ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
12.2
12.2
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Christine Light
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My difficulty is that I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.
—Virginia Woolf, letter to Ethel Smyth, 28 August 1930 There are certain experiences (from the self-fragmenting poles of ecstasy on one end to trauma on the other) we cannot begin to approximate through linearly narrative exposition. It is unsurprising, then, that writers of trauma would reach, perhaps must reach, instead for lyric strategies to trouble the segmented realities of their lives post-rupture. While linear narration would coerce a writer’s experience into reported cause-and-effect, invalidating the dissociated self, trauma writing requires other logics. Here I frame parataxis—from the Greek for arrangement beside—as a primary strategy writers of trauma employ (in conjunction with supporting strategies of assemblage via montage and segmented essay; recursion; and the use of white space on the page). These strategies work in tandem to preserve the writer’s agency among multiple self-states without subordinating one to another or forcing a single “reasonable” voice or pattern for sense-making.
These strategies reach toward self-constitution and coherence that coexist with segmented states; they expand into and exist within space on the page, mimicking a reclaiming of consent for both writer and reader. These strategies are not decorative. They mark ethical technologies that allow breaking-and-cohering on the writer’s terms, operating both on the mimetic level—mirroring how trauma occupies the psyche—and on the conductive level, mediating an experience of meaning for writer and reader without necessarily generating overwhelm. I track these strategies across three nonfiction texts that center trauma largely related to loss and grief: Here After by Amy Lin, Bluets by Maggie Nelson, and Dyscalculia by Camonghne Felix, highlighting the ways writers of trauma reach for parataxis to simultaneously break and cohere and thus to gift readers permission to do the same. I selected texts mostly composed of large prose blocks for this study; I find that on my own journey toward permission to break, sizable segments have offered a more digestible way-in than smaller pieces (say, with lines of a poem). As Felix offered in an interview with Little Village, “…prose blocks offer…the ability to experience restraint, experience the author’s restraint…the ability to take some space to breathe.” I use the term “trauma” throughout this essay in a way that is consistent with this description from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA): “Individual trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being” (7-8). While Lin’s, Nelson’s, and Felix’s texts center not only around trauma but also around grief—related to the sudden loss of a spouse in Lin’s, related to heartbreak after the loss of a romantic partnership in Nelson’s, and related to childhood trauma, bipolar disorder, and heartbreak following a breakup in Felix’s—I am particularly focused on how writers tend to the dissociative rupture of trauma, versus to the unfolding process of grief. With Nelson’s Bluets, I do not claim that heartbreak is synonymous with trauma (though heartbreak can be traumatic when the loss is experienced as emotionally harmful and leaves lasting adverse effects). Rather, I track how lyric strategies can hold compound rupture—grief in response to romantic heartbreak braided with the proximity to and caretaking of severe bodily trauma—without forcing one experience to justify or take precedence over the other. Given that trauma can lead to a sense of overwhelm, difficulty concentrating, and sudden mood shifts, the person experiencing a traumatized state can feel confused and as though something in them is broken—the self can feel dissociated, like its pieces are not linking as they once have. Writers in this state or seeking to process or explore their own experiences of trauma are often without the inclination or ability to orient their experience in a linear narrative—i.e., through hypotaxis, which subordinates certain clauses or segments to others, creating a hierarchical structure among disparate segments. Writers of trauma may thus reach for parataxis, again allowing a mimesis of what is truer for the psychological state of trauma, wherein clauses or segments of thought and experience may exist side-by-side without clear subordination or causal relationships. In conveying their stories of trauma, Lin, Nelson, and Felix all write paratactically, arranging segments side by side without drawing linear links among them. Within the frame of parataxis, each writer’s strategies include the what—the contents of the textual segments (vignettes and fragments in various tones and registers)—and the how—the ways the segments are assembled such that they both maintain paratactic relationship and reach toward a new coherence. Lyric-essay craft scholar Heidi Czerwiec notes in her book Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord that the etymologies of segment and fragment carry different energies and implicate varying degrees of agency: Segment comes from the Latin secare, ‘to cut,’ while fragment is from fangere, ‘to break’—a distinction that quietly raises the question of whether