"Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever"
On the supply chain and Sally Rooney's last novel
In Howards End, after the abortive engagement between Helen Schlegel and Paul Wilcox, her sister Margaret commiserates with her.
“To think that because you and a young man meet for a moment, there must be all these telegrams and anger,” supplied Margaret.
Helen nodded.
“I've often thought about it, Helen. It’s one of the most interesting things in the world. The truth is that there is a great outer life that you and I have never touched – a life in which telegrams and anger count. Personal relations, that we think supreme, are not supreme there. There love means marriage settlements, death, death duties. So far I’m clear. But here my difficulty. This outer life, though obviously horrid; often seems the real one – there’s grit in it. It does breed character. Do personal relations lead to sloppiness in the end?”
“Oh, Meg –, that’s what I felt, only not so clearly, when the Wilcoxes were so competent, and seemed to have their hands on all the ropes.
“Don’t you feel it now?”
“I remember Paul at breakfast,” said Helen quietly. “I shall never forget him. He had nothing to fall back upon. I know that personal relations are the real life, for ever and ever.”
“Amen!”
My mind turned often to this moment while reading Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World Where Are You. The passage is one of those eminently teachable bits in Forster’s book, one of the ways the novel often seems too self-consciously about itself and about the possibilities of the novel as a form, its usefulness for considering social relationships, the way that what, for shorthand I’ll call the classic, bourgeois novel, dramatizes a tension between personal relationships and social antagonisms. Love and Money, if you like.
Like Rooney’s novel, Forster’s is structured around the relationships between two couples or occasional couples: the intellectual heiress Margaret Schlegel and Charles Wilcox, the widowed owner of a large country house, Howards End; and Leonard Bast, a working class autodidact who resents his being trapped in a loveless marriage and the less intellectual but extremely sensitive Helen Schlegel. Over the course of the novel, romance is pitted against the merciless British class system, and we’re shown how difficult it is to disentangle the two things. The Schlegels’ insistence on personal relations is revealed to be much flimsier than they think. In the end, these two great forces, Love and Money, fight to a sort of stalemate. Poor old Leonard dies, in a painful irony, after being crushed by a bookcase, but his child, by way of Helen, will inherit Howards End. In the meantime, various tensions, between sensibility, commerce, and privilege are negotiated. Personal relationships do overcome, but slowly, tragically, without really altering the way the “great outer life” works, and we get to enjoy pitying the characters as the conflict grinds them up.
Rooney’s novel is about Alice, a famous Rooney-like novelist who has retreated to the west coast of Ireland to recover from insane-overnight-success-related burnout. She house-sits in the grandest house in the town/village. There she pursues a love affair with Felix, a warehouse worker who is a proud nonreader, while maintaining a fraught relationship with her friend Eileen, who is in love in a messy way with their mutual friend Simon, an “absurdly handsome”, and slightly absurd, 6’3” tall left-wing parliamentary researcher who is also a practising Catholic. I won’t reveal too many of the ins and outs of their relationships, although often the difficulties seem, perhaps too realistically, to be barely there at all.
The parallels are not just in the doubles love match or the cross-class affairs. There are small, unimportant ones. Like Forster, Rooney gestures vaguely in the direction of German Romanticism – Schiller, rather than Schlegel, taking her title from his poem ‘The Gods of Greece’. But more importantly, like Forster, Rooney dramatizes the relationship between the inner and the great outer life by taking up, I think, a variation of this phrase “telegrams and anger”.
The emails in BWWAY divided reviewers when the book came out: in the LRB, Christian Lorentzen finds them “vapid”:
vapid: embarrassing to read and perhaps to have written. It’s true that people send one another articles and other trivia over email all the time, but why make characters in a novel exchange Wikipedia pages before veering into discussion of their love lives? I took this as a sign of laziness on Rooney’s part but perhaps it’s a mark of her genius for the broad stroke.
He picks on, in particular, by far the most annoying email, the one sent at the beginning of the novel by Alice, which, if the novel weren’t such a smooth reading experience, would have been enough to lose me. In the email, Alice describes a version of what you might (I will) call the supply-chain sublime:
All the various brands of soft drinks in plastic bottles and all the pre-packaged lunch deals and confectionery in sealed bags and store-baked pastries – this is it, the culmination of all the labour in the world, all the burning of fossil fuels and all the back-breaking work on coffee farms and sugar plantations. All for this! This convenience shop! I felt dizzy thinking about it. I mean I really felt ill. It was as if I suddenly remembered that my life was all part of a television show – and every day people died making the show, were ground to death in the most horrific ways, children, women, and all so that I could choose from various lunch options, each packaged in multiple layers of single-use plastic.
