscape fundamentally shaped by Hart and Kaufmann’s work. It’s no exaggeration to say that “You Can’t Take It With You” is a blueprint to the modern sitcom. This lineage was on the mind of Orenstein: “Kaufman and Hart were masters of structure, setting off chain reactions that build comedy. My points of reference are shows like 30 Rock, Frasier, Nora Ephron films, Rob Reiner, even Key & Peele,” Orenstein says, “All of that owes a debt to Kaufman and Hart. Their style is the original sitcom formula—one set, one room.” With this in mind, it’s easy now for me to see all the subsequent shows and films that owe an obvious debt to Hart and Kaufmann. Wes Anderson’s films, “The Royal Tenenbaums” especially, in their twee eccentricity and Rube Goldberg-esque physical comedy, come to mind.
*
In one reading, combined with a foray into Moss Hart’s own background, the play emerges as a kind of idealized fantasy version of the family Hart wished he had growing up–artistic, eccentric, bohemian–rather than the destitute working-class background Hart emerged from. Born to immigrant Jewish parents at the turn of the century, Moss Hart had a difficult childhood. He grew up, as he recounts in his memoir, Act One, “in an atmosphere of unrelieved poverty.” Reading Moss Hart’s memoir, it is hard not to see Grandpa Sycamore as a kind of inverse of Hart’s actual grandfather, whose presence, according to Hart, was domineering: “My grandfather, whom I adored,” Moss Hart writes, “towered over my first seven years like an Everest of Victorian tyranny.” Describing her grandfather’s childhood, Emma Hart says: “He came from extreme poverty and made it big in a way that I think is nearly impossible now. That kind of poverty stayed with him. Even after he was successful, he struggled with feeling like he didn’t belong.” Theatre was an early form of escape for Hart. He writes, “I have a pet theory of my own, probably invalid, that the theatre is an inevitable refuge of the unhappy child.” But to say this play is simply a kind of wish-fulfillment would be to fail to do it justice, as both a comedy, and a work that asks thoughtful, philosophical questions.
What do we carry with us? What do we leave behind? These are some of the questions “You Can’t Take It With You” asks, and these questions were on the mind of Emma Hart. As she eloquently puts it: “ What do we inherit—biologically, spiritually, psychically? And what’s possible to leave behind?” The play is existential in that it asks fundamental questions about how we should live our lives, but it’s existentialism that is accessible. This is still a comedy, after all.
As Orenstein puts it: “Every classic was once radical,” and this play, in its own unassuming, tongue-in-cheek way, is indeed quietly radical, even if it might not appear so at first glance. Perhaps the most radical and resonant aspect of the play is its depiction of someone who has left the rat race and has managed to carve out a life and find fulfillment and community outside of it, with his snakes and his family and his commencement ceremonies.
Text available on request.
Visions of Narcissus: On Genet, Freud, and Mark Hyatt’s “Love, Leda”
Cleveland Review of Books
March 2025
While he desires to quench his thirst, a different thirst is created. While he drinks he is seized by the vision of his reflected form. He loves a bodiless dream.”
— Ovid, Metamorphoses
“Never did I try to make of [my life] something other than what it was, I did not try to adorn it, to mask it, but, on the contrary, I wanted to affirm it in its exact sordidness, and the most sordid signs became for me signs of grandeur.”
— Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal
Love, Leda, the recently published posthumous novel of the late poet, Mark Hyatt, is a picaresque account of urban life in the London demimonde of the 1960s. Published some fifty or so years after its author’s death by suicide in 1972, first in the UK in 2023, Love, Leda is now available for the first time in the US from independent publisher Nightboat Books. A self-professed romantic, its titular protagonist, Leda, is constantly teetering on the edge of living “down and out.” While he manages to steer clear of the total abjection of, say, a Jean Genet novel—prison, prostitution, begging—he is, like a typical Genet protagonist, largely estranged from his family and frequently broke. Mostly, he manages to get by through odd jobs, the largesse of his friends and occasional romantic partners, and his good looks.
Nearly everything that Leda encounters reminds him of himself. Throughout his wanderings, whether attracted, repulsed, or enraptured by them, the myriad denizens of Leda’s London become reflections of himself. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his introduction to Genet’s Thief’s Journal, writes, “Not all who would be are Narcissus. Many who lean over the water see only a vague human figure. Genet sees himself everywhere; the dullest surfaces reflect his image; even in others he perceives himself, thereby bringing to light their deepest secrets.” The same could be said of Leda: that unabashedly vain flâneur of the demi-monde who sees himself everywhere.
Genet and Hyatt both display an interest in ontological instability, explored via a narrator whose sense of self is highly responsive to their environment and fundamentally unstable. In Love, Leda, Leda’s self is the canvas upon which the novel’s characters fill. Leda’s psyche is porous. He struggles with self-regulation. At one point, he muses, “At this moment I can hardly understand myself, for I am stimulated by my own emptiness and have no idea how to develop the self in me.” And later, he exclaims: “My mind is no good at government. It adopts all.” Here we get a sense of the magnitude of Leda’s vanity, which would likely put even your most self-involved friend to shame.
As perhaps the archetypal figure of ontological instability, of the unregulated Ego in the extreme, the mythological figure of Narcissus haunts both Genet and Hyatt’s work. In Ovid’s famous account of the Narcissus myth in his Metamorphoses, Narcissus’s tragic downfall is that he is so consumed by his own reflection, unable to distinguish between himself and another, he falls in a futile, all-consuming love with himself, that “bodiless dream.” The motif of Leda as Narcissus is established early in Hyatt’s novel. We follow Leda through a typical morning routine: After a nocturnal tryst, he sneaks into his friend’s empty flat, where he stays occasionally, borrows his clothes, and draws a bath. “I feel flamboyant, undress, and walk around the flat in my nudity,” Hyatt writes. “Nursing my own love, narcissus without fault.”
And later, in a comedic scene, we stumble upon Leda self-reflexively staging himself as Narcissus, reenacting the myth:
“I look through a cupboard full of junk and pull out a full-size mirror. Putting it in the bathroom, I first lay it on the floor and stand on it, but being dressed, find no desires for myself. I go back into the kitchen and drink the tea. In the bathroom, I turn off the tap and put a handful of bath salts in the water. I get undressed and stand back on the mirror, looking down at myself. There is nothing of me that I fancy, so I stand the mirror against the wall. I get into the bath, lying out straight and trying to make myself flat. But I can never do it. The mirror is steaming up and reflects nothing.”
In his restaging of the myth, Hyatt’s protagonist is not felled by his self-love. He is not, as Narcissus is, turned by the Gods into a flower. Leda’s immersion in himself is neither total nor complete. The aforementioned scene of onanism is notably a failed one: Leda fails at getting himself off.
In his seminal paper on narcissism, “Zur Einführung des Narzissmus” (“On Narcissism”), Freud outlines two forms of narcissism: primary and secondary. Autoeroticism, for the infant libido, is the crucial component of the former: the child’s centering of their self as the sole object of satisfaction and stimulation. Secondary narcissism is perhaps closer to what we conventionally think of when we think of the stereotypical narcissist: self-centered to the point of delusion, which, for Freud, was often connected to other personality disorders, namely schizophrenia. It would be interesting to hear what an analyst’s diagnosis of Leda would be. He appears to get past the primary infantile narcissistic stage—he does seek out others for erotic pleasure—but whether he would avoid the label of secondary narcissism remains up for debate.
Hyatt seems to be playing with the figure of the narcissist and the historical usage, as Freud notes, of describing homosexual behavior as narcissistic. I think it is safe to say that while Leda may exhibit some narcissistic tendencies, he does not fully succumb to narcissism’s thrall. He does not, like Ovid’s Narcissus, become lost in his reflection. While he is unabashedly self-obsessed and vain, his narcissism has a specific function in the novel. One of the lesser acknowledged facets of Freud’s theory of narcissism was his recognition of positive aspects of narcissistic behavior. In a paper in the European Journal of Psychoanalysis on Freud’s theories of narcissism, Sergio Benvenuto writes, “Freud spoke of narcissism as a tactic, a libidinal position taken, for example, when a human being is in physical pain. A severe toothache will make anyone narcissistic, because drives will be concentrated on the hurting part of the body.” One can detect this same self-protective tactic in Leda, as a response to the often painful, hostile conditions he lives through. Rather than become paralyzed by self-obsession, Leda’s narcissism functions as a fuel, a balm, a solace. It is his very awareness of his beauty that allows him to survive in the repressive, homophobic society of postwar Great Britain.
•
The novel follows a rough pattern: Leda does some kind of itinerant, menial work; has a night out at a venue where he does not feel welcome; has a hookup that goes badly; finds refuge at a friend’s place; and receives a good-natured lecture about his lifestyle habits. Then he sleeps, and the cycle repeats.
Although Leda is aimless and adrift, he doesn’t seem all that bothered by this apparent lack of direction, despite frequent admonitions from friends and strangers. Take the following exchange with coworkers at one of the many gigs he works in the novel, in this case, cutting sheet metal:
“Judging by your cards, you haven’t worked for years,” old Bill says.
“That’s true.”
“Then how do you keep on living?”
“I usually find a rich woman and live with her.”
“Don’t you find that degrading?”
“No.”
“Don’t you feel immoral?”
“No, why would I?”
“Well, I would, if I did that.”
“I live sheerly for myself, and not for other peoples’ thoughts.”
Leda’s philosophy towards work might be described as the following: Make enough to get by, but don’t expect spiritual fulfillment from your work. Regarding such ideas as a career or vacation, he is coolly detached, even cynical. Speaking to a friend and occasional female lover, Zara, he says:
“I’ve got to find myself a casual job and put some money in my pockets.”
“That doesn’t pay much, or does it.”
“Half a crown an hour, I think.”
“Twenty-five bob a day. It’s hardly worth it.”
“Twenty-five bob to me is what I call being semi-rich.”
“Then you’re a fool.”
A few lines later, Leda justifies himself:
“I’m happy happy at the moment. I need nothing more.”
“That’s because you’re still dreaming of Daniel.”
“I know. I love Daniel just for living.”
Beyond meeting his immediate material needs, Leda’s motivations are largely focused on his ultimate, and ultimately unrequited object of desire: Daniel, an older married man. The central conflict in the novel might be described as Leda’s romanticism clashing against his harsh everyday reality of living in working-class London as a gay man in the 1960s.
•
Leda’s London is roughly the same one that its author inhabited. It was a London where homophobia was as casual as it was rampant, and homosexuality not just socially condemned, but highly criminalized. In England and Wales in 1954, there were over 1,000 gay men in prison for homosexual acts. Love, Leda was written on the cusp of the passage of the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967, a watershed moment for gay rights in the UK that decriminalized male homosexual acts. As Huw Lemmey writes in his foreword, “Love, Leda was written in that strange thawing of the sexual permafrost that came between the 1957 Wolfenden Report, with its recommendation to partially decriminalize sex between men, and its implementation in the Sexual Offences Act some ten years later.”
This “thaw” in attitudes towards homosexuality lends the novel an atmosphere of pervasive uncertainty. Leda’s position is still definitively on society’s margins, and he is aware that to some his behavior would be considered criminal, but his position does not seem fixed. The novel carries a sense of hope that the future may be different. “Now I look upon the world with optimism,” begins its final line.
The novel had a long, convoluted, fifty-plus year-long path to publication. Originally compiled by Hyatt’s close friend, Lucy O’Shea, the existence of the manuscript was unknown to scholars of Hyatt’s poetry until 2019, when Luke Roberts and Sam Ladkin, editors working on a posthumous collection of Hyatt’s poetry, learned of the novel through O’Shea’s correspondence.Here is a book that can truly be said to have been “rescued” from the archive.
According to Luke Robert’s afterword, certain events in Leda’s life mirror Hyatt’s. Hyatt was born in South London in 1940 and took his own life in 1972. Hyatt likely shared with his protagonist a domineering, violent familial upbringing. Both grew up in poverty and lived an itinerant life. Both would attempt suicide. However, Leda as narrator manages to lift us beyond the cold, bare facts of his life. Love, Leda is, I’d venture, stranger and more fantastical than the life of its author likely was. So while there are biographical similarities, it would be a mistake to read Love, Leda as a straight roman à clef. If Mark Hyatt wanted to write a straightforward autobiography, he would have done so. The form of the novel was likely more welcoming for Hyatt, the poet. Unlike, say, Robert Lowell’s direct autobiographical style, Hyatt’s poetry, while striking in its emotional candor and vulnerability, tends to eschew explicitly stating personal details.[4] Perhaps the vehicle of the novel allowed Hyatt, via his larger-than-life literary creation, Leda, to depict truths and memories, wounds literal that may have been too painful to depict head on.
Again I am reminded of Genet. Sartre writes of Genet in the same introduction to A Thief’s Journal: “His autobiography is not an autobiography; it merely seems like one; it is a sacred cosmogony. His stories are not stories. They excite you and fascinate you; you think he is relating facts and suddenly you realize he is describing rites.” I’d argue that Leda can be seen, à la Sartre, as the center of the “sacred cosmology” of the novel. As one reads Love, Leda, it becomes clear that this is no straightforward autobiography. Through a kind of ecstatic solipsism, Leda builds his own narrative of himself, at a remove from the harsh realities of the outside world. “I abandon myself from this sham of a world,” Hyatt writes, “and bury myself deep in the treasures of the heart.” Throughout the novel, Leda constantly invents and reinvents the mythology of himself, as if writing his own hagiography.
This is not a novel without flaws. I confess that by its end, the repetitive, episodic structure started to wear on me. But given its posthumous publication, I am inclined to assess the novel based on what I think Hyatt attempted to achieve with it, with the understanding that the book we hold in our hands may not be the one Hyatt intended for us to read, if indeed he planned for us to read it at all. It would be a gross reduction to call Mark Hyatt simply “Britain’s Genet.” To do so would be to erase the important differences between the two and neglect the aspects—his self-taught background, his work as a poet, his highly idiosyncratic prose style—that make Hyatt unique. Beyond their similarities on paper, these two rough contemporaries—two gay men writing about the respective underbellies of their milieux in books that were often not traditionally published at the time—do seem to share an aesthetic and philosophical kinship.
Although they would lead drastically different careers—with Hyatt’s being tragically cut short after his death by suicide and Genet living out his final years to a ripe old age in the Middle East—they can be seen as two sides of the same coin. In both of their work, imagination, or willful “illusioning,” becomes a transformative force that allows a marginalized person—poor, queer, and criminalized—to exist, and at times even to thrive, in otherwise unbearable conditions. The question that Love, Leda seems to pose, with its tragic ending, is how long one can sustain this line of thinking. For Genet, against all odds, and especially when one considers the “occupational hazards” of his lifestyle, his life and career would be long. Hyatt, tragically, would not share the same fate.
Radical, provocative, groundbreaking, controversial: These adjectives could be used to describe Hyatt and Genet to varying degrees. Both writers could be considered radical simply for the fact that, at a time when their existence was criminalized, they chose to document the substance and tenor of their lives in all their beauty and squalor. But beyond any so-called identity politics, even beyond a capital “p” politic, what comes to the fore after spending time with their work is the radical quality of their imagination. Whether dismissed as solipsism, mania, or narcissism, Genet and Hyatt’s work demonstrates the transformative potential of re-imagining one’s reality, especially in the face of a criminalized existence.
Neither offers an easy way out. One finds no homilies, no utopias in Hyatt and Genet’s work. This is not the cliche “imagine” of John Lennon, but something necessarily more solitary and inward—the imagination of the exile, the outcast. This is the imagination of the margins, which makes it all the more resilient and remarkable, sustained despite disregard and contempt from mainstream society. Read today, when our world seems to be sliding frighteningly closer to the one Hyatt was writing from, his work provides a kind of solace, a grim hope: No one’s coming to save us, except ourselves.
[1] For a sampling of Hyatt’s poetry, see the following: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/poetry/Mark-Hyatt/
Photograph of the author’s father, Wichita, KS, c. 1960
Outis (Οὔτις)
— Greek, meaning “nobody” or no one
“Cyclops, you asked my noble name, and I will tell it…My name is Nobody. Nobody I am called by mother, father, and by all my comrades.”
— Homer, Odyssey
I. Homecoming
I know my father through his absence. His death, just before my fourth birthday, robbed me of the opportunity of knowing him. I know I am not unique in not knowing my father. Literature is rife with fathers who have left, in one form or the other. Many people know their fathers only through their leave-takings, literal or metaphorical. My statement could be just as easily applied to any of the many absent fathers throughout history, stretching as far back perhaps as the original Absent Father of literature himself: Odysseus, the “man of cunning.”
The Odyssey is one of our oldest stories. The poem has origins that stretch back further than the first recorded papyri versions from the 8th century, BCE. It is the product of the Greek oral tradition, a story told and retold for generations until someone, conventionally thought of as a blind poet named Homer hailing from the islands of Smyrna or Chios, thought to write it down.
There are only two kinds of stories: man leaves home and man returns home. Homer’s Odyssey is mostly the second kind of story—Odysseus’ winding journey home to Ithaca. But it is also, at some moments, the first. Traditionally thought of as an epic about a hero’s homecoming, the Odyssey is also a story about an absent father and the people he leaves behind. It is a bildungsroman of sorts—the story of Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, who leaves home at the bidding of the goddess Athena in search of his father.
This second narrative, the story of Penelope and Telemachus, is the one Penelope weaves each day and unravels, secretly, each night. Until relatively recently, it was largely neglected by ancient authors and scholars who were generally more interested in the story of Odysseus. This second story, of those stuck at home in Ithaca, is less flashy and more quotidian compared to the swashbuckling adventures of Odysseus. It is the story of Odysseus’s household enduring continual abuse at the hands of the suitors who have descended upon the house like a plague. Theirs is primarily a story of domesticity, grief, and waiting.
As a boy, the story of the hero’s journey home captivated me. The stories of Odysseus and the Sirens. Odysseus navigating through sea monsters. Odysseus outsmarting the cyclops. However, as I grew older and reencountered the Odyssey for a third time, in college, it was this second plot-line, the “B story”, that captured my attention. [1]
II. Telemachus
In college, during a required freshman seminar called “Literature Humanities,” I was forced to see Homer’s epic with new eyes. In that class I had the experience, which I often seek but rarely find, when a text seems to stare at you directly. Via a form of X-ray vision, the text sees you, momentarily, in disarming totality. This experience with the Odyssey was one of the most intensely personal, almost invasive experiences I’ve ever had with literature. I am almost inclined to call it a religious or spiritual one. It was certainly a moment of revelation for me—the text piercing through the self like a sudden bolt of lightning. Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Bruegel’s Conversion of St. Paul. Or Cyclops’s heat vision in the X-Men series. It was autumn, late September or early October. We had just finished reading the Iliad, the first text all freshmen at Columbia College are assigned to read, and were reading the Odyssey. This particular moment occurred during a discussion of Telemachus as a character. His role is often overshadowed by that of his father, whose shadow he languishes in for most of the epic. The “hero’s journey” is Odysseus’s story. But the Odyssey is also a story about Telemachus’s journey, his quest to find his father, and his struggles with masculinity. Put in contemporary terms, Telemachus’s plotline reads like a “crisis of masculinity.” His journey is motivated by a need to “prove himself” in the context of the masculine conventions of Ancient Greece. He does this first by leaving home to find his father, and later, once his father returns, by helping him to chase away Penelope’s suitors. As a character, he reads like a stereotypical teenage boy. He is stubborn, full of angst, occasionally prone to violence, and eager to prove himself worthy of the title, “son of Odysseus.”
The class discussed Telemachus’s masculinity. The discussion focused on how his traits reflect persistent ideas of masculinity that many have now, rightly, deemed to be “toxic.” Telemachus is often patronizing and paternalistic towards his mother. He treats her as incapable, as lacking agency, and as someone needing to be rescued. He can also be interpreted, I argued [2] that day in class, within a larger context, as a product of the patriarchal society he grew up in, one in which women were systematically disenfranchised and men ruled over their households like kings.
Throughout the epic, this mantle of Athenian masculinity weighs uneasily upon Telemachus’ shoulders. He bristles under the pressure of growing up in the shadow of such a father. He is constantly measuring himself up, and being measured against, his father’s legacy.
In our class discussion, I found myself being critical of but also sympathetic towards Telemachus. More than sympathizing with him, I felt that I understood him on a deep, intimate level. This feeling of identification came to a head when we landed on one particular exchange in Book One. In this passage, the goddess Athena, disguised as the mentor figure Mentes, has arrived as a guest. Telemachus speaks with this stranger over dinner, eager for any news from this man who claims to have known his father. Athena, in disguise, asks Telemachus: “Tell me now— are you Odysseus’ son?”
Telemachus responds (here rendered in Emily Wilson’s translation):[3]
Dear guest, I will be frank with you. My mother
says that I am his son, but I cannot
be sure, since no one knows his own begetting.
I forget my exact reaction when we read this passage that morning. I don’t know if I spoke or commented. I know I couldn’t voice the intense internal reaction I was having, one which brought me nearly to tears. I was new to college, an anxious freshman who was nervous about speaking up in class about something so personal. I had heard my father in these lines, and through the character of Telemachus, saw my own relationship (or non-relationship) with him. At that moment, I felt that I understood Telemachus intimately. I knew how it felt to grow up in theshadow of a father who is unknown to you. That day in seminar, I felt my father’s absence for the first time in years.
Telemachus revealed something to me about my own experience with masculinity and the mystery of paternity. Like Telemachus, I knew my father only through the vectors of other people’s memories and stories of him. When people ask me about my father, I give my own variation of Telemachus’s reply to Athena. In Book Nine, when the cyclops Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name, Odysseus responds, with characteristic cunning, that he is called “Nobody” (outis). Like Telemachus, I am the son of “Nobody.” My own paternal lineage is uncertain. Likewise, I cannot be certain of my own “begetting.”