the page’s separations feel surgical, violent, or consent-driven (Czerwiec 50). A fragment is an (often deliberately) incomplete utterance or section. Fragments follow a logic of rupture, appearing as broken elements of a largely invisible whole. In this essay I use the word segment overarchingly to encompass both fragments and vignettes, nodding primarily to the difference between jagged, broken pieces (fragments) and short scenes (vignettes); I consider segment to be the more surgically precise term that nods to each author’s stitching together of a book-length text. Vignettes, in that they are self-contained micro-scenes, tend to more linearly cohere. Each book I discuss here oscillates between dissociation (fragment) and provisional integration (vignette). While I do not go into greater depth around the use of fragments versus vignettes in the sections that follow, I do use each term, and, while they are close in definition, they are not interchangeable. Vignettes contribute to short-term, linear narrative coherence. This conducts for the writer and reader a space for traction and rest before moving back into a less structurally coherent fragmented field. This is especially helpful for the writer and reader who are seeking permission to break and thus are not yet accustomed to it—who find relief in occasional moments of narrative coherence. I also note in this discussion paratactic tonal and register shifts, which enact a cultivation of agency on the part of the writer. Paratactic shifts assert a claim to multiple states of self as valid and even as necessary for processing. A tonal shift might look like a quick swing (from one segment to the next) from despair to humor; a register shift might look like a move from deep introspection to referencing coolly the work of an early-20th-century philosopher. I assert that these paratactic shifts are both mimetic—mirroring the psyche of the writer of trauma—and conductive, offering both writer and reader an opening to a paratactic sense-making, to the coherence that lives between segments. While writing paratactically cultivates agency and validation of the segmented psyche of the trauma writer and potentially of the reader, and while much of the coherence among the segments occurs associatively, each writer chooses precisely how they pull the segments together in the literal physical text—how parataxis comes together on the page. Nelson said in an interview with The Creative Independent, “I’ve always been…interested in…what two covers do to seemingly raw expression” (Nelson, “Interview: Maggie Nelson”). Here Nelson nods to the marvel of placing aspects of the self (“seemingly raw expression”) into one space (between “two covers”) and watching coherence form without forced linearity. This said, the expression is only “seemingly raw;” it is at some point intentionally arranged on the page. Nelson, Lin, and Felix assemble their expressions—their fragments and vignettes—between covers via a craft strategy of montage that is arranged into lyric essay or memoir. It is important here to note the difference between montage and collage in craft terms. According to the Poetry Foundation, “collage in language-based work can now mean any composition that includes words, phrases, or sections of outside source material in juxtaposition.” Collage splices material from outside sources. Montage—from the film-editing technique of assembling separate pieces of thematically related material and placing them in a sequence—might reference outside sources (e.g., a quote from Wittgenstein in Bluets) but is architecturally internally sourced. Also, through the lens of construction, “collage” comes from the French coller (“to glue”), while “montage” comes from the French monter (“to mount” or “to assemble”). Notably, two of the three writers I study here—Lin and Nelson—have commented in interviews on their processes including an assemblage of their own text blocks. Lin, for instance, publicly discussed that her process in writing Here After was to pull together all the Substack posts she wrote in the time nearly directly after her late husband Kurtis’s unexpected death. Writing these posts was, at the time, part of Lin’s grieving “project” without there being a vision for assembling and further publishing any of what she wrote. Lin later distilled 110,000 words by mapping a small text box onto each page and snipping her prose until she “began to see this very bright bone of grief, the essential part of [her] experience” (Lin, “Design Matters”); in Here After she assembles these in numbered segments that are structurally fragmented but that associatively cohere in a montage we would call lyric memoir. Nelson, meanwhile, wrote the 240 numbered propositions of Bluets across a three-year window wherein she nursed heartbreak while also caring for a close friend who had undergone severe physical trauma. That doubleness is precisely why Bluets belongs in this study: The book’s paratactic method becomes a way to survive and think inside a life wherein heartbreak and trauma co-occupy the writer’s days, without reducing either to the other. Nelson shared with the Washington Square Review, “The hardest part isn’t editing later to accentuate those [segments], it’s letting oneself write out all the possibly unconnected but instinctually related stuff in the first place” (Nelson, “An Interview with Maggie