This house is strange.
Its shadows lie.
Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?
—Toni Morrison, Home
Creatures, enter at your own risk! In this edition, some horror and some haunting and some history.
Ghost Dance
I revisited Toni Morrison’s Beloved for the first time since it was assigned in high school. I don’t have a lot to say about this elliptical story about the psychological and spiritual mutilations caused by slavery. It’s all the kinds of ghost story: the angry ghost, the ghost with unfinished business, the ghost you may have misidentified out of grief and longing; the ghost you can become while still alive, in order to protect the place you haunt or the people who fear you; the ghost as resurrection. In its portrayal of a haunted house whose very hostility is what makes it feel like home, it might recall The Haunting of Hill House: “Whatever is going on outside my door ain’t for me. The world is in this room. This here’s all there is and all there needs to be.”
Multiple haunted places, and metamorphoses, people who can’t tell if you’re an animal and people who you can’t tell if they are animals: “Out there where there were places in which things so bad had happened that when you went near them it would happen again. Like Sweet Home where time didn’t pass and where, like her mother said, the bad was waiting for her as well. How would she know these places? What was more—much more—out there were whitepeople and how could you tell about them? Sethe said the mouth and sometimes the hands. Grandma Baby said there was no defense—they could prowl at will, change from one mind to another, and even when they thought they were behaving, it was a far cry from what real humans did.”
I haven’t read that much Morrison. Sula is a raucous brass-section jam of a novel whereas this one is a low moan. Sula offers some of the pleasures of the unmotivated act: We all like seeing transgression for no obvious reason, like yes, Sula is underparented but she’s also willful and that’s the fun part, the sudden puncture in the soul where reasons for doing things or not doing things can drain out. Beloved’s transgressions all have reasons, the way revenge is only revenge if there’s a reason.
A Bright Room Called Day
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, which I read in Susan Bernofsky’s translation, is the biography of a stretch of land by a lake, and the buildings on that land. Characters are identified only by their relations to the house or the land (the architect, the gardener, the childhood friend, the illegitimate owner) and the novel zigzags through history, so you have to flip back and forth in each short chapter to understand that the little girl playing by the lake is the same one who is now dying, not much older, in a Polish ghetto.
A summer place is a good place to set a story of this kind. The timelessness of the summer place contrasts with the cataclysms that transfer this particular place from Nazi Germany to Russian-occupied territory to the GDR. All summers can feel like the same summer at the summer place, and so Erpenbeck’s sentences ramble and spill, she loves comma splices and elisions and sudden jumps, because the changelessness of the summer place is deceptive: One day somebody will kick you out, even if it’s only death. The summer place is a refuge for memories, but also a piece of property that might be sold or divided or expropriated or rendered as restitution. I think for me personally, the most resonant thing in Visitation was an old woman’s reflection on our tendency to think that having something is the default, and losing it is an anomaly in need of explanation:
For as long as her family still owned the farm, this big wooden gate was always kept closed unless they were just carting out milk or bringing in the hay. But when suddenly she had cause to seek employment as a dairymaid on her own farm, she knocked on this same gate from the outside and asked the Poles who had meanwhile taken over the farm whether they could hire her. Being at home had already been the first half of this strangeness without her having realized it back then, when she was still at home, chapter one so to speak, and then going away was only the other half, chapter two, strangeness seen from the outside, both halves equal in size, mutually corresponding, but all of it at once—in other words: shutting a gate and being either inside or outside—all of this is very familiar to her.
Title of this section via Tony Kushner.
The Squamous Equations
Also read Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, tr. West. My dad read this first and basically said, You know, it does what it says on the tin. He’s right! Good grief, this is a terrific book, and it really is about understanding and the absence of understanding. It’s a book of short stories, all of which are tightly woven in to the real history of (mostly) mathematics; mathematical discoveries seize people like religious ecstasy, or like a blackout, and mathematical theories unravel the world as much as, or more than, they explain it. There’s a real Lovecraftian element here, the horror of wrong geometries. I glimpsed the inside of the atom and my skin erupted in carbuncles, a carapace of mushroom clouds.
For me the first story was the best. It dances, like a tightrope walker or maybe like a guy in his basement showing you the scary bulletin board he’s covered with newspaper clippings connected by strings, from the discovery of a royal blue pigment to the origin of the name of Dr. Frankenstein to the death camps, just German men discovering an exceptional fertilizer or an off-brand use for a pesticide. Or both! And you’re yanked along, with barely time to catch your breath, until you hit the final paragraph and the ground under your feet just disappears. That last paragraph is extraordinary, incredibly disorienting, you truly will feel what it is like for life to make no sense; Labatut knows that the scary thing isn’t the monster, but the look on the face of the man who’s seen it.
Picture of Prussian blue powder by “Saalebaer,” via Wikimedia Commons.