Acknowledgements
This book started life a decade ago at the University of Nottingham, began to mature at Queen Mary, University of London, before then coming to fruition many years later at the University of Birmingham. In these successive professional homes, I’ve had the fortune of working alongside encouraging, patient, and inspiring colleagues. I also feel fortunate to have had the chance to contribute to institutions where the Humanities have received support and investment, throughout what continues to be a challenging moment—understatement—for higher education in Britain. Nor do I take for granted how lucky I’ve been to work under the exemplary leadership (and in some cases the valuable mentorship too) of Michèle Barrett, Warren Boutcher, David Colclough, Mark Currie, Markman Ellis, Paul Hamilton, Dominic Head, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Julie Sanders. Being awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize as this project began to emerge from its chrysalis was an exceptional honour. I thank the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary for supporting my application for the scheme and for so convivially accommodating my subsequent leave from teaching and administrative roles in the department. This Leverhulme Trust grant facilitated a transformative period of research and reflection—a rare, privileged opportunity. I thank the Trust not only for the resources themselves, but for continuing to encourage and foster the kinds of humanistic inquiry that take risks.
Over the past decade, the conception and development of this book has benefitted immeasurably from an international community of academic friends, collaborators, and correspondents. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with Rebecca L. Walkowitz and Matthew Hart on a book series for Columbia University Press that has genuinely transformed my sense of contemporary literature studies as a field. This editorial partnership has also revamped my understanding of what can be done with a monograph, and hopefully this book bears some trace of the many things I’ve learned from our labours on Literature Now. I’m also grateful to Michèle Barrett, Tim Bewes, Kevin Brazil, Joe Brooker, Santanu Das, Robert Eaglestone, Jane Elliott, Ben Etherington, Patrick Flanery, Jonathan Flatley, Finn Fordham, Yogita Goyal, Patrick Hayes, Andrew Hoberek, Suzanne Hobson, Chris Holmes, Rachael Gilmour, Eric Langley, Michael LeMahieu, John Lurz, Molly Macdonald, Doug Mao, Huw Marsh, Nicky Marsh, Jesse Matz, Peter D. McDonald, David McAllister, Sam McBean, kitt price, Jacqueline Rose, Matthew Rubery, Paul Saint-Amour, Charlotta Salmi, and Urmila Seshagiri for generous and invigorating reflections on the ideas surrounding this book. Gerard Aching, Derek Attridge, Elleke Boehmer, Mrinalini Chakravorty, Rita Felski, Peter Howarth, Katherine Ibbett, Michelle Kelly, Heather Love, Laura Marcus, Scott McCracken, Deborah Longworth, Ankhi Mukerjee, Graham Riach, Nadia Valman, and Jarad Zimbler invited me to consider unforeseen implications that turned out to be genuinely significant as this book began to take shape. Neal Alexander, Mark Currie,
Acknowledgements
David Dwan, Andrzej Gasiorek, Matthew Hart, Dominic Head, Heather Houser, Julia Jordan, Peter Middleton, Paige Reynolds, Andrew van der Vlies, Nathan Waddell, and Rebecca Walkowitz all went well beyond the call of friendship by tackling quite sizeable portions of the manuscript with great insight and thoroughness. I’m deeply fortunate to have benefitted from the wisdom of these brilliant scholars—who effortlessly combine intellectual companionship with rigorously unbiased advice—and of course any remaining kinks in the following pages are wholly mine.
Audiences attending symposiums and research seminars at Cambridge, Cornell, Frankfurt, Keele, London’s Institute of English Studies, Oxford, Portsmouth, Queen’s Belfast, Queen Mary, Virginia, Sussex, York, and Zurich, as well as those attending panels at MLA conventions and Society for Novel Studies conferences (in Austin and Philadelphia, and in Pittsburgh and Ithaca, respectively), all provided memorable discussions and provocative suggestions that helped to strengthen the sinew of my arguments. In recalling such occasions, I feel especially indebted to Elizabeth Anker, Nancy Armstrong, Harriet Baker, Nick Bentley, Peter Boxall, Alicia Broggi, Angus Brown, Stuart Burrows, Robert Caserio, Jonathan Culler, Ben Davies, Jim English, Grant Farred, Paraic Finnerty, Jonathan Grossman, Nathan Hensley, Adam Kelly, Alexandra Kingston-Reese, Elizabeth Kollmann, Michael Levenson, Caroline Levine, Alex Murray, Christopher Nealon, Kent Puckett, Bryan Radley, Jahan Ramazani, Gayle Rogers, Ellen Rooney, Antony Rowland, Martin Ryle, Melissa Schuh, Pam Thurschwell, Sara Upstone, Johannes Voelz, and Hope Wolf.
This book contains, on purpose, a good deal of close reading, some of which is directed at works in translation. As such, I’m tremendously grateful to David Grossman’s English-language translator, Jessica Cohen, for finding the time to meet and talk about his work. She tolerated my queries about tiny details, appeased my nagging worries about working on translated text, and generously commented on what would become a crucial chapter in this book’s critical story.
The anonymous readers for Oxford University Press offered superb advice and compelled me to think well beyond my comfort zone about this book’s larger conceptual and historical purposes. The editorial and production teams at the Press itself are exemplary and it has been so reassuring to be in their safe hands. From the outset, Jacqueline Norton astutely recognized what this book was trying to do. I’ve benefitted in equal measure from both her advice and her patience, doubtlessly exploiting the latter a little too much as the manuscript entered its (seemingly interminable) final approach.
