Mary MacLane’s spectacular moods first fueled, then failed her

There comes a time when the way you are is not just the way you are, but also the way you might die. There arrives at that time a word for what you said or hoped was indescribable, a diagnosis for your lure. Always there were moods you had that others did not, moods that were your organizing principle. Now they become your undoing. You weren’t wrong to think nobody else was like you. Not many people are. Almost nobody would want to be, and that’s where — in your wilding moments — you were wrong. I was.

The numbers could also be wrong. If not, and if you’re an adult in America, there is a two to five percent chance you have what is now called bipolar affective disorder (and I want B.A.D., an acronym that feels somehow bratty but also courteous, like a warning, to catch on). If you write for a living, multiply that chance by ten. Of course, you (or I) don’t write only for a living, but also to live; you (well, I) believe writing is both a reason to keep doing so and the effect of doing it singularly. Then comes a time when writing is just another symptom.

Records of the human condition are often kept by its least reliable narrators. Consider the case study conducted by the American psychologist Nancy Andreasen and compiled in her 2005 book, The Creating Brain, for which she chose 15 authors from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, class of ’74. As the connections between one’s creativity and one’s psychiatric history, or diagnosis, began to light up, Andreasen’s group grew to 30; so did the control group. Over the next fifteen years of follow-up studies, two of the Iowa writers committed suicide. Nobody in the control group died.

In 1983, the psychologist Kay Jamison, herself bipolar, surveyed 47 British artists and writers and found that 38 percent had sought treatment for mood disorders — a percentage about 30 times the national average. Writers, according to writers, were suffering at a higher rate of breakdown, while among them poets had it worst of all: Half of those surveyed had been hospitalized for depression and/or mania. Poets, decided Jamison, had the most “creative fire.” At first, this seems a suspiciously convenient thing for poets to believe: It’s better to burn, burn, burn than to pay the heating bill. Still, there are few other explanations for the survival of poetry, which must feel like rubbing together sticks while other writers use barbecue lighters, blowtorches, barrels and barrels of oil. The poet, always having to prove she’s not dead, must be more concerned with breaths and heartbeats and flickers of viscera than any other writer, and so, more than any other writer, it’s the poet who remains our most stubbornly libidinal subject, at odds with the fleshless world, embodying at least one early, Freudian notion of bipolarity.

Whether a person is bipolar before being named as such is for structuralists to contest. After the diagnosis, certain erraticisms do cohere. Certain flaws get excused. Six close friends say they’d “always known it.” All we actually “know” is what studies say, and what studies say is that manic depression (as it was once known, and is still better described) gets diagnosed later in life than depression, in part because it’s often misdiagnosed as the latter. For women, the first episode is typically depressive; for men, manic. Whether or not that divide collapses when gender norms do, doctors agree the first episode tends to occur before 25, and is easily confused with, well, being under 25.

Two years before Jamison’s study, Francesca Woodman, who is now considered a seminal proto-Cindy Sherman  photographer but was then just 22 and mostly unknown, jumped from a Lower East Side loft window to her death. It was a shock, not a surprise. In her system a switch had gotten stuck. Betsy Byrne, her best friend, wrote in 2011 that Woodman’s “ultimate conflict” was between a “strict American puritanical work ethic” (depression, surely) and a “pure Roman delight in life’s sybaritic pleasures” (sounds awfully like hypomania). In Marya Hornbacher’s 2008 memoir, Madness, Hornbacher recalls days of work so intense her friends resented her, then a night she drove 600 miles on a whim. Robert Lowell, self-lacerating after a 1959 manic attack, blamed himself for “all the Baudelairean vices, plus … stupidity.” Woodman, too, excoriated herself. “[Francesca] bounced from extremes,” wrote Byrne, “living very regimented in control or very recklessly out of control, and she berated herself mercilessly for the latter. I always thought that Francesca secretly longed for the conventional, a life of plain old day-in-and-day-out sameness and security — forget about the art, the constant self-doubt, loneliness, insecurity and obsessiveness inherent in the process that can overtake the life.”

Longing, unlike desire, conceals the need for dissatisfaction. What you long for you definitively can’t have. When what’s longed for is “sanity” or “conventionality” or “adulthood,” the mad one longs mostly, I think, to reassure herself that these “responsible” choices are not ones she can — nor can be expected to — make. “All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children… I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life,” said Anne Sexton, whose damnedest looked a lot like dancing the “Dying Swan” in a backyard filled not with balloons but with bottles, and who nonetheless had babies with someone named Alfred. “But,” she added, “one can’t build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.”

You will be interested to know that nightmares happen overnight, and so too — so often — does the axis-bending turn in bipolarity. Woodman had early-onset, untenable extremes; she went out like a match.  More commonly, it’s as the early 20s turn to the late 20s that certain, amplified tendencies become wildly unlike delight. For most of us, when a time comes, it comes then.

* * *

In 1917, at age 36, Mary MacLane published the better and less read of her two memoirs, I, Mary MacLane. It had been a while. A decade and a half earlier, when she was 18 and unknown to her home town of Butte, Montana, let alone the world, she wrote a memoir in which nothing happens outside her febrile, arguably vile, indisputably brilliant mind. Published in 1902, when she was 21, The Story of Mary MacLane  was the phenomenon a century forgot.

This year, republished and restored to its original name, I Await The Devil’s Coming feels both proto- and anti-confessional: MacLane invented female self-expressionism, with its radicalized ego and racing nerve, and yet, faced with the nadiristic, nth-degree prospect of Marie Calloway’s first book, What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life, I am sure she’d say “put on some fucking syntax.” (If you sold 100,000 copies of your diary in one month, you too would be a boss — and I do mean one hundred thousand copies. Of an unknown girl’s diary. In one month. In 1902. Anyone still want to talk about Cat Marnell’s book deal?)

I, Mary MacLane didn’t change the game. Fifteen years of fame and infamy and reactive detachment, of moves to Manhattan and back to Butte, had amounted to near career suicide. MacLane had been writing her second book for several years, allegedly since her late 20s. Now she was in her middle 30s. In 1917, that was considerably older than it is in 2013. Her feminism, intellectual fervor, and active bisexuality were neither suppressed nor about to be socially accepted; she was still called the “wild woman of Butte.” And yet the older a wild woman gets, the more she’s left to roam alone. Then as now, then as before, it’s wild girls who get all the good outrage.

“The egotism of youth is merciless, measureless, endlessly vulnerable,” writes MacLane from her “Neat Blue Chair” (her capitalization of certain signifiers is capricious, but the inconsistency works: that cocky “Me” separates ego from a self who knows better). “I have got by that stage of egotism. But I’ve entered on another wilder, more lawless — farther-seeing if less bevisioned.”

MacLane, with her weary clear-grey eyes, sees not only farther, but deeper, too. She can imagine the world almost well enough to empathize with its women in ways she could not when, as an 18-year-old #radfem, she considered herself infinitely more human than the mere persons around her. At 36 she doesn’t think of herself any less, only differently. This diary of her days “may or it mayn’t show also a type, a universal Eve-old woman,” she disclaims. “If it is so it is not my purport. I sing only the Ego and the individual.”

Later, there is an updated “About Me” page that makes my ribs feel like wishbones, and is worth quoting in one long breath:

“I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright
world and dearly and damnably important to Me.
Face to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair
and with great intentness.
I put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the
Caming trivial Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus:
I am rare — I am in some ways exquisite.
I am pagan within and without.
I am vain and shallow and false.
[...]
I’m like a leopard and I’m like a poet and I’m like a religieuse
and I’m like an outlaw.
[...]
I am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint,
fanciful in my truth.
I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it.
I am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous.
I am young, but not very young.
I am wistful — I am infamous.
In brief, I am a human being.”

Compare this perfect self-elegy with the recursive boasting of I Await the Devil’s Coming, in which MacLane declares herself a thief, a philosopher, a beauty, a fool, a woman from the age of 12, and above all, a genius. Not just any genius, either. She is by turns “a peculiar, rare genius,” “a genius in [her] own right,” and “a genius more than any genius who has ever lived.” The word “genius” is used 46 times in I Await.

In I, Mary MacLane the word “genius” occurs in one turn of phrase, used just twice. “There is no Cleverness in this I write,” she says (the capital C implying not clever, which is elsewhere uncapitalized and used differently, but something like pretentious). “There is writing skill and my dead-feeling genius.” Two hundred pages earlier, she’d ended said elegy with: “I am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arresting dead-feeling genius. And were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad.”

At 36 it is too late to say she’s mad, anyway. Were MacLane alive in the ‘70s or the ‘90s or now, it would have been said by her psychiatrists at 19 or at 21 or certainly by 27, when she had left cities and begun to keep diaries again. But in 1917, in Butte, Montana, much of the grandeur had gone from her madness, and the delusion from her genius, and maybe there was no genius without the delusion. But what a delusion! To claim the fatherly crown, whether deserved or not, is a radical and astounding act, and it happened a hundred and ten years before, say, Sheila Heti’s “female genius” debate. There had never been as defiantly of-herself a heroine, or, as MacLane said in I Await, a not-heroine.

In I, Mary MacLane, the older, sadder “I” sees herself as a — not the — subject. She sees also the world. And yet — she can never quite reach it. The wider and brighter it becomes, the further she recedes, lapsing day after day into silent, solitary routines performed in plain black dresses. Today in her diary she is “oddly joyous.” Tomorrow all seems “a nasty life.” But always she dresses the same, as if exerting magisterial authority and control over moods she, at 19, described as “alternating periods of hope and despair,” of hunger for life and flirtation with death. Now her highs are “the flashing burning sparkling mad magic of being alive” and her lows “the cold and restless terror” accompanied by thoughts of death, of “death and destruction,” of “death and death and death everywhere.”

Here it is either that MacLane exaggerates her moods, or that her moods have grown huge and ungraspable, leaving her powerless to exaggerate her mind. Or, if not powerless, daily less desirous of what she’d most admired: strength. “I might say I prefer strength to weakness or weakness to strength,” she writes, nearing the end. “Neither would be true. What I prefer is a hellish hovering, an endless torturing Tenterhook between the two.” And then: “One reason it will be pleasant to be dead: I can then no longer Waver.”

* * *

The doctors tell B.A.D. girls to keep a “mood diary.” They use words like “document,” and “familiarize,” and “monitor.” And “manage.” I sigh: Do I have to? Isn’t this just, like, Twitter? And also impossible? (Ellen Forney in her graphic memoir of bipolarity, Marbles: “How could I keep track of my mind, with my own mind?” She almost doesn’t.) But slowly I learn to follow self-reportage like a script, eschewing a prescription, getting better by pretending to be more here, less here. I’m 25 and 26 and some days I’m fine, “asymptomatic.” Then I’m 27 and those days are fewer, then farther apart, and I dread the day after which no more days are fine.

In I, Mary MacLane, she writes to God and you know a time has come. There’s no more externalized bipolarity than MacLane turning to heaven from the depths of a death-mood, just as, fifteen years earlier, she waited for the Devil on a high.

In that moment, when he finally arrives:

It feels as if sparks of fire and ice crystals ran riot in my veins with my blood; as if a thousand pinpoints pierced my flesh, and every other point a point of pleasure, and every other point a point of pain; as if my heart were laid to rest in a bed of velvet and cotton-wool but kept awake by sweet violin arias; as if milk and honey and the blossoms of the cherry flowed into my stomach and then vanished utterly; as if strange, beautiful worlds lay spread out before my eyes, alternately in dazzling light and complete darkness with chaotic rapidity…

This is genius but not mad, only the extremest poesis of manic lust. Even mild upswings make me feel invincible enough to love whoever can hurt me the most, and so, in the summer, I ride on the back of a motorcycle down Mulholland Drive. In the fall I climb onto the unprotected ledge of a hotel looming over the West Side Highway. Come winter I don’t fuck with condoms, and by spring I’m forgetting to not to say I love you.

But I’m older, a little. The light is less dazzling, only too bright, and the darkness doesn’t rest. I stop counting fine days. I can act. As long as nobody asks if I’m okay, I’m okay, and at the same time, it can’t be that bad, because who has ever accused me of being a poet.

When I am asked, I list exigent concerns: work, money, sanity. I don’t say the real fear is never again feeling love so high I’m sure nobody has ever felt it, or ever will. Now I am sure of nothing, not even Nothing.

“The passion-edged mood is burnt out,” wrote MacLane when her grey days began outnumbering, irreversibly, the violet and pink and blue days. “Gone, gone, gone.”

It is true some nights that when all the champagne turns to ash in my throat I think, flickeringly, I’ll never taste happiness again.

And I do not think it’s safe to walk home.

“As long as your creative fires burn, you are propelled forward,” opined the New York Times on Woodman’s life and death. This was in 2011, when a faintly soap-operatic documentary about her and her family, The Woodmans, came out. The movie prompted a significant revival of interest in Woodman, and of concern-trolling: “But if you are consuming yourself in the process, what is left when the fire begins to sputter?”

There are ways MacLane martyred herself on that artistic pyre. There is also a way in which, if the diary she wrote at 18 invented her life, the one she published at 36 tried to save it. It was her “mood diary,” only no doctor told her to keep it. Still, she could not be her own doctor and her own teacher, her own lover, her own sister, her own companion. Even at her clearest, Mary MacLane could not seem to find anyone with a humanness equal to hers, or to try.

But she knew they were out there, or, better yet, under there. “I’d like,” she wrote, “with breathless eagerness — to read the analyzed being just beneath my skin. Everybody — every human being — is wildly Real: radiant and desolate.”

That Mary MacLane could be wildly, really, truly of-herself, even while psychically divided against herself, makes her my personal genius. That she lived so long and only for-herself left her a solitary, middle-aged corpse in a Chicago rooming house, August 1929, cause of death unknown, or known only to those who’ve read her, and who are themselves a little too radiant, or too desolate, some days.

Hans Keilson’s novels point out the inadequacy of a purely psychological or philosophical approach to history. 

