An Encounter with Maggie Nelson & Naomi Alderman
I didn’t want to write about Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, because it’s too obvious. Everyone loves this book, and what else could I possibly have to say? Like all astonishingly good books, The Argonauts feels like a long lost part of your heart, whispering truths you had forgotten into your ear. The experience is not just intimate, it’s internal, like a warm drink — both alien, and immediately assimilated into your body.
I read The Argonauts in a matter of days and when I got to the last page I lay in the bath until the water went cold, thinking about it. Well, not even thinking about it. Thinking about how much I want to re-read it, immediately, to soak up everything I missed. Thinking about how much there is about the daily experience of being a woman that is silent and silenced, willingly and unwillingly, so that it’s almost paralysing to read a book like The Argonauts and discover that someone else shares those experiences with you. Paralysing because now you realise how long you have spent (do spend, will carry on spending) silent and silenced, willing and unwilling, throwing half your life into shadow.
Apologies for the low-brow leap, but I had a somewhat similar feeling when I first started reading Mumsnet.com, while I was pregnant. A friend gave me two pieces of advice when I told her the news about the baby: 1. You’re going to have to start reading Mumsnet. 2. You’re going to have to start making friends with your child’s friends. Point 2 came much later. Point 1 was instant. The rage. Oh, the rage. Mumsnet is a parenting website that includes a busy forum for discussion about all aspects of life. It’s a good way to get hold of advice about dummies and cotbeds and sleep routines, from other people who are caught up in that same elastic moment of their child’s development. But it’s also filled with women who are overcome with rage. Rage at the amount of housework they do. Rage at the amount of childcare they do. Rage at the way their lives have turned out. I have never seen a public forum like it. The rage of women. All of us, trapped and angry.
Of course, Mumsnet is anonymous, so it’s publicness is also behind closed doors. The rage of the women on there is, no doubt, contained while they are at work, round the dinner table, on the long, lingering walks to and from school. But there it is nevertheless, throbbing in the veins like an electric pulse. Keeping something going. Or keeping something down.
Just before The Argonauts I read The Power by Naomi Alderman. The Power is a novel: a thriller. When I bought it, the woman behind the till gave me a knowing smile. This is a good sign, I thought. And when I started to read it, I loved it. The titular power is the power to electrocute, which women discover they can generate in their bodies. Women become the stronger sex, and the story charts the transformation of society from a patriarchy to a matriarchy. Here, the matriarchy is in fact the patriarchy, but in women’s hands. Power corrupts, and physical power corrupts predictably, it seems.
I don’t think I’d ever considered how it feels to be physically stronger than other people. I know, of course, how it feels to be physically weaker. The knowledge is deep and internal, manifest not just in my body but in everything I (don’t) do with it. Don’t walk home alone. Don’t sit in an empty carriage. Don’t travel to a new city at night. “I’m one of those idiots who walks around at night on their own,” said a poster on Mumsnet recently, in a discussion of things you are afraid of. She was actually phobic of clowns, but shared her night-time wanderings to demonstrate how reckless she could be in other areas of her life.
If I’m honest, that last paragraph is a lie. When my son was born I knew what it was like to be physically stronger than another human being, to be able to crush his tiny bones just by gripping too hard. I had monstrous, waking nightmares where I could feel myself throwing his fragile skull to the hard floor. I despised myself, of course. I still do. I blinked away the visions and tensed the muscles in my jaw. I policed the rest of my body into stillness, softness, silence.
Was I responding to a natural feeling of power? A feeling so unnatural to me that it really did make me crazy? Or did I know that the power of a parent is an awful one — a monstrous responsibility, which only my imagination could explore? I was quietly disappointed that the women in The Power don’t remake the world in a kinder, more collaborative way, even though I know there is nothing innately kind in me, and believe there is nothing innately womanly in any of us. I am troubled by this — by my disappointment. I am conflicted. So much of my identity is about refusing power. Is this a positive choice or just a way of rationalising what I can’t have? Am I really standing up to patriarchy, or just obeying orders to know my place?
When I talk about having a baby I often say, “it was like I died.” And then I apologise for being over-dramatic. But I am not exaggerating. Those are the only words I have found for the complete disintegration that took place. Not because I had a baby, exactly, but because that experience was the process by which I realised that my sense of self was cultured in the petri dish of patriarchal power and expectation, and that I was never going to be allowed to go through with the experiment. I would always be part of the control group, instead; the group that measures the success of the Thing.
The control group is a form of absence, a form of lack. It is another way of saying No Thing. Nothing. I had long hated being a woman but here I was, large and lumbering and holding a baby; publically, iredeemably, No Thing. Fuck. And I was a misogynist to boot. Everything I had internalised about my lack of power, my risk of sexual assault, my need to work twice as hard to get half as much done, was not just the effect of misogyny but also the way the virus kept itself alive. I fell apart. I kept on falling. And all this falling is certainly not part of the Thing. All this falling is silent and silenced, willing and unwilling, throwing half my life into shadow.
And then I read Nelson’s fragmentary memoir about change and the human condition, and felt warm liquid running through my veins, calling me to life as if I was actually here or there, after all. While I was reading The Power I looked up every so often and forgot, for a split second, that I was not a powerful human being. The list of chores to be done or bodies to be tended would pierce my thoughts with a sharp, sour pop. But while I was reading The Argonauts, I felt something completely different. I felt like I could touch the meanings of the words, that I could feel them on the back of my neck like goose pimples. Like goose pimples, just the memory of the words is enough to provoke the feeling.
The Argonauts is named from the ship in the famous thought experiment: if parts of a boat are replaced over time until every bit of it has changed, is it still the same vessel? Does there come a time when it is something new? Is there a better name for the new ship than The Argonaut? Is it the name that holds it together?
I felt like my body, which I have hated for as long as I remember, had been recognised. Has been recognised. The feeling persists. I am re-reading The Argonauts. If you haven’t read this book yet, read it now. If you hate people telling you which books to read, do it anyway. It is a book about being and not being, life and death, multiplicity and irresolution. It is about being alive, privately and silently and collectively and in the midst of all impossiblities. Nelson wanders through what it feels like to fall apart, to feel yourself coming to pieces, and to sense a self in the process of dissolution — not despite, but with. Something both alien and internal.
It is a familiar feeling, isn’t it? Perhaps, like me, you could never find the right words to describe it, to report it in the terms of the Thing. Perhaps, like me, you didn’t know that words don’t have to hold everything together. Perhaps, like me, you didn’t know that sometimes words just kiss the edges of something familiar, like a long-lost part of your heart kissing the back of your neck, giving you goose pimples, making you ecstatic with the power of not having to know what any of this means.
