I once read that people who’ve had trauma to a particular part of the brain’s right hemisphere can develop a fixation on small, seemingly irrelevant objects. Walking into a room to do some task or other, they’ll get stuck obsessively staring at the door hinges. I don’t remember where I came across this fact—so much of what one reads these days slips into that great jumble of flotsam that drifts about the mind—but it occurred to me more than once while reading Claire-Louise Bennett’s books. Many passages begin in a straightforward way, with the setting of a scene and the promise of dramatic action. But then the story stalls, zeroes in on some incidental detail, and collapses into a mode of reflection that is circular and recursive. An early passage of her debut, Pond (2015), begins, “Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice.” The next four pages digress into aimless musings about a banana’s ideal state of ripeness, the best way to arrange almond flakes on a bowl of porridge, and the fact that oatcakes can also go nicely with coffee—so long as they’re the rough sort. This is before we’ve learned anything at all about the narrator whose consciousness will become the book’s subject and substance.
Bennett’s second book, Checkout 19 (2021), opens with an account, narrated in the collective “we,” of the experience of reading a book, a passage that begins as an encomium to the pleasures of literature but soon derails into a forensic analysis of the precise manner in which the eye travels across the words on the page:
When we open a book our eyes nearly always go over to the left page. That’s right—the left page, for reasons we have never previously reflected upon, has a much stronger pull on us than the right page. We always look down first of all at the right page. The right page first, that’s right. But the words on the right page always seem much too close. Too close to each other and too close to our face…. The words on the right seem far too eager, over-bearing, and yes somewhat ingratiating in fact, and very soon our rattled eyes leave the right page in order to seek refuge in the left.
The prose continues in this vein for several pages, considering how one must shift the book upward slightly after turning the page, and how it’s common to read the last sentences of the right side more hurriedly in anticipation of the turn. If Thomas Bernhard perfected, in his novels, the obsessive redundancy of human consciousness, Bennett captures this circularity at its most comically banal. The authorial voice that is supposed to be embarking on a story has gotten stuck, and the reader is stuck alongside her. We thought we were walking through a door, but instead our attention is continually returned to the construction of the door itself, reminded that we are reading a strange technology called a book.
That is, at any rate, what I take to be the purpose of the passage. As it happens, the first time I “read” Checkout 19, I was not reading at all. I’d downloaded the audiobook for a long drive across the Midwest, and as I left Chicago on the Dan Ryan Expressway, Bennett’s looping prose washed over me, invisibly and hypnotically, as I stared at a wide gray sky.
Bennett’s previous books, which sit somewhere in that generative no-man’s-land between novels and short story collections, are, to various degrees, invested in questions about literature, language, and reading. Pond, whose title is a nod to Thoreau’s Walden, details the quotidian life of an Englishwoman living alone in a cottage on the western coast of Ireland. The titular body of water has a sign next to it reading simply “Pond,” and the book was written, Bennett has said, during a period when she was “very fed up with semiotics and this notion that everything is a symbol or a sign.” It’s a problem that is not so easy to escape. The “Pond” marker is itself a sign in both senses of the word, emblematic, as the narrator puts it, of the “idiotic overlay of literal designations” that prevent us from moving about the world “in deep and direct accordance with things.” Checkout 19 is a coming-of-age story told through encounters with literature. It’s a book that captures the thrills of reading as a young person, when the written word is experienced as pure possibility, a state of prelapsarian innocence before language hardens into a collection of “literal designations” and familiar linguistic categories.