Nelson”). Nelson nods here to the act of parataxis as praxis for living—for allowing ourselves to reach across forced coherence for a more instinctual kind of sense-making. Nelson asserts that the assemblage, the act of montage itself, is much less challenging than the act of allowing ourselves to exist as we are—of writing from there. Finally, Felix has publicly discussed her process in writing Dyscalculia as beginning to write sentences in lieu of verse and experiencing resonance: “Oh, there’s something happening here,” she recalled thinking, in an interview with Little Village Magazine. In the same conversation, Felix shared, “As I was writing the book there were places where that [philosophy] research would pop up for me or where it would make sense … mostly my brain identifying with that content, identifying with that language. It became part of my thinking as I was writing.” Where Lin and Nelson assembled their segments paratactically largely in the revision process, Felix consciously unfolded paratactically into the writing process itself, seeing associative leaps (what I refer to as paratactic tonal and register shifts, described further below) as they happened in real time on the page. As I review in a further section, Felix’s assembling logic was designed to more directly mirror and conduct the recursive spirals of the fractal, a “never-ending pattern” that “[reproduces] itself in perpetuity.” This structure holds in balance the seeming chaos and stability of a life and a universe wherein, as with writers of trauma, we continually both break and cohere. It follows, then, that Lin and Nelson—in their montage approaches of assemblage—might opt for the shared strategy of numbering segments as a way to further cohere their paratactic pieces, while Felix (who shared she was inspired by Bluets as she embarked with the intent of rigor upon writing her own lyric memoir) allows the fractal to contribute to crafting patterned coherence in her book. While I inquire further into the fractal later when discussing recursion, I will take a moment here to engage the cohesive function of numbering segments in writing trauma. When a montage or segmented essay is numbered—as in Bluets and Here After—segment-selection is still the material focus. Numbering shifts the reading physics. The eye tracks the series as a movement-toward, rather than as a heap. Montage and segmented essays are about what you paratactically juxtapose, while numbering the segments modulates parataxis by formalizing the gaps. Numbering converts blank space into counted silence, creating tempo and expectation, still without fully subordinating the parts. After Lin snipped her Substack pages into smaller pieces, she assembled these blocks of text into a montage of numbered segments that exists now as lyric essay or memoir. While numbered, the segments are typically not ordered linearly. They also resonate together not only as spatial montage but as temporal montage, as Kurtis shows up in the present tense directly alongside, and even within, scenes wherein we know—in the context of narrative linearity—he has passed. This has the effect of mirroring the writer’s experience, so that the reader understands that Lin’s husband’s presence for her is just as real as (if not more real than) his non-presence. This also conducts for the reader a similar experience of both a suspension of linearity (within that paratactic frame) and of momentum, via movement of the segments’ associated numbers ticking steadily upward. Though we do not know where the story is headed, in a narrative sense, we do know (and feel) that some measure of time or experience moves on, all the while. Lin’s numbered segments each start on a fresh page, claiming for herself (and thus for the reader) the chance to pause and breathe before continuing with each next beat. On the other hand, Nelson runs her 240 numbered segments (her propositions) forward one after the other on whatever page each one lands, with equivalent spacing between propositions carried throughout the book. This evokes an accretive effect. The segments are still paratactically oriented (not cohering through a subordinating logic or through linear sense-making), though they—by way of their continual movement and, again, upward-ticking propositional numbers—tumble upon one another toward an inevitable conclusion that the propositions together make sense as a coherent whole. Nelson points to this phenomenon in proposition 184: 184. Writing is, in fact, an astonishing equalizer. I could have written half of these propositions drunk or high, for instance, and half sober; I could have written half in agonized tears, and half in a state of clinical detachment. But now that they have been shuffled around countless times—now that they have been made to appear, at long last, running forward as one river—how could either of us tell the difference? (74) In Bluets, then, the numbered propositions propel the reader through the segmented essay as unequivocally as a river flows onward. Meanwhile, in Here After the numbered sections function more as deliberate steps forward, even when the text on the page is not narratively moving forward. Both mark valid orientations toward trauma. In Bluets, propositions motion toward a logic of fluid, accreted meaning, while in Here After, Lin’s numbers allow us to step a reliable cadence: one, two, three, four, and so on.
