Going Nowhere

In the summer of 2021, as an unemployed theater and performance studies scholar and mother of a four-year-old with a partner working two full-time jobs to provide for us, I often find myself wishing to escape from my life. Specifically, as my back seizes up and my son requests me to play a third “unboxing Batman toys” Youtube video of the day, I wish to escape my body, to escape my perspective, to escape the pandemic, to escape the everything and the everywhere of the current, long, multi-hyphenate moment. 

Once in a while, late at night, indulging in a fit of revenge bedtime procrastination—my awareness of this condition in the act makes me cringe, deepening my desire for respite—I watch a video I first read about in an interview with the author Ottessa Moshfegh. It’s this performance on a variety show by the singer Lena Zavaroni in 1981. The song is called “Going Nowhere.”  Here’s how Moshfegh describes it:

It’s a TV program, probably one of those variety TV shows. The music starts, and then it pans over to her onstage. She’s wearing this long-sleeved, skin-colored gown, and looks so fragile—but absolutely self-possessed. Like she’s carrying the entire weight of the world inside of her. Her eyes are totally clear. When she’s singing you can see into her mouth, which looks like the mouth of a child. I find that really moving, somehow. She’s not a woman, though she’s certainly not a child anymore. She’s something else. Like an angel of pain. (emphasis mine)

When Moshfegh describes the performance as moving, the movement is sublimation. Zavaroni is doing embodiment for her—neither a woman, nor a child, she is something else, something beyond such common and felt structures of being, of living in this unlivable world. She—and by “she” I mean both Zavaroni and Moshfegh—is somewhere else. 

I want to go to nowhere. Whereas the “nowhere” Zavaroni performs is fully embodied, I imagine how the experience of watching and listening to her “nowhere” allows me to achieve an entirely different, almost non-corporeal “nowhere” performative of my own. Jean-Luc Nancy identifies catastrophe as exposure.[1] The existential realities resulting from ongoing global catastrophe are known and even darkly mundane to many. But the explicit toll the past few years have taken on caregivers, and specifically mothers, and how that toll calls for moments of respite from what may feel like “the entire weight of the world” (à la Zavaroni), demands some attention. My encounter with Zavaroni’s “Going Nowhere” and Moshfegh’s articulation of its stakes led me to a hypothesis I wanted to test: would reading the work of this writer who both called attention and briefly theorized this performance that captivated and held me attention to the extent that I felt a kind of pleasurable absence lead to further experiences of this kind? 

In this essay, I identify the role of reading the fiction of Ottessa Moshfegh in and as a practice of self-care. Upon investigation, and somewhat in contrast to her empathetic depiction of Zavaroni in an interview, Moshfegh is a writer of morbidity, feminine torpor, and what Sianne Ngai might call “ugly feelings.”[2] But as a reader, despite these contents, I am interested in how the self-spectatorship in the reading act allows for a respite from the body. In other words, I ask: what happens when reading and discovering complicated ideas about the body becomes a strategy and practice to avoid the perils of physical attunement and somatic awareness of the body in space and time? The phrase “lost in a book” comes to mind in my effort to describe this practice and experience; as the global COVID-19 pandemic endures and lingers in our minds and bodies, I attempt, to varying quality and degree, to lose myself between the pages of, specifically, the short story “Dancing in the Moonlight” from Homesick for Another World (2018). Drawing from theories of affect, emotion, and subjectivity from Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, I perform close readings of my readings. Specifically, I attend to the act of reading as an embodied performance that reaches toward disembodiment. With this framing, I unearth the politics of escape as a mode, if problematic, of self-care. This is to say: in these acts, while solace is not found, some kind of embodied escape is realized—a specifically maternal one. The goal here is not to reach a resolution, but merely to catalog what I believe might be a strange frame of reference for maternity-as-labor; finding the pleasures of somatic dislocation as a maternal version of sublimation, or release.

One afternoon, sometime during the fall of 2021, I notice that my son, J, is acting sleepy. He’s in his sleeping bag in the living room, his head lolling, staring at his lego set. I seize the opportunity, and immediately head to my room. I splay out on my bed, stomach down, legs up swinging back and forth as I reach for my book on the dresser: Homesick for Another World, a collection of short stories. The page is folded down where I last left off (I’ve long since abandoned bookmarks for books I own, as J is obsessed with bookmarks for some obscure four- year-old-brain reason). I’m a few pages into the story “Dancing in the Moonlight.” I prefer to put books like this down when I’ve finished a story and am about to start another. I like finishing one, holding it in my mind like a little world that flickers, and then either falling asleep or, if possible, going about the rest of my day. Ever an aspiring completionist, though, in this case, I go back and re-read the initial pages of the story. 