Like countless scholars who are drawn to the riches of the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, I have enjoyed the care and guidance of the Center’s infinitely helpful staff. They enabled me to navigate J. M. Coetzee’s voluminous archive, along with the more recently catalogued papers of Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. I would especially like to thank Rick Watson, Head of Reference and Research Services at the HRC, for speedily sorting out numerous practicalities. I’ve been able to incorporate these archival materials with the permission of the HRC and with the direct consent of John Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ian McEwan, to each of
Acknowledgements
whom I extend my gratitude here. For Ishiguro and McEwan, quotations from their respective papers are reproduced by permission of these authors c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.
Finally, I’m grateful to a number of presses and editors for being able to include material here that, in rather different form, appeared in essays of various kinds. Portions of ‘Critical Solace’, New Literary History, 47.4 (Autumn 2016): 481–504, reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press, allowed me to test-drive contentions that were subsequently developed more extensively in Chapters 2 and 6. Chapter 7 integrates material from a review of David Grossman’s Falling Out of Time in Public Books (1 November 2014): special thanks to Sharon Marcus for her assiduous and generative editorial advice. Chapter 7 also includes revised sections from ‘In Defense of Lyrical Realism’, an article that first appeared in Diacritics 45.4 (2017): 69–91copyright © 2018 Cornell University. Elements of critical and archive material from Chapter 4 have been reworked for the essay ‘Styles’, in The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee, ed. Jarad Zimbler (Cambridge University Press, 2019), reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press.
I knew this book was never going to be straightforward to conceive, research, and write, revolving as its pages do around losses of all magnitudes. María del Pilar Blanco has accompanied me through all the twists and turns of that process: reading and rereading the fruits of my labours along the way, she tolerated their embryonic arguments while tolerating too their knock-on effects for our daily rhythms at home. Somehow, she found the patience and energy to remain my most razorsharp reader from start to finish. Midway through my time spent drafting commentaries on the unconsoled, our life was given over to the beautifully exhausting commotion that only a newborn can bring. Every day since, my son has offered up his own rascally consolations, memories of which would no doubt have been consumed by the mists of sleep deprivation without a smartphone’s handy and now invaluable archive of snaps. He has brought immeasurable joy to families on both sides of the Atlantic, not least by bringing them closer. If this book turned out in part to be about the powers of description, I make no pretences to felicity when it comes to finding words that might capture how precious the gifts are that flow from William and his mum. Together they’ve helped me to learn how to read emotion differently.
Introduction
Consolation’s Discrepant Forms
Taking solace. A commonplace for comforters, the phrase is no less consequential for being so reusable. As instructions go, it sounds benign, tactful, virtually straightforward. Yet when we try to console we also, however delicately, try to counsel and the advice we bestow can present an emotional feat—a virtual leap from what’s lost. For solace recommends the prospect of feeling otherwise, a rather speculative prospect that may seem like a betrayal of the damage for which consolation is designed. Accepting solace in turn means conceding what cannot be repaired, facing what escapes easy mitigation. Unlike effortless distraction, solace only brings into greater focus the wound it targets, more often exposing than dispelling the desolation it promises to offset. On this score consolation rarely guarantees lasting comfort, let alone augurs a cure. As a countervailing phenomenon that closely tracks the distance we travel from loss, consolation also maps the affectively rocky ground we may yet need to cross.
What has literature to say about these things? Words of solace. Another commonplace, perhaps. But how do consolation’s verbal lineaments actually work in literary expression? Do writers seek to approximate the potencies of solace—unwanted or welcomed, unsuitable if nevertheless expected—we glean from words of compassionate reassurance or uplifting alleviation in life? Or do they in fact do something quite different, something we can only grasp when the emotional approximation of consolatory effects isn’t the text’s only possible or indeed desirable goal? Lingering on the implications of that last question, this book examines what’s at stake in contemporary literature’s extension of consolation’s critical and creative conditions of possibility. In orientation, my inquiry moves beyond the issue of whether or not literature tangibly consoles readers in order to consider the contexts and consequences for writers who negotiate solace as a problem—a source of equivocation rather than a placating solution. Granted, consolation isn’t typically regarded as a conundrum in this sense; earmarking instead the prospect of relief, it carries hints of revival and eventual endurance. For this very reason, we also know that consolation isn’t always condoned by the bereaved or harrowed, for whom remedial stories might feel intolerable. It’s not difficult to imagine situations where the impulse to console would seem inappropriate and disrespectful, even insolent or obscene. And one could imagine in turn how a book’s impulse to console, to redress the scars it describes, only diminishes rather than magnifies the emotional costs of the turmoil
it plots. In critical discourse, this sort of aesthetic treachery is well documented and easily indicted. But in creative practice, is the work of solace really that uncomplicated or ethically unsound?
Sonali Deraniyagala doesn’t think so. In late December 2004 she was visiting Yala national park in Sri Lanka with her husband, Steve, and two sons, accompanied by her parents from Colombo. At dawn on 26 December Deraniyagala first glimpsed a ‘foamy wave’ rising rather higher than usual along the shore next to her hotel; although one ‘never saw water on that stretch of sand’, she ‘thought nothing of it’.1 Moments later, as ‘more white froth’ appeared, ‘not receding or dissolving’, suddenly ‘charging, churning’, she fled with Steve and the boys with such terror that they ‘didn’t stop’ even to alert her parents (5). Their ensuing attempt to escape the tsunami in a friend’s jeep lasted only minutes, as the wave swamped and overturned them. Deraniyagala herself was flung clear into ‘unknown chaos’ from which she somehow emerged alive (9). Found staggering deliriously in circles she began to make out a wasteland of annihilation, a ‘knocked-down world’ left by the receding waters her family did not survive (11).