Nelson’s proposition 184 above also serves as an apt introduction to the varying tones and registers encountered within a work written through a strategy of parataxis. Again, given that extreme swings in emotion and awareness are common for those experiencing or processing trauma, it makes sense for a writer of trauma to incorporate these shifts in their work as a move to claim agency to exist in multiple self-states without having to subordinate one to another—without having to identify or perform a single reasonable narrative voice. While all three writers work considerably with paratactic tonal shifts, they work with register shifts to varying degrees (arguably Lin the least and Nelson the most), creating effects that resonate at varying distances from the central theme of the book. Lin and Felix largely include fragments and vignettes that offer personal experience and commentary, keeping their memoirs tighter to the experience of their traumas (all while their segments vary considerably in tone). Nelson’s registers span out to include, at length, philosophical and biological commentary in parataxis to personal reflections. There is thus a more expanded sense of montage within Bluets and a tighter-to-the-core collection of segments in Here After and Dyscalculia, potentially creating in these latter works a more concentrated experience for both writer and reader. In all, the paratactic tonal and register shifts illuminate the parataxis itself, tipping the writer and reader to the lack of linear continuity among pieces while also offering texture and often reprieve from intensified emotional states. For instance, in section 108 of Here After Lin moves from a scene wherein she is with friends who are helping her sort through her late husband Kurtis’s items to commenting on Kurtis sneezing in her face one night: I sort through all of it. He is everything, he is nothing. Pain seethes in my body, but I still have not let myself cry in the apartment in front of Katie and Brayden. My head hurts terribly. The juxtaposition—the tonal shift between collage fragments—is so sharp, it arrests and engages the reader, inspiring potential endearment, sadness, or even laughter (this depends on the reader’s own associations).
While Here After is a montage of fragments and vignettes that are more overtly thematically or topically coherent, Dyscalculia marks a shift away from the more experiential montage to add—though still sparingly—fragments that seem to exist slightly outside of the first-person lived experience and relate to mathematic philosophy and calculation. Consider, for instance, this fragment toward the end of the book: Ancient Pythagoreans subscribed to the dogma of transmigration and memory, both of which they believed to be the key to a soulful immortality, an immortality only attainable if the soul takes a three-thousand-year journey in which your individual soul inhabits many different bodies in order to return to the divine. It’s this insistence on remembering that allows one to rise with the gods, a cumulative accounting of three thousand years of wisdom, a collection that improves the soul and magnifies its offering to all beings. (Felix 201) The above fragment is, at first glance, unrelated to Felix’s childhood trauma, bipolar disorder, and/or breakup. The resulting topical distance allows both writer and reader to fill in the semantic space with their own associations. As shared in a Felix quote earlier in the essay, she identifies with and integrates a mathematic-philosophical language into her thinking and thus into her writing. Writers of trauma, like Felix here, offer paratactic material, which is characterized by associative leaps. The reader is then compelled by a subconscious human reach toward meaning-making that invites them to cohere this fragment with the rest of the book.
