ŷ������

I do not read a lot of the recently published fiction as I agree with Martin Amis that “it’s just an uneconomical way of dividing your reading time��. However, in my very limited sample I’ve noticed certain patterns in recent “experimental�� works. These patterns might be totally determined by my subjective selection of course. But it seems, the fashion of pure autofiction and fictionalised biographies is fading. It has been replaced by a number of more daring and generally more interesting forms. Those forms by itself are not necessary that new. In fact they’ve been used for centuries. But they are still a rare drop in a sea of traditionally told plot or character driven driven “stories��. And it is refreshing to see the younger authors trying to play with something more challenging than that.

The one these forms is a fragmentary text comprising mini-essays, research notes, poems in prose and personal memories mixed in, centred on a certain theme, place or even another work of literature. The recent examples I’ve read:, The Baudelaire FractalOut of the Sugar Factory After Sappho]. In these works, the relationships between the fragments are often more important that any single fragment. And the reader is actively engaged establishing these links. Another modification of this is a fragmentary oral history, factual or a counter-factual. The examples: Kick the Latch, ROAR: American Master, The Oral Biography of Roger Orr, Osebol).

A different form is a book-length interior monologue of the main character who is often (but not always) the narrator as well (and not always a reliable one). The text would be focused on a relatively short period of time be it an hour, a duration of a journey, or possibly - a season or a year at maximum. The text would be structured into two levels. The one would be a framing narrative that positions the narrator inside the external world. While thinking, often the narrator would be travelling, walking, smoking or doing something similarly monotonous. So this activity would serve as a skeleton of the whole novel and periodically would anchor the narrator’s thoughts. In other cases, this framing narrative would be some simple situation or a rudimentary but atmospheric plot.

But the main core of such works is the second level - the narrator’s interiority. The beauty of this form is that the narrator is free to digress on any theme, observe, travel the memory lane or express opinions without the author’s obligation to labour some artificial plot to incorporate all of this. Respectively, the variety of these thoughts are a welcome and the coherence is not an overwhelming requirement.

Another distinguishing feature of these works is that the reader is bound by a single perspective of the narrator. This could be a unique experience, but could be boring depending on one’s connection with the narrator’s voice and her preoccupations.

It seems a whole plethora of the novels like this were recently published. A few from the ones I’ve read: Panthers and the Museum of Fire and Wall, A Passage North, The Logos.

"Study for obedience" is an addition to this list. The book is exactly what the title says - a study. The author conducts her study of obedience as a concept; what does it mean to be obedient and which consequences it might bear. But she does it through the eyes of her character, the unnamed woman who is also the narrator and very likely the unreliable one. It is unclear whether the woman just remembers her past year or she is writing some report about it. I would think the second is more likely due to her style of expressing herself.

The main pleasure of reading this book was that it was written in a long, elliptical and beautifully crafted sentences.

There is no dialogue, not even much of reported speech. But though this statement is technically true, it cannot be further from reality: the text is full of dialogue with other texts, other authors and very likely - with the readers as well.

The framing narrative in this case: the woman moves in into a small town in a strange country to live with her recently divorced brother. The dynamics of this relationship is obscure by design. But she seems to be initially satisfied to be his companion and almost a servant. He seems to be relatively assimilated in the place. While she is clearly alienating the locals. Strange accidents with domestic animals and the pets coincide with her arrival. Might that be the reason for their hostile reaction to her presence. Or is it deeper in a mythology of the place and her origins? The brother is absent on business for the big chunk of the book while she is familiarising herself with surrounding nature and people. This external framing creates almost gothic atmosphere or a timelessness of a fable.

The core of the text is her interior abstract thoughts and ideas, perceptions and observations. She of course is puzzled by her situation, but apart from this, she thinks about many different things. And it took me long time to figure how to focus my review without basically repeating a half of the book. (I am not sure I’ve actually succeeded in this btw). Two epigraphs to the work have eventually helped me.

The one of the epigraphs is taken from Malina and it is about language. The narrator (very likely - the author as well) is seriously preoccupied with the notion of language, its functions and its limitations.

Through her eyes, we observe an illustration how effective mastery of language could be an instrument of power in a society. Her brother is very vocal both in their native language and in the local lingo. It is evident he uses this to exercise his influence, to persuade, to impose his will on the others.