Four years in, we’ve yet to see a great novel about the economic collapse. American literature has seemed as unable to engage directly with the crisis as the politicians. News stories have pseudo-official names within hours of their breaking, while our inability to commonly describe this crisis is reflected by its lack of a title. Is it merely a “recession,” a brief set-back in the flow of triumphant market-democracy, is it “the Great Recession,” or is it already over, merely fallout from the “financial crisis” that ended in 2008? Every month brings conflicting reports that recovery has finally arrived, or is faltering, or is continuing apace.

The crisis’s defining features in the US — student and credit card debt, underwater mortgages, precarity and underemployment — are deeply individualized, atomizing, and psychological: difficult to organize around politically, but seemingly ripe territory for novelization. While there have been a number of oblique, dystopic confrontations (A Visit from the Goon Squad, Super Sad True Love Story), and despite the oft-touted return of literary realism, there are few head-on discussions (Capital, a farce by British writer John Lanchester, is the only English language example that comes to mind). Is the bourgeois ennui of Jonathan Franzen really the best we can hope for?

The American release of Hans Keilson’s Life Goes On, first published in Germany in 1933 during the catastrophic final days of the Weimar Republic, throws this lack into stark relief. Appearing in English for the first time, the semi-autobiographical novel — Keilson’s first, written when he was only 23 — centers on the gradual but inexorable destruction of a family clothing store in an unnamed small German city suffering from Germany’s economic collapse. Life Goes On features two protagonists, Herr Seldersen (often referred to as Father), the store’s owner, and his son, Albrecht (Keilson, loosely), who enters his teenage years just as things start going downhill at the store. Herr Seldersen’s financial troubles, which he hides from Albrecht as long as he can, counterpoints painfully with Albrecht’s bildung in a country with nothing to offer its young people.

The parallels between Albrecht’s life and the current (2013) crisis make the book feel surprisingly contemporary, and raise important and still-relevant questions about what inspires political involvement. The correspondence between then and now appears most obvious when Albrecht goes to Berlin for university. In the city, Albrecht finds his education lacking and throws himself into his part-time work as a musician (which Keilson also did to pay for school). But neither gigging nor college offers a solution to the deep alienation of a young adulthood without a future: “The fact was, the students all wanted to pass their exams, even if they meanwhile had to play the trombone or the saxophone or what have you and neglect their studies. But what did that even mean: their studies? What were their prospects afterward?” We know well what the future holds for the Jewish Seldersens and Albrecht’s university cohort, but in 1933, Keilson could have no idea.

The slow collapse of the store acts as a synechdoche for the general immiseration of the German middle class during the period. This synechdoche is achieved through the many characters beyond Albrecht and his Father — classmates, business associates, friends and family — that take a central role: the scope of the novel is broader than just a pseudo-autobiographical reflection of one family’s crisis. Keilson slips freely in and out of characters’ internal monologues, always without quotation marks and often within paragraphs (a technique that will reappear in his later novel Comedy in a Minor Key), and the multiple voices diffuse the primacy of the novel’s protagonists and reenforces the sense that this story’s subject is broader than the lives of its chief movers.

Still, Life Goes On is not quite a “social novel”: Though it certainly uses the plight of the individual as a way of highlighting political and social strife, it is ultimately the interior experiences of the characters that make the novel tick. Can a novel so thoroughly interested in psychological expression be deemed political? These tensions — between the political and the psychological, between the social and the individual — are fundamental ideological and novelistic concerns. And while these dichotomies are false constructions of bourgeois individuation and subjectivity, they are also, as a result, the stuff of lived, everyday experience under capitalism. Political engagement, a struggle which necessarily emerges from individual experience, also requires the supersession of the individual as such.

What sort of experience produces political commitment? For Keilson, it is born when a person’s conflicted, often disoriented interior life meets extreme exterior political events. Such encounters run throughout Keilson’s body of work.

* * *

It is the rare obscure writer who lives to see his rediscovery and canonization, but Hans Keilson, who died at 101 last June, saw his  novels The Death of The Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key re-released (and, in the case of Comedy, translated for the first time) to widespread acclaim, appearing on best-seller lists and garnering him a number of major awards. These two long-ignored novels about life under Nazism, like Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise and Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, have reappeared just as Nazism is slipping from living memory.

Unlike Fallada and Nemirovsky, Keilson, a doctor by training, managed to escape those horrible years by hiding in the Netherlands (though hardly unscathed: his parents were killed in Auschwitz). Keilson eventually joined the Dutch resistance, for which he travelled the Netherlands, giving psychological support to children hiding from the Nazis, mostly orphaned or separated from their parents.

This would become his life’s work. After the war, Keilson would retrain as a psychologist. If it weren’t for the novels’ rediscovery, he would have been remembered (though less widely) for his contributions to academic psychology. His dissertation on “sequential trauma,” built on interviews with Dutch Jewish children who survived the war, is considered foundational in the field, according to his translator and advocate Damion Searls.

It is unsurprising, given this, that a psychological approach is predominant in his novels. His protagonists are never at the heart of historical events. There are no battlefields, no camps: Characters are always at a physical remove from the major events against which their lives inexorably bend. Albrecht witnesses a violent protest, but he is swept along in it, watching rather than participating. The town in Comedy in a Minor Key sits below an Allied flight path, but the bombs never get that close. In The Death of the Adversary, the Jewish protagonist arrives at a hotel where Hitler is speaking, but never enters the lecture hall: Losing his nerve, he waits in the lobby and listens over an intercom. Keilson prefers mundane, daily scenes, and it is mostly in characters’ reflections and conversations that the political and historical appear.

The tension between a somewhat ‘normal’ every day life and the grand dramas of Europe ripping itself to shreds is a powerful force in all his novels, but it is the central trope of Comedy in a Minor Key, where it is played for (very dry) humorous effect. In the novel, a young Dutch couple, Wim and Marie, hide a Jewish perfume salesman, Nico, in their home. But in the very first scene of the novel Nico dies of illness in his room. The obvious narrative tension (will he survive? will the Nazis find him?) thus dissolved, the book, which mostly takes place through flashback, instead portrays the quotidian experience of both the couple and Nico living in secrecy together. The daily indignities and foibles, many culled from Keilson’s experiences in hiding, become the entire scope of Nico’s world: his emotional life played out entirely within a banal house arrest in some strangers’ home.

None of the characters, neither Wim nor Marie nor Nico, are noble or particularly brave. They live in a small, quiet city in Holland, and their dramas are small-scale, playing out in awkward dinners and strained chats. A few times Nico is almost seen by visitors, and then once he is, but, as we know from the start, nothing comes of it (save fear and self-recrimination). Nico is also ten years older than Wim and Marie, and the reversal of age-based power roles, only heightened when he becomes infirm and must be cared for, widens the emotional gap created by their wildly divergent experiences. They never overcome that distance. “Even while [Nico] was alive, everything [Marie] heard him say, everything she saw — his voice, his movements  — was like something seen from the opposite of a river while mist hung over the water and masked any clear view.”

This distance between the couple and their charge mirrors the distance between their daily experience and the Nazi horror that surrounds it. Keilson’s insights into his characters’ feelings produce sympathy for all positions. But the attention to the small-scale — the domestic, the particular, the interior — can be as frustrating as it is illuminating. There is little sense here of urgency or historical immediacy. The novel opens a window onto a certain way of life specific to its time and captures moments of beautiful tenderness and sadness, but does not open to the broader questions its subject matter requires.

The contradictions of everday life in the face of massive social upheaval are nowhere more pronounced then in Keilson’s masterpiece, The Death of The Adversary, which is told from the perspective of an unnamed German-Dutch Jewish narrator obsessed with Hitler (referred to in the novel only as “B.”). His obsession with B.  mirrors what he understands as B.’s obsession with him, which is to say, with Jews. And since Hitler’s rise to power came on the back of anti-semitism, since, the narrator reasons, he is defined by his enemies, he must ultimately need them: Therefore the dictator could never destroy him, not really.

This position is is founded on a philosophical relativism that allows the narrator to underestimate Hitler by understanding the adverserial relationship between him and his victims as essential to Hitler’s survival. Here Keilson reveals the extreme inadequacy of purely psychological or philosophical responses to the historical. At the center of the novel is a very long conversation between the narrator and an (also unnamed) Jewish friend who is fighting against Hitler’s rise. The friend tries to convince the narrator of the necessity of action. The narrator argues that action would be wrong, even detestable. Instead, he says that

[Hitler] means as much to me as I mean to him…You only see him as an aggressor, who is threatening us. But that is only one side of him. Hence, you over-estimate him…for him we are aggressors, to exactly the same extent…The mere fact that we exist is sufficient to make him feel that he is being attacked, perhaps that was how it all started. The same fears which you and I, which all of us have to endure, he has to endure too. Not similar fears—the same ones!

The thinking is psychologically consistent to a certain extent: Fascism certainly is built on fear and a total submission to power which can only reflect self-hatred. But to say, as the narrator does, “I see both sides, not only one,” provides him a basis to refuse action, and thus to completely misunderstand a situation through an overvaluing of understanding.

This is not the only time the narrator is obviously dead wrong, and at times he can be infuriating: In one scene, mentioned above, he attends a rally where B. is speaking in order to civilly convince him in conversation that he’s misguided about Jews:

He will not admit his mistake straight away, of course not. But it depends on me, on my tact, on my powers of conviction, whether his eyes are finally opened. If only I could manage to convince him! Yes, at that time I still believed that people could be changed by arguments. If I could change him, it would only increase my admiration for him.

Such a position is dangerously naive, of course, but who hasn’t at some time believed they could argue down an enemy? At what point do we recognize an enemy as not merely adverserial, but existential? Keilson undercuts a series of liberal ideologies about political discourse, about loving and knowing your enemy, and about belief in the (at least potential) good will of powerful people by ascribing the ideologies to a Jew who, as a result of them, refuses to fight Hitler’s rise to power. In following these principles to their logical conclusion, the narrator fails to fulfill one of the most clear-cut ethical obligations of the 20^th century.

But such a misguided narrator is also the only one who could take us into the novel’s most powerful encounter. Pursuing a crush on a coworker, he ends up in her parlor with a group of young Nazi recruits. One of the recruits is describing the desecration of a Jewish cemetery to his compatriots. All of them know that the narrator is Jewish, and the recruit hesitates before telling the story, but the narrator’s curiosity allows him to egg the man on, to get him to tell the whole story. A stronger character would object, walk out, or try to fight, but the confused, weak-willed narrator sits through the story and suffers. Such confrontations must have occurred in the early days of Nazi power, before the full development of Nazi law. It is a horrific scene.

This complex novel feels at times like an accusation, at times like an apologia (Keilson himself underestimated the danger of Nazism, and had to be convinced by his wife to flee to the Netherlands), at times like a book-length philosophical investigation into the failures of philosophical investigation. Part of the complexity is built by Keilson’s prose style, which is simple in structure and vocabulary and filled with strange logical leaps and ellisions. Conversation is rarely direct. “I always knew that words are suitcases with false bottoms,” Keilson’s narrator says. In The Death of the Adversary the word “Jew” is never spoken, nor are the Nazis or Hitler named, the latter referred to as “my enemy” as often as “B.” This technique reminds us that the name Hitler immediately evokes so many ideas, so many clichés, that it can leave little room for investigation. Though we never for a second forget what is being spoken of, the absence of the proper nouns subtly affords the reader space to retain an openness about historical ideas otherwise thoroughly considered and built up. It is a wonderful if simple intervention.

And the novel is full of these. It is rare to be able to say, “Here, then, is a new angle on Nazis,” and, written in 1959, The Death of the Adversary is hardly new. But Keilson’s narrator’s position often forces us beyond simple ideas about what it meant to live under Nazism’s rise. The narrator’s fearful admiration of Hitler forces us to look at the way anyone, even a Jew, could be deceived by fascist power, as well as to confront the shared fantasy that, if we were in Germany, we would have fought tooth and nail against Nazism.

It is easy to say, “Of course if I’d lived under the Nazis I’d have joined the resistance.” But statistically speaking that is probably not true. The vast majority of Germans and other Europeans under Nazi occupation collaborated or did nothing. It is a complicated and difficult thing to take a political stance, to make a real decision to fight for a better world: Even the appearance of Nazis, which should make the choice simple, did not force action for many until it was too late.

The narrator does not remain supplicant, an admirer of his enemy, a coward, a fool. Near the novel’s conclusion, he goes, again, to a Nazi rally, this one outdoors, and he sees B. for the first time. B. drives by in an armored motorcade, surrounded by soldiers. This image, combined with the experience in the girl’s parlor, finally breaks him from his complacency:

I understood that I was deceiving myself and that I was helping [B.] to deceive both himself and me. If I regarded him as my friend, there was no need for me to see the soldiers at the back of his car, and I could induce him to see them either, even though he was carrying them about with him. But they were always there. They were part of him.

Here, finally, the narrator recognizes that power is a truth beyond and outside mere psychological understanding: Hitler’s fear and hatred was always backed up by a gun. The recognition of naked force frees the narrator from his abstract philosophical consideration and admiration of the man. Massive power, once confronted, reveals that it is born of something both much more and much less than a psychological irregularity. The necessity of action becomes clear when the vulgarity of force gathered against you is understood.

The Death of the Adversary employs a minimal framing narrative: We’re told that the text was given by the narrator to a lawyer, who hid it throughout the war and then gave it to yet another unnamed character. Their conversation begins and ends the novel, and in it we understand that the Jewish narrator became, after writing the text,  a vital figure in the Dutch resistance, an excellent forger who died in a trap set by an SS officer but managed to take the officer down with him. The novel is, in many ways, a record of how one could arrive at a political commitment so strong you are willing to give up your life.