In her Lit Hub essay, “On the Gentle Balance of Writing about Trauma,” Felix comments that “remembering those [humorous] moments is what makes the retelling of trauma feel more real, because a reader understands that sometimes, the painful can be painfully funny. They want to read authenticity and be able to see glimpses of their own painfully funny realities in yours. This is what makes it real, and what makes it bearable—that the reader is able to use laughter to help mitigate the trigger in their own bodies as they enter the work beside you” (Felix, “On the Gentle Balance…”). Felix here calls out paratactic tonal shifts as not only true—as honoring what is real in the experience of trauma—but also, in that very realness, as ethical. Parataxis offers writer and reader the permission to cohere in their disparate states versus requiring them to force their segmented pieces to arrange into a narrative that is linear or considered by others to be reasonable. An example of this kind of paratactic tonal shift in Dyscalculia arises between pages 135 and 137. On 135, Felix includes a reflective vignette in response to seeing an accident on the other side of the freeway; she contemplates the individual narratives that might have led each of the three drivers to this seminal moment, noting: Any one of them could be the fatal other, the one with the confession to make upon meeting their maker, but regardless, in the end, even the one least responsible for the final output at least had the choice of the input in hand. From over here, all of the victims are villains, and all of the villains are dead. (Felix 135) This pensive moment, this reverie that metaphorically links this “three-car pileup” to Felix’s breakup and thereafter to her heartbreak, is followed by a full blank page on 136, then by this three-line segment on page 137:
It was when the girl he was messing with said, “It’s just a breakup—you’ll both get over this,” that I started to get a little pissed off. (Felix 137) With the space after the initial contemplation, the reader is left to sit with the finality of a fatal car accident, with how this fits into their own sense of self-constitution, and with how this resonates within the space of Felix’s lyric memoir. After that beat, Felix shifts the tone to one that is sharper, more singularly focused, nonmetaphorical, and uses a colloquial phrase, “a little pissed off,” that can strike as humorous. This mirrors and conducts for the reader the variegated emotional landscape that exists in the space of rupture and gives both writer and reader room to pull back for a moment from the visceral heat of observing physical trauma (of the car accident). This paratactic shift also humanizes those who are traumatized, allowing dimensionality versus calcifying them in a singular state of “deep” or as always occupying a specific mood.
Bluets offers an even more diverse mix of registers. Bluets gathers segments that are personal and reflective alongside fragments that tell the stories of others who Nelson knows or has known, and segments that are even further (semantically) distant from Nelson’s lived experience—that bring into the conversation, for instance, philosophical inquiries into color and memory. This kind of segmented essay—compared to the relatively topically homogeneous montages gathered in Here After and Dyscalculia—engages the reader in a broader spectrum of experience, crafting a different kind of paratactic range that allows for pause and breath, for greater distancing from the central emotional tenor of the book. For example, proposition 4 reads as a personal admission invoking an intimacy with the reader while proposition 5—though still centering on loneliness—markedly shifts register: 4. I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke—take your pick—an apprehension of the divine. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.) The abrupt “But first” at the beginning of proposition 5 moves us then into an historical account of a letter from Mallarmé to Cazalis, slightly cooling the intimacy from proposition 4. This register shift moves us away from a first-person reflection on loneliness and across space and time to an historical figure. Such a transition generates space for the writer and reader to gain distance from and perspective on what is perhaps more emotionally difficult material. The reader is invited to integrate, consciously and subconsciously, the preceding segments into their sense of accreting meaning—into their constitution of the work and of themselves.
