I Write the Days in Green

Weirdness suffuses the fiction of Claire-Louise Bennett. Her debut, Pond, was a collection of interconnected passages on subjects like the proper time to eat porridge. In Bennett’s follow-up, a free-associative Künstlerroman titled Checkout 19, the narrator thinks of the First World War while bleeding through her knickers in a pristine school bathroom. In her latest novel, Bennett has ventured inward and outward, examining self-discovery and human connection in a time of upheaval.

Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye takes the form of undated journal entries by a woman who recounts her past while living in a woodshed. The novel avoids particulars; we never learn the name, age, or location of our narrator (where, exactly, are those “acres and acres of dubious green”?). Instead, the past comes to us as disjointed recollections. Bennett intersperses the narrator’s ruminations on her life after moving to the country with her thoughts about her ex, the elderly and affluent Xavier. Moments from that relationship, occasionally tender but usually unsatisfying or aggravating, are braided with the narrator’s drafts for an email exchange with her former A-levels teacher Terence Stone. These musings appear alongside surreal dreams, abstract third-person reminiscences, and even a conference presentation analyzing Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. Passages reinforce and juxtapose each other: a dream affects her retelling of a scene with Xavier, or a quarrel with him spills over into her thoughts while writing an email to Terence.

The haphazard journal reflects the narrator’s self-conception: she refuses to view her life as a coherent and meaningful story. It’s not for lack of trying; after the narrator describes how she was “mad about” her A-levels philosophy teacher Robert Turner, she says that “We read all the stories and listened to all the songs and thus our madness was given dimension. Dimension and tangibility and direction and new words.” And read all the stories she has. In Bennett’s novel, we are never very far from books: a poem by Andrew Marvell, a battered copy of Wide Sargasso Sea, Hildegard of Bingen, J.K. Huysmans, Eric Stenbock. There’s a little riff on Mrs. Dalloway: when Xavier’s bouquets begin to annoy her, the narrator decides to “choose the flowers myself.” An even smaller nod to Joyce; after all, can the word “commodious” ever be used without conjuring his presence? While these stories provide the narrator’s emotions with expression and a vocabulary, narratives do not structure her self-understanding. She characterizes the phrase “a chapter of my life is coming to an end” as “trite” and “vapid drivel” and questions Xavier’s attempt to spin his high-society past into a “bio” for a movie. The novel evades progression by constantly flashing backwards and forwards, with the first sentence announcing this view: “Two weeks from now I won’t be living here anymore. I’ll be in the woodshed in L-.” The prepositional phrase lacks a comma; through the elision, an anticipation slides into the existing reality unimpeded. Past, present, and future merge into a breathless simultaneity. Musing on her journals, the narrator asks “Are they the past? No, not entirely. I am made of what they contain and I am living now. I am here. I am still here.” With these meditations, the self becomes a collection of events that transcend time.

The narrator’s metaphysical stance resembles Galen Strawson’s idea of “The Unstoried Life.” In the essay, Strawson draws on Marcel Proust, Fernando Pessoa, and Virginia Woolf and philosophers like Emerson and Nietzsche to contradict the dominant philosophical and psychological view that we should frame our lives as stories. For “nonnarratives” like Strawson, the past is a series of fragments that do not come together into an ordered whole. In the following essay “Two Years’ Time,” Strawson zig-zags through his youth during the 60s: dabbling in Sufism, trying out as a bassist for Henry Cow, and naturally, crossing the Iran-Turkey border in a rickety Bulgarian truck shortly after the Apollo-11 launch. The essay’s episodic structure would be praised by Bennett, who has called narrative a “ghastly, bedeviling, rudder.” The novel’s narrator also jettisons interpretation. While swimming with a friend, she retells a dream about crossing between two rooms and encountering a scorpion. She decides to “eliminate” the immobile creature, crushing it with a book. Only pages after Bennett dangles the dream in front of the reader (it’s too easy: the scorpion equals Xavier, the book the author's writings), the narrator nonchalantly defuses the analysis by saying that it had already occurred to her and that maybe there is nothing to it, since she often uses her copy of A Very Short Introduction to Freud to swat flies. A cigar is just a cigar.

Language displaces narrative as the means of self-knowledge. While reminiscing on a childhood fascination with idioms, the narrator recalls how some words sparked “little flares going off inside of you, briefly illuminating that dark innermost space, plethoric and phantasmal.” In this novel, words can be held onto, like possessions; after the narrator uses the phrase “some dealings” to describe her philosophy teacher Robert Turner’s improper relationship with her, the word recurs, echoing within her consciousness. Or they can be carefully staged, like dioramas, such as when the narrator evokes how she feels on her period, stating that “My capacity for convention, limited in any case, is fairly etiolated at such times. I am impulsive. I am acute. I see things aslant.” Here we see free indirect discourse running in reverse, as the first-person voice of the journal rehearses an impersonal, writerly register. At times, this verges on parody. When the narrator lies about not having a title for her book after Xavier recommends one, she declares, “I certainly wasn’t going to proffer my idea while he was so proudly brandishing his own superlative suggestion.” Here, the goblet of Bennett’s language fills to the brim, the meniscus coyly wobbling with diction. But occasionally, it spills over. In an agitated email to Terence Stone, the narrator’s language collapses into a linguistic anarchy by equation: “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…” She recovers towards the end, stating that green “... 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.” But the cup has run over; the illusion of control has dissolved.