Wave is Deraniyagala’s 2013 memoir of that horrific day and the months and years of extreme grief that followed. It’s also a book about formidable challenges of assembling in prose the particularities of such an unspeakable loss. ‘When I began writing’, she notes, ‘I was terribly afraid of details’,2 a fear that turns into a temporary source of endurance, enabling her to withstand the void that remains: ‘I must stop remembering’, we’re told in Wave’s first part, since the ‘more I remember, the greater my agony’ (44). But as she later recalls, ‘gradually with the writing I began to reach for details and recover them’.3 As a chronological whole, the memoir testifies to Deraniyagala’s arduous progression from her fear of verbalizing what’s gone, of affirming the family’s absence by describing them with any detail at all (‘They are my world. How do I make them dead? My mind toppled’ [34]), towards a desire instead ‘to get right into those details’, where her impulse ‘to write well allowed [her] to access the memory as closely as [she] could’.4 Readers of Wave would doubtlessly find this most dreadful of losses irremediable. But in between the book’s searing accounts of heartache, tenderly narrated recollections reanimate the loved ones they both capture and mourn. ‘Remembering has been the huge consolation’, attests Deraniyagala, ‘making’ bereavement ‘tolerable, even more than tolerable’.5
This sense of finding consolation in agonized retrospection is reciprocated at the level of form. Wave’s forensic approach to memories, distressing and cherished alike, suggests that descriptive specificity can itself be restorative, if also avoidably painful. Deraniyagala seems determined to appreciate past experiences in a language of vigorous precision. To ‘recover all the details and in the process recover myself’, became ‘my way of keeping them with me’, she reflects. Facing recollection with such exactitude ‘was agony’—but ‘a better quality of agony’ than ‘try[ing] to keep it out’.6 One stylistic consequence of this shift from rejecting details to seeking them out is the book’s movement from ferocious restraint to elegiac lyricism. Descriptions evolve from spare, shard-like glimpses throughout Wave’s catastrophic exposition to incrementally prolonged, lusciously recounted moments of
everyday family life as the years pass. Expanding, increasingly scrupulous depictions release the prose from the clutches of sorrow. Deraniyagala’s register and syntax thus double the mental effect she favours more than once of being slowly unclenched, as immediate calamity makes way over time for the possibility of reconstructing the habits, routines, and fascinations she shared with Steve and their sons, Vikram and Malli. In the opening sections, for instance, her clipped, declarative syntax simulates not only the tsunami’s physical horror but also those ensuing weeks of psychic devastation and self-destruction that led her to research reliable methods of suicide: ‘All that they were missing, I desperately shut out. I was terrified of everything because everything was from that life. Anything that excited them, I wanted destroyed’ (35). Four years later, in the London home she always assumed would be unbearable to revisit, she finds herself ‘clinging to its familiarity, which soothes me somehow’ (94). Just as ‘the descriptions of nature’ in Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard—the 1978 book that consoled and inspired her while writing Wave—proved to be ‘a painkiller’,7 so here, in Deraniyagala’s all-too-empty home, naturalistic observations offer their own consolatory elevation. The uplift accompanying those observations syncs Wave’s style with Deraniyagala’s discovery that recollections, though periodically torturous, keep her ‘buoyant’ with the details they recover.8 While this domestic setting couldn’t be more unremarkable, the affective swell it causes couldn’t be less so: her cautious, granular appreciation of a frosty garden at dawn both acknowledges and audits the scene’s percolating solace. Since the picture she forms cannot be disarticulated from the violent absence of the children who could be sharing it, Deraniyagala’s assiduous work of description initiates and fosters a variety of vigilant consolation.
And there is a lovely web on the climbing rose this morning, very showy and intricate. But they can’t see it. So is it because I am hazy from sleep that I still feel a stab of wonder when I do? My desolation of last night is now dissolving, but is this just the cheer of the early sun? I wonder, but I am also certain that, for some time at least, I will keep returning to this house and to its warmth and comfort. There is a small snail edging across the table on the patio. The heat from its tiny body is thawing out the beads of frost that have studded the table overnight. It leaves a watery trail. They would be so stirred by this. (94–5)
Note the emotional alternations. Though wary at first of the way ‘wonder’ attenuates ‘desolation’, Deraniyagala then acknowledges her wonderment’s affinity with the ‘stirred’ response she imagines in her sons, a response whose studied fascination, whose close-up enchantment with the frosted snail-trail, is enacted by the scene’s pictorial devotion to the fauna of an otherwise ordinary morning. While her paired questions temporarily confirm her initial caution—watchful as she seems of her own surrender to the appealing ‘cheer’ of what she sees—this momentary segue into self-scrutiny is surpassed by the descriptions that follow. From interiorizing worry, from the shame implied by delight escaping for an instant the mesh of grief, she turns in the end to the garden, captivated again, just as she resolves to ‘keep returning to this house’ notwithstanding the loss it monumentalizes. The solace yielded by this episode is staged yet also examined with a language that accepts yet also
inspects the ‘warmth and comfort’ Deraniyagala identifies in spite of herself—and in spite of whatever limits we as readers would impose upon the very idea of consolation in this shattering book.