Paratactic tonal and register shifts create mental and emotional space for the reader to validate and to build coherence of multiple self-states (occurring both in the text and in the reader’s experience of themselves within it). Lin, Felix, and Nelson also lean into craft strategies of recursion and the deliberate use of space on the page to move toward constitution—toward a hanging-together—in the context of parataxis. Here After is structured as recursive on nearly every page, with Kurtis’s life and death being the element that continually comes back up or around in a way that is both the same and different (largely in that it is contextualized to new and changing events happening in the book). By creating this tight recursive spiral, and thus a clearer ability to cohere around a felt and specific sense of trauma, Lin’s memoir segments don’t stray from the center of her grief (that “bright bone”). In Dyscalculia, Felix uses the fractaling pattern of recursion to point toward the fractaling pattern of recursion (to explicitly name the pattern that spirals throughout her book) starting early, at page 13. This occurs twice more in ways that are subtly different from one another yet also vastly different in that they occur at different parts along the writer’s and the reader’s journey through these conductive segments and vignettes. The first: A fractal is a never-ending pattern—infinitely complex. It’s a simple equation processed over and over again, reproducing itself in perpetuity, hiding around and inside of us, like Russian dolls, like a forest bordered by and stuffed full with trees, like a river that splits and meets itself in another river, like a stamp, like your DNA, like your brain, like your lungs, like their functions. (Felix 13) The second:
A fractal is a never-ending pattern, infinitely complex. It reproduces itself in perpetuity, in everything, hiding around and inside of us, like Russian dolls, like a forest bordered by and stuffed full with sisters of trees. A river that splits and meets itself in the mouth of another river. A simple equation processed over and over again, like a stamp, like your DNA, like your brain, like your lungs, like a mother. The third and final:
A fractal is a never-ending pattern—infinitely complex. It’s a simple equation processed over and over again, reproducing itself in perpetuity, in everything, hiding around us and inside of us, like Russian dolls or a forest bordered by and stuffed full with the trees of its own soil, a river that splits and meets itself in the mouth of another river. A simple equation processed over and over again, like a stamp, like your DNA, like your brain, like your lungs, like a mother. Between the first and the second instances (page 13 and 125, respectively) of this fractaling pattern, “a mother” appears. As do “sisters of trees,” “in everything,” and “in the mouth of,” nodding to Felix’s deepening relationship to this repeating segment. The “sisters” then disappear by the third fractal on page 218, leaving the mother intact and marking a turn inward toward “its own soul.” Further, the second fractal’s second paragraph does not appear at all in the first fractal. This connotes a scope of awareness and resonance that forms by midway through the book (at the second fractal) and carries forward—a motion to the fact that the pattern of return is not just echoic but also accretive. The beginning of each instance starts with the same words—“A fractal is a never-ending pattern”—mimicking the way these patterns show up in lived experience (with an onset or inciting moment that is, at length, recognizable). Other pieces, though—like “a simple equation processed over and over again”—reorder from the first to the second fractal and then, in this case, multiply by the third fractal, wherein this phrase occurs twice, in both of its previous locations. These subtle shifts, along with the sheer amount of experience between fractals (marked by 122 and 93 elapsed pages, respectively), point toward a self that is evolving and that is indelibly marked by these quiet traces, by this “simple equation” that iteratively “reproduces [the self] within itself.”
Another example of recursion in Dyscalculia: On page 69, Felix notes the “white women with merlot-stained and lined lips…Didionian or Plathian, with a modern twist” (69); this fragment refers to Didion and Plath as overly mimicked writers. The book then ends with three lines from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus”: Herr God, Herr Lucifer There is no explicitly drawn meaning in this recursive calling-forward of Plath (the first a mention, the second almost an invocation), though the reader will likely, consciously or subconsciously, link the two. There is also room to consider (with Plath as a legendarily traumatized woman) the function of this particular recursive pattern for Felix as a texture that contributes to the associative cohesion of Dyscalculia.
