Form and genre constrain. Literary experimentation comes up against these constraints, but a failed experiment is one where the constraint wins out, making the work suddenly farcical, kitsch or implausible. It takes us a long time to recognise success because a successful experimentation will cease, after a while, to be experimentation at all (this is true in the sciences, by the way, and is what divides science from engineering). Everything between success and failure sits in a no man’s land of mild dissatisfaction, perplexity and the occasional mal mot. Things might be good, great even, but they are not sublime.
Christina Tudor-Sideri’s debut novel, Disembodied occupies this non-zone. It would be easy to say that Disembodied is a serious debut that shows promise but has some rough edges. Better luck with the sophomore novel, Christina!
That would be a rough judgement, but such is the life of the writer. Such a judgement, however, may be too hasty. Disembodied occupies this non-zone only by nominal means. The judgement is true against the yardstick of novelistic expectations. I am, however, not so sure that Disembodied is best thought of as a novel, with all the descriptive and dialogical baggage that term carriers. It is certainly a work of fiction. Yet there is a consistent breaking of convention – yes rules were made to be broken and so on but bear with me here - that is more than just experimentation. Tudor-Sideri the novelist and her subject matter are at odds. In many ways this is the dramatic axis of her fiction.
Disembodied is the final breath of its protagonist, a surge of meditations and recollections before total blackness. The book’s universe is really self contained in this sense, turning the final page terminates our narrator in the same instant. A nice meshing of content and form (or even materiality). Our nameless narrator will in this lengthy final breath have her thoughts drift from disquisitions on Nietzsche’s eternal return to remembrances of lover and then on to final attempts at making sense of one’s life. These are always interesting, occasionally profound, and at times sentimental.
Tudor-Sideri’s consistent disregard for novelistic convention is immediately apparent. Consider the opening line of Disembodied: “I died on the twelfth of September, at the height of happiness.” In many ways this is a classic opening sentence: happiness and died sit in such a horrific juxtaposition, and then the odd specificity of twelfth of September all grab one’s attention. To start’s one story with “I died” is, however, the negative image of ending a story with “I awoke”. Both are to be avoided as they undermine a certain gravitas of storytelling. Yet how else to begin such a story? In terms of scene setting this is as efficient as it gets. We have date, event and the only character who really matters compressed in just over ten words.
It is one long paragraph from this sentence to the book’s final word. The single paragraph, comprising some 135 pages, represents the final breath of our narrator. To make one’s novel uniparagraphic is another conventional rule broken, one demanded by the subject matter at hand: the single paragraph and the single breath are the same. Such a technique can be used to great effect. Tudor-Sideri uses this technique well; the first forty or so pages of Disembodied are utterly compelling. Draw in by the patent absurdity of the premise, one is soon carried along by the text as it twists and turns across its disparate subject matter. The lack of any paragraph breaks is used to force the reader into disquisitions and digressions with urgency, a kind of literary equivalent to flooding the brain with oxygen.
All this does not not a novel make. Plenty of novels are uniparagraphic. Plenty of novels have strange conceits or mediocre opening lines. Consider Thomas Bernard’s Old Masters. Over the course of a single 300-page paragraph what is revealed is not just an old man’s annoyance with Heidegger (and many others) but the story of Reger, and – despite the subtitle of the book – a rather intense tragedy concerning the death of his wife. Reger’s life story is retold by Atzbacher. This introduces another and a double, a “di”, another aspect of storytelling that by itself does not a novel make, but helps reline Bernard’s experimentation back within the genre of the novel.
What begins to really throw into doubt the genre status of Disembodied is how it approaches recollection. Plenty of novels ‘recollect’, retelling a life in retrospect. Indeed one could say this was foundational moment in the modern novel. Yet there is something off in the recollection that is found in Disembodied. This is in part due to the nature of the book; the memories being recounted slip into vagueness and indeterminacy as our narrator decomposes. Of course, there are recollections in a technical sense – with our narrator already or almost dead there is nothing but recollection – but the images are imprecise, impressionistic, fleeting. A scene is defined briefly, by a green armchair before something else moves the text along. The following is typical:
Odessa, 1917: a memory, a fragile inscription upon the pages of an ever more fragile book, a timely labyrinth to lose oneself in. Morning itself now touches the windows of the house, and in doing so, it shatters this synthesis of hunger and angst which I had been using for warmth. I leave nothing behind me except for rainwater. Rainwater upon the objects inside the house, rainwater here, in the garden, rainwater all the way to the village, that is where my dog now sleeps, perhaps in the arms of a child, perhaps at the feet of an old woman who reads to him at night. Rainwater in the jam jar, rainwater under my fingernails. Rainwater that falls from the sky, incessantly, like needles piercing the skin of the living, needles I no longer feel but still know of. Rainwater that floods the bed and fills the heart. Rainwater in the image of the creator.
Odessa 1917? What of it? The lack of description, the preference for abstraction – “hunger and angst I had been using for warmth” – build the thinnest of imageries in passages like the above. Then repetition forces a motif – here it is rainwater – to dominate. There is a thinness to these recollections which is intentional, but pushes Disembodied further and further away from the novel.
