For most of 2019 and some of 2020, I had more contact with visual artists than I have had before or since. I worked in a museum gift shop. Together we sold postcards of paintings of dogs, expensive impressionism-themed scarves, and sometime after my last shift, a transphobic mug. The crossover with the literary world was, it seemed to me, smaller than you would expect. The artists were better dressed. They liked cooler music. Their parties were less often punctured by sadness. The artists had widely varying amounts of interest in theory. One of them convinced me that Jack Vettriano was actually good
Another of them, a Brazilian artist, whom I once saw perform a surprisingly moving piece where he removed a balloon from his anus while dancing, was often to be found reading works of canonical or recent theory behind the till. I’m sure that if I wanted to, I could find a theoretical authority for the general structure of the balloon-performance. But in the context, it was mostly the disjunction from the other works, which seemed heavy-handedly full of meaning—a meaning that could be traced back to theoretical authorities—that made the balloon’s removal and subsequent inflation seem so commanding. It was self-sufficient.
But is this itself a theoretical statement? I’m sure we could more specifically tie the piece to an argument about ‘queer joy’, that we could move from the work’s aesthetic self-sufficiency, via the signifiers (balloon, dancing, rectum) to the history of queer aestheticism, to history of aesthetics itself as a critique of thinking that only considers the true and not the beautiful. We thus could make the work of art mean something in argumentative terms.
To me, that’s part of the problem with language. And with language arts (or literature, as I like to call them). It is the medium (arguably) that we have for argument, for proper thinking. It has less of the stubborn thinginess that the other arts permit. I am doing something when I write about the performance that can’t be done with the performance itself. I can reduce it to its mere meaning. The way it gestures beyond its own material.
I say problem, because I think writing has a specific, more difficult situation than the other arts, in which its harder to break out of the prison of theory and argument. And easier. This is the same problem.
The two prongs of this particular problem, which I think is the hardest one a competent writer who has any intellectual ambition confronts, are mere failed argument, and overly successful argument. On the one hand, the text can be a mess, and on the other hand everything, even its profusion of details for their own sake, can somehow appear to be theoretically determined. Something that can, in the end, be boiled down to argument. These problems are not unique to language. All art can fall on either side of this fork, but the fork is much narrower with words
I say this as a preamble to discussing how I felt recently, reading Helen Marten’s The Boiled in Between, because it is a novel by a fairly major visual artist—Marten won the 2016 Turner Prize—that seems to have significant theoretical investments and a huge attachment to materiality. It thus runs the two pronged risk—let’s call them reduction or rubble.
The Boiled in Between is about a relationship, or the loss of a relationship between two people, Ethan and Patrice. It is narrated by them and also by a kind of chorus, a collective voice called the Messrs. This is the formal address in the plural, a shortening that is a bit like the French Messieurs. But in the novel, it is also quite clearly intended as a pun on the word mess.
The pun is useful because this is a novel is full of mess, physical mess, emotional mess, and the independent ‘agency’ of mess itself. The chaotic point of view, the novel’s loose relationship to a conventional narrative is partly intended to draw out the messiness of life, the way it exists not in your head, but in a world in which everything is messily entangled. The Messrs say something a little like this in the novel’s prologue:
We are like a plastic hawk dangling from an olive tree, our movements tracing a shape to inform fullness, swaying through the blaze of sun.
The olive tree, grey and stoic with observation, is always there. And when in those glorious new days we are not the hawk—neither body nor air, but a silent streaming of temperature—we can see it all from a dissolving point of view. There is no code or sin, but translation.
This is the grand scramble, the boiled in between.
It’s nicely written stuff, with the same tactile attention to language that you get in the whole novel. An impulse to follow the syllable into a tangle that delights the tongue. This is sort of rare in contemporary fiction, but the novel arguably has more in common with a poem the likes of Lynn Hejinian’s My Life, than it does with Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (discussed briefly in another post). What it also has in common perhaps, with Hejinian, is that it has what seems to me like a theoretical project. This is a novel, not about those prefabricated concepts, characters, even though the characters suffer and continue, but about something else. In fact, I think it makes quite a big deal of its aboutness, advertising its purpose in the title. It is pointedly about ‘the grand scramble, the boiled in between’.
Boiled what? In between what?
Well, we might think of it as intimacy, the way that intimacies heat up the space between things. So the novel’s title is not Patrice and Ethan, but instead dwells on ‘relationality’ itself, and how this is present not just in this estranged husband and wife as they yell at each other, but in every aspect of how they interact with the world. To this end, every particular has its particularity and stubborn materiality emphasised. Patrice and Ethan dwell endlessly on food, detritus, the slosh of idle sexual fantasy. There are passages and passages of wonderful weighing up of food, body parts, environments. There’s hardly any conversation.