Our fathers, especially the ones who leave us, always remain for us partially obscured. And for boys, or those of us socialized to be boys, whether we like it or not, we are destined to grow up under the yoke of our paternal lineage. In response, we tend to grow up either fleeing our fathers or searching for some sort of replacement for them. In the absence of a male role model, we construct our own. Like Telemachus, my father is more myth than reality.
Self-identification—seeing oneself in a text—is traditionally not the most respected form of literary criticism. It is often seen as naive at best and self-indulgent at worst. However, I would argue, after having dipped my toes in the other schools of criticism, that self-identification remains what consistently draws us back to literature, again and again. Although we may deny it, I believe that we read largely in order to see some version of ourselves, even a highly distorted one, reflected back at us. Or perhaps we read to see ourselves through another character’s eyes— an alternative version of ourselves, reflected prismatically through the text. For me, the Odyssey has had such a hold on my imagination, throughout all these years, because I find myself in the character of Telemachus. More than sympathizing with him, I experience a form of literary self-identification that becomes, through the operation of reading, a miraculous transposition.
III. Reunion
When Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca, he comes disguised by Athena as an old man. At the home of the swineherd Eumaios, Telemachus, at first, fails to recognize his father. He takes him to be a stranger. After Eumaios leaves, with Athena’s permission, Odysseus finally reveals himself to his son:[4]
I am that father whom your boyhood lacked
and suffered pain for lack of. I am he.
Odysseus weeps and embraces his son, but Telemachus, stunned by his sudden appearance after twenty years, doubts that it is really him. The return of his father is both too wonderful and too unlikely. He doubts, because he is afraid to believe such good news. Poignantly, Telemachus exclaims, “You cannot be my father Odysseus! Meddling spirits conceived this trick to twist the knife in me!” [5]
Traces of this scene are later echoed in the Gospels of the New Testament when Christ is resurrected and presents himself to his disciples. The disciple Thomas famously doubts that Christ has returned. He demands proof, asking to see Christ’s wounds so he can stick his finger into Christ’s side. Faced with news that seems too good to be true, he demands tactile evidenceof his teacher’s resurrection. Similarly, Telemachus refuses to believe the impossible fact that his father, long presumed to be dead, has finally returned.
I too have moments when I believe that my father has returned. I don’t believe in an afterlife, at least in the Christian formulation, but having been raised Christian, some kind of latent spirituality remains buried within me. I believe, at the very least, that the borders between life and death are somehow porous. I find it comforting to believe that the dead never truly leave us, that they persist somehow in a shadowy, non-corporeal form.
My father rarely visits my dreams, like he does for my mother, but sometimes I find myself catching fleeting glimpses of him out in the world. When I first moved to New York, I experienced repeated episodes of deja vu. These occurred most often in Chinatown, around the Grand Street station. Every tall, thin Asian man I encountered on the street or on the subway platform looked like they could be my father. Mmore somberly, I find my father in the news reports documenting anti-Asian hate crimes. I see his face in the horrific images of bloodied Asian men who have been beaten, stabbed, or murdered.
In various intangible ways, despite his continued absence, my father persists for me. Maybe this is merely the last remnant of denial. The final stage of grief. Or just a form of wishful thinking. I never actually saw my father’s dead body, or if I did, I have no memory of it. And in my stubborn mind, perhaps this allows me to believe that after nearly twenty years, he has lingered. It is not hard for me to imagine that perhaps he might one day show up, at the house of a stranger or at the threshold of my home, perhaps shrouded in some disguise, so that I hardly recognize him.
Like Penelope, my mother holds out hope for a reunion, if not in this life, then in the next one. Like Penelope, after twenty years, she has maintained her faith. She has never remarried or even dated another man. She claims, and I believe her, that she still loves him, despite— or perhaps because of— his continued absence. In some form or another, we both, I believe, possess a lingering hope. A hope that perhaps everyone has been wrong this whole time, and that my father, after twenty years on a far-flung journey, will someday return.
[1] My first encounter with the Odyssey, as a child, was via an episode of the animated children’s show Arthur which spoofs the 1 epic. My second in freshman year high school English in graphic novel form. Thirdly, during my freshman year of college, in its entirety.
[2] See, as one example, Book One, lines 350-360.
[3] Odyssey, Homer, Emily Wilson, lines 205-206, pg. 111.
[4] Odyssey, Book Sixteen, tr. Robert Fitzgerald, pg. 295.
[5] Ibid.
In a letter to her friend Joë Bousquet, the philosopher Simone Weil wrote: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” while elsewhere, she writes, “Attention taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”
Reading Srikanth Reddy’s recent collection of essays, Unsignificant (Wave Press, 2024), I often found myself thinking often of Weil’s work, and in particular, her beautiful, often opaque writings on attention.“More often than not, as any analyst will tell you,” Reddy begins the titular opening essay, “the background is as important as the foreground in looking at things.” From this opening line, we are given a guiding philosophy of sorts that informs Reddy’s approach to looking at art, whether it be the paintings of Rembrandt, Cy Twombly, or Bruegel, or the poetry of Emily Dickinson or Gertrude Stein.
Reflecting upon his preoccupation with the “background” in a work of art, and the apparent dearth of books on the subject, Reddy poses the following questions “What is a background? Is it just a figure suffering from low self-esteem? What are we missing when we disregard those unassuming little figures—birds, clouds, unmanned military drones —in the offing? Can paying attention to what’s going on in the background make you a better person?” Like Weil, Reddy is interested in the ethical implications of our attention, i.e. that there are always ethical ramifications when we choose to pay attention to one thing over another.
In the three wide-ranging, yet tightly controlled essays that comprise this collection, Reddy considers the implications of the way we focus our attention towards works of art. The collection provides a series of case studies in generous, attentive engagement with art. Reddy is especially interested in which aspects of a work of art compel our attention, the division between foreground and background, and how certain works of art subvert our expectations by drawing our attention from the foreground and towards the oft-overlooked margins.
In this vein, it is telling that the first work of art Reddy invites us to closely examine is W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” itself an ekphrastic account of the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The poem, written in 1938, in the aftermath of Auden’s first-hand experience of the horrors of the Sino-Japanese War, is, in Reddy’s reading, a poem about human suffering. He writes, “‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ is not so much a poem about a particular painting as it is a meditation on the suffering that goes unnoticed in the background of ordinary experience.”
What follows is the collection’s first, delicate, approachable exercises in ekphrasis: Reddy “looks” at Auden’s poem which itself “looks” at a painting, namely Bruegel’s Landscape With The Fall of Icarus. Auden’s poem isolates its attention on the solitary figure of the ploughman, noting “how everything”, including the ploughman, turns away from the “disaster” that is Icarus’s plunge into the sea. The ploughman turns away because for him it is not “an important failure”—meaning one that impacts him directly. Auden’s poem is interested in the painting’s economy of attention, and namely what it has to say about the larger world’s failure, in Reddy’s words, “to register the suffering of others.”
Reddy is an enviably nimble explicator of both visual art and poetry, and in the case study of the Auden poem/Bruegel painting nesting doll, he moves our gaze smoothly, seamlessly, between painting and poem, as if adjusting a long telescopic lens. He is an ideal art historian for poets. Perhaps owing to the fact that these essays originated as a series of lectures, his conversational tone and the complete lack of pretense to his prose, serve him well, here and elsewhere in the collection, as he moves on to tackle more obtuse, less literal material.
In part two of the second essay, “Like A Very Strange Likeness And Pink,” he provides a close reading of Gertrude Stein’s disorienting 1923 poem, “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” Destabilizing the very notion of representation and the genre of portraiture, Stein’s nominal portrait of her close friend Picasso, as Reddy goes on to demonstrate, rapidly disintegrates into a scattered series of disparate associations and images, stretching our concept of likeness and representation to its limits. As Reddy puts it, “Stein’s experiments in resemblance show us how different things are not unlike.”
Perhaps the most wide-ranging piece in the collection is the final essay on “wonder.” Here he acknowledges the slipperiness of his subject: “wonder, I’d venture, is always already a fugitive affair.” Whether Reddy succeeds, in this last essay, in achieving his goal of bringing us a bit closer to “wonder itself” is up for debate. As an emotion or experience, wonder, is slippery, and highly subjective. But I can attest that the way in which Reddy attempts to locate wonder within poetry, namely in the examples he discusses such of shield of Achilles in the Iliad and the erasure poems of Ronald Johnson, is compelling and entertaining. One reads these essays, not necessarily for the satisfaction one takes in watching Reddy pin down his subject, like a lapidarist netting a butterfly, but for the joy and vivacity Reddy clearly takes in getting there: the confident, associative leaps he makes from Achilles’ shield, that “impossible object” in the Iliad, to Milton’s Paradise Lost, to the brilliant, evocative absences of Ronald Johnson’s erasure poems made from Milton’s epic.
“Pure, intuitive attention,” Weil wrote, “is the only source of perfectly beautiful art, and truly original and brilliant scientific discovery, of philosophy which really aspires to wisdom and of true, practical love of one’s neighbor.” Weil’s theory of intuitive attention has much in common with the practice of attentive viewing and aesthetic engagement Reddy performs across the essays of Unsignificant.
Thinking of Weil, while reading these essays, and especially the last essay, I couldn’t help but think of the kind of sustained, open minded engagement with art Reddy practices as a form of prayer. Perhaps it is exactly through the kind of intuitive, prayerful attention that Weil describes and that Reddy demonstrates in these essays—a paying attention to what is often overlooked, to the trivial, the quotidian, the marginal—that is what allows us to open ourselves up to the possibility of wonder.
In elegiac, lyrical, wry, snarky, and wonderfully plain-spoken prose, the author crafts characters through conversational pairs
In sociology, the term “dyad” refers to a significant relational pair. Husband and wife. Brother and sister. Parent and child. Across Yiyun Li’s prolific career—10 novels, two story collections, and a memoir, as well as several works of criticism—this structure surfaces again and again. The stories in her most recent collection Wednesday’s Child teem with pairs: a mother and her deceased daughter (“Wednesday’s Child”), an elderly nanny and her client (“A Sheltered Woman”), a pair of friends (“Hello, Goodbye”), a woman and her former teacher (“A Small Flame”), an octogenarian former etymologist and her middle-aged caretaker (“Such Common Life”). In Li’s work, the dyad often becomes the locus or node around which a story whirls.
Perhaps the most common set up for a Yiyun Li story: Two people—whose relationship’s contours have yet to be defined—speak to each other. Her novels often play out in the form of extended conversations, with interludes of action and reflection. There is frequently an element of philosophical debate, where characters—with varying degrees of candor, irony, and humor—pose fundamental, often existential questions about how one should live, given the certainty of continual suffering. But if any of this implies to the unfamiliar reader that Li’s writing is academic, professorial, or didactic, rest assured it’s the complete opposite.
Across her books, Li’s writing is versatile and protean. Her prose can be elegiac, lyrical, wry, snarky, and wonderfully plain-spoken. If characters are dispensing hard-won pearls of wisdom, the writer is generous—if sternly attentive—to the psychological faults and deficiencies in their interior logics. To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, Li’s characters tell the truth but they tell it slanted. She never quite lets anyone off the hook, including herself, as in Where Reasons End; its narrator, Li’s fictive stand-in, is often described as “gormless” and is chastised by her son for being imprecise, lazy, or—that cardinal sin—cliché in her use of language. If a character says something that smacks of certitude or “wisdom,” we sense Li behind us, gently prodding a closer look, to scrutinize, to re-examine.
Li’s most frequent dyad is that of the storyteller and the listener. Her protagonists often find themselves drawn to characters—despite their various foibles and flaws—for their captivating ability to tell tales, to turn the most minor of life’s dramas into narrative. In Wednesday’s Child, Li writes: “Nina liked to be told stories, and Katie was good at telling stories.” And then again, in The Book of Goose: “I never made up stories, but I was good at listening to Fabienne.”
Often, Li’s ostensible “plots” seem to be a pretext for the real meat of the story: that same ongoing dialogue. At the center of The Book of Goose, her most recent novel, is the dynamic, complex friendship between Fabienne and Agnès. The major events that unfold in Agnès external life—her ascension to literary celebrity, her departure from her rural home to attend boarding school, her isolation, and her eventual expulsion—feel, at times, like incidental episodes. It is easy to imagine another writer mining these same plot beats for their full, melodramatic potential, producing a pulpier, less interesting novel in turn. Li chooses the riskier route. She lets the continual conversation between Fabienne and Agnès occupy center stage.
One essential feature of the dyad is its dynamic of attraction and repulsion, compellingly fueling many of the relationships depicted in Li’s work. We see it in Agnès’s all-consuming dedication to her friend Fabienne, against the external forces that are determined to pull them apart. When the dyad encounters a third person, it must adapt in order to endure.
“How do you grow happiness?” Fabienne asks at the beginning of the novel. The girls are 13, but they feel that they are older. Growing up in impoverished, postwar rural France, their lives are far from idyllic. Already, they have experienced more than their fair share of toil, drudgery, and death. But the two have also managed to carve out a shared, private world, an Eden of sorts, sustained through language.
Of course, it cannot last forever, and their fall is inevitable. When the two girls hatch a plan to begin to co-write books, outside forces enter their world. First, their “mentor” M. Devaux, the neighborhood postman harboring failed writerly aspirations, who capitalizes on the potential he sees in them, eventually resulting in scandal. And later, much more potently, in the form of Mrs. Townsend, the headmistress of the English boarding school Agnès attends, as she attempts to undermine her epistolary correspondences with Fabienne. The novel can be read, ultimately, as a story of the evolution and eventual dissolution of this fraught pair.
In Where Reasons End, Li’s 2017 semi-autobiographical novel (although neither of these terms really do the book justice), the dyad goes from an essential plot mechanism to become the plot itself. Put another way, the structure becomes superstructure. Very little actually happens. The entire plot could be summed up by a single sentence: A woman and her dead son talk to each other.
Where Reasons End takes a question—what would it be like if we could speak to those who have died?—and lets it play out in the form of a book-length conversation. The narrator, a mother (also a writer and a kind of sly stand-in for Li) addresses her son, Nikolai, who died by suicide and now speaks to her from beyond the grave. Their conversation is a unique, meandering thread, chatty and cutting in turn, somber and joyful, existential and quotidian, without an apparent destination or clear purpose. Their discussions drift from etymology, to music, to baking, to Wallace Stevens’s poetry, to time, emptiness, to grief.
In Where Reasons End, stripped down to its barest essentials—with setting and character reduced to the nearly incidental—we can see clearly how the dyad functions as a narrative container. The novel poses the implicit question: In the absence of a conventional plot, what is left? What breathes life into these characters? The answer, at least according to Li: conversation.
As with Agnès and Fabienne in The Book of Goose, and many of the pairs in Wednesday’s Child, the format of the dialogue between Nikolai and his mother provides a stage upon which Li makes her characters’ thinking legible. They unveil their pasts, lie, write and rewrite their personal histories; they display faulty logics, glaring omissions, self-deceits. Across her work, Li seems particularly fascinated with the kind of shaping—of oneself, of the future, of the past, of others—that happens when two characters speak, in agreement or in argument.
Where Reasons End recalls foundational texts in the history of Western and Eastern literature and philosophy: the Analects of Confucius, Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, and the dialogues of Plato. Like Plato, Li uses dialogue as a vehicle for the development of characters’ thoughts, a staging ground for ideas, a platform upon which beliefs can be argued and defended. Like Socrates, Nikolai is inquisitive, challenging, skeptical. Written while Boethius was imprisoned by the Gothic Emperor, The Consolation of Philosophy—like Where Reasons End—is narrated from a position of isolation and despair. In both, their narrators find comfort and companionship with a ghostly interlocutor who appears to them all of a sudden, miraculously.
For Li, though, unlike Confucius or Plato, the aim isn’t as clear cut as a pursuit of knowledge. The dialogues are not a simple means to an end. Nikolai teases his mother for sounding like “a mediocre self-help book.” There are no easy solutions given here, in the end, but the talking was worthwhile.
At the very end of Where Reasons End, the narrator tells us: “For days and weeks after Nikolai’s death, I had spent much of my time in his room, knitting, unraveling, knitting, unraveling.” Like Penelope in the Odyssey, weaving and unweaving each night, awaiting her husband’s return. The conversations we witness between Li’s dyads mimic a similar linking and unlinking—a repeated thesis, antithesis, synthesis. As characters speak, consensus forms and is broken; ideas are rebuffed, solidified, re-wrought. Each story, each pair, each conversation, a link in a daisy chain, continuing ad infinitum.
“You could not have wished to be born at a better time than this, when everything has been lost.”
— Simone Weil
The first time I read Weil, I was a senior in high school. I was given a copy of Gravity and Grace by my older, much wiser friend who was in college and who seemed infinitely more advanced than me. Weil had become, for her, a kind of spiritual and intellectual mentor. For years, she carried her dog-eared, heavily annotated copy of Gravity and Grace with her like a pocket King James Bible. The epigrammatic, koan-like Gravity and Grace reminded me of the austere architecture of a Roman cathedral—something both lofty and utterly removed from daily life—or of the uncanniness of medieval Christian portraiture. There was something alien to her writing, something simultaneously recognizable as human while also appearing to exist primarily outside of our world. On my first read, I’ll admit that I found Weil, cold, impersonal, and opaque. As someone who was raised Christian but who has since lapsed into a vague spiritualism, her intense devotion was initially off-putting to me. It often felt, while reading her, that she was speaking another language. Nevertheless, I sensed that there was something to her, a reason why my friend and so many others were consistently drawn to her life and work.
In the fall of 2020, as the world reeled from the pandemic, I, like everyone else, was spending a lot of time at home and alone with my thoughts. I I decided it was time to give Weil another try. After acquiring an anthology of her writing, I began working my way through it, and instead of finding her writing dour, discomforting, or off-putting, I felt as if I were being led by a warm, firm, steady hand. I took comfort reading her during the dark winter months of 2020, finding something reassuring in reading a thinker who could write with such moral clarity during another uniquely calamitous time in history.
Weil lived during a time filled with ethically fraught, high-stakes decisions. Although the circumstances were different, the pervasive feeling that one’s daily decisions had grave, large-scale consequences, is common, I think, to both Weil’s lifetime and our own. Weil was living through an ethically convoluted environment similar to the one that myself and everyone I knew faced as we attempted to navigate our lives during a global pandemic, where daily decisions could have literally life or death consequences. Weil’s writings on living ethically during fraught times resonated deeply with me. I found myself asking, only partly ironically, when faced with challenging day-to-day choices and attempting to calculate what would cause the least amount of harm: “What would Simone Weil do?”
One way, out of many, to read Weil’s work and life, is to examine how she applied her ethical philosophy to her own actions. This is the kind of reading I will attempt here—looking at the way theory and praxis merged in the particular instance of Weil’s engagement with labour throughout her work, following some of the twists and turns in the development of her thinking on the topic of work, both in an abstract and a literal sense. The site of this engagement was most often the factory floor. During her short career, the factory, like the lycée, was a place where Weil engaged in philosophy, among her peers and her fellow workers. It was a fertile breeding ground for Weil, and, especially early in her career, a place where some of her most well-known theories—notably her theories of “attention” and “affliction”—were first sketched.
Simone Weil lived a short and intense life bracketed by two world wars. Born in 1909, a few years before the outbreak of World War I, she died in 1943 from a combination of tuberculosis and self-imposed malnutrition. In her short life, she produced a prolific amount of work on everything ranging from classical literature, mathematics, psychology, science, and religion to, of course, philosophy. In a short time, she managed to live a remarkable amount of often contradictory lives, and part of the joy and difficulty one encounters reading her work is how to make sense and reconcile the starkly different “Weils” that one encounters. Weil was, at various points in her life: a Frenchwoman, a mystic, a Platonist, a philosopher who labored among factory workers, a Jewish-born convert to Roman Catholicism, a pacifist who fought in the Spanish Civil War, a revolutionary who was skeptical of revolution, and (according to André Gide) the “patron saint of all outsiders.”
Having lived through three wars and participated in two (the Spanish Civil War and World War II), her short life during this intense historical period gave her a unique amount of opportunities to put her ethics to the test. Unique among her contemporaries is the narrow distance between the values she espoused and the actions she performed. Although she contradicted herself over her career, and her actions were sometimes misguided and even unhelpful (see, for example, her absurd proposal to parachute unarmed nurses onto the Allied front-lines, or her botched attempt to fight in the Spanish Civil war, which ended after she accidentally burned herself with oil) Weil was, above all else, deeply committed to all of her beliefs.
I.
One of the first causes the young Weil pledged herself to was the plight of the workers. Like many other French intellectuals of her period, she was attracted to Marxist ideas and from a very early age expressed an interest in labor relations. Where Weil differs significantly from her French intellectual contemporaries, however, is how she applied her concern for the worker’s conditions. She was not simply an armchair Marxist, teaching about dialectics in a university somewhere: she made concerted (if sometimes ridiculous) efforts to meet the workers where they were, to tutor them in the cultural education she felt them to have been robbed of, and to engage with them on their own terms. Weil was not, despite her bourgeois class position, writing about labor from an idealized, comfortably removed position. Rather, Weil wrote from the perspective of someone who had intimately acquainted herself with physical work and who knew both how soul-crushing and how fulfilling it could be.
While teaching at a small lycée in Roanne, an industrial city in southeast France, Weil applied to work at the Alsthom factory in Rue Lecourbe. Slight, clumsy and plagued by migraines, she was certainly a poor candidate for hard labor. But despite these deficits, she persisted in her search for factory work, finally convincing the factory director to take her on in 1934. While teaching her half-dozen students philosophy at the lycée, she worked during her off-hours at a machine press on the Alsthom factory floor. It was obvious that she was not well-suited to the work: she often missed her quotas (once damaging an entire quota’s worth of metal components), frequently burned herself, and, wracked by migraines and fatigue, finished most of her work days weeping.