Political action is the end result of  Life Goes On as well. The final scene of the novel sees Albrecht’s family in Berlin, destitute, participating in a march that passes by their own apartment. But Keilson’s characters must witness personal collapse or communal atrocity before arriving at their decision, and they arrive at action too late. In our own period of increasing authoritarianism and inequality, where suffering is still distributed unevenly and is all too often invisible, how can we avoid the same errors?

A warmed globe needs new writers to guide us through it; will climate change, like World War I, usher in a new novel? 

It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if, a decade or two from now, some prominent novelist or cultural tastemaker were to amend Virginia Woolf ’s iconic 1923 claim — “On or about December, 1910, human character changed” — to something like “On or about November, 2012, the climate changed.” Certainly near-future novelists will feature the relationship between humans and the environment more centrally than do most current writers. The seas are rising and the seasons are unraveling: It is inevitable that our fictional landscapes will evolve in tandem with our physical landscapes. Indeed, as our climate becomes ever less certain and more hostile, we might expect our fiction to start resembling the highly ironic, world-weary works that emerged from Woolf ’s war-stricken generation.

Woolf ’s frankly arbitrary choice of late 1910 as the turning point in social history is most striking for its lack of connection to World War I, which erupted in July 1914. Her earlier date is linked most commonly to 1910’s London art exhibit “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” which introduced Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Picasso to the stodgy British and, presumably, knocked the aesthetics of Modernism into them. Exposure to new art, apparently, proved potent enough to alter character. My own prediction that November 2012 will be considered a cultural milestone moment is more direct: Hurricane Sandy hit.

Well, technically the storm touched down in October. But it was November before we began to comprehend the full extent of flooding damage; November before all the deaths were counted; November before power started to flicker back on in coastal communities; November before the New York City subway system — shut down for only the second time in its century-long history — began to run again. It was November when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg endorsed Obama for president on the grounds that the incumbent was more likely to take action in combating climate change, and November when Bloomberg started talking seriously about building a levee for the city. In November (and December), the Internet grew crowded with articles about the newly plausible demise of New York, and the graphics from Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth depicting a submerged Manhattan started to seem less fantastical.

In Woolf ’s era, as in ours, change was stirring long before the perceived moment of transformation. Modernist art and literature, for example, started to thrive on the European continent from the late 19th century on. In the 21st century, we have had plenty of warnings that climate change is occurring, and quickly. Months before Sandy began to form in the Caribbean, we knew that 2012 would go down as the hottest year recorded in American history. In March, thousands of daily-high temperatures were broken in a freak heat wave; over the summer, thousands more all-time high temperatures were broken in cities across the country. The plains parched in a massive drought, killing the country’s corn; the West burned in record-setting fires, destroying some of its oldest trees. But even though it only affected the Northeast, no catastrophic weather event this year really turned our collective head until Sandy.

Some boilerplate qualifying is probably necessary at this juncture: Yes, even those scientists who agree humans are causing the climate to change (namely, all of them) have generally refrained from attributing specific weather events to climate change. This cautious reserve is in the process of melting away, as climate scientists begin to analyze the likelihood of recent extreme weather events with or without the influence of human-induced climate change (hint: they are many times more likely to occur “with” this influence). Still, it is important to interpret current weather soberly and predict future weather calmly, despite all indications that we should panic and run for inland Canada.

***

Contemporary, pre-November 2012 fiction writers certainly approach climate change in their work with far more caution, reserve, and silence than do the scientists who are studying its future effects. This is less true of speculative novelists: Writers of science fiction and fantasy such as Margaret Atwood, Matthew Sharpe, and James Howard Kunstler have been directing their energies toward an imagined climate apocalypse for some time. But non-speculative writers, who haven’t yet had access to actual apocalypse, tend to mention weather issues obliquely, as a tangent from their primary issues, or as one ingredient in the substrate that feeds a character’s general sense of anxiety and unease.

Consider, for example, the internal mutterings of Julius, narrator of Teju Cole’s acclaimed first novel, Open City

I had my recurrent worry about how warm it had been all season long. Although I did not enjoy the cold seasons at their most intense, I had come to agree that there was a rightness about them, that there was a natural order in such things. The absence of this order, the absence of cold when it ought to be cold, was something I now sensed as a sudden discomfort.

Weather-related thoughts recur a few times in Cole’s novel: Julius mentions his fears once several pages before this passage and again several chapters later. But weather is just one of many worries that causes him “discomfort,” alongside history, family, friends, psychiatric patients, New York’s (non-climate-centric) future, bedbugs, and, of course, mortality. As in American and global politics, climate change in Open City is allotted far fewer words — and therefore significance — than issues whose psychic payoff is more immediate and whose urgency is more obvious. Julius, it seems, can resolve his “sudden discomfort” simply by going indoors.

He is also horrified by people like me, who relentlessly attribute odd weather to climate change even after admitting scientific ignorance. After elaborating on his personal concerns, Julius explains that while he isn’t the “skeptic” he’d once been, he refuses to accept any “jumping to conclusions” either: “Global warming was a fact, but that did not mean it was the explanation for why a given day was warm. It was careless thinking to draw the link too easily, an invasion of fashionable politics into what should be the ironclad precincts of science.”

Julius is narrating from 2006, when we had somewhat less evidence — of either the scientific or the anecdotal variety — that symptoms of climate change were manifesting all around us. In the 2011 novel, climate change is still a debate, still an enigma, still a political “fashion” that might be worn to achieve a certain effect but can be discarded just as easily. It is still a secondary or tertiary concern that needn’t be attended to until further notice. Julius fears that by noticing November warmth (for the night narrated is in November) he is himself becoming what he calls a climate “overinterpreter,” a “careless thinker” ignorant of science.

It might have been easy enough, in 2006, to overinterpret weather events in the temperate continental United States, but in some parts of the world the manifestations of climate change had already slipped from overinterpreted to overdetermined. Such is the case in Alexis M. Smith’s slender debut novel Glaciers, in which protagonist Isabel’s yearning for a connection to the past via vintage objects finds a parallel in the slow death of the eponymous glaciers she loved as a child. The novel itself is set in Portland, Oregon, but takes frequent remembered trips back to the Alaska of Isabel’s childhood. Early on in the narrative, for example, Isabel imagines a late-20th-century ferry crossing from Washington State to Alaska. What she feels should be a funereal sight is for most passengers merely a “spectacle”: “The ferry slowed where a massive glacier met the ocean; a long, low cracking announced the rupture of ice from glacier; then came the slow lunge of the ice into the sea. …There were shouts of appreciation and fear, but nothing like grief, not even ordinary sadness.”

The “sudden discomfort” of Cole’s Julius is here inflicted on the glacier, providing onlookers a concrete piece of evidence on the effects of climate change. Rather than simply feeling warmer air (feeling — that least recordable, least reproducible of the senses), the people on the boat can hear the “long, low cracking” of climate change, can see its “slow lunge,” can corroborate each others’ accounts of the event. They have the material to tell a story about the present-day reality of the phenomenon. But the ferry-goers underinterpret the event they witness: they experience the calving without relating it to long-term human-induced climate change. The narrator is forced to step in to remind us that we are experiencing a death.

But Isabel’s melancholic nostalgia is as thinly spread as Julius’s highbrow nervousness: She is as likely to apply it to a vintage apron or an old postcard as to a dying glacier. The day of her life that shapes the novel is full of tea and her library work and vintage dresses and a tall/dark/silent love interest; the plight of the glaciers necessarily pales in comparison to the micro-dramas of quotidian existence.

Indeed, Isabel makes a conscious effort to avoid thinking about climate change. We learn that her father, a frustrated musician, worked in Alaska’s oilfields and was injured there. By employing her character in this ecologically-charged trade, Smith seems to be saying that we humans are all implicated, all a part of this environmental mess. Isabel’s response to the enormity of the problem is conscious blindness: “Isabel cannot read magazine articles or books about the North. She cannot watch the nature programs about the migrations of birds and mammals dwindling, the sea ice thinning, and the erosion of the islands.” How can this young woman, whose livelihood has her mending abused library books all day, turn her back on an abused ecosystem? The obvious answer is that she is too sensitive to cope with reality and therefore chooses to ignore it. The decline of the Arctic exists on the same plane of emotional importance as the sad fate of her great-grandmother’s house. The point, in this context, is not that Isabel fails as a character because she neglects to sign up for the next Keystone pipeline protest. The failures are of the world around her: She still inhabits a moment in which it is possible to ignore climate change in day-to-day life. On or about November, 2012, that world vanished.

***

Woolf ’s choice to place her turning-point moment three and a half years before World War I, surely the event that shocked the European psyche into modernity more suddenly and effectively than any other, perhaps indicates a belief that human character would have changed dramatically even if there had been no war.

And perhaps our future novelist will be asked why he or she — let’s just go with “he” — selected November 2012 as the tipping point in climate history, when Hurricane Sandy killed only a measly couple hundred people, and not, say, the European heat wave of 2003 (approx. 70,000 dead), or Katrina in 2005 (approx. 1800 dead), or perhaps — oh, I don’t know — the North American heat wave of 2016 (approx. 200,000 dead; Phoenix abandoned) or Hurricane Henry in 2019 (approx. 3500 dead, Virginia Beach abandoned). Our novelist will have to admit that he is from the East Coast of the United States, perhaps even lived in New York for a time. His choice, like Woolf ’s, is personal.

Perhaps he’ll say he wants to correct the visions that pre-2012 novelists presented of New York City’s future. In Super Sad True Love Story, for example, Gary Shteyngart paints a bleak picture of a city whose culture has dissipated and power faded, but whose primary threats are Chinese money and the U.S. government, not its own waterways. Sure, the feckless narrator, Lenny, has to deal with “stifling June heat,” but his autumn is appropriately “blustery” and the Staten Island Ferry is functioning without weather interruptions.

Or maybe our novelist will refer to the nearfuture finale of Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which takes a more direct stab at New York and climate change. In Egan’s future universe, mysterious “warming-related ‘adjustments’ to Earth’s orbit had shortened winter days”; a February day “was ‘unseasonably’ warm: eighty-nine degrees and dry”; and “the trees, which had bloomed in January, were now in tentative leaf.” All good so far; all apocalyptic enough (or realistic enough, our novelist might say, terrifyingly) to set the tone Egan wants.

But Egan couldn’t have known how climate change would affect Lower Manhattan in 2012, and her portrayal of the neighborhood unfortunately destroys the novel’s illusion of reality for our novelist. She sets her February concert, the climax of the novel, in 2020s Lower Manhattan, choosing the location presumably to evoke 9/11 and thereby tap into America’s cultural memory. Indeed, for her character Alex the “weight of what had happened here more than twenty years ago was still faintly present,” detectable as a “sound just out of earshot, the vibration of an old disturbance.” But what about the Lower Manhattan “disturbances” caused by Hurricane Sandy ten years before Alex’s 2020s visit, our novelist wants to know? Much of this concrete jungle still lacked power for weeks after the storm, and much of its retail remained closed, and city construction workers far outnumbered bankers and lawyers in business suits, and everything smelled like dirty water.

And what about the even-more-destructive hurricanes that followed Sandy?

Our future novelist doesn’t really write like Egan or Shteyngart, nor like Smith or Cole. His technique has much more in common with Hemingway’s, or Eliot’s, or any number of younger writers who emerged from the Great War alive and hungry for literary recognition, Woolf among them. Human character might have changed in 1910, but Woolf ’s writing style didn’t change until World War I ended: Her two prewar novels are prim and traditional; her first postwar novel, Jacob’s Room, marks the beginning of her decades-long experiment with literary form. This novel does something quintessentially postwar: It writes all the way around Jacob, the title character who is doomed to die on a World War I battlefield, and all the way around World War I, without ever actually writing them. Woolf ’s winding sentences have little obviously in common with Hemingway’s famously clipped specimens, but Hemingway would soon employ a similar technique in writing about war: supplying only the sparest details and allowing the reader to fill in the rest.

Woolf and Hemingway could omit key details because a critical mass of their readers had all suffered through the same hardships: the fear and loss inherent in any war, the horror and despair inherent in witnessing the war that mechanized mass slaughter. A seemingly harmless word or phrase in their fiction — Woolf ’s Jacob shares the surname “Flanders” with the infamously bloody battles, for example — could evoke a torrent of understanding from contemporaneous readers. Modernity and its potential for infinite destruction (a potential to be tested severely in 20th century warfare) had taken hold. There was no reverting to prewar ignorance.

The future novelist has access to a similar collective suffering, one whose foundation isn’t all that different from the one that formed in the last century. As weather disasters increase in frequency and severity, an ever higher percentage of the global human population will experience life-threatening weather conditions, will lose homes and livelihoods, will lose family and friends to climate. Gradually, we as a species will lose faith in the Earth’s ability to support our civilizations and lives. The world will start to look as hideous and hopeless as it did to Eliot in 1922 when he wrote “The Waste Land,” and many parts of the world will truly be that parched or drenched.

When words like “hurricane” and “flood” and “fire” and “drought” have turned hot enough to burn anyone who hears them — hot as the word “war” was in 1922 — we’ll need novelists to navigate around and through them with an ironic detachment reminiscent of Modernist fiction. We’ll need novelists to show us, in other words, how we respond to a world rapidly becoming even less certain and stable than it already had been.

This all sounds rather grim. I’d prefer to end on a note of hope, but there is no denying that the changing climate is going to make all of our lives harder and less predictable over the coming decades. Just as there was no un-inventing the machine gun, there is no un-polluting the atmosphere — at least not in such a way that the people of this generation and the next couple dozen won’t be affected.

Literature will bear the burden of witnessing and processing our cultural response to the ravages of climate change, and these ravages will soon be ubiquitous enough that novelists will make them a central concern. Works that forefront climate change are just now emerging in the American mainstream. This summer’s gorgeous film Beasts of the Southern Wild is one example; Barbara Kingsolver’s just-released novel Flight Behavior is another. Many more examples will follow. It will become impossible for non-speculative novels to ignore climate change because dramatic weather events will necessarily affect their characters’ lives. It will even become difficult for novels to ignore climate for a hundred pages at a leap, like Cole’s and Smith’s. As our experience of climate change proceeds from scientific observation and prediction to the lived reality of frequent weather disasters, climate literature of the future will look increasingly like war literature from the past. Its central concern will be so obvious and so painfully known to readers that it will hardly need to be named.