“My brother knew how to interpret, to impute, to notate, knew in other words how to wield power. "

She, in contrast, being very articulate in her thoughts, seem to unable to exercise any power in communication and uses the language only in a way prescribed by others. She also cannot master the local language at all. So it is much easier for the locals to ignore her or the worse. It is symbolic that while the narrative progresses the situation seems to be getting reversed in parallel with changes in power dynamics: her ability to express herself whether with language or otherwise seem to be growing while her brother linguistic powers seem to fade.

He first act of “disobedience��, even if subconscious, has also taken place through the use of language. Her job was to transcribe the audio recording into the text. I cannot restrain myself from quoting at length as the passage is very elegant. She comments with such a cerebral wit on the subject of business style of writing. The one that nips any creativity in the bud:

“Up to then, writing had been an exercise in fidelity: transcribing exactly what I heard within the parameters of a strict grammatical framework. Semicolons were to be used sparingly and to separate two independent clauses joined by a conjunctive adverb or else to separate items in a list where those items themselves contained commas. All other uses were to be avoided. Such was the house style. I had prided myself on a well-placed comma, a clarifying colon. It had always been a delight to me to take the vocalisations of my colleagues and organise them according to the immutable laws of grammar, turn them into the purest, most crystalline utterances. And yet, and gradually, my adherence to these rules dropped off. I became more interested in the sound of my colleagues�� sentences, the shape of their words, the occasional and probably unintended sibilance, the repetitions and elisions, the hesitations or pauses where the grammar did not mandate them. I found new ways to mark these idiosyncrasies, making use of space on the page. It seemed to me a truer notation of the language than how I had proceeded up to that point.��

So her first act of disobedience is actually an attempt to deviate from the standard, to find the truer language through empty spaces on a pages. In other words, to give more weight to the pauses, to silence as a way of expression.

The narrator also thinks about any language’s ability to express truth. The most memorable illustration of this potential impossibility is an episode when a local woman blames the narrator’s dog, Bert, for the pregnancy of her dog. But Bert is in fact snipped. However:

“What I knew about Bert’s sterility was a veterinary fact, perhaps even a biological one, but I acknowledged that this was only one way of seeing things. The woman had, doubtless, her own worldview, one that was evidently incompatible with mine but no less true, according to its own internal rules.��

I think we all nowadays can relate to the piercing absurdity of this situation while two incompatible “world views�� make the notion of truth close to meaningless and the language to express it - powerless. How would you explain a biological fact to a person who does not consider science as a valid proof?

There is a theory about language that it has evolved as a tool of persuasion rather than a tool for distinguishing true and false. This book is about it: Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists. Language allows to create narratives which often simply connect certain assertions in a convenient way or allow some “inconvenient�� events simply to be dropped and forgotten. The resulting narrative does not suffer from the omission, in fact it often improves and it becomes much tidier. A narrative is often used both individually and by a collective in order to create a certain, more palatable picture. In this book, the narrator experiences the result on her own skin. Apart from being a stranger, she is also a Jew, many of her people perished in this land in the past:

“My presence violated some crucial and unspoken rule, which I thought now had to do with narrative, the right of a people to preserve the stories they told about themselves and their own history. My silence was a reproach to them, something pressing at the edges of their consciousness, a terrible knowledge they did not want to own and which I made them look at day after day. In silence, yes, for words have more than once led us away from truth.��

These people needed the stories: “stories one told oneself in order to live, to go on living with oneself, knowing what one was capable of, knowing the things one had witnessed, the things one had done.�� This echoes a well-known phrase by Joan Didion.

In seems, on one hand, a language makes life more palatable; but on the other hand, the same language helps to obfuscate something essential, the truth. The narratives are overrated, “words have more then once lead us away from the truth��, so the narrator is often choosing silence. I am not sure whether it is an act of resistance; very likely - not. But it is an act of disobedience by default.

I also admired how the narrator has started to doubt other nuggets of acquired, previously unquestionable “wisdom��:

“It’s true, I thought, ...that imagination may be a moral faculty, as some writers have maintained, but how to understand its workings? ...If imagination was to be understood primarily in terms of morality, I needed to know how to cultivate it, I needed to understand the terms and structures of goodness and its pursuit. (in another part: “I wanted to be good in the terrible world.��) ...the charge of a lack of imagination was one I took seriously. Had I not spent my life imagining myself in the shoes of the other?��

Such questioning has made this work very engaging for me as a reader. I’ve almost screamed: “you are confusing imagination with empathy��; and “i do not believe imagination is moral otherwise all artists would be saints and the art would never be used to inspire evil acts.��

The second epigraph is by Paula Rego: “I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.��. It is interesting to speculate whether this is a message on behalf of the author or the narrator. I would prefer the former as creates another meta-fictional layer. The narrator, in my view is not quite there to become both at the same time: murderous and obedient.

