Writing and naming (1)

Today I feel like talking about lies. A special form of lies. The lies that come with writing. Of course, we’re used to talking or hearing others talk about the mendacious nature of fiction (the most refined, I’d like to believe, form of writing). Its very name says it all: fiction is fictitious. It tells of aliens, of speaking animals, of places that never existed, of princes and princesses more numerous than the history of the entire world put together.

The other lie

Everything that lives under the banner of fiction is accepted by us, by others, by the world, as a form of lying, and we read it knowing full well that in order for fiction to be efficient we need to believe in it. Through fiction we learn how to accommodate dogma, how to turn a blind eye to the most outrageous of falsehoods, and love it to bits.

Lies, lies, lies.
Source: www.stormfront.org

But there’s yet another form of lying that comes with writing. It somehow follows from what I talked about a couple of weeks ago: the (wrong) belief that writing is a form of memory. I think I managed to at least vaguely suggest that memory is far from being served by writing. On the contrary, writing is storage: it is about words preserved in a sterilized jar, whence we take them out by the spoonful and consume them to our heart’s content, without having to memorize anything at all. It’s the jar that matters, really; and writing itself is often a jar, a receptacle: it preserves the words of our language, the rules that transform these words, and the sanctions applied upon non-compliance. We learn how to avoid these sanctions by learning the rules that make writing acceptable, literary, or academic. Respectable. Worthy of our admiration. 'Good.'

Well then, writing (as a technological complication of language) is also a big lie insofar as it turns out to be a naming device.

Deceptions

Names. What are they? Means of recognition, right? We name a thing because we want to make sure next time we come upon it we don’t have to wreck our minds again trying to figure out what it is (what it was in the first place). Now of course, some of the naming we’re handling was done for us well before we were born. And because we were born surrounded by these names we believe this really is the way they are – that this really is the only way they can be. Little that we know, however, that we've been deceived.

To start with, these names are arbitrary. They are things decided upon almost at a whim. Between an object and the word that names it there’s very little, if any, ‘organic’ association. Of course, we have onomatopoeia, or the imitation of sounds, as it is known, which seems to point out a capacity inherent in language to reproduce the sounds of nature. But do you know what roosters say in French? In German? In Swahili? Don’t be surprised if they speak foreign languages too. Don’t be surprised to find out they have had their own Tower of Babel. The truth is this: an onomatopoeic word doesn't belong in the animal kingdom. It has been decided upon by us, humans, that a rooster should say Cock-a-doodle-do in English and Cocorico in French.

And now we’re back to the initial statement, and capable of enlarging its purpose: language in general is a lie, and writing (its offspring) is an even bigger liar. It imposes upon whatever-it-is-that-we-call-reality the artificial layer of human presence. Words (whether spoken or written) don’t reflect nature but reflect us.
There are no words in nature. Words are our addition, our contribution to the intricacies of whatever-it-is-that-we-call-nature. In nature, things exist. Among us, they are what their names tell them to be.

The redesigning of the Grand Design

So if human language is lying in the first degree, writing becomes lying in the second degree. How so? Well, language is the first imposition we make upon nature. We transform the environment (by which I mean stuff that’s surrounding us; you know - like nature, like the universe, like relationships between things) to fit our desperate need for relevance. We tame nature to resemble us. It’s very much like planting trees and pretending they are natural beings (as if our act of planting them had never existed; as if we could wipe it out with a sponge). And in doing so, we perpetrate the first big lie: we deceive the Grand Design by giving it another substance.

Source: Los Angeles Times

But this is not enough. No, Sir-ee. We come upon our own language to modify it yet again. This time, we take those names we've imposed upon nature and make them into visible signs. We create letters and make combinations of letters to figure out a way to call a dog “dog” and metamorphosis “metamorphosis.” But to do that, we once again exercise our unique ability to deceive. Because the writing of a given sound, of a given word, has nothing to do with the way we pronounce it. As much as sounds were our interpretation of nature, letters are our interpretation of sounds. It’s us interpreting us, isn't it?

Between sounds and letters

Excuse me if I’m getting a little philosophical here, but I must. There is no direct correlation between the sound and the letter called upon to reproduce it. The noise we make when we say ‘Ah’ (the noise alone, the letting out of air through our mouths) is in no way a direct source for the letter A. The three lines we use to build the letter A have a history of their own. They have evolved through time, as a result of the whims of many, many generations and many, many complications (or simplifications, as the case may be). But what’s even more important is that these lines are purely artificial. Take a look at the European alphabet in the context of other systems of alphabetic notation and you’ll see what I mean.