In his Exercises, Raymond Queneau demonstrates not how to build a style but how to dismantle one.

It’s hard to imagine a bygone work of experimental writing more perfectly suited to our literary moment than Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. The book, first published in French in 1947, has good avant-garde cred: It’s seen as a foundational text for the Oulipo movement (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature), which Queneau established in 1960 and which included Italo Calvino and George Perec among its members. It also starts with a beautifully simple, sound-biteable idea: Queneau takes one short anecdote, about an encounter on a bus in Paris, and tells and retells it 99 different ways.

Aside from its cool pedigree and catchy premise, the book’s present-day appeal rests on a word in its title. Style is in style, you could say. Fueled in part by writing programs and the craft courses and workshops that comprise them, contemporary literature is preoccupied with questions of language, form, and voice. Where popular wisdom used to say that a story is inseparable from the way it’s told, it seems more and more now that style precedes content and meaning. The postmodernist Gilbert Sorrentino once wrote about Queneau’s book that it “lays to rest (or should) the quaint idea that fiction is composed of two equal parts: Form and Content.”  The implication is not only that the two parts depend on each other but that the former is more crucial than the latter. Sorrentino’s words prefigure the growing faith in the idea that how you write determines what you write.

The recent reissue of Exercises in Style, published in December by New Directions, provides more hows than ever before. In addition to Barbara Wright’s original English translation of the 99 exercises, the book includes a slew of outtakes: exercises that Queneau wrote and published in subsequent years, as well as some he’d never published.  It also contains ten new exercises written by ten new “stylists” (as the book’s blurb describes them), from Jonathan Lethem and Ben Marcus to Lynne Tillman and the Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas. Altogether, the volume promises to be a primer on, and a celebration of, the possibilities of language — a style love-in.

Until you actually read it. The book is, in fact, much stranger, more difficult and provocative, than any neat description of it suggests. It’s fair to say that Exercises in Style turns the current thinking about writing entirely, and brilliantly, on its head.

Past its title, what’s immediately obvious about the book is its deliberate oddness. The “Double Entry” exercise, the second in the collection, starts like this:

Towards the middle of the day and at midday I happened to be on and got on to the platform and the balcony at the back of an S-line and of a Contrescarpe-Champerret bus and passenger transport vehicle which was packed and to all intents and purposes full.

The stuttering synonym-rhythms in the sentences have a peculiarly beautiful musical quality; yet it’s clear that this isn’t a practical stylistic method, an example of how to write. You won’t ever call upon Double Entry to recount a story. Nor would you likely have a reason to employ Anagrams (“In het S sub in het hurs hour a pach of tabou swnettyx”), or Spoonerisms (“One May about didday, on the bear fatborm of a plus”), or something called Permutations by groups of five, six, seven, and eight letters (“Ed on to ayrd wa id sm yo da he n tar re at”).

It’s not all number games and wordplay. Queneau makes use of poetic and rhetorical devices: He composes an alexandrine and a sonnet, writes metaphorically and with litotes and apostrophe. Some exercises display imaginative wit (“Cross-Examination”: “At what time did the 12.23 p.m. S-line bus proceeding in the direction of the Porte de Champerret arrive on that day?”); others play with point of view (two back-to-back chapters, “The subjective side” and “Another subjectivity,” offer the story from the perspective of two different men on the bus); still others heighten a particular mode of experience (“Olfactory”: “In that meridian S, apart from the habitual smell, there was a smell of beastly seedy ego”).

What’s most notable about the collection is the sheer variety of the variations. As the chapters pile on, as Polyptotes is followed by Hellenisms is followed by Haiku is followed by Geometrical, there is a sort of flattening, a leveling out of the distinctions between styles. “Dog Latin” begins to feel interchangeable with “Ode,” and “Modern style” becomes just another textual permutation.

Though it’s tempting to see Exercises in Style as a showcase, a dazzling display of the many ways to tell a story, the truth is that most of these exercises don’t make very good versions of the story at all. Either they’re plain incomprehensible or they’re forced and awkward. Barbara Wright, the translator, says in the introduction that the styles are exaggerated “ad absurdum — ad lib., ad inf., and sometimes — the final joke — ad nauseam.”

This is exactly the point. Quite the opposite of a showcase, the book’s ad nauseam variations mount a challenge to the primacy of style and the preciousness of language. The crucial word in the title is not “style” but “exercise,” with its connotations of both the physical and educational drill. It suggests that you can throw on and throw off a multitude of styles, or that you might cycle through a host of them to give the writing a workout. For Queneau, language is meant to be pushed around and played with, stretched and bent and chopped and tested.

What is it being stretched and tested for? In the first place, the exercises could be said to benefit the individual writer. Just as runners train with high-knee sprints and musicians practice scales, writing about a bus ride in Opera English or by using Zoological terms expands your flexibility and range.

While this seems like a relatively obvious idea, it contests a prevailing notion about how writers develop. These days the emphasis for writers is on finding, honing, pinpointing their voice, a language purportedly unique to them — as though there is an essential style to be mined from within each person and then sharpened and exacted on each successive narrative. Style today is about branding. But Queneau’s endless parade of ventriloquisms and games is distinctly anti-branding. Nowhere is this contrast made clearer than in the juxtaposition between the original book and the tribute exercises appended in the New Directions edition. It’s interesting to read Jonathan Lethem’s stylish “Cyberpunk” version of the anecdote, and Enrique Vila-Matas’s clever “Metaliterario” account, but the writers’ singular offerings only highlight how hectic and multifaceted Queneau’s Exercises are. When he wrote the book sixty-five years ago, he wasn’t honing his voice, associating his name with a particular style. He was tearing a story apart a hundred times over — for his own writerly exercise, but also as a kind of cure for a more collective honing or codification of style.

Ultimately, Queneau’s larger project is a kind of style purge. When asked about his book, he ventured that “the finished product may possibly act as a kind of rust-remover to literature, help to rid it of some of its scabs.” The ideas he later developed in Oulipo, his Workshop for Potential Literature, provide some insight into which rust and scabs he means. François Le Lionnais, the mathematician who founded the group with Queneau, wrote a manifesto for Potential Literature that defined the key Oulipoan concept of constraint:

Every literary work begins with an inspiration (at least that’s what its author suggests) which must accommodate itself as well as possible to a series of constraints and procedures that fit inside each other like Chinese boxes. Constraints of vocabulary and grammar, constraints of the novel (divisions into chapters, etc.) or of classical tragedy (rule of the three unities), constraints of general versification, constraints of fixed forms (as in the case of the rondeau or the sonnet), etc.

Must one adhere to the old tricks of the trade and obstinately refuse to imagine new possibilities? The partisans of the status quo don’t hesitate to answer in the affirmative. Their conviction rests less on reasoned reflection than on force of habit and the impressive series of masterpieces (and also, alas, pieces less masterly) which has been obtained according to the present rules and regulations . . .

A significant point here is that all writing exists within constraints. The constraints range from the basic rules of grammar to the conventions of particular traditions. They include fixed traditions — Le Lionnais mentions the rondeau and the sonnet — as well as indeterminate methods that nevertheless solidify over time. We write novels and stories more or less the way novels and stories have previously been written; we approach sentences and paragraphs and chapters how they’ve been approached before. Even the ways in which we establish our so-called originality tend toward sameness and pattern. Both consciously and not, we inherit our habits.

Oulipo imagined ways to break free the deep grooves that have been etched in literary practice. Their “new possibilities” fixated on mathematical patterns. Queneau is well-known for  Cent mille milliards de poèmes, or A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, a series of ten sonnets with each line of each sonnet on a separate strip: Any line from any sonnet can be combined with any from the nine others, resulting in 100,000,000,000,000 poems. Another famous Oulipo book is George Perec’s La Disparation (A Void) — a novel written without the letter e — but Perec is also the author of La Vie mode d’emploi, or Life: A User’s Manual, a complex puzzle-novel that presents the life of a Parisian apartment block and employs both The Knight’s Tour (moving between narratives, and between different rooms in each apartment on the block, like a knight in a chess game) and The Story Machine (setting predetermined lists of items, references and objects that each chapter must contain). Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, with its oscillating sine-wave chapter structure, and If on a winter’s knight a traveler, with its alternating and interlocking storylines, also illustrate the group’s absorption with numerical structures.

Their works are not mere play, extra challenges the writers manufactured to inspire themselves. They needed the math, their Knight’s Tours and sine waves and ninety-nine variations, to jostle the buried conventions from their place. Exercises in Style is one machine Queneau built to disable the rusty habits of writing. By naming all the old ways, from Cross-Examination to Alexandrine, by rounding them up and subjugating them to the demands of a new pattern, Queneau leaches them of their importance. If we reread his book now, it’s to remind us that our polished originalities inevitably become mechanical exercises, to remember how easily they all turn into some drills on a list.

We might also read this small book for its story. With all the fuss about concepts and formal experimentation, not much attention gets paid to the plot itself. Yet this is the one thing that occurs again and again in the book. The events might seem unexceptional, but of course they aren’t meaningless. The narrator sees a young man on a crowded bus, accusing another man of pushing him. A couple hours later, the narrator sees the same young man in the street, being advised by a friend about the position of the top button on his coat. In one of the previously unpublished exercises that appear in the new edition, Queneau sums up the latter half of the anecdote in one vague, dismissive sentence: “Afterwards came, but some time later, and elsewhere, the question of style.” Sometimes style is nothing but a button on your overcoat.

“Anyway . . . As you were saying . . .”

In Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, originally published in France in 1947,  99 exercises recount, in 99 different ways, a banal anecdote about a young man – wearing an atypical hat and possessed of an unusually long neck – embroiled in a minor dispute on a bus. The exercises employ different types of speech (say, Cockney), different types of written prose (for example, a publisher’s blurb or a formal letter), and different types of poetry (haiku, free verse, sonnet, etc.), among numerous other “styles.” “Promotional” is a previously unpublished exercise, translated by Chris Clarke, appearing in a new edition of the book recently released by New Directions.

 ”One day on the platform.”

“The what?”

“The platform.”

“The platform?”

“Yes, the platform of a bus. You don’t know what the platform of a bus is?”

“No. First of all, buses don’t have platforms.”

“Well, my good sir, in days gone by they had them!”

“Oh bah.”

“One day, then, on the platform of an S-Line Bus . . .”

“Of the what line?”

“Of the S-Line. S-Line. S.”

“S? The letter of the alphabet?”

“Yes, number 84.”

“Oh, I see! The line on which the cars don’t have platforms . . .”

“Exactly! Well, one day, on a then still-extant platform of that formerly otherwise designated line, I noticed a young man whose hat . . .”

“Whose what?”

“Whose hat.”

“Whose hat . . .”

“Yes, whose hat. You’re not going to tell me that you don’t know wot a hat is?”

“Of course I know wot a hat is. But a young man . . . whose hat . . .”

“Good sir, back in the day when buses platformed, young people wore hats.”

“You don’t say . . .”

“Well, my story doesn’t seem to be all that interesting to you.”

“Please continue . . . ”

“I’ll spare you the details. The fact remains that an hour later . . .”

“A what?”

“An hour later . . .”

“That’s not very long.”

“Yes, it isn’t very long. That’s what makes the anecdote interesting – otherwise it would be insipid.”

“Anyway . . . As you were saying . . .”

“An hour later I saw him once again in the company of a friend who was questioning the sartorial value of a button . . .”

“Of a what?”

“Of a button. You’re not about to tell me that you don’t know what a button is. A – BUT – TON.”

“Oh a button! (full of joy) A button! But that’s the only thing that never goes out of fashion! Ladies, gentlemen, purchase your buttons from the F.F.B.B.F., the French Federation of Bituminous Button Fabricators – Non-oxidising! Non-decaying! Non-dissolving! – you have nothing to lose, the one you should choose is a button to use!”

— Translated by Chris Clarke

“This page was once plant material.”

Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style was originally published in France in 1947. In the original edition, Queneau wrote 99 exercises describing, in 99 different styles, the same minor dispute between passengers on a bus. A new edition released by New Directions includes a handful of previously unpublished exercises and a series of tributes written by contemporary writers.

This page was once plant material, crushed and sluiced and pressed through a machine in a warehouse, the process looked over by a man plagued with a skin flaking infection. The man, ankles swelling after the sixth hour on the job to the point that he would loosen his damp shoelaces for some late-day relief (the flesh pillowing over his yellowed athletic sock), would scratch the pimpled back of his hand, his wrist and arm, so liberally that a veritable shower of his necrotized flesh would sprinkle down upon the pages as they flew through the pressing machine. The pages themselves, speeding by — printed on which, the man could barely discern, were the story of a bus trip — became infected with the particulate matter of his sores, wounds which wept in the morning but after a hot afternoon in the warehouse had almost fully dried and clotted. The man found such perverse relief in rubbing a particularly affected spot on his forearm that his wet eyes rolled wetly back and his mouth dropped wide, allowing a line of spittle to gather at his lip, roll down his chin and over his stubble, and drop onto a speeding page, like a button sewn on a jacket, immediately before its entrance into the oven, baking the genetic evidence of his future demise (heart disease) into this very page, this page which you are touching with your hands and which, the older this book becomes, will find its way into a used bookstore after your death (heart disease) and become even more likely to be touched by other hands, hands attached to bodies perhaps ill with the flu, sinus infections, affected by the kind of solid mucus that moves out of the body like a bus pulling out of a station, the empty seat waiting.

Carlos Fuentes’s final novel takes on the sociopolitical problems of modern Mexico. 

