Art Monster: Readings and Responses
Both Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation and Zinzi Clemmons’ What We Lose operate as non-linear two-way mirrors, held up to the writers’ experience and explorations of loss, grief, sickness and infidelity. Through these mirrors, the reader is offered glimpses of moments in time. Isolated vignettes of incidents and circumstance, which move around in time and space to paint a holistic picture which develops in fragmented pieces. These shards of broken mirror are completed and reassembled by the reader, but often without crisp conclusion, asking more questions than providing answers. In gazing through the two-way mirror at her life as she recalls it, Offill pierces the darkness of her memories with a nostalgic ache of tenderness towards those around her, poking holes in the shades of her recollection with the crisp bright light of a memory brought forward with intense clarity. Similarly, Clemmons adjusts the aperture of her own lens, pulling back across continents to spotlight difference between here and there, in her case America and South Africa. Both approaches take the reader’s hand in the darkness of remembrance and create a constellation of memories which assemble into a holistic collection of often painful lived experiences.
In doing this, both Offill and Clemmons concern themselves with loss and grief. Loss of her mother but also of a relationship which falls apart for Clemmons, and Offill’s aspirations towards the creative freedom promised by her youth which disintegrates into a marriage characterized by her husband’s infidelity. Told as non-linear narratives, both authors echo the experience of grief itself. Recollections which move around in memory, jumping between remembrance of the physical and the emotional. Grief itself is non-linear, with the path of loss never a straight line. Both authors hang their stories on a loose chronological framework, but pepper their recollections with the disorientation which comes from the irregularity of memories. In holding true to the volatile characteristics of grief and memory themselves, we are able to map thematic beats inside the stories, such as when Offill first notices something is amiss in her relationship, but we are still too close to be able to see the entire picture, just as Offill is inside her own experience. If both authors were to adjust their narratives to adhere to a linear structure, they’d invite a lowering of the experience of grief itself. We’d feel it less. The events of the story can be plotted chronologically in time, but not our recollection of them.
Midway through her novel, Offill combines this non-linearity with a narrative change from first person to third person. She begins to refer to herself as ‘the wife’ instead of ‘I’, looking back on herself from a disassociative distance where the loss of her relationship is echoed by a loss of defined self. She’s moving from a story of you and me to a story of him and her as the us of their relationship crumbles. Writing in The New York Times of Offill’s novel, Roxane Gay describes this moment: “First, we are part of the marriage and then we are studying the marriage from a distance as things begin to fall apart. There is an infidelity and an excruciating period of indecision and self-doubt as the wife, as she is now known, tries to assess her role in the marriage coming apart, and as she determines the right and proper shape for her anger.” The move from first to third person doesn’t just reflect Offill’s loss of self, it also removes the reader from the claustrophobia of the relationship as it begins to crack. We ourselves are distanced as Offill molds the ‘shape of her anger’. And while the novel tonally resolves itself in the final chapter as Offill recalls a tender moment when the family were united inside of a we, there remains the ambiguity of where to place the moment in time which has been present throughout the piece.
Going further into the feelings of disassociation, in Chapter 32 Offill begins to fold the narrative back upon itself. Breaking the fourth wall between reader and writer, and reversing who’s looking through the two-way mirror. Here she’s looking at us. In introducing a self-referential commentary about how the book itself has been written, Offill asks us as readers to check her own recollection of the events. Did she capture it accurately? Is what was written really the way things really happened? We already know the events from earlier chapters, but Offill is scratching at their accuracy and stability in our own memories. Asking for more detail, just as we might want to when we struggle ourselves to remember. Her framing takes us out of the narrative and echoes the perspective she has of being distanced from her own emotional stressors. If we’ve been holding Offill’s hand so far, it asks us to let go and places us as readers outside of the frame of the novel and asks us to look inward in a way which Offill reminds us that she is still in control of what’s getting remembered.
Similarly, the inclusion of visual artifacts in What We Lose serve to bring both an intimacy and an authority to Clemmons’ writing. An intimacy in introducing the elements of diary and journal, of notebook adjacent to her writing in a way which draws the reader closer to the intimacy of her own thoughts. When she attempts to visualize her emotions (P.112) the graph she draws is as crude and simple as her own struggle to make sense of her mother’s diagnosis and death. Her graph is an attempt to rationalize the incomprehensible, to bring order to a chaos through mathematics. And to provide the sense-making so impossible inside of grief and an indifferent universe. When she tightens her original graph into a more mathematically accurate one (P. 115), so further reflects the impossibility of her grief in ‘attempting to approach a line but forever failing’ and using it as a framework for reflecting how ‘my mind was trying to reconcile my new reality and failing, over and over again’. We might informally describe this as a psychological spiraling cycle of behavior, but it’s an analysis without resolution, just like grief.
