"Maybe you're thinking I should take everything my friend Lun-Yu tells me with a grain of salt. She also told me that day one of her favorite psychoanalytic theorists was Wilfred Bion. I'd never read Bion before, so after she left I read a bit about him, and I found online the complete text of a seminar he held in Paris in 1978. The beginning of this seminar is very interesting. At least it was to me. Bion says that he wants his listeners to imagine a scenario: they're seeing a new patient, a twenty-five-year-old man who comes in complaining of some dissatisfaction in his family life. Bion says he's not sure what family the man is referring to, and asks his age, which the man gives as forty-five. Bion is confused. He just said the man was twenty-five, and then he notices that the patient has wrinkles, and appears in his sixties. He asks his listeners to consider this confusing state of affairs and to determine whether they would, under the circumstances, take on such a patient.
He says the question is much like the question of what you would do if you walked into a bookstore, picked up a book, and read the scenario he just described. He asks you if you would continue reading this book. Then he says, imagine it's not a book, but a piece of music. Or a building you're in, and you see the way the light falls, you see the colors coming through the window. Do you want to think about the window some more?
I imagine these questions were somewhat perplexing to some of the participants in the seminar. At one point in the transcript, someone in the audience makes an "inaudible reference" to "psychotic experience." Bion calls that a very "cerebral" question, not a practical one to the analyst. He says that analysts shouldn't be blinded by labels like manic-depressive or schizophrenic. Rather, they should be asking themselves what kinds of artists they are and whether there's an interesting spark that occurs with a potential analysand that might lead to something productive in the consulting room or, as he puts it, the "atelier." Somebody asks what an analyst is supposed to do if he's not really the artistic type, and Bion says that if that's the case, then the person's in the wrong line of work. In fact, he says, he doesn't even really know what would be the right line of work, since a person needs to be an artist in everyday life.
The he throws out the term artist, which has obviously become meaningless. The point is, he tells them, that reducing things to "scientific" diagnoses or narrow definitions is really the death of things. "You will have to be able to have a chance of feeling that the interpretation you give is a beautiful one, or that you get a beautiful response from the patient. This aesthetic element of beauty makes a very difficult situation tolerable."
Obviously I loved that. I wrote Lun-Yu and told her about the seminar I'd read and how it had moved me. She said, "Oh, that's the 'bad' Bion, from his mystical phase. That's also the part I love best." Apparently sometimes he wasn't quite so wacky."
All you have to do is walk into a bar and have somebody start telling you the story of their life to realize that everybody, to some degree, is an unreliable narrator—especially of him or herself. I try very hard to be honest in my fiction, again not because I find that morally superior but because it interests me, what that means, to try to be honest in fiction.
Barbara Browning, in an interview with Rebecca Miller (The Believer, 2017)
What do you do when you receive spam email? Do you ignore it like the majority of the world, or do you choose to respond? One day, a character in Barbara Browning’s novel “The Gift” decided to do the latter.
Guest author Evan Bryson studied painting and writing in Indiana. He lives in Chicago and works in higher ed. Here he reflects on Barbara Browning’s The Gift published by Coffee House Press. …
My friend Emma is the lit editor for Third Coast Review, a website following Chicago-based culture. She solicited my response to a novel that I thought would be a joy to read! And sometimes it was. The below reproduces my notes and feints as I worked toward producing what became a fairly strident response for her section, which ultimately surprised me. I read what was published on the site to Daniel and he said, “Wow, it’s unmistakable that you hate the novel!” and while this didn’t perplex me, I thought, Oof, I don’t actually hate the novel, I just have opinions about its shortcomings. So the below is also, I guess, something of my softer, second consideration.
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I read Browning's first novels, I'm Trying to Reach You (2012) and The Correspondence Artist (2011), a few winters back, at a rare juncture of poverty and exhibitionism. I had no money, no standards, and I was tired of staying indoors grousing over very cheap meals. I volunteered for a community dance project having never done anything like that before—that is, aside from drunkenly dancing my ass off in bars. I thought it would be constructive to turn a thing I loved to do, but that nevertheless filled me with deepest shame (trust me, I really broke it off at weddings), into a more mindful, more healthful and more regimented activity. It would get me out of the house, I thought, and it was free. I would be a part of making art, which is usually prohibitively expensive, as anyone with a fine arts degree can tell you. For dance, for this dance, the choreographer requested only that we show up on time. I'm a freak about punctuality. The stars had aligned.
Browning is herself a dancer (and an academic, and of course a novelist) and the narrators in her novels are same. The performing body and its capacities as a connecting medium (shamed and celebrated), this is the great inquiry of her work. If I felt, in that first month of reading her books while also dancing for the scrappy little corps, that I was conversing with her ideas—augmenting thesis with praxis—then I also responded to the novels’ meta-inquiry, the nagging suspicion that dancing for the company increased my sense of disconnection and isolation; that I had waded, in fact, into embarrassment. I might love to shake my body, I might even have the intensity and ferocity of a really expressive dancer—but that doesn’t mean I actually contributed in a meaningful way to a successful artistic enterprise. Being a part of an artistic failure, besides, is its own kind of experience, albeit one we try to avoid.
