ARTS ILLUSTRATION JOHN GENDRON DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS TEXT CECILIA BARRON 13
he writer Sheila Heti loves Édouard Manet’s “Sprig of Asparagus,” the sequel to the modernist painter’s “Bundle of Asparagus.” She’s devoted space in two of her three books to the still life. In “Sprig,” the lone asparagus lies on the edge of a table like a limp cigarette. The head of the stalk bends up towards the heavens. Standing before this painting, Mira, the protagonist in Heti’s newest novel Pure Colour, realizes that “humans make art because we were made in God’s image—which doesn’t mean we look like God; it means we like doing the same thing that God likes.” Creation has been God’s hobby for millennia. But Mira, here, is not creating “Sprig.” She’s an observer of the creation. It is as a critic that she feels God’s awesome power. Pure Colour, Heti’s ambitious third novel, tells an alternative creation myth. It begins with the declaration that this world and all its history is only God’s first draft of creation. God, at the beginning of this draft, split up humanity into three types of critics: the bears, the fish, and the birds. The bird critiques from above, the fish “critiques from the middle,” and the bear approaches humanity from an even plane, with love and warmth. Operating within this framework, humanity works to revise and edit our current draft in hopes of producing a better one, farther down the line. Mira, the birdish protagonist, is an aspiring literary critic who struggles to justify art’s existence in a time just before cell phones. Comprised of aphoristic chapters, Pure Colour scales between the metaphysical
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
and the physical, the mystical and the real. Mira is the glue which binds these pages into coherence. Halfway through the book, though, Mira’s father dies, and her mythology collapses. Skipping decades to her death, it’s clear that by the end of Pure Colour her life is about enduring, not making. Mira “would not go into the world to critique or fix it.” Instead, she would live, and then she would die. The narrator of Pure Colour is not Mira, nor is it God. I won’t make the critical mistake of assuming it is Heti herself. The narrator instead acts as a middleman between this world and the one above, someone hovering between the creator and the created. One eye looks down onto mortal chaos and the other looks up to perfection. With her attunement to the process of creation and her understanding of public reception, Mira’s occupation as a critic leaves her in the same suspended state. Pure Colour, like Heti’s other works, could be considered “autofiction,” a subgenre that has only become popular in the last 15 years. In 2014, the critic Jonathan Sturgeon made the first brave attempt at a concrete definition. He argued that autofiction is a work where the artist’s oeuvre “is the soul.” These are books by writers about writers, hence the auto that mocks the genre’s bend towards biography. But, beyond this, autofiction books are books “about their own writing,” as critic Christian Lorentzen puts it. Mira is at once studying criticism and critiquing the world; she is learning about the lives of artists as she contemplates her own artistic life. Autofiction presents itself to the reader with an acute self-consciousness. It blurs the line between author and text, between form and content, and eventually, between the reading subject and the autofiction object before her. Autofiction allows the tension held within Pure Colour’s narrative structure to explode upon the reader, throwing into question the fundamental form of the novel. These are books about their own writing, so they envelope the reader in the project of her own reading. If the text is suspended precariously between its ambivalence towards a concretized self and an insistence on this self, then the reader is suspended in this dialectic too. To literalize this phenomenon through a less textual medium, take Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Rooms.” The rooms, covered in mirrors and kaleidoscopic sculptures, create a tangible feeling of endlessness. At the same time, the parallel mirrors reflect the viewer infinitely, allowing them to see themselves as the work’s subject. One could imagine Mira stumbling into a Kusama exhibit, looking around for the project’s form. She would only find herself looking back at her, a thousand times over, critic after critic after critic.
What results from Pure Colour’s autofictiveness is a novel rife with muted dictates and maxims directed towards the omnipresent you: “You have love in you, but that part is extra-human, and that part is in the plants, and the animals, and the clouds, and the seas, and everything. What is lovable is not humans, but life.” But life is hard to love without first loving humans, and it is this problematic that traps Mira as she tries to critique a world infested with people. Pure Colour, like other autofiction that tends to focus on a writer in crisis, rejects the human while idolizing her. Mira, at one point, leaves her human form to inhabit a leaf with the soul of her father—whether you take this as metaphor or not, a devalorization of the human is implicit within this shift. Rachel Cusk, another famous autofictionist, wrote the Outline trilogy from the perspective of an academic/writerly figure going through a divorce, a biography similar to her own. The protagonist, though, is most notable in her mysteriousness—the novel is in the first person, but it is almost entirely about other people. These authors, though, only glorify a life beyond the self by using the traditional mechanism of character. What results is an even heavier emphasis on the individual, for it is
now both the thing to be overcome and the tool through which the overcoming can occur. Pure Colour and its contemporary acolytes in the new world of autofiction have thus doubled down on the self: the author’s, the character’s, and most importantly yours. +++ “Asparagus” does