Despite not being a very capable manual laborer, her experience at the factory proved fruitful intellectually, as is documented in the “factory journal” she kept during her time at Alsthom. To read her journals from this period is to watch her distilling her physical experiences with labor into philosophical theories in real time. At the factory, her experience with the mind-numbing, repetitive, painful experiences of physical labor was essential for the development of her ideas, especially her writings on affliction and attention. Work, as Weil’s thought develops, becomes an especially intellectually dense locus within her broader philosophical system. This sphere of activity is a meeting place where many of the ideas Weil explored are staged. In her later writings, as will be shown, work acquires for Weil spiritual implications that are latent in the earlier “factory journal” entries.
When work is done under nonideal conditions it produces the kind of acute mental and physical suffering Weil experienced herself on the Alsthom factory floor. This affliction is both physical and psychological: it reduces those that endure it (the workers) to the status of things—dehumanized, non-thinking things. To paraphrase Weil, affliction reduces its victims to slaves. Writing about inhuman labor conditions and affliction, Weil often sounds like Marx writing on the alienation of the worker from his labor.
In an essay written a few years later in Marseille in 1941, “Prerequisite to Dignity of Labour,” we find Weil writing again about the negative effects of work done in inhumane conditions, but this time from the vantage point of someone who was undergoing a spiritual conversion. She begins the essay by stating that in all manual work and all work done out of the need to survive, there is an element of constraint: “it means exerting effort whose sole end is to cure no more than what one already has, while failure to exert such effort results in losing it.” Anyone who has had to work for a living—to pay rent, support their family or themselves, and put food on the table—will understand the kind of experience Weil describes vividly: “the unit of time is a day and [workers] oscillate like a ball bouncing off two walls, from work to sleep, working so as to eat, eating so as to continue to work and so on ad nauseum.”
For Weil, the condition of working simply to subsist produces “revulsion.” All workers, but especially those who work under inhumane conditions, are the most susceptible to revulsion. The connection to her earlier notion of “affliction” is explicit. Revulsion, it seems to me, is an instantiation of Weil’s theory of affliction that applies specifically to workers. In this state of revulsion for the worker where all “effort is survival,” the Good is notably absent. As Weil puts it, “necessity is omnipresent, good nowhere.” Weil’s intellectual debt to Plato, her deep love and allegiance to his philosophy, is especially evident here, and is indicative of her moral philosophy at this later stage in her career.
Never a particularly orthodox Marxist, it is Weil’s unique conception of work as it relates to the Good that I would argue distinguishes her among other philosophers similarly concerned with labor relations, forms of oppression, and revolutionary politics. Breaking ranks with Marxist orthodoxy, Weil claims that Revolution is not a cure-all for this state of revulsion, but rather like a “drug”; it is an illusionary form of compensation. Revolution “as a revolt against the injustices of society” is right, according to Weil, but “as a revolt against the essential misery of the working condition it is misleading, for no revolution will get rid of the latter.” If revolution is only a partial solution, what does Weil suggest as an alternative?
II.
As “Prerequisite to the Dignity of Labour” continues, Weil makes a turn, revealing her hand. It is here, as her thought begins to ascend to a loftier, spiritual plane, where Weil begins to lose me. What workers need most of all, Weil argues, in order to fill their miserable and empty lives, is beauty. “Only one thing,” Weil writes, “makes monotony bearable and that is beauty, the light of the eternal.” What is not needed for workers is bread so much as beauty in the form of poetry—but not poetry’s “closed inside words,” as we would conventionally assume—poetry in the form of religion. “Such poetry can come from one source only, and that is God,” she writes. Religion fulfills what workers are fundamentally lacking in their lives: purpose. Interestingly, for Weil it is the worker who is in a social and economic position most well-suited to receive God: “Nothing separates them from God. They have only to lift their heads.”
The very work that they do, which was also the medium for much of their misery, becomes also a vehicle for their salvation. Although in the workplace “all thought is dragged down to earth,” the tools and material of the workplace contain, for Weil, the cure. The workplace, as Weil enumerates, is full of reminders of God. For these workers, “the very work which paralyses, provided it be transformed into poetry, will lead to intuitive attention.”
Work is the ideal medium for the practice of Weil’s notion of “attention,” a crucial, loaded term in her philosophy, traces of which can be found in her early factory journals, although it wouldn’t become a fully fledged concept until the final years of her career. What then is Weil’s theory of attention? It is hard, given limited space, to summarize her concept fully. Nevertheless, here is an attempt.
Contrary to the conventional understanding of attention as a kind of intense mental effort, Weil separates attention into two categories: inferior attention (mental exertion or “mental gymnastics”) and intuitive intention. “Pure, intuitive attention,” she writes, “is the only source of perfectly beautiful art, and truly original and brilliant scientific discovery, of philosophy which really aspires to wisdom and of true, practical love of one’s neighbor.” Attention is also, for Weil, a form of prayer, one that, if practiced correctly, promises a direct link with God. Like prayer, it involves a great amount of patience, and it requires us to leave ourselves open to the possibility of being awed.
Weil’s practice of attention is also intimately connected with the Good. It is here where we see Weil’s particular flavor of Platonism in full force. She writes, in Gravity and Grace: “If we turn our minds towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.” This kind of orientation towards the Good, through the practice of attention, involves a particular form of self-abnegation—the suppression (or even destruction) of the Ego. However, in Weil’s case, this detachment does not result in a hands-off, cloistered kind of noninvolvement, but instead a particularly charged form of ethical engagement with the world.
At first, this statement seems to be, like many of Weil’s theories, a paradox. Here, understanding a little about Weil’s thinking on the relation between perception and ethics is helpful. For Weil, in contrast to other theories of phenomenology, perception and value judgement are coterminous. Thought, she argues, occurs simultaneously with discernment: we perceive and we judge simultaneously. Thus, for Weil, acting morally is contingent on “seeing” the other properly. Attention, in Weil’s unique formulation, is therefore able to take the form of an ethical precept. Especially when the subject of our attention is another human and their suffering, the act of attention takes on pronounced ethical dimensions: “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it.”
Attention, when its object is another human being, can be described as a conscious attuning to the sacredness inherent in the other regardless of their status, their behavior, or their identities. Proper action towards another human, for Weil, can only first emerge when this inherent sacredness of the other is properly apprehended.
III.
With all this in mind, what can studying Weil, both her work and her life, teach us today? What if we do not agree with all of her views, especially those concerning God? What if we are unbelievers? I’ve struggled with this often while reading Weil, as I find myself torn between being drawn to her strongly and almost inexplicably despite rejecting (or at least severely doubting) many of her fundamental religious beliefs. As a spiritually curious, lapsed Christian, there is much of Weil that I disagree with. Still, I can’t stop reading her. Reading gives me a glimpse of the kind of clarity and surety that having such devout belief can bring to one’s life. It is this feeling, of being awed by such a display of devotion, that is part of the reason I return to Weil, again and again. This, and the fact that she seems to have something important to say about nearly everything. As one of her translator’s, Richard Rees, puts it in the introduction to her First and Last Notebooks: “There is probably not a single fundamental problem of our age, in any domain, that is not resolutely faced and examined somewhere in these pages.” She is a thinker who, I believe, rewards continual, long term engagement. In other words, Weil rewards our attention.
Unfortunately for her readers today, Weil’s work will not provide a simple compendium of answers to common ethical questions. A reader looking for a “self-help” style guide on how to live will come away frustrated. Her writing does not provide any easy answers. It will not, for example, tell us how to solve climate change, who to vote for, or whether you can buy from Amazon and still consider yourself a good person. Even the more direct answers that she does give to moral problems may prove equally unhelpful, at least initially. But do I believe that a sustained engagement with her work does serve to train us to be better at thinking “ethically”—at interrogating our beliefs, and our motivations, and our ideals, so that when we do act, we do so with great intention and moral clarity.
In a general sense, I think Weil serves as a model of someone who lived a committed life, held firm ideals, and thought and lived rigorously until right up until her death. She is a model for a version of the philosopher: the philosopher as a thinker who is also engaged in daily life—a model of philosophy not as a solipsistic retreat, but as continual re-engagement with the world. It is not only Weil’s theories that are worthwhile to study today, but her particular way of thinking through them.
It was Weil’s thought as a verb and not as a noun that ultimately proved the most rewarding takeaway during my year of reading her. By reading, in her journals and essays and lectures, Weil articulating simultaneously her experiences “doing” work and “doing” philosophy, I began to understand the intimate relationship the two possessed for her. Philosophy, for her, was not something detached from one’s daily, banal existence but something fundamentally inextricable from it. After spending a year with Weil, I believe that she has much to teach us about what it means to be a thinking person in this world and how thinking itself is a morally fraught action. Weil is something of a philosopher’s philosopher: she writes lucidly about the role of a philosopher, and what doing philosophy means at all.
At her very best, Weil is a kind of moral exemplar in the sense that she encourages us to think more critically about our thought processes (and the actions that spring from them) and to commit ourselves more deeply to what we believe in. As she writes in her notebooks, “philosophy is exclusively an affair of action and practice. That is why it is so difficult to write about it. Difficult in the same way as a treatise on tennis or running, only much more so.” This is both a wonderful, succinct definition of her conception of philosophy and a useful way to approach her own philosophical practice. For Weil, thought was action, although it was not a complete substitute for it. Even if her attempts to enact her ideals were sometimes flawed in execution, there is much to admire in a person who is willing to live and die by their beliefs, a person whose ethics are so enmeshed in their life, that it is nearly impossible for them to separate ethics from existence.
It took me a long time to come around to Weil. I felt intimidated, uncomfortable, and a little guilty reading her. It is easy, when reading Weil, to feel ashamed. One feels that they are continually falling short in her presence. I am reminded, every time I read her, that I am not doing enough for the causes and ideals I believe in. I think that, especially today, this feeling is not a bad thing. As one of her earliest friends and later her biographer said of her, “Who would not be ashamed of oneself in Simone’s presence, seeing the life she led?” Shame, I think, should only be our initial feeling reading her. For if we get past the shame, the richness of Weil’s teachings are unveiled to us, and we are given the immense privilege of bearing witness and giving attention to her beautiful, luminous mind.
"Nuanced Portraits: On Brandon Taylor’s “Filthy Animals” "
Los Angeles Review of Books
September 2021
Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor. Riverhead Books, 2021. 288 pages.
“POTLUCK,” THE FIRST story in Filthy Animals, may just be the perfect encapsulation of a Brandon Taylor story. It reads a lot like a miniaturized version of Real Life, Taylor’s debut novel, released last year to widespread critical acclaim (it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and included in The New York Times’s “100 Notable Books of 2020”). All the ingredients of a Taylor story are here: an outsider protagonist, a dinner party, an explosive romantic encounter, and a microscopic examination of the violence lurking under even the most benign encounters. Taylor’s unique gifts are all on display in this opening story, which forms the first in a quintet of linked tales featuring recurring characters (the 11 stories in the collection all influence one another in various ways).
Taylor is uniquely adept at capturing the discomforting feeling of being out of place at a social gathering. For anyone who’s ever had the painful experience of standing around awkwardly at a party, hovering on the fringes of conversations hoping to be admitted, this collection will surely resonate. See, for example, this moment early on in “Potluck”:
“The conversation was difficult to catch. Everyone was talking in extended references to other moments, other events, other parties, and each reference, instead of drawing two things into relation, was instead the whole of the idiom, the entirety of the gesture. […] He had no way of getting inside the reference, the system.”
This quality of being “outside,” in one way or another, is one of the recurring themes of Taylor’s writing. In both Real Life and Filthy Animals, Taylor is preoccupied with various categories of estrangement — whether among friends, among peers, or even among one’s own family.
Perhaps it is Taylor’s scientific background that allows him to anatomize social interactions so effectively (he left a graduate program in biochemistry to pursue a writing career). As in the above quoted passage, Taylor treats human interaction schematically without being overly clinical. For anyone worried that a scientific background might lend itself to a stilted, lifeless prose, I can assure you that the stories in this collection pulse with life. Neither cold nor detached, these stories are suffused with a warmth and humanity that recalled for me the uncanniness of Raymond Carver, the empathy of Alice Munro, and the meticulous irony of Chekhov.
There is indeed much of Chekhov in these stories — in their revealing details, in the way events gradually build and unspool, in the author’s close observation that plumbs the depths of human behavior. As if cheekily noting the connection, one character in “Potluck” even makes passing reference to the Russian author: “Is your heart’s desire to interrogate strangers at a dinner party like a Chekhov character?” In Chekhov’s stories, we are often given a one-dimensional portrait of a character at the beginning, which is further complicated and revised as the tale progresses, so that by the end our initial expectations have been undermined.
Taylor’s gift for close, empathetic observation can be found especially in the linked stories in this collection. The dancer Charles, for example, whom we first encounter in the opening story through the limited vantage point of Lionel, is given greater depth in the third story, “Flesh.” Here, we inhabit Charles’s perspective as he explores his relationship to dance and to his body, the fragile vehicle for his livelihood, as well as his complicated relationship with Sophie. This relationship, the linchpin of the linked stories, is fractured by a sexual encounter with Lionel in the opening story, only to reach a kind of tentative resolution in the final story in the collection, “Meat.” Charles, who in the first story is an enigmatic antagonist and romantic interest, is eventually afforded the same narrative attention as Lionel, and as a result our initial view of him grows more complicated. He is no longer just a minor character but a flawed and interesting human being in his own right.
As characters appear and reappear across stories, we are given richer, more nuanced portraits of each of them. Encountering them again and again, we experience some of the readerly joys one is accustomed to in a novel. Indeed, the hybrid form of the collection places it somewhere between a gathering of individual stories and an episodic novella. Not all the stories are explicitly related, but they all share similar settings, preoccupations, and themes. Most concern the lives of students or young people engaged in creative professions, most are set somewhere in the Midwest, and many feature characters who are estranged in some way from their families. Almost all feature a character who is on the “outside,” often due to their race or sexual orientation.
Although the stories are successful as individual units, I found myself most compelled by the ones that follow Lionel, Sophie, and Charles. These linked tales, stitched throughout the collection, allow the characters, and thus the author, more room to stretch out and breathe. This added depth and resonance sometimes made the stand-alone stories feel leaner by comparison. This isn’t to say that such tales as “Little Beast” or “As Though That Were Love” aren’t well crafted in their own right, but as stand-alone pieces they made less of an impact on me compared to the richer, more three-dimensional portraits we get in the linked stories. Taylor is proficient at narrative compression, a skill showcased in the shorter pieces, but he shines most, I think, when given the leisure to revisit characters and their interpersonal dynamics, usually from different vantage points, to apply additional layers of perspective to relationships we thought we understood on first sight.
Events in one story have repercussions, later on in the collection, in another. The effect is a bit like watching a chain reaction occurring in slow motion. By and large, the stories in Filthy Animals are patient and quiet — until they’re not. These stories are not flashy, there are no postmodern tricks, just a masterful grasp of pacing that gradually builds tension toward an inevitable eruption.
Reading the 11 stories, I found myself thinking of the painter Paul Cézanne. I thought of the way he would approach even the simplest of still-life subjects — a bowl of apples, say — with a meticulous, almost obsessive desire to render it as faithfully as possible. Taylor’s portraits exhibit the same kind of attention to quotidian detail, the same solidity and fullness and depth. Taylor is rarely content to allow one perspective to dominate in his writing. He considers his characters from multiple viewpoints, from all angles, meticulously layering brush stroke on brush stroke, returning, like Cézanne, to the same themes, the same dynamics, the same subjects, again and again.
Text available on request.
CODY BENFIELD
“How I wish I could name them all,
But the list, confiscated, cannot be found.
— “Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova
I. Introduction
The masthead of the recently created COVID Memorial website reads, “Not forgotten. Not just a number.” The website, created sometime this year during the COVID-19 pandemic, functions as a digital graveyard of sorts to commemorate some of the more than 2.5 million (at this time of writing) lives that have been lost during the pandemic. The site allows families to post brief obituaries of their loved ones along with a photo. Scrolling through the seemingly never-ending stream of posts commemorating parents, children, friends, and lovers who have died from the coronavirus, the sheer scope of collective grief is staggering. The United States recently surpassed the grim milestone of 500,000 COVID-19-related deaths since the pandemic began. One of the pressing questions we now face is how, while still in the midst of a pandemic, we should honor those we have already lost and the thousands more who will die in the coming months.
The FAQ page of the COVID Memorial website describes its raison d’être:
“People around the world are realizing that COVID-19 is much more than statistics and graphs […] These are the faces and lives we have already lost.”
Browsing this website, one gets a sense of the moral impetus underpinning this memorial. As evidenced by these posts, many have not been granted the simplest dignity of being allowed to see their loved ones on their deathbeds. A reoccurring, heartbreaking detail in many of these obituaries is that their loved one died alone.
Websites such as this one exist, in part, because of the nature of the pandemic and our measures to contain it: In order to stop the spread of the virus, we have been forced to grieve its deaths largely in private. If any funerals and memorials are held in person now at all, they are small, private affairs. The pandemic has deprived us of public opportunities to mourn. We have not been fully allowed to grieve. In response to the reduction of the victims of this pandemic to mere statistics and the lack of public opportunities for mourning, people have invented new ways to give these deaths the individual dignity they deserve.
If it is true, as Joseph Stalin is famously reported to have said, that “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,”how can we prevent these deaths from becoming mere statistics?Whose obligation is it to hold all these deaths in memory and give each their due? This dilemma prompts the question: Do “we”, in a collective sense, have a moral obligation to remember the dead?
II. An Obligation to Remember
Much has been written, in philosophy, about how one ought to be, and much has been written about memory, but far less has been written about the interstices between these two —a domain we might call the “ethics of memory.” This concept may at first seem counterintuitive, since we usually think of memory as more related to forms of knowledge than to actions and ethics as being the domain of our actions. However, as Paul Ricoeur argues, it is possible to speak of an ethics of memory:
“Memory has two kinds of relation to the past, the first of which […] is a relation of knowledge, while the second is a relation of action. This is so because remembering is a way of doing things, not only with words, but with our minds; in remembering or recollecting we are exercising our memory, which is a kind of action.”
I want to emphasize Ricoeur’s observation of memory’s relationship to action, remembering as “a way of doing things.” We might call this voluntary memory. There are countless examples of voluntary memory in our everyday lives, actions we take to shape how and what we remember. Think, for example, of the student who writes out flashcards to study for an exam, or someone who employs a pneumonic device to remember a phone number. By pointing out the dual aspect of memory as both knowledge and action, Ricoeur helps us become more attuned to the agency we possess in the act of remembering.
If there is such a thing as voluntary memory, it becomes possible to speak of “acts of memory”, the same way we speak of “acts of service”. On a grand scale, these acts of memory are enacted through memorialization. For what is the memorialization if not the act of committing something to collective memory? Many of our rituals surrounding death deal with this idea explicitly. A memorial service frames a person’s life and ultimately shapes how we will remember them. A discussion of the ethical concerns of memory, on a large scale, must therefore eventually turn into a discussion of memorialization.
One significant recent scholar on this topic is Avishai Margalit. His book, aptly titled The Ethics of Memory, is an instructive source to turn to when considering the questions of memorialization and memory. Margalit, building on existing discourse on collective memory, is concerned both with microethics, the ethics of individuals, and macroethics, the ethics of collectives. In the book’s introduction, he lays out explicitly his aims: “The topic of this book is the ethics of memory, with a question mark:Is there an ethics of memory?”
Margalit begins his investigation by first distinguishing between morality and ethics, two terms which are often conflated, but that he believes refer to fundamentally distinct concepts. These two terms, in Margalit’s view, are distinguishable by the kinds of human relations they refer to. Ethics tells us how to regulate our thick relations with others, usually people we are in close emotional proximity to. Ethics, on this account, is broadly concerned with ideas of loyalty and betrayal. Morality, on the other hand, governs our thin relations—our relationships with strangers and acquaintances—and is more concerned with themes of respect and humiliation.
This distinction is important, both for Margalit’s project and for our current discussion of memorialization because memory, Margalit argues, usually falls under the domain of ethics, meaning it is a concern of our thick relations. Care is at the core of our thick relations, and care, Margalit argues, is only possible if we ‘remember’ the person we are caring for.
Communities of memory, with one example being the family, Margalit says, are the foundation of ethics. Memory is a prerequisite for our thick relations and is thus under the domain of ethics. Consequently, this means that by Margalit’s original definition, memory doesn’t extend beyond the ethical borders of our intimate circles. However, there are some instances where Margalit argues that the imperative to remember becomes relevant to communities of thin relations—the domain of morality. Margalit gives the Holocaust as one example of an event that extends beyond the typical ethical borders of memory, and, as I will argue, the COVID-19 pandemic also falls into this category.
The Ethics of Memory is interested in situations where the moral imperative to remember extends beyond our inner circle. Margalit goes on to advocate for a “moral community of memory.” A moral community of memory, for Margalit, would be tasked with remembering certain “radical evils,”a term Margalit borrows from Immanuel Kant. These “radical evils,” according to Margalit, include “crimes against humanity, such as enslavement, deportations of civilian populations, and mass exterminations.” I would like to extend Margalit’s definition of “radical evil” to include another large-scale recent tragedy: the COVID-19 pandemic. The scale of death in the US alone rivals that of World War II, making this pandemic a tragedy on the same scale as the other kinds of mass suffering that Margalit describes. Additionally, although the deaths from the pandemic are from so-called “natural causes”, and thus not intentional in the same way as the other atrocities Margalit describes, an argument can be made that the rampant, uncontrollability of the pandemic is also the result of poor decisions made by human actors such as politicians and world leaders. The pandemic’s staggering death toll is the result of a pathogen, but also the result of the action (or inaction) of individuals. A recent study by Lancet found that 40 percent of COVID deaths in the US were preventable.