Adam in Eden is a novel about drug-trafficking that doesn’t talk about drug-traffickers. It is a novel about the Garden of Eden that hardly acknowledges God. It is a political novel free of rants and rhetoric. And it is a funny novel, with a sort of hidden poignancy: it makes you laugh until, upon closing it, you find yourself no longer laughing.

It is also the last published novel from the celebrated Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, a man who wrote almost exclusively about Mexico but was once called into question for lacking a true Mexican identity. And inasmuch as all of his novels have been forays into the history of Mexico (one way or another), Adam in Eden goes the furthest, outlining in no uncertain terms the sociopolitical situation as he sees it: The country is corrupt, and only through corruption can its ills be healed. Fuentes himself called the book “novel-reportage” and “very journalistic.” Yet it reads like Vonnegut, the kind of satire-candy that bloodies gums.

The jokiness and nonchalance of tone can be a little irritating until the reader relaxes into Fuentes’s “ironic disposition.” This “paradoxical weapon” is what helps us process what the author decides we cannot deal with: truth and Mexico — or the truth about Mexico, at least Fuentes’s version of it. In lean (but often repetitive) prose, Fuentes details the commercial and domestic woes of Adam Gorozpe: prominent businessman, husband of a corpulent and flatulent ex-beauty queen, and lover of a mistress he calls L. Gorozpe is confronted with his double, a short and portly supervillain “with a face like a cooked ham” who has been put in charge of public security — “or what little remains of it.” Góngora makes love to Gorozpe’s wife and begins a reign of state-sponsored (in that he-is-the-state-and-so-can-sponsor-it) terror, imprisoning and killing at random, making arrests of innocents and small-time crooks in order to let the real bad guys, “the gang and cartel leaders, the gunrunners, and the criminals who extort and kidnap,” go free.

Adam in Eden is a portrait of a country imperiled, in which the sons of gardeners are murdered and housemaids slapped (all senselessly) to preserve an order that has given a very few possession of all the wealth, power, and pursuit of happiness. The result? “We have lost our faith in everything.” The political parties are too preoccupied with infighting to solve any of the several dozen problems facing the United Mexican States: border troubles, drug trafficking, the price of oil, corrupt armed forces, joblessness, and the “need everywhere for construction and reconstruction: highways, ports, dams, development of the tropics, agricultural development, urban renewal.” The putative problem-solvers merely compound problems, spawning others less easily fixed.

The novel that could so easily be shouted from a soapbox concerns itself with smaller matters. Consider Gorozpe’s refrain, which builds momentum from simple query (“But why are all my employees still wearing dark sunglasses?”) to bulleted list (“The black sunglasses worn by my associates. My poor Priscila’s romantic rebirth. The military menace of Adam Góngora.”) and finally to litany (“The threats accumulating like clouds, Góngora, Priscila, Abelardo, the criminals, the injustices, the insecurity, Jenaro Rubalcava, Chachacha, Big Snake, my father-in-law, the Boy-God of Insurgentes, my associates wearing sunglasses in the office—”). The refrain gains intensity as Gorozpe continues not to act. Instead of tackling the bigger problems, Gorozpe’s “most immediate concern” remains “how to work out my screwed-up relationship with L.”

When Gorozpe’s brother-in-law, the wayward aspiring writer cum spiritualist toadie who declaims the ugly truth in the first place, asks him about the soul of Mexico, Gorozpe appears unconcerned. Rather than trumpet any grand pronouncements, he begins to hedge: “The soul… Well… There’s still time for that…All eternity, after all? Unlike the fate of the nation’s soul, my situation at home needs urgent attention.” For Gorozpe has smaller — and, according to the novel’s hierarchies, more important — things to deal with: “Priscila: Abelardo’s sister, Don Celestino’s daughter, Góngora’s (likely lover), and my wife before man and God…” Small potatoes, according to the prophets and the politically outraged — but very much Gorozpe’s bigger beef.

Adam in Eden is no polemic. By concerning himself with the quotidian, with the particular and interpersonal, rather than the current sociopolitical turmoil in Mexico or the corruption of the world, Fuentes subverts expectations of his narrator, whose frankness and candor steer us through factoids and newspapery bits and back-door feats of allusion until, through comprehending the situation of one man, we comprehend his country. Because his narrator is selfish, Fuentes, steering the narrative on a straight course through the narrator’s personal realm, forces our focus also to narrow. The state of greater Mexico is secondary, and becomes visible only in the background, as if by accident of excess paint and not design — as if it is nothing more than the playground for a fallen man.

Four lines from Paradise Lost figure as the epigraph (a little obvious, perhaps, for a novel about an “Adam” — in Eden or anywhere else). There is a henchman named Big Snake, a Boy-God Holy-Boy preaching on the corner of Insurgentes and Quintana Roo, and a grey-veiled Virgin of Guadalupe. There is even a mistress coquettishly named L., who calls to mind a certain first wife of Adam. Yet, as the aptly named friar Filopáter tells Gorozpe, his sin is not Eve: “It’s the apple. And the apple is greed, rebellion, pride.” Gorozpe must take down the villain Góngora, pull off his blinders (and the dark sunglasses of his crew) and confront what plagues the country.  The task that becomes the former’s “moral commandment” is to defeat the latter at his own game “by employing, better than he can,” greed, rebellion, and pride.

The slow boil of Gorozpe’s inertia, plus the endless rote refrain of his quotidian concerns, justifies his final acts. These are more satisfying for Gorozpe’s initial lameness and his tendency not to stand up too prominently for anyone or anything. Góngora, then, is not merely an evil foil, the foe of modern Mexico; he is an adversary worthy enough to drag our hero out of apathy. Gorozpe’s actions are ultimately just as much about revenge as they are a ploy to save the aforementioned (and scoffed at) soul of Mexico.

Fuentes renders Gorozpe as a second Salieri, forced to confront an impish nemesis whose tactics he must fear and therefore credit with a certain respect. (“‘He is a genius!’ I despair.”) The villain’s name, Góngora, references the 16^th century poet Luis de Góngora. And Fuentes compares the hero Gorozpe, despite himself, to “a latter-day Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas,” whose rival conceptismo strove to do what Fuentes does so effortlessly against the Góngoras of the world, which is to say, through word play, wit, and simple style, convey as much and as many possible meanings in the fewest words.  (By the same token, Gorozpe’s brother-in-law Abelardo may well be named for that great 12^th century Realism-defeater and rationalizer of religious truth. Abelardo may be made to look ridiculous, but he is a true believer.)

The novel unfolds like highly textured fabric, heavy as expensive drapery, beginning with a fugue of questions and continuing at a fast pace, even though nothing really happens until the end. In a world where “we employ violence without revolution, peace without security, democracy without violence,” where everything is falling apart and there’s no harmony, “the forces of order only create more disorder.” Because there’s “no authority” anymore, Gorozpe must seize it, must take control of his own narrative arc, must be the genuine order in his world and in ours. He must bombard Eden with a cleansing violence and stand guilty in the ashes. The novel closes with a restoration of hope and faith for most, but also a PR campaign launched from the pulpit of Insurgentes and Quintana Roo that guarantees that the criminal punishing of the criminals will be seen as “heaven’s revenge,” “an apocalypse live and in person.” This is just the sort of snarky flip for which Fuentes is famous. Heaven didn’t intervene to save them all; Gorozpe did, and he is godless — but who believes in heaven anymore? A comet blazes across the sky (or several comets are always blazing) and the priests and astrophysicists will continue arguing over what they mean.

This is not a book about losing Eden so much as a book about regaining paradise — by force. Gorozpe confronts the line between lies and truth by lying better than the other side in service of truth’s exposition. As a narrative feat, the approach works mainly because we do not expect it from our narrator. The vicissitudes of globalization, of the things we get away with, the knowledge, the greed, rebellion, and pride, are neutralized in one covert final opus sensibile of a lucky but otherwise unextraordinary businessman, a zany parable that might well stand in for Fuentes’s last will and testament. The moral of the story: Good people must intervene to save our souls; the ends in this case justify the means; and, ultimately, there may still be hope.

The penultimate note, however allusive, strikes a secular major chord. Order (and Eden) can be restored, but not by God. Power corrupts and deceit is wrong, but when employed in measured doses by a desperate man who’ll not take credit, they can fulfill a dying author’s wish and purify a country. It will be a secular redemption, of course, but the people will bow before their virgins and their crèche and thank their iconography all the same. Then Fuentes can begin a novel with a sly confession — “I don’t understand what happened” — and end it with a man named Adam killing one Snake and his gardener taking another home to nurse. An unlikely narrator pulls off an act as catastrophic as it is unexpected, a farcical barrage of sudden action with a strikingly uncomplicated final resolution — a subdominant cadence, if you will.

E. Shaskan Bumas and Alejandro Branger’s jaunty and often colloquial translation might be trying a little hard at times to render Fuentes’s innovative and expressive Mexican street slang into English (“not-so-hot tamale”?), but their rendering preserves the playful quality of his prose (“the one who is narrating, the one who is not me, but who I once was”). The translators’ voices disappear completely whenever Fuentes’s finger splits the page to address his reader more directly, the reader who must always end the novel, wresting it from the author’s hands: “‘And what does all of this have to do with Adam in Eden, the novel you’re reading?’ ‘Everything and nothing.’” We continue to outsmart each other, writers and readers, narrators and nemeses, translators and Mexicans and denizens of Eden. A noble narrator declaiming certain truths about the state of Mexico would seem preachy where an ignoble one does not. Gorozpe is imperfect, a little petty, and that’s precisely why he is Fuentes’s chosen instrument for this last (wishful) act of social change. Fuente’s final character, his last man, is the first man.

From our stories, you’d think we were ending the world 

Anyone who has studied creative writing has probably come across the pathetic fallacy, the prohibition against reflecting your character’s emotional state in his or her surroundings. (Our hero, devastated by the breakup, walks home alone in the dark, as lightning cracks, and it begins to rain…) The pathetic fallacy is strictly forbidden. It’s cheap, even if it was good enough for Shakespeare; in these enlightened times we know how absolutely indifferent the world is to our feelings and our petty struggles. Indeed, the unflinching recognition of this indifference is arguably the defining characteristic of the modern age: We have physical mechanisms and automatic natural processes where earlier ages had ritual sacrifice, angry gods, and sympathetic magic. “All violent feelings have the same effect,” writes John Ruskin, who coined the term pathetic fallacy in his 1856 Modern Painters; “They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things.” The truth, of course, is that the external world doesn’t care if we’re happy or sad. It doesn’t care about us at all.

So when the mad king is deviled by the storm in Act III of King Lear, we call it plot contrivance. And when the Northeast is crushed by the second hundred-year-flood in two years, we call it a remarkable coincidence. And when scientists tell us that this sort of thing is going to keep happening more and more, as a direct result of ongoing human activity, we call it science fiction. “Let the great gods / That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads / Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch / That hast within thee undivulgèd crimes / Unwhipped of justice.” That’s fine for an old play, or some summer popcorn movie—but of course we know the world can’t really take our sins and give them form.

In the 19th century, when Ruskin was warning against such false impressions of external things, science fiction authors primarily reacted to the radical indifference of the natural world through an overarching mood of existential dread. In part this is attributable to the difference between Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment science: Where Enlightenment figures tended to explore the well-ordered regularity of nature, the post-Enlightenment instead discovers nature’s fragility, its flux. The catastrophism and mass extinctions at the heart of Darwinian evolutionary theory, in particular, produce the unhappy possibility that this fate will someday be visited upon human life as well—and the discovery of entropy, the propensity of all thermodynamic systems on all scales to run down over time, actually makes this final apocalypse a scientific certainty. Regardless of anything we say, do, think, or feel, someday the universe will grow cold, the stars will go out, and everything that has ever or will ever live will be long dead.

Lumping science fiction, horror, and fantasy literatures into a single hybrid genre he calls fantastika, John Clute writes of how discoveries ranging from evolution and entropy (in the 19th century) to relativity, ecology, and quantum mechanics (in the 20th) have recast the human race not as the privileged children of God but rather “a species clinging to a ball that may one day spin us off.” This is what Clute calls “the world storm”: the unceasing, vertiginous pulse of a planetary history propelling us faster and faster towards inevitable final ruin. For Clute, horror is the most vital form of fantastika, because the feeling at fantastika’s core is always precisely the horror of recognition: “It is the task of modern horror to rend the veil of illusion, to awaken us. Horror (or Terror) is sight. …. Horror (or Terror) is what happens when you find out the future is true.”

Which brings us back to the weather. People forget that H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, published in 1898, is already a climate change story; the Martians invade Earth because their planet has already begun to grow cool while ours is still lush and warm. But the entropic disaster they face will be our fate, too; the climate crisis that threatens their civilization is only an anticipatory version of the “secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet” as well. This chilly vision of the end of the world—echoing the cold twilight of the earth in the farthest-flung future of Wells’s own Time Machine—is repeated in dozens of stories in the pulp era of science fiction. These are bleak attempts to resign ourselves to the indifference of the universe: an almost neurotic recitation of hyperbolic spatial and temporal scales that dwarf the human lifetime and reduce us to a miniscule footnote on a footnote on a footnote.

In John W. Campbell’s brutally entropic “Night,” from a 1935 issue of Astounding Stories, the word ‘millions’ is repeated over and over again on a single page, in a kind of obsessive compulsive rehearsal of cosmic scale: “the million million million that had been born and lived and died in the countless ages before I was born”; “a thousand billion years before”; “the magnificent, proudly sprawling universe I had known, that flung itself across a million million light years, that flung radiant energy through space by the millions of millions of tons was—gone.” In Nat Schachner’s “As the Sun Dies,” published in the same magazine that same year, the bleary-eyed last survivors of the human race find themselves “buried forever under millions of tons of ice, attached irresistibly to a whirling, frozen orb, doomed to circle eternally around a small dim star through depthless space.” One can find the same hopeless, frozen future portrayed in Henry Kirkham’s “The End of Time,” G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s “The Coming of the Ice,” Amelia Long Reynolds’s “Omega,” and many more besides—and this is just the ice ages, before we even come to the planetary collisions, supernovae, superviruses, and extradimensional cosmic accidents that wipe out humanity in dozens more.

