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rushthatspeaksEarlier today I read Ottessa Moshfegh's new novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which has been gathering a lot of buzz in mainstream lit circles, and which is certainly noticeable in a bookstore, since its cover fuses a po-mo hot pink with a painting from the circle of Jacques-Louis David that somehow manages to express infinite irony when juxtaposed with the book's title.
I had been wanting to read it, not because of the buzz (though that's why I heard of it), but because the protagonist goes (attempts to go) to bed for a year, and going to bed for a year is something I have done myself, though it was not particularly intentional on my part.
It is not something I have read many books about, because it is not an experience all that many people write books about. The most recent other book I've read in which something similar happens is Porochista Khakpour's Sick: A Memoir, which is, in fact, a memoir, about the author's experiences with chronic Lyme disease.
I might have expected the books to be, in some ways, diametric opposites, since Khakpour has spent a large percentage of her life trying to get out of bed, while Moshfegh's unnamed protagonist devotes a great deal of time and effort to staying in it. But it became clear to me fairly early on that both books, along with a third I read at some point in the past few months, Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman, read to me as though somehow, either through zeitgeist or through deliberate theoretical exploration, we are beginning to see the emergence into the literary mainstream of Sick Woman Theory.
Which, as a sign of life in a set of genres I have found fairly moribund for huge stretches of time, those labeled "respectable literature", is heartening.
All three books feature a central woman who narrates the book first-person, in an extremely distinctive voice. In the Murata, this woman is a convenience store worker, who is devoted to her job and to the smooth, swift, and pleasant operation of the convenience store; in the Moshfegh, she is twenty-something, beautiful, and privileged, with an inheritance sufficient to keep paying her rent and a previous attempt to enter the art world. She did not so much fail at that as wander away from it. In the Khakpour, she is a literature professor and extremely talented writer attempting to make sense of the illness-filled stretches of her previous life.
(Yes, I know it's problematic to compare a memoir so closely to fiction; I'll get to why I'm doing that in a bit.)
All three women are seen by somebody, possibly a lot of somebodies, as sick, and that vision drives the narratives, though of course there are also other things going on.
The convenience store woman is seen by her family, workmates, and acquaintances as sick because she does not share the standard, societally-accepted ways of expressing and feeling emotions. She has settled on the convenience store as a life strategy, because by being a good worker, by putting in work for a socially appropriate amount of time for which she is paid, she can pass as acceptable to others, and is therefore allowed to survive. She enjoys her work very much: the bargain she has made with the world (an illuminating typo: I originally typed 'with the work') is that she is competent and thorough and cheerful at her job, and that equals normality to everyone around her, and they don't bother her about her differences as they did all through school. Except that, as she ages, the social expectations around womanhood start to come up-- marriage, family, the idea that a convenience store is a temporary job for students or else a career in which one is eventually promoted to manager-- and these expectations force her to recalibrate her bargain, because she can no longer manage to be left alone.
She does not see herself as sick. She is a happy, productive person who likes other people, and her infectious cheer is part of why others pathologize her, because how can anyone be that happy in a convenience store job?
Moshfegh's unnamed protagonist does not particularly see herself as sick, though she uses the language and specialized vocabulary of sickness to manipulate her psychiatrist (chosen specifically for incompetence) into giving her sleep drugs. What she wants is to sleep. She wants to sleep until all the aggravations of her previous life fall away from her, because she hates absolutely everything about her life. Her wealthy, privileged, unloved childhood, her Ivy League education, her discovery that the world of art (where one might have expected she could rebel) is another facet of exactly the things that motivate everyone else she's ever met: she hates everybody and everything. She does not hate life, she does not want to die, but she hates her life, and hopes that if she can sleep for long enough, she can get rid of all of it.
She might see herself as sick, sometimes. It's difficult to tell, because Moshfegh's corrosive satirical voice is so logical, persuasive, charmingly worded that, well, everybody and everything in her life is eminently hateable, while remaining, unfortunately, fairly close to the bounds of realism. I can't manage to read her as depressed, but as a person experiencing a rational reaction to a ludicrous reality. It might be stupid to go to bed for a year, but it isn't a bad idea, given the circumstances.
And yet, the thing that others (including readers) are most likely to pathologize her for is, in fact, that powerful and desperate hatred. How can anyone find working in an art gallery that nauseating?