Browning’s latest novel The Gift probes the narrator’s compulsion to create “inappropriate intimacies,” while working to define what those intimacies could possibly be. Some of this work is done through dance—articulating intimacy by bringing us into proximity with a body, with the body’s hands, the body’s nakedness and movement—and a lot of this work is done through failure: failing to arrive, failing to tell the truth, failing to appear. Are we foremost bound up in bodies? When we extend ourselves across mediums—social, textual, televisual—and when we breach boundaries of cultural and creative divides, is the effect additive (increased sensorium, expanded presence) or subtractive (do we just spread ourselves too thin). How is intimacy sustained, enhanced, or encountered at all via absence?
Browning only half sustains her inquiry “novelistically” (with characters and situations), relying instead on a more academic mode of glosses, summaries, interpretations and applications of post-structural theorists and other en vogue critical discourses. A character is rarely in love without also examining that “love” through a lens of affect, queer, disability, and/or political theory. Sexual acts go through the Lacanian ringer. Emails, reproduced, irritatingly, seemingly unedited, are examined and replied back to at length. (Having a JSTOR account on hand isn’t necessarily a prerequisite, but it can really help.) On Browning’s website, she calls her works “fictocriticism,” an uglier version, I suppose, then Lance Olsen’s “critifiction,” though the fussiness of these designations could be swapped out with “auto-fiction” or “metafiction” with minimal loss in comprehension of the novel’s interest in formal innovation and authorial exposure.
I’m an advocate of Browning’s work but I want to be careful to express my unremitting frustration with this novel. Her avatar, Barbara Andersen, guides the reader through a series of low-heat, low-friction performance art encounters, recalled in (admittedly) hazy detail. The opulence of the narrator’s apologies on behalf of her faulty memory feels like the extension of a crude olive branch from the author herself, apologizing to the “real” people and their “real” projects the book describes. Some of these details are a bit off! It’s very much graduate student winking at the professor in the middle of a dissertation, or perhaps the dissertation’s acknowledgements section. I used to format edit those; that was my stipend work as a graduate student; the impulse is touching. Reproducing that impulse in fiction is, I think, meant to be a selfless corrective against critical overreach: the narrator doesn’t want to totalize or co-opt someone else’s experience or someone else’s performance: this “liminality” is ethically less suspect but makes for ponderous, slack descriptions of what would be better served by brute assertion of detail. (I just looked up “liminality” and it’s a term used in anthropology. Wikipedia says: “In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete.” Browning would probably appreciate the idea that her sometimes fuzzy reenactments mean the readers must do the collaborative work of more fully imagining the novel’s happenings, the novel’s timeline, etc.)
Browning is adept at staging intellectuals in their milieus; she’s also acute in describing their off-hours, when they’re frustrated, alone, bouncing bad rent checks, and dithering away on deadlines. The Gift’s academic, in her off-hours, makes ukulele covers of sentimental pop songs, and begins a hiccupy romance with a musical savant in Germany. Whether you find yourself engaged by this part of the book may in part have to do with whether you’ve read Browning’s other novels, and whether you’re at all stimulated by a belated discussion of “the real” at a time when most any fourteen-year-old is versed on the personas we create online and the messy ways those personas betray our offline, “RL” bodies. It might also help if you love to dance or spend long hours avoiding your actual work (that is, the work your employer expects to compensate you for) (as I often do) watching YouTube videos of people dancing. Having a love for the mores of the academy and the scruples of graduate students and the particulars of cultural reportage also helps. Jennifer Doyles’ Hold It Against Me, a study of emotions and affect in in art (Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, James Luna), should figure but somehow does not.
Lauren Berlant crops up in Browning’s novels, and for this I read her essay “Affect Is the New Trauma” (wasn’t paywalled!), a discussion about “work” in the academy—a truly broad designation of activity that doesn’t necessarily look like “labor,” and that doesn’t necessarily describe a “career.” A painter sitting in his studio looking at a canvas is still “painting,” is my example. And professors, Berlant writes, describing her own procedures, “we are allowed to experiment and fail, to be wrong and revise, to get distracted, to not know what we’re doing while we’re doing it, to stop in the middle, to follow our instincts and hunches, not just building on established foundations. We are allowed to demand patience for the obscure, the experimental, the political, and the pedantic.” This is The Gift to a tee.
I would argue that the mediated self is a poor substitution for the living presence in all of Browning's works, not only especially this one. The German musician in The Gift, a mysterious figure who seems to drive the plot’s engine of desire, has a literal amputation—his leg above the knee—and a more figurative one, in his autism, which affects his ability to communicate and emote. He becomes a missed connection, and, if I’m reading the novel’s ending correctly, an ultimately abandoned one. Browning’s previous novel I’m Trying to Reach You said it right in the title: her characters are stymied by missed connection, by the shortcomings of most communiques, and then they’re heartbroken. You might send a stranger a quick ukulele cover, but it doesn’t mean that stranger will thank you.
