Speedboat and the Amoral Consciousness

D. W. White

Editorial Meditation

Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal.

Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read A Book?”

In the English language, there are tricks. Following these tricks are clues—hints and whispers of reason, sense, method to the madness, as one great moralist said of a rather unscrupulous protagonist. Polonius, of course, was referring to Hamlet’s words, and the insouciance with which he used them. Insouciance, from the French, comes approximately to sans souci, a quintessence of trick—no worries. Another tricky word, at least for me, is morality, which often as not I find to have typed out as mortality, that slippery little T, audible for us, forming at once a jeu des mots and inciting incident for this very paper. Indeed, to read the novel as it stands today, the moral and the mortal are not so very distinct at all.

It is another Shakespearean epicenter who kicks off Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, as Maria, speaking for a moment in her own voice, candidly approaches evil, picking it up like a stone and examining it: “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.” In his Introduction to the novel, David Thompson especially admires this moment; it strikes him as notable, that a heroine of a major novel knows of this thing called evil—“I think it’s true of the modern novel, and perhaps the novel as a whole, that it does not often speak of evil.” On first glance it is a rather odd comment from a major literary critic; how could one contend that novels (and we can take Thompson to mean literarynovels—the categorical angst over Capote’s In Cold Blood comes to mind), could avert so foundational a component of lived experience? But he’s not wrong, indeed far from it. More it seems than any other art form, it is the novel which is made to traffic in the ethical, the righteous, the right and the wrong. The, in a word, moral. What might account for this demand? Perhaps it is due to the medium; language has a way of achieving an elucidation that is at once more intimate and less expansive than, say, artwork (had we but time, Horatio, we might speak here of Wittgenstein)—there is simply not as much room, in a novel, for the audience to maneuver through the shadowed Acheron of interpretation. What is said, is said: it is indicated, pointed towards, called into being. And because we as a species think very highly of thinking very highly of ourselves and our opinions, what is allowed to be exposed in so stark a manner must, of course, be good. 

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There is also the matter of the voice.

The novel speaks in a voice, and again due to language this is done in a manner far more directly than elsewhere; there is an unmistakeable—indeed foundational—dialectic feel to a novel, that conversation between reader and narrator, be it heterodiegetic or homodiegetic (outside the story or in—in the third person the first). We simply don’t seem to like it when presented with the sensation that we are engaged in colloquy with a morally ambiguous creature, be it narrating entity or protagonist. As Thompson says of his experiences in recommending Didion’s masterpiece, “And sometimes people come back with a hurt look: the book is very…sordid, isn’t it? And tough—by which they mean not a tough read, but hard-hearted. Sometimes people flat out say the story is bleak and unpleasant, and in the end they couldn’t like Maria enough.”

And in the end they couldn’t like Maria enough. That, it seems, gets us to the heart of things. The novel as a form, certainly of the twenty-first-century vintage, dislikes what Thompson calls “evil” and we might call immorality—somehow, in the contemporary cultural landscape, with its censorious (dare we say rather Victorian) aspect, art and particularly literature are to revert back into (often obvious) celebrations of whatever might be the latest word on righteousness. This caprice is essential to the problem as trends change rapidly, and what was yesterday’s cause célèbre is tomorrow’s bête noir. (That all of this is driven by the blind cynicism and sheer avarice of capitalism is left to go unremarked.) The burden, too, falls unevenly: female protagonists (and authors) navigate a more morally demanding marketplace than their male counterparts—one needs only to look at the respective reputations of Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgård, most notably in the United States, to appreciate the disparity.

In our class on Cusk and the Self, I give this example to my undergraduates, highlighting the ways in which the label “autofiction,” in particular (a concept they tend to find exceedingly alien), is frequently used to denigrate the artistic accomplishments of novelists such as Cusk. In trying to teach them the ways in which a novel might be dissected, to separate and comprehend its discrete functions, we talk about the linear narrative, and how it is used to reify morality via the prism of female characters. They are freshman, nearly none of them English majors, and the methodological approach we must therefore take to literary analysis is by their deliberateness illuminating. As we come by degrees to realize, there are levels of graduation to this requirement of morality in fiction. Readers of the mainstream novel (at any rate, the ideation of them in the minds of publishing executives) especially do not like a narrator who is not sufficiently averse to the darker side of life—or at least does not receive a final judgment—and thus morality is more obviously a question in the first person. And, finally, the audience very especiallydoes not like female characters who break the rules; the morally objectionable female narrator is, more than anyone, persona non grata.

