Narratives are all the rage; very few people make claims. Social scripts, how one behaves under specific conditions, not how one ought to behave in a moral sense, but how one does behave in an individual free environment carry the day. Narratives. For example, if my boss says I need this done on Thursday, I, a worker, will rarely reply “I’d prefer not to.” There may be a question and answer session, or niggling over details but the dialogue so written in our social world is such: yes sir/ma’am, right away.
A story: a man (not me) meets another man at a bar (also not me). Man 1, let’s call him Alex, offers to buy Man 2 (Damian) a drink. Damian obliges; Alex pays. One common turn is to debt; Damian now owes Alex conversation. Alex may feel the opposite, perhaps Damian owes him nothing, but Damian offers small talk and Alex regrets the purchase. There’s a chance Damian says thanks and runs off, Alex left showering in the cold loneliness of money spent on rejection. We once called these scripts, if they presented in culturally specific ways, “customs” though that word, tainted by the Orientalizing impulse of some social and hard sciences left cultural discourse with mere husks of argumentation, so called narratives of why things exist as such, to divert speakers from claim staking. A tragedy.
The English understand wool is a claim. The English Understand Wool is a narrative.
Helen DeWitt’s novella follows Marguerite, a young girl writing a memoir about kidnappers masquerading as her parents. She has a seven-figure book deal and an editor named Bethany. What could be a thriller turns into a novel of manners and customs. Opening on Margureitte’s lugubrious prose, “backstory” as Bethany calls it, sets the tone for irony between DeWitt and her readers. The people on the page may look refined, but they’re all so boring.
The novella operates in some ways like her most famous work The Last Samurai, which similarly follows a precocious child trying to navigate an increasingly bizarre adult world. Yet, while the “trauma” of Ludo in Samurai exists in the negative space of Sybilla’s concerns for his future, Marguerite’s lack of “trauma” is the central concern for the editor, Bethany, who can’t seem to get this teenager to write an interesting sentence. Bethany’s gentle editorial notes point to the aesthetic range she wants Marguerite limited by; Bethany wants trauma porn, while Marguerite can offer brief anecdotes about social mores in Marrakesh.
It is at Bethany’s insistence the humor of Marguerite’s boundaries are illuminated, the young girl can only write about why the Irish understand linen because her pretentions lie there. The supposed drama of her parents’ kidnapping and deception is just that, only theoretical. After all, Marguerite now possesses vast knowledge of the world, knowledge she would lack without her kidnappers. Bethany finds this all preposterous, but because the publishers have invested such large sums into Marguerite, her priorities become recouping some investment from this child.
The novella is one of how to behave amongst delicate things, but the social landscape is not one of tea rooms and social faux pas. DeWitt’s terms of engagement reflect the opposed desires of taste and profit-making. In Gawker (rip), Jared Marcel Pollen places these oppositions in the context of the larger literary landscape and DeWitt’s own experiences publishing with a commercial press. Thankfully, Pollen doesn’t linger too long on a biographical reading of this work yet I disagree with the suggestion that this novel plays with a “new version of an old struggle” between art and profit.
Pollen correctly identifies the attentions and concerns of mainstream publishers were different in the modernist period when Joyce never expected to make money from writing, but it is the material conditions of publishing where the largest change has taken place. The titillating trauma story that Marguerite withholds becomes a social faux pas because of the limits of publishers like Bethany’s employer, but being an editor at a large press is often a precarious job as suggested by the figures brought to light by the recent Harper’s Strike. The publisher is the obelisk watching Marguerite and Bethany; Bethany is a clerk at the service of the publisher’s whims, specifically the choice to give a young, unpublished woman a seven-figure advance. She is not blameless in their relationship nor is she the most sympathetic character, but the guilt of a publishing system that profits off bad art and refuses to pay workers doesn’t lay at the feet of people like Bethany. It is not immediately clear to me, either, that the power is in the hands of Bethany over Marguerite, (“art” may contain more power here than “profit”) for while it is true that Bethany is the decider over the publishing of the memoir, the investment in Marguerite ensures she has leeway to be unfulfilling in her obligations to the house.
When we discuss something as “systemic” or a “system” it often goes unremarked that the underlying apparatus of a system is self-sufficient. The velocity of profit motion in say the publishing industry is not dependent on individual actors like Bethany making decisions. Whether or not Bethany accepts Marguerite’s prose means nothing for the larger publishing house. Instead, the success of publishing under a capitalist regime remains entirely dependent on the ability to not make choices. The ability to let the system operate devoid of actors. The publishing world portrayed in DeWitt’s novella is one of pure free will; one can only make a true decision once there is only one option.
The knowledge at the base of the drama contained here comes to a head once Marguerite finds a way to outsmart Bethany, someone who doesn’t believe this child would break the rules of their game. Marguritte transgresses the normally acceptable social customs when she manipulates the publishing contract to her benefit. This act, a thing that could broadly be called “resistance” but is much closer to trickery, offers a glimpse into the tragic irony DeWitt offers us out of the bind of publishing. In a distinctly Liberal manipulation of rules rather than critique of underlying bases, Marguerite saves her story only insofar as she is allowed to tell it how she wishes, the irony being her concerns are not for the story itself but rather claims about taste.
And still, it is far more preferable to me that a writer be concerned with things like taste, class, and dignity than pleasing the clerk class or the various supposed rules of a legal relationship. An artist, like Marguerite, unconcerned with these things can achieve the hedonism and abandon necessary to make good art, but she lacks the third ingredient and one DeWitt has in bundles: talent.