Source: www.disclose.tv

Our letters have never inherited our sounds. No; they merely exist out there, as a possibility – not even the best of the possible worlds, as philosophers would put it, but rather as the most popular of all possibilities. We (I mean our human race, collectively taken) have decided, in the course of history, that A, B, C, D… is an acceptable system of notation, a good way of reproducing in written form our audible world. And this is a lie, because it circumvents the truth of our descriptive impotence.

(to be continued)

Causerie à deux in “Kathleenville”

An interview with Kathleen Winter

Two months ago I published a post on this blog, which was a review of Kathleen Winter’s novel, Annabel. It was followed, soon after, by a review on my other blog, Zero to One, where I called it “a book of contrasts.” The novel had been a finalist in the 2014 edition of Canada Reads, the most important book-reading event taking place in Canada. I was a little upset when the novel was excluded from the competition based on an interpretation that I found (and still find) completely wrong and unfair. As my friends know too well (and as will become apparent below), I am not a Canadian. But Annabel caused avalanches of thoughts in my mind, a lot of them too Canadian not to be highlighted. So I wrote the blog posts mentioned above. But I wanted to know more. And there was only one way I could find out the author’s perspective on place and space (which are, to me, the strongest elements in the novel). I contacted Kathleen Winter and asked her to give me an interview. To my delight, she accepted. Here is the result of our electronic exchanges:

The novel features a strong contrast between geography and urbanism. On the one hand, there is Croydon Harbour, a place that doesn’t exist on real maps – a mythical place of vast expanses, of white winters, of seasons that follow their own path, where humans are nothing if not subservient to ontology. On the other hand, there is St John’s, a real place in Labrador-Newfoundland – a place of human interests, of explosive colours, of distances that can be measured, of streets that limit movement or channel people’s actions. This contrast reminded me of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who proposed a distinction between what he called “smooth spaces” (the equivalent of your Croydon Harbour) and “striated spaces” (your St John’s). Would it be fair to say that the novel hinges on the understanding of this relationship and its own hermaphroditical nature? ||| My brother Michael told me that my writing about Croydon Harbour is really about a place he calls “Kathleenville”. He sees it as an extension of my imagination, which I suppose in a way it is. I have to admit, though, that as I wrote about Croydon Harbour, I thought I was writing about the real Labrador, and not really an imaginary place. It surprises me to find out that what I think of as earthy, real, tangible aspects of a place might in fact be none of those things. When I was writing Croydon Harbour, I envisioned Labrador communities I had seen and known. The landscape, the animals, the vegetation and the skies are “real”. But yes, the power and electricity and magnetism of the place, well, I guess they are real as well, but in order for them to be manifest they need a person, or consciousness, to meet them. St. John’s is a place I lived in for decades, but there again, in a way, it represents layered myth and story, to me. It’s sort of like a ragged, east coast San Francisco – the hills, the coloured houses, and what my daughter calls the higgledy-piggledyness. I love it there. The contrast between Croydon Harbour and St. John’s is, for me, partly about intimacy. Croydon Harbour is a place where the soul expands out into great space, whereas St. John’s is where it rests, like a cat, kittycorner and protected.

Croydon Harbour feels like a place that had to be imagined. My question is: what came first – Wayne or Croydon Harbour? Which one started the engine of the novel? ||| The character, the person of Wayne/Annabel, started the engine and caused me to begin writing a short story that would turn into the novel.  I met a Labrador artist who had worked a startling and mysterious figure into a beaded work on black felt, and when I asked her about this figure, she told me it was “a hermaphrodite.” She told me people of dual gender were known about and accepted in Labrador as having special powers. I had already begun writing the book when she told me this, but she helped me see a bigger picture, and Labrador was part of that picture.

Did you imagine the other places mentioned in the novel (I mean, of course, the places visited by Thomasina, which you describe to a certain extent) or did you actually see them all yourself? ||| I knew some of the places, such as London, from experience. My dear friend Elizabeth wrote me postcards from Bucharest that I used, with her permission, when describing Thomasina’s postcards. Elizabeth was my friend in St. John’s and she rented her basement apartment to a pair of Mormon missionaries. They came upstairs in the evenings and she gave them tea and cookies and they enraptured her so thoroughly with the Book of Mormon that they converted her and she became a Mormon missionary herself, which is how she got to Bucharest. Elizabeth is an artist and she has the best stories of anyone I know, the most humane and heartrending and compassionate. I beg her to let me use them and every now and then she does. Other places in Thomasina’s travels I researched or imagined.