This dynamic is, of course, at the heart of those twenty-first-century responses to Play It As It Lays; as a heroine, Maria Wyeth is many things—alluring and mysterious and precipitous and sad—but she is certainly not “moral,” whatever that may mean. And, as Thompson shrewdly observes, Didion’s switch to a close third person impacts the book’s orientation towards morality; Maria exists in a fairly coherent linear narrative, rendering her amorality intra-textual, i.e. within the progression of the fictive concern. In this way the book is closer to Cusk’s Arlington Park, with a heterodiegetic narrative entity crafting a cogent storyline but refusing to evaluate its protagonist on moral grounds. But there is another elaboration of narrative amorality, one we might call extra-textual in its suffusion of the very composition of the novel itself, born of a homodiegetic mind that so comprehensively reduces the idea of the linear narrative as to construct a fictive world of pure thought and observation, idiosyncratic and self-perpetuating, where questions of morality appear at turns quaint, preposterous, and unimaginable. From Elizabeth Bennet onwards the traditional female narrative inhabits a linear plot which leads to and itself embodies morality; thus when it is ruptured, the break is often (near-)total: Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Nelson’s Bluets, Cusk’s Outline trilogy, Duras’ Emily L. Through this declension we come to Speedboat and the amoral consciousness of Jen Fain.

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From Not to Nothing: Theatricality, Facingness, and the Feminist Consciousness

Speedboat is a novel of profound language. Perhaps its most powerful statement, however, is articulated with silence: the lack of moral or ethical judgment about its protagonist made by the narrative. Jen Fain’s discursive account of the “stuff of life,” to paraphrase Woolf, places Speedboat in select company as a compositional divergence from, and implicational challenge to, the traditional female narrative, a feat made all the more remarkable given the attendant (d)evolution of the novel over the last fifty years. As is indicated by Thompson’s collection of readerly responses to Play It As It Lays, for much of its relatively short life the novel has posited femininity as a vessel for morality and goodness while denying female characters the complexity and complication allowed the masculine narrative—the prototypical ‘novel about nothing,’ one in which the protagonist struggles valiantly with his own thoughts and ‘existential’ crises, is a male one. The literary heroine has instead been a figure wherein moral dilemmas are reified, at once removed from societal discourse and defined by external act, all within a strong plot. What Austen’s Bennet does she does as a moral statement, one that perhaps challenges the ways society limits her but which nonetheless acknowledges and enacts her role as a moral agent.

Adler’s achievement is not so much a challenge of this moral prescript but a compete obviation of it; while Speedboat achieves its narrative amorality both extra- and intra-textually, it is the latter that is the more striking:

Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written—disrupting a cliché and, presumably, creating a genre. That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I find, are the ones learned in your sleep.

From the first word we have an insouciant orientation towards narrative that extends into the defiant. To properly comprehend Adler’s technique we may look to painting, and the criticism of Michael Fried and Robert Pippin. As the latter says about the former’s concept of facingness in Manet, the painted subject exists in a “moment of defiance” that encapsulates a promise of meaning which both “frames the paintings but is not, perhaps cannot be, realized within such a frame.” For Fried and Pippin, facingness is a solution to the problem of theatricality, a trend which began to emerge in the mid-nineteenth century and threatened to overwhelm verisimilitude and thereby defeat art as an ontologically coherent possibility. As the latter discusses in After the Beautiful, the theatrical painting is a “mannered” one that adheres to societal morals; therefore “the defeat of theatricality is an essential condition of the work’s being an artwork…a “failed painting” is a failed work of art: i.e. not a work of art” (84-5, emphasis original). Manet, for these critics, achieves this conquest of the theatrical via the technique of facingness, wherein the painted subject’s gaze turns to the viewer, “directly, even aggressively, confronting the beholder…producing a dramatic “strikingness” that, in its intensity, its instantaneousness, its challenge to any narrative coherence, defeats any theatrical effect” (90). In other words, it is the very challenge of the artwork, the refutation of the traditional subject/object binary and the explicit rejection of moral-technical convention therein that preserves Modernist art qua art.¹ Against this vivid background we may more fully appreciate the compositional-ontological positioning of Jen Fain’s narrating consciousness, eschewing conventional plot and relying on language to move from pas moralité to sans moralité.

For Adler, working of course in the discursive medium of language, the challenge is taken up inherently through narration. It is the way in which she presents the story of her protagonist (more properly, allows her protagonist to present the story) that serves as conduit for claims made about the role of a morally-understood convention in the emanation of Speedboat as a work of art. A specific result of that claim is naturally a feminist one, not only in that any refutation of morality or congenitally in a female narrative (by which I mean, simply, a narrative told by and/or centered around a woman in literature) is such—although that is true—but also because by making this assertion artistically; by taking up a philosophically coherent position via the stylistic nuances of the literary art, Adler inexorably entangles the aesthetic with the ontological, meaning that her claims about the possibilities of the female narrative, and whatever they may have to do with broader socio-cultural gendered dynamics, emerge through her artistry. In Wittgensteinian terms, the feminist account is not spoken, but rather makes itself manifest. It is thereby effectively irrefutable.²