In parallel, the inclusion of photographs adds an authenticity and truthfulness to Clemmons’ already vivid descriptions. They allow us as readers to understand what it was really like, and that Clemmons was there. They provide a journalistic layer of research where Clemmons has done her homework. When she explores the rabbit hole of serial killers’ wives, struck by ‘how normal and happy they look’ (P. 66), we get to see what she sees, but how it’s also a fruitless search. How ‘I search every inch of the pictures for hints of the horror that lurked inside their husbands, but there is nothing’. It’s the same lack of resolution she finds from apply math to her sense-making of grief. Of how the information found and presented fails in the finish to provide any sense of closure. She finds no meaning in the wives’ pictures any more so than she does in the calculus of spiraling graphs. Both concern grief and loss, but one presents the smiling faces of those left behind, the other the impersonal calculation of endless frustration. Both augment her descriptions, and place them in the very real world of loss.
Over the past few years, I have been writing down the stories of my life for my teenage daughter to read one day. The stories of how I met her mother. The stories of how I came to live in America. The stories of how I beat cancer. They’re a place for me to come to terms with the past, but also a place to celebrate it. To acknowledge what happened, savor it as a memory, and pass it on. It’s an exercise I wish my parents had done for me so a cycle broken and a limbic space bridged into the future. They’re deeply enjoyable to write, untethered by the constraints of assignment or length, and preserve in amber the moments which have made me. I share them with friends, who often feature in the stories themselves, and who at times recall the events differently. The stories aspire to truthful memoir, and rarely slip into fiction, but there’s always the acknowledgement that any recollection is itself a form of fiction. That a single perspective ignores the others.
Clemmons’ assertion that fiction has more possibilities than memoir tends to show up more prominently when I write short stories grounded in historical fiction, such as my recent stories Beware the Owls’ Herald, and its prequel / sequel The Concrete Bride. I delight in deeply grounding these kinds of stories in the kind of believability which asserts a truth for the reader, drawing them into an era long passed, but then which ever-so-slightly adjusts its reality. It takes a highly detailed truth, but treats it as a malleable object. Something which feels true, but could never be. A real-life location, but behind which lies the paranormal, revealed with only the lightest of scratching. So while I’ve primarily been enjoying writing down the stories of my life for my daughter to read in the future, my creative writing has focused more on journeys into the past which play with time and space. They invent characters and events which feel all-too-real, feel familiar, and to whom we relate. We feel like we’ve heard rumors of Manhattan’s secret societies, or the myths of workers falling into the cement of buildings, but here they are, set down and grounded in the illusion of truth. My own experience has also been that these are exponentially more fun to write. If memoir serves to articulate a memory and perhaps impart a lesson, historical fiction unburdens itself from both of these constraints. It plays with physics as much as it does the reality of dates and places, and can ultimately take the reader to a place no-one has even dared go before.
When Clemmons says ‘the advantage of being an outsider is seeing things more clearly’ she’s describing a remove, a distance which provides both writer and reader a valuable objectivity towards what’s written. And how in this space we are able to observe with increased clarity. That by being too close, either in distance or emotional proximity, we miss the forest for the trees. My professional life in a busy newsroom reconciles these two dynamics every day. In attempting to impart the kind of sense-making required of the news to millions of readers, we aspire to ‘see things clearly’ and objectively, but in doing so, acknowledge that there is always a large degree of editing happening. All news stories have degrees of filtering applied to them. This might be for technical reasons, linguistic reasons, and especially in recent years, political or partisan reasons. It might even be for economic reasons as many news organizations wrestle with the changing climate of the news being essentially free, everywhere online. Inside the newsroom, we are all insiders. We see the stories before the world does, and our responsibility is to provide as objective and distanced a set of reporting as possible. But this is never straightforward. Reporting on genocide and tragedy always brings with it a degree of empathy in the reporting, and by consequence, a change in that objective distancing.
I have much to lean on as an outsider in my own writing. I’m an immigrant, a survivor, a proud geek, a diehard Cleveland Browns fan and the only person I know who watches the British soap opera EastEnders every day. But you’re only an outsider if you choose to have that perspective. Inside of all these groups are people who think and feel the same as me, and are just as passionate about these topics as anyone else. When I go to a Browns home game I get to spent the afternoon with seventy thousand of them. EastEnders has a rabid and passionate fan base. You’re only an outsider should you choose to adopt that perspective. It took me a long time to reconcile this after moving to America. I was the person who didn’t understand the references, spoke differently, and had only just learned to even drive on the right side of the road. I’ve experienced the xenophobic request to ‘just go home’. In my own writing, but also in life, it’s been more beneficial to think of the space between outsider and insider as deeply malleable. I’m an outsider as an online student at Penn, yet here I am trying to get to the sleeping panda in Canvas each week. I’ve only been to campus a handful of times but one of them ended up with me throwing toast at Franklin Field, a true insider’s act. It’s not that I’m insider or outsider, it’s that I’m both. And in that comes not only a place of peace, but also a healthy reconciliation of both objectivity and subjectivity from which I can always pick as a writer. If we realize that we are rarely exclusively one or the other, we afford ourselves the space to do what all great writers do. Tell a truth.
