Either Way, We're Not Alone
From “During a Rave Party” by Lise Sarfati. St. Petersburg, Russia 2010.
Reading Kate Zambreno’s Drifts, I’m struck by her dedication to the act of disappearing into her writing. Of inhabiting a moment in real time, then transmuting that moment to the page, letting it sit, then going through the rigors of publishing—creating artwork, editing, galleys, etc. The immediacy lasts beyond the act of writing, and even the more academic moments lose their pretentiousness in favor of a diaristic approach that I would call autofiction if I was confident that Drifts was even remotely fictional.
Zambreno specializes in fragments. In her books, these fragments pile on top of each other, accumulating into a whole with visible fractures. The connection of information in Drifts is implicit, except when it’s direct. It makes reading her writing easy, because the quiet epiphanies in the pages arrive when your mind is attuned to them, which means sometimes you miss them entirely. Reading a page while half paying attention is, I assume, not what she would want, but it’s a mode that feels comfortable, almost like meditation.
Here’s Zambreno on loneliness, or, more accurately, Zambreno on the act of talking about loneliness as a means of interrogating imposter syndrome, itself a means of trying to figure out what it is to feel unsettled in your own skin, in the career you’ve built for yourself, in the general, fragmented build up of uncertainty that comes with acquiring enough knowledge about the world to feel diminished within it:
It’s interesting reading Drifts—a hardcover book of fragments—during a time when a large portion of the writing world I am part of—which exists constantly and angrily on Twitter—would maybe feel disdain for this type of writing for all the reasons that it currently works: It’s indulgent, it revels in its unfinished-ness. It is not showy, and in its anti-showiness, it becomes sort of quietly in your face. Drifts is the most inspiring book I’ve read in months, but its unwillingness to proclaim its big ideas is the reason it’ll probably never be considered a classic. Or maybe the problem is just my generation’s borderline pathological suspicion of assigning permanent superlatives to new art.
Zambreno’s exploration of the fragment isn’t just appealing to me because my attention span has been rotted by years of watching the downfall of America on Twitter, it’s also appealing for the way that it subverts the structure of how we take in so much art: movies are generally 90-120 minutes. Songs are usually 3-5 minutes, and written so that they appear timeless even when they sound too contemporary to exist outside the current moment of their release. When this process is changed, it can be fascinating—either for the way the familiar becomes confounding, or for how the tossing off of self-imposed restrictions can offer new clarity to the world at large. For Zambreno, it appears to be an exercise in disappearing into her text: writing of the immediate with immediacy. Her sentences living in parallel with her lived experience, even though we are not reading those sentences until long after the moment described has past.
The very incisive critic Lauren Oyler has written, in Fake Accounts, a fascinating novel about what it’s like to be alive right now, which is, I recognize, a generic statement that has become blurb fodder for many novels (what it’s like to inhabit a body, what it’s like to be alive right now, what it’s like to exist in the world, etc, etc), but it’s also the core of this book, plot aside. What does it mean to live in a constant refraction of reality? What does it mean to recognize and then rebuke a trend that you have contributed to, even as you continue to contribute to it?
Oyler seems to dislike fragments for very good reasons. From Lizzy Harding’s Bookforum review of Fake Accounts:
The online-dating section also stages a rebellion on a formal level. For thirty-nine long pages, the narrator openly parodies the pithy, aphoristic manner of contemporary fragmentary novelists like Jenny Offill or Olivia Laing—whose style she disdains for implying “utmost meaning” in its gaps. She considers this a literary shortcut but readily adopts it, noting, “What’s amazing about this structure is that you can just dump any material you have in here and leave it up to the reader to connect it to the rest of the work.”
Oyler, or rather her narrator, is exposing the type of relationship that is forged between writer and reader. How we fill in the gaps only when there are gaps to be filled, and how those gaps can mean as much as the words on the page.
Is Fake Accounts a rebuke of Drifts? Not really, but it does feel like a rebuke of a lot of literary norms. Where much modern fiction celebrates terse, unadorned sentences, Oyler writes long ones, filled with commas and digressions. Even the layout of the book pushes the margins to the edges of the pages. The text is long, on a line-by-line basis, and as a result, it requires a close read. There’s a good argument to be made that I wouldn’t even notice something like this if I were reading new fiction by pretty much any other writer. That’s probably true. Oyler’s dedication to examining cultural phenomena, to interrogate how something becomes a thing, is one of my favorite things about her criticism, so it’s hard not to look at every decision in Fake Accounts and assume that it’s pushing up against a trend or idea that we’ve all complacently accepted. Even when I don’t agree with her, I agree with her pursuit of an understanding of the narratives we create for ourselves in order to carve out personality.
“Looking for a creation myth, ended up with a pair of cracked lips”
People like the quieter moments of Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher, but the real game changer is “I Know the End,” which captures humanity’s current obsession with the slow apocalypse. It’s about traveling, about the end, about touring, and loneliness—it’s immediate: at one point it becomes, more-or-less, a list of things Bridgers notices or feels while driving: singing along to an “America-first rap country song,” slot machines, big bolts of lightning, the low crackle of flat America, and then this moment: “everyone’s convinced it’s a government drone or an alien spaceship…either way we’re not alone.” the horns come in on “either way,” drawing a line between the magic of aliens and the mundane reality of constant observation. The song ends in a wall of horns, woozy strings, and Bridgers screaming her voice ragged.
When she performed it on SNL, one or more people got mad that she smashed her guitar. Some more people decided her scream was coming from somewhere primal. While the discourse was discoursing, we missed the beauty of the current moment that she’s describing in the song.
Disconnect as human life, small epiphanies in the margins of our memories. Getting lost by avoiding the place we live, and the history we’ve accumulated, greeting the end of life or the end of the world with an apathetic “yeah, I guess the end is here” because who can be sure enough in their beliefs to assume that it’s really, finally, the end?