At one point our narrator says that we die again, or truly, when the last person to remember us dies:
you will breathe the final breath, not the breath from the moment of death, but the final breath that one takes when there is no one left to remember us. For that is when we die, when through the dark, forgetfulness stretches out its limbs and grabs you, right when the last of those who knew you have disappeared into the transient warmth of their final hour.
There are different ways then to die. As our narrator recollects and gathers up the past a story unfolds in which these slices of death emerge. She compares death and the orgasm: “for death loves life so ardently that it gives itself to it through means of all that is beautiful and through the language of the body that feels and throbs and aches and orgasms.” This would normally be trite except it introduces an idea of death and life as being intertwined. Not in the normal sense in which our finitude determines what kind of beings we are – if we were immortal would we really be alive? – but the sense in which death is present in all life. The link is fleshed out in a more concrete way, as death, pleasure and bondage are brought together: “it was perhaps the same pleasure that I took from lingering on the bottom of the pool, the same pleasure I later found in asphyxiation and in ropes and bounds. The same pleasure I take now from death, by lingering on the verges of life for far too long.”
At one point is made clear that our narrator is unwell, there is great pain cause by something, according to a doctor’s diagnosis, in her blood. Right before we learn of our narrator’s diagnosis of their mysterious disease –perhaps some kind of blood curse – we are told that “I remember how to do a double-column tie instead, how to join a wrist to a thigh or an ankle to a chair.” In the context of pain and disease and death, we are given this rather intimate confession:
Impermanent pain of any kind, if I am honest, though never self-inflicted, was what provided me with the greatest of comforts—it was my pear with every lunch, my cigarette with every bath—and the perfect backdrop for it was, of course, the sexual act: transient pain followed either by comforting hours or hours in which one slept without dreaming, without nightmares, without fears and, most of all, without the pain that invited all of them in the first place. I went as far as to consider it a gesture of kindness toward myself: to get down on my knees and receive pain under the control of something other than my diseased body.
The analogy of pain and death with bondage and submission is deeper than the tired connection between death and the orgasm. Those who, in the context of sexual intimacy, like to make suffer and to suffer alike may be familiar with the term ‘subspace’ a kind of mindset the submissive partner enters into, a state of passivity and pseudo-dissociation. Of course, much like death, I have only be told about such things. For my part I am far too interested in cruelty to have experienced such states.
What the recollections of Disembodied do is not paint a vivid picture of a life now lost. Rather they articulate a series of deaths, of relations to death. The idea Tudor-Sideri defends is that we can and do think death. Yet because it is also a cessation we will only ever approach the limit. Yet it lingers, in transient fragments, in pain, pleasure, submission and existence.
In Jacques Derrida’s seminar on the animal, The Animal That Therefore I am he offers a succinct definition of his term limitrophy. This is a mixing of and a confusion at the limit. He writes:
Limitrophy is therefore my subject. Not just because it will concern what sprouts or grows at the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it, raises it, and complicates it. Everything I’ll say will consist, certainly not in effacing the limit, but in multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply.
For Derrida this term allows him to investigate where the human and the animal overlap and diverge without sliding into an implication that there is, in fact, no division between the animal and human life.
This is what Tudor-Sideri does in Disembodied. It charts, in retrospect, a series of approaches to the limit of death. That it takes place against this limit is only natural. The philosophising that opens this book speaks to this problematic. As if one’s last thought would be of the a priori or Nietzsche’s eternal return. Rather this is a settling of accounts. The question at the heart of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason after all, can be phrased as “how is experience possible” but Tudor-Sideri is not interested in normal experience, but experience at the limit.
In this way Disembodied is really a work of philosophy rather than a novel. Perhaps you wish to call it a novel of ideas. Or an essayistic novel. Or a novel-essay. This might be compelling in a pedantic sense, as terms to designate the intersection of the treatise and the fictive. Yet even this is not so straightforward. Though not always present in such tomes, dialogue is a consistent enough feature of the novel of ideas that Sianna Ngai asks if it is not simply a subgenre of drama, echoing Martin Puchner who aligns it with dramatic Platonism. As for the essay side of this distinction, it shall suffice to note that Györg Lukács, in Soul and Form, associated the essay with life. All this reaching for distinctions, however, ignores the problematic of Disembodied itself, that what it seeks to depict unknots our standard storytelling procedure.
In another way it would just simply be ludicrous to call Disembodied a work of philosophy or even essayistic. This confusion is, I think, the point. In my review of Tudor-Sideri’s first book, Under The Sign of the Labyrinth I point out that the book, a mixture of the essay, memory, and philosophy takes the form it does as integral to the point Tudor-Sideri wishes to make about the body, trauma and thought. In this sense, form and content converge. Likewise, Disembodied cannot, by the very nature of the moment it seeks to depict, maintain the elements that would make it either a novel or an essay. Or indeed some kind of combination of the two. The problem simply is that what is at stake is experience at a limit none come back from. In this manner to treat this topic in an uniparagraphical monologic fiction – or if you prefer, a monograph - is to take seriously the demands of the subject, a subject as demanding as it is universal.