Though she sometimes included them in letters to family and friends, the poems of Emily Dickinson were largely discovered after her death. Her manuscripts are often not definitive: some of the words and phrases are marked with little plus signs, for which, along the bottom of the poem, she includes variants and synonyms. For example, in a poem that mentions ‘a thrilling teller,’ she hesitates about the nature of the figure, and adds fourteen other possible adjectives: warbling, typic, hearty, bonnie, breathless, spacious, tropic, ardent, friendly, magic, pungent, winning and mellow. Clearly, a story can be told in many ways, and the matter of how to tell one is not easily resolved.
One of my favourite ‘hesitations’ occurs in a poem in which Dickinson makes the comparison ‘like swans.’ In the manuscript, below the poem, she offers her alternative:
‘like ghosts.’ And though the options don’t have to agree (just as a thrilling or breathless teller doesn’t sound particularly mellow), I can’t help but read the poem while thinking of both at once. I imagine ghostly swans, or wonder whether swans aren’t already somewhat ghostlike, the way they float on water and seem to embody a form of beauty magnetic though dangerous.
The author Ocean Vuong, best known for his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), started out as a poet, publishing the collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016). In the poem containing the titular image, he quotes from one of Dickinson’s letters: ‘The stars are not hereditary.’ If you look up the letter, you’ll find that the statement follows a question. A mutual acquaintance has died, and Dickinson asks: ‘Do you know if either of his sons have his mysterious face or his momentous nature?’ So the quoted sentence expresses incredulity: surely the traits of such a singular person cannot be simply passed on? Can the elements of our loved ones really be detached from their person, to recur in other people, in later ages?
Vuong lingers in the ancestral theme, and mimics Dickinson’s tendency to offer alternatives, pushing meaning into a spectral state of double exposure. The poem in which he quotes Dickinson is called ‘To My Father / To My Future Son.’ He tells these figures, this double figure, to ‘find the book I left / for us, filled / with all the colors of the sky / forgotten by gravediggers,’ and to use it ‘to prove / how the stars were always what we knew / they were: the exit wounds / of every / misfired word.’
The poem is in orbit, a pair of binary stars circling a mutual centre of gravity. The sense of the sentences changes depending on the addressee you imagine. The misfired words of a father are not like the misfired words of a son, stars are not hereditary, yet both have exit wounds to show for it. The reference to Dickinson illuminates the situation: she left us her poems with all the possible ‘misfires’ intact, captured just before she pulled the trigger and settled on any definitive meaning, footnote-plusses scattered across her manuscripts like constellations. Vuong’s poem exists in a similar intermediate state: his double address defers a definitive recipient, allowing him to write both to and from the position of the father, showing how a feeling beats through generational divides.
AGAINST RESTORATION
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Before it got published, Vuong described On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous as ‘the ghost of a novel.’ It began as a series of ‘little essays.’ Vuong voiced an uneasy relationship with our ‘desire to restore culture,’ with the way in which what we call ‘restoration’ runs the risk of erasing previous acts of violence. ‘We lose the traces of what made those breaks in the first place.’ Hence his interest in the motif of exit wounds: like ghosts and swans, a wound remembers.1
‘What if I wrote a novel that is so fractured – so in pieces – that it becomes the epicenter of the break itself?’2 Vuong set out to write ‘the phantom’ of a whole, ‘the shards in the dirt,’ to try to get to the point ‘where we can’t even imagine what it looked like before the fracture.’3 Against restoration, Vuong prefers the wound, the break, the ruin.
The novel is a ghost story in another sense. It is addressed to a mother who doesn’t speak English, written to a mother who cannot read. In the poem ‘To My Father / To My Future Son,’ the addressee keeps flickering. In the novel, she remains just out of reach: the book takes place in the time of a delay. The message is halted halfway through its arrival, intercepted by strangers – us, the readers. ‘I only have the nerve to tell you what comes after because the chance this letter finds you is slim – the very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my telling it possible.’
Vuong’s ideas and strategies resemble those of poet and novelist Ben Lerner, who was his teacher at Brooklyn College. In 2013, Lerner published an article in Frieze about virtuality in literature. There, he describes a jealousy he’s felt when confronted with the visual arts. Somehow, a sculpture or a painting seems more real than an object made out of words. Instead of talking himself out of this ‘largely indefensible’ feeling, Lerner became interested in the ways in which the opposing virtuality of literature might be put to work. ‘I’ve come to think that one of the powers of literature is precisely how it can describe and stage encounters with works of art that can’t or don’t exist.’ Perhaps the novel can be thought of ‘as a fundamentally curatorial form [wherein] an encounter can be staged between individuals […] that are not or cannot be made actual. […] Writing is particularly suited to figuring what we can desire or fear but can’t (now) make.’4 A common name for such fiction, Lerner mentions, is science fiction. Another might be ghost stories.
