Y/N | After Sappho
Esther Yi: Y/N — a novel. New York: Astra House, 2023.
Selby Wynn Schwartz: After sappho — A Novel. New York: Liverlight, 2023.
We readers of modern fiction have practically seen it all. There are stories in which the hero plots to murder someone who happens to be the reader of the story; or the heroes escape their fictive world while their "god" the writer is asleep; stories in which the heroes quest for forbidden knowledge (that they are characters in a fiction), the discovery of which either annihilates them or both them and the world.
But what happens when a celebrity reads a self-insert fanfic novel starring himself: what entails from such an erotic doubling?
Esther Yi's debut novel builds up to this surreal thought experiment. It did in fact make me laugh considerably a couple times. Y/N moves at a fast clip from the student parties in Berlin to an urban odyssey in Seoul, Korea. The heroine is recently obsessed by the Korean pop star Moon, an infatuation that eclipses her relationship and all other commitments. Her breakup letter morphs into a [Y/N], insert Your/Name fan fiction, which she sends to her ex anyway.
When Moon suddenly and inexplicably announces his retirement from music and public life, she struggles to cope with this unrequited love whose likelihood of consummation is "infinite in the negative." Her therapist says, "If you really loved him, you'd be in Seoul right now. You'd be walking the streets day and night for him. the magnitude of the task would crush you until you became a ball of pulp containing just your heart." Which is precisely what launches the back half of the novel.
Yi has drawn a slightly unhinged, amplified version of urban life in advanced global capitalism. The Kpop outfit Moon fronts uses atonal compositions and rapid rhythms while singing about death and sadness. Dialogue is extra incisive, like Masterson's observations about Moon fandom:
"We once turned to philosophy for an interpretation of God, for that which lies beyond our comprehension. But philosophy has relinquished its authority to data. Now we know too much, especially what people want and how to give it to them. Religion is no longer a site of interminable struggle with negativity. Religion, shorn of philosophy, is now a vending machine for manifestation and fulfillment. That's why there are as many lowercase gods in this secular, cynical era. Oblivious to the contradiction, we yearn for spiritual practices that will make us worthy of receiving permanent answers and solutions. A boyband like this" — Masterson waved the picture of Moon — "is one such god. Here we have data disguised as philosophy, information disguised as art. We no longer go to church once a week; we attend a stadium concert once a year."
Hey, he's not wrong. And the heroine isn't wrong to prefer the reams of amateur writing produced on fanfic and webnovel databases over the professional fare. "I preferred these stories to most contemporary novels, which mirrored the pieties of the day with absurd ardor."
In Seoul, she talks with an expat couple who are also Moon fans. "Moon's disappearance had been near fatal for the couple. They'd exchanged invectives of astonishing cruelty as they hung from each other's shoulders, unable to keep their balance. Without the gravitational force of Moon, the water making up their bodies had been thrown into chaos."
The pacing and plot conveyance get more sketchy at this point: chapters kind of just throw her from here to there. But we track Moon down to a kind of artistic workshop compound, full of rooms containing surreal tableux. One atelier belongs to an eccentric high school geography teacher named Mister Suguk.
Mister Suguk pointed at the map hanging over the chalkboard. It was a cartographical monstrosity: he'd sliced the world atlas into dozens of vertical strips and arranged them into a new order. The result was a spastic composite of blue and green. I could identify no country, no ocean. Gone were the patiently winding curves of a bay, artless blocks of land. Nothing sprawled. Sometimes a few slivers of green pieced themselves together across the strips with jerky fortitude, but they were inevitably cut short by blue.
"When one lives deeply, the world looks like this," Mister Suguk said. "...Your pen pals are proof that you are not just here."...
A pretty good picture of globalization and its compression of space. I objected that the heroine's first-person narration conveys her around a little too easily, as if she weren't thinking through her intentions and plans. But perhaps they aren't intelligible even to her. Multiple women in the story are willfully atomizing themselves, as if the pressures of massified culture and the domination of technology is driving people to aspire "to be one thing as intensely as possible," in the heroine's words.
