Catherine Lacey's Imaginary Countries
I have just finished Catherine Lacey's Biography of X (is there a “The” in the title or not?) and am writing from the limbo of not knowing what to reach for next. This novel surprised me in a way I unknowingly longed to be surprised.
It is an account of composing a biography of an artist who never existed by her widow. My modest initial expectation -- sparked by a photo glimpsed on the author's Wikipedia page, of her alongside Siri Hustvedt -- was that the story would play with some of the same ideas as The Blazing World. Sure enough, Lacey's descriptions of X’s nonexistent art projects and unwritten books did not disappoint. But for the entirety of the book my imagination was captivated by its first third and hoping (against hope because the narrator makes it clear we won't return) that the story will wind back to the uncanny Southern Territory and the stories of people shaped by its decades of theocracy, censorship, and isolation.
Writing after the fall of that state, the narrator reflects on its origins:
On Thanksgiving Day 1945, twenty-two million America citizens woke up to news that they were no longer living in America--a wall had been erected between much of the Deep South and the rest of the country by an insurgent theocratic government that now controlled the newly anointed Southern Territory.
It may seem like such a retelling of fairly recent historical events is geared toward the external audience, those who have never lived in the world of the artist X and for whom the fourth wall otherwise is not broken. Yet the cultural gulfs between the three states into which the US has split make the Southern Territory an enigma to its neighbors. As the narrator travels between real homes of her interviewees and the pieces of the Potemkin village put up for tourists’ sake, this framing of the trip with an encyclopedia-like entry seems to be also for her own benefit: an attempt to make sense of a place radically different from what she knows -- a place that has shaped people in ways she struggles to grasp.
To me, the most evocative among the biographer’s interviewees’ stories is that of Bree Morton, a woman who renamed herself:
she'd been given a different name at birth--Mary Magdalene Morton--but had participated in a 1997 program that allowed certain FST citizens to legally rename themselves. Bree was born in 1947, just after a law had passed requiring all Southern Territory children to be given biblical names. The traditional, ordinary names were popular at first, but eventually children were christened as Psalm, Leviticus, and Galilee, and later the names got stranger--Resurrection, Crucifix, TheBlood.
This brief story about a law, its larger effects, and the individual act of renaming affords the reader a glimpse into a complex “what if” scenario in which familiar decisions have a menacing aspect and unfamiliar consequences.
The interview with Bree is interrupted:
In the middle of the interview, one of Bree's brothers came into the room to say he wanted a sandwich. Bree went to the kitchen to prepare it, and when she returned she resumed her story as if no time had passed.
As if in a fairy tale, the other brother interrupts the interview as well, also asking to be fed. But it’s not a fairy tale, and so Bree does not gain anything by offering the brothers food. The menacing incursions, the biographer learns later, do have serious consequences.
While I stumbled upon a review that dismissed her Southern Territory as reminiscent of Atwood’s Gilead, I find the dismissal unfair. Both of these imaginary countries allow the reader to think through historical precedents and new utopias that rest on the wish that if only everyone could be coaxed into professing the same thing, we would have harmony and happiness. Theoretical heavens carry within them counterpart hells, obscured unless we try to imagine actually living in the proposed blueprint. Populating imaginary countries with people to whom things happen is a way to get the gears in motion, pull on levers of ideas, and get the ideological picture out of its visionary inertia. Some of the original elements of the vision will be revealed as props, some as deadly machinery. There will also be the building blocks of everyday lives, though not always readily relatable to the reader:
When we analyze the Southern Territory from afar, we don't stop to think that in the middle of this black hole--in this bleak, dark country where millions were imprisoned, tortured, killed--there were also children walking in the dark, hand in hand, intensely in love. They spoke of their families, their classmates, the church, Bible passages, the books they'd read in Gregory Charleston's library, and whether it was okay to read those books, and whether the feelings they had for each other were godly or ungodly.
I remain amazed by that first third of Biography of X. To my mind, it's a part of the novel that doesn't need X, though it needs the widow-biographer and her journalistic sensibility as the reader’s guide. I'm a little wary here that I am writing about what Elena Ferrante has theorized as “the third book” -- not the one the writer understands to be her work nor the actual words on the page, but the book in the reader's mind, informed by the reader's imagination, expectations, understanding, and misreading.
Although the Southern Territory is not the only imaginary country in the novel -- what we know as the United States is divided also into the Northern and Western Territories -- it is the most dangerous one. It is the forbidden place to which we shouldn't or can't but want to travel in search of deeper truths or insights into what Jung called “the shadow” -- a dispossessed part of our self. There is another scale of the shadow, a national and cultural one, at play when it comes to the creation of imaginary countries. We put in them that which we suspect about our immediate surroundings but cannot fully see or name, disowned truths.
The wall around the Southern Territory reminded me of several different walls, both real and literary: the Berlin Wall, the border between North and South Korea, the wall of Donald Trump's monologues where it figures as an object of desire, a naively simple and supposedly perfect solution that for four years kept reminding me of the wall in George R. R. Martin’s Westeros where it made more sense. The wall, however cleverly built, keeps the outside away but encloses that which is inside it in a tightening grip.
In China Mieville’s The City and the City, the wall is not a physical barrier but a taboo of perception: two cities paradoxically occupy the same space, but can only do so if the reality of the other city is being forcefully unseen, renounced by those who look from the other city and glimpse the alternative. Biography of X reminded me of all of the above because the alternative America of the book read to me like an alchemical attempt to distill something elemental about American culture -- to separate for closer examination the incongruous, often quietly warring but fused parts of the country.
Although the story did not revisit the Southern Territory, I happily read on and enjoyed the book as it was written (or so I think because the “third book” is perhaps inescapable), and now I keep thinking about the unwritten book whose kernel is that first third of Biography of X.
PS: My copy of Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia is currently in a box. Once I unpack it and put it back in its proper place on the shelf, I will try to add a footnote about her concept of “the third book.” It probably deserves a post of its own. I hope someone's written it already.