Bennett’s latest, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, continues to explore these questions, this time through the problems of love, relationships, and desire. In the opening scene the narrator, a writer, arrives at a restaurant carrying a copy of her new book to give to her lover, Xavier, a much older man who was once a jet-setting private banker and is now living in a somewhat more modest style. He has periodically spent time in Mallorca, smoking weed and writing a memoir about his recollections of British high society in the 1960s and 1970s. Their relationship, which has been going on for nearly a decade, is romantic but minimally sexual, and has been fizzling out for some time, in part thanks to his age (he now uses a wheelchair and wears dentures). When he asks the narrator for a kiss, she refuses him. “I seem old to you?” he asks, to which she replies, “Yes…you are old, darling.” When she gives him her book, he comments on her author photo (“Cute little ears”). The reader is not privy to the subject of the book, or its genre, or its relationship to the narrator’s life, but a few days later Xavier emails her to say that he has read it and found it to be “some sort of HELL.” They do not speak again for several months.
During this mutual silence, the narrator leaves her apartment in the city and moves to the Irish countryside to live in a rented woodshed. For a long time she does not tell Xavier that she has left London and relishes the thought that he doesn’t know where she is. She goes on long hikes in the mountains and swims with friends in the sea. Most chapters are rendered in a diaristic present tense and begin with idle musings and trivial anxieties. The narrator recalls dreams she had the night before and worries about saved voicemails that have mysteriously disappeared. She documents the practical details of her life, which involve a lot of food and flowers and tend to evoke whatever the Irish version of hygge is: picking up port wine and cherries for a duck sauce. Drinking hot brandy after a swim in the sea. Risotto with mushrooms and hazelnuts. A gift of white lilies and red dinner candles.
Like a lot of prose that falls loosely under the heading of autofiction and that documents the life of a writer while they are doing everything except writing, the novel feels vaguely apophatic, as though we were seeing only the luminous rim of a light source that is otherwise obscured. We never learn more about the “HELL” that Xavier perceived in her book, nor anything at all about its contents. And while the narrator notes that “I haven’t written so much in eons,” there are no clues as to what she is working on.
This is, in fact, a recurring feature of the novel, which returns again and again to texts that are absent in one way or another: text messages and voicemails that remain unread or misplaced, letters that are lost in the mail. The narrator writes emails that she never sends, or composes them in her head without typing them out. One day while going through some old letters, she finds a copy of Xavier’s memoir (or what he calls his “bio”), which he asked her to read years ago, and which she never finished. (She told him that she’d lost it, embarrassed by some intimate details he’d included about their relationship.)
On another day she receives an email from her first publisher with a scanned letter from her A-level English teacher, who didn’t know how else to reach her. The teacher, Terence Stone, recently discovered that she’s become a writer, and he has some nice things to say about her books. The narrator replies, and they strike up an email correspondence, discussing Andrew Marvell and Wide Sargasso Sea, and reminiscing about other students and teachers, including a philosophy teacher named Robert Turner. “I had some dealings with him,” the narrator writes cryptically in one of her emails. “You probably know that.”
Later, she realizes that the letter forwarded to her by her first publisher was actually the copy of a letter Stone had written weeks earlier and sent to her second publisher. After realizing that this first letter might have been lost, he’d used a photo of the original to transcribe it word for word, and sent it to her first publisher. The narrator, who now possesses both letters (the first was eventually forwarded), reads them side by side—“I am well-practiced at comparing near identical versions of a text,” she notes—and finds that Stone had made a virtually perfect copy of the original, subtracting nothing and limiting his additions to two exclamation marks. “Imagine writing something out again and not being able to alter it,” the narrator marvels. “Not a single word!”
“A letter always arrives at its destination,” Lacan said in a 1955 lecture included in his Écrits. The aphorism occurs in his discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter,” which revolves around a letter that is stolen and replaced with another without anyone reading it. For Lacan, the letter is a “pure signifier,” an object that is important not for its content but for its structural part in the story, which compels characters to repeat the same actions in scenes that mirror each other.
