Ottessa Moshfegh and the Specter of Death
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard notably referred to the September 11th terrorist attacks as the “absolute event,” implying, in part, that this is when the 21st century truly began. Others have made similar arguments. And saying so makes sense, in a perverse sort of way: September 11th begat the War on Terror, which begat anger at President George W. Bush and his administration, and so on. September 11th haunts American cultural life. After all, we’re reminded of it every time we go into an airport. But we should remember that 21st-century life, which has indeed been bizarre, was preceded by 20th-century life. The 20th century was no less bizarre.
Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which was released in July, is set in 2000 but doesn’t stay in 2000. We know what’s coming. What struck me while reading it was how the country hasn’t changed much. Moshfegh demonstrates how many Americans have warped senses of beauty — the lead character, envied by many, has supermodel looks but a tragic past and a lackadaisical, detached approach to life — and with no sense of anything transcendent. It’s clear that, for Moshfegh, the average American is asleep.
So it makes sense that the lead character has decided to withdraw from the world to sleep. She’s mainly doing what everyone else is already doing.
On the surface, the idea sounds appealing: staying at home, getting some rest, spending your waking moments watching movies and scarfing down snack foods. But what the lead character really wants is to exit her humanity. She no longer wants to feel. And so she takes a cocktail of medications prescribed by a quack psychiatrist named Dr. Tuttle (a nod to how overly-medicated Americans have become) and hopes she can spend a year in a quasi-coma, emerging at the end, butterfly-like, as a totally new person.
Can we flee from our humanity? The answer, of course, is no, but human beings have attempted to for a long, long time. It’s why Blaise Pascal, a 17th-century French thinker, spoke of “distractions.” None of us is comfortable with our condition. Modern life, especially as it has been lived in the late 20th and the ongoing 21st centuries, has given us the illusion that we can escape our humanity. There are drugs we can take to blot out bad feelings. Technologies let us leave the real world and live almost permanently in a virtual one. People today can wake up, go to their laptops or their tablets, and receive sexual gratification. They can learn. They can have conversations without sitting in front of a living, breathing person. They can pretend to be the people they’ve always wanted to be.
But such a life is also boring. Life today, just as it did at the end of the 20th century, encourages mediocrity. It wants to indulge our most base and most carnal pleasures. Buy this. Have sex with her or him. Gossip about Celebrity A. Read a boring self-help book. There is nothing beyond the material — or that’s what we’re told, at least.
So there’s something else about the lead character’s project: a search for transcendence. Art, for the character, won’t provide it, especially since, at one point, she observes that the art world, which cares nothing for the sacred, is not much different than the stock market; both reflect “political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine.”
Also, the lead character often views her friend Reva with a sort of disgust. Reva is held up as an avatar of all that is wrong with American culture today. She loves fashion — which, by definition, has no lasting value — and devours self-help aphorisms. She is obsessed with looking thin. She cakes on makeup and perfume and says she wants nothing more than to fit in with Manhattan’s elites. So, in some ways, we can view the lead character’s sleep project as a monk-like rejection of materialism. She speaks about her journey, as mentioned, as something that will lead to a new appreciation — a new vision — of life.
She speaks often of avoiding the abyss, and, in fact, says she can see it in a dream and tries to pull away from it. One of the medications she takes puts her in a stupor, and she manages to blackout for nearly six months. After blacking out, she notices things she had ignored before. Her negative emotions are gone. She is now “soft and calm,” and she can feel things. “Things were alive,” she observes during a walk in Central Park. “Life buzzed between each shade of green, from dark pines and supple ferns to lime green moss growing on a huge dry gray rock.” She sees “grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows.” She is more in-tune with the world around her, having disposed of most of her material possessions. She’s had a kind of conversion experience.
She also notes she can now move on from the death of her parents. The reader learns earlier that her mother was abusive and an alcoholic, and her father was distant. She attributes, indirectly, much of her coldness to the treatment she received from them.
Death is the unseen character in the novel. It haunts it like a specter. After all, the lead character isn’t the only one to suffer a loss. Reva’s mother dies, too, and it leads her to consider the reality of death, perhaps for the first time. The novel also presents multiple forms of death: the death of stability, the death of relationships, the death of careers. And the lead character’s sleep project, in a way, is a kind of death — and there were times where she was hoping it would lead to the end of her life.
Moshfegh, like other writers and philosophers, seems to suggest that moderns do what they do to avoid death. Part of finding peace — which, for Moshfegh, involves getting out of yourself and looking outward — is knowing and accepting that, at some point, you will die. Purchasing nice things or attempting to run in elite circles won’t change that, because all of it is fleeting.
The novel ends on a morning in early September in 2001, a morning that would later serve as Baudrillard’s absolute event, a morning that irrevocably shattered our illusions about prosperity and peace and material worth and reintroduced the culture as a whole to the reality of death.
It was a morning where all of us, at least for a time, were jolted awake.