As you can see, I don't actually consider either protagonist to be sick at all. They are at right angles to what other people expect of them, and both are in varying degrees of complicity with the myths of what they are supposed to be. Either of them could easily, as Moshfegh's protagonist pretends to do, enter the medical establishment and try to receive some set of diagnoses.
The question is where things would go from there.
This is why I wanted to talk about the Porochista Khakpour, because her experience is a) real and b) heavily involved with that medical establishment. In her case, the thing that is going against everyone's expectations, including hers, is her own body. As many who have chronic, debilitating illnesses with long lists of symptoms do, she finds it difficult to get a diagnosis, still more difficult to get a diagnosis that is in any way useful, and most difficult of all to get helpful treatment. Especially since, as so many women have been told for so long, she gets the repeated insistence from doctor after doctor that it's all in her head.
In short, her illness places her, whether she likes it or not, at an angle to the rest of society, and it becomes very clear after a time that what the people around her expect, and have great difficulty with her not managing, is that she either get better or die.
And so her career, her writing, her teaching, her personal life, are these things that she has scratched out with great and laborious difficulty from that space between getting better and dying, that liminal space for which we do not have good words or good explanations. (There used to be the concept of the invalid, but how often was the invalid productive? Our current system holds that if you are managing to be productive, then, in some way, you aren't really sick, are you. Illness and labor as opposing states.)
Khakpour would, I am certain, prefer not to be in pain, and her search for that option, given the way her doctors are about it, is a story of dogged resistance. I don't mean that in the inspirational-disability way, of Overcoming Great Trials; I mean that, whether she wants to or not, in order to survive she has to insist repeatedly and with great effort that she is sick. That she will not shut up about her pain, that she will continue trying to seek solutions, that professional success does not mean she has stopped hurting. Illness has to become part of her identity, because it's only on that level that she can start getting other people to take it seriously.
Her memoir is interesting as a constructed narrative-- it does not have much shape. It cannot, because chronic illness, when it truly is chronic, when it is going to go away and come back again for the duration of a lifetime, resists most conventional concepts of narrative. There is no final resolution, there is no climax. The shape of the book is bent around pain the way that her life is bent around pain. What we are left with is pain, the systems of the world that are perpetuating and not assisting with that pain, and resistance to both pain and those systems.
Which is also what we are left with in that pair of novels. The resistance is the thing the three books have most in common. (Cf., as I said, Sick Woman Theory.) The fiction is, as fiction does, using metaphor and symbolism to filter and reshape the same sort of experience Khakpour is working with, the liminal spaces between sick, well, productive, non-working, a knot of cathexes centered around friction between women and illness and late capitalist society. Both novels are, due to their non-reality, free to concentrate somewhat less on pain, and free to tip over into surrealism; this is part of the process of exploring the space that lives like Khakpour's have long taken place in while invisible to fiction.
And this, I think this is huge, as a theme coming up in not just literature, but in literature that is being critically acclaimed and selling books to highbrow types and winning awards. I think it says something that all three of these books are by women of color, and that all three are getting amounts of publicity and critical discussion that indicate they are being read and to some extent respected. I think it says something that these are three separate approaches to carving narrative out of subjects that have traditionally not been considered appropriate subjects for Great Art.
Of course, I'm glad to see this kind of innovation in narrative and these themes partly because of their applicability to my own life. (Do I have migraines because of the PTSD, or because I had meningitis at twelve? Do I have PTSD partly because of the migraines and how people around me as a child failed to notice or treat them, or is the PTSD entirely about the abuse? Is the endometriosis because of the abuse, or related to the PTSD? Who knows?) (No one. There is no way to know these things.) (How am I supposed to know what, in my own life, counts as resistance?)
But I'm also glad to see this because it indicates that something is shifting, somewhere, in the edifices of power. I am used to this sort of literature being labeled experimental and being printed by small presses and sold in feminist bookshops. I am used to this sort of book being marginalized.
May whatever is shifting keep shifting: this kind of narrative is, given the world we live in at the moment, necessary. Because those of us who cannot necessarily make it to marches or stand in the street need a politics of resistance, too, and narratives of resistance are one of the ways to inch into conceiving those politics.