This narration, by definition, determines the relationship between reader and text, between art and audience. As Pippin has it, “what is at stake in the proper or successful expression of a relation between the artwork and beholder is inevitably also an expression of shareable intelligibility in general, a subject-subject relation, not some sort of subject-object relation” (86). Following broadly a de Beauvoirian duality, we can see this concept in Speedboat’s narration and narrative alike—the familiar Structuralist historie and discours; not only what Jen relates, in her vignettes covering everything from relationships to politics to the ubiquitous peculiarities of rats on the New York Streets, but how she does it, with energetic, nearly hypnotic prose and a fragmented approach to narration (this latter to which we will return) that defy the readerly convention. At times, exploiting a freedom in technique that has its genesis in her singular voice, Adler’s heroine turns directly to the reader, implicating us in the narrative act and thereby reaffirming her possession of an audience—and herself as artificer—even as she disintegrates the traditional contract between writer and reader.

There don’t seem to be many instances of the pure straightforward. And yet. Will is away a lot. I have my work. There is a passage in Dante when he and Virgil, traveling through the Inferno, stop aside a man buried to his neck in boiling mud. He does not care to speak to them. He has his own problems. He does not want an interview. Dante actually grasps him by the hair and gets his story. Some sort of parable about reporting there, I think. In fact, I know.

The direct address parallels the figures at the center of Manet’s pictures, with the defiant expressions elucidated by Fried and Pippin. As narrator and character both—creator and creation—Jen accounts for the audience while eliding the type of theatricality found in the traditional first-person narrator or narrative. Returning to Pippin, the unification in Speedboat of Jen-as-reporter (and, in other passages, as lover, friend, student, or the like) and Jen-as-reported, emanating within a disjointed and non-linear narrative, precludes either a “submission to a collective subjectivity” as self-objectification or an objectification of the audience by the art, the two perils of theatricality (87). That is to say, Speedboat accounts for the audience on equal terms allowing its heroine to be elle-même, not as a morally-charged embodiment of narrative but instead as a radically existent being. There is a gloss laid atop the conventional first-person narrative; when Nick Carroway first addresses his reader—the younger and more formative years, the “middle-west”—he does so in order to incite a given narrative, one that inexorably grounds him in a role of storyteller, working towards an expected end. While this method has been challenged at times by male characters, in novels with a female protagonist the ontological viability of the homodiegetic narrator is nearly always bound up in the account of themselves as vessels for a progressive linearity that constitutes and culminates in narrative. Therefore, by obviating (one might say obliterating) this linearity, Adler’s protagonist rejects the socially-understood morality that comes with a coherent plot and posits both her/self and her narration as emanations of a consciousness that via its very existence accelerates the novel’s critique of gendered literary norms and manifests a feminist account within and alongside the stylistic one.³ Indeed Adler’s kaleidoscopic understanding of the novel exemplifies the ability of art to do philosophical work beyond philosophy itself, bringing Speedboat towards something like a Heideggerian truth event, at turns revelation and obfuscation of the world it refracts and posits. 

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A Break with Convention: the Fragmented Narrative as Amoral Act

What makes Adler’s method even more fascinating, for our purposes, is her continual invocation of narrative as a concept, within the larger rejection of linear narrative writ large. Jen relates endless anecdotes across the novel—indeed Speedboat may be thought of as an anti-narrative constituted solely of narrative—and as such offers the possibility of the coherent narrative act even while consistently refusing to acquiesce to its larger architectural demands. It is as if, through her protagonist, Adler confirms that she could engage in the conventional game, if she wanted, but simply declines to do so. In this way her technique is more fully realized iteration of extra-textual, homodiegetic narrative amorality than similar works such as Sleepless Nights or Bluets, noted above; of recent novels like Emily Hall’s The Longcut, Anna Burns’ Milkman, Shelia Heti’s How Should A Person Be?, or even Adler’s own follow-up, Pitch Dark. Speedboat is at once closer to and farther from the narrative space than those novels, a comprehension of linearity used solely to inform its own fracture.

Often times these micro-narrative moments intertwine with the direct address discussed earlier: “I think you are not altogether American,” Jen tells us, à propos, more or less, of nothing, “unless you have been to Mississippi; you are not a patriot if you start to faint when somebody breaks her thumb. Anyway, I never faint.” (36) Her accounting for the reader becomes all the more defiant when arising at intervals from narrative segments that otherwise work precisely against a unified coherent whole. As Guy Trebay says in his Afterword, Speedboat is “a novel that not infrequently calls into question the moral of the story and, often enough, the story itself” (177). If to inhabit and relate a linear narrative is the traditional method by which conventional requirements of morality impose themselves on the female narrator in the novel form, imprisoning her within a received rationality, then Speedboat is something of a ghost, a mischievous apparition who with spectral fluidity and a certain jouissance flits in and out of her cell at will.