Finally, the most subtle yet arguably among the most impactful supports to writers and readers of trauma in the discussion of paratactic coherence—and thus of existential permission, agency, and consent—lies in the relationship between segments and white or blank space on the page. Where text is material, white space offers time to digest and integrate the material and the experience—to allow association to take leaps, to live within the space of the paratactic, incoherent psyche and to feel okay there. White space offers the opportunity for the writer and the reader to reach for a breath, to take a pause that they might otherwise be forced to push through against the better judgment for their care. Czerwiec similarly frames white space as an authored pressure point: It can deliberately heighten the reader’s meaning-making labor (even to the point of intended unsettledness), asking the reader—within that small pause between parts—to infer, connect, intuit, and crucially, feel (Czerwiec 40-41). Situated within a culture that, at large, demands productivity versus rest (the push versus the pause)—especially for those with trauma, who need time for healing—white space provides a radical invitation. In Bluets, while each proposition is spaced the same distance between the propositions before and after, Nelson occasionally offers much shorter entries, which arrive as moments of personal reflection or reclamation. These briefer fragments are sparse and arise almost as visual flags amid fields of text. Brevity serves as a form of white space; Nelson permits herself and the reader to slow down, to pause. Proposition 49 offers a kind of pause that is especially rare in our culture—one that exists explicitly around or within the body. Propositions 48 and 49 read as follows: 48. Imagine, for example, someone who fucks like a whore. Someone who seems good at it, professional. Someone you can still see fucking you, in the mirror, always in the mirror, crazy fucking about three feet away, in an apartment lit by blue light, never lit by daylight, this person is always fucking you from behind in blue light and you both always seem good at it, dedicated and lost unto it, as if there is no other activity on God’s given earth your bodies know how to do except fuck and be fucked like this, in this dim blue light, in this mirror. What do you call someone who fucks this way? Proposition 48 begins with “Imagine,” pointing the reader to look at sex from the outside. Its third sentence is marked by rolling commas—a breathless view of a “fucking” scene (or a series of them, marked by the appearance of “always” and “never”). In this proposition, “mirror” and “blue light” each occur three times, further evoking the sense of viewing the activity by way of a mediator (with mirror and light), versus experiencing what it feels like within the body.
In proposition 49, by contrast, we go “inside of the fucking,” finding a way into the exterior painted in proposition 48. This single-line fragment invokes a reclamation of being inside the body during sex in a way that could not occur if this sentence were simply tacked to the end of proposition 48. Its isolation heralds rapt attention, demands acknowledgment. The reader is invited to pause between the breathless external view and the paratactic contemplation regarding the color that is found inside the fucking. The reader, as such, is encouraged to fill this space with their own associations. (For instance: What color is inside the fucking?) While Nelson’s propositions, again, take space in a tumbling-forward fashion and always fill to the margins of the book’s pages, most of the segments in Dyscalculia are contained on a single page with significant white space in the upper and lower margins; it is the exception that there are longer prose blocks that feel more chapter-like and span across multiple pages. Felix also uses full-page white space for additional associative coherence and care. Felix shared with Little Village Magazine: “Find ways to make sure you don’t retraumatize yourself as you create the work and that will mean you don’t retraumatize the reader.” She also wrote in her Lit Hub essay, “Building the healing into the language helped me truly see which parts of the trauma were necessary to include, and where to pull back to offer my readers a way out of the book’s trauma.” Felix implies here that her own move toward healing, in pulling back text and creating more space around the vignettes and fragments that remain in Dyscalculia, aligns with ethical treatment of the reader. I previously examined Felix’s paratactic register shift on pages 135-137. To call this back to mind, these pages included her car accident reflection, followed by a blank page, and then by “It was when the girl he was messing with said, ‘It’s just a breakup—you’ll both get over this,’ that I started to get a little pissed off” (Felix 137) on its own full page. The white space here (the full blank page followed by a single line on an otherwise blank page) encourages the reader to pause, integrate these segments into the whole of the memoir thus far, and allow their own associations to emerge. The “pissed off” segment on page 137 more directly pulls the reader back to the topic at-hand—back from the imagistic, reflective car-pileup fragment so that they can re-enter the text at-large. Felix uses white space in this way on several occasions, offering a punchy fragment that the reader then has ample visual room to adjust to—to ingest—before being conducted onward by the fragments that follow. See this in the following examples, wherein the quoted text is all that exists on its respective page: Where, for the first time, things begin to add up. (Felix 180) At times Felix plays out vignettes in longer blocks that span full-length pages. There are also times she carefully employs white space as a strategy to slow the reader, to allow for greater room in the conductive experience of meaning and, as she has explicitly called out in interviews, as part of an ethos of caring for the reader. For instance—this short, relationship-transforming scene that plays out across two side-by-side pages:
(left side) This is followed, on the next page, by:
The entire premise of our relationship goes up in a smoke of purist hubris. (Felix 114) This fragment stands alone in a field of space, sizzling with a sibilance that rises from a razed ground. If these three fragments were crowded onto one page (a markedly different craft choice), the coherent resonance would be lost. The pacing physically slows the reader, setting a vibration of importance and marking a voltaic moment in Felix’s relationship to her ex-partner—the topical source of the heartbreak that runs alongside the childhood trauma and bipolar disorder Felix centers in her vignettes and fragments. Without the slowing, and without the standalone line that lifts from page 114, the volta is lost.