The analysis of obedience as a concept is quite nuanced. Also it allows the narrator to observe many connected phenomena like historical memory, surviver’s guilt and power dynamics. Sometimes, the narrator feels her obedience is rewarded. But those moments are fleeting. Predominantly, the narrator comes to the conclusion that obedience often borderlines complicity; and meekness or deference are “the swiftest route to one’s own eradication��. I find the two brilliant passages below almost ruthless in their effectiveness:

��...meekness brings out the sadist in people, the atavistic desire to bite at the heels of the runt of the litter. As one writer put it, it’s not the meek who inherit the earth. The meek get kicked in the teeth.��

“As I cycled across town, to the dump, to the farm, as I cycled back up the hill to my brother’s house, I thought often about life and its chance encounters, the inexorable question of complicity, about how not one of us could claim to be innocent any longer. I thought that naivety, though it had long proven useful in protecting one from facing facts more squarely than it suited, was more inexcusable, more repugnant than ever. No more padding between the word and the world. I read once that ours was a century of half measures, and I thought even then that nothing could be further from the truth. Every single one of us on this ruined earth exhibited a perfect obedience to our local forces of gravity, daily choosing the path of least resistance, which while entirely and understandably human was at the same time the most barbaric, the most abominable course of action. So, listen. I am not blameless. I played my part.��

Interesting that in The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind Simone Weil, (in the list of references to this text) considered obedience as a necessary condition of coherence of a society. She defined obedience as the consent given by an individual to be governed by someone else. This side does not to seem to be resurfaced in this book.

To conclude, in my favourite essay “Intertextual irony and levels of reading��, Umberto Eco specifies 4 qualities of a novel: 1) meta-fictional - a commentary of the text on itself; 2) double-coding - at least two possible levels of reading; 3) dialogism - dialogues with other texts; 4) intertextual irony - it is a concept, similar to dialogism, but more subtle - the reference to another text is either not obvious or ironic. The text would make sense without it, but the experience of reading is enriched by it. Since i’ve read the essay, i’ve somehow adopted this list as a kind of a personal checklist of qualities i like in a novel.

Needless to say, this one worked for me. All four elements were seamlessly there making my reading a rewarding experience.

I cannot resist sharing an example of “intertextual irony��. The narrator’s brother made her read Montaigne at the morning. (This particular example resonates as, like the narrator, I also try to read some Montaigne on some mornings with a mixed record of success:-):

“As I struggled through Montaigne each morning, I felt the greatness of his intellect, its expansiveness, and, in spite of this, and truth be told, I felt slightly ashamed on his behalf. Was it that I felt, instinctively, that it was improper to use one’s mind in public, in so public a way? Was it, in the final analysis, a disgraceful, even obscene thing to think out loud, still worse to have one’s thoughts outlive oneself, to travel through the centuries in no straight line, surviving only because of the vagaries of taste, the accidents of translation, to make it through so much only to end up in the hands of some person like me, so ill equipped to receive them?��

I found this passage not only witty but also quite funny in terms of her perception of Montaigne. It is ironic of course as this novel does a similar thing to Montaigne - a study of a concept through someone’s subjectivity and knowledge. Moreover, he paid quite significant attention to obedience in particular. I’ve counted 47 mentions of this notion across his different essays.

The last chapter was the only part of the novel that left me a bit underwhelmed. I am not quite sure what the author wanted to achieve by it. It seems she was looking for a resolution for her framing plot or for a culmination of the absurdity of the situation of her narrator. But i personally did not find it convincing or necessary. The fact that the narrator has made a very stylised speech and starts to use an academic jargon such as “adjection�� and “structures�� was a bit puzzling as it went against the perceived absence of the common language with the villagers. The eloquence of the speech, though a wonderful exercise in style did not add anything new for me. Was silence supposed to be a better weapon?

I also wish the narrator act more decisively or “murderously�� in the sense of Rego’s phrase. That is, if the author’s intention was to get gothic elements of the plot from the background to the main stage.

However, these reservations about the last chapter have not spoiled the pleasure of reading and thinking about this book: this might also be obvious from the length of this review!