The space between certainty and uncertainty
How do you write about people who left no traces?
Deborah Levy writes a lot about certainty, or lack thereof. I’m reading the third and latest installment in her “living autobiography”, Real Estate, which is loosely structured around her desire for a new and permanent home which is characterized by various very specific features, including an egg-shaped fireplace and a place to swim. It will feel lived-in and like a place for laughter. This home does not exist - it is “unreal estate” - but it is constantly in Levy’s thoughts. It is an unstable place - sometimes it has a pool, other times a pomegranate tree. It is uncertain.
In the book, Levy muses about women who have gone missing from history - whose stories have been lost or modified by the tellers so that they are smaller and less impressive. She wonders how to find these women, which is something I often wonder. And she also seems to suggest that perhaps we don’t need to, or we cannot, “find” them, but we might have to recreate them ourselves.
Lauren Groff does this in her most recent novel, Matrix. She tells the story of Marie de France, who was definitely a poet - she signed her work with the name “Marie de France” - but whose real identity is not known. She may have been Marie, the Abbess of Shaftesbury, or she may have been several other Maries who lived around the same time in the twelfth century in England and France. Groff creates a life and personhood for her which is rich and strong and fierce, but which is uncertain - it is a novel, after all. And so we have a possible Marie, who has been brought out of the shadows of history onto “Best of” book lists and into 21st century minds. Does it matter whether or not she has been “found” or “created”? Groff isn’t too concerned with telling the reader that the heroine of her book is a person called Marie de France. She is much more interested in conveying the story of a young woman who grew into great power in an unusual way, and the things she felt and did as she grew. It’s a very good story.
Stories are for the people they are about and also for the people who read them. Sometimes (often?), those two forces are at odds. This disconnect is directly addressed in Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead. In the novel, an actress playing a real-life heroine realizes in the course of filming the movie that the story the film is telling is wrong. She learns new things about the woman she is bringing to the screen, and knows that the story she is part of telling is not true. But she chooses not to reveal what she has learned, believing that the secret is better kept, and so the story of the great aviator she is playing is immortalised on screen as it was written by screenwriters in Hollywood decades after the real woman lived. So the story takes on a life of its own, separate from the woman whose life inspired it. Stories are not always true, but is that always bad?
I’m writing about a woman at the moment who was a student at the Slade School of Art in London in the 1890s. She definitely existed - she is listed on the student register. She even has a Wikipedia page, as many random Victorians do because the people who study them like to scatter proof of their existence as widely as possible. But I can’t find any of the art she made while a student or in the decades after, nor any letters or documents about her. Her name is Gwen Salmond. She left one tantalizing note at the bottom of her friend Ida’s letter to their mutual friend, a P.S. reading “Unlike Nettleship I, though improving, am coming to the conclusion I shall never draw. Whistler’s [academy] is worth living for.” That’s all I have. Everything else I know about Gwen is from her friends. She went on holidays with them, she was funny, her professor made her cry. Her friends recorded these things about her, and so she lives on through them.
In academic writing, you can’t just recreate someone so that their identity can reach new audiences. You can’t tell a story the way you wish it was, the way it should have been. I have a hard time with this, because I love to edit and embellish stories to make them more fun. But I also have a hard time with it because there are so many people like Gwen, or Marie de France, who have gone missing in history even though we know they were there. They are like shadows lurking between the kings and philosophers and bards who were so loud and so good at leaving a record of their lives, occasionally solidifying long enough for us to be certain that yes, they were really there, they really lived.
On Desert Island Discs recently, Levy said, 'Why not just write something you don't understand and see what happens, so that you write between understanding something and absolutely not?' I love this way of articulating the space that exists between certainty and uncertainty, or understanding and not understanding, which is different. There is so much between those two poles, and I think all these ways of understanding the way stories and people are lost and sometimes found again exist in that liminal space. I don’t accept that the stories we struggle to tell are not worthy of being told because of a lack of information. Most of those stories are about women, and even though it’s hard to know for sure what happened to them, it is also a distortion of the truth to pretend they did not exist. The narratives that we traditionally learn about the history of humanity are guided entirely by the physical traces of the past that we can still consult, which is obviously not a reflection of how anything actually happened - it is a reflection of what survived, and of who was able to leave traces of themselves in the first place.
And so I want to embrace the uncertainty of trying to find the missing story of Gwen. I want to center her existence in my research, even though to do so means drawing an outline of her through disjointed, fleeting mentions of her in other people’s lives. She was there, and her friends thought she was important, and so she was.
Some Other Things I’m Thinking About
Anne Helen Petersen on the fundamental difference between a game like Candy Crush and a game like Wordle (I love both of these games so this was honestly a little harsh to read but probably a good wake up call)
The White Pube’s latest podcast on Gabrielle de la Puente’s first anniversary of Long Covid. Such a vulnerable and horrible reflection on what it’s like to become disabled with a brand new disease that no one knows how to help you with
Haley Nahman on crying at small beautiful things, which she calls “art tears”
Season 2 of Cheer is so intense and, I think, significantly less fun to watch than season 1?
One austerity measure taken by the UK was the closing of all Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency offices, meaning in order to apply for a driver’s licence I have to MAIL the original copies of my passport and visa card to Wales and wait up to 8 months for them to be returned (r u kidding), because there is not a physical office for me to go to and simply show my documents. I HATE this.
Related to this, I hate the concept of passports and all modern notions of national borders and citizenship.
I made this at-home Chicken Shwarma recipe and it was delicious
I only recently discovered Haley Nahman... (a TRUE SHAME). I cannot tell you how many people I forward her emails to. Happy she is striking a chord around the globe. :)