Lerner’s thinking about the ghostliness of literature culminates in the monograph The Hatred of Poetry (2016). There, he wonders why we ‘love to hate’ poetry – even as poets. One reason, he thinks, is because poetry is the name of an impossible demand: ‘that we make an alternative world out of the fallen materials of representation that we have […] like wanting to sing a song that can reconcile a social division and can evade all the traps of language. Of course, every time you try to do that, you fail.’5 Lerner’s mistrust of reconciliation prefigures Vuong’s mistrust of restoration. Here again, Lerner doesn’t try to resolve the problem and talk himself out of it, but turns it into a resource. ‘If you buy into this logic, all empirical poems are records of failure in a certain sense. But, there’s a way of hating on particular poems that actually enables you to commune with the abstract possibility of the medium.’6 Our contempt can teach us how to ‘keep alive the imagination of an alternative,’ to look for something in the flickering of ghosts and swans. ‘If you think all actual poems are failures, the question for a poet becomes: how do you keep your poems from being merely actual? What are the techniques that charge it with abstract possibility, even though they exist in a market or in time?’7 Doubling down on their virtual character, Lerner believes that poems or novels ‘might come to resemble love.’8
The problem with our desire for restoration or reconciliation – for a supposed return to unity – is the assumption that the violence which brought about our damage and discord has an assignable origin, a point before which it didn’t exist. But returning to the past from the perspective of the present, we realise we’ve been blind: our troubles outpace our memory. To keep alive the imagination of an alternative, one must first obstruct both nostalgia and naïve optimism. One must refuse the desire for the whole. In order to do this, Vuong takes up both Lerner’s curatorial and speculative strategies: he opts to write a novel so ruined as to make an unbroken past inconceivable, and to stage it as an impossible letter. It cannot but fail. The way in which it fails might provoke our imagination to desire differently, but this will never erase the fact of its failure. The shards will not be mended, the narrator’s mother won’t ever read them.
We tend to construe phrases like writer Samuel Beckett’s now infamous ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ as some kind of optimism, but it is a mode of melancholy, when it has recognised that what we call victory is as bad as defeat, if not worse, because it cannot even see itself for what it is. Beckett continues: ‘Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good.’9 The stakes are risked in the slight space opened up by the ambiguity of the last phrase. Does for good mean only forever? Or might there be good ways of being sick, resting in failure?
LANGUAGE AS POSSESSION
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Early on in Vuong’s novel, the narrator, Little Dog, introduces the elements that form the background of his letter. He lists several memories in which his mother hits him. They are framed when he writes that ‘parents suffering from PTSD are more likely to hit their children. […] Perhaps to lay your hands on your child is to prepare him for war.’ It is one of the questions propelling the letter forward: ‘When does war end?’
One night, the family – composed of Little Dog, his mother and his grandmother Lan – is awoken by their neighbours shooting fireworks ahead of Independence Day. Lan puts her hand over Little Dog’s mouth. ‘If you scream, the mortars will know where we are.’ Since the war hasn’t left the bodies and minds of the people raising him, it remains present at home, and hasn’t ended. Time travels in a spiral, writes Little Dog, because ‘we are creating something new from what is gone,’ causing echoes.
The question of the end of war bears indirectly on the matter of the mother tongue – thus on the mise en scène of the novel itself. ‘What if the mother tongue is stunted? […] What if the tongue is cut out? […] The Vietnamese I own is the one you gave me, the one whose diction and syntax reach only the second-grade level.’ Little Dog’s mother didn’t return to school after the building collapsed due to an American napalm raid. ‘Our Vietnamese is a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.’
Little Dog must write in English: it’s the only language he knows to a level sophisticated enough for the attempt to understand his history. This aspect of language, I feel, is too often overlooked in contemporary debates about social problems. The language we use to even make sense of a problem, let alone solve it, is by and large developed at elite institutions of higher education. We cannot simply do without such language (discarding our tools in a misplaced and privileged desire to remain clean from their provenance), but we cannot use it without establishing a dependence on the institutions which engendered it, and the economies in which they are caught up.