In my review, I reflected on the myth of the androgyne, because it seemed so obvious to me. I have not seen this aspect mentioned in other reviews. Of course, I haven’t seen all of them! But how does this stand with you? Did you draw inspiration from literature that accommodated the idea of the hermaphrodite? ||| I have always been fascinated with gender, and have always felt a tension at having to play-act at being female. All my inspiration is unconscious, so it’s hard for me to be exact about a question like this. I just know that androgyny excites me and always has, whether in myth and story, or in life. Whenever I see or hear of someone who has broken the prison of gender duality, I feel released, somewhere deep in myself. Every single one of my favourite writers lives or lived beyond gender.

Wayne is written as a boy. Did that make it difficult to you to imagine him, to write his ‘gender-specific’ thoughts and actions? ||| It was the most difficult part of the book. In some ways, I feel it was impossible for me to do justice to this, which is why if you examine the story it becomes obvious that most of the gender-defining comes from people around the main character. In a way, Wayne/Annabel is transparent, and might even be said to be nonexistent. This is why I needed the idea of bridges in the book. The structure of bridges, their substance and their engineering, along with their overarching beauty, loftiness and grace, gave me a sort of whole entity that Wayne and Annabel could embrace and be interested in. I mean, you can’t have one without the other.

A Canadian trapper (a type embodied by the character Treadway)
Source: Le Dernier Trappeur, via www.avcesar.com

Wayne is the protagonist of the novel, but his father, Treadway, covers a lot of narrative territory as well. And of course, the ending belongs to him too. I don’t have the right metrics to measure this, but it seems that he appears more often than other characters in the novel. Why is that? ||| I began with one opinion and vision of Treadway, as a macho, one-dimensional man. But I based him on several men I know, and I think perhaps because of this, he quickly taught me that pinning him down would not be so easy. He taught me that nobody is one-dimensional. He taught me that love can make a father change his mind and question his own fears, and accept one’s child. He was not what I expected. My editor, at one point (when a fourth or fifth draft was not working), asked me if I should maybe “kill off” Treadway in the second half. I think that when she asked me that, I suddenly knew how important Treadway was, to the book. Her question made me work on bringing out his power and loveliness.

Also on Treadway: he never struck me as a person capable of thinking about murder. He kills animals for a living, but that’s where his capacity to kill seems to stop. He is not violent, he is not unfair, he is not revengeful. And so his determination to punish those who had dishonoured his son took me by surprise. Not that I though him incapable of reaction; but to me he seemed more likely to respond with a reflection rather than such a drastic action. When did that transformation happen in him? ||| I think of that time in Treadway’s mind as the time he regretted that he had not been able to protect his daughter. He thought of the attack as an assault on a daughter, and felt a father’s quiet, poisonous and lethal rage. I think it was fuelled by deep sorrow and regret that he had failed to prevent the violence against Annabel. Also, I felt that he knew the perpetrator would hurt someone else in the future. He wanted to at least prevent this. From a purely practical standpoint, he would dearly have loved to incapacitate the cruel, stupid bully.

To end with, there’s another aspect that I find striking in your novel: reading. Your characters read a lot. And not just each other’s letters, but books, serious books: Aristotle, Diderot, and so on. Is that normal for a man who goes out trapping in the Labrador wilderness? ||| Yes, it is normal for a Labrador trapper to read. I spent time with an old trapper who told me this, and I also heard it from other people. Trappers like Treadway were part Inuit and part Scots, and there was a lot of European influence on the Labrador coast. If you go to some of the coastal communities now you will find libraries full of books brought by the Moravian missionaries, and Labrador is full of fascinating people who combine practicality and deep knowledge of the land with a knowledge of literature and philosophy, as well as music.

Photo for Le Monde, (c) Jessica Auer

This is where our interview finishes. But I have to say I felt, from the very beginning, that I could spend days talking to Kathleen Winter, on all the intricacies of her novel and the specificities of her characters and stories. In order to understand all this, her novel needs to be read. Annabel needs to be on people’s bookshelves. For its hermaphroditism, for its themes, for its beauty.

||| Also, visit Kathleen’s blog, with a title taken from Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, to see her other ways of approaching writing, as well as the other wonderful talent she has: drawing. |||

Is Kathleen Winter's "Annabel" a Canadian novel?

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?”

(Swinburne, Hermaphroditus)

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.’

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. 

The colourful city of St John's, the opposite of fictional Croydon Harbour,
a place Kathleen Winter knows by heart.
Source: www.stjohns.ca

Like Macondo (I just can’t help treading this bridge!), the world of Annabel is a self-sufficient world, a world that could live without our reading it. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear someone saying that reading through this novel feels like violating the heavy secrets that make the atmosphere of the novel so dense.
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.

Labradorian winter
Source: www.perceptivetravel.com

This is the kind of reading after which you need a rest. Its imagery and metaphors come in such poetic avalanches, you need to remind yourself of how prosaic the real world actually is.