In Orlando, Virginia Woolf defines the most important part of prose style as “the natural run of the voice,” a quality “born of the air” that “breaks like a wave on the furniture.” In this novel, there’s certainly a lot less furniture. But like a wave it is: Bennett’s idiosyncratic and multifarious prose doubles back on itself through repetitions, gathering force until it surges paratactically with a glorious weirdness. While riding the train, the narrator reflects on her email exchange with Terence Stone. After lengthy digressions on the sinister plot of J.K. Huysman’s The Damned and the recurring theme of green in their emails, the narrator launches into excursus:

“Terence Stone upped the ante in his next email by referring to Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’, the sixth stanza of which concludes with the line ‘Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade,’ a line I remembered well, and which, seeing it again, sent me into a pastoral reverie, there in the woodshed, and at the bosky heart of this veritable oasis thrummed ‘the greening power of God’, viriditas itself, an enlivening yet concurrently soothing notion that I fortuitously came across in the writings of Hildegard von Bingen during the early days of the pandemic and which I did consider referring to in my follow up email to Terence Stone.”

Bennett’s assortment of techniques is on display: colloquialism (“upped the ante”), literary reference, memory, free association, obscure vocabulary, rhythmic modulation, affectation (“an enlivening yet concurrently soothing notion”), and clarification (“which I did consider referring to”). The sentence ends in the mundane by cycling back to its beginning. Bennett chains together passages like these, forming unbroken swaths of prose, black rectangles of ink that resemble pages from Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy. However, the narrator’s free-flowing monologue belies an anxiety to be heard. Phrases like “perhaps,” “of course,” and “in fact” perforate the narration, with Bennett citing Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “dialogism” as an influence in interviews. In these minute acts of extension, the self is established through an address to the other.

And yet, the narrator rarely connects with the men in her life. Stilted conversations, unsatisfying bouquets, and fitful email exchanges never soothe her yearning for the presence of others. In a particularly striking conversation with Xavier, the narrator tells him about when an ex-boyfriend broke into her home. He offers patronizing support and advice as she details the incident, and after she describes escaping the house in her dressing gown, he says, “I bet you looked cute.” Through exchanges like these, Bennett shows how men often fundamentally misunderstand women. These gender dynamics, however, are part of something metaphysical. Bennett signals this in the epigraph, a quote from The Damned in which Mademoiselle Chantelouve declares, “No, you cannot hear the thousand conversations with which my soul pesters you.” The desire for communion runs up against a fundamental solipsism and becomes a frenetic one-sided dialogue. This is hinted at early in the novel, when Xavier suggests that the narrator’s book should be titled A Singular Woman. His title begins to seem unintentionally apt; she is only one person and feels intensely aware of that oneness.

Against this solitude, however, runs a current coursing through the novel: a mysticism that hovers around the erotic. In a bravura passage recounting a sexual encounter with Robert Turner, the narrator is astonished by his lust, describing it as “the shrouded depths of that hunger and the variegated history of that hunger and the chthonic force of that hunger.” Later, when she commands Xavier to kiss her, she describes his tongue as an “ancient cold thing” and her back as “incalescent and primordial.” Here, Bennett attempts to get beyond mere appearances, to “sink down a bit” under the “surface of things” as the narrator says. If only for a brief moment, these physical encounters dissolve misunderstanding and time itself. In the final pages of the novel, she steps outside of herself, using the third-person to retell a moment between herself and Xavier. Succumbing to the overwhelming nature of human touch and connection before their first kiss, she says “There is so much drama in the room suddenly. She is not her, she is the situation, and the situation pulls things from her that exceed her direct experience and personally gained understanding. She is immaterial. She is all the ages.” As Xavier approaches, Bennett’s prose refuses the specific, only insisting that "Something is going on. Something is really going on and it is not what she foresaw…” The passage ends by nestling into the epiphanic, with the narrator repeating how “We are in the dark. We are together in the dark. He is very strong in this place. I want it to go on and on. I want to stay here. The dark, the dark.”

In her essay “Modern Fiction,” Woolf declared that “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” At times, Bennett’s luminous halo threatens to blind us. It’s difficult to interpret Big Kiss, Bye-Bye; the novel actively resists the shaping of its events into a tidy narrative. Any common reader of the novel, however, is struck by the desire to connect with others despite everything, by the beauty and variation of the language, by the immediacy of the physical world and the possibility that something lies underneath it. Something that, perhaps, can be glimpsed in the collection of moments that is this unstoried life.