Now if someone tries to unearth a history that includes within it a trajectory of social, cultural and educational migration, they face an impassable obstacle. The words with which you write are words you only received along the way, as part of the history they must express. They cannot but somewhat distort what came before them (rendering perceptible what was actually latent, tacit, implicit, unspoken, implied, hidden, misunderstood). You must repeat one of the forms of violence whose past you’re trying to describe: the fact that one can be subordinated by a lack of language. Language is a privilege you cannot analyse without using it.
The form of Vuong’s novel, an open letter closed off to its sole recipient, is then not just some poetic flourish. It is a construction ensuring that the book will never be able to deny its own measure of violence – for it is violent to speak to someone in a language they can’t understand. The novel has, at times, been criticised for an overly ornate style, and without disagreeing I feel the judgement must be accompanied by an awareness of the means by which one makes such claims. In the New York Times, critic Dwight Garner praised Vuong’s observational capacities, but mentioned that the novel was also ‘filled with showy, affected writing, with forced catharses and swollen quasi-profundities,’ each instance ‘a pebble in the reader’s shoe.’10 His examples are quite convincing, but in making his argument Garner has forgotten that he is not the proper ‘reader’ of this text – none of us are. All the showy writing should remind us of the fact that the person it is supposed to be shown to cannot even read it.
In her study of the term ‘gimmick,’ Sianne Ngai has shown how something denounced as such is judged both aesthetically and economically: gimmicks are cheap.11 The elements Garner criticises are all gimmicks: showy writing, forced (rather than earned) catharses, profundities pretending to be deep while being shallow. They work too little for the effects they want to provoke, the artist hasn’t supplied enough labour to deserve the sought-after added value. Consequently, they also work too hard (for the nothing they produce) and come across as strained. The point is not that Garner’s critique is wrong, but in invoking gimmicks he introduces cheapness as a mode of judgement – made from a wealthy critical position the actual recipient of the writing cannot actually occupy. The judgement becomes complicit in the excluding gesture Vuong has made at the heart of his work; every reader is put in the position of having to judge the worth of an object whose proper owner cannot begin to appraise it.
And the story seems to respond to this situation. At one point, Little Dog sees a ‘cheap painting from Family Dollar.’ Examining the brushstrokes, he sees ‘that they were not painted on at all, but printed on speckled relief, suggesting a hand without enacting the real. The relief “strokes” never cohered with their shades, so that a stroke would hold two, even three colors at once. A fake. A fraud. Which was why I loved it. The materials never suggested authenticity, but rather […] a desire to pass as art only under the most cursory glance.’ It is precisely the ‘showy writing’ which convinces us that the framing device is not just an excuse. The shades don’t match the strokes, the intention was never really to have the book pass as art for the sake of art.
DEAR / READER
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Of course, we also are the intended audience. Vuong has pursued the publication of a novel. But to write fiction isn’t simply to pretend, it is to enter into a complex relationship with one’s language. The possibility of address doesn’t rely on the presence of the recipient; the mode of any text resembles prayer: seeking out the other side without any assurance of arrival, attempting to provoke ghosts. Vuong’s attempt is to lure the phantom of his mother into English.
This becomes explicit in a poem from Vuong’s second collection, Time is a Mother (2022). In ‘Dear Rose,’ Vuong tried to ‘rewrite the novel’ as poetry. The distance has changed, the addressee has passed away – but not exactly. Every letter carries the risk that it might not arrive, and in fact an earlier version appeared in 2017, when Vuong’s mother was still alive.
The poem opens: ‘Let me begin again now / that you’re gone Ma / if you’re reading this then you survived / your life into this one.’ The line breaks shake the sense, the phrase ‘now that you’re gone’ is broken up for us to read ‘let me begin again now,’ the moment split between the time of writing and the time of death. The recipient is likewise divided: ‘Pink Rose Hong Mom / are you reading this dear / reader are you my mom yet / I cannot find her without you this / place I’ve made you can’t / enter.’ Again, the run-on sentences blur their meaning: ‘dear’ first names the mother, then becomes ‘dear reader’; this reader is impatiently asked if they are ‘my mom yet,’ the impatience is erased when ‘yet’ turns out to belong to the phrase ‘yet I cannot find her without you.’ This ‘you’ becomes ‘this / place I’ve made,’ before dissolving into ‘this / place I’ve made you can’t / enter.’ Who is it that can’t enter? The addressed mother, unable to occupy the place of the English-speaking reader? Or the reader, who can’t become the addressed mother? Both? Neither? Are we the swan or the ghost?