The first thing I do is try to figure out the gender and age of the story’s narrator. The narrator is describing a woman selling furniture in a pop-up Christmas market on the Lower East Side in New York City. I assume—though of course I cannot be certain—that the narrator a man when I get to this part:

She wore tight red trousers and a black shirt that looked like the top of a ballerina’s leotard. Her hair was frizzy, bleached blond, and she had a lot of make-up on—too much, I’d say.[3]

The casual judgements made by men about women’s appearances. The casual glibness of it, too: “looked like the top of a ballerina’s leotard.” I bet she got it from American Apparel. I know she got it from American Apparel. Reading the thoughts of this character takes me back, safely, to a time when I also would go to pop-up Christmas markets on the Lower East Side. Back in my 20s. Before I had J. Before Covid. I write “takes me back safely” because sometimes those thoughts make me wistful. Now, reading this, I feel vaguely smug. What an idiot. Everyone is so fucking stupid. This little moment, combined with the excitement of guessing the identity markers of a protagonist that came before it, coalesces into a feeling of vague, all-knowing, no feeling, abstraction. I pay attention to this story, but as a surveyor, not as a kind of miner for closeness or with the desire that myself be reflected back to me. I look at the words in the story, but the words don’t look back at me. This is no abyss. Maybe reading this now I am, perhaps, a rung or two up from anything abyssal. It’s pleasant in the not-too-down-below. In the Taos autumn heat, it feels cool down here, in bed, reading this story. 

In short, I am interested in what’s going on on the page I’m reading. I am anticipating what is to come, in a coolly analytic way. Indeed, according to Sianne Ngai, as an aesthetic category, the “interesting” is necessarily accompanied by a “rational coolness.”[4] In addition, the interesting has vital relationships to the novel as a form (as well as to conceptual art). Citing Mikhail Epstein’s description of the interesting as a “measure of tension,” she writes, 

Always connected to the relatively small surprise of information or variation from an existing norm, the interesting marks a tension between the unknown and the and the already known and is generally bound up with a desire to know and document reality. (Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 5)

Though “Dancing in the Moonlight” is a short story, the imperative to document something deeper than mere reality, something beneath the surface of ordinary facts and figures, is a structuring force throughout Moshfegh’s oeuvre. And I posit that “the interesting” as a category for literary experience is made possible by this intensive documentation. When asked about her process in an interview for The Atlantic, Moshfegh says

I’m not one of those writers that sits there scratching my head being like, “What should I write next?” The thing calls to me, and when I get to it, I’m in ecstasy. When I’ve hit the vein, I feel immortal. There’s a lot of pain around it too, but I wouldn’t do it if I weren’t in ecstasy 10 percent of the time. I feel then as though I’ve discovered something, and honored it—that I’ve made it happen by being a conduit. I have faith in that ability to move beyond myself, and it’s made me strong and self-reliant. (emphasis mine)

It’s that faith that calls to me, that faith in how the documentation of something both inexplicable yet also indelible can provide a respite from the pain of being alive—of being perceived. In other words, the faith in reading certain works that allow me “to move beyond myself.”

But do I feel, right now, as I read the beginning of “Dancing in the Moonlight,” that I, like Moshfegh, am in that 10% of the time state of ecstasy, that postmodern replacement, perhaps, for grace? No. I feel interested, but not lost in a book. The distinction between “interested” and “lost” (or “immersed”) emerges, I believe, in my readerly self-awareness: this is the inherent modernism of Ngai’s theory, of “ugly feelings” as a subjective formation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic politics, the subjective formation that Moshfegh’s fiction is indebted.[5] Like the narrator’s semi-omniscient characterization of the woman at the flea market in “Dancing in the Moonlight,” I view my own body and sense of existence in a similarly detached-but-curious fashion. And frankly, it feels as good as anything could possibly feel right now. I kick my legs behind me, feeling the blood inside rush a little, singing in my ear. The sound of the body sounding, strangely, outside of myself. 

I hear J rustling around in the living room. The sound of a Batmobile. I keep reading, but stop dwelling, my eyes flitting across the next few pages. Once I get to the part where I left off last night, like clockwork: “Mama? Mama?” I fold the page down for a second time, crease on crease, a palimpsest of aborted absorptions. 

***

That evening, with J and his dad in the living room, I re-assume my position. Tummy down, legs kicking back and forth behind me, fan above me full blast, book in hands, face near ink. On this page, the narrator is describing another character, this one also a woman. Moshfegh writes,

Every time I saw Lacey, she’d gained five more pounds. She was turning into the kind of obese girl who does her hair like a forties pinup and wears bright red lipstick, a blue polka-dot dress with a white doily collar, colorful tattoos across her huge, smushed cleavage, as if these considerations would distract us from how fat she had become. In a few years she’d get her eggs frozen, I predicted correctly, and the rockabilly thing would disintegrate into Eileen Fisher tunics and lazy, kundalini yoga. (Moshfegh, “Dancing,” 229)

While reading this passage, I place my hand on my chest. I smile inside and a little on the outside, as quarantine has rendered my emotions to be always a little obvious whether I’m alone or with others, despite best efforts at decorum. I am wearing the weird doily-collar top my mom sent me for my birthday. I think this is a little funny, but still feel slightly queasy from the casual cruelty. The narrator goes on to describe a sexual experience with Lacey: “I got drunk and went back to her place, came to with my face buried in her back fat, about to consummate my desperation” (229).