In this respect the mad, hopeless predicament inaugurated by the development of the atom bomb comes as something of a perverse relief; if nothing else, it returns to the human race agency over its own destruction. In the famous final scene of 1968’s Planet of the Apes we find Charleton Heston’s astronaut-hero, thousands of years in the future, discovering a half-sunk Statue of Liberty in the desert: “We finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up!” Watching the film today one thinks not of nuclear war but of climate change. And what has happened, in fact, is exactly climate change: the implied nuclear war of Apes has transformed the biome, turning New York City into a desert. As John Beck notes of the scene: “Part of the disorientating effect [is] having the quintessential icon of New York City planted in what is clearly a Pacific environment. … The West functions in the film as a vision of the post-catastrophe East: after the apocalypse, New York will look like Arizona and California—the East will look like the West already looks: blasted, inhospitable, and inhabited by the grotesque after-effects of a horrible but unfathomable history.” In the sequel, unbelievably, things get even worse; an even more embittered Heston, mortally wounded and having lost everything, discovers an intact nuclear superweapon capable of destroying the entire planet—and he decides to activate it. The planet explodes; everything dies; the franchise goes on for three more films.

Our superweapons threatened to unpredictably detonate at any moment in the future, destroying all we have, and transforming the planet into a radioactive, desertified cinder. Thus the urgent need, expressed by so much leftist science fiction of the Cold War period, to oppose more bombs, more wars. But, as Timothy Morton has noted, the temporality of climate change, the quintessential planetary apocalypse of our moment, is rather different: “Global warming is like a very slow nuclear explosion that nobody even notices is happening. … That’s the horrifying thing about it: it’s like my childhood nightmares came true, even before I was born.” In the unhappy geological epoch of the Anthropocene—the name scientists have proposed for the moment human activities begin to be recognizable in the Earth’s geological record, the moment visiting aliens or the future’s Cockroach sapiens will be able to see scrawled in their studies of ice cores and tree rings that humanity wuz here—the climate has always already been changed.

The current, massive disruptions in global climate have been caused by the cumulative carbon release of generations of people who were long dead before the problem was even identified, as well as by ongoing release from the immense networks of energy, production, and distribution that were built and developed in the open landscape of free and unrestricted carbon release—the networks on which contemporary civilization now undeniably depends, but which nobody yet has any idea how to replicate in the absence of carbon burning fossil fuels. Benjamin Kunkel said it best: “The nightmare, in good nightmare fashion, has something absurd and nearly inescapable about it: either we will begin running out of oil, or we won’t.” That is: either we have Peak Oil, and the entire world suffers a tumultuous, uncontrolled transition to post-cheap-oil economics, or else there’s still plenty of fossil fuels left for us to permanently destroy the global climate through continued excess carbon emissions.

Few cultural documents depict this moment of confrontation with ecological disaster more vividly than the opening sequence of the 1973 overpopulation disaster film Soylent Green, which depicts a miniature history of America. We begin with a quiet classical piano score over a sepia-tinted montage depicting 19th century settlement of the American West, in which the wide-open natural spaces of the frontier seem to dwarf their human inhabitants. But soon something begins to change. Suddenly there are too many people in the frame, then far too many people; cars and then airplanes begin to appear; cities grow huge. New instruments enter the musical track: trumpets, trombones, saxophones; the cacophony begins to speed. Now humans are dwarfed not by nature but by the ceaseless replication of their own consumer goods—replicating the logic of the assembly line, the screen becomes filled with countless identical cars. We see jammed highways, overflowing landfills, smog-emitting power plants, flashes of war, riots, pollution, and graves. The sequence goes on and on, using vertical pans to give the sense of terrible accumulation, of a pile climbing higher and higher. Finally we reach the end—the music slows back to its original piano score, combined with an out-of-harmony synthesizer, over a few sepia-tinted images of that same natural world in ruin, filled with trash. The end of the sequence locates this site of ruin in the future; New York, 2022, population 40,000,000. But of course these nightmarish images are all photographs from the film’s present: the disaster had already happened, even decades ago, it was already too late.

As the narrative begins, we see the world this crisis has created. A loudspeaker announcing which fraction of the city’s residents will be allowed to use the streets for the next hour, while on the tiny TV in the apartment of (again!) Charlton Heston they announce that free consumer choice has been replaced with “Soylent Green,” which is a food in such short supply that it can only be distributed on Tuesdays—capitalism’s free-market economy ultimately generating its dialectical opposite, central planning. One character explains why Soylent Green is necessary:

You know, when I was a kid, food was food! Until our scientists polluted the soil… decimated plant and animal life. Why, you could buy meat anywhere. Eggs, they had. Real butter. Fresh lettuce in the stores! How can anything survive in a climate like this? A heat wave all year long! The greenhouse effect! Everything is burning up!

The ad claims Soylent Green (looking like a bright green tofu cube) is a revolutionary foodstuff “harvested from plankton from the oceans of the world,” but—as anyone who has ever heard of this film knows—the true horror is that Soylent Green is really made of people. American consumerism is forced in the end to eat even itself.

In contemporary ecological science fiction we find a sense that there is nothing left to do but somehow accommodate ourselves as best we can to ongoing and effectively permanent catastrophe. In Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, a widely loved ecological anime from Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, the eras of both green forests and global capitalism are in the distant past, lost in the mists of thousands of years. The legacy of a final war called the Seven Days of Fire is a snarl of toxic jungles and mutant insects, in the gaps of which scattered human beings still struggle to survive. Paolo Bacigalupi’s stories of the future see their quasi-human and non-human protagonists exploring polluted landscapes in search of new types of beauty (if any are possible) in a world where unchecked capitalism has completely destabilized nature. In Daybreakers, a literally vampiric capitalism has run almost completely out of blood; in Avatar Earth’s last and only hope is magic rocks. And in John Brunner’s utterly apocalyptic The Sheep Look Up—arguably the best of these texts, if only because it so unflinchingly shows us the worst—even this bare consolation is denied us as a parade of ever-worsening environmental horrors poisons every aspect of our lives, and yet nothing ever changes.

The logical endpoint of such narratives generates again that final position on the spectrum of apocalyptic possibility: the Quiet Earth, a planet that is devoid of human life entirely. The negative charge of the Quiet Earth is the elegiac fantasy of an entirely dead planet—now, a murdered planet—in which the human species has left behind nothing but death before finally killing even itself. We watch such shows for entertainment: Life After People, The World Without Us, Aftermath, The Future Is Wild. Both Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake see humanity deliberately murdered by mad scientists in the name of saving the rest of the planet before it is too late; in WALL-E—a movie marketed to children!—the world capitalism makes is a total loss, best left for the cockroaches and the robots; These blighted visions of ruined, empty worlds recall—and transform—Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem “Ozymandias” as an anticipatory memory of Earth’s barren, ruined future. In the desert of a “distant land” stands the toppled monument to the arrogant king of a lost civilization that believed both he and it to be immortal. But only the head and legs remain, half-sunk in the desert, like Apes’s Liberty; all else has turned to dust. The “lone and level sands” that “round the decay of that colossal wreck,” once the thriving cities and once-verdant landscapes of Ozymandias’s empire, have been erased by totalizing desertification that, in the present moment, now inevitably suggests to us the bleak endpoint of global climate change. But of course, climate change is the total package, giving us not just deserts but all our fantastic imagined weather apocalypses simultaneously: floods for the coasts, deserts for the breadbaskets, wildfires for the forests, ice for a post-Gulf Stream Europe. Look upon our works, ye Pathetic Fallacy, and despair. Tell me again the external world doesn’t notice us.

“When we contemplate ruins,” Christopher Woodward has said, “we contemplate our own future.” The apocalypse is thereby transformed into a memory, an event which is yet to come but which has also somehow, paradoxically, already happened. Behind the endless, neurotic rehearsal of the debate over whether or not climate change is “real” lurks the much more depressed sense that it doesn’t even matter either way—even in the increasingly unlikely event there’s time, we still won’t act to save ourselves. Three months after Hurricane Sandy, eight years after Hurricane Katrina, 25 years after James Hansen testified before Congress, 40 years after the development of a scientific consensus around global warming in the 1970s, 70 years after climate models in the 1950s first began to point to the problem, 107 years after Svante Arrhenius first modeled the greenhouse effect in 1896, we still sit and wait to see what happens. It’s as if we’ve been practicing the end of everything for so long we’re relieved, or even exhilarated, to see it finally become real. The market has spoken, and the media, and the voters: we’ll continue to do nothing, eagerly surrender to our collective death drive, freely author our own collapse. Perhaps Lear would have thought it all a bit too on-the-nose—but now our suicidal urges and our selfishness and our sickening disregard for the future come back to us as hurricanes and heat-waves. Let a thousand science fictional panoramas bloom: the Statue of Liberty frozen over, toppled in the sand, neck-deep in water. Hollywood on fire. Texas cracked with drought. Hundred-year storms every other year. Après nous, la glace, le feu, le désert, le déluge.

Rousseau at fifty-three — afflicted by illness, temperamental and alone, an anguished, paranoiac conscience — sitting up at his desk in Wootton, in the 1760s: “Nothing about me must remain hidden or obscure. I must remain incessantly beneath the reader’s gaze, so that he may follow me in all the extravagances of my heart and into every last corner of my life.” The Confessions are Rousseau’s response, in the form of a remedy, to the pain and contradictions of a human heart filled with content that can no longer be transmitted vertically, toward the heavens. The task of the accused to supply proof of innocence, to authenticate the rightness of his conduct, requires a new, lateral kind of divination. A community of readers, not saints, is what counts. “My decision to write and to hide myself was perfectly suited to me,” says Rousseau in his solitude. “With me present, no one would ever have known what I was worth.” He writes neither as pious (Augustine, Chateaubriand) nor partisan (Montaigne, Saint-Just), but as a companionless telepath of his own moral character. The secular heart, with all of its extravagances, cannot confirm its innocence — or its intentions, or its beauty, or the terms of its character — through petitions to an omniscient authority, to God. An empty, unwatching sky entails an earth without witness, and the dethroning of the old promise that one’s life history can ever be intuited from above. The goal of absolute, maximal transparency means that Rousseau’s must be an autobiography written under his own eyes, and his alone.

Two hundred and fifty years later, in a bifocal work of criticism — part memoir, part cultural tract — Marek Bieńczyk mourns the dulling of Rousseau’s standard of the unobstructed, transparent heart. But Transparency, published in Poland five years ago and now appearing in an English translation by Benjamin Paloff, is by no means a document of lament. What interests Bieńczyk — a novelist, critic, and translator of considerable repute in Poland, and the latest recipient of that country’s Nike Award for literary achievement — is the evolution of an idea inherited from Rousseau, and the circumstances underlying its retention in contemporary taste, in language, politics, certain works of art, and architecture. Ours is a political moment tempered by a public-relations promise of transparency and political accountability; so much of our urban environment, from the buildings of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro to the glass faces of Lower East Side condomniums, insists on giving (and getting) the whole view. From Aristotle, for whom transparency meant the expression of light, a hidden medium of illumination; to the glass bodies dreamt by Fontenelle and La Mettrie, and the metaphors of a republic of light in the eighteenth century; to the appearance, in the nineteenth century, of the first public aquariums and the Crystal Palace, so abhorred by Dostoevsky for the punitiveness of its scale and the tyranny of its vision; to the twentieth century’s layering of multiple surfaces, “as if they’re made of celluloid,” in the paintings of Piccaso and Léger, and the glass-and-steel imagination of architects like Bruno Taut, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Philip Johnson. For Bieńczyk, sitting at his own desk in Poland, the terms have changed: A concept dissociated from its lineage, the Rousseauian idea of transparency is these days moribund before a politically prostrate electorate, modified by contemporary techniques of civic pseudo-therapy and empowerment, the “new opium being distributed to the people, the great civilized substitute for the feeling of having a modicum of power.”

* * *

But this book is not in the service (at least not principally) of describing feelings, political or otherwise. The thirty-seven chapters of Transparency trace a sensibility without explicit thematic connection; the book confects a series of movements between discontinuous ideas, and its achievement is the density and sinuousness — but also the restlessness and intellectual itinerancy — of its imaginative range. There has been no irremediable fall from transparency for Bieńczyk, but rather a transaction across several styles of thinking and varieties of experience. A first-person treatise supplemented by Bieńczyk’s own memories, real or imagined, the book ultimately appeals to three recurring preoccupations:

Transparency as an aesthetic feature. This is exemplified by the interiors of Gothic cathedrals, for example, or the prose works of Maurice Blanchot and Alain Robbe-Grillet, about which Bieńczyk writes, “Devoid of all affect, emotion, of a particular rhythm, [the work] seems to create — like white monochrome in painting — a space in which, insofar as it is possible, all traces are erased.” Cubist paintings, already mentioned, provide another, although somewhat different, model of stylistic diaphony. (Braque, for instance, superimposes his images so that, as Bieńczyk says, “the viewer may come away with the impression that he’s looking straight through them.” The effect here is of a crowded, stuffed space, not the coolness and clarity of the minimalist painter Robert Ryman or, returning to the novel, the French writer Michel Butor.)

Transparency as a disposition. Or, perhaps more appropriately, as a way of encountering the world, of experiencing things and persons. Here, Bieńczyk invokes the “existential imperative” of the nineteenth century, with its taste for exhibition, collecting, and for putting into view, as well as the great encyclopedists and taxonomists (Diderot, d’Alembert, Linnaeus) at work during Rousseau’s lifetime. Zola’s refrain, “To see everything, to say everything,” also supplies the premises of the flaneur, the preemiment melancholic. “Looking through a windowpane is a textbook embodiment of the melancholic condition,” Bieńczyk writes. “Seeing without having leads to other, worse verbs: refusing, departing, dying. One needs, for example, the city.”