Nothing seems more indiscreet than evaluating a narrative about scales of grief that few of us are ever likely to experience. But if it’s not for us to judge whether Wave offers any tangible solace in the end—just as Deraniyagala herself has insisted that despite the letters of gratitude she receives from bereaved readers she is ‘not in a position to give advice or to console’9—then the line of affective inquiry needs adjusting. For Deraniyagala invites more than respectful appreciation, however awed we are by the extremity of what she recalls. Doing justice to this book therefore means doing justice to what its very style makes possible when we are confronted with experiences that might appear inexpressible. With great rhetorical dexterity, Deraniyagala imparts emotions at once fierce and poignant, macabre and mundane, finding a vocabulary for the convulsions and convolutions of grief that refuses to sanctify sorrow as ineffable. A work of reconstruction that’s as formally innovative as it is emotionally courageous, the memoir confronts preconceptions about what consolation amid inconsolable loss means for literature and indeed for life.
Wave movingly proves that ‘figurative language’, as Christina Crosby attests, ‘helps us approach what’s otherwise unapproachable or incommunicable’.10 Crosby had her own harrowing reasons to discover that ‘[w]riting offers, not a way out, but a way into the impossible dilemmas of not-knowing’ (200). A literature professor of gender and sexuality studies, Crosby was at the peak of her career in 2003; a keen cyclist, she was also at peak fitness, aiming to clock 1,000 miles over the season. In September of that year she celebrated her fiftieth birthday. A month later, she caught a branch in her spokes at the brow of a hill, slamming her chin-first onto the pavement with a force that left her instantly paralyzed. A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain is Crosby’s 2016 record of confronting and adapting to a new life of profound physical disability and chronic neurological pain. She maintains that ‘living in extremis can clarify what is often obscure, in this case the fragility of our beautiful bodies and the dependencies of all human beings’ (10). The book itself allows her to dramatize the struggle of reconciling two selves in time, before and after paralysis, in much the same way as Deraniyagala embarked upon Wave ‘to re-enter each aspect of my life, of before, and recover all the details and in the process recover myself’.11 For her part, Crosby ‘started writing this book to create something from an otherwise confounded life. Only through writing have I arrived at the life I now lead, the body I now am’ (12). Finding ‘solace in tropes’ (12), she shares with her friend, the writer Maggie Nelson, a conviction that ‘language’ is ‘the most likely medium for addressing the imponderable’ (8), just as Deraniyagala gradually hones in writing the means for ‘absorb[ing]’ memory’s ‘findings free from the fear of always colliding with the too familiar’ (206). Indeed, Nelson’s poems ‘were a second gift’ for Crosby: composed while bearing witness to her agonizing hospitalization, they focus on ‘a time that left a deep, confused, and overwhelmingly painful impress’ on her; yet they also ‘suspend’ Crosby’s ‘life in the richness of poetic language’ (9). A Body, Undone reprises this consolatory metaphor of preservation towards the close:
Tropes transport memories and transform them, as resin is transformed under pressure into amber, sometimes with a small, ancient bit of life suspended inside. Amber can be remarkably clear, but the piece that conserves a suspended life is often more valuable. Writing works on memory, compressing and doubtless distorting the past, and offers bodies for the inspection of reader and writer alike. (201)
Crosby concedes that literature cannot entirely recapture the fullness of past experience. Depiction itself may even damage what’s recalled. But she also suggests that although the ‘intricacies of bodymind interactions defy certainties and confound representation’ (21), finding a form to communicate experience’s resistance to expression, to work through the very paradox of describing affects that escape signification, affords its own consolation. Literary creation, in this account, is an emotional incentive that’s also an epistemological imperative: ‘I see no other way to go on – how else will I understand? How will you?’ (21).
When works like Deraniyagala’s and Crosby’s eloquently delineate feelings that seem to defy description and stable comprehension, they present creative possibilities and solicit critical opportunities. Because these texts further our understanding of how narrative figuratively captures and transmutes seemingly opaque or indecipherable feelings, they also provoke alternative ways of reading for emotion’s literary registration. By supplying a language for states that struggle for inarticulacy, Wave and A Body, Undone also test and extend our analytical literacies for approaching affective depiction. Like many of the works in chapters to come— fiction and memoir alike—these narratives involve us in the fraught process by which emotional and physical devastations achieve legibility, even dramatic immediacy, a process they announce rather that conceal when using the difficulty of expression as a spur to creation. Pain that seems to ‘confound representation’, to recall Crosby’s terms, pushes the envelope of style in contemporary writing in ways that warrant further examination. And throughout this book, writers will ‘transport’ us into formidably affecting worlds where we’re invited to ascertain literature’s capacity to ‘transform’ the ravages it so adeptly describes—and to gauge the ethics of associating that transformation with what literary consolation might now entail.
‘Discrepant solace’ refers to these contentious operations, which present us with stylistic, ethical, and affective destinations for textual analysis. Consolation in works that seem all about inconsolability will invite us to notice how the very language of fiction and memoir countenances solace in emotionally forbidding climates. These texts don’t simply communicate experiences that are patently extreme but also challenge the suspicion that the very depiction of such experiences serves to prosecute form as a balm for what otherwise cannot be faced or enunciated. In this way, the contemporary figures I consider unseat conventional wisdom about what consolation might consist of in critical encounters with ferocious situations that their writing animates. While pursuing this story of solace in works where it doesn’t comfortably belong, I acknowledge that the very ‘question of what does or does not console’, as Angela Leighton shrewdly reminds us, ‘involves some fixing of the emotional stakes’. Consider that ‘most bleak and “anti-sentimental” of elegies, Larkin’s “Aubade”,’ a poem, reflects Leighton, that ‘might also be grimly, even upliftingly, consoling’.