I argue that this pandemic, as a large-scale traumatic event, would fall under the purview of Margalit’s “moral community of memory.” It is an event that “we,” in a broad sense, have a moral obligation to remember. Once this obligation has been established, the question becomes, What do we mean when we say “we?” Who exactly is responsible for this remembering?
III. Who Should Remember?
In pre-modern times, the role of remembering important cultural events would likely fall to that of the storyteller—the bard, singer, orator, or griot who learned a repertoire of stories to pass them on to future generations, not only for the amusement of an audience, but for the transmission of cultural memory. Today, most modern societies have dispensed with the tradition of the oral storyteller. With the advent of modernity, asWalter Benjamin laments in his famous essay “The Storyteller”, the role of the storyteller has declined until it has become virtually nonexistent.
In absence of the storyteller as our receptacle of memory, Margalit’s concept of the “division of mnemonic labor” provides a potentially useful alternative. Building off of the economic concept of “division of labor”, Margalit adapts this term to refer to the way that the burden of collective memory is distributed throughout a society. He goes on to explain:
“In traditional society there is a direct line from the people to their priest or storyteller or shaman. But shared memory in a modern society travels from person to person through institutions, such as archives, and through communal mnemonic devices, such as monuments and the names of streets.” Who then, does the responsibility for preserving and transmitting cultural memory fall to? We all, in a sense, have free rein in determining what gets remembered. Each of us, for example, will hold our own unique memory of this pandemic. But in practice, cultural memory today is usually constituted by the exporters of mass culture: the press, politicians, artists, writers, etc.
As Margalit points out, the most enduring transmitters of memory are nonhuman. It is rather physical objects, the communal mnemonic devices—monuments, art, artifacts, and memorials—that are “responsible, to a large extent, for our shared memories.” In this way, I argue it will be our artists, writers, and architects who are the best suited for tackling this task of remembrance. They are the ones who, in the coming months and years, will face the unique burden of preserving the cultural memory of this pandemic and the countless lives that have been lost.
IV. The Ethics of Memorialization
The task of memorialization is always a complex process, deeply fraught with ethical considerations. An ethics of memorialization seeks to lay bare these ethical questions. It is especially concerned with rhetoric—the way that memorials convey their historical message or content. Recently, we have seen the kind of controversy that memorials can spark with the recent debate around Confederate monuments in America. The story of the justifiable backlash against these monuments is a case study in failed attempts at memorialization, failures which an ethics of memorialization seeks to interrogate.
There is the ever-present threat, in memorialization, of distorting history to serve the needs of a regime or ideology. In the case of Confederate monuments in America, there has been a recent resurgence of scrutiny and outrage at the ideological connection between many of these monuments and white supremacy. The outrage and controversy around these monuments has only grown in the past year, resulting in the removal and destruction of many Confederate monuments around the country. In just the past year, after the killing of George Floyd this summer by a police officer, nearly 100 Confederate symbols were removed in the United States, “either by local decrees or forceful protesters.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on Confederate monuments is an example of an ethics of memorialization in action. An ethics of memorialization seeks to ask questions about how memory is being constructed, and whose story is being told. The report, which features an exhaustive list of the nearly 2,000 Confederate monuments in the United States and a compelling argument for their removal, frames this ethical question explicitly in its title “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy.” Its heading further lays out the ethical stakes of this particular case of memorialization: “Our public entities should no longer play a role in distorting history by honoring a secessionist government that waged war against the United States to preserve white supremacy and the enslavement of millions of people.”
As the example of Confederate monuments in America shows, failed attempts at memorialization can distort history and reify violence, rather than providing reckoning, closure, or healing. Even events as ostensibly “apolitical” as a global pandemic can still be inadequately memorialized. Events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which are simultaneously “universal” in their reach, but highly unequal in their impact, have an arguably greater potential to leave voices out or to come across as incomplete or one-dimensional. This doesn’t mean we should shy away from the task; it simply calls for a tremendous amount of care and attention to be paid to any attempts at memorialization.
It will require a great deal of creativity and ingenuity to properly account for all the collective loss we have experienced since the pandemic began. Our old models of monuments and memorials may not serve our needs this time around. They may be instructive in some ways, but it is imperative not to repeat their mistakes and shortcomings. This pandemic is a unique tragedy in many ways and any attempts at memorializing it will have to rise to meet the unique demands of the current moment.
The COVID Memorial website is an early, triaged attempt at memorialization. It satisfies an urgent need, providing an outlet for those who have lost loved ones during the pandemic and are looking for a public space to mourn. However, it is more a product of necessity—simple, utilitarian—than a carefully-crafted piece of artistic expression. These memorials will come later, either while the dead are still being counted, or in a few years when we finally have a moment to look back and take stock of all that has been lost. These new memorials will likely have to invent new ways of articulating grief for a post-pandemic world. This may mean utilizing new technologies, new mediums, or perhaps even inventing a new language of grief, in order to properly speak of our dead.
Editor Thomas Mar Wee reviews Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts.
In the opening pages of Fake Accounts, the recent debut novel by Lauren Oyler, who is better known as a critic, the narrator describes her intentions (and the novel’s intentions) in telling the story of the dissolution of her relationship with a man named Felix who, she discovers, has been secretly operating an extremely popular conspiracy theory account. The narrative is structured in six parts and plays out roughly over the course of the beginning of Donald Trump’s Presidency.
The narrator believes, as she states, that she is the most interesting character in this story, a belief that reflects both the narrator’s self-obsessive personality and alludes, slyly, to the inherently self-obsessive nature of writing a story about oneself. She goes on to say that she is writing this story in order to better understand herself and also in order to “enchant an audience, promote certain principles I feel are lacking in contemporary literature, and interpret events both world-historical and interpersonal.” This is a bold agenda for any novel, especially a debut. And it means that we are perhaps inclined, as we read, to place the novel under greater scrutiny than usual. We are invited to hold the novel to the demands it sets for itself and especially to its promise to rectify some of the purported defects of contemporary literature.
Debut novels, especially by critics, invite a certain amount of (perhaps undue) criticism. They are a tempting target for other critics, especially if the author is known for being devastating in their critiques of other people’s writing. As someone who went into reading Fake Accounts unfamiliar with Oyler’s criticism and who has a soft-spot for debut novels, I am perhaps more predisposed to searching for moments of promise and potential in Fake Accounts rather than to relishing places where the novel and its author fail to meet the daunting standards they have sets for themselves.
However, if I had to evaluate Fake Accounts on its own criteria, I would say that it occasionally entertains while not quite managing to enchant, and that it successfully melds the world-historical and the interpersonal in the way that it captures a larger historical moment through the observations of its protagonist. Whether it succeeds in rectifying the ills of contemporary literature remains a matter of debate, one that is predicated on an agreement about the merits or deficiencies of contemporary fiction in the first place.
There is perhaps an argument to be made that the novel sets itself up for failure. Only the very best novels manage to be simultaneously enchanting, grand and personal in their scope, all while reinventing literary trends. One can, I believe, appreciate the moxie of a novel’s ambition while still remaining skeptical about whether it ultimately succeeds in its aims. Time will tell how this novel will be remembered within the history of early 21st-century literature. What can be said about Fake Accounts at this point in time is that it appears more to reflect the trends and attitudes of contemporary literature rather than subverting them.
Although not unique to them, the kind of relentless hyperawareness and self-analysis characterized by the novel’s narrator seems particularly endemic to the Millennial and Gen-Z generations. This wry, cynical, slightly disinterested, critical tone combined with varying degrees of self-awareness seems indicative of many of the novels that have emerged over the years out of a loose cohort of Millennial writers (the narrators of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation come to mind in particular).
Oyler, who self-identifies as a Millennial, has written a white, Millennial-aged female narrator who seems to be representative of a particularly contemporary form of Internet-addled self-awareness and self-obsession. The narrator, who blogs for a Buzzfeed-esque website, is plagued by a hyperactive pattern of thinking which she at one point refers to as the “neurotic minute-taker of my thoughts.” In grand terms, this attitude of constant criticism of others and the self, of constant risk assessment and the mental tallying of scores, and of a sense of life as something lived under the constant threat of public scrutiny, could be called the malaise of our postmodern condition. In humbler terms, the narrator’s attitude will be intimately familiar to anyone raised on the Internet or who spends too much time online.
This novel’s strength at accurately reflecting the common thought patterns of a generation bred on social-media-fueled self-scrutiny is also often its downfall. The experience of reading Fake Accounts is one of recognition and tedium. Reading Fake Accounts, I was reminded of another novel that similarly attempted, through the neuroses of its narrator, to reflect a certain cultural moment—in this instance, 20th century modernity filtered through the lens of existentialism. I am referring, of course, to Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, considered his major success as a novelist and the only novel of his that most people still bother to read today.
In both novels, I was impressed by the author’s ability to report the experience of living in a particular cultural moment and by their accurate portrayal of the interior psychological states of their protagonists. Both novels feature a protagonist, who by their very ordinariness, becomes in some way representative of the social conditions of their milieu. For both novels, however, the reading experience was as frustrating and claustrophobic as it was illuminating.
The strength of Oyler’s writing comes primarily from her apt observations. Like a novelist of manners, she is highly attuned to the different ways people perform in social situations, both online and offline. When there is comedy in this novel, it is observational. Perhaps due to her background as a critic and culture writer, her prose lends itself to aphorism. There is a satisfying flash of recognition in reading Oyler’s narrator describe a specific emotion, personality type, behavior, or way of interacting online that is familiar to us but seldom described.
This strength quickly becomes, when repeated throughout the novel, tiresome. The tedium of Fake Accounts comes in part from its bloated structure, frequently bland descriptions, flat characterization, as well as its questionable tendency to report events and conversation indirectly. The protagonist’s inability to escape the deluge of her thoughts, coupled with the narration’s lack of compelling description, ultimately results in a novel that feels trapped within itself.
In the spirit of being generous, this tedium may be more the result of the novel’s exhausting subject matter than the result of its faults or failings. It is often tiring and redundant, even nauseating, to read a portrait of the historical moment one is living in, even if that portrait is a faithful one. If, as Stendhal famously said, the novel is a mirror on a high road reflecting life back at us, perhaps there are some experiences that simply don’t benefit from being thrown back on a contemporary reader. The mirror may be spotless, but we may be tired of seeing ourselves and our current moment reflected back at us.
A person’s experience reading Oyler’s Fake Accounts will likely be predetermined by what they look for in the books they read. Recently, I find that I need to be thoroughly convinced to read a contemporary novel that only offers, at most, an accurate reflection of our times. I find it exhausting enough just to live through our alienating, late-capitalist, postmodern Internet Age, and this has led me more often to seek out books that either report a novel experience, offer a perspective that is different from my own, or suggest alternatives to present circumstances.
In many ways, Fake Accounts is a faithful mirror. It presents a believable, if extremely unlikable narrator with all-too familiar neuroses. It reflects our hypermodern condition of perpetual estrangement, paranoia, and anxiety. A reader will likely find many eerily resonant moments in this novel. The question becomes as to whether the world that this novel reflects is one a reader wants to spend any more time in. Perhaps this will be one of those books that is deemed mediocre upon its initial publication, but years later, when future readers are curious to see what life was like during this period in history, it will gain relevance and stature for its accurate portrayal of our tedious historical moment.
Fake Accounts / Lauren Oyler / Catapult, 02/2021 – $26 (Hardcover)
Interviews
Writing Beyond the Masterpiece: Thomas Mar Wee On Embodying the Unromantic Writer
Working Artist Magazine
March 2025
ELIZABETH: In your own words, could you introduce yourself both to me and to the reader and share who you are and what your artistic practice is?
THOMAS: My name is Thomas. I’m from outside Chicago, and I’ve lived in New York since 2017, when I moved here for college. I have been writing since I was a kid, and I have slowly realized that I want to try and make that into a career. It’s been a really long process of convincing myself to actually try to follow through with that realization.
I am at Hunter College for their fiction program. It’s my first year. I am also freelancing and doing a bunch of random stuff, but I have worked as a barista, I have worked in publishing, tutored, been an assistant for people, worked a bunch of part-time odd jobs. Ideally, I’d be writing and working as an editor and a critic—working with people focused on consuming art, talking about art, writing about art, and producing art.
Living here [in New York City] has been such a boon for all of that. I came here, and people were really serious about creating. They would be, you know, twenty or something and making a magazine or shooting a film. Meeting a bunch of people like that made me realize that I could actually take writing seriously. Something I love but that can also be annoying about living here is that people are very honest and often unashamed to be nakedly ambitious. I slowly picked up on some of that, and now I am less ashamed to be like “yeah, I’m a writer, even if you’ve never read my work.”
ELIZABETH: I totally get that, and, as someone who also grew up in Chicago, I do think Chicago is the city that pushed me into falling in love with writing. I think I would have fallen in love with writing no matter what, but for me, growing up within and around the Chicago DIY scene and seeing people create in a way that was fun, enjoyable, and feasible gave me the bug to do it myself. But, of course, Chicago is also a more affordable city than New York.
I would love to hear more about what parts of your growing up in Chicago instilled a desire to be a writer within you. How were you able to carry that with you in New York?
THOMAS: I think back really fondly on that experience of coming into myself in Chicago. I was very shy about wanting to be a writer. I had one friend who is still one of my closest friends—Ruby. She‘s a little bit older—we met in high school. She was the first person I knew who was like, “I am a writer.”
Ruby was really serious about writing in a way that was completely foreign to me. I went to a big public high school and there were a lot of people doing a lot of different things. I felt that I was in the middle of a divide–I was hanging out with people who were kind of considered burnouts and people who were extremely driven in a specific, academic way. There wasn’t much room for anything in between or just pursuing art very seriously.
Growing up, a lot of my friends were really serious about music, and that was the scene I found myself in. I was in band—I played clarinet and saxophone—and entered into a tiny DIY scene that was sort of spillover from Chicago. I met people who were more focused on school and people who weren’t but were still very dedicated and talented.
I definitely have the school bug. I still wanted to go to school, but I also always wished I could be the kind of person who was set on going to a conservatory or something. I had this one friend who dropped out of music school, and now they’re in this band that has gotten very big. They are touring the world. I’ll shout them out, the band is Friko. I bring them up because they are a Chicago success story. They were working very hard for a very long time, but they had a community in a scene that was small enough and really supportive, and they could get big in their hometown and then expand outward. There are plenty stories of that happening here [in New York], but I think it is harder.
For me, the point of origin when I realized I could be a writer was meeting my friend Ruby. She was like, “oh, you’re a writer? What do you write?”
At that point, I was writing fantasy and, honestly, fan fiction. Stuff that I did not take seriously. It was also so private. I was pretending to be this stoner music guy, but I was really going home and writing. Ruby was the first person who took that seriously. She was older and had a whole sensibility that I hadn’t been exposed to. It helped that she was older. She went to college ahead of me, and she came back and exposed me to all of this stuff that I was initially put off by. She would be like “here’s Kathy Acker, here’s Proust, you need to read this book, Thomas,” and the book was Swann’s Way.
I was like “why is this guy just writing about his mom for like fifty pages?” And then it became one of my favorite books by one of my favorite writers. Ruby was the first person I knew who took herself seriously.
I went to college, and I wanted to come to New York because I had swallowed up all these romantic notions of going to New York. I had seen movies, read books, and I thought I was going to live with the Beats or something.
ELIZABETH: Oh yeah, I thought I was going to go to CBGB every night.
Thomas: And then you realize that basically all of those places are gone, yeah? But you can kind of still do that, you can live in that spirit, but it looks really different. You’re living some degraded 21st-century version of it. I came here for college and honestly was really intimidated. Back home, in high school, I was a bigger fish in a smaller pond. Then, I came here, and I felt like everyone else already knew what they were doing.
I kind of retreated for a while, honestly. I was an English major, but I took some writing classes, and I think I had to slowly accept that writing was actually what I wanted to do. I had to accept that it wasn’t going to be easy, and I wasn’t expecting to be good enough to achieve anything–I knew what the odds were, and I had no illusions of selling my work early on. I knew that it was going to be years and years to even get a little bit of something in return from my writing.
I graduated, and I was really lost. It was Covid, and I didn’t know what to do. This is where publishing came in. I thought, “ok, I really love writing and editing and being an editor on [student-run literary magazine] The Columbia Review.” I loved the collaborative aspect of it, the ability to talk about writing all day. I was naive–I thought “this is a job, a career.”
Then, I realized it was a lot more complicated and harder to get into publishing than I thought. So I applied to MFA programs, and I got waitlisted and then did not get in. I was like, “what am I going to do now?”
I found my way into the small magazine world. I got really lucky. I got what is called an apprenticeship at this magazine, One Story.
They were so supportive in such a tangible way. I think some of these magazines, their heart is in the right place, and they want to support young people in publishing, but then all they have is an unpaid internship, and they promise to write you a letter of recommendation after the internship.
I had graduated, and I needed to pay my rent. One Story gave me enough money so that I could at least pay my rent. And then, I was working as a barista on top of that. Now, I am in grad school for writing. I had a period where I was working a nine to five at a literary agency, but now I am returning to that life of having the writing thing and then working a totally unrelated job in the service industry. I feel I’ve experienced both worlds of stability in the nine to five and the perks that come with that and working part-time and non-salaried jobs.
ELIZABETH: So many of our peers at The Columbia Review went into publishing because the magazine was a publishing world feeder. I remember in college, I so badly wanted to be in publishing. I was like, “I’m a writer, I want to be a part of this world,” and then I realized the number of hoops you have to go through even to get your foot in the door, and you’re making $30,000 a year without the guarantee of progressing. It’s so cutthroat and, also, it felt very stagnant. In a way, that was very frightening to me.
You’ve managed to take the experience of not getting into grad school, and now you have gotten into a program. I would love to know what made you decide to give grad school another go and how you made it work this time–whether it was luck or something else–and why you chose the program you chose?
Thomas: The short answer is that I was getting burnt out at my job. I graduated in 2021, I applied to one program, I got waitlisted, and it was a drawn-out, anxiety-inducing process. It felt like my whole future hinged on one decision beyond my control. And then I didn’t get it, it was like “oh shit, I didn’t get the thing I wanted, it didn’t work out,” and I did not know what to do next.
The publishing industry, right now, it’s not like in the “old days.” That’s a romantic view, but you used to hear stories of people who would show up at Penguin and be like “I’m bright, I’m a 21-year-old English major,” and they’re like “oh come on in!” That just doesn’t happen anymore.
I did three unpaid internships. I was home for part of that. In my senior year, I won an award for my thesis, and that was a strangely large amount of money that came from the English department and allowed me to finance a summer in New York while working an unpaid internship. One thing led to another. I was very lucky, and it also took a long time to get an entry-level job in the publishing industry. I got a job that felt like it was my dream job. It was at an agency that represented so many writers I loved. I got there, and I was like “oh my God, this is the rest of my life,” you know? I was riding high for a long time. And then, suddenly it came crashing down.
I realized what the day-to-day looks like. It was intense. I don’t want to burn bridges here because I had an incredibly valuable experience. At the same time, I realized this place was kind of notorious for being extremely intense, and the people who succeeded were willing to sacrifice a lot and dedicate their entire lives to being an agent. I admire my colleagues who are these selfless servants, to the art of getting books made. I think part of that requires almost a lack of ego, a lack of urge to produce writing, you know what I mean? You purely see yourself as an instrument. I realized, “oh my God, this could be the rest of my life,” and it was terrifying.
I saw people working at the agency who started right out of college 20-30 years ago. The type of agency I was at is rare nowadays, you really can be there for your whole career, which doesn’t really happen anymore. You always hear about editors leaving because the pay is shit, and they are stuck in this giant corporate structure shoved around, pushed out, forced into retirement. It felt like we were kind of a tiny ship in a crazy sea of publishing, which in some ways was lucky. We were independent a little bit from the rise and fall of the market.
I also knew that if I put in my time and worked there for the next ten years, financially I would not be making a huge increase. I found out that my colleagues weren’t making what seemed like much more than I was making, and they had been there for years longer, and they were full agents. The financial incentive was not that strong—you really have to buy into it. You really have to believe you are helping books get out there. The cool thing was, I believed in the work. But the day-to-day demands were intense, and honestly I wasn’t the best at it. I was good, even really good, at certain parts, but I was not the best.
I had a lot of hand wringing thinking I wasn’t smart enough, or good enough. Through the support of my friends and my loved ones, I realized I was good at some things. Maybe not at this specific kind of extreme version of work, but I was good. I was writing as an escape from the job. It was hard because the work was intense, but I needed something else. I think my self-esteem needed me to create something that wasn’t tied to my job.
There were days I would go in, I would mess something up, and I would think I was worthless. Then I’d go home and write. I’d begun a novel before I started, and I was able to finish a draft while I was at the agency. I think that gave me confidence—I felt I had at least a solid first draft, and at least I had finished something. I realized I could continue working on something long enough to see it through, at least for a first draft.
I kept applying to MFA programs after graduating. The third time I applied, I got in. I applied to three programs that third time around because applications are expensive and time-consuming. There are plenty of programs that are happy to take your money, and in some ways, I am skeptical of them. I think they are asking you to pay for something that does not promise a guaranteed return. I think there is something predatory about that. Of course some are more like this than others. But it’s impossible for an MFA to ask for tens of thousands of dollars and promise to get you published afterwards. That’s not how it works.
So, I applied to programs that were fully funded. For my own financial situation, that was a necessity. It narrowed the pool down to maybe ten or twenty programs. I wanted to ideally stay in New York, which left it to NYU, Columbia, Hunter, Brooklyn College. I knew that NYU did not offer guaranteed funding, and Hunter was fully funded. The Hunter program also seemed designed to give attendees space and resources to write rather than being billed as a pre-professional incubator. I get why pre-professionalism is a draw for people, but because I’d worked in publishing, that was less of a priority for me. I focused on finding a program that would give me time, space, and guidance to write.
