Bookshelf

Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. Bookshelf is a regular column that reads books for, by, and about artist parents.

I recently read The Long Form by Kate Briggs, who is also a translator of Barthes and dragged a whole bunch of Barthes into this important novel. The title sets of up the terms of engagement: “the long form” is a term that Barthes uses to refer to the novel, and Briggs plays with the question of how the masculine, continuous, monumental conception of the novel (the Great American Novel and its ilk) intersects with other experiences of time, particularly the fragmented days of early motherhood. Over the course of a day, or a couple days intertwined—who can really tell in that haze—the narrator tends to a young baby, walking, bathing, nursing, napping, holding, reminiscing, and occasionally reading a freshly delivered secondhand copy of Tom Jones. This is the situation:

Caring for a baby was an activity, productive of its own relationality, and therefore open to anyone, to everyone. Its meaning came from the day-by-day walking and carrying through of an ancient set of gestures that were new to her, while also keeping on with her own self-care activities - feeding herself, washing herself - and finding original ways of doing them too (now accompanied, often while holding someone else). Undertaking these tasks, thinking about them: also, by necessity, doing the thinking that arose from the doing of them: testing and wondering, querying and revising, inventing and projecting. And it was true that they sometimes gave rise to unexpected, open-ended, unusual sorts of thoughts. Her days with Rose were making her look at herself, and the world, from other angles. They were making her do things (and think things) she had never considered doing (or had thought of) before. They were bringing her up against old questions, big questions, strange combinations of questions, hyphenating them and bracketing them and reaccenting them. They forced open the imagination in ways that might one day reveal themselves to have been transformative. For now, though, she just felt stupid. Or was it disappointed.

The narrator is much better versed in the history of the early modern English novel than I am, and of course also in the ins and outs of being a mother. But the fragmentation of time is instantly recognizable. It pulls me back to my first year with a baby in the apartment, to the frantic blocks of work wedged in during naps and quiet moments, to the single-minded bouts of activity aimed at attending to a newly awoken or newly upset or newly hungry baby, and to the sheets of pure presence that fell in between all of that, the skin and the smells and the smiles. It’s enough to call up a sentimental mood.

But why not ‘sentimental’ also in the sense that poet Friedrich Schiller ascribed to it? As one of two distinct attitudes towards writing and the world (towards writing the world). On the one hand: ‘naivety.’ The direct reporting of experience. Telling it. On the other: ‘sentimentality,’ a mode which draws on and makes explicit the poet's relationship to the materials, to the situation, to the experiencing of experience: ‘sentimental’ on his terms meaning situated and self-aware.

That resonates nicely with the way that I’ve been thinking about biographical criticism and autofiction, gently pulling together a framework to evaluate the degree of self-awareness that these modes of writing or making art bring to each other. Briggs is extraordinary for the way her criticism is built directly into her fiction. The Long Form plays with the way that language is broken up, both within the narrative of the text and in the housing of the narrative. I love this bit in particular, as a demonstration of this point but also because it’s a beautiful realization of what it means to be alive, the weight of responsibility for the self and sometimes others that we wake up to every day:

… no one had taken her aside and warned her. There would be no sudden extension to the space of her character, no instant expansion of patience and tolerance — no. To be clear: there would be no immediate, radical inner change. Instead, there would just be —

THE DOING OF IT

It was her discovery.

Listen - she wanted to tell someone: this is what it involves.

Doing it.

That line that’s written all in capital letters in the middle? That’s a section or sub-chapter heading. The passage preceding it ends a left-hand page, cutting off the sentence right in the middle with the dash, and then the title of the next chapter resumes the sentence. After which the body of the chapter continues on, so that the chapter heading isn’t an interruption at all but a bit of concrete poetry that carries on its own weight within the story. The book, which achieves the length of its form through an accumulation of fragments and is all the richer for it, becomes a vessel for the holding of all of this poetry. And holding is what the whole things is all about—it’s what occupies the narrators day:

Their day was the story of their holding arrangements: an ongoing narrative of finding (sometimes planning, sometimes inventing, making up) and holding to (for as long as they lasted: believing in), then collapsing little scenes.

Allowing them, stretching them out.

The meaning of holding: to maintain, to sustain, to support. To stop and stay. To keep to, and persist in. A situation involving an intentionality as well as the promise of a certain duration.

This practice of holding is something that is familiar to anyone who works as a caregiver to children, anyone who works as a homemaker, but also to anyone who works with creative people and helps to guide the creative process. (As an aside, my favorite thing about the physical format of these Fitzcarraldo Editions novels is how the blue slowly wears down to white, revealing a how the book has been held over time—its holding pattern.

Tolerating the collapses and the breaks, committed to re-establishing the sorts of environments that hold steady enough and prove flexible enough to accommodate someone else's discoveries: the provision of a mutually invested setting to imagine out from.

This is what I love about what I do, in my professional work as someone who tries to make interesting contexts for artists to bring their work to the world, and equally also in my personal work as a father to someone who is struggling every day to bring herself out into the world. Love is holding space, building an architecture for that space to appear. I’m fond of saying that love is a practice:

It’s alright if love feels like a rhythm of reaching and falling short. Then an unexpected receiving—a sometimes wholly unsought interaction, having nothing whatsoever to do with ambition. A dispossession. Not an achieved steadiness.

It’s alright if the feelings you feel are so mixing and mixed. If there can be patches of the day when you feel panic, then nothing - not a thing for anybody, not even for yourself.

The key is to keep going.

It’s alright if the whole project can sometimes feel like an unsupported invention, an unprecedented co-production.

It’s alright. Say it's alright.

It’s okay. It is (going to have to be) alright.

In her reading of Tom Jones (and not just Henry Fielding, also E.M. Forster and Bakhtin, among others) alongside and throughout her rituals of love and holding, the narrator establishes that the novel always contains disruption and discontinuity, and that to pretend otherwise is to be blind to their rhythms. In my favorite sub-plot, the driver delivering the novel rings the doorbell and awakens the baby, which seems thoughtless to the narrator and of course completely innocent to the driver. But we get to follow the driver for a bit on his route through the neighborhood, and we come to understand that he is waiting for a text from a paramour. With the Barthes connection in mind, I immediately jumped to A Lover’s Discourse and the temporality of waiting, the expectant yearning that Barthes unravels so beautifully: the lover is the one who waits. The lover carries the weight of that empty space. As the driver continues through the streets and alleys and the narrator attempts to hold her baby we become privy to two kinds of time running in parallel. Intertwined processes of reading and writing bring the text into life.