Discrepant
By contrast, an overtly ‘consolatory ending’ (Tennyson’s from ‘In Memoriam’, for instance) ‘may only depress with triteness’.12 These observations point not merely to the capriciousness or sheer variety of responses that any given text may elicit— responses that may not always fit hand in glove with the emotional terrain a book crosses—but also to the way that language solicits our participation, as Derek Attridge has described it, in the very ‘medium itself as it reveals some of its powers and possibilities’.13
Part of what’s revealed will also include the capacity of literary style to work aslant the stirring action it conveys (the ethical repercussions of which I’ll consider later in this introduction). The very different texts this book brings together elaborate the way style frequently ‘complicates the direct emotional effect of the represented scene’.14 Contemporary writers thereby unsettle the premise that for literature to be tangibly consoling—and, by extension, for consolation to be an object worth analysing—it must ultimately replicate some direct semblance of solace in its audience. My corpus suggests that we are in a historical moment when novelists and memoirists are confronting consolation’s contested legitimacy not by producing ‘just some mental simulacrum of affect’, as Attridge puts it,15 but by locating that contestation in the anatomy of form—a term I invoke capaciously in practice to include stylistic tenor and texture, idioms of diction, syntactical and rhythmic connotations, as well as the overarching organization of a given narrative. Over the following chapters, writers raise the critical stakes of discovering what it means to read for consolation as a paradoxical affordance of the formal operations of texts that may seem virtually antithetical to comfort. Consequently, the byword discrepancy will be as applicable to interpretive method as to the conflictive elements and implications intrinsic to those creative works under discussion.
Counterintuitive though such an approach sounds—foraging for consolation’s ingredients in textual habitats renowned for its scarcity—we are not unaccustomed to reading like this as a matter of course. Mostly it happens the other way around: we exalt texts that refuse to console us, applauding their responsible prudence in leaving damage uncompensated. One corollary of this habit is that disconsolate art becomes synonymous with adventurous art. When novelist Colum McCann warns that a noticeable amount of contemporary writing has been ‘devalued in favour of comfort’, his concern dovetails with the tendency in literary and cultural studies to view such comfort as a hindrance to criticism’s task of identifying what he calls ‘more dangerous’ prose. ‘Good sentences’, insists McCann, ‘have the ability to shock, seduce, and drag us out of our stupor’—the opposite, one would assume, of leaving the reader consoled. Such are the sentences we’re inclined to celebrate in works that lead readers ‘beyond coercion, intimidation, cruelty, duress’, even though this mission, as McCann pictures it, of defying aesthetic comfort in order to defend ‘the freedom to articulate yourself against power’ sounds like a consolingly dignified one for contemporary writers to pursue.16 Indeed, as novelists and memoirists in this book will reveal, reckoning with consolation by no means inhibits the sort of oppositional creativity McCann holds in high regard. But where criticism is concerned, the assumptions underlying his complaints about comfort are true enough: we don’t expect writing that we politically or
ethically admire to alleviate the strenuousness of reading about history’s ravages, whether at the personal or global scale.
And you will find few soothers in this book. Discrepant Solace is concerned with something different, something that has less to do with whether literature today fortifies or assuages readers more effectively than at other points in its history or with the supposed disservice done to contemporary culture by writers who are deemed insufficiently combative because they swap antagonism ‘in favour of comfort’. For what would literary consolation now look like if we approached it not as a calmative but as an agent of contestation, one that signals rather than mitigates the implications of traumatic eloquence, implications that surface in renditions of acute, all but incommunicable feeling? And could we unveil an alternative picture of consolation’s conceptual, experiential, and political richness in contemporary literature if we deemphasize hypotheses about audience response as the principal foundation for defining writing’s consolatory operations? What might it mean, in other words, to think of solace not only as a phenomenon we estimate with rough calculations of how readers emotionally react to diegetic illustrations of consolation (or its privation and inadequacy), but as an affective state staged by the formal components of literary works themselves? In the chapters to come, writers perform this staging of solace for different ends: in some instances, to scrutinize how tenable or unattainable consolation becomes at a characterological level; in other cases, to offset crushing events against the very language that conveys them. Writers may thus bring solace dramatically into play over the course of events, where consolation’s agitated viability emerges in the milieu of characters’ sorrows, longings, and atonements; and they may also manifest it linguistically, in the torsion of sentences that contend with, at times tonally counterpoint, the very experience of loss, shame, or fear that they so vividly communicate. By drawing the work of form into critical contact with dramas of devastation (at scales ranging from the personal to the environmental and world-historical), the phenomenon of discrepant solace brings together narratives that twin the aesthetic conundrum surrounding how writing consoles with the ethical one of whether consolation is desirable at all.
