Good evening! You’ll no doubt be thrilled to hear that I’ve been thinking a lot about context this week, especially the contexts that writers produce work under and why/if that is important. So you have that to look forward to.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
When I taught first year undergraduates, I would ask them to do a reading exercise in our first week. I would ask them to read the following extract from Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay:
Whenever I returned I found a city that was spineless, that couldn’t stand up to changes of season, heat, cold, and, especially, storms. Look how the station on Piazza Garibaldi was flooded, look how the Galleria opposite the museum had collapsed; there was a landslide, and the electricity didn’t come back on. Lodged in my memory were dark streets full of dangers, unregulated traffic, broken pavements, giant puddles. The clogged sewers splattered, dribbled over. Lavas of water and sewage and garbage and bacteria spilled into the sea from the hills that were burdened with new, fragile structures, or eroded the world from below. People died of carelessness, of corruption, of abuse, and yet, in every round of voting, gave their enthusiastic approval to the politicians who made their life unbearable.
I would then tell them that the city being referred to is Naples, that the book is set in the late twentieth century during violent clashes between political factions, and that Ferrante is an anonymous writer. Then I would pose the following questions:
What can we perceive from the paragraph by itself?
Do we need the context of Italy’s political situation to understand the tone of Ferrante’s writing?
Is Ferrante’s anonymity a barrier to the reading experience? Do we need to know something about the writer to understand a text?
These questions would always garner a variety of responses, but what it would get students thinking about is the difference between close reading a text in isolation, and reading it within certain contexts. These contexts range from the setting of the novel to the position of the author which, in Ferrante’s particular case, is unknown. We don’t know if these were written during the story’s setting or after; we don’t know if elements of the character Elena’s life are autobiographical; we couldn’t even say with all certainty that Ferrante is Italian, or a woman (but can make a pretty good guess that she is both).
I didn’t teach this module last semester, so I haven’t thought about this exercise in a while. It came back to me, however, when I was about 60 pages into Sarah Schulman’s People In Trouble (1990). I didn’t really know that much about Schulman before picking this up, aside from her being the writer of the oft-quoted Conflict is Not Abuse (2016). If I had, I might not have felt a bit confused about what it is she is trying to achieve.
People in Trouble is about the AIDs crisis in New York, told from the perspective of an artist, her husband, and her kind-of-secret girlfriend. Kate and Peter, the couple, are the type of people who would describe themselves as ‘comfortable’ when asked a direct question about their finances, whereas Molly works part-time in a cinema and is pretty skint, but content. (Side note: Imagine living in Manhattan on a part-time cinema wage now…unthinkable). At one of the many funerals of somebody she knows who has died with AIDs, Molly comes across the group Justice, who use guerrilla tactics to protest the treatment of queer people and their access to medication (based on Act Up). She becomes involved in their direct action while also spending her days pining for Kate, who does not want to leave her marriage for her.
As all of this is established, Schulman sets the scene in New York during the 80s. The summers are very hot and the winters are very cold; a business mogul is evicting long-term city residents to expand his portfolio; both the rich and the poor are unavoidable during a simple walk down the street. The homeless and the precariously-housed are a big focus in the novel, and this is where I started to run into issues — Schulman spends a lot of time detailing the ethnicities of New York’s poorer residents, especially Black and Jewish people. It felt odd, constantly being told that the person a character was meeting was specifically Black, that the group of people making noise in the street were specifically Jewish, that the shop cashier was specifically Chinese, and so on.
In the first 60-ish pages it happens so much that I started to really think that there must be an end goal to it all, and it does all come together eventually. Kate and Peter, in their unexpected involvement with the queer community ultimately have their horizons opened. Peter knows about Molly, and feels a lot of feelings about his wife being with a woman and not a man, and often feels like he is being persecuted in how visible gay men and lesbians are becoming in this period. Kate is reluctant to call herself anything but straight, and sees her involvement as an individualised experience, removed from community. Molly, who is fairly involved in the gay scene, realises that she can be more involved in the work that Justice are carrying out, and that she has a responsibility towards gay men, and women who have contracted the virus. All of them, whether they like it or not (and whether they accept it or not), have their very middle-class (and white) perspectives opened up.
When I was still a bit bemused by the novel, I looked up Schulman. She was, and still continues to be, a historian of the AIDs crisis, she is a lesbian, and she is Jewish. I most likely would have come to the above conclusions on the text without knowing all of that, but it did make it click into place a lot faster than it might have otherwise. I think, ultimately, what she was trying to present is that these middle-class people were faced with ugly truths about health, and realise that their socio-economic positions account for much more than they previously thought. Their awareness of their own positions manifests in differing ways, but they are the ones who now realise that the issues thrown up by the AIDs crisis disproportionately impact people who do not look like them, or live the same lives as them. The awareness of race in the novel is not just a historian of this period pointing that out, but it also shows how these three people navigate their communities, and how this shaped the way that everything came out.
I’m not hugely interested in talking about who is ‘allowed’ to tell certain stories, but once I knew the contexts that Schulman was writing under, it did change my perspective of the text. That mean quite a lot, I would say (and I won’t bore you with whether I think it is positive or negative because I actually don’t know — I just think it’s interesting).
I also read Kathryn Scanlon’s Kick the Latch (2023) this week, which was also an interesting study in context. It is drawn from interviews and conversations with a horse trainer called Sonia that Scanlon had, which is an interesting exercise in drawing from real life. It is presented in vignettes (I love vignettes), and outlines Sonia’s childhood in rural America, to her time training horses full-time as an adult. It presented a kind of life that I’m wildly unfamiliar with, which I always love, and (as I’ve said to anyone who will listen) put me in mind of Lucia Berlin’s stories. Like Berlin, Scanlon writes about an extremely specific setting while keeping feeling at the forefront, making it both accessible and almost universal. There is a simplicity to it that seems to be both from Scanlon’s skill and (most likely) from the material she is drawing on — there is a conversational tone to Sonia’s retelling of her life. I’m actually not too bothered about delving into where the line between reality and fiction ends and begins in this case,because I think it is a really wonderful text that should be celebrated as just that — a text, that has been constructed.
I started reading Jean Rhys’ short story collection Tigers are Better Looking (1962) yesterday, one of the last remaining books I have left to read of hers. I won’t talk about Rhys’ contexts, mainly because I feel like I’ve spoken about them at length a million times before, and because I haven’t read enough of it to warrant me chatting on for thousands of more words.
Books on my radar
I was recently sent a copy of Augustina Bazterrica’s short story collection 19 Claws and a Black Bird (tr. Sarah Moses) by Pushkin Press, and I’m really excited to read it. I feel like all the horror I’ve read recently has been a bit shit but I have high hopes for this one.
I also weirdly have not mentioned that I’ve been slowly plodding through Richard B. Jewell’s The Golden Age of Cinema (2007), which is v v v v good. So here’s me mentioning it.