I had been wanting to read it, not because of the buzz (though that's why I heard of it), but because the protagonist goes (attempts to go) to bed for a year, and going to bed for a year is something I have done myself, though it was not particularly intentional on my part.
It is not something I have read many books about, because it is not an experience all that many people write books about. The most recent other book I've read in which something similar happens is Porochista Khakpour's Sick: A Memoir, which is, in fact, a memoir, about the author's experiences with chronic Lyme disease.
I might have expected the books to be, in some ways, diametric opposites, since Khakpour has spent a large percentage of her life trying to get out of bed, while Moshfegh's unnamed protagonist devotes a great deal of time and effort to staying in it. But it became clear to me fairly early on that both books, along with a third I read at some point in the past few months, Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman, read to me as though somehow, either through zeitgeist or through deliberate theoretical exploration, we are beginning to see the emergence into the literary mainstream of Sick Woman Theory.
Which, as a sign of life in a set of genres I have found fairly moribund for huge stretches of time, those labeled "respectable literature", is heartening.
All three books feature a central woman who narrates the book first-person, in an extremely distinctive voice. In the Murata, this woman is a convenience store worker, who is devoted to her job and to the smooth, swift, and pleasant operation of the convenience store; in the Moshfegh, she is twenty-something, beautiful, and privileged, with an inheritance sufficient to keep paying her rent and a previous attempt to enter the art world. She did not so much fail at that as wander away from it. In the Khakpour, she is a literature professor and extremely talented writer attempting to make sense of the illness-filled stretches of her previous life.
(Yes, I know it's problematic to compare a memoir so closely to fiction; I'll get to why I'm doing that in a bit.)
All three women are seen by somebody, possibly a lot of somebodies, as sick, and that vision drives the narratives, though of course there are also other things going on.
The convenience store woman is seen by her family, workmates, and acquaintances as sick because she does not share the standard, societally-accepted ways of expressing and feeling emotions. She has settled on the convenience store as a life strategy, because by being a good worker, by putting in work for a socially appropriate amount of time for which she is paid, she can pass as acceptable to others, and is therefore allowed to survive. She enjoys her work very much: the bargain she has made with the world (an illuminating typo: I originally typed 'with the work') is that she is competent and thorough and cheerful at her job, and that equals normality to everyone around her, and they don't bother her about her differences as they did all through school. Except that, as she ages, the social expectations around womanhood start to come up-- marriage, family, the idea that a convenience store is a temporary job for students or else a career in which one is eventually promoted to manager-- and these expectations force her to recalibrate her bargain, because she can no longer manage to be left alone.
She does not see herself as sick. She is a happy, productive person who likes other people, and her infectious cheer is part of why others pathologize her, because how can anyone be that happy in a convenience store job?
Moshfegh's unnamed protagonist does not particularly see herself as sick, though she uses the language and specialized vocabulary of sickness to manipulate her psychiatrist (chosen specifically for incompetence) into giving her sleep drugs. What she wants is to sleep. She wants to sleep until all the aggravations of her previous life fall away from her, because she hates absolutely everything about her life. Her wealthy, privileged, unloved childhood, her Ivy League education, her discovery that the world of art (where one might have expected she could rebel) is another facet of exactly the things that motivate everyone else she's ever met: she hates everybody and everything. She does not hate life, she does not want to die, but she hates her life, and hopes that if she can sleep for long enough, she can get rid of all of it.
She might see herself as sick, sometimes. It's difficult to tell, because Moshfegh's corrosive satirical voice is so logical, persuasive, charmingly worded that, well, everybody and everything in her life is eminently hateable, while remaining, unfortunately, fairly close to the bounds of realism. I can't manage to read her as depressed, but as a person experiencing a rational reaction to a ludicrous reality. It might be stupid to go to bed for a year, but it isn't a bad idea, given the circumstances.
And yet, the thing that others (including readers) are most likely to pathologize her for is, in fact, that powerful and desperate hatred. How can anyone find working in an art gallery that nauseating?
As you can see, I don't actually consider either protagonist to be sick at all. They are at right angles to what other people expect of them, and both are in varying degrees of complicity with the myths of what they are supposed to be. Either of them could easily, as Moshfegh's protagonist pretends to do, enter the medical establishment and try to receive some set of diagnoses.
The question is where things would go from there.