Here After similarly features space around the text to slow the conductive flow of a shattered experience, to give room to the reader so that they are not traveling warp-speed through a difficult emotional landscape. Lin varies the length of prose blocks throughout the book, with some (as with the other works here) spanning multiple pages and many taking up one-half or less of a given page. Perhaps Lin’s most striking use of white space around a segment in this text is with the single line in segment 21: “When he dies, I fall out of time” (31). The text, as it speaks, falls into a void on the page. Lin shared in an interview that she reached for this spatial strategy in her book because space was something she needed but could not have in her grieving process in the near- and longer-term aftermath of her husband Kurtis’s death. She could not (and perhaps cannot) claim this breathing room in life, so she chooses to claim it on the page. This self-offering aligns with immediacy to what both Lin and Felix have mentioned as their reader-oriented ethics in writing trauma. Who can tell whether the revisionary impulse was to take space because the writer needs it or because the reader will surely need it, but the reality here seems to be that what offers care to the writer offers care to the reader, and vice-versa. Space, through this frame, rounds out this field of strategies of paratactic support in a way that allows room for the writer and reader to live on the page, to make associative connections between textual segments toward a nonlinear, self-affirmative sense-making and self-constitution, and to claim consent at each turn of this process. Lin, Nelson, and Felix have crafted anthems—perhaps also guidebooks—for existing and writing against the subordination of traumatized peoples within traumatized bodies. Those who have been traumatized face cultural demands that foreground linearity, that call writers into a hypotactic narrative when this requirement is not, at a foundational level, true or sustainable for those who have experienced trauma. Even the act of pulling fragments together in a book (of placing them one-after-the-other, start-to-finish) could mark an acquiescence to make something of an experience that is otherwise more fully non-constituted. I continue to wonder about forms that resist even this level of self-arrangement and where it is possible for writers of trauma to continue to iterate from here. Consider, for further study, Anne Carson’s accordion, foldout book-in-a-box Nox, wherein she attempts to come to terms with her brother’s death. Nox still presents as having a clear beginning and end, though it engages the reader in a nuanced journey through a form that feels and behaves differently in the hands. Or look to Carson’s Float, a collection of 22 individual chapbooks (which gather lectures, poems, notes, and more across myriad topical terrains, including liminality and loss) that can be mixed and matched and read in any order, inviting the reader to create their own order among fragments. Those who have experienced trauma face continued pressure to fit the form of a linearly constructed, productive self. Adding fuel to this fire, we exist within a time wherein to take up space in physical form—within a body and within our art—is ever-the-more radical. Maggie Nelson’s, Amy Lin’s, and Camonghne Felix’s offerings provide for me a sort of relief, and the beginnings of a liberation in this space of the body. Investigating from here, I am in search of work that feels and behaves differently in the cognition of writers and readers of trauma. These writers invigorate me to participate in an evolving literary tradition that takes seriously the ability to gift a marked return to the body, a validation of the fragmentary, nonlinear self. |
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Christine Light lives in Florida, where she co-leads a bimonthly poetry workshop, chairs the Publications Committee for the Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation, and presents locally on establishing a personal, human-centered ethos in relation to AI. She also works as a mental health provider. Her short fiction won Globe Soup’s 2021 Flash Fiction Competition as well as their eighth 7-Day Story Writing Challenge, and she is currently working on a poetry manuscript and an essay collection. Christine is the current Lead Poetry Editor and Lead Copy Editor at Revolute and is pursuing an MFA at Randolph College.
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