On Jen Craig and Wall — Gus O’Connor

Grief tends, in large enough doses, to obliterate its host. Jesus weeps, wilted and wordless; Cyparissus (after killing his stag) turns into a silent, mourning tree; Toni Morrison’s Hagar dies of grief in the empty endless space between paragraphs, after being told to “hush.” Grief refuses form, refuses representation. Yet all too often grief and trauma become a sorry stand-in for the full story, or else false connective tissue for our social relations. In our fiction and our lives, we allow grief to become a legible totality of the self. One trauma bonds, or trauma dumps. Novelists write trauma plots. Researchers attempt to predict suicide. We bang our heads against the wall. 

So it is refreshing and exciting to read the work of Jen Craig, who critiques exactly this reductive tendency to construct a life, or a fiction, out of simplistic collections of grief. Craig’s novels follow artists who sift through their trauma, believing they will find themselves there. To “solve” the grief-laden problems of their lives, they build architectures of hypotheticals, always-in-the-future plans. But then the architectures crumble—their failures are baked into the material itself. Craig brings this folly pursuit to its illogical conclusion through her formally astonishing prose. Her novels are at once obsessive attempts to give a full account of grief-laden lives, and a demonstration of the impossibility, the ridiculousness, even, of such a pursuit. On its final sounding, Craig’s work becomes a forceful argument for what art can and cannot do.

Nowhere is this more true than in Craig’s most recent novel, Wall, a work which arrives as the apotheosis of her singular style and chosen subject matter. We follow an eponymous artist-narrator, Jen, who returns to her recently dead father’s house in Australia with plans to turn its contents into an artistic, architectural rendering of Jen’s life and grief. Years before her return, Jen had left her home country to escape a “tangle” of familial trauma, jealousies, and resentments—her violently encroaching parents, her father’s hoarding, her history of anorexia, her complicated friendships with fellow art school students. In London, Jen builds a new life for herself: she makes new friends, finds a long-term romantic partner, establishes a successful artistic career. But when her father dies (her mother was already), Jen must return home, where there’s only the stuff left over, the “only apparently lifeless” leavings of her parents and herself and her brother and her sister. In other words, returning home means a forced encounter with “the full textured spread” of everything Jen had run from. Jen’s only way to reckon with such an impossible task is to produce an even more impossible task out of it, one she believes is at least on her own terms: to construct a material story of her life, “a vast and meticulous installation in the style of that famous artist Song Dong.” The novel we read is a letter Jen has written to her partner, Teun, in the aftermath of her failure to realize this artistic project. And yet even in the wake of that failure to build, this novel—perhaps stubbornly, perhaps insistently, or even necessarily—is titled Wall.

Jen Craig, author, is as obsessed with the details of her writing as Jen Craig, character, is with her father’s objects. This obsession is fundamentally methodological; it is concerned with construction and the possibility of building a “meticulous installation” of life. Craig-the-Author’s methodology of writing is painstakingly airtight. Every metaphor, punctuation mark, and object speaks to each other. The novel's title, too, is a one-word blueprint for the story itself. Wall  contains no dialogue, no real beginning, nor middle, nor end. No simple structures to explain away a character. Instead, Craig constructs a wall, which is also a labyrinth: a place formed with inextricable windings, closed entrances, dark linguistic corridors. Jen-the-Narrator, inextricably bound to Craig-the-Author, is the labyrinth’s architect, the labyrinth’s captive, and the captive’s savior. She loses herself in a maze of her own creation, following the line of string at her feet, both approaching and avoiding its center, that place she has predestined herself to meet her minotaur of grief. For the course of the novel, however, this center is unreachable. The writer-narrator searches for it, leads the reader down this way and that. Neither Jen nor the reader ever arrive; nor were we meant to. (The novel shares its title with a separate artistic project the protagonist endlessly wishes for and yet never makes.) There is no sudden confession, no cheap flashback, no aha! moment. The novel resists formally the very thing Jen, the narrator, is trying to achieve: explain herself, and her grief, fully. 

Central to this attempted explanation—to Jen’s artistic plans for her father’s house, and for the novel as a whole—is the Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong (宋冬) and his most celebrated work: Waste Not (物尽其用). It is a 2005 piece made in collaboration with the artist’s mother, itself an obsessively curated exhibit of Song Dong’s familial belongings in the wake of his father’s death. What’s meaningful about Waste Not’s methodology is that it sees architecture as necessarily relational. Waste Not is a physical arrangement, installed in a set location; the only way to engage with the exhibit is to walk, literally, through its material structure. Waste Not’s architecture is a manifestation of the relational. More precisely, Song Dong builds three kinds of relationships—people to people, people to objects, and objects to objects. These three relational bones (walls, perhaps) form the literal and figurative materials of his re-configured house. He builds a collaborative relationship between two people—Song Dong and his mother, the artist and the “ordinary person”—who build their house together. He builds a collaborative relationship between the house and the public: the family’s private, personal objects become a collaborative, public home. (This home tells the story of an entire generation of people who lived through the Cultural Revolution. In the exhibition’s debut, many commented to Song Dong and his mother that this was their home, as well, that they used the same soap, the same cooking oil, the same medicines.) Finally, he builds a relationship between objects, placed carefully next to one another, which tells an inter-generational cultural history—from Song Dong’s grandmother’s shoes, which once held her small, bounded feet, to his niece’s newest red sneakers. 