This is why I wanted to talk about the Porochista Khakpour, because her experience is a) real and b) heavily involved with that medical establishment. In her case, the thing that is going against everyone's expectations, including hers, is her own body. As many who have chronic, debilitating illnesses with long lists of symptoms do, she finds it difficult to get a diagnosis, still more difficult to get a diagnosis that is in any way useful, and most difficult of all to get helpful treatment. Especially since, as so many women have been told for so long, she gets the repeated insistence from doctor after doctor that it's all in her head.
In short, her illness places her, whether she likes it or not, at an angle to the rest of society, and it becomes very clear after a time that what the people around her expect, and have great difficulty with her not managing, is that she either get better or die.
And so her career, her writing, her teaching, her personal life, are these things that she has scratched out with great and laborious difficulty from that space between getting better and dying, that liminal space for which we do not have good words or good explanations. (There used to be the concept of the invalid, but how often was the invalid productive? Our current system holds that if you are managing to be productive, then, in some way, you aren't really sick, are you. Illness and labor as opposing states.)
Khakpour would, I am certain, prefer not to be in pain, and her search for that option, given the way her doctors are about it, is a story of dogged resistance. I don't mean that in the inspirational-disability way, of Overcoming Great Trials; I mean that, whether she wants to or not, in order to survive she has to insist repeatedly and with great effort that she is sick. That she will not shut up about her pain, that she will continue trying to seek solutions, that professional success does not mean she has stopped hurting. Illness has to become part of her identity, because it's only on that level that she can start getting other people to take it seriously.
Her memoir is interesting as a constructed narrative-- it does not have much shape. It cannot, because chronic illness, when it truly is chronic, when it is going to go away and come back again for the duration of a lifetime, resists most conventional concepts of narrative. There is no final resolution, there is no climax. The shape of the book is bent around pain the way that her life is bent around pain. What we are left with is pain, the systems of the world that are perpetuating and not assisting with that pain, and resistance to both pain and those systems.
Which is also what we are left with in that pair of novels. The resistance is the thing the three books have most in common. (Cf., as I said, Sick Woman Theory.) The fiction is, as fiction does, using metaphor and symbolism to filter and reshape the same sort of experience Khakpour is working with, the liminal spaces between sick, well, productive, non-working, a knot of cathexes centered around friction between women and illness and late capitalist society. Both novels are, due to their non-reality, free to concentrate somewhat less on pain, and free to tip over into surrealism; this is part of the process of exploring the space that lives like Khakpour's have long taken place in while invisible to fiction.
And this, I think this is huge, as a theme coming up in not just literature, but in literature that is being critically acclaimed and selling books to highbrow types and winning awards. I think it says something that all three of these books are by women of color, and that all three are getting amounts of publicity and critical discussion that indicate they are being read and to some extent respected. I think it says something that these are three separate approaches to carving narrative out of subjects that have traditionally not been considered appropriate subjects for Great Art.
Of course, I'm glad to see this kind of innovation in narrative and these themes partly because of their applicability to my own life. (Do I have migraines because of the PTSD, or because I had meningitis at twelve? Do I have PTSD partly because of the migraines and how people around me as a child failed to notice or treat them, or is the PTSD entirely about the abuse? Is the endometriosis because of the abuse, or related to the PTSD? Who knows?) (No one. There is no way to know these things.) (How am I supposed to know what, in my own life, counts as resistance?)
But I'm also glad to see this because it indicates that something is shifting, somewhere, in the edifices of power. I am used to this sort of literature being labeled experimental and being printed by small presses and sold in feminist bookshops. I am used to this sort of book being marginalized.
May whatever is shifting keep shifting: this kind of narrative is, given the world we live in at the moment, necessary. Because those of us who cannot necessarily make it to marches or stand in the street need a politics of resistance, too, and narratives of resistance are one of the ways to inch into conceiving those politics.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-20 12:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-20 01:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-20 02:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-20 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-20 02:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-20 10:24 pm (UTC)There used to be the concept of the invalid, but how often was the invalid productive?
Surely this is a class thing? There's the well-off invalid who can afford to lie wan in a bed while a nurse brings the next bowl of gruel or broth, and then there's the working-class granny who knits scarves and socks by feel because she can't see and can't walk and still has to do something with her gnarled hands.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-01 09:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-04 02:28 am (UTC)