In its insistent materiality, it sometimes reminds me of your classic high modernist novels, Dalloway, Ulysses et al. But those books place their great gush of luminuous experience in tension with other forms of ordering life common to novels: marriage plots, wars, adventures, empire, social climbing, social falling. They seek new forms immanent to experience in order to transform the old ones that have become generic convention. This is not ‘critique’ anymore than what cuckoos do is. It’s experienced not as this intellectual project, but as an achievement, a threading of thought through words that comes to seem more complex than the world itself.
The Boiled in Between, though it as tangly as any modernist text, has reduced itself to a much simpler, or more boiled down entanglement than theirs, I feel. We are entangled in the infinite complexities of a relationship between two people. It is both messier than most modernist novels are, more material, and I think more theoretical.
It seems to me that the novel is the way it is partly because Marten believes there to be something redemptive about entanglement itself. There is a hint, or intimation, in this book, that to conceive of entanglement differently would be to see the world right, and to love it, and that this would be, if not politically redemptive, than consolatory, the achievement of a sort of bare mess, a disorder in which we delight and do not actively destroy the world. I’m not saying that the novel is written to exemplify some theoretical treatise on vibrant matter, but the matter is suspiciously vibrant.
Towards the end, there’s a kind of symbolic moment, where Patrice abandons an old pickle box that she and her husband Ethan had once “hammered silver pennies into… as though we were decorating a headstone with shining manic teeth’. I have no idea what a pickle box is, but the way that the object here becomes a series of relationships and figurations is very skilfully done. The object which is on the one hand a symbol of death is alive when looked at another way, and both of these are the result not of the box but an entanglement of relationships with the box. As the box is metonymic of the failed relationship itself there’s something doubly wonderfully self-involved going on.
Patrice then abandons the box and proceeds to have a slightly odd interaction with the earth next to it:
I poked my red finger down into the mud, feeling little resistance or any displaced weight of the great deciduous forests or vegetative existence that had surely once rooted there. I spat inside the hole, putting my mouth right up close to the ground so I could feel the cold water vapour rising brownish against my face. My spit might gradually raise the temperature of that tiny hole, just for a moment, whilst it was absorbed and nudged away through silt.
A different but related kind of messy entanglement replaces the abandoned object. The temporary mingling of body and earth is both a little absurd, and also quite effective in portraying a wider arc of intimacy. The word ‘temperature’ here seems to me to hark back to that temperature in the chunk of the prologue quoted above. It is a state reflective of agitation caused by interaction. There’s some boiling going on. That’s what vapour is, after all. And what is boiled is the space in between person and person, and between person and world. The love story between Ethan and Patrice, its failure, blends into the general condition of relationality itself. As Patrice abandons the pickle-box (again what is a pickle-box?), she thinks:
Something of our mutual speech was held tight to that pickle box and resting it silent on the grass we would finally take leave of one another in many double reverberations of material: all their peculiar weights and volume and density embedded over and again all rich and slippery but left out to decay for good.
I could leave everything just as I decided: my final handoff of aged wood and scents in this landscape as blue and green as any other. I could smoke a cigarette and drop the broken matches on the ground, feeling the conjunction of their own selves as slivers of wood once part of these trees and their roots deep down in mineral volumes. I would leave everything to water and land, to sparrows and starlings with their clever eyes. Everything entirely of body or soon to be body in all its useless delinquency, all of it folding in countless luminous signs, this way and that…
This is beautiful, and performs a kind of elegy for the relationship in the book, as it collapses into the condition of relation in a decaying material world. Everything is meamingful, all of it is related to us, and the relationship between Patrice and Ethan takes on its significance in that context.
But this universal meaningfulness, these endlessly luminous particulars, seemed to me at times to be profoundly unsatisfying, aesthetically. When matter is always materiality, what makes anything matter in particular?
This dissatisfaction also seemed to me to be partly a problem in the style. Everything in the book is rich and strange, and that can seem somehow to be itself too much of a point. The writing is not specific to the objects it describes, but is rather so intent on making the language shine out that one sometimes doesn’t see anything. In the end, for my money, it is hard to read the book as itself and not as an embodiment of the theory of itself.
I don’t know if that’s clear. I mean that rather than unify the theoretical generality and the particular together in some complex of images, there’s a kind of constant and general collapse of the one into the other. All of the book’s rubble can be reduced to an argument about rubble.
But then again, perhaps this reading I’m offering is just part of what made often made it hard for me to deal with contemporary visual art when I tagged along with my colleagues to their viewings and parties. Lacking the kinds of concepts one has pre-established, like character, plot, or say, portrait, I would want to read a work of art’s rubble and be disappointed by the generalization I reduced it to. Somehow, I felt I needed some meaning, some argument, for the particulars of the work of art to work against as I experienced them. In that sense, the problem I have with Marten’s novel is a fictional one. If I abandoned my own investments in the argument making power of words, perhaps I wouldn’t see it emerging from surprising places, swelling like a balloon. Instead, I might see the swell of things themselves.