This week I read an essay by Christopher Noël titled “Keeping Open the Wounds of Possibility: The Marvelous, the Uncanny, and the Fantastic in Fiction.” It was an approachable, hands-on review of ideas from the Russian Formalists (especially defamiliarization) and Wolfgang Iser (especially the reader and author co-creating the text). But I liked it most for helping me clarify some of my intentions with writing.
For one, I realized it’s more powerful to leave it up to the reader to decide whether or not a character is hallucinating or actually talking with god or is simply a delusional narcissist. I think this is reflective of how it feels when we have surreal experiences or encounter those who claim such experiences. But more importantly for my own writing projects, it also reflects the ways people targeted by abusers must unhinge themselves from reality, just a little, to survive the other person’s madness.
Better yet, not explaining too much puts the reader into the unsettling and inescapable position we find ourselves in when we hear stories of abuse or atrocities: Am I going to choose to believe the perpetrator or the victim, and can I even tell the difference?
I’ve noticed that hearing about abuse, many people react as if they are being asked to determine whether they’re encountering a tale of the marvelous (something horrific that really happened) or the uncanny (something horrific that originated in the victim’s mind). Too many people choose to believe things are “made-up” rather than confront the horrors that are commonplace. So why not dig into that a little? Why not invite readers, in the space of fiction, to confront their own preference to believe the most comfortable perspective, regardless of what is true?
I think also that few things can defamiliarize your own life and make you as unsure of reality as child abuse can. You are told everywhere by well-meaning but foolish people that parents love their children—but your parents beat you, so is this love, or are they not your parents? You are told at school or church or just by randos in a grocery store that you are a wonderful, special, sweet child, and then you go home and are told you are monstrous and misshapen and unlovable and undeserving of the roof over your head, that anything less than constant cheerful obedience is proof of your inherent evil and will lead to homelessness or violence. If you cry, your tears are fake. If you plead for mercy, you are manipulative. If you insist you’re telling the truth, you’re lying. So what is true?
Child abuse is so disorienting that you begin to wonder if reality even exists at all, or if there are parallel realities. Adults, you learn much too young, have a special resistance to the truth, what Hannah Arendt described as “the simple resistance ever to imagine what another person is experiencing.” If it’s a reality they dislike, they simply invent another one. You become a tree falling in a forest then, and people hear different things as you fall—based on whatever they have decided you are.
You are a child, though, and have no choice. To be a child is to exist in a state of powerlessness. Still, you must survive, and perspectivism isn’t really practical, so you must distinguish between all the different realities to find the one that is true. You have to invent an outside observer. Someone who watches through windows and sees the truth and tells it to you. Someone utterly objective, independent, clear-eyed. Basically, you invent God. And God watches and listens and considers and decides: This is bullshit, God says. You’re just a kid. I don’t know who these people think they are, but they created this shitshow themselves.
It’s such a weight off your mind, hearing that. You feel blessed. More so than you did at your own baptism, which you barely remember aside from the tepid bathwater and the heavy white gown that pulled you down along with the man’s thick forearm, and the pink Cinderella watch your grandparents gave you, trying to show that they supported all this religious nonsense. But this—this is different. This is really God speaking to you, and you feel relieved. Reborn.
It’s not your fault. Isn’t that what He said? None of it is your fucking fault.
You are free.
You are free.
You are free.
***
Featured Photo by James Cheney
The Trailer Park MFA 