One senses that any given text in Big Kiss, Bye-Bye (and perhaps even the text of the novel itself) is more important structurally and formally than it is on its face. There’s something compulsive and dreamlike about the novel’s language, which is often deliberately redundant. Scenes and anecdotes recur across the novel—the memory of a former lover who spills coffee all over the bedcovers; her most recent encounter in a cemetery with Robert Turner, the philosophy teacher—but fail to become clearer through repetition. At times, the prose recalls not so much Bernhard or Gertrude Stein but a certain type of buggy LLM output known as repetition degeneration (sometimes called the “repeat curse”), in which the model gets stuck in self-reinforcing loops. (When asked to name as many books as possible, the LLM might answer “For example, Pride and Prejudice, written by Jane Austen, and The Great Gatsby for example, Pride and Prejudice, written by Jane Austen, and The Great Gatsby for example, Pride and Prejudice, written by Jane Austen, and the Great Gatsby…”) At one point the narrator asks herself why she’s sustaining the correspondence with Stone, projecting herself into the future: “And he will write back again. He will write back and I’ll write back and he’ll write back, and for how long will that go on for exactly, and why?”
The most prominent recurring loop in the narrator’s consciousness is her relationship with Xavier, which she spends a lot of time reflecting on during her early weeks in the countryside. Many of the conversations she recalls are so circular that they evoke domestic banter as pure form, more than any substantive communication. One chapter begins, without any establishing context:
“It’s as if several layers of skin have been removed,” I said. “That sounds like shingles,” he said. “That’s not how I meant it,” I said, “I was speaking metaphorically.” I don’t understand,” he said, “can’t you put it another way?” “Another way?” I said. “Yes,” he said, “I want to be able to understand.” “Well,” I said, that’s very considerate, but unnecessary—it won’t endure.” “Nevertheless,” he said. “Besides, it might come back.” “I’m sure it will,” I said.
Toward the end of this recalled scene, the narrator becomes fed up with Xavier’s questioning and confesses that she doesn’t want to describe what she’s feeling. “Some things are resistant to words maybe,” she tells him, “and when you start trying to apply them you end up with something else, another thing—a theory, I suppose.”
The narrator’s suspicious attitude toward language is most acute when she is confronted with the pressures of social decorum. While writing a letter to Stone, she realizes that it’s impossible to say anything direct or true because the whole tone of their correspondence is rooted in conventional pleasantries: “Polite, politus, polished. Smooth it all away, yes. Expunged. What the corps d’elite really care about is keeping things exactly as they are, because the way things are is jolly nice, thank you very much, it suits them very well.” She has the same beef with Christmas, a holiday that’s “ridiculous” because it is the same every year: “The same decorations, the same clothes, the same songs, the same food, the same sentiments…. It’s tedious and asinine yet everyone is trapped in it because nobody wants to let anyone else down.”
She eventually breaks the silence with Xavier, writing him a short email to say that she moved away a few months ago. She wants to remain friends with him and believes, even, that it is her “divine appointment” to be with him when he dies. But Xavier rebuffs her attempts to carry on a more platonic version of their relationship. “I will not exchange my LOVE for friendship,” he writes back. She starts to compose a reply, beginning with the sentence “It seems to me that you don’t know the first thing about love.” But then she stops, realizing that this is something she’s written to him countless times before. Love, in fact—and the effort to define or categorize it—was a recurring theme in their arguments over the years. She recalls some common refrains: “You have no idea what it means to love someone!” “Love asks nothing!” “I can’t believe we’re going through all this again!” But they do keep going through all that, again and again. Nowhere is the superfluousness of language so blatant as in a romantic relationship, where each quarrel echoes and recapitulates disagreements that have occurred in the past. In the end, she doesn’t finish the reply. “I deemed the email I had begun to write utterly pointless,” she reflects. “It said nothing new.”
In a 2016 interview with The Paris Review Bennett, whose novels capture the experience of consciousness more acutely than practically any other contemporary fiction, expressed skepticism about identifying too closely with her own mental activity. So much of what happens in the mind is repetitive, she said: “Habit creeps into thought and cuts off other more generative possibilities. Patterns, connections, associations, they occur quite naturally, don’t they?” If the recurrent scenes and images are occasionally frustrating, it’s because they reproduce, with a fidelity that is nearly intolerable, the well-worn circuits of the mind’s engine.