In memoir’s case the stakes of identifying consolation in hostile moments couldn’t be higher, of course: not only for the memoirists themselves, trying to do justice to the experiences they redescribe, but also for readers, especially sceptical ones. Reading for solace in contemporary literature ignites methodological arguments about how we approach and appraise literary works that innovatively engage ethically testing and emotionally forbidding material. Wave and A Body, Undone offer a flavour of what several memoirs in the coming pages do: answering back to critical misgivings about consolation as commensurate with reckless denial, placid acceptance, or soothing escapism, they also refuse to privilege devastation’s impenetrability or presuppose that the grammar of loss is inexplicable. As these defiant works would imply, Discrepant Solace is concerned with what narrative can do in overcoming the intractability of formidable emotional states, and its chapters select writers for how they debate solace amid the sorts of physical and psychological devastation, dereliction, or threat that allegedly evade representation. By these lights, consolation’s contemporary conditions of possibility become historically
apparent: twenty-first-century novels and auto/biographical texts not only thematize but also formally embody in their construction (and for personal memoir, in the lived turbulence of their creation), the recognition that solace, like suffering, ‘demands the continued existence of the very art it forbids’.17
That, in any case, was Adorno’s prescient verdict, from his 1962 reflection on literary commitment. He goes on to add that ‘hardly anywhere else’ than in art ‘does suffering still find its own voice, a consolation that does not immediately betray it’.18 Conveying some sense of the variety and texture of such a voice defines one major mission for this book. But I set about this task in the thick of considerable doubt over a phenomenon that’s easily merged with the very impression of betrayal Adorno suggests we should correct. For we don’t tend to think of solace as performing good work, especially not the kind of work that would enable ‘someone to have an unmystified, angry view of large and genuinely systemic oppressions’, in Eve Sedgwick’s influential account, even though the resistance to reparative thought or ameliorative art such a view normally entails ‘does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences’.19 Neither does consolation typically figure among those maligned or neglected structures of feeling that affect theorists and historians of emotion have encouraged us to comprehend anew.20
Perhaps this is not surprising. After all, few emotional promises would seem at once so desirable and dubious as solace. Though seldom ranked among our most forbidden pleasures, it can nonetheless feel distinctly illicit: a temporary patch in times of sorrow; an indulgent diversion from pressing iniquity; an expedient sedative that blunts compulsions to rebel, that invites us to acquiesce, to be content with what we have. Consolation can be charged with all these misdemeanours. Contemporary writers know its impeachments well, knowing too that they can do more than merely satisfy our assumptions about consolation’s impediments, since that would be to comfort us by confirming our own cherished misgivings. What could be more consoling than a gratifying consensus over consolation’s suspect ploys? Self-validated objections to solace are themselves irresistibly soothing, and in recent years writers have offered striking counterarguments that don’t always fulfil readymade expectations about an affective condition that seems both trusty and mercurial—or about the critical work contemporary literature itself can perform when evoking consolation’s experiential and representational complexities. Those counterarguments are the subject of this book.
READING FOR SOLACE
When we consider what consolation means for literary experience the temptation is to focus on claims about the salubrious profits of reading. According to this trend, consolation is a variety of vicarious escape: we enter fictional realms of distress from which we’re relieved, in reality, to be spared; we find respite in imagined lives thanks to the compelling diversions they afford. From the Latin consolari, consolation shares with solace the same root, solari, ‘to soothe’, an affinity that not
simply justifies their interchangeability—though they will indeed be transposable over the pages to come—but that also signals semantic foundations which tend to prompt reservations. Being soothed by a book may be a common enough reward. But the palliative perks of one’s immersion in literary worlds are not what professional criticism is trained to appreciate, still less to endorse. Hence consolation’s hazy reputation in life as in art: for companions, a mollifying gesture can reconcile intimates to behaviours or beliefs that they really shouldn’t tolerate; for culture, the uplifting experience reading or spectating might momentarily allay material need, insinuating solutions to social contradictions that one ought to oppose. According to such allegations, solace should be seen as a fiction in itself—a fable recasting what cannot be put right as something that might still be overcome. To be consoled in this way is to betray the very losses that dispose us to distraction. To allow oneself to be soothed in the eye of grief’s storm is to diminish distress by self-deception. To seek refuge in visualizing how blighted events could otherwise have transpired is to entertain stories of speculation that deceive rather than edify, that threaten to attenuate the love for what we have lost, that coax us to retreat from the inexorable turbulence of experience altogether.
‘Change always solaces’ loss, observed Michel de Montaigne; by diverting us from the wrenching fact of what we cannot recover, change ‘dissolves’ loss and consequently ‘dispels it’. Reading, following his account, becomes one of several mechanisms by which we can ‘escape’ distress ‘into the crowd of other pastimes and cogitations’.21 To postmillennial ears, this may sound downright irresponsible. Yet there’s nothing wrong with regarding literature as an affective amenity. Indeed, the dismissal of writing’s palliative or therapeutic potential suggests that criticism may be most hubristic and uncharitable when it invokes a notional reader all too susceptible to solace, a reader who bears little resemblance to how and why audiences find support in the cultural works they consume. What’s more, literature may not need to be comforting or dangerously distracting for it to be tangibly consoling. Traumatic scenarios can leave us feeling fortunate, buoyed up by our recognition that we’re in the custody of tranquillity—possessing the very security that’s chimerical for characters whose fates we follow. Along these lines, reading not only transports us beyond immediate worry, but does so, curiously, despite what we read about. One might come away from a text consoled, regardless of the subject matter at hand. Whether distressing or elating, reading can be a welcome detour, a mental getaway that’s no less fortifying for being so temporary. Again, this is likely to carry a whiff of irresponsibility, even though refusing to indulge literature’s aesthetic compensations doesn’t guarantee the critic a passport to effective resistance. Warning readers of the hazards of diversion or pointing out a work’s bewitchments isn’t an intrinsically progressive mandate, even if the variously curative and ameliorative effects of reading have often been greeted with ‘almost embarrassment or disdain’, as Timothy Aubry has shown, as though such benefits were ‘indicative of a dangerously self-centred worldview’s inescapable influence’.22 In any case, it’s feasible to imagine a book leaving us consoled and productively incensed. Uplifted by the creative radiance and singularity of a work, we can still find its content enraging. There’s no reason why aesthetic consolation
Discrepant Solace
should necessarily inhibit our incentive to act upon the outrage provoked by reading stories of injustice, trauma, or heart-rending deprivation. And yet, simply restoring this kind of complexity to consolation in relation to how we experience the form and content of literary worlds doesn’t altogether shield it from certain stock reputes. Because solace is readily equated with inactive or compliant forms of response, it tends to be regarded as the gift from literature that any ideologically vigilant and sufficiently suspicious reader should refuse—the epitome of a naïveté that’s easy to see through.