I joke that the Hunter alumni magazine should interview me. It’s only been a semester, but Hunter is amazing so far. I’m very rosy on the program. That might change, but so far, it has delivered. The program is structured like a workshop, a place to experiment. It also attracts a certain kind of person, a certain type of writer. I’ve benefited from being around people who are less focused on selling their book and more focused on the writing. It’s been really freeing.
There is a part of my brain that wants a concrete return on my time and my work. I know how long and grueling the process of bringing a book to print is from working in publishing. It is both demoralizing and motivating seeing writers who are struggling mid-career, or people who would come to my boss with a novel they’d spent ten years of their life working on. Their whole future is hinging on this novel. You have to be kind of delusional, I think. You have to believe that one day it will happen, that it will all be worth something. I think it’s been good being in a program that doesn’t pretend to give a prescription for success.
It feels like an oasis from the outside world, the commercial and corporate ideas of publishing, where writing is something that, if you check the right boxes, your book will do well.
ELIZABETH: I’m intrigued to hear more about you as a writer, but before we get there, you talk about the support you got from your loved ones and your friends. Community can make or break one’s ability to muster enough courage to do the thing they want to do. How have your communities in both Chicago and New York, your friends, your family, nourished this urge you have to create, and how has that support formed you as a writer?
THOMAS: No one has really asked me that before, and I really love that question because community is a huge part of creativity. Sometimes you encounter people who are truly just, I don’t know, it’s like they were touched by God, and they know they are going to be an artist. I think that is rare. I think, most of the time, becoming an artist is something that your environment encourages you to do or, at least, it pushes you in that direction.
Neither of my parents are artistic. I grew up with a single mom, and she has always been supportive, full stop. The difference is that her world has been pretty traditional–she was a social worker, a teacher, she went through her life checking the right boxes. At the same time, she was never like “you need to become a doctor to make money.” I appreciate her because she’s honest. She took jobs that did not pay a ton but were in a line of work she believes in. That also means she can’t be like “you have to sell out and make tons of money.” Of course, at the same time, she is worried about my long-term stability.
She has been very supportive, but she is also cautious. I think part of my growing up has been finding my relationship with that and choosing things that are riskier. It was scary to quit my job. I have had moments this year where I feel happier, but I am more worried about money. I gave up a job with healthcare and stable income. At moments I am like, “was it worth it?” And then I go to class, and I am like, “yeah, it was.”
I would sometimes envy my friends who grew up with artist parents. I grew up in a pretty traditional household. My dad, who passed away when I was a kid, grew up first-generation Chinese. His parents were immigrants, and he did the pretty classic first-gen immigrant thing of being an overachiever academically. He went to Stanford, tried to be a teacher and then switched to computer science. He was someone who, as far as I know, loved music and art. But he was a very practical person from what I know of him.
My friend Ruby also grew up with a single mom but lived a much more precarious life early on. She experienced real hardship but also grew up in a family of artists. Her mom is now a very successful graphic novelist. As a kid, she went to her mom’s art school classes, and I was so jealous of that. For Ruby, there was no other option, becoming an artist was the norm. She struggled with the opposite of what I struggled with—how someone gets a corporate job was way more abstract to her than becoming an artist.
For me, pursuing the arts was like how does one even do that? My grandmother would scoff at my family members who were artists and would take unglamorous jobs to pay the bills, but I always thought they seemed happy. I was lucky that I grew up with a grandfather who was the ultimate English major nerd. He went to college, and his dad wanted him to be a doctor, but my grandpa rejected that. He became a professor of library sciences and had an amazing library. I felt like I got to know him through borrowing his books. I wish I had grown up with him, we would have had great conversations about Joyce and the Modernists.
He had an impact on me–that combined with growing up in Chicago around people who deliberately decided to do the DIY thing and work a million jobs and play in twenty bands and hope something would happen of it.
And then I moved here, and I think the reason I stayed here is because I met people who were really pursuing that and I really got along with them. To say the cliché, I found my people. It took a really long time, but what keeps me here are my friends who are making a lot of sacrifices to pursue the thing they really love.
ELIZABETH: And now, I would love to hear more about you as a writer. What does being a writer mean to you?
THOMAS: It’s changed a lot. There is the capital W version of being a Writer and then there is the thing you do every day. Sometimes those are at odds. I think part of my experience has been the romantic view of the writer clashing against the reality of writing. When I was younger, I was taken with the romantic view of being a writer. I had this idea of being in New York, and it did get me to come here, so I’m not upset.
I write a lot about my family. Writing has been a way to process my life, how I grew up, and to unpack a lot of experiences. I am definitely one of those people who needs to write about something for it to make sense, that is the deep reason. Surface level, I was an only child. I was bored and lonely and writing was one of the activities you could do by yourself. I think I developed a really rich interior world because I had to entertain myself for a lot of my childhood. That’s when I really started.
I also love language. My mom instilled that in me. She’s an English teacher, and she studied linguistics. I read books where I was like, “how does someone write like that?” Virginia Woolf was one of the first writers I encountered whose writing was so beyond my abilities. It was like seeing someone doing an insane gymnastics feat, and I was wondering how on earth a human could do something like that.
I write a lot about my parents, but not exactly my parents, and not necessarily my relationship to my parents. I have to distance myself more. I’ll write a character who is my age but is actually my dad. A lot of the writing I have been doing has been trying to understand relationships with people I didn’t grow up directly with. I didn’t grow up with my dad, but I feel like writing about him has enabled me to get to know him.
Right before my dad died, he wrote me a bunch of letters. I came across them again when I was eighteen and read them. They were intense and moving. They made me really emotional. I felt like my life had been building to that moment of finding those letters again. I felt like they were this ultimate text of my life.
If I have to point to some true seed of me wanting to be a writer, it was those letters. I was so grateful my dad had taken the time to do this, when he was dying. And I decided I needed to do something with them for myself, for him. I love writing. It has gotten to the point where I can’t imagine not writing anymore, even if no one ever reads it. I think, at this point, I am kind of stuck with it.
ELIZABETH: I think you answered this with the stories of the letters, which is such a wonderful gift to give someone and to receive. In a time when it is increasingly difficult to create, how and why do you keep creating?
THOMAS: That is kind of the answer. That is the big picture answer. There are a lot of romantic ideas about the act of writing. In my dreams, I wake up at five am every morning, and I sit there with my beautiful leather notebook, and I write, and I attack —the Hemingway thing of attacking my typewriter, and I am writing as if it were a noble craft, like the idea of going home and working in a woodwork shop.
It can be motivating to have that idea of writing, but the less glamorous version of it is that I write on my phone. I write at work. I would write at my coffee shop job in Grand Central. That’s not ideally how I would be writing. It’s an actively unpleasant way to write on this cramped screen, and I hate being on my phone all the time for that reason. But it was working–you know? I think once I accepted not to knock the thing that was working, I was like “ok, I am going to do this.”
It’s been slow, steady little drips for years now. I have moments where I have great days, where I sit down, and I bang something out. I think that really keeps you going. But I kind of came to terms with the fact that as long as I keep coming back to writing, that’s more important than the number of pages I am writing each day.
I like to tell my friends who are struggling with a creative block that, “as long as you believe that eventually you will write again, it can be months or years, that’s what matters. It’s more important that you are sustaining the marathon.”
ELIZABETH: Is this the mindset you brought to working on your novel, which is, in many ways, like running a marathon?
THOMAS: Yeah. I am not a long distance runner, but if you start a marathon thinking “oh gosh, I have to run over 26 miles, and that is so far and so long,” you paralyze yourself. If I knew how long it would take–and this first draft ended up being 400 pages—I would not have started. But I was able to psychologically trick myself. I started it while I was working this coffee shop job in Grand Central, and the story started out really small. It was just little bits here and there. The form of that draft and the premise is that it is a book of letters from a father to a son.
ELIZABETH: Does it have a title yet?
THOMAS: The title right now is Paper Son, and that’s probably going to stay. I took a course in college about the beginning of the novel. We read all these books that were written as letters because people didn’t know how to write novels yet. I didn’t love all of them, but there was something sweet in watching writers figure out in real time how to write a novel. I was inspired by that because I was also figuring out how to write a novel. I thought writing a novel in letters was a little forgiving. I knew I wasn’t great at the geometry or moving the pieces around the board to create a story, but I could get from one letter to the other.
ELIZABETH: Do you have any next steps for the novel yet, or are you holding on to it right now?
THOMAS: I’m holding it. I am probably going to work on it a little at Hunter. I am at a crossroads. I’ve worked on it for a long time. I would like to do something with it. I also know a lot of examples of writers who show up with their beloved first novel they have been working on for years. It’s their pride and joy, their baby. And then they talk to an agent, and the agent is like “you are a great writer, but we can’t sell this.”
That could easily be the situation. It’s hard to know when to move on, you know? But I honestly don’t know if this is—it feels worth pursuing, but I don’t know if it is the thing I need to be doing right now.
I also don’t know, honestly, if I am old enough and experienced enough to do this project justice. I feel like I might have made the mistake of choosing a project that would be better served as an older person. I like reading first books by young novelists partly out of curiosity for myself. There are common subjects and themes and approaches that make sense. You are limited by the experiences you have.
But I picked a premise of an old man who is dying and is writing about his son and fatherhood. I haven’t had that experience. It’s hard, and I am not as confident in doing that. I can’t rely as much on my own experience. Maybe, I put this in a drawer and come back in my forties, but I have invested a lot into this novel.
I think when you are young, there is this pressure of knocking it out of the park the first time, otherwise you are a failure. I try to tell myself that the first attempt is often shit and it continues that way for a long time. I am trying to remind myself that it is not a race.
I know writers my age who have much more raw talent than I do that are just too much of perfectionists or too afraid of rejection or they are afraid to share their work. I am like if you could see what I see on the other side: all the shit out there, people who are so confident, I have been tempted to be like you should read some of these submissions I have read.
If I could give one piece of advice: if you are a writer, don’t just read really good stuff. People are always like “read the best,” and that is important. Also read the really bad stuff. It’s motivating. That definitely inspired me to submit more.
At the darkest moments, my worst nightmare is that I am that guy who is sixty and believes he is the next Charles Dickens and is totally delusional. That is my biggest fear—being out of touch with where you actually are as a writer in terms of your abilities. Part of the reason I wanted to do an MFA was to be held accountable. Some of the danger of being in your own world is that you can get really out of touch with the quality of what you are producing—both good or bad. You can be writing something, and it can be basically publishable, and someone discovers it twenty years later, and you’re dead and they’re like “oh this was this brilliant writer.” Or the opposite where you’re like “I am a genius, everyone else is stupid” and your writing is really, really bad. But you are so trapped in yourself that you reject any kind of criticism…
I think writing is an inherently lonely profession. Sometimes I wish I had picked something more social. I think about my friends who are musicians. It sucks for so many reasons, but at least if you are on a shitty tour, you are hopefully with your friends and going through it together.
With writing, the highs and lows, you are the only one who ultimately experiences them. I am an avid consumer of these career help resources for writers. It’s really helpful hearing other people’s experiences, especially people you really admire.
There is this false impression that the finished product comes out fully formed and perfect when, in reality, it’s more likely that the finished product is draft fifty, and the writer was living in their car before the book got published.
Some resources I love are The Creative Independent. I wish I had found that sooner. They have great interviews from all different disciplines. I also want to shout out my friends who do a podcast and reading series called Limousine. They are great, approachable, fun people and writers. They do a great job demystifying the process. Hearing from people who are around our age is really helpful, too. You get something from an NPR interview with Zadie Smith, but with someone who is a peer, you can almost see how a person does it when they talk about the road that led them to where they are.
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel Real Life, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, as well as The National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and the 2021 Young Lions Fiction Award. His work has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, Buzzfeed Reader, O: The Oprah Magazine, Gay Mag, The New Yorker online, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow.
Thomas Wee: I thought that I would start by asking you about the differences between the forms of the short story and the novel. You had your spectacular debut novel, Real Life, and now you’re following that with Filthy Animals, a short story collection. I’m curious if you think that you can achieve things in the short story that you can’t in the novel, and if there’s one you feel more at home with?
Brandon Taylor: I think that there are some writers who are able to work on a story at a time. They are able to follow their impulses down into the morass of storytelling. Then they look up, and years have gone by, and they have written thirteen stories, and they all just so happen to go together. I am not one of those kinds of writers. I can’t start writing a story until I know the shape of the manuscript into which it’s going to fit, because the characters don’t just show up. Characters always come with constellations of relationships. I sometimes won’t start a story until I can feel out the four or five stories down the road from it.
Sometimes those connections are narrative, and sometimes they’re thematic, or sometimes they’re connected by location, or sometimes they’re connected by time periods in a person’s life. But I am always writing in constellations of stories, and I’m always thinking about the manuscripts. I’ve got what you could call “manuscript brain.” I can never just write a one-off. Even my stories that are not narratively connected are resonating with other stories in a larger system. My process is that I walk through the world and wait until I can feel a sufficient weight to power three or four stories, and then I’ll sit down and write them.
As for the difference in form, I think because I’m always thinking in terms of superstructure and thinking in groups of stories there’s maybe not much difference in my approach to the novel or the short story. I do think that the short story is my base narrative unit. That’s the form I feel most comfortable in, and that I’ve read the most of, and that I think about the most. I do think that there are certain things that you can do in a short story because they’re shorter. You can do experiments in voice in a story that you can’t do in a novel. The commitment isn’t as high for a story as a novel in terms of structural, or formal play, or voice work. There are things that you can do in a novel that you cannot do in a story. You can really tease out a character’s whole life in a novel. You can do that in a story, but it’s hard to do that in a story without cheating. [laughs] It’s hard to do that without having mastery over the techniques.
I think that they’re different. They have different rhythms. They have different impulses. They demand different things from the reader and from the writer.
TW: The point you made about constellations brings me to my next question on the recurring characters in your collection. Why did you choose to separate the Lionel stories and intersperse them throughout Filthy Animals?
BT: I wrote those stories in 2016, and I wrote them at a time when my understanding of what you could do with a story was very narrow because I was still learning. When I was writing these stories, I felt like I hadn’t exhausted everything I wanted to say about this character, but I didn’t have a pattern or a blueprint. I didn’t know you were allowed to do it, back when I still believed in rules.
Then, I came across the stories of the Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant, who wrote hundreds of stories in the New Yorker and a collection called Varieties of Exile. She has recurring characters in her stories, and NYRB Classics published two sets of her stories in one volume. It blew my mind. I thought, you can do that? You can tell one bigger story across different stories?
As a clingy reader, I get attached to these characters and don’t want to let them go, so I knew I wanted to do that. I wrote until I had written what felt like the full breadth of the stories of Lionel, Charles, Sophie, Alec, and the rest of the characters. I could keep going, but then it’s just a novel.
I felt that part of why they had to be stories was that with a story you could just cut out all the boring plot with stories—you don’t have to explain all of the backstory or include transitions to get to the big important moments. You can pick the parts that are interesting to you, and you can change point of view, mood, and tone. There is so much to do with that ellipse and white space that happens between stories, and that can be where you compress the boring material and leave it up to the reader.
I wanted to follow these characters but not write a whole book. By putting the stories together, I used them as the central organizing column with interstitial stories that had different modalities and registers that expand the book and enrich it.
Campbell Campbell: I want to turn to your use of interiority. Your books focus on interiority to the point where I feel like I have access to thoughts that I shouldn’t have access to. Could you speak about your interest in pursuing interiority? And what cannot be said in the fiction form? And how is this connected to your larger goals for Filthy Animals?
BT: I used to not know what interiority was. I considered myself a naturalist and a disciple of Ibsen, and I was trying to compress everything to gestures and not give the reader any interior thoughts. Then, I went to Iowa University and was told that you need interiority because Iowa is the paragon of the fiction that descends from Henry James and Jamesian psychological acuity. I internalized this idea that every story should have interiority to the point where my stories would get so long and bloated with interiority.
I found a nice middle ground, and I learned a lot from reading Jean Stafford and Mavis Gallant. I always try to make interiority flow from the natural context of the narrative, and I do not want interiority to be so overwhelming that it dissolves into abstraction. We have all read books, some of which were very good and very moving, that follow as, “We are having thoughts about thoughts about thoughts about thoughts.” There are no bodies anywhere, and the interior state is the whole of the thing.
I think that interiority is important, but I try to locate the primacy of the story in the body. The more interesting part of a character’s interiority isn’t even the thing that the author says; the more interesting part is often what is underneath the interiority. The subtext of the interiority that the author is evoking. The pulses that grant access to the character. It’s like being in a plane and going over a body of water and looking down to see sometimes a flat surface and sometimes a dark surface, but there are sometimes flashes of light that you can see at the right angle. That is a well functioning interiority—moments of insight and illuminated patches of consciousness.
When I’m writing about interiority, I always think that we have been inside for so long. Where are we? Where is the body?
TW: I know that the terms of genre may not be useful, but where do you see your fiction in the lineages of modernism, postmodernism, and naturalism?
BT: When I was a younger writer I thought, why is it so hard to understand postmodernism? Then, I read the modernists and thought that it was so bizarre. Now, I have read more literary theory and literary criticism and realize that it can be so much more confusing. I think that contemporary fiction is dominated by what I call “character vapor,” the disembodied and psychologically alienated narrator of Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk, the roaming Sebaldian “all-seeing-eye” consciousness that I do not want to do.
I hope that my work is embodied. The theme that I come back to again and again is, I want to capture, not the pulse of consciousness, but the pulses of embodiment. What it is like to live in a body and move through our three-dimensional world and come up against various systems that act upon the body. I think that there was this split in fiction like 10 years ago, where some people went the Sebaldian route and some people went the historical realist route. I consider myself more on the embodied side of things and try to think deeply about the paradox of being a consciousness and a body who’s moving through space.
Sometimes I think, “Oh, I want to write Black fiction with Black people being in their bodies,” and then I read Ann Petry and Richard Wright and know that they have already done it sixty years ago. Finito. I have a vocabulary for myself because of them, and that’s why I locate myself as an embodied naturalist.
TW: How do you feel about the label of “realism”? Do you consider yourself a realist, and do you consider that word to still be a valid description of fiction today?
BT: I consider myself a realist. I think that realism is an acceptable term, if we acknowledge that there are a variety of realisms. One moment that frustrated me was writing a realism essay and having my classmate claim that it was not realism. It is real to me, and they were reacting against certain impulses in my writing that come from being a Black queer person.
In my work, for example, there are people who believe in the devil and ghosts and coincidences. My classmates in my MFA would push back against some of these stylistic impulses of my work, and I said that we have different realisms. I’m from Alabama where everybody believes in ghosts. Then, some people would ask, “But you’re a scientist?” Yes, I am a scientist and an atheist and still believe in ghosts. I think that realism is any internally coherent system that represents a more or less legible relation to an agreed-upon reality, and that reality can look different depending on who is looking at it.
People are silly when they insist that realism looks one particular way, as opposed to thinking of realism as a relation to some exterior reality that we move through in different phases and modes. But, yes, according to my definition, I am such a hard-coded realist that it looks naturalistic.
CC: I want to turn to the running theme of language as a limited medium for communication. The characters often speak in references to which the main character does not have access, and the main character’s thoughts are not accessible to any of the other characters. Could you talk about your interest in limited communication and what is unsaid?
BT: I grew up in a family that did not talk, so I had no access to the thoughts of people around me. When I went to college, I asked my friends, “Do other people have thoughts and feelings?” And they said, “Brandon? Yes.” Such was the extremity of my deprivation from the interior states of other humans. That is my experience with the world, and I was frustrated when I read a novel or short story and the characters would know what to say to each other. They have access to the same references, and the dialogue is so slick and smooth with no misapprehension or misunderstanding.
I realized that one thing that characterizes my work is that I write characters who do not have access to collective social knowledge, social paradigm, or a set of references. They are trying to figure out the games that are being played around them. I think that this is such a dominant part of my social experience that I do not see in fiction: nobody is talking about the impenetrable set of references that coheres between people who do not have access to the same references. As someone who has difficulty in settings like that, I want to capture the absurdity and beauty of it. People are able to communicate in a way that goes beyond what they are saying, and there is extra-materiality that is real social communion.
In Filthy Animals, Lionel is unable to communicate with others and is aware that they are doing it around him. That’s another element I am deeply interested in—the unknowability of others and the way that we are never fully privy to other people or their motives or their intentions. How do I know that people won’t hurt me? Do I have to take their word for it? You have to have faith that people who connect with you do not want to hurt you, and that can be a harrowing prospect if you have been on the outside your whole life.
In my writing, I hope to capture the tensions, impulses, fears that a person brings to a social situation and to see social encounters as a site of inquiry and curiosity rather than a place to rehash received paradigms or scripts.
CC: Do you think that this is an inevitable condition of the world? Or do you think that this is one condition that perhaps the character Lionel can overcome?
BT: I think that in the context of the book, Lionel’s condition is unique. But I do think that we all have moments, especially in a capitalist society, that one finds oneself in situations where you don’t have access to the references that signify belonging to that particular context. One example where people often experience this situation is when you do a class migration. I grew up working class, and then I went to college and I was suddenly among all these people whose parents had graduate degrees. They’re all talking in this very particular way, and they had a set of references that signified belonging to their class which was different from the set of references I had access to. This also happened when I moved out of science and went into writing creatively, with the people who had done MFAs and who had done English classes. I took two English classes in undergrad. Suddenly, I was among these people who had access to a whole set of idioms and references that I didn’t have access to.
I think that one of the things that signifies the particular contemporary condition of alienation, be it migrating across class or moving from one context to another, is the fact that you’re moving into a context that has references that you perhaps don’t have access to. There’s a particular kind of alienation and loneliness that comes from that. I don’t think that is an inevitable condition for everyone, but I do think it defines our contemporary condition.
TW: On a similar note, I enjoyed how you describe academia in a satirical but honest manner. Campbell and I are both steeped in this culture and were intrigued by how academia can seem like a performance, like birds signaling at each other. How do you think you’re expanding the campus novel tradition with Filthy Animals and Real Life?