Writing can be a way out of this circularity: to put something down on paper is to transform the endless mental churn into a narrative that is linear and progressive. But Bennett is working within a strain of modernism that eschews order and clarity in favor of capturing the perpetually unfinished business of thinking, which is constantly undermining, undoing, and subverting its own conclusions. She has said that she agrees with Samuel Beckett’s assertion that the task of the artist is to “find a form that accommodates the mess,” an arguably self-defeating endeavor given that the very act of writing makes the fluidity of thought final and static. Once you put an experience into language, you end up with “another thing,” as the narrator of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye puts it.
The novel is, to a great extent, about this central paradox of language, its ability to simultaneously deepen and cheapen the immediacy of experience. The narrator recalls the magical power that certain words and phrases held for her as a young person. Even something as ordinary as the colloquialism “he has a chip on his shoulder” occasions, for the child who is encountering it for the first time, “little flares going off inside of you, briefly illuminating that dark innermost space, plethoric and phantasmal, that you don’t know very much about but sometimes feel yourself sinking into.”
When the novel eventually arrives at an extended memory of the narrator’s encounter in the cemetery with Robert Turner, the philosophy teacher she had “dealings with” as a young person and whom she calls her “first love,” the story takes an unexpected turn. The passage is narrated in the first-person plural (the voice that Bennett uses to depict the collective consciousness that exists before “female individuation,” as she puts it in Pond). At that point of our life, she notes of Turner, we did not know “what he was really like. Because obviously we were too young then to know what he was really like. Only now could we know. We were grown up now and knew how to know what people were like.”
The ability to put people into categories can be a protective measure, especially when the classification designates men with questionable intentions. But rather than presenting her “dealings” with Turner through the familiar lens of trauma and betrayal, the narrator expresses a longing to return to the mystery of unknowing, the madness of love, the curiosity about people that exists only when “we are at our most alert and sensitive and independent,” and when stories and love songs still possessed the capacity to deepen those feelings, giving them “dimension and tangibility and direction and new words.”
The scene reminded me of a passage in Pond, where the narrator recalls an erotic correspondence with a man. The hundreds of “lustful emails” they wrote to each other were so thrilling because the narrator had never before attempted that kind of writing. After deleting these messages, she wishes she’d kept them. “I won’t be able to write emails like that again you see,” she observes.
That’s to say I won’t be able to write emails like that for the first time again. And that really was what made them so exciting—using language in a way I’d not used it before, to transcribe such an intimate area of my being that I’d never before attempted to linguistically lay bare.
The relationship between the narrator of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye and Xavier similarly uses the erotic as a metaphor for the new and fleeting thrills of language, which inevitably lessen as we grow older, just as love ages and dims over time. Recalling her early days with Xavier, the narrator notes, “He said many other things during our apparently chaste rendezvous, impassioned admissions that I assumed I’d cherish forever, but in fact their poignancy soon faded.”
There are moments when the novel seems to be documenting the end of a love affair with language, a wistful and ambivalent good-bye to a medium that can no longer enchant in the way it once did. We live in a world that is entirely saturated with writing—with emails, text messages, the great ocean of language on the Internet, the inexhaustible machine-generated text that appears on the screen faster than the eye can consume it. The notion that we are moving into a postliterate era is not unrelated to this sense of overabundance. When the written word is cheap and widely available, it becomes harder than ever to see it as meaningful, like a currency that is devalued by inflation. Musing about the mystery of why she writes, the narrator of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye suddenly interjects: “Pfennig. Pfennig. Pfennig. They have gone now and the word has gone now. Can’t there be a new thing we call ‘pfennig’?” What would it mean to rename writing as “pfennig”? It’s a sly proposition, conveying the fear that language is a low-denomination coin that has fallen out of use—while also suggesting the possibility that it might be renewed.
