Checkout 19, Berg and Malina
Oh hello
Predictably, when I started these emails, I was feeling overwhelmed by living, still, in this world, with you, a world that both rewards uniqueness and whips, whips, whips everything it can to a curated homogeneity, all dressed, naturally, in pinks and blues and beige so light, so faint that you, too, might also smudge out of shot. Predictably, I felt a depressing sameness to my life, an obviousness that I was trying to wriggle out of but could not: like a dramatic irony that the whole world saw, smirked and then nudged me until I, also, beginning to sore in my ribs from all the nudging, began to join in: smirking and rolling my eyes at myself. Of course! the void yelled at me. Of course! I yelled back. It was all, yes, beginning to become rather cringe.
In Charlie Markbreiter’s thoughtful essay on trans cringe and assimilation, he describes cringe as “the gap between how others see you and how you want to be seen”. What I’m talking about can perhaps be framed in the same way, but can more usefully be viewed as cringe in cliché: wincing as the world said, “Yes, you would do that.” Like cringe, feeling like a walking cliche is not something that is specific to the trans experience, but I expect is particularly prevalent among trans people because, like cringe, it is intimately tied up in being perceived: in surveilling myself and feeling (and being) scrutinised by the world.
These emails, then, began in part as a way to (desperately) construct something like a self that didn’t feel so obvious: a figurative removal from a loud bar (where I couldn’t hear myself THINK), to go outside and talk more. I’m still doing that but in my more galaxy brained moments, as I realise that you can literally call anything a starter pack if you want and that my experience can always be described as cliché (even haha this email), I’m hunting instead for models on how to construct myself that do not clutch too dearly to uniqueness; that disavow anything to do with having a personal brand (ew); that commit instead to the wonder of ordinariness—not in the LA Apparel white, exclusionary, we’re all the same because of capitalism sense—but in a collective ethic that can be built on shared connection, shared interests, shared timelines. When feeling the watchful dread of cliché, I don’t want to respond with “Of course :( !” or “No!!!” but, rather, something closer to: “Of course lol”.
Checkout 19 (2022) by Claire-Louise Bennett
Checkout 19 is about a woman who writes and reads, who keeps writing and reading, who is intent on writing and reading, and along the way, builds her life and herself. It starts in a working class town in England, a schoolgirl reads (“Turning the pages. Turning the pages. When we turn the page we are born again”) and doodles in the back of her exercise book. The loops, she is drawing, then, begin to “calm now”, and become “a smooth line relaxing across the page” and then turn “into words, just a few words” and then into a story, the contents of which we later learn are about a girl sewing so studiously that “her fingers cascade into growing lengths of thread”. There are other stories in Checkout 19, collected together loosely because they are written by or involve the narrator: one is about Tarquin Superbus who is looking in his library—a library full of empty books—for one line, a line that will transform him, “a sentence, just one sentence, of such transcendent brilliance it could have blown the world away”; another about a large Russian man in a supermarket; and then, about a relationship ending, about being raped, and about finding someone who has killed themselves. Those last two moments of trauma startle when you read them, like turning a page and seeing the new page chewed and torn.
Checkout 19 is exactly what I want out of a novel: stylistically sharp, fun and experimental in its form, and taking itself seriously enough to grapple with how to live. For the narrator, reading offers a chance to connect to something else, something that resonates and hums with you. She writes:
“Sometimes all it takes is just one sentence. Just one sentence, and there you are part of something that has been part of you since the beginning, whenever that might rightly be. The source, yes, you can feel it thrumming and surging, and it’s such a relief, to feel you are made of much more than just yourself, that you are only a rind really, a rind you should take care of yet mustn’t get too attached to, that you mustn’t be afraid to let melt away now and then. Yes indeed.”
Yes indeed. Checkout 19’s form captures brilliantly this simultaneously de-centred and self-centred ethic (or, perhaps, an examination of the self that looks for connection with others rather than a solipsistic mirage): while the story follows the narrator, our understanding of her is a bricolage of the books she reads and the stories she tells. Checkout 19 references Ann Quin, a 60s era British experimental novelist and influence for Bennett. In Berg, a story about Berg a man who changed his name to Greb, and travelled to a seaside town to kill his father, there is a similar drive to tell a personal story (in Berg, it is the psychoanalytic equivalent of a dragon slaying quest) that isn’t obsessed with the personal project. Berg wants to become a star, but not to sparkle, not to shine!, rather to “disintegrate, gradually breaking apart”. Later, in the sea, Berg experiences “the separating of yourself from the world that no longer revolved round you, the awareness of becoming part of, merging into something else, no longer dependent upon anyone, a freedom that found its own reality, half of you the constant guardian, watching your actions, your responses, what you accepted, what you might reject”.
Malina (1991) by Werner Schroeter
Look, I’m having fun, and the opening quote to Checkout 19 is from Malina, the novel by Ingeborg Bachmann, so I decided to watch the movie adaptation, starring Isabelle Huppert who plays an unnamed writer (but is in fact Bachmann herself), directed by German filmmaker Werner Schroeter and with a script written by Elfriede Jelinek (of The Piano Teacher fame). The film is from 1991 but screams a 1980s frenzy that reminds me of Andrzej Żuławski and Philip Kaufman. Huppert plays a writer in love with Malina but married to Ivan. She writes letters, thousands of letters, that she does not send. The postman, also, withholds from her letters she is sent. She tells Malina as he lies in bed on top of her: “A week without you is a week without reality.” She says: “I’m also Malina, and Malina is me.” With red teary eyes and a bandaged head—bloodied from hitting her head in frustration against a wall—she adds: “Believing in you brings eternal life.” This is not a woman besotted by stretched notions of codependency. This is a woman in LOVE.
I loved Malina for its madness and effusive styling: it seeks to occupy and splatter onto the screen the internal mind of a gifted woman overcome with desire, and how to make sense of her life while trembling for someone else. What the writer craves is to be lost in love. Cradled in bed by Malina, the writer, scared, admits that what’s so sad is that “No one was ever everything to me.”
Malina is also moving, I think, as a story of a narrator willing herself not to be its protagonist. She would like desperately for someone else to take control. In this current era, where the girls are returning genuinely and aesthetically to religion, where they are again praying to be god’s favourite, Malina—and its sweat of ecstatic subsumption—resonates.
Love
Anne