Transparency as a force. One can be a victim of transparency. This, perhaps, was Dostoevsky’s fear; the glass house, the Crystal Palace, is really one early and interminable kind of surveillance palliated by the lie (the riddle?) of its utopian vision. Here is Bieńczyk: “What would seem a harmless sort of dream” — the dream of Rousseau — “becomes involved in a concrete project for organizing social life, one in which the ruler can completely control the ruled.” The panopticon imagined by Jeremy Bentham in the 1790s is one instance of this, although Bieńczyk does well here by foresaking an exhausted reprisal of a certain subset of démodé theoretical formulations (about power, punishment, disciplinary societies, etc.). If transparency is a force, it is also vulnerable to the counter-pressure of its metaphysical antonym: hysteria. The hysteric is the outcome of a flaw, a defect in the quality of Rousseau’s diaphanous heart — Bieńczyk calls it the “experience of an unexpected, sometimes staggering encounter with an obstruction” — that, when coupled with transparency (the two are coterminous), produces “one of the formative features of modern existence.”

But hysteria is also the frustration of a revelation; the hysteric’s vision — of another place, a kingdom of heaven, an elsewhere — never fully obtains, and the hysteric himself is left alone, the victim of an implacable and sedentary consciousness, a writer without a reader. For Bieńczyk, “this vision surpasses us: after all, this is where we came from, this is where we had our lives, and then we were suddenly left with nothing, without those lives, holding nothing but our useless selves.” Such a temperament is less “one of the formative features of modern existence” than the expression of a spiritual project, if by spiritual project we mean the obeisance — and the subsequent response in the form of endless, repetitive tasks — to the painful knowledge of the Fall. However, faith, not knowledge, is what matters; hence the ecstasy of the response to the Passion, which often has nothing to do with language or with laws of any kind, but with the needs, and the frailties, of an impure human body. When we do get the response in the form of spiritual autobiography, as we do in the tradition of Teresa, Augustine, Bonaventure, etc., it is always marked by the author’s awareness of the inadequacy of his work, and therefore by his frustration. Thus Augustine’s remorse: “I am saddened that my tongue cannot live up to my heart.”

* * *

Jean Starobinski’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, mentioned only briefly by Bieńczyk but a far more sustained elaboration of his ideas, describes the Genevan’s optimism about the written word: “Language fills a middle ground between the primordial innocence and the verdict of final judment, which is supposed to establish the fact that Rousseau has regained his innocence.” But this innocence, by Rousseau’s own admission, is illusory. One can’t have the whole life, at least not in the way it has been written traditionally; one needs the advantages of a less even-tempered style of self-dramatization, a language increasingly fussy, undisciplined, prone to deviations and inconsistencies of thought: “By abandoning myself to both the memory of past impressions and to present sentiments, I shall paint two portraits of my mental state, showing it as it was when the event occurred and as it was in the moment I described it. My uneven and natural style — now brisk, now digressive; now restrained, now wild, now grave, now gay — will itself be part of my history.” Transparency achieves a similarly “uneven and natural style”; the discontinuousness between many of Bieńczyk’s chapters, and his preference for the first person and for storytelling, are the effects of a work that speaks capriciously, and in tongues.

And yet the book’s promise is not in its incongruities, but in the cool, bravura manner of its presentation of ideas; it is more successful when Bieńczyk lets us follow him to the conclusion or exhaustion or fulfilmment of a thought than when he plays at literary flourish. While Rousseau grants this book its intellectual heritage, it confirms its loyalties not only by rehashing certain kinds of anxieties — about how to communicate one’s innocence in an age without guarantee of divination, about the consequences of a life defrocked of its old securities and promises — but through its temperament. Like Rousseau’s Confessions, Transparency is the achievement of a supple and transient style of thought. As an example of criticism, it is deliberately inconclusive, depersonalized, approximating; as a work of literature, its plaintiveness warms to the touch. That so much of Transparency feels either incomplete or, less frequently, overdetermined is beside the point, though this incompleteness is one expression of the pursuit of extreme techniques of dissociation and harmonization typical of a great deal of the art of our time. Two standards of conduct and feeling that inform so much of our new work are assault (of the senses, of materials, of the viewing space) and participation (of the audience, which is often invited to complete sections of a performance, for example; or of the viewer, who is asked to respond to questions and follow instructions concocted by the artist). Bieńczyk’s book appeals to this tradition as simultaneously an assault and an invitation. Each of its solutions to certain critical problems combusts before the onset of larger, although by no means less ephemeral, dilemmas; the destruction of these solutions is therefore Bieńczyk’s invitation for further debate, further reflection. It is the work of an appetitive imagination, and a vivid example of the terms underlying one variety of art and ideas today.

1.

In a 2010 interview, the novelist and blogger Kate Zambreno explained the genesis of her blog,  Frances Farmer Is My Sister, where she often posts responses to her reading, as a reaction to the “deadening objectivity” of the third-person critical voice. She wanted, she said, “to write about myself as a reader experiencing the text, how I spilled some hot sauce on a certain page, that I was on the rag when I was reading it, that my hands were down my pants when I was reading it, all the libidinal and emotional experiences of reading.” Begun in 2009, the blog eventually led to her just-published book Heroines, in which Zambreno considers the lives of women modernist writers in terms of her own life and vice versa. In the first  post on her blog, Zambreno said that she was inspired by Dodie Bellamy’s Barf Manifesto (2008). Bellamy had decried the “oppressiveness” of the neatly constructed essay, lodging an appeal for chaotic, disorderly writing. Bellamy’s slim book is itself a reading of and reaction to Eileen Myles’s essay “Everyday Barf,” in which Myles describes a boat ride that causes her fellow passengers to get seasick. In a feat of positive thinking, Myles is inspired by the puke, and writes a letter to her mother in a projectile rush. The essay is similarly uninhibited, its argument carried out by association and implication. Spontaneous writing, Myles suggests, is the writing that is most alive. And so, with Bellamy and Myles as her disheveled models, Zambreno “wrote and wrote and wrote and read and read and read and vomited it all up.”

A phalanx of recent books by women — among them Zambreno, Bellamy, and Myles — operate by a similar principle of messiness, refusing old-fashioned plot structures and paying special attention to the unruly sexual lives of their characters. Eileen Myles’s Inferno (2010) chronicles the early development of a young poet named Eileen and her coming-of-age as a poet and as a lesbian. In The Buddhist (2011), Bellamy describes getting over a lover, a man she’s nicknamed by his spiritual orientation for purposes of blogging about him; through blogging, she emancipates herself from his thrall. Zambreno’s Green Girl (2011) uses intimate, impressionistic vignettes to fathom the oddly depthless pools of its heroine’s mind. This year, Sheila  Heti’s How Should a Person Be? follows the trials of a blocked writer named Sheila, especially the ups and downs of her friendship with the painter Margaux (in life, Margaux Williamson). Heti’s much-discussed “novel from life” draws on audio recordings she made of friends, and the narrative is punctuated by transcriptions of these conversations and reproductions of email exchanges. Heti has acknowledged her debt to Chris Kraus, who assembled I Love Dick (1997) by a similar method. The narrator of I Love Dick — Kraus herself, more or less — is obsessed with a man named Dick, and Kraus tracks the elaborate, aphrodisiac game that she and her husband, Sylvère Lotringer, play as they try to lure Dick into Chris’s life. Much of the book is a record of Chris’s communication with Dick and of Chris and Sylvère’s communication with each other. These passages capture the erotic buzz sparked by Dick’s (reluctant) arrival upon the scene of the marriage and transform Kraus’s desire for him into art.

All of these writers — the new semiautobiographers, you might call them —  reject privacy and propriety for openness and provocation. In their novels-from-life they aim for a synthesis of the personal and the intellectual on the one hand, and the fictional and the nonfictional on the other. They display a skepticism about plot, an interest in intellectual work, and, in their feminist determination to confer full aesthetic legitimacy on experience historically treated as marginal, a sense of political purpose. They are self-conscious about the act of writing and often make subjects of their toil, ambition, and doubt. The most recent of their books also seem influenced by, and in the cases of Zambreno and Bellamy, fashioned from, blog posts, the ideal literary forum for a self-consciously messy performance. Never edited by an alien hand, totally under the control of the writer, the blog post refuses to be anything but what it wants to be. It will not subject itself to “some highly toned artificial neat form,” to quote Zambreno. The (ostensibly) vomiting or blog-like narrative will make the mistakes it makes; it will be as clear or unclear as the writer pleases. Most important, it will read as it was first written. The amount of time that passes between the writing and the posting is between the writer and herself, but if she wishes, there need be none at all.

Zambreno has proposed, on her blog, two categories of writing: the anorexic and the bulimic. The cleverness of the distinction is apparent in the way that all writing instantly sorts itself into one group or the other: Whitman is a bulimic, Dickinson an anorexic. The classification is usefully descriptive rather than evaluative (though Zambreno notes wryly that her more “anorexic” writing has been easier to publish). But she has been explicit about what she considers the political value of the bulimic style and spoken out against the self-restraint of “good writing”: Good writing is “hegemonic and boring” because it insists on “behaving.”

This distinction between the raw and the cooked is of course an old one. In 1939 Phillip Rahv, with his carelessly racist categories of “redskin” and “paleface,” attempted to draw an analogous contrast, which for Rahv was between energy and intellect, the American West and East, the prairie and the drawing room. Rahv’s objects of comparison were always white men: Twain versus Melville, Whitman versus James. Where on this spectrum would women be positioned? Saul Bellow inadvertently provides one possibility: “Females were naturally more prone to grossness,” Mr. Sammler remarks in Mr. Sammler’s Planet. “They had more smells, needed more washing, clipping, binding, pruning, grooming, perfuming, and training.” Women writers were excluded from the ranks of literature that mattered, while woman themselves were characterized as excessive, disorderly creatures. The women Mr. Sammler is describing are young activists, and, it turns out, Mr. Sammler’s sexism doesn’t preclude some insight into what they’re about.  Their unkempt appearance is on purpose: They’ve “resolved to stink together in defiance of a corrupt tradition built on neurosis and falsehood.”

Bellow’s retrograde protagonist helps illustrate why a political connotation often attaches to the two poles, why the unruly “bulimic” story earns the tag of radical and the controlled one the tag of conservative. For women, it is out of a need to defy a corrupt tradition. What does it mean, then, to “stink together”? The logic is at once fuzzy and quite obvious: A sentence that doesn’t follow grammatical rules, a narrator that changes voices, a narrative that comes to an abrupt end all disrupt our expectations of how things “should” behave — and the formal misbehavior insinuates political rebellion.

The return of this scheme of classifications raises important questions for our literary moment: Which has the greater claim to liveliness, reality, truth? The “disorderly” narrative or the “highly toned artificial” one? Are the well-wrought and the truthful opposites, or can they be allies? And is apparent disorderliness (the escape from others’ narratives into one’s own unnarratable truth) as politically or personally liberatory as it claims to be?

2.

Although it is easy to find antecedents for the raw or bulimic style in American prose — say, in the Beats or Henry Miller — the clearest inspiration for contemporary semiautobiography lies in the New Narrative movement, a loose association of writers that originated in San Francisco in the late 1970s. Affiliates of New Narrative include Kraus, Myles, and Bellamy, as well as Robert Glück, Dennis Cooper, Kevin Killian, and Kathy Acker. In its formative days the group was interested in (but also resistant to) the Language poets as well as influenced by European theory. Many of its members are gay. As Glück tells it, the writers of New Narrative wanted to bridge the gap between communicating the raw experience of being gay and their abstract desire to be “theory-based writers.” The effort posed certain risks. Would the work be too avant-garde for ordinary gay readers who, like everyone else, were raised on middlebrow fiction and wanted to see their experience reflected back to them? At the same time, did it have “too much sex and ‘voice’ for a literary audience?” These questions rose out of a deeper question: “How to convey urgent social meanings while opening or subverting the possibilities of meaning itself?” The old familiar way of telling stories had been oppressive to these writers — but that was itself a story.

The task was to change the way narrative worked. The New Narrativists didn’t want to throw narrative out (they were decidedly not Language poets), but they did want make it serve their own purposes. Fictional narrative as it had been handed down to them tended to impose a specious unity on subjective experience. The form of the novel, so often organized around heterosexual marriage, obviously wasn’t sufficient to a life that had little use for such a partnership, and a literary style that represented experience as consistent in its tone and point of view was useless if you felt experience to be otherwise. Glück again: “I wanted to write with a total continuity and total disjunction since I experienced the world (and myself) as continuous and infinitely divided. That was my ambition for writing. Why should a work of literature be organized by one pattern of engagement?” In their attempts to make narrative more closely adhere to their lived experience, these writers embraced the fragmentary, the pastichey, the disjunctively conversational. They treated sex directly (especially transgressive sex), and they mixed the high abstraction of the theorists they were reading (Lukács, Benjamin, Barthes, Althusser, Foucault) with the gossipy, hyper-personal details of their own lives and those of their friends. In this way, they began smudging the line, never too cleanly demarcated in the first place, between fiction and nonfiction. In a sense, their self-investigations resembled psychoanalysis, which also values confession and tries to make sense of a person in terms of sexuality. But the ideology bore more resemblance to Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Freudian philosophy, which rejected the unitary ego of standard psychoanalysis and saw desire — fluid and fissiparous — as inherently revolutionary.

