balbanna

Amina Cain's stories are addictive in an emotional way--I don't want them to end, I want to keep reading them the way I want to keep watching a movie I like because I want to stay longer in the emotional world that these stories conjure up for me, a world of acute observations and perceptions, and such such sensitivity. Even though there's quite a bit of unrest in these tales, I look up from the pages stunned & gratified, a bit dazed from having been immersed in such a beautiful world. So different from the clumsy, crude world I usually have to deal with in the here & now. But Cain's world is real, it's the world created between people & creatures who feel and have relations with one another, who pay attention to the temperature differences between different raindrops and feel each other's longings as a kind of biology, a geography. She does it all in a deceptively plainspoken language, the kind of language that reminds me of what Truman Capote said of Jane Bowles' English, that it sounded like the kind of English that had been written in a foreign language at first and then clearly translated into English. A similar sense of uncanniness, alterity, and remove in Cain's English. And I do sense Jane Bowles, along with Marguerite Duras, along with Jeannette Winterson in places here. A woman acutely aware of her place or non-place in the world. A human who feels with the immediacy & intensity of an animal. In fact, there’s a deep ecology at work in Cain’s stories, an ecology of desire & relation where emotions form the connective tissue that govern the movements of people towards and away from each other. The dominant emotion is love, an inexplicable kind of longing that may or may not be expressively sexual, but is always erotic. The stories revolve around points of contact which fit together a bit askew yet are part of a larger coherent system, like the microcosmic Warsaw apartment community in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue. Characters often approach one another with an arbitrary, almost childlike sentiment reminiscent of Jane Bowles. Humans and animals move in a continuum, we are all creatures in Cain’s world, which is arguably a feminine world. Once I was talking with a friend about the kinds of dialogue that characters have with one another in Marguerite Duras stories, the strange quality of literal disconnect between one character’s statement and the other character’s response, yet this literal disconnect actually feels like a deep emotional resonance. And this friend (who absolutely loves Duras) said, that’s because the characters are responding to the unconscious content of each other’s words, they are conducting conversations on the level of the unconscious. A similar thing happens in Cain’s fiction. I feel transported to an uncanny, almost surreal-seeming world, yet all the events feel deeply recognizable to me, as though I myself have lived them in a former life. This is quite different from the strangeness-for-the-sake-of-strangeness quality that annoys me in some examples of experimental fiction. Cain’s strangeness is striking & resonant because it expresses an actual unconscious reality that has been suppressed, neglected. I recognize this world because all my life I’ve sensed it running along in parallel with the dominant world, I’ve sensed it but have not had the language to describe it. So there’s a simultaneous sense of the very small and the very large in Cain’s fictional world. It’s like a Buddhist ecology: everything you do affects everyone else, past present and future. Creatures have counterparts who may be very far away; they can’t see their counterpart but they can feel the counterpart’s influence. They also feel the influence of those who are nearby.

2023-06-16 16:55