Jen’s job as a reporter and general possessor of a global savoir faire lends to her fragmentation of narrative an element of the meta-narrative as well, commenting on the notion of storytelling such that the novel’s technique and structure are irradiated with the absurdity of the very idea, alinear (and amoral) narrative all the way down. Adler achieves instead a multivalent effect to composition that is, again, Modernist in sensibility: verisimilitude is achieved via thematic, or ontological, meaning, as opposed to the strictly mimetic representation of “Realism,” working sense-affectively rather than discursively.

The reporter had arrived at the catastrophe without his notebook. He wrote down everything he could on the backs of blank checks. Long after midnight, when he had finished phoning in his story, he stopped, on his way home, at the neighborhood liquor store. He bought Scotch. He asked the clerk, who knew him well, to add on ten dollars cash; he made out his check for the total. “My, my, what’s this?” the clerk said, as he started to put the check in the cash register. “I can’t cash this check. There’s endorsements or something all over the back.” The reporter mumbled wearily that they were story notes, that they were on the backs of all his checks that night. “Gosh,” the clerk said, when he had gotten the check approved by the owner of the liquor store. The owner added, “You must’ve been in the poetic mood.”

A little over halfway through the book, we find as good a thesis as any for Speedboat’s ontological claims and the remarkable manner in which it asserts them. Narrative coherence is found to be impossible even amongst its own elegance and dexterity; it is an arresting, powerfully written passage, attesting to the vast outnumbering of the known by the unknown.

It is all nonsense, both heroine and novel assert, to try and make meaning out of the disordered facts of life. It can be done for moments, at times and in starts, but by the end there are only events, being, things-as-they-are, and attempting to impose an order on them is far off the point. It is the act of narration, not the result of narrative, that counts—Jen asserts her right and her capacity to exist in the world as she finds and presents it, not for the reader but before him. It is an act of defiance, a gesture towards the beauty of the senseless and the extant. It is also a profoundly philosophical act, one done ostensively, via art as such, and carrying with it the feminist critiques that arise through a refusal of moral demands.. If there is evil in the world, let us have it, so that we might answer with creation.

At 4 a.m., the phone rang about fifty times. I did not answer it. Aldo suggested that we remove it. I took three Valium. The while night was sirens, then silence. The phone rang again. It is still ringing. The paper goes to press tomorrow. It is possible that I know who killed our landlord. So many things point in one direction. But too strong a case, I find, is often lost. It incurs doubts, suspicion. Perhaps I do not know. Perhaps doesn’t matter. I think it does, though. When I wonder what it is we are doing—in this brownstone, on this block, with this paper—the truth is probably that we are fighting for our lives.

This moment, earlier in the novel (a somewhat meaningless clarification amongst the book’s timelessness; with which acute, elusive play is made in the passage’s switch to present tense), speaks to—or rather, perhaps, illustrates—Adler’s most profound claim,⁴ about the power of words against the impossibility of language, and the sheer defiance one must embody in elucidating the world through one’s own, irreconcilable consciousness.

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Endnotes

1. I would argue for Speedboat as a Modernist text, in literary terms, much in the way I have elsewhere argued that Cusk is Modernist. ↩︎
2. If the question is something like “can or should the female narrative (or, even less overtly stated but more insidious, author) transcend the type of inherent morality found in linear plot progressions and operate as unbounded, ontologically coherent entities rendered via style and not story,” then the positive answer of writers such as Adler and Cusk, which essentially come down to showing over telling, is only contestable from a position that these works are artistically unsuccessful, which is an extreme and precious (and rather absurd) one.  ↩︎
3. To put it another way, despite (or inspired by) the limitations of its medium, the feminist accomplishments of Speedboat are artistic, not didactic ones; much like with Cusk, it is the stylistic skill (and the preposterous talent of Adler’s diction) that are the locus of whatever (significant, to be sure) socio-cultural comment the novel makes. The critique follows the artistry, not the other way round. To invert these, or to ignore the first altogether, as is often done, is to not only minimize the talent and skill of writers such as Cusk and Adler but to misunderstand and thereby vitiate their accomplishments in both arenas. ↩︎
4. And, indeed, a thoroughly Modernist one. ↩︎

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D. W. White writes consciousness-forward fiction and criticism. Currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago, he serves as Founding Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review, Prose Editor for West Trade Review, and Executive Editor and Director of Prose for Iron Oak Editions. His writing appears in 3:AM, The Florida Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among others. Before returning to Chicago, he lived in Long Beach, California, for nine years.