Sex was central — especially rowdy, public, uncategorizable, sometimes violent sex. Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker are possibly the two best-known exponents of New Narrative (though, being more famous, they are less likely to be thought of in terms of their association with it). Frequently tagged as a horror writer, Cooper wrote about young boys, and the sex in his books was inseparable from the violence. His George Miles Cycle — Closer (1989), Frisk (1991), Try (1994) Guide (1997), and Period (2000) — based on Cooper’s real-life friend and muse and almost-lover, was designed to reflect the brutality of its contents, so that over the course of the series the novel’s form would be “gradually dismembered to nothing.” Acker used cut-up techniques and borrowed freely from other writers. In her Don Quixote, she grafted her own pronoun to Cervantes’s novel. The collaged letters, pornographic drawings, and multiple voices of her Blood and Guts in High School (1984) tell of a girl in love with her father, who sells his own daughter into sexual slavery. Stories such as these resembled the “schizoanalysis” of Deleuze and Guattari, in which life yielded increasingly heterogeneous interpretations, not some singular reductive theory. Blood and Guts in High School, some critics suggested, was hacking the Oedipal myth into pieces. Freudianism had been a theory about repression; the implication of New Narrative was that any overarching theory was itself repressive.

3.

Though she has no obvious personal or even aesthetic ties to New Narrative, comic or graphic artist Alison Bechdel, whose memoir Are You My Mother? came out earlier this year, has much in common with writers like Myles and Kraus. Bechdel has spent decades working on the literary periphery, documenting the lives of lesbians, and her new memoir describes her relationship with her mother, especially as it developed over the course of Bechdel’s writing her previous book, Fun Home, about her father. Like the writers of New Narrative, in other words, she writes about her own life and about writing: At one point, her mother observes, to Bechdel’s delight, “It’s a metabook!” She also folds other texts into her own, using Woolf and Winnicott as inroads into her own history. She treats sex and the body in matter-of-fact detail. Above all, Bechdel, like the writers already named, is trying to arrive at a form through which to make sense of her experience as a woman, a sexual being, and an artist.

Unlike the New Narrativists and their heirs, of course, Bechdel’s books are graphic, pictorial. She studied studio art and art history in college, and her career began in 1983 with Dykes to Watch Out For, serialized nationally in alternative newspapers. At 30 she quit her day job. Fun Home, which took seven years to write, came out in 2006 to a blaze of attention that dwarfed the slow burn of appreciation her comics had earned her, and two years later she ceased DTWOF, in part to work on Are You My Mother? Bechdel used her characters in DTWOF as mouthpieces to comment on events in the world, making the comics politically explicit in a way that her books are not. Her early intention was to show that lesbians were “regular people” reflecting intelligently on their lives. But DTWOF was, as Bechdel admits, a kind of soap opera, and she came to chafe against the limits of the comic-strip form. In the longer memoirs she had the room to write more ornately and the license to take on more serious subjects. The drawings, always clean in their lines, grew even tighter, and the episodic comedy of the comic strip gave way to the interrogative, recursive quality of a novel of ideas.

But Bechdel differs from the New Narrativists in a subtler and more fundamental respect than the illustrations. Where the other books feel raw, loose, even jagged, Are You My Mother? feels digested, finished, wrought — both structurally and on the level of the sentence.

Early frames of Are You My Mother? show Bechdel driving a car, rehearsing how to tell her mother about the “dad” book. “This story begins when I begin to tell another story” — but it could also begin elsewhere. It could start, she says, when she came out to her mother — or even earlier, when she told her mother about her first period. The “real problem,” it turns out, is that the story “has no beginning”: All of life is just a “dizzying, infinite regress.” And if you can commence the telling anywhere, you also never know when to stop: “Another difficulty is the fact that the story of my mother and me is unfolding even as I write it.” As her mother tells her, “You have too many strands!” Life, narratively speaking, is a mess. But if the bulimics respond to the mess by being equally messy, Bechdel — anorexically, Zambreno might say — makes a strenuous, ascetic attempt at order. Are You My Mother? is immersed in the chaos of daily life, as these other books are, but it imposes a rare coherence on personal experience.

Bechdel manages the competing strands of her life in part through her drawings, which help her communicate theoretical ideas narratively. In one example, she sandwiches a picture of herself reading in bed with written text lifted from the psychoanalytic classic The Drama of the Gifted Child. It is through this book that she encounters the theories of the psychoanalyst Winnicott, whom she at first assumed was a woman. We learn about her brief confusion about (Donald) Winnicott’s gender via thought bubbles, at the same time that we witness, via the drawings, a moment of tension between Alison and her girlfriend. The girlfriend wants to have sex; Alison wants to keep reading. Because one strand (the relationship tension) is drawn, and the other (the thoughts about psychoanalytic theory) is written, these things can be followed simultaneously. Bechdel favors this technique of talking about one thing while showing something else and often uses it to illustrate a concept or idea.

Characteristically, the scene in the bedroom is complex. Winnicott makes her think, punningly, of Winnie-the-Pooh, and Bechdel cuts to a drawing of Christopher Robin dragging Pooh down some stairs. The text, meanwhile, explains Winnicott’s theory of the transitional object: “It occupies a ‘territory between the subjective and the objective. It’s not ‘me,’ but not ‘not-me,’ either.” The drawings animate the abstract explanation. Through a few frames, we grasp something that, written, might take paragraphs to explain. And the technique mimics consciousness in a special way. As we go about doing things — putting on pajamas, getting in to bed — so are we also thinking things. The distinction between the wordless doing and the linguistic thinking, so perfectly marked by a division between what is drawn and what is written, is not reproducible in ordinary literature, where everything is pressed through the sieve of language. The ability to layer doing and thinking is a feature of all comics, but Bechdel is unique for the extent to which she places the technique in service of explaining abstraction, for the often great distance between the “action” and the words, and for the number of threads she manipulates at once.

4.

The Russian formalists separated fabula — the material of the story, chronologically “as it happened” — from sjuzet, the order in which the narrative presents it. The fabula-sjuzet split has been criticized for apparently valuing sjuzet over fabula: that is, for subordinating the chronological events to the reordered narrative. (It has also been pointed out that the strict division doesn’t account for the way the telling affects or even effaces the “original” events.) A blog doesn’t necessarily tell the story of a life in a strictly chronological way; it may not tell a story at all. But there is a way in which the blog, by its nature, seems to critique retrospective narrative, or to critique the structuring that narrative implies, by valuing a sort of natural order of thought. Whether or not a blog tells a story in chronological order, it will present the story as it occurred to the writer. This is in part a function of the speed of its composition and the immediacy of its publication — and the legatees of New Narrative, favoring a fragmented, stream-of-consciousness style, have often also seemed to prize spontaneous fabula over ordered sjuzet. In Are You My Mother?, by contrast, sjuzet swallows fabula. It’s difficult to say what the chronological story is or keep track of it when reading. Time is plaited, knotted; so are the book’s ideas. This manipulation makes it easier and more pleasurable to trace the arc of the account, not less. Of Bechdel’s many strands, none appears to hang loose.

Peter Brooks observes in Reading for the Plot that beginnings are made meaningful by the existence of an end: It is what happens later that invests the early moment with significance. Even in the innocuous first sentences of a story, the narrator appears to have a sense of portent that a real person, not knowing the end of her own story, rarely has. A friend of mine once said about another friend’s book that it would have been a very good memoir if she’d only waited a few years; he meant that if she’d waited for some sort of end she would know the meaning of what had happened to her and wouldn’t be narrating from the middle of the story, blind to its patterns. Is my friend’s judgment old-fashioned, or even sexist? The revolutionary gesture of Kraus, Myles, et al. is to write from within the moment of their experience — to say, proudly, that what they know in that moment is enough.

Because of the finished quality of Bechdel’s book, it is tempting to assume that she had a certain amount of time to reflect, that this high degree of finish is a result of insight arrived at over time, more insight and time perhaps than the New Narrativists give themselves. But it’s always impossible to measure how much art has gone into a given artistic effect. “I love giving the impression of the unmediated,” Bellamy writes in The Buddhist. At another point, she describes the effort that has gone into a short piece she’s written about her former lover, which becomes the opening of the book: “The ‘now’ takes place within a few minutes, but the content extends and swirls way out … It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how personal or vulnerable my subject matter, at a certain point in writing it all boils down to formal concerns.” Bellamy may craft her work no less than Bechdel; Bechdel may write no more spontaneously than Bellamy. It may not matter how easily or arduously something was written: It can take a long time to give an impression of haste.

Still, there is a relation between the composition and the character of a book that can’t be denied. The birth of a book as a blog must encourage some excess, some messiness; the graphic nature of Bechdel’s memoir must have enforced a certain economy, caution, and precision. In fact Bechdel reports that her first book took seven years; her second one took six. Bechdel’s process involves multiple passes, in which she builds a page from the skeletal words, to a series of sketches, to the final ink. In her aspirations to the lifelike, she bases her drawings on photographs, posing her own body in the positions that her characters will take. For a scene in Fun Home in which she watches fireworks as a teenager with her father, in order to precisely reproduce the skyline, she tracked down the exact rooftop that she and her father had originally stood on.

But more important for Bechdel’s refined approach to narration than lengthy drawings is her use of psychoanalysis. She relies heavily on psychoanalytic theories for making sense of her life, and describes her experience of  being analyzed with striking earnestness. She gives an illustrated guide to her shrinks that includes their names and portraits and the dates of her work with them. We witness her sessions. We learn about her dreams. Each chapter, in fact, opens with a dream, analyzed as the chapter progresses. We have access both to the dream and the dream’s interpretation, the life and the life’s interpretation. Interpretation, of course, is no less than the making of narratives, and for all Bechdel’s chronological doubling back, her laments about “infinite regress” — in other words, for all her complexity — she believes in a big, simplifying narrative about her life, an argument about the meaning of what has happened to her and how she has come to be who she is.

In her case, the story goes something like this: Bechdel’s mother was withholding, physically and emotionally. She was reluctant to accept her daughter’s sexuality, and incapable of fully seeing or hearing her. (Much space is devoted to their one-sided telephone conversations.) The mother is also intelligent, expressive, and driven. By working as an artist herself — Bechdel’s mother is both a writer and an actor — and by fostering artistic talents in her daughter, she offered Bechdel a means of handling the very problems her tricky version of love had created. This argument concludes in the book’s moving final pages, which illustrate an early game played by mother and daughter. When a small Alison refused to get up off the floor, her mother, rather than scolding her, would ask if she was crippled: did she need a brace? did she need a cane? Alison usually did. The szujet is especially obvious here: the end of the story is its beginning. And Bechdel has clearly learned her mother’s lesson: something invented — an imaginary brace, a narrative cane — can express something real.

It was part of the radicalism of psychoanalysis to suggest that the raw stuff of free association was valuable. But psychoanalysis also teaches that free association isn’t useful without interpretation. Slips of the tongue, dreams, blurted comments, half-thoughts — they don’t mean on their own. They achieve meaning in relations of causality and temporality; they have meaning inside of stories and arguments. What gives form to the book are a system of patterns and associations, the resonance between Woolf’s and Winnicott’s and Bechdel’s lives, the vibration between dream and event and historical event. Of course the risk of any interpretation is that it will be wrong. We can’t say that the story that Bechdel tells is exactly right — and indeed the “mom” book records Bechdel’s mother dissenting from the conclusions of the “dad” book. Even Bechdel is skeptical of her own judgments. In fact by narrating the process of making a narrative, the book admits that every drawing was preceded by a sketch, and that every sketch could have been of a different subject. Bechdel’s giddy theorizing will never be quite finished; the pattern will never be quite whole. Nevertheless, she insists on the pattern’s reality.

An old charge against narrative is that storytelling, because it manipulates events, distorts basic truths, and an old charge against psychoanalysis is that its explanations, at once over-elaborate and overly simplified, just don’t get us right. The power of the raw, disorderly novel/memoir is its claim to unvarnished reality. First thought, best thought, was Allen Ginsberg’s maxim. First thought, truest thought, the semiautobiographers seem to announce. But psychoanalysis counters with the troubling suggestion that reality is not so easily described, so immediately discovered as that. It declares psychic truths to be neither fixed nor finally accessible, while demanding a long and careful search for them even so. Psychoanalytic storytelling may necessarily be endless, its horizon defined by overlapping waves of insight. Yet the patient’s original, spontaneous narrative, it claims, is faulty; the task of analysis is to help separate genuine insight from habitual perception, to distinguish the essential from the incidental.

Bechdel holds to an idea of art that is basically psychoanalytic in nature. Against the grain of the moment, she vindicates the wrought, the refined, the symbolic. Does this make her a conservative artist? Certainly she is hardly avant-garde: She works in a pop form and appeals to a mass audience. She makes rarefied concepts digestible. And yet, absorbing the lessons of the postmodern schizophrenic narrative, she has arrived at a hybridized style that is as formally inventive, metafictional, and aware of its own textuality as any New Narrativist might hope.

A cursory look at our movies and books, our comics, our movies based on comics, demonstrates that we’re more in love with the usual narrative satisfactions than ever before: the readerly and writerly customs of a middlebrow (but by no means a psychoanalytic) culture. Against these obedient arcs, a little narrative graffiti is more than welcome. New Narrative and its daughters refuse the old dictate that women be demure and follow the rules, especially the constraints of “good taste” that can act as an obstacle to the kinds of stories women have to tell. In elevating a kind of “bad” writing, these artists shrug off an (implicitly masculine) standard or grammar of narration. And yet when our main mode of communication today is the bad writing of the dashed-off email, and when sex and gossip have become as quick a route to fame as any, how avant-garde is it to incorporate an email into a novel? The idea that certain subjects or styles are forbidden is mostly, these days, a useful pretence, affording the messy narrative the appearance but not often the reality of brave honesty, and obviating the costlier truths got by synthesis, interpretation, reflection, revision.

New Narrative was surely right to suggest that one way to falsify experience is to cook it in the wrong way, or overcook it, telling the reader what to think by thinking for her, robbing her of the chance to participate in or even to reject the process of meaning-making. But New Narrative’s inheritors invoke a repressive culture that no longer really exists, traded in for one that gorges on sex scenes and has no use for privacy. If we are aware that pre-given narrative and formal structures can conceal the truth of our experience, so ought we to be aware of the danger of never trying too hard to figure ourselves out. As Bechdel helps us see, the attempt to order experience needn’t represent an acquiescence to some oppressive authority. It can also be a — perhaps our best — chance at liberation.