This is, it seems, to me, for better or worse, a nod to the, now (I think) classic, master moment of the supply chain sublime in Ben Lerner’s 10:04, when the narrator (Ben) finds a bag of coffee before a storm and has some thoughts about it:
Finally I found something on the list, something vital: instant coffee. I held the red plastic container, one of the last three on the shelf, held it like the marvel that it was: the seeds inside the purple fruits of coffee plants had been harvested on Andean slopes and roasted and ground and soaked and then dehydrated at a factory in Medellin and vacuum-sealed and flown to JFK and then driven upstate in bulk to Pearl River for repackaging and then transported by truck to the store where I now stood reading the label. It was as if the social relations that produced the object in my hand began to glow within it as they were threatened, stirred inside their packaging, lending it a certain aura – the majesty and murderous stupidity of that organization of time and space and fuel and labor becoming visible in the commodity itself now that planes were grounded and the highways were starting to close.
It’s a conceit that comes up again in Lerner’s novel, and is gestured to in his third, in the best set-piece in that book, involving some milk in the supermarket.
10:04 is a novel about the commodity form, and tries to use its own self-consciousness about being a novel, in order to subvert its own commodity status. It uses narrative to do that. Telling the story of the commodity, including the novel itself, undoes what Marx sees as the fetish character of the commodity by revealing not an object but the relations that went into it. Or at least that’s the aim, the artistic urge that drives that novel. In doing that, Lerner also tries to reopen the possibility of more traditional novelistic empathy and traditional novelistic resolution, love and marriage. At one point, we see this gesture of the supply chain sublime posed used to help rethink and repoliticize a kind of bourgeois domestic space. Lerner has let an Occupy protestor use his shower, and is cooking him dinner, and this act of solidarity reminds him of his inadequate performance of intimacy more generally:
Moreover, what did it mean to say that Aaron or Alena had prepared those meals for me, when the ingredients were grown and picked and packaged and transported by others in a system of great majesty and murderous stupidity? Realizing my selfishness just led to more selfishness; that is, I felt lonely, felt sorry for myself, despite the fact that I was so often cooked for, because, as I stood there in my little kitchen stirring vegetables, stood there at the age of thirty-three, I was crushed to realize nobody depended on me for this fundamental mode of care, of nurturing, nourishing. “Don’t leave me,” Nina Simone begged in French, and, for the first time I could remember – whether or not the desire was a non sequitur – I wanted a child, wanted one badly.
Lorentzen doesn’t talk about Rooney’s supply chain sublime as allusion, perhaps because to him it seems that Rooney misses the ironic humour that Lerner achieves. There’s something elegant in the way he (Lerner) lurches, much as his novel itself does, from contemplating whether or not wrong life can be lived rightly to embracing reproductive futurity. He has some kids, feels a bit better, the story is continued, in deliberate counterpoint to the finished, barren commodity. Rooney’s novel does the same thing, plot-wise, but the email establishes the stakes with what Lorentzen would probably say is a less compelling version of self-consciousness. Alice’s pose here is, indeed, a bit “cringe”.
But I think we’re meant to catch the allusion in Rooney’s email. We’re meant to see Alice thinking through the terms set by contemporary fiction in its recent trends of moving away from characters and plot towards meditation, and in particular, here, towards a key question of Lerner’s. How could the novel possibly be an adequate form for considering the modern supply chain? We might, like Lorentzen, cringe at the way she stages the problem. Uncharitably, you could say it’s not a particularly interesting regurgitation of Lerner’s point. The email has even less dramatic tension than a man panic-buying before a storm.
The big trend for highly-regarded fiction in the last decade, whatever you want to call it—autofiction, post-Sebaldian reverie—The contemporary cuskesque—posed, I think, a challenge to ‘realism’ whether classic, or hysterical. The world-system of contemporary capitalism has, these novels suggest, become too big, too unwieldy and absurd to dramatize artfully through a manageable number of personal relationships. But the system can be thought about by a character who knows this fact. Why not dramatize that thinking, and cut out what otherwise might make your novel seem forced, or zany? There’s not many ways to connect the kinds of people most western writers know well enough to imagine to garment workers in Bangladesh, apart from having a character thoughtful enough to acknowledge this invisible connection.
This work of connection (only connect) is not what many of these novels say they are about—they’re mostly about the possibility of making art. But that’s the point: how do you make art when you can’t grasp or depict some socially shared reality from a personally interesting standpoint? I think the attraction of the form of autofiction is precisely the possibility of being able to grasp something real. If you get it right, authorial self-consciousness can both contain reference to the world system, via essayistic digression, and still dramatize it, still make it interestingly personal. If you pull it off, you can locate a whole social world inside a person’s head.
I think that in her newest book’s telegraphic authorial digression, Rooney shows her novelist feeling challenged by this trend, to declare a dissatisfaction with the kind of novel she seems to value most, the classic, Victorian one, with its focus on personal relationships. But obviously, BWWAY itself doesn’t just become autofiction, even though Rooney is often discussed in these terms anyway. This is not Rooney echoing Lerner, but Rooney putting the challenge to the mode of realism she seems to feel attached to that Lerner (or Sheila Heti, or whoever) represents into her character’s mouth. It is, very pointedly, a defence of the novel form, and it uses these emails, cringey as they might be, to make the case for it, for reading these various meditations and wiki-info dumps novelistically.