BT: I find academia funny because I belong to it and am outside of it. I spent most of my life in academic settings, and I thought to myself, “What do I know enough about to fill an entire book? Being a student. That is the thing that I know best in the world.” It is why Real Life and Filthy Animals are centered around students. I love books about students and books set in schools. I cannot get enough of it. You would think that I had been traumatized enough. [Laughs]
But campus novels are often about people in the humanities, or white people, or straight people, or people who don’t have to work or worry about money or worry about what they’re going to do after they graduate. One of the elements that campus fiction lacks is the feeling of precarity that students contend with and characterized my own undergraduate experience. How am I going to eat today? Also, tomorrow? How am I going to afford coffee and make my scholarship stretch a whole semester? Even in an exam, I would be thinking, do I have enough money in my bank account for X, Y, and Z?
Part of what makes that experience so urgent for many people is a sense of precarity. In the reception to Real Life, a lot of people focused on—and I think rightfully so—that I was trying to rewrite the campus novel from the position of a Black, queer lens. I think that’s true, but embedded in that was also an attempt to bring a sense of precarity back to campus fiction.
TW: I wonder if this precarity is a historical phenomenon because going to college is now such a financial investment. College has always cost money, but I think that we are witnessing an inflation of college and a lot of pressure on students to make something of this risky financial investment.
BT: It’s horrifying…I recently read an article on the rise of adjunct fiction on over-educated characters who work at universities and experience precarity at all times. It was a review of Want by Lynn Steger Strong and The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood and looked at the experience of many MFA students who work as adjuncts, make little money, and write about probing the system. It is so horrifying to get a college degree, get access to some middle-class cachet, and have huge amounts of debt and not receive the job you want. But that’s America.
CC: Could we discuss the repetition of character dynamics throughout the book? I was interested in the multiple stories of someone alienated from an intellectual circle, or of someone estranged from their family, or of someone isolated from their sexual partner. How did returning to these scenes give you a new understanding of the anatomy of these dynamics?
BT: When Roxane Gay was promoting her short story collection Difficult Women, she said that when writers find themselves returning to the same scenes, they should not worry because that means they’ve found their voice. I thought, ah, yes, thank you for validating this habit of mine. [Laughs]
I think that it comes from a lifetime of being an outsider. Looking back at my early writing, I was always writing about displacement and exile and what it is like to be a satellite in a place where your “real life” should be but leaves you feeling displaced. The tension between the South and the collective. That theme animates all of my work. The idea of the forced return or one’s past being a country that you cannot repatriate.
In my stories, I start at the same place—a character, a collective, and the gap between the character and the collective—and follow a character’s singular relation to that sense of the whole. It is sometimes a relation of resolution, it is sometimes a relation of continued alienation, and it is sometimes a moment of connection and the realization that they want to be on their own. I wish that I could say it changes over my next two books, but it is still me figuring out how one lives in relation to other humans. How does one figure that out? I don’t know how one does that! [Laughs]
CC: We are reaching the end of the hour, so I want to discuss why you think critics and editors are choosing to read your books through an autobiographical lens. How do you feel about this reading, and why do you think this is a pattern in the industry with many authors, including Rachel Cusk, Ocean Vuong, and you?
BT: My attitude is that this is fair play since I did title the book Real Life. I can see why you may be tempted. Writers of color, writers who are female, writers who are not straight white males, write books on, not their direct experience, but what it is like to move through the world in their mode, and readers think that this is harrowing and ripped directly from their lives. I wrote in a recent blog post that every Black writer is an auto-fictionist even if he doesn’t want to be and even if he isn’t writing about people like himself.
I think that it’s a lens problem. White readers may consume literature about people of color from a sociological lens and assume that the greatest value of literature can be that it derives how a Black person lives rather than tells a singular account of one consciousness.
In my case, it happened because I wrote a book about a Black gay student from Alabama and in a science program in the Midwest and I was a Black gay student from Alabama and in a science program in the Midwest. There are obvious topological similarities between me and the central character of the novel. Sometimes, editors and critics think that that is the most important part and stop thinking about other impulses in the book. It is unfortunate that the autobiographical mode becomes the main mode of the reading and narrowest mode of reading, and it is unfortunate that Real Life is not directly about me at all. Filthy Animals is a more personal book but not directly about me, so I am curious to see how readers approach the new book.
I am working on a new novel that is directly from my life. Some authors play with that tension between the author and themselves, and they are autofictionists. Some do not, and they are assumed to be autofictionists. As a reader, I often do not know that a person wrote a book. [Laughs] I’ll think, ah, yes, this book that I am reading and that just came from the sky and that has no history. Then, I will read about the book and be surprised. I feel really lucky coming to the book in a childlike manner where I care most about the book and hear the context later.
CC: Could you talk about your goals and your intentions with the blog Sweater Weather? What are you hoping to pursue in the blog that you cannot pursue in your other writing?
BT: Thank you for calling it a blog rather than a newsletter! I love that I have a blog!
I thought about taking a break from the noise of Twitter, but I like that I can talk to people on Twitter. I revived the newsletter to have a continued dialogue with the world, and I started reading literary criticism and literary theory and having ideas on the contemporary literature that I was reading. I was developing a vocabulary for the content that I was reading, so I use the newsletter as a way to think through what I am learning in a way that is longer form than a Tweet. This lets me synthesize my ideas on contemporary aesthetics and literature and transform it into an essay form. I am writing these essays for myself and sending them out into the world. I am shocked that people are reading my newsletter and referencing me in criticism. [Laughs]
I resisted writing essays for so long because a friend of mine, Alexander Chee, warned me that you have to be careful because white readers love brown people’s essays but they don’t love their fiction and that if you want to be known as a fiction writer you have to be intentional about the nonfiction you’re publishing. It is easy to make a name for yourself writing think-pieces as a writer of color. That being said, I try to write essays that interest me and on my own terms so that I am not a race prophet, and I try to capture the tensions and paradoxes and nuances on what it is like to move through the world.
CJLC editors Campbell Campbell and Thomas Wee interview Kate Zambreno on her most recent work, To Write as if Already Dead, a postmodern telling of a body in sickness and motherhood and a study on the collage, distrust, and friendship in Herve Guibert’s To The Friend Who Didn’t Save My Life. Philosophical in her approach, Zambreno turns to other thinkers to find a collective understanding of mortality and illness.
Kate Zambreno is the author of many acclaimed books, including Drifts (2020), Appendix Project (2019), Screen Tests (2019), Book of Mutter (2017), and Heroines (2012). Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction.
August 17th, 2021
Campbell Campbell: You write about questioning which novel you would choose to study and write about. What drew you to Guibert? Why To The Friend Who Didn’t Save My Life rather than The Compassion Protocol?
Kate Zambreno: I love to cheat on what I am supposed to be working on, so when Jenny Davidson approached me and said that [Columbia University Press] is commissioning a series of book-length essays on novels, I thought that this would be my new secret project [Laughs]. I always need a secret project that I’m not supposed to be working on.
There were a couple of novels that I considered for the study. Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, and Bruce Boone’s Century of Clouds, a New Narrative work about friendship and community and volleyball at a Marxist conference. I love that Guibert is channeling Bernhard to write this fictionalized essay on Bernhard even though it is rarely read as a book about reading, a book about channeling, a book about an obsession with Bernhard.
You ask about Compassion Protocol, and the truth is I do find Compassion Protocol to be more beautiful, more profound, more elegiac, more despairing, but I chose To The Friend because it is the book that troubled me and that I often think people misread. There has been such a wonderful Guibert renaissance by writers that I admire, for example Andrew Durbin, but a lot of the review coverage of the Guibert book from the Semiotext(e) reissue has focused on the book as an authentic and sympathetic AIDS portrait. I think that what he is doing is more layered, more bitchy, more slippery, and it is a work that I kept reading and re-reading to figure out, since around the time that I wrote Heroines.
I chose the book because it was a problem for me. And I wanted to write through a problem, which was the problem of friendship and betrayal, the own writing I felt compelled to do through that. I felt that necessary friction and tension about the ethics of betrayal and how he was ruining his friendships for the sake of his writing, yet I also felt a kindredness and elective affinity for him.
Someone has to reissue The Compassion Protocol, though!
CC: I love that you mention Duras’ The Lover. I just finished it and found it exciting.
KZ: When I moved to New York, I was asked to do a panel with other writers–you can Google this to get the real gossip–but I got into a fight on stage with a writer about Duras’ The Lover. It was supposed to be a celebration of the book with four writers speaking on stage, and I had come from a writing community who revered Duras despite, of course, that there is amazing Duras and less great Duras like there is a good Guibert and bad Guibert. These were writers who were very productive and rewrote their work over and over again to have this whole body of work that was fascinating, glittering, and constant. So at the panel there was this other writer there who wrote one famous memoir and taught full-time at an MFA program. He just tore Duras apart and claimed that this was not real writing and could be workshopped to be better. I took the bait, you know, because I had not learned not to take the bait, and we ended up in this fight on The Lover.
I did not write a book on The Lover, though, because I didn’t know if I should be the one to write about it, especially the context of how she’s writing about race and colonialism. Even though there is an ethical slipperiness that I wrote about a person with AIDS, I did feel like I had to write about Guibert. If I didn’t write about him, that would be a deep loss for me because he is a writer that I think through and wrestle with.
CC: Who won the fight at the panel?
KZ: I don’t know! [Laughs] . I think that he was the famous writer that the majority of the literary audience came to hear speak and that he might have been perceived as winning due to his forcefulness, but I think that I won.
CC: Do you see yourself borrowing, expanding, or perverting Guibert’s form in To The Friend? How are you both circling around questions of the intertextuality of the novel and of the self?
KZ: I think that I was drawn to how much Guibert is reading Thomas Bernhad and channeling this mordant, nihilistic, fast Nietzschean ressentiment in To The Friend. Guibert was always channeling Bernhard, and I felt like I was channeling Guibert by writing about my obsessions with the notebook, diary, body, time, but I was also channeling him and Bernhard in the second half of the book.
I wanted to know what happens when you push a sentence into aggression, into despair, into absurdity, into an abyss, and I think that the person I have been ultimately perverting since Screen Tests has been Bernhard. I am not alone in my Bernhard obsession, and I think that it is his slightly fictionalized send-ups of artists and community and existential despair that I have provoked, and I have thought of my sentences through his sentences.
I like to think of less of the sentence and more of the space on the page when I think of Guibert. I am trying to create energy, space, sentences in conversation to other writers and hoping that my own sentence emerges from it, right? I hope so, but I do think that I have been gently playing homage to both of them and hoping that some of my voice remains. What is a voice? What is the self? What is beyond the boundaries of the self?
Thomas Mar Wee: There has been a lot of buzz around the “fragment” and the “fragmentary” in contemporary literature, including its prominent role in your own work. Do you agree with this label being assigned to your work, and how do you conceptualize the fragment as a unit in literature?
KZ: I recently had an event with Kate Briggs who said an interesting remark by Roland Barthes in his later period of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and A Lover’s Discourse. He said, “Oh, all of this talk of the fragment,” but you’ll have to look at the recording of the event because I am merely translating Kate, the translator. He was annoyed by this buzzword, that everything that is fragmentary [Laughs]. In my novel, I am trying to playfully reckon with these two buzzwords that seem to be attached to my work: autofiction and fragment.
The fragment–we can call it the F word–has been in discourse since the popularization of the lyric essay, and this brings up questions, such as what is fragmentary writing? Is a sentence a fragment, or is a paragraph a fragment? I do think that I am interested in the tradition of writing that is aware of the space of the page and of the rhythm and tone of writing, and I am intrigued by thinking of writing as language, of language itself as an object.
In Drifts, I am in conversation with Maurice Blanchot, the great theorist of the fragment who saw that sort of writing as anti-capitalistic, anti-commodity, where it favored writing that was centered on process and practice and against the consumable narrative. My work is in the notebook, the fragment, but that fragment may go on for pages and pages. I am a student of Sebald and Bernhard, of the digression, and I think that Sebald is called fragmented because of his obsession with the list, the archive, the museum, the zoological garden, the Wunderkammer.
I am philosophically interested in the fragment and bored by mainstream publishing’s commodification of fragmentary writing, and I think that there is a huge range of writing that is called fragmented that does not exist in the same tradition. It misses the vast mischief of contemporary writers who are experimenting.
TW: This brings up another question: what is non-fragmentary writing? Is it Henry James?
KZ: Campbell and I were talking about mysticism before you got on the call, and Amy Hollywood is a scholar of mysticism who has written about Henry James and his obsession with the object. He has a fetish with the object, so why is he not seen as fragmented?
TW: Speaking of intertextuality, works of visual art (both Guibert’s work and the work of other artists) are a frequently recurring subject throughout this book. What led this ekphrastic inclination throughout the text?
KZ: I was looking through the Book of Mutter this morning because I was sending it to a translator. Every time I do this, have to open a past work, I must confront questions like what is this book and is it any good. That was the first book in which I actively decided to write about visual art. I wanted to incorporate writing about Louise Bourgeois, both her biography and her process and her Cells, the magic and the form of the Cells. In this way I began to experiment with a collage that lets me leave the self, and that has been the way in which I have de-centered the “I” in my work, through collage.
I remember thinking that I couldn’t write about artists, such as Henry Darger and Louise Bourgeois, because I was not trained in art criticism. My partner John Vincler writes a lot about art, and we often ask: is it too easy to bring in other artists, what is the ekphrastic mode, why go to it, and what does it do for the reader? I think that we like to look at the visual to make the writing visual, and the visual world is what excites and disorients me that I feel a need to expand upon it. I have written catalog essays in the past, but I began to understand that there is a formula to it that I do not want to do. I will write about the visual for myself, thinking through the process of artists, and the way that these forms experiment in ways I long to, and sometimes it will later get published and become for everyone else and we can share in our elective affinities. I think that the process of writing about art brings me closer to thinking about my fixation on community and its relationship to capitalism and the ephemeral. I like most in the Guibert study–a moment no one discusses, and I don’t know why–is the long opening dealing with Manet’s friendship with Baudelaire, his unfinished painting on his funeral. Thinking about other artists is a form of historical and ecological thinking because it is centered in others. I wanted to pay tribute to Guibert, and his mentor Foucault, who wrote art writing and photography criticism. The most marvelously strange parts of To The Friend are the moments when Guibert is writing about 19th century artists and his own studies in drawings of everyday objects.
I am writing currently about Joseph Cornell–still thinking about him, his process, his work, his biography—his diaries were just as interesting as his boxes later placed in museums, and I kept thinking about the line in his diary that says collage equals life. His diaries and his organization, his archiving and source files, were as important to him as the objects he created.
CC: This text parallels Barthes’ Preparation of the Novel, which ponders the prerequisites of writing a novel. I love the passages in To Write As If Already Dead in which you gain inspiration and questions from your female friendships; how is female friendship essential to your writing process, and how does this contrast the male friendships between Guibert and his contemporaries who gossiped and betrayed one another?
KZ: I’m always arguing with Foucault in my head, who really revealed himself in his interviews, in conversation with others. While writing the Guibert study I kept returning to Foucault’s thinking about the formlessness of friendship, that was transformed from an interview and repackaged as an essay after his death, which focused on intergenerational male communities that could turn eros and bonding into knowledge. We can look at these ideas with suspicion and wonder how this may exclude anyone who does not fit the cute boy of the Foucault world. When I read his thinking on this I agree with him, am antagonistic to him, feel excluded by him. Do we always want friendship to be formless? No, we want boundaries, to protect from power imbalances.
I carried these ideas with me when I was writing the Guibert study. I wanted to focus on community; I wanted to focus on women and non-binary friendships; and I wanted to capture the frustrations and beauty of the knowledge that we can produce in those spaces. It is a necessary and political act to turn to the community for narratives and not subsume everything into one authorial individual project. Guibert and I both write from love, but he also has a ressentiment side to his writing and personality that I admire. Writers are all supposed to be so moral and write from a place of empathy, but I confess that one of my drives is to look at the haters, the anti-humanists, the bitchy writers.
That being said, I tried my best to be careful with my friendships in my work. Sofia Samatar is a frequent and playful collaborator, she often writes from our correspondences, as I write from ours in Drifts and a little in the Guibert study. Perhaps this sense of writing as a conversation, as a collaboration, comes from both of our experience in the blogging world, which is a desire for a space that is anti-capitalist, non-hierarchical, impossibly utopian, and at a time before the internet felt completely commodified. [In the book] I am paying tribute to that time when it resembled performance art.
TW: It is very different from buying a subscription to Substack, right?
KZ: Right, although there are wonderful longform essays that seems reminiscent of that world. But still there is that neoliberal world that forces everyone to market themselves and that renders everything business.
TW: The first half of To Write As If Already Dead deals primarily with your online friendship with a writer writing under the pseudonym of “Alex Suzuki”. Situated within a book that is ostensibly a study of Guibert, this seems to call for comparison between these two authors. What connections did you find between Suzuki’s anonymous writerly persona and Guibert’s oeuvre of radical self-disclosure?
KZ: Alex Suzuki is a fictional name of a heteronym for a truly brilliant writer. It is interesting that French autoportrait writing by Guibert and Duras, was happening at the same time as New Narrative, but the autoportrait writers were celebrities and best-sellers in France while the New Narrative writers were often writing for each other, and did not get published by major publishers in the States, with the exception of Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper. I would associate the Alex Suzuki character, rather than Guibert, with the New Narrative tradition, at least in terms of community, but also for the desire and longing behind their writing, which is about a conversation, a Blanchot idea of communion, as opposed to for the market. I think that Alex Suzuki, at least the pseudonymous character who wrote on a blog, and Guibert are similar in their tone, speed, and ease of writing.There’s something bloggy about Guibert—and a link between the letter, the diary, the notebook space, that he wrote from, and theorized, but also a blog. There’s more commonalities between me and Guibert, at least in terms of being authors in the world, and speed and productivity. The author who was the inspiration for the alter-ego that was the real life persona of Alex Suzuki is a deliberate, slow, compassionate, writer who writes a book every decade, and although I love him, that is very different from Guibert, and different from myself as well.
Larissa Pham is a Brooklyn-based writer and artist interested in chronicling intimacy in all of its forms. Her work has appeared in Bookforum, The Nation, and The Paris Review Daily, among other publications. CJLC’s Thomas Wee and Campbell Campbell interviewed Larissa about her recent essay collection, Pop Song, which features a remarkable breadth of art writing in addition to personal essays. Cover photo by Adalena Kavanagh.
Thomas Wee: I want to start with the process of putting together the essay collection: What was the process of writing the essays and anthologizing them? Had you written any of the essays before putting the collection together? Did you start the collection with the idea that these essays were all going to be eventually unified?
Larissa Pham: I started this project with essays formatted as lists, which I mention [in Pop Song] in a very meta way. That was how the whole project started: I was in Taos on an arts residency, to which I had applied with something completely different in mind. I was working on this manuscript for the first time, and I landed upon the list format as something that allowed me to connect things without really connecting them. It felt liberating to write in the list format as opposed to the narrative and argumentative criticism that I was used to writing.
Those four list essays became one component of the book. And I did draw on two previous written essays that were published in the Paris Review and titled “Blue” and “Body of Work,” but both essays were substantially revised in the final collection. It became a very holistic process—I was happy to write these essays, which I consider chapters, that speak to each other rather than act as discrete essays
Campbell Campbell: You borrow from many genres of literature in the collection—art analysis, memoir, cultural criticism, perhaps “MeToo” essays. Were you striving for one of these genres? Or something else? Did you hope to disrupt the conventions of these genres in writing this collection?
LP: I suppose that I was trying to disrupt all of those genres, but perhaps not intentionally when I was writing the project because I wanted to write freely. I wanted to write something that only I could write, and I finally had this book deal that allowed me to have more freedom. I didn’t have to think about the constraints of house standards, word count, or the seriousness of a review. I wanted to be able to flex and do what I am best at, so I was inspired by those genres but was not striving to write in a specific genre or mode.
CC: You employ theoretical terms to understand yourself in this collection, and I was interested in how most authors borrow authority from theoretical material and slip it into the narrative, but it seems that you are doing something different. What was the role of theory and autobiographical material in this collection?
LP: I don’t consider this book to be a work of auto theory because I do not consider it to be a book that argues anything. It was important to me that it didn’t. I don’t know if I could argue something clearly when life is so complicated. However, I do use theory and find it very helpful for giving language to and illuminating certain aspects of life. That’s the primary way that I use it. I know some writers who really like to just paste in a chunk of theory in order to bolster an argument. I think that’s one way of using it, but I think it’s a bit more interesting if we talk about, “Why this particular theory? What does it mean? How is it playing off of my other observations?” I enjoyed using theory in that way in the chapter “Camera Roll” with Sontag and in the chapter “Crush” with Barthes. I’ve always felt this way about theory: you can take what you want and leave what you don’t want, and it is not intended to be an authority on the world.
TW: I’m curious about your process of selecting the different works of art you discuss in your essays. I appreciated that there is an intermingling of canonical “high” art and—more conventionally thought—“lower” forms of art in this collection. Could you talk about that process of deciding which works you wanted to write about?
LP: I am curious what you might consider to be the “high” and “low” works of art because I like knowing my reader’s sense of references. Some reviews have pointed out that I write about Frank Ocean, but I think of Frank Ocean as high art! I included every artist in this book because I had an authentic experience with their artwork and wanted to write about it and ensure that I was selecting a variety of artists and different mediums. It is mostly contemporary art, which makes sense because it is based on artwork that I was seeing at the time. I wanted it to be accessible when I was doing the research so that, if the reader was interested in an artwork, they could reasonably find it somewhere online and have an opportunity to see it.
CC: I was intrigued that you included works that act as intellectual and aesthetic objects; and it seemed important to you to find works that could be experienced with the mind and the body. How did this inform your writing process?