The stratification of these three relationships in Waste Not allows Song Dong to locate that more intangible one: the human relationship to grief.  In order for Waste Not to have come into being—in order for its objects to have been curated and made into a new house—Song Dong and his mother needed to leave the old one. They needed to release their grip on its material contents. They needed to allow the meaning of these left-over objects to shift: for the stuff to remain while the grief had gone. And so the completed installation, Waste Note, becomes a testimony to Song Dong’s completed cycle of grief. Song Dong’s architectural methodology successfully disposes of grief by transmuting it: the family grief changes from private obsession to a collaborative, public project, which collapses the categories of art and life. Their stuff is not haphazardly tossed away, thrown into the bin; nor is it held onto. It is changed, redeemed through art-making. What is left over is not grief at all but simply the memory of what they’ve left behind without wasting a thing. Above the exhibition is a neon sign: “Dad, don’t worry, we and mom are fine.”

Jen wants to convert her grief into something meaningful, as she believes Song Dong has done. And so she will grab hold of Waste Not and do something else with it, in what she styles as her “Antipodean and appropriately suburban version of Song Dong’s approach.” She is convinced that it will allow her to “salvage something of my life in Australia,” that it will “solve, at last, the one huge problem in [my] life that it has always been impossible to solve.” This “stern confrontation with the definite and ordinary thingness of it all” will be how Jen tries to make sense of the “unbearable horror of everything I had been left with here in the family house.” Her deepest desire is to make her grief bearable, to make it mean something, to materialize it into “something I can live with. Something, in fact, that was art.” It is a hope for her project to have the same redemptive spirit as Waste Not. 

But Jen’s version lacks many of the essential elements of the original. Most pointedly, it is not relational. Jen has no creative, familial collaborator; she refuses to allow the objects to shape-shift their meaning; she cannot cross the threshold between private and collaborative remembrance; and she fears that intentional collapse between her art and her life. When she arrives back in Australia, Jen can’t bring herself to go inside. It’s simply too much, an “overwhelming mountain of things to deal with.” She circles the house from the outside, “wondering how on earth I was going to get in closer to it.” For weeks she prevaricates, buoyed by the idea of the confrontation yet always keeping it in abeyance. She becomes very much like Song Dong’s mother at the beginning of his project, who, paralyzed by her grief, had refused to part with any of the objects inside the house, or even to leave the house at all. Rather than a redemptive project that may allow her to live through and beyond her grief, Jen’s idea takes the shape of something horrifyingly opposite: “the complete oblivion of my parents to this project.” Any attempt, Jen writes, “to change just how things were in the precise arrangement of the stuff I’d inherited would be to raze and obliterate it.” To change anything, to throw anything out, to transmute her grief into art would be to destroy not only her parents but also “an understanding that I had inherited along with my hair, my bones, my teeth. A sacred understanding that, for most of my life, I had only managed to hold on to through the persistence of a pained avoidance and, of course, neglect.” To destroy anything inside the house, or even change its arrangement, would be to destroy herself. Stuck in the destructive, untrue belief that her grief is a totality of her identity, and that the house comprises a full account of that identity, the only choice left is to let the house and her grief be. 

Another way of saying this is that Jen’s attempt to curate her family’s junk becomes disordered (and eventually defunct) by her privatized self-obsession. Jen cannot distinguish the line separating curation from erasure, or refinement from reduction. So when she attempts to replicate Song Dong’s project, she is unable to do so. Instead of curating an art installation out of her family’s leftover materials, Jen reduces her life to an organized collection of trauma. 

Lacking the essential elements of the original—collaboration, pliability, and release—Jen’s version of Waste Not fails. It is atomized, lonely. It veers toward self-obsession (she even admits to the project’s being her “celebrity diversion”). And it is perfect for our contemporary atomized, lonely, and self-obsessed culture. Jen’s confusion is, precisely, that of our contemporary moment, where grief is commodified, where selves are reduced to sales pitches, where art is drained of complexity.

But where Jen’s Song Dong project fails, Wall succeeds, and brilliantly. Craig’s sensitive dissection of the narrator’s trials through grief becomes an argument in itself: that grief is ultimately incompatible with form. In this way, art-making cannot be “the total solution” to one’s problems but rather what follows. Art is a response to—different from a resolution of—the debilitation and obliteration that grief brings. 