Selby Wynn Schwartz is a comparative literature scholar by training who has published a historical study of drag culture. Her first novel After Sappho follows historical women in Italy and England who encounter the fragments of Sappho's verse, sending them on various paths and passions. This plays out in the context of the late 19th century in Italy, with legislation that stripped women of property, forced them into marriages after they were raped — a hideous policy war on women based on an alliance between new capitalists and old landlords.
Schwartz's book is in the third person, and its chapters are broken up into tiny vignettes with clear headings. In this fashion we read through a web of filaments connecting Sappho, Cassandra, Salome, Theocritus, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, together with Ibsen's Doll’s House, and a large cast of influential feminists, artists, activists at the turn of the century; romaine Brooks, Renee Vivien, Eva Palmer, Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Penelope sikellianos, Eileen Gray, and so on.
Behind the array of storylines is an intellectual tapestry taking up weaving and thread-spinning, the ancient femine productive practices, as well as the organized collectives of women, taking inspiration from the thiasoi of Sappho’s time.
With this sort of project, I worried that it would be the sort of new novel that Yi's protagonist talked about, the books that are "mind-numblingly easy to agree with. I preferred reading fans and dead people because they were hard to agree with."
It kind of was, to an extent, but it was also an enjoyable read. It's a woman-centered romp through the historical passage from Romanticism, symbolism, literary decadence, to Surrealism, the avant-garde, and high modernism in Europe.
The real picara of the narrative is Lina Poletti, who captures the imagination of the third-person narrator, who uses the legion "We" pronoun. Lina eludes the otherwise thorough historical presentation, and the "We" seems to be always chasing after her.
Although Lina was hardly a woman like any other. Striding around in her high buttoned boots, leaning her elbows on the balustrade while she smoked, writing of aviation and the euologies of Carducci: Lina, ineffably, was Lina.
Lina, in our opinion, was butch!
Cassandra is a powerful image as the woman in Aeschelus's play, whose absolute knowledge of what's going on is useless, since she is cursed to not be able to utter it.
Actually we should say that Cassandra screams outside of language. The scream is to gash the fabric of moral life, to rend it into strange tatters. Then it is open to prophecy. Then Cassandra lives in her own future.
So who is this "We?" Not exactly an eternal feminine taking the form of a traditional narrator. Maybe it's like a Greek Chorus. Schwartz is using "metafiction" devices from the 60s and 70s, where the paradoxical artifice of this narration forces us to ask who normally gets to articulate historical facts. This voice contests how men like Ibsen and Ovid have controlled the narrative of women’s experience, while also taking inspiration from their creations.
Nevertheless, this “Chorus” binds together a wide range of sources, and itself takes the form of an historical democratic spirit for women.
They cannot bury us under stones, they shall not entomb us in despair, our voices will live on even after our deaths. The chorus of us will never be silenced.
However, ideologically we are still in a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois frame of reference when it comes to women's emancipation. There isn’t a relationship to socialism or the Russian revoltuions of 1905 and 1917 raised here, nor their impact on Italy’s political tumult in 1919. There is a postmodernist indifference to historical “master narratives,” here, similar to Carmen Boullosa’s Book of Anna from a few years ago.
At certain turns the class line is made directly subordinate to the gender line, using appeals to bourgeois pacifism and humanism to paper over the issue.
For example, in Paris in 1917 the midinettes were striking, they were women working in the factories who anted a fair wage and safe conditions. Of course we supported them. But they were working in the very factories that produced uniforms for soldiers.
Schwartz has written an effective and compelling documentary novel about the struggles European women were forced to take up, but for the critic there's always the lingering conceptualization of class struggle. If it isn't misunderstood, it can be elided, as it is here.
In the same vein as the “domesticated” character to the experiments of the novels covered in the previous letter, After Sappho similarly has worked through the tangly narrative questions of the historiographic fiction from the last century. Schwartz takes up the question of who writes the text of history, but to make her material more accessible, not more obscure; she reinforces the rhetorical role of the “realistic” third person limited narration, rather than destabilize it.
Still, it seems to be a much more earnest combination of research and fiction-writing than another comp lit experimental novelist, viz. Vollmann.
Next: going back to an indulgent “postmodern” meganovel of the late seventies. But we may not be done with contmeporary English-language publishing once and for all...