Oh hello
The other night, at home, alone, I texted a boy, who described himself as kind, to come over, right now. I said to him: darling, could you please fuck me like ket. He said what. I said could you please fuck me so it feels like I’ve taken a few little bumps of ketamine and then in the morning can you get us takeaway lattes, which we can sip in bed. He said what. Okay, I said, I will explain. I want a sexual experience that is both to my body and removes myself from my body. Do you understand? I said: I want my body to crawl up toward the ceiling, maybe into the attic, to look away from me and crouch. I want our connection to be physical but, through our action, to dislodge my body from our intimacy. Then, with my body having left the frame, I want my spirit to be gripping your shoulder. I want my heart to be shuddering. I want my desire to be biting your neck. Do you see? He kept on looking at me, this kind boy. He replied with a series of questions that began: do you like and have you tried. To which I answered yes, no, and finally: I don’t think you get it. Then, some silence, after which he was still there before me, still there and cute, still there and interested in me. During sex, his body crushes my body which crushes myself. In the morning he remembers about the latte.
Now, reflecting on that night, in my room alone, surrounded by new gifts, including: a coffee cup that, if I leave undrunk for too long begins to hum, quietly at first, before switching to the sound of an approaching seagull; and an ivory coloured water bottle that makes a quiet gulping noise every ten minutes, a response that starts off as tamagotchi cute but becomes, in its repetition, violent. These gifts are on my desk, squawking.
Life aghhhhh, you must agree, needs reining in and so, at least until the summer solstice, I want to focus these emails and write only about two literary movements from the mid 20th century: the British Experimentalists and authors of the Nouveau Roman. I keep returning to these writers (see e.g. previous emails on Ann Quin and Nathalie Sarraute) but I wanted to engage with them more thoughtfully and collectively. Rather than giving you a long summary of what these writers are about, I would like us to build that picture together as we go. I will select films that complement them. Doesn’t that sound fun?? It is 2023 hellloooo.
So, to start, I’m going to write about someone more peripheral to the Nouveau Roman movement: Luisa Valenzuela, an Argentinian writer who moved to Paris when she was 20, after marrying a French sailor, and met there members of the Nouveau Roman scene before returning a few years later to Buenos Aires.
He Who Searches (1977) by Luisa Valenzuela
A professor of semiotics becomes enchanted with a sex worker in Barcelona. He follows her and doubles as her psychologist in disguise. She, his muse, is theatrical in speech, offering phrases that, in their vagueness and lack of explanation, add to her mystique like: there are things that people lose and don’t know it and claim afterward”. She remains nameless, fleeting, disappearing and reappearing in Argentina as someone that others are queuing, pilgrimaging to visit. Our narrator returns to Buenos Aires to search for her and “for myself, for my feminine counterpart. I’m searching for truth, for reality”.
In a 1999 interview with BOMB magazine, Valenzuela said: “We don’t live in a plotless novel. The novel of our lives has a very rich plot! And the only thing a writer does is follow that plot as best she can.” As Valenzuela follows the careening plot of He Who Searches, she packs in reflections on love, identity, mawing obsession and returning home.
The narrator believes the woman that he pursues to be infinite - proof, he initially believes, that he is in love. He knows “there aren’t enough walls in the world for her”. Love, for him, is grounded in seeing someone as possessing edges that cannot be drawn, a gestalt image that can never be fully seen because it is the unknowability of the lover to him, specifically him, that forms his love. The narrator rejects this ‘proof’ but in a manner that only confirms it. He says this cannot be the basis of his love because our understanding of the infinite is too small. It “is a tiny infinite in relation to the other one, the true one, and only foreshadows a love in its image, petty and limited”.
The protagonist’s search for her lacks a chronological development, turning instead in on itself as she—the unnamed object of his love—shifts in shape and in place. In Argentina, he describes the path on which he circulates to find her as a Möbius strip: a shape in which clockwise and counter- do not make sense. Earlier, he tells himself that “beginning all over again can’t be done successfully for ever can it? One must accept cycles and allow oneself to be carried along by the current”.
Valenzuela creates a man possessed with a goal but aware, like we are, that the goal is changing and the journey he is on to reach that changing thing is also shifting: never simply right foot left foot right foot. He Who Searches is a mad comedy about looking for yourself through resolutions, dreams, and other people in whose blurring outline you can store “cracks of hope” and the “irrational series of unrealities that reconciles [yourself] with life”. It is about finding the cornices of your life by fitting yourself within other lives. The last word, as the narrator would want, must go to she for whom he searches. Musing on the largeness of the world, she says: “... we ought to be like russian dolls: we ought to fit inside each other and mingle our lives and exchange experiences. I want to be the smallest of the russian dolls, the one that’s farthest inside and doesn’t open.”
The Tracey Fragments (2007) by Bruce McDonald
Tracey Berkowitz, the protagonist in The Tracey Fragments is also searching. She, a moody, dysphoric teenage girl, played by Elliot Page, is looking for her younger brother, Sonny, who she has hypnotised into thinking that he is a dog. “This is the story of the girl with no tits” she announces. Tracey travels around Manitoba in winter, on the eve of a snowstorm, to find her brother. The film begins mid-search and over time fills out its story with flash backs and forwards to: Tracey being berated by her parents; Tracey seeing her psychiatrist; Tracey on the bus draped in a shower curtain. At school, Tracey is considered dweeby in a Perks of Being a Wallflower way and teased for having small breasts. Angsty disinterested Billy arrives at school, who Tracey is drawn to. She asks: “How come beauty burns everything away so the rest of the world even me disappears.”
McDonald turns a simple quest narrative into a harrowing story of alienation and longing through the film’s non-linear narrative and split, mosaic frames in which the viewer is presented with a cascading series of moving images that appear, repeat and fade. A fight will play out at different angles, and be repeated (like the loop in Tracey’s head). Or, Tracey will be on the bus but also in her psychiatrist’s office and also leaving the bus. The literal fragmentary style builds tension and underlines Tracey’s regret.
Tracey’s family is angered by her loneliness and prescribes that she be treated and diagnosed for what the film makes clear is a deep psychic alienation from her family, her school and her physical environment. Billy does notice Tracey. He arrives while she is on a walk with her brother. We learn, only later, that her brother goes missing while Tracey isn’t watching him, while she is instead in Billy’s car. What should be a denouement of romance—of connection in which loser girl gets misfit boy—becomes a tragedy in which her desire for belonging is skewered into selfish neglect.
The Tracey Fragments is terribly sad to watch. McDonald builds a narrative in which the viewer sees, through split screens, different planes on which Tracey’s life exists. We see Tracey’s self loathing and guilt for her brother’s disappearance. We see the responsibility that her parents place on her. And also, like a phantom that stalks the narrative, McDonald presents Tracey’s alienation—not as simply the colouring to a teenage coming of age love story—but as the structural cause of all that goes wrong. It is her total lack of support that is the true tragedy of The Tracey Fragments.
Love
Anne
P.s. you can watch The Tracey Fragments here.
a skewer through the heart with this prose! "a tragedy in which her desire for belonging is skewered into selfish neglect."