No literary text is read by necessity. Since you read in part for pleasure, all writers are to some extent trying to seduce you. You must want to read on. ‘The text you write must prove to me that it desires me,’ says the essayist Roland Barthes, one of Vuong’s regular interlocutors.12 In this case, we serve as substitutes: ‘reader are you my mom yet / I cannot find her without you.’ We’re only here to evoke the ghostly presence of someone else.
The literary industry has, in the past decade, seized upon the often heavily confessional work of historically marginalised voices. Publishers have learned they can turn a profit by selling these confessions to progressive readers eager to feel empathy and pity beyond the boundaries of their income, colour, sexuality. Exploitation disguised as emancipation, giving a platform. The description of a sex scene between Little Dog and Trevor, a boy he meets at fourteen working on a tobacco farm, also describes the relationship between Vuong and his reader. Trevor grabs Little Dog’s hair, and he tells him to keep going. It’s not so much about pleasure as it is about control. ‘To be inside of pleasure, Trevor needed me.’ Little Dog begs Trevor to fuck him up. ‘It felt good to name what was already happening to me all my life. I was being fucked up, at last, by choice.’ The sex is described as ‘a nightmare we swore was real.’
AMERICAN GHOSTS
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The story of Little Dog’s social migration is structured by the word American. When he pranks his mother, shouting boom! from behind her while wearing a toy army helmet – making her scream and burst into sobs – he is ‘an American boy parroting what I saw on TV.’ When they splurge at Goodwill, his mother asks him, holding a white dress, if she looks ‘like a real American.’ When he is bullied and hit by another boy, the bully has ‘already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers,’ parroting: ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you.’ To grow strong, his mother gives him ‘American milk.’ Trevor, the boy ‘who would change what I knew of summer,’ is described as his ‘all-American beef.’ He is ‘an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun.’ America is at once a source of violence and value, a brutality to be desired.
In part because the value of being American is real. Being American grants access. When the family walks forty minutes to a supermarket in order to buy oxtail, to make bún bò huê, Little Dog’s mother cannot find it and asks for help in Vietnamese. The man behind the counter doesn’t understand. She starts imitating an ox, making mooing sounds, using her finger to imitate a tail. She tries some French, which she remembers from childhood. Another man comes to the counter, speaking Spanish. All the while, the men are laughing, louder and louder. She turns to Little Dog: ‘Tell them. Go ahead and tell them what we need.’ But he doesn’t know the word oxtail. They end up buying Wonder Bread and mayonnaise.
‘That night I promised myself I’d never be wordless when you needed me to speak for you. So began my career as our family’s official interpreter. From then on, I would fill in our blanks, our silences, stutters, whenever I could. I code switched. I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours.’ The narrator’s Americanisation, barring his mother from understanding him, is a necessity for making her visible, and for them to survive. In a similar moment, after Little Dog tells his mother about his bullies, his mother reprimands him. He has to find a way to defend himself ‘because I don’t have the English to help you. I can’t say nothing to stop them. You find a way. You find a way or you don’t tell me about this ever again, you hear? […] You have to be a real boy and be strong. You have to step up or they’ll keep going. You have a bellyful of English. […] You have to use it, okay?’
Little Dog’s story is the result of a break in social reproduction. He has to differ from his family in order for them to better assert themselves. Such stories, writes philosopher Chantal Jaquet, are always double: both the entry of an alternative model into an existing milieu (becoming the American member of a Vietnamese family) and the exile of an individual into a foreign milieu (becoming a ‘masked’ Vietnamese boy in America). Sometimes, leaving a milieu is not simply a consequence of rejection or expulsion, but of a collective aspiration: children becoming the voice of their parent’s thwarted desires. The ‘parents, who despite themselves produce an order that crushes them,’ writes Jaquet, ‘are going to strive so that their child does not have the same life as them, at the cost of enormous sacrifices, including the greatest – that is, the loss of the child.’13
The violence at the heart of the novel, the barred address, has been the goal of the history it recounts. It is the result of an attempt to escape another, older violence. And precisely because this goal was only to be reached through a complex economy of violence, of sacrifice and loss, it cannot be the story of a restoration. In telling and reading the story of a necessary fracture, to desire restoration is to desire distortion. It is our readerly desire for wholeness – in both senses of the word – which makes such stories illegible. Again and again the novel echoes the same idea: the violence is older than you think, the war is not over. Parents with PTSD hitting their children, bullies parroting their damaged American fathers. Readers enjoying the vulnerability of marginalised bodies. An author writing in a language his mother cannot read, both as the result of the shared hope that he might have a different life, and as a necessary defence against the violence endured when lacking a majority language. The son can’t be healed from the person he’s had to become. You have to hope the child is sick for good.