LP: Writing about art occurs on two levels. You can think through art and experience it on a bodily level whether it be listening to music, dancing in the club, or looking at a painting. When I write, I like to think that I am not trying to replicate the artwork. A picture is not worth a thousand words because a picture can do something that words can never do. I am hoping to commit an imaginative act with words in which I convey what I am feeling and enrich the reader’s experience with the artwork. I am trying to understand why art means so much to me.
TW: In these essays you write about several groups of experience that could be called experiences of the sublime. What do you think of the ability of art, and especially writing, to record or provoke experiences with the sublime?
LP: I’m glad you pointed that out because I had a whole chapter about the sublime and then my editor and I cut it because like it wasn’t quite fitting into the collection. I had a chapter called “On Beauty,” in which I wrote about the work of Anoka Faruqee, who is an abstract painter based in New Haven who I studied with at Yale. She makes these amazing color field paintings. They’re not exactly color field paintings, but they’re similar to color paintings with their abstract compositions.
I didn’t get a chance to write about that in the text itself, but I do think that the sense of looking for something bigger than yourself does shape the text. Nature is a setting for the sublime, in the standard romantic sense of the term. Like a sea storm—it’s huge, majestic, romantic, powerful. I think that we turn to the sublime in literature to take us away from the mundane and alienated moments in our day-to-day lives.
CC: I want to turn to your fear of being misunderstood by your lover in the text and the reader. Could you talk about the way this fear of communication surfaces in this collection? What causes communication and knowledge of others to be limited?
LP: Ginger Greene pointed this out in a review in the Observer, “This writer resents the inability of language to convey everything that needs to be conveyed.” I do think that it’s tragic that language cannot do everything, which is the reason that I’m drawn to other art forms. A painting can do something different than what a book can.
I know that words are my medium and all I have to express myself. Words are the only thing I have, and I am never going to know what is going on in another person’s consciousness. It is tragic to me that there is this gap between people, and I think that the collection is leaning toward the figure of a lover—it is an address—while knowing that it cannot pass the distance. This space is where knowing forms, and the whole project could be read as an attempt to grapple with the tragic condition of humanity.
I have a tattoo from a moment in Anne Caron’s Autobiography of Red. Geryon and Herakles are two teenage boys in love and sitting in a car together, and they sit up in joint astonishment when the car starts, not touching but joining in astonishment as to fly parallel in the same flash. It is the space between them that is always going to exist, and they know it but are trying to reach each other anyway.
CC: Doesn’t fear of miscommunication and being misunderstood suggest that we have knowledge of ourselves? Why are you sure of this fact?
LP: I am not sure of it! My first book Fantasia was concerned with the idea that I have the trapping of the self, for example my glasses, nose ring, bangs, or general aesthetic, that may not be mine, but who am I if you remove these elements of myself? It is about a girl in college who meets her doppelganger at a party, and they descend into a web of obsession together. I do not know if the self can be known….
CC: You discuss Susan Sontag’s notion that, once you take a picture, it’s over and the image is dead. It would seem that you would have the same concern for writing, how can I write a book in totality if I won’t stay the same person throughout the writing process? What was your relationship to the book ex post facto?
LP: It’s funny because I clearly had to believe in this book to write it. I still stand by it as an artwork, but I wrote it over a year ago, and I think that its mission is to live with readers. It is not necessarily dead, but I know that I am more living than the text is.
I think that there is a lot of pressure on young writers to write every single thought they have ever had in their debut work, and there is a lot of pressure for debuts to be works of genius and synthesis of their every idea. That is fake and not possible because I am going to write more throughout my life. This book is merely a snapshot of myself.
TW: Building off your comments on the inability to know the self: Why does this book dramatize the distance between the authorial “I” and the character “I”, and what is your relationship to these two “I”s in this collection?
LP: I thought about this topic a lot while I was drafting the book. When you write an event, you are writing from a specific moment in time. Fiction has a narrator telling the story, but nonfiction has the seat where I was writing from and the movement back and forth in time throughout the collection. I had to be clear where my narrator was in that moment of time, and the book is written from the authorial perspective of me during the pandemic. The “I” is moving through time and existing at different intervals, and I wrote “Body of Work” in the present tense because I was borrowing that literary trope that writes criticism as though it is currently happening. I thought to myself, I am going to analyze these memories as if they are pieces of art and I am going to use this convention even if it does not work out. There is an authorial “I” from the pandemic time and the character “I” who has porous eyes observing the world.
TW: I am curious how you think narrative unreliability added to the text. Did you consider one of the “I”’s to be more objective, or are they both imbued with narrative unreliability?
LP: The authorial “I” pops up at moments when I sit down to write the chapter and can make judgments on the other “I.” That is how you have lines, like I don’t regret that or I was that girl. I am directly grappling with the many lives that I had in the past and that I can see from a distance.
Unreliability seems to be such a huge component of writing memoir and creative nonfiction. I think that most texts engage with that question—the unreliability of memory.
TW: In terms of your use of the second person, did you have a specific individual or a general audience in mind? How is that functioning in the text, and how does it affect the intimacy with the reader?
LP: It was the only way I could write the book. Bluets was a model for me during the writing process, and I think that many poetic texts address the reader as you. It is directed toward a lover, but I did not use a name because I wanted it to be anonymous and about the idea of the person and a literary device. I am still parsing why I did that, and I have asked readers if it affected their intimacy with the text and if they thought they were being broken up with in the text.
Perhaps it is too much on the nose, but the second person does occur in music and specifically pop songs. It is equally about a specific person and about anyone who is listening to it alone in a room.
CC: You discuss Carson’s interest in the body losing its boundaries in moments of love, but she further describes this phenomena as the cultural expectation for women from Ancient Greece to modern day in The Men. Do you view this phenomena as gendered? Do you have an understanding of why this happens and what are the benefits?
LP: I do not think that it is necessarily a gendered phenomenon, but I will anecdotally say that my friends and I are all women and have expressed it. There is a meme that was popular that asks if romantic love was a myth created to manipulate women. Is that true? [Laughs]
In dialogue with Barthes, all lovers wait for the sense of objections and isolation and have a fear of losing themselves in their love for someone else, and that is not gendered.
TW: I think that we could even describe Barthes’ and your work as gender neutral in the essays; the notions of love could be leveraged toward anyone.
CC: I am excited by mysticism and this notion that you can empty yourself to be filled by another person, and it seems that there is a connection between losing boundaries and embodied acts of mysticism, like meditation, BDSM, etc, that weaken you and fill you with something else. What do you think are the benefits and motivations to turn to the embodied acts?
LP: I have an essay about this topic that is coming out in the Spring issue of a magazine. It is about how I want to believe in god and be religious, but I cannot believe in god and turn to other acts instead. I think that we are talking about accessing some other mental state when we discuss transcendence and mysticism, and I have tried going to those states but have not known why I am drawn to another plane. I do not know if it comes from any dissatisfaction from the instability of this earthly plane, but I strive to leave it. I love hot yoga, meditation, and exercise, and I see this as an important aspect of BDSM even if I have changed my relationship to it since I wrote “Body of Work.” I see myself going to places to be made into a vessel for something else to touch me, whether it be hot yoga or the club.
TW: I think that it is interesting that many of the visual artists in the collection, including Agnes Martin, are fascinated by this subject and trying to provoke this response in their artwork. Do you think this state is more accessible in other art mediums, or do you think that writing can capture this vessel quality best?
LP: It’s great that both of you have brought this topic up because I didn’t write about Hilma Af Klimt but do write about her in the new article I wrote for Document Journal. She is such a cool mystic figure and had groundbreaking work long before she was famous, and Yayoi Kusama is similar in her communion with another dimension.
I think that nonverbal artwork helps us reach that place because the art is not literal and brings out speech rather than relies on speech—the language of the art is not verbal or written. I think that words and literature can take us to that place, but they do not take us there by describing the place. I think that I have felt like a true woman of transcendence when I have been so absorbed in a fictional story, transported to the setting, and made to care about what happens to the characters. I reach that place when I feel swept away by the masterful language in literature.
TW: Could you tell us the writers whom you’re lovingly indebted to in this collection? Who were you reading and were present in the metaphorical room when you were writing?
LP: This is embarrassing, but I read a lot of white women’s memoirs. I wanted to let myself go there and not question my ability to tell a story that was worthy of telling; that is such a hurdle to overcome. I read Bluets, Argonauts, The Folded Clock, Ongoingness, and Empathy Exams. I read literature by Kate Zambreno who is such an idol of mine because she is great at switching topics and talking about what she wants when she wants to.
It is interesting to talk about style because I’m currently in a fiction program—the residency MFA at Bennington—and I’m reading books for the program that are very different from what I read while writing the book.
TW: What are you writing now?
LP: I have the article for Document Journal. I am in the fiction program and learning how to write a novel, which is hard [Laughs]. In the next couple of years, I hope to have a draft of a novel loosely based on my family and the aftermath of the First Indochina War, which turned into the Vietnam War and led to my family coming to America as refugees. It will be interested in what we inherit from our parents and what they’ve inherited from the parents—the idea of epigenetic trauma in our memory.
I have never written about my family before, and I’m enjoying it. I’m also writing short stories to determine how fiction works and to play on a formal level.
Pop Song available from Catapult Books. For more of Larissa’s work, visit https://larissapham.com/.
CJLC editors Campbell Campbell and Thomas Mar Wee interview Meghan O’Gieblyn on her new nonfiction book, God, Human, Animal, Machine (Doubleday, 2021), an expansive and rich text that traces the connections between the history of religious discourse and the current artificial intelligence discourse.
Meghan O’Gieblyn is also the author of Interior States (Anchor, 2018), which won the 2018 Believer Book Award for nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Wired, The Guardian, The New York Times, Bookforum, n+1, The Believer, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes and her work has been anthologized in The Best American Essays 2017and The Contemporary American Essay (2021). She also writes the “Cloud Support” advice column for Wired.
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July 25th, 2021, 6pm.
Campbell Campbell: We hoped to start with a few questions to give our readers a sense of the topics in your book. What drew you to the connections between religious thinking and artificial intelligence discourse? How do you see religious thinking resurfacing in contemporary language around technology advancements such as artificial intelligence?
Meghan O’Gieblyn: I grew up evangelical and went to a small fundamentalist Bible college, where I studied theology. Two years into my program, I had a crisis of faith and left the school, and a few years later I renounced that whole worldview and became an atheist. I was living in Chicago, working at a bar, and one of my coworkers introduced me to Ray Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines. It’s one of the landmark texts of transhumanism, a form of West Coast utopianism that arose in the 80s and 90s that insists that humans can use technology to further their evolution into another species. Transhumanists helped popularize a lot of futuristic possibilities like nanotechnology and mind-uploading–topics that now seem a bit dated, though some of their ideas, like mind-computer interfaces, are now being developed. They basically wanted to achieve immortality, eradicate suffering, and transcend human nature to become something “beyond the human.”
I’d never heard of this movement before, but I quickly became obsessed with it. I wasn’t able to articulate at the time why I was so attracted to it, but it’s clear to me now that transhumanism was making the same essential promises you find in Christian prophecies. I grew up in this very millenarian strain of Evangelicalism that was focused on the “end times” and Christ’s return. We believed this would happen in our lifetime, that we would become immortal, get raptured into the sky, and live forever with Christ in a state of perfection. Most transhumanists are not religious people–they are by and large atheists–yet they are drawing on these hopes that have played a larger role in Western culture.
So that was one initial seed that the book grew out of. The other was the machine-learning revolution, which was generating a lot of buzz around the time I started writing the book. This was around 2016 or 2017, right after AlphaGo beat the world champion of Go. These advanced AI systems have since been incorporated into the justice system, policing, financial institutions, medicine. Because they rely on deep learning, most of them are black-box technologies, meaning it’s impossible to know how they arrive at their outputs. At the time, a lot of tech criticism was drawing on religious language to describe these algorithms. The popular refrain was that they are unfathomable the way that god is unfathomable. We have to take their answers on faith. One Harper’s critic drew on the Book of Job, which was a book I struggled with when I was studying theology. Most of the critics making these comparisons didn’t have a background in theology, so I was interested in unpacking that tech criticism and thinking about how these religious ideas were mirrored in emerging technologies.
CC: I loved the humor and earnestness when you’re training your Aibo dog in the first chapter and thought that this was a great entry point into the discussion on artificial intelligence as it relates to the reader. How do you see people turning to technology for emotional intimacy, and where do you see this going in the next twenty years?
MO: I don’t know that we’re seeking emotional intimacy in technology so much as it’s being thrust on us by companies. I never had the urge to have a phone equipped with Siri, but these features now come along with the technology. We’re increasingly forced to interact with social AI, these programs that speak to us, respond to us, joke with us–that have some of the trappings of human interaction. All of us anthropomorphize, we attribute human qualities to things that are not actually human, or that are not actually alive. And I think corporations know that they can maximize engagement if people begin to emotionally bond with their products. I think that will be the trend going forward.
During the pandemic, there were a lot of stories about people who were so lonely they started talking to chatbots. I actually downloaded one of these apps around the beginning of the pandemic because I kept seeing these stories about them, and I was curious. The newer ones are eerily intuitive–it feels at times like you’re talking to a real person. And the technology is going to get better, especially with the recent developments in natural language processing.
CC: I find myself wondering what need capitalism will create next. I couldn’t help but wonder if these tech companies were creating a need or resolving a need with the creation of emotional technology?
MO: I’m interested in the extent to which technology is now trying to solve problems that technology created. The most obvious example is the app that blocks you from checking other apps, or from checking your email during certain hours. A lot of people have made this point in terms of social media. Technology has isolated us and alienated us from real face to face human interactions, and now we turn to social platforms because we’re hungry for connection. It’s a vicious cycle. It’s an overstated argument, but there is undoubtedly some truth to the fact that living our lives online entails a loss of intimacy that then prompts us to engage even more with social technologies.
Thomas Mar Wee: You point to a discourse that has transformed from discussing religious subjects metaphorically to religious subjects literally, and you try to warn readers about making a similar mistake with technology discourse. Where do you see this happening in technology discourse, and what are the pitfalls of discussing technology in this mode?
MO: When I began writing this book, I was interested in the idea that our brains are analogous to computers. This metaphor has become integrated into everyday speech. Even people who know nothing about computers speak of “processing” new information, or “storing” memories, “retrieving” memories, as though we had a hard drive in our brain. The metaphor is usually traced back to the pair of cyberneticists, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, who pioneered neural networks in the late 1940’s. They were responsible for developing the computational theory of the mind, this idea that the human brain functions like a Turing machine, that thought is basically symbol manipulation. It was a brilliant metaphor in a lot of ways, and it was also wrong in a lot of ways.
The analogy has been crucial to both cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence, and over time it’s become more literal than metaphorical. When people in AI speak of systems that “learn” or “understand,” those terms were once put in quotes to signify that they were metaphors. But now you rarely see those terms in quotes. People say instead that the computer’s visual system is actually seeing, the machine learning system is actually learning, as though there were no difference between the way a machine and a brain performed those tasks. As far as how this translates to religion, I grew up in a fundamentalist culture that often confused metaphors for literal truth. We read ancient myths and parables as though they were literal prophecies about what was going to happen in the future, transposing texts from the sixth century BC on to 21st century global politics. I’m really interested in the slippage that occurs with metaphors–how we often forget, over time, that metaphors are metaphors. What happens when we begin to think of them as literal?
TW: Do you think your religious upbringing gives you a unique perspective on the topics of philosophy of the mind and consciousness in comparison to other thinkers and philosophers who are pondering these questions?
MO: I suppose that growing up in a culture that held a great deal of certainty about the validity of its beliefs made me attuned to the presence of ideology in rhetoric–ideology that is pretending not to be ideology. Every intellectual framework, religious or scientific, has certain assumptions that are so basic to the worldview they’re not questioned. It’s more subtle in scientific discourse, but there are still premises that are taken for granted, or ideas that people have only recently started to question. The topic of consciousness, for example, is not really taken seriously in AI at the moment. It’s too vague, it has a lot of metaphysical baggage. People in the field tend to focus exclusively on intelligence. But they often appear to be talking around the idea of consciousness, especially when they’re discussing the limitations of certain systems. Another problem I discuss in the book is the question of what matter actually is. It’s such a basic question that most people never really think about it. But recently there’s been a renewed interest in panpsychism, the idea that all matter is conscious. More mainstream thinkers object; they think this is absurd. But then when they’re challenged to say what comprises matter, they argue that it’s not a relevant question. Matter is matter, end of debate.
CC: I was thinking about the distinction you make between assuming that plants have whatever quality makes humans special and assuming humans have whatever banal quality that makes plants function. You make parallel comparisons between the thinking behind artificial intelligence and religion throughout the text. Could you make a similar distinction in this case: are you assigning wishful thinking—leaps of faith—to artificial intelligence discourse or are you assigning the rationality of artificial intelligence discourse to religious thought? Is this a matter of debunking AI discourse or elevating religious discourse, or neither?
MO: I’m more interested in uncovering the wishful thinking lurking in technological discourse. I don’t think religious discourse is especially rational. I don’t say that in a pejorative sense. It’s not ‘irrational,’ per say (though some of it is, obviously) as much as ‘non-rational.’
I’m interested in frameworks like transhumanism, which shares some things with religion but is rooted in empirical realities. We have Moore’s Law that says that computing power is increasing at an exponential rate. All of the technologies that would be needed for mind-uploading and digital immortality are theoretically plausible–there’s nothing about them that would require a supernatural force, at any rate.. But these ideas are also clearly appealing to those deep emotional longings that were once satisfied by religion. It’s very difficult to accept the reality of death, especially if you don’t believe there’s anything after it. What appealed to me about transhumanism, when I first discovered it, is that it promised me everything that Christianity promised me, but through science.
So yeah, there’s a lot of wishful thinking that is sort of sailing under the guise of empiricism, and I think this is becoming more true as secularization advances. The more that we eradicate those traditional sources of meaning, the more we’re going to look for them in other areas of our culture, including in science and technology. And I think there are dangers in mixing those two pursuits. Max Weber wrote that if you find yourself with religious or spiritual longing, you should just go to church. Don’t try to find transcendence in science; that’s not an attitude to bring into the lab.
TW: To what extent do you entertain fears that technology will exceed human functioning? You discuss the importance of being explicit in terms such as consciousness, thinking, information, etc, so I will ask you, where do you see gaps between the terms we are using, such as consciousness, and what is really happening with technology?
MO: The largest threat with AI is not the classic science fiction scenario where robots are conscious, have a will of their own, and try to kill us out of some malicious intent to take over the world. The more likely possibility is that AI will exceed human intelligence, but it won’t have any idea what it’s doing. The machines won’t have a will of their own, or consciousness.
But in a way, that scenario is just as dangerous. This is the concern Nick Bostrom illustrated with his famous example about the paperclip-maximizer. You program a machine with a very simple goal–for example, you train it to maximize the number of paperclips in its possession. If there were an intelligence explosion and the machine gained infinite intelligence, it would essentially destroy the world. It would take all of the available resources to create paperclip factories, killing humanity to fulfil this aim. That’s not because it’s an “evil machine.” It’s just doing what it was programmed to do.
Norbert Wiener, the godfather of cybernetics, talked about this problem in his 1964 book God & Golem. He compared it to those folktales where a genie offers to grant someone a wish, but the person words their wish carelessly and it creates some catastrophic scenario. Computers, too, are very literal. So the terms we use really matter. The stakes are especially high with machine learning. It’s difficult to know how they are going to evolve or what new, creative means they might discover for fulfilling their programmed objectives.
TW: To what extent are David Chalmers’ claims that GPT-3 possesses consciousness warranted? Do you buy into that claim?
MO: [Laughs] I don’t really buy into that claim. And I think that Chalmers is being a tad facetious. I find it hard to believe he actually thinks that.
I’m more interested in the point where it no longer matters that AI doesn’t have consciousness. You can already see glimpses of this with GPT-3, where some of its writing is so convincing, it’s hard to believe that there is no human consciousness behind it. Add to that our natural tendency to anthropomorphize. The anthropologist Stuart Guthrie talks about how we are especially prone to assign human qualities to a machine that uses language because we’ve only ever encountered humans with that ability. Now we’ve created these systems in our image, with our language abilities, and we’re basically helpless, due to our evolved tendencies, not to see them as human, even if we know on an intellectual level that they’re not conscious.
TW: Do you think developments in natural language processing, such as GPT, prompt a reassessment of our traditional hermeneutic concepts such as “text” and “author”?
MO: There’s a way in which these systems literalize a lot of the poststructuralist theory that arose around the middle of the last century. The death of the author, the Lacanian idea that when we use language we draw from a public treasury of speech rather than consciously translating our preexisting thoughts into words. We are a medium for this amorphous system of language that is working through us.
Natural language processing models are doing precisely that. They’re drawing from a public treasury of language, the internet, and are working blindly to produce language that looks like our language. It raises the questions of well, what are we humans doing that’s different from machines? To what extent do we understand what we’re saying? Is it unconscious or conscious? If you read about those systems, it’s very difficult to avoid questioning our own use of language and what it means to understand language as a human.
TW: Where do you place the role of the writer in a world where algorithms can generate believable, coherent, human-sounding prose?
MO: I had this conversation with a writer friend a few weeks ago. She had asked whether I could ever connect with a book written by an algorithm, assuming it was as convincing and powerful as a novel authored by a great writer. Would knowing it was written by a machine make a difference? I didn’t know how to answer, and I still don’t know how to answer. So much of the pleasure of reading, for me, is the sense of connecting with another consciousness. That feeling of being less alone. I suspect that if an algorithm ever produced a great work of literature, I would either not connect with the text, or I would end up convincing myself that the system was truly conscious.