What do I mean by novelistically? Well, for now I mean what I think Rooney means, a way of exploring the tension between a character’s inner life and the outer world of systems – of impersonal forces, of capitalism – by setting these two forces against each other.
Let me put it another way. If, in Howards End, the British class system and property itself are set up by the plot as an antagonist of love, in BWWAY capitalism is set up as an antagonist, not because of the plot, but simply by dint of these emails. They reflect the increasing self-consciousness of recent fiction but also the conditions demanding this self-consciousness—capitalism.
You don’t need plot to think about capitalism, according to Rooney, indeed plot might not do justice to Capital’s now having subsumed all of life; but she doesn’t want to abandon the old ways. The novel is about identification with the romance plot in particular, with romance itself, through character. There is a sort of formal drama here, where the big themes the novel throws out threaten to dwarf the significance of the relationships. The outer life, as Helen Schlegel puts it, is one where “telegrams and anger”, justified anger at climate collapse, hyperexploitation etc, just seem so much more important than whether two people who have sex occasionally will admit that they in fact care about each other. The telegrams (emails), threaten to reveal themselves as the real life. As Alice herself puts it:
To confront the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful. Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel’s protagonists, when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species? Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter?
Over the course of the novel, such points might tire some readers who can’t bear too much undigested reality, but we can be a little more generous to the emails as a device. For one thing, we can see them as quite obviously distorted by the plays of desire that occur in the other chapters. We aren’t meant to read these emails cold, as essayistic author inserts that impress us with their insight into our modern predicament— nor simply as proof that Rooney has thought about the endless thinkpieces that have criticised her previous work—but as thoughts bent out of shape, slightly, by the various romantic ups and downs occurring in the other strand of the novel.
Eileen responds to Alice’s doubts quoted above with quite an uplifting defence of personal relations as the core of what matters. “After all, when people are lying on their deathbeds, don’t they always start talking about their spouses and children?” And we know, in part, that her defence of novelistic empathy as emblematic of the way we actually live our lives, worrying about those we love, is shaped by the fact that she has just had sex with Simon, the Ross to her Rachel. Likewise, we know that Alice’s burnout with regard to the novel is also her burnout from life more generally, or that when Eileen is unsympathetic to some of Alice’s intellectual flights, it might be because of real, interpersonal tensions. Reading these tensions back into the emails themselves becomes one of the pleasures of the book.
The novel refuses to subordinate personal relations to its own abstract idea of the impossibility of justice, which is figured, I think, by the supply chain. To that end, Rooney offers up the ultimate symbol, in Christianity, of an abstract idea fundamentally founded on and embodied in the personal. In Eileen’s rather touching recounting of her trying to understand Simon, for example, we see the case being made for empathy, even though she finds his religion sort of abstract and impersonal. Then Alice interposes:
I am fascinated and touched by the ‘personality’ of Jesus, in rather a sentimental, arguably even maudlin way. Everything about the way he lived moves me. On the one hand, I feel toward him a kind of personal attraction and closeness that is most reminiscent of my feeling for certain beloved fictional characters – which makes sense, considering that I’ve encountered him through exactly the same means, i.e. by reading about him in books.
She differentiates this personality from Myshkin etc., but this comes close to the point of the book: that personal relationships are the substance of the world, not simply one thing among many but a symbol of the best possibilities of relations in general. If you can love your on-again off-again sex partner, you might just be able to love your neighbour. Jesus is both the abstract idea of justice and the personal. He is the one, I think the novel argues, because he is the other. Only by being human, which for Rooney seems to mean embracing romance, can we feel the need for justice etc. As for the supply chain, what better way for a novelist to grasp that then to have sex with a warehouse worker?
I think there is a real formal complexity at work in this novel as it tries to defend its own romance plot, its own interest in personal relations. What I do think it’s worth saying, though, is Rooney is really very serious indeed about fiction and not about the performance of being a good person, or meritocracy, or the various structural critiques that tend to be made of her as if she was emblematic of some kind of millennial unseriousness. The most interesting things in her novels are structural critiques of the novel, as in a testing of its limits. I found it impressive to see the lengths to which she goes to defend personal relations without sloppiness.
I think here is the point to say that I don’t think this is successful, artistically, for reasons that I might elaborate later, reasons that have to do with the difference between pity and mercy in fiction. I do not think this novel is a great novel. Where I think she fails, is ultimately, her unwillingness to show the system overcoming her characters. In Alice’s first email, she imagines her life as a TV show, “and every day people died making the show, were ground to death in the most horrific ways”, but Rooney is too concerned, I think, to spare her own characters from the grinder.