I begin to notice that there is something Romantic about “the interesting.” If “the interesting” is about extreme documentation, then the Romantic takes it and turns it into obsession, or at the very least the anxiety of desperation. No longer merely observing tension, “the interesting” (or rather, the interested man, here) experiences and must catalog his own tension by relating to a complicated object, i.e. a woman with back fat. Regarding masculine subjectivity, and aesthetic theories of emotion, Ngai writes, “While Kierkegaard is careful to distinguish this anxiety from melancholia (the life of Don Giovanni, a vitalist to the core, ‘is not despair’), the agitated male subject seems to be a modern variant of the male melancholic, a figure with a much older cultural history. It could in fact be argued that the state of unease or agitation eventually codified as ‘anxiety’ gradually replaced melancholia as the intellectual’s signature sensibility (as earlier claimed by Richard Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy)” (Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 214).

Anxiety, when codified into narrative, becomes shame. Mere tension on its own, anxiety must enter a narrative context to become shame, a feeling grounded in relationality. In “Dancing in the Moonlight,” this shame occurs via the interpenetration of the documentarian “interesting” with the feminine object of excessive subjectivity. For it is not only that Lacey has back fat, but that she does not conduct herself properly as a person with back fat. She wears polka dots and is entirely too confident. 

I know exactly the kind of person Lacey represents. Upon writing this essay, I realized how the narrator’s contempt made me recognize my own embarrassment around this kind of person. I felt a little ashamed then. Interestingly, “shame” is not of particular concern in Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, as it “potentially ennobling or morally beatific” in ways that exceed the scope of the more “minor and generally unprestigious feelings” of her interests (Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 6). But, like the realization that sometimes reading a book by a popular writer can be engrossing in pleasurable ways—even for mothers—my particular shame in my feelings about this character’s depiction is not especially profound or grand. I feel only a little shame, as Lacey is not a real person, albeit with real counterparts and, perhaps, consequences for my own personal inventory of “aesthetic emotions,” per Ngai’s term. That being said, what are the feminist politics of Moshfegh’s inventory of aesthetic emotions? Upon the release of Moshfegh’s latest, Lapvona, the critic Andrea Long Chu, in one of her signature take-downs, critiques Moshfegh’s career-long perpetuation of misogyny, transphobia, and fatphobia via depictions of fat characters as aesthetically and thereby morally (again, that Romantic impulse!) repugnant. Chu is correct on this point. In this way, then, to return to Ngai’s revision of Kierkegaard, with my minor shame here, am I, then, subjectively speaking in the aesthetic encounter, Richard Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy? In other words, in my recognition of the narrator’s anxious “modern variant of the male melancholic,” via reading and enjoying the respite from maternal obligations by indulging in this character’s perspective, am I participating in “a modern variant of the male melancholic”? The answer to these questions, I believe, is that I am a mom reading a book, and it’s making me feel ambivalent, something that discourses of subjectivity and identification around modern motherhood is decidedly anxious about. And maybe I like that. Maybe I am locating pleasure—or something adjacent to it, more of an aesthetic experience of momentary respite from momness—in this dissonance between the narrator in “Dancing in the Moonlight,” perhaps in influence a descendent of Richard Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, and my regular, non-reading life. 

When I wrote this essay, I had tremendous anxiety over appearing like I do not like or love my son, or that I am not a good mother, or—worse—that I am solipsistic. But, in the act of reading about moral reprobates like Moshfegh’s characters, in my one little crevice of solitude scraped out of the ordinary emotional rigor of my daily life as a mother with a small child during Covid, I feel fine. I get to judge the narrator’s judgments, his shame, without the totalizing feeling of that shame, in its full impact. As someone who feels shame and guilt, in some form, approximately twice every fifteen minutes in my own daily life, this lofty feeling is a balm. 

It is not an earth-shattering insight to say that sometimes reading fiction—in literary form or otherwise—feels like experiencing other people’s life vicariously, and that to enjoy characters that are not real people can give insight into both real life as well as the beauty and complexity of narrative form. But to return to the Nancy quotation, if catastrophe is exposure, then maybe reading amid precarity, as I have done here, can remind us, via exposure, how it is not just the pleasures of reading stories that can make ordinary life fun or bearable. It is also that the act of reading, as an experience carved into, as it were, the backfat of ugly feelings structuring the daily life of caregiving amid disaster, can induce feelings of interest, a cool frame of documentary analysis that can be a welcome respite from the necessity of caring, and even love.