In 2001 the electronic musician William Basinski found in his New York City loft a bunch of magnetic tapes that contained ambient “found” sounds he’d recorded in the 1980s. In the process of digitizing them, Basinski discovered that the tapes had been damaged. Rather than trying to restore them, he played them for extended periods, allowing them to deteriorate even more, which resulted in a series of short, haunting loops of sound, some with horns and strings, others featuring a metallic drone, like music heard through a thick wall or in a dream. The project, which was finished shortly before September 11 and which Basinski listened to as the Twin Towers collapsed, was released the next year as The Disintegration Loops.
Marshall McLuhan once argued that new media are “at first disguised as degradations of older media.” Each new technological medium is built on the content of the medium it has replaced. Film drew on the conventions of the novel and the theater. TV was built on the conventions of film. “The new form swallows, as it were, an older form,” he argues in his 1964 essay “New Media and the Arts,” an observation that holds up remarkably well six decades later. (The Internet has devoured TV; large language models have ingested the Internet.) McLuhan’s point was not just about technological mediums but about artistic forms as well. Hieronymus Bosch used the new rules of pictorial perspective as a container for medieval icons, just as Marlowe and Shakespeare used blank verse to swallow the medieval chronicle.
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is less a novel than a technology that has swallowed the novel, a looping record of a genre that is disintegrating before our eyes. Its narrator speaks to us as a free-floating consciousness that has consumed countless scraps of books and letters, emails and lectures, and is trying to discover new wineskins for old wine. In the midst of her hypnotic prose, one occasionally hears echoes of other novels (“I would prefer to go into the shop and choose the flowers myself”) or literary remnants that have slipped off the page of one book and found themselves in another. When the narrator reads the passage in Huysman’s The Damned where Monsieur Durtal receives a letter from Madame Chantelouve written in “pale myrtle green ink,” she underlines it in a green ink of her own, “one of a slightly more robust hue.”
The narrator and Terence Stone have developed a habit of ending their emails to each other with literary allusions to greenness. It’s yet another novelty that has settled into the roteness of convention. At one point, eager to shake herself out of this pattern, the narrator observes, in a letter to him, that green is the color of death and decay as well as of new life:
Green is life is poison is sickness is peace is envy is fast is angelica is innocence is delirium is money is grass is chlorine is health is vomit is absinthe is tarnish is labyrinth is melancholy is nature is kryptonite is moss is gangrene is phantasmagoric is deceit is lush is infection is solitude is beginning is asparagus is putridness is secret is decay is spreading is tropical is nausea is mould is freshness is vitality is snot is lagoon is guilt is enchantment is mildew is vile is rampant is the colour of my ink yes, the colour of my ink, change, yes, instability, yes, life, life, yes, death, yes. Death. And the days, I write the days in green, and the things I need, the things I need—I write those in green too.
It’s possible to read this passage as a dead end: those who are a tad too literate, who have invested themselves too thoroughly in the notion that everything is a sign, eventually find that every object and idea, including the color of newness itself, cancels itself out with its opposite. The color comes to symbolize so much that it becomes meaningless. But there’s also something vigorous, nearly explosive, about this rush of language, as though it were a last-ditch effort to break through the impasse, driven by the enduring hope that writing might touch that totality of generative possibility that lies beyond language and can never fully be captured by it.
It’s easy to dismiss Bennett’s novels as language games that are formally clever but too conceptual to be enjoyed in any immediate, visceral sense. But after any extended immersion in her books, one feels bored with the plodding linearity of other novels, with their dutiful backstory and studied beats of narrative “reflection,” and is eager to return to that raw consciousness of Bennett’s narrators, who circle their subjects restlessly in the hope of stumbling on the unexpected. The signature tic of Bennett’s writing is a phrase, often following an observation, “Yes, that’s right.” It’s an expression that points backwards, to what was already said, but which has the effect of making the text feel spontaneously alive, as though the narrator were discovering what she is trying to say in the act of writing it, a perpetual becoming.