I’m not sure if any other readers of Annabel have grown frustrated with the discussions televised in the second and third days of Canada Reads, around two weeks ago. Judges could simply not get over the issue of the pregnancy featuring in the novel. I don’t care if what I am saying here is a spoiler, because even if the episode of the pregnancy was meant to remain a secret, the judges have done a great job at making it known to the entire world. So now, we can talk about it without fear of disappointing other readers.
Motto:
“To what strange end hath some strange
god made fair
The double blossom of two fruitless
flowers?”
When I was
about thirty or so pages into Annabel
I made a note on my bookmark to check if there were any allusions in the novel to
Plato’s myth of the androgyne. With a hermaphrodite as the protagonist, the
novel had presented itself as a likely contender to the reference.
So when I came upon the ‘pregnancy moment’ I knew I’d found what I’d been waiting for.
Wayne, the
character in question, the novel’s protagonist, is discovered to have
impregnated himself (unknowingly) due to a natural – says the author –
disposition of hermaphrodite bodies to perform sexual functions of both male
and female organs.
Aristophanes,
in Plato’s Symposium, says this:
“The
two parts of man (the Androgyne), each desiring his other half, came together
and throwing their arms around one another, entwined in mutual embraces,
longing to grow into one; they were on the point of dying from hunger and
self-neglect because they did not like to do anything apart.”
Wayne
is found to be in a state of constant self-embracement. He behaves equally as a
man and as a woman. He has the feelings of both, the physical attributes of
both, the desires of both. Even the way he satisfies himself sexually, his idea
of orgasm, is ambiguous. What’s more, he reaches a stage where the tension of
his singularity is so great he takes no care of his external appearance –
something that other characters notice. I found this to be Plato’s Symposium almost to the letter.
As a
consequence, I was not at all concerned with the medical possibility of the act
of pregnancy in a hermaphrodite body. There was no way I was going to
trivialise the beauty of this book by checking out if such self-impregnations
were possible. Well, the judges in Canada Reads thought it was worth their salt
to play the role of fact-checkers. And what a show they made when they discovered
‘the medical truth.’
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| Canada Reads, Day 3 Source: CBC |
Now, when
it’s well known that Annabel is not
the winning book, I can reflect on something that became apparent to me as soon
as the debates were over. This time, I can say it with confidence: the judges
were right to think that Annabel was
not a Canadian book. That’s because the scope of the novel and its narrative
force go well beyond the geographical limitations of a given country. I am not
a Canadian, but I don’t think Annabel was
written with Canada in mind. I may seem wrong, since so many places (even the
imaginary ones) are so Canadian in nature, but the book certainly doesn’t
present itself that way. Catherine Winter has aimed a lot farther and a lot
deeper. And in order to arrive at this destination, she employed, at so many
levels, this universal myth of the double, the doppelganger, the Janus Bifrons,
the facts of coincidentia oppositorum,
the internal conflict that transgresses issues of gender, sex, race or any
other issues capable of generating binary oppositions. In other words, Annabel is not Canadian because it is
too hermaphrodite, too unstable, too risky to pin to a single space or a single
idea.
Annabel is a book freed of the strictures of geography, and
yet a book in which geography features prominently, blending in with the
characters, growing to overwhelm the human.
Unhinged characters
All
people in Annabel are soft. They are
not people of flesh and bone. They are people of words. So that even the
harshest of them, the most brutal or unfair, is laid on the page with a light
touch, similar to that of watercolour. There’s really something about the way
these characters settle on the page that creates, in my mind, the whole mood of
the narrative: a mood in which life is not fought-for but negotiated, and where
sentiments are turned on the proper side the way you turn a pillow on the cool
side on a hot summer day when your bed is soaked in perspiration.
These
people are never complete. They have unresolved issues that loom large after
they’ve had their narrative turn, or when they’ve disappeared from sight: like
Treadway on his last tracking season, after which he comes resolved to avenge
his son; or like Thomasina, who returns to her errand life in search for the
best places on Earth; or like Jacinta, who drifts into madness, where all
things oscillate between dream and reality. Because of this indecisiveness, no
characterisation is ever complete. In almost every chapter there’s a new reason
to rest on these characters’ physical appearances, or to delve into their
anything-but-static psyches, as if we were seeing them for the first time.
Silky
people, their actions - blobs of aquatint. That’s how I like to think about
them. They never just speak. They speak while performing little domestic
actions or paying tribute to little domestic memories, as if life on Earth were
the only source of action. Jacinta and Thomasina talk to each other “as they
spread jam on toast thinly, the way they both liked it.” Of her life in the
city prior to the marriage, Jacinta remembers with striking accuracy “the
pigeons who lived in the O of Browning’s department store.” That’s how the
lives of these characters unfold: with exactitude; with the dot on the ‘i’ and
the cross on the ‘t’; with details squeezed out of the diachronic nightmare of
life.
While
reading Annabel, one very often gets
this feeling that one is midwifing a world into being. Somehow like Gabriel
Garcia Marquez’s Macondo, perhaps: a world that doesn’t explode into life, but
develops slowly, through little additions, through little events that take
place in an almost natural course of events. This is a world that’s constantly
assessed but never invented.
Larger than life
But
the novel, a text of in-betweens and dualities, is not only given to these
engagements with the little world of domesticity. The other side of things is
one that envelops the narrative in a gigantic, mythical veil; in a trans-human
blanket.
When
the unprecedented fact of a hermaphrodite child occurs to Jacinta, she asks Thomasina
(the only other person who knows the secret):
‘’Will
other people love it?’
‘That
baby is all right the way it is. There’s enough room in this world.’
This
is how Thomasina saw it, and it was what Jacinta needed to hear.”
Here,
the world is weighed and found capacious. But it is not made into a
capacious thing. It is merely assumed to be so. Because, as via the Platonic
myth, the world, in its mythical (Labradorian?) age, used to be large enough to
contain the third sex: the androgyne.
The
world is large enough for all the people who inhabit the world of fictional Croydon
Harbour to become palpable. People of flesh and bone, laid on the page with
gentle touches, but who perceive geography on a verge between the grandiose and
the sublime.
“They didn’t
call this place the big land for nothing. It was big in a way that people who
came in either respected and followed or disdained at their peril. You could
live like a king in Labrador if you knew how to be subservient to the land, and
if you did not know how, you would die like a fool, and many had done.”
This is the
logic that affects Treadway directly, and the other characters in oblique but
not unrelated ways.
Atmosphere
I
could go on forever quoting this book. Catherine Winter provides metaphors so
evocative they stay with the reader for long, long time. This is, by and large,
a book of atmosphere. Its weight and appeal rest in the weight and appeal of
its luxuriant descriptions. In this atmosphere, the characters live as if in a
warm, comfortable amniotic liquid, refusing to be born: refusing, in other
words, to be part of this world, in which us, the readers, reside.
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| The colourful city of St John's, the opposite of fictional Croydon Harbour, a place Kathleen Winter knows by heart. Source: www.stjohns.ca |
But once you’ve started reading, secrets or no secrets, there’s no way you can stop, unless you find a goddamn good excuse. More importantly, this is not a book to skim through. There are surprises at every corner, beautiful things at every turn of the story. You can’t take a vacation without being burdened by the thought that you have missed a lot by not reading every sentence.
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| Labradorian winter Source: www.perceptivetravel.com |
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