I do worry sometimes about my economic livelihood as a writer. Despite their limitations, the systems are probably going to be able to do a lot of standard magazine writing very soon. And in a sense, we’ve already paved the way for this to happen. We’ve reduced writers to “content creators,” a term that implies that the writing is secondary to the clicks and the ad revenue it brings in. Magazines have been, for a long time, using algorithms to determine what content gets the most views, which tends to be the content that hits some lowest common denominator–whatever is most popular. And language models are very good at producing this type of writing, stuff that isn’t especially provocative or original. Content that uses a very elementary level of language and avoids any kind of artistic flourishes. That’s not to say that writers are going to disappear or become obsolete. But I do think we’re going to witness a lot of changes to the structure of the media world.
TW: Going off of this, what do you think about the general hesitation to grant computers attributes such as “creativity” or artistic “genius”? Is this an example of, as you put it, humans “moving the bar” for intelligence, or order to “maintain our sense of distinction” as human beings?
MO: Daniel Susskind, an economist who writes about automation, uses the phrase “the intelligence of the gaps” to refer to this tendency to define human intelligence in relation to machines. He’s alluding to the “god of gaps” theology, the notion that we attribute to God anything that cannot be explained by science. We do the same thing with machines. Whenever they come up against a limitation, we point to that and say there, that’s a distinctively human quality. But the bar keeps moving.
The cybernetic pioneers in the 1950’s and 1960’s wanted to build an enormous intellect that could beat humans at chess and solve complex theorems. This goes back to the Medieval idea that humans are unique, compared to animals, because we’re rational beings. For centuries, this is what made us distinct. But as soon as computers could beat us at chess, the terms shifted and we began to say that to be human was to be social and emotional, with feelings and intuition.
That’s a natural reaction to have, but I am concerned about the ad hoc nature of these definitions, the fact that we are reconceiving what it means to be human every time a computer develops a new skill. What does it mean for humans if GPT-3 can write beautiful poetry and perform other creative tasks? For years, automation experts have advised us to work on being more creative so that we could get jobs that wouldn’t be outsourced to machines. Well, if computers can produce sonnets and compose classical music, to what extent is creativity a unique human quality?
CC: I am curious about how well GPT-3 writes because my knowledge is limited to your article and conversations with tech friends who say in a condescending manner, “We are coming for your jobs!” We may question if we are writing better throughout the course of history, but we cannot deny that we are expanding and perverting genres, to which we assign value in literary communities. Does GPT-3 have the ability to expand and pervert genres in the way that Piers Plowman can?
MO: The way it works, to my understanding, is that the algorithm identifies the genre of whatever text you feed in as input, and then mimics it for the output. You input a Q&A or short story, and it will recognize that genre and continue in that vein, based on the examples it’s consumed during training. I don’t know if it can blur or innovate genres; I suppose that you could feed it genre-bending work and ask it to mimic it, but I wouldn’t really call that innovation.
I would like to think–and maybe this is my own wishful thinking, trying to maintain some human distinction–that it would need some other kind of intelligence to innovate on the level of genre, something that the models do not currently have. That’s not to say that they won’t once they have more parameters.
Thomas, you have experience with the algorithm and may have more to say?
TW: I gave GPT my own poetry and prose, and I had to manipulate the text to resemble those genres because it currently does not know what a genre is. It does not have the human categorizations of genre because it is still interpreting it as a text and as ones and zeros. You can give it a genre-defying text, but it is up to the reader to say that it is prose or poetry or something in-between. It doesn’t yet have a theory of languages or literature.
TW: One recurring theme in this book I noticed is the limitations of language to accurately convey subjective experiences such as consciousness and the perils of speaking metaphorically. I couldn’t help but think of the work of Wittgenstein and his claim that many of the problems debated in philosophy are actually just the result of a miscommunication or a misuse of language: Did you encounter the limitations of language—such as its failure to accurately communicate subjective experience—while you were writing this book?
MO: Yes, all the time. The first draft of the book did not have much of my personal experiences in it, and that was the result of my being overwhelmed by the research and wanting to privilege it. I kept resisting the use of the “I,” and then I would get lost in the writing and not know where I was going. The book only started to come together when I began discussing my personal experiences.
Subjective experience tends to be my anchor, my connection to the world. That doesn’t always require the use of first person, but it does require thinking about what’s at stake for me, and why I became interested in whatever question I’m exploring. When I’m not thinking about that, the words on the page begin to lose their meaning. It’s almost like I become some version of GPT-3, this disembodied machine that is blindly manipulating symbols apart from any real-world knowledge.
The subjective, of course, can be treacherous territory. We have limitations and biases; we don’t always see our experience clearly. But I do think that the self, in writing, is useful as a limit, or a lens. It becomes a kind of filter, a way of understanding a world that is overwhelmingly complex from a specific vantage. I think that we need those limits, to some extent, in order to write.
CC: For our final question, what are you reading and writing that you want our readers to know about?
MO: I’m working on an essay for Harper’s on habit and automation, exploring the virtue of ritual in a world where many routine, repeatable tasks are being handed over to machines. I’ve been reading mostly fiction lately. The research for the book was somewhat intense, and I’ve been eager for something lighter in comparison to some of the darker subjects in my book [Laughs], so I’ve been reading and enjoying Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Crossroads.
For more about Meghan O’Gieblyn, visit her website at http://www.meghanogieblyn.com/.
November 15th, 2020, 5 pm.
Poet, artist, and polymath Eileen Myles talks with CJLC about queer avant-garde writing, the New York poetry scene of the 70s, the instability of the writerly self, their ambivalent relationship to the archive, and more.
Campbell Campbell:
To get started, I’m just gonna jump the gun and say—I’m interested in you being not only queer but also a writer of queer texts. What does it mean to be queer and a writer of queer texts to you? Does being queer necessitate a queer form, and how do you feel being placed in that genre?
Eileen Myles:
I feel okay about it because it’s sort of irresistible. The thing about being queer is that if that’s in you, or a part of you, or who you are in a way, then I think that culturally we just file that way. I know I’m read more widely by people who are queer. I think, unlike being heteronormative, it gets to be a part of how you’re associated and how you’re arranged. In ways that are wonderful and ways that are weirdly discriminatory. It’s a mixed blessing, and it’s interesting in terms of how I talk about myself [rather than] what I do in my work, because my work is organic and a place where I can make playful and powerful choices. I’ve never regretted the decisions or felt that I had to go in a direction, one way or another, because of who I was. It just seemed part of the apparatus, my queerness.
But I think talking about the work, it’s tricky. The comparison between queerness and race doesn’t really work, but I will say that the “double-consciousness” notion does compare because you’re always thinking about yourself in these two ways and knowing that it’s part of your richness and part of your burden.
CC: How do you imagine a queer form?
EM: I think in the same way that people are increasingly talking about transness, it’s a way of thinking that transness is the root of sexuality. That there’s just a changeableness about human sexual nature. I’ve found perpetually that the most interesting writers, the ones I’ve gravitated towards, are almost to a one—queer. I think that radical form almost “queers” itself in a way. In the same way that historically most of the Americans who have won the Nobel Prize have been alcoholics. What does that say about America or literature?I just think that most avant-garde writing, that I know of, is queer.
CC: I’m also interested in the fact that a lot of your works are autobiographical, whether that’s your memoirs, your poetry, your essays. I’m wondering if your experiences, specifically your queer experiences, are best conveyed in a queer form or an autobiographical text?
EM: I don’t really use “autobiographical” as a description of my work. I was in college in the late 60s, and one of the things going on then was “New Journalism”, which someone like Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. People who were doing journalism in this ecstatic, poetic way. They were busting open the form and notions of objectivity. It seemed very related to the world of film and media that was starting to be really interested in new kinds of documentary filmmaking. I think what happened in the 60s is that people started to throw away notions of objectivity and truth being conveyed in journalism and recording. I think fiction and nonfiction started to blur, it seems to me, in the late 60s and 70s.
I’ve always said this about Chelsea Girls; I was responding a lot to Truffaut, who was the first “art filmmaker” I saw when I was in college. He was doing this fictional account that seemed also an autobiographical account of a young man. And I thought to myself, “Why isn’t there a female version of this?” And so when I started to write, I was probably more interested in making films, but I had no idea how to do that, but I thought about my writing as filmmaking. I thought, “I don’t know story, I don’t know plot, but I can imagine a movie about this moment in this character’s life.” So it just kind of felt like an assemblage. I’ve always felt very aware of the synthetic nature of identity, and that we’re kind of making ourselves up. Our name is a fiction that our parents gave us. And so I never felt very truthy about “Eileen Myles”, but I just thought that I would use them as my character. And so, I never thought of it as”autobiographical”. I thought it was sort of a wry commentary on the self, and someone who had, to my mind, some amazing experiences.
Thomas Mar Wee: Building off of that, you’ve mentioned some writers who have inspired you: the New Journalists, the queer writers that you alluded to, and even filmmakers who’ve influenced you. You mentioned in For Now about responding to the Beat Generation, your friendship with Allen Ginsberg, and I’m curious about how to situate yourself within the broader legacy and lineage of poetry in America. How do you see yourself and position your career within the people who have come before you and the people who have come after?
EM: I feel like the whole notion of schools has collapsed, but I don’t think privilege has collapsed. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but bopping around Twitter has been this thing that Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young did about the “American Poetry World”, and the reward system. They used some very obvious names like Pinsky and Louise Glück and this real system of…“these two were on panels that gave major literary awards for decades and they were all each other’s students.”
When I came to New York in the 70s I went briefly to Queen’s College. I had no idea what I was doing. I was definitely coming to New York to be a writer, to be a poet, but I didn’t know so much. I knew Ginsberg; I knew Sylvia Plath; I knew Baudelaire; I knew Dylan Thomas. I’d studied poetry in a general literature way in college, and I did a little bit of “in the world” poetry stuff in Boston, but I really had no orientation whatsoever.
So I came to New York. I very briefly went to Queen’s College for graduate school and I was tipped off by the guy who taught the writing workshop there, saying something about “St. Mark’s Church” and that was where denizens of the so-called “New York School” hung out. I had seen poems by Schuyler and O’Hara by then, and I was very excited by that work. It just seemed so vernacular. It seemed like something I had never seen before, except in something like Ginsberg. So I made a beeline to St. Mark’s church and then just became a part of that community. And then a guy named Paul Violi, who was kind of my first poetry teacher, made me a “tree” of all these schools.
It was very: “this is Black Mountain, and this is Beat, and this is New York School” and he told me: “This is our camp because we’re the non-academic school of American poetry, and we’re outsiders, and we’re associated with music and politics and culture outside of the academy.” It was very exciting, and even the teachers who taught there asserted that they were working artists. We didn’t think of it as an institution, and it really wasn’t, you didn’t get accepted, you just showed up on Friday night at Alice Notley’s workshop with a beer and just began. It was kind of remarkable who went to those workshops.
And so, happily, I met all those people. I’m twenty years older now than John Ashbery or Allen Ginsburg were when I met them. I was in my twenties and it just seemed like the world was so open. It was a very small poetry world so that within less than a year of hanging out I was at a party at Allen Ginsburg’s and Robert Lowell was there, and we were like “Oh my God, how did this happen?” You could just move to New York and be in that room. For ten years, I was part of it. I saw Gwendolyn Brooks read. I saw Amiri Baraka read. It was white-dominant. It wasn’t heterosexual dominant, but it was very much that world.
By the time I ran the Poetry Project for a few years, we were interested in “queering” it. It was interesting because the “elders” were queer but the younger ones weren’t necessarily. And I started having my own gay life over here. I’m not really interested in Adrienne Rich’s work. It strikes me as conservative and just a different poetics, and so when she died, it was very funny because I kept getting asked, as an established poet, to write something about Adrienne Rich, and I kept thinking “Yeah, but I don’t have anything to do with Adrienne Rich.”
I think what’s interesting is that we all read across these camps. I think even though you’re in “this camp”, you probably read some people from over “there”. And so when I had the opportunity to curate and edit, I made clear that I had a more diverse taste than the one that I was in. When you look at how publishing and power unfold, certainly in this country, it still is along these lines. “These people are not published by these presses, and these people are not getting these awards.”
I’ve never been nominated for a National Book Award. Not even long listed. It’s interesting, when I was a judge for the National Book Award, I was officially the “other” on the list. Fred Moten was the person I wanted to see win, and I just pushed and pushed and pushed. I had a lot of say in who the finalists were, but in the end, everyone loved Louise Glück. And she had never won a National Book Award. It was so interesting because we didn’t even talk about her. I learned that that’s how things happen: if you talk about something, people can take it down, but if you want something, you don’t even talk about it and it just moves ahead quietly until at the last moment they’re like “Louie Glück! Louise Glück!”, and you’re like, “how did that happen?”
I can’t deny being somewhat of a New York School poet. As for the Beat thing, I had friendships there. Allen was very generous to me as a young poet, and I associated with St. Marks Church and Naropa [University]. Naropa was very interesting; I went there as a younger person and I continue to go there in certain ways. I came from a Catholic background, Catholic school, twelve years of it. So I had an essentially religious education and certainly disavowed that by high school.
What was so funny about that was I arrived at Naropa being a kind of drunk, druggy, young queer. By the time I was a little older and was teaching there, I’d stopped drinking and taking drugs, because I come from a lineage that dies of it, and I didn’t want to die, so I stopped it in my thirties. What I started to realize was that Naropa was a Buddhist art school and that it had a practice. “Practice” is a Buddhist word. Practice is related, in a way, to spiritual practice, but also to art too. I found that it made sense to think of work in terms that engaged with process, and performance, and enactments. There was something about making work that was processive, and that I thought had a lot to do with Buddhism in the way that the Beats were thinking about Buddhism. I was unwittingly influenced by that and then actually influenced.
I’ll also say, growing up I was very interested in Sci-Fi, and I wanted to be an astronaut. I had every desire to be catapulted out of this world in any way possible. As a practicing artist, what I started to think was no, the thing that’s interesting and difficult is to be here. To inventory where you are. Like when a rocket ship takes off, there’s a countdown. The “ten, nine, eight, seven, six”.
As a poet, I love James Schuyler’s work. There’s always an inventory that erupts into a kind of spiritual transition, whether it’s sexual or spiritual. It’s always based on this inventory of what’s there, and then you suddenly can go into a new space.
TW: We’ve talked about the generation that preceded you, but I’m curious what you think about the generation of poets that has come after you. You’ve been publishing work since the 80s, and you’ve accumulated quite a large readership, so I’m curious if you can see the impact you’ve had on poets that have come after you and have been reading your work?
EM: The thing is, lots of them are my friends. I hate the word mentor, I just go crazy at it. I think the older poets that I met, we became friends, and that’s the relationship we had. It wasn’t so professionalized. I met CA when they were in their twenties. They called St. Mark’s church and was like, “do you know Eileen? How can I get in touch with Eileen?” And then I got this phone call.
There’s a transmission that occurs between younger and older poets. The young poet goes to, not necessarily someone older chronologically, but a poet who is someplace they want to be, and you go to this person and you start having a conversation. CAConrad was like that, and Arianna Reines and Michelle Tea were like that years ago. I recognize aspects of my work that are in their work, but everyone always pervertsit into a new direction. You’re kind of there to be used in a way and reinterpreted. I think it’s exciting because at some point I realized you don’t ever finish your work. You start things, and it never gets done….In the same way that the audience completes the work, so do the people that are influenced by you.
CC: You mentioned your writing changing, I love the moment in For Now when you say, “don’t hold me accountable for what I say about writing because it’s fluid, and it’s going to change.” I find myself very similarly disliking when people hold me accountable for something I said or thought months ago because I’m constantly changing. What is your relationship to your past writing in light of this idea?
EM: Friendly, sometimes I’m thinking “God I wish I could write that now,” but I’ve changed; I’m not that same person. The way publishing operates you have lots of moments of choice to leave certain work behind and pick certain parts of your past. So there are poems in books that never get in, say, a “Selected Works”. And sometimes I think, “oh, I was wrong, that actually was a good piece of writing.” But usually I feel I’ve chosen pretty well and I feel good about it. Writing prose is different because you make all those choices as part of the process of making the work. You leave paragraphs and pages by the side of the road as you’re constructing the narrative of the book. So it’s brimming with choices, but they’re made. Whereas with poetry, those choices are still out there somewhere. And sometimes, I reread things that I can hardly remember writing [laughs].
CC: How do you think your writing has changed over the years?
EM: I think it’s less personal. There’s less data. There’s less information. I think I don’t lean on information as much. I think it’s become more generalized in a sense.
CC: Why do you think that is?
EM: I guess I have less to prove, I think. I’m more interested in the ways a statement is without specificity. It seems more about movement. The thing about writing is that you want the reader to do a lot of the work. It’s kind of like [Google] “search terms”. Like if I wanted to find this, what word would lead me to that place? In a way, that’s what I’m wanting to do in my writing.
It’s funny, Willem de Kooning had no mind left, and he was still painting, you know. My memory isn’t as good as it was in my twenties. It’s funny because when I was in my twenties and thirties and doing a lot of drugs and drinking, I feel like my mind was so dirty, I had all these shelves and crevices, and I could pack stuff into all these places. And I remember when I got sober I was scared because I felt like this water had rushed through my brain and it was clean. I was like “how can I work with this?” It was working in a clean room suddenly.
I think time does that too. I’ll work on these ideas. You start something and drop it, and I go off and digress with the assumption that I’ll return. My digressions have to be simpler now because I feel like I can’t keep that many balls in the air. I think sometimes it would be amazing just to tell one story that doesn’t stop until I stop. I’ve never attempted that.
TW: You talk in For Now about your relationship to your work being archived, I’m curious if you could elaborate about your hesitance to participate in the archival moment, this fascination with preserving works from writers and having them on display for the public.
EM: It’s just creepy! [Laughs] It’s so weird because you spend so much of your life wanting to be known. All the desires I had when I was younger and at earlier points in my career, for my work to survive and to be known when those started to be realized it just starts to get fixed.
Fans talk to you as though they already know you, and as a writer, I begin to think of myself that way which is when it becomes dangerous. It’s hard. The trick is to get out from underneath your own archive. Writing in journals has come back for me, but it’s different from how it used to be. At this moment in time, Maggie Nelson is my literary executor, and I think to myself, “have I ever talked shit about Maggie in my notebook?” It’s weird to be observed by something that you won’t be around for. You are “post-consumed”.
You constantly have to figure out the new condition: when I stopped drinking, I wondered how I could write while sober. I wondered how I could write queer texts when I came out because, in my twenties, I had various sexual identities but operated in a heterosexual manner. When I stopped, I felt that incredible surge of energy and wrote as a queer person.
There’s always a new mode that you haven’t written in, so this archival moment will fall behind me. It’ll simply be the only writing I have. To be this person who was assuming that my work is being collected.
CC: Do you think that it is an issue with the archive or how people treat the archive?
EM: Both. I think that we are all overwhelmed with the archival question. It used to be, for a while, that every time I met someone and asked what they’re working on, they would say that they’re “working on the archive”. What does that mean! It represents the sheer capaciousness of time and history and our need to save work.
TW: We are all being archived too, with the digital traces that we leave on social media. When you die, Facebook can preserve your account forever.
EM: Exactly. You are leaving traces at every moment.
CC: Do you think, with our heavy surveillance of writers, that there is pressure to over-confess in the text?
EM: Yes, but there is pressure to over-edit too. There is no private moment, and it changes how we disclose information. Everyone talks about how combative poets and artists were decades before me. There was no sense of a career, and you would say shit about people’s work. Now we’re more careful about the traces we leave behind.
I remember when people started to record their poetry readings. People would gossip in between reading their work, and I remember the day we knew that the reading was going to be recorded and put on the internet. Now I have to be less voluble about what I say in the reading because people will hear it. Not only will they hear, they’ll watch me say it! It puts a chill on the community, and that becomes the new normal.
TW: I am curious what your relationship is to Instagram? Do you see it as a part of your work, part of your profession, just a normal outlet?
EM: All of those things. I have always loved taking pictures, and my account has become a public gallery. I showed at a gallery in Provincetown, the Bridget Donahue gallery. Every time I moved into a new genre, there were opportunities for reward and attention. I would like to be oblivious to that, but I realize that my putting pictures on a wall created desire.
You can take a picture and have it identified for its sense of beauty, but there is Instagram where I have no rules and can take more than one picture per day. That is a type of curating which is different from my past experience with it. It is more relational in how the photos are ordered, and it’s also obviously there for publicity needs.
I am obsessed with East River Park and its demolition, and Instagram has become a site of activism for me. It is nice to have a lot of followers who are affected by you. It can be a useful political tool.
CC: You often collapse time in your work. You’ll show your thoughts in such detail that we are exposed to your present interiority, but you remind us that your self is constituted by past experiences and future goals. I wonder how you embody the present in your work and how you balance the acts of seeing, creating and living, writing.
EM: What you said is the description of a writing process. I cannot keep the balance of these acts as a human being because it’s hard to finish a piece of writing and have a particular existence. It’s unsteady, yet writing is how I steady myself.
I was a part-time advertising agent in my past, and a friend, the traffic manager, got me the job so that we could drink and work. I think that writing and living is a form of trafficking.
I’m writing a large novel that I hope to finish in under five years and an anthology. And I’m asked to write short pieces because I’m a known writer. There are all these kinds of writing happening, and it feels like a dog race where you have to let one dog win to finish the other tasks. After I’ve worked for so long, I know that I will not fail and I’ll finish the tasks at hand. I will make sense of the pieces that, as of now, just go go go and run off the pier without an end. There will be an end.
I think that the poetry’s that is the greatest teacher follows that Frank O’ Hara line and goes on your nerve.You write and gain momentum, and you become comfortable writing it and being it. It will abandon you even when you write the work, and I think that editing saves the work as part of a synthetic process.
I wrote poems because I knew “I could be this Eileen for the length of this poem.” I wanted to write novels, but I thought, “how can I write novels if I’m not the same person tomorrow?