This disapproval of solace has become a dutiful habit that’s hard to shake off, and the following sections outline some of the advantages of giving it up. To make that case, I unpick the assumption that consolation remains a close ally of aesthetic therapy. It’s not that there aren’t circumstances in which the specifically therapeutic assets of the solace people cherish in literary reading aren’t worth defending. What could be more sanctimonious, surely, than exhorting some purportedly better—that is, more politically virtuous, self-consciously responsible, or allegedly urgent—way of admiring literature for audiences who may genuinely want to gain some respite or encouragement from what they read, without being accused of carefree passivity or ideological complicity. However, by shifting beyond a receptionmodel of solace as the primary means of analysing its textual effects, we have a better chance of noticing how consolation has as much to do with the work that style does as with what implied readers supposedly feel. Sometimes emotionally complementing narrative content, at other times conflicting with it, solace leads a provocative life in discreet elements of rhythm and syntax—including the micro-inflections of lexical register and acoustic connotation—as well as in largerscale units of structural progression (or stasis), motivic patterning, and manipulations of genre.
From this perspective, what often makes consolation ‘discrepant’ in contemporary writing is the restive interplay between the solace afforded rhetorically or structurally by a text and the affective repercussions of its wrenching outcomes. My critical story of solace hopes therefore to be as attuned to consolation’s formal triggers and manipulations as to the variety of reactions its dramatic presence or absence can provoke. To do so, I observe that important ‘difference’, as Steven Mullaney helpfully clarifies it, ‘between narrative representations of emotional states— whether descriptions, depictions, or enactments—and the narrative process and phenomenology’ of the reader’s participation in affecting plots. ‘In the one’, explains Mullaney, a reader may be ‘presented with an example, a model, or an illustration of an affective state’; whereas in the second process, the reader ‘is being modelled or shaped or reconfigured as much by his or her own reading . . . as by a represented state of being, capable of imitation’.23 With these distinctions in mind, I disaggregate—without of course disconnecting—the stylistic and diegetic lives solace leads in representation, the role it plays compositionally for some writers (especially in the case of memoirs where the writing process itself is also one of grappling with whether creativity surmounts or perpetuates the very inflictions that are the writer’s inspiration), and the myriad responses that consolation (including its unacceptability) may arouse in readers. With the help of these analytic tiers,
we can infer more precisely what solace does at different levels in literary works today that make consolation’s experiential breadth and aesthetic diversity seem impossible to overlook.
If solace presents a formally and ethically animating problematic for contemporary literature, it also invites us to reconsider the critical values we might associate with its effects—values that are tricky to compile, less easy still to defend. One probably wouldn’t shortlist consolation as a prime candidate for helping literature ‘to be a site of agitation’, in the words of activist poet Cathy Park Hong, ‘where the audience is not a receptacle of conditioned responses but is unsettled and provoked into participatory response’.24 But as we’ll discover, the kind of participation Hong is advocating here is precisely what consolation in contemporary writing solicits. Recent works of life-writing and fiction dislodge solace from its etymological ancestry as a soothing remedy, attentive as they are to the ethical and emotional costs of propping up cushions between word and world. Contemporary works considered throughout Discrepant Solace allow us to understand solace less as a beneficent yet typically censured emotional residue of consuming books than as an active, often volatile ingredient in how they are made.
And what’s made is by no means conventionally consoling. Providing few lasting tranquillizers, the contemporary writers considered in coming chapters test and vex the traditional connotations of solace through character, action, and form. From this tripartite perspective, solace will have as much to do with what literature enacts (inadvertently or purposefully) and with the affective consequences of what it compositionally performs, as with our vicarious or sympathetic reaction to how characters feel. Complementing Sianne Ngai’s compelling work on ‘tone’, I thus see consolatory effects as ‘never entirely reducible to a reader’s emotional response to a text’, nor ‘reducible to the text’s internal representations of feeling (though it can amplify and be amplified by both)’. When consolation is entertained as an identifiable affordance of the interaction—and, as we’ll see, often the friction—between elements such as grammar, diction, and focalizing register, its implications as an ‘objectifiable emotion’ become critically useful. Even in palpably traumatic, poignant, or ethically disturbing works, consolation can present us with what Ngai calls an ‘unfelt but perceived feeling’. When framed in this way, consolation is not simply a by-product of our ‘sympathetic identification with the feelings of characters’, but rather a phenomenon whose various states of impermanence or contestability are embodied in and animated by specific formal techniques.25 To be sure, the nature of readerly identification and immersion is hardly irrelevant, particularly if we are to account for the ways in which becoming empathically or sentimentally absorbed in a text is not always synonymous with being consoled. To shift consolation beyond what Katherine Ibbett has termed ‘the therapeutic model’ of textual affect ‘by attending to formal devices and structures’ is not to sideline our reactions to literal descriptions of feeling in favour of taxonomizing solace in purely narratological features. Rather, it is to recognize how we can enrich accounts of literary consolation by examining the shifting dynamics—sometimes reciprocal, sometimes discrepant— between one’s aesthetic experience of a text and the emotive tensions or orientations it formally engenders.26
Discrepant Solace
Reading for solace by reading for form in this sense provides a tempting shortcut to plurality, skirting consolation’s definitional stodginess. Its dynamic presence in contemporary writing as something prosaically attractive yet potentially duplicitous—defended in some works, dreaded in others—contrasts consolation’s staid meanings over time. Certain denotations and self-evident characteristics stick, notwithstanding how historically and culturally contingent accounts of public and private emotion remain. According to the 1822 edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, for instance, the substantive consolation (along with its numerous, though nowadays rarer, derivations: consoler and consolator) is firmly synonymous with giving ‘comfort’, with the ‘alleviation of misery’. In turn the idea that someone or something (an artwork, a piece of rhetoric) can be consolatory is explained along the same lines, and indeed the word not only functions in an adjectival sense but is also given as a substantive category (conso’latory), naming a ‘speech or writing containing topics of comfort’.27 Meanwhile, solace too is associated with comfort yet also with ‘pleasure’, even ‘recreation’—a connotation Johnson draws from Milton. In this historical usage, to solace someone means therefore ‘to cheer’ and ‘amuse’ them.28 So what has changed?