Despite Wall’s concerns with our 21st-century inability to grieve, Craig’s is not the snooty critique of a privileged seclusion. She invites the critique upon herself: the artist-narrator shares her name. This, too, adds to the playful complexity of Wall. It is a self-obsessed novel about self-obsession and self-hood, which manages to retain its complexity, nuance, and style. Even in its critique, Wall is unpretentious because it focuses on methodology instead of value judgments. Its objects come alive—and by way of Craig’s intricate, meticulous, wonderfully strange prose, Jen does, too. Jen calls her life at home in Australia “a somnolent soup of existence.” A café is a “coffee-serving place.” She compares her art to “Lego pieces on a how-to paper, and so dead as dead and hanging over a fence like a stitched-up carcass.” These odd and beautiful phrasings draw the reader’s attention to the strangeness of this narrator, the irreducibility of her character, and the abnormality of her (and our) very modern obsession with making something out of grief, not to mention privatizing and commodifying it. We come back to the idea of structure. How does one build a Wall? Is the objective of grief really to build a Wall around it, anyway? To construct a monument to it?

Craig, in the style of her shadow-self character, reckons with these impossible questions by asking of herself an even more impossible task. She forms a novel according to formless grief. Indeed, grief—paralyzing, obliterating, and incompatible with the form and structure inherent to art-making—is Wall’s essential foundation. I imagine two cliffsides, a length of wire between them, and Craig poised in the middle, building out of thin air this beautiful and intricate labyrinth which must crumble as surely as Jen’s Song Dong project must, too. To give a full accounting of her grief, to hold onto something which necessarily cannot be held onto, Jen attempts to tell the story all at once. And she begins like this, with two sentences upon which the architecture of the novel is precipitously prodigiously deliberately deviously erected:  

I need to tell you that once I’d given up on the idea of turning the contents of my father’s house into a vast and meticulous installation in the style of that famous artist Song Dong, it just took me getting the call from City Hire Skips as I was walking down the hill from the ridge where I was staying—this call that confirmed the bin would be arriving by one pm—to make it seem, suddenly—magically—as if the entire house were already clear of the junk and disintegrating remnants of more than fifty years of abject living, and that now there were no more distractions keeping me from the Wall. Nothing at all between me and this Wall I’d been planning to construct for well over a decade now, as you know—this Wall that, according to all the proposals and applications and descriptions I’d been putting in my CVs and artist’s statements since 2002, intends to give ‘strong and substantial form to a very personal phenomenology of surviving anorexia.’ (1)

These words, like brick and mortar, agglutinate out of mutual need. The six temporal frames Jen introduces one after the other constitute the bricks of the sentence. There is the 1) present moment of writing in the already emptied-out house, the 2) prior decision to give up on the Song Dong project, the 3) subsequent call from the moving company, the 4) confirmation that the bin will be arriving shortly (though, of course, we know in the present moment that the bin has already come, just as the Song Dong project has already failed) the 5) backward lurch of fifty years to discuss the state of her parents’ belongings, and the 6) forward lurch to 2002, in explanation of the Wall, a very different project from the Song Dong project but something no less personal, something perhaps more personal, the project which she implies is the one true thing she’s been wanting for decades to approach. The several key terms—"house,” “call,” and “Wall,” the only repeated nouns of the passage—then serve as the mortar, to which the bricks of the sentence can adhere. Yet this architecture rests on the precarious, empty-air foundation of grief. To keep it standing, Jen (Craig) writes with a breathless urgency, constantly interrupting herself, backtracking, contextualizing, all in an attempt to corral her life into something intelligible, something with form.

It is as if Jen knows that the letter she is writing—and the novel Craig is constructing—may crumble at any moment. Out of this precarity comes the torrential expression of information, memories, and time frames, a torrent in which it is almost impossible for the reader to orient themselves. The passage is meticulously overwhelming, purposefully obscure. Jen worries late in the letter that all its details, its very stuffed-ness, will be “way too much for you.” The labyrinth presents a paradox: in its very attempt to give a full accounting of her grief, Jen ensures the material’s own incompleteness.

The material will always be incomplete; grief will always wriggle from Jen’s attempted grasp. Wall begins with an urgent need and a bold intention to tell a complete story. Yet by the novel’s end, Jen’s need has morphed into a humbler hope. “I am hoping,” she writes, that “you might have begun to get even a small understanding of why—as you have always put it—I have never been ‘rational’ about my life over here.” It’s a hope and a kind of confession that she has failed at her task, and that a life remains irreducible to its attendant griefs, and that an attempt to construct a tale on grief’s empty foundation will always fall prey to the forces of gravity. The novel ends with an admission that Jen has gone and done everything she had told Teun she would not. “Not going to succumb to the inevitable pressure,” she writes. The final sentence is a fragment, unable to stand on its own. The final word succumbs to the very thing the sentence—and Jen, and the entire novel—means to resist, ending on the downward, soft, un-stressed vowel, a final admission of the beautiful brilliant failure of Wall.

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Gus O'Connor is a writer based in New York City.