In one sense, not much. The homology of consolation and comfort survives today mostly untouched: it isn’t hard to envisage how one might delicately opt for amusement when trying to ease a friend’s sorrow; nor is it uncommon to hear of recreation being proposed as a physical antidote to immobilizing dejection. Levity may still be a potent remedy in our time as in Johnson’s, however ticklish amusement seems as a stratagem for cheering someone up. It turns out that solace—a calculated action and a felt condition, denoting available treatment as well as charity received—can appear as consistent in the realm of everyday gesture as it is contentious in aesthetic thought, even though we know consolation, like any affect, is unfathomably variable across centuries and continents. That being the case, equally satisfying—if equally imperfect—options present themselves. One would be to preserve consolation in literary-historical amber, so that it’s readily available for analysis irrespective of contextual permutations. Another would be to admit defeat by assuming one’s perspective on solace will always be just that—perspectival, temporally relative, partial, even distorted by one’s present interests. Neither solution will do, but they offer undoubtedly appealing ways for the critic to deal with consolation’s aesthetic and historical heterogeneity. Foreswearing the analysis of what solace means for literature on the grounds of sheer diversity over time is just as self-reassuring as anchoring consolation to formulaic modes of feeling justified by the diachronic persistence of its definitions.
In this book, I try to avoid such solutions, without presuming to catalogue the archive of contemporary literary solace in its entirety. Whether consolation is positioned as a facet of representation, as a psychological asset of reading, or as one chapter in the bewilderingly long history of emotions, there is no superior platform from which to view it correctly. Instead, solace asks that we ‘face the porousness of our knowledge’, in Stanley Cavell’s phrase, so that we may recognize that there’s no definitively authoritative ‘place from which we can see the past’—including
our more immediate past. 29 If consolation provides opportunities to reflect on how literature solicits new ways of critically attending to affect, then it also invites us to acknowledge that our own interpretive ‘position’ towards consolation’s historicity is ‘to be discovered’ rather than nailed down, in Cavell’s words, ‘in the painful way it is always done, in piecing it out totally’. While I can’t pretend to offer a theory of literary solace in its transcultural totality, what I do hope to show, adapting Cavell, is how we can ‘put ourselves in’ consolation’s textual ‘present’. This can be a risky move, especially if it results in ‘the repudiation of our perception altogether’, when literary solace answers back to embedded assumptions about its inefficacy.30 But when it generates this kind of epistemic turbulence, consolation also motivates us to ask how we might do better justice to what it does in the literary imagination—not least for narratives that would seem inimical to consolation’s feasibility. Discerning in the formal quiddities of those narratives the conceptual, emotional, ethical problems that revolve around solace is one way of thinking with contemporary literature as it models its own distinctive modes of affective inquiry and insight.
That consolation might be a custodian of critical and creative value isn’t a prospect that enjoys much support in contemporary literary studies. And yet it’s not at all obvious that the ‘impulse to see fiction as a form of redemption’, as the late Carol Shields put it, a consoling resource that can recuperate and ‘redeem what otherwise might be lost’, is inherently misguided, philosophically bovine, or politically suspect.31 Literary succour of all generic stripes cannot be so easily dismissed. However, if the figures at the centre of this book refuse to affirm expectations about consolation’s own long-lasting definitions, they also complicate its links to appeasement, alleviation, progressive adjustment, and—again—redemption (a term to which the following section turns). Uncoupled from such kinships, consolation in these works coincides with the examination rather than dissipation of sorrow and apprehension. Whether the privations in question are foregoing or anticipated, several of the writers I consider achieve this by putting style and structure in argumentative relation to ‘topics of comfort’ (to recall Johnson’s meaning of consolatory), helping us to see how literature formally collides with as much as it reciprocates the emotions it plots. Works in this vein refuse the typical suspicion towards consolation’s reputedly placating side-effects, especially since they often boycott that epitome of structural solace: the reparative ending, or what Reta—Shields’s writer of ‘light fiction’ in Unless (2002)—ruefully calls ‘the calculated curving upward into inevitability’. These manipulations of circumstance could be seen as epitomizing the consolations of structure, where the ‘corruption of cause and effect’ contrives, in Reta’s words, the ‘gathering together of all the characters into a framed operatic circle of consolation and ecstasy’. Alas, readers will be disappointed if they hope to see this compensatory ‘architecture’ exposed for indictment in Discrepant Solace, with its disentangling denouements, its ‘lovely slope of predicament’.32 Instead, the works we’ll encounter arrive at affectively disruptive conclusions that deflect gratifying repair—often deflecting too some of the interpretive gratifications of critique. Throwing the conflation of consolation and resolution out of joint, they
