The Shape of Confusion in Joni Murphy's Double Teenage
Double Teenage by Joni Murphy. Book*hug, 208 pp., $20.
Two girls set out to live life. They adapt themselves to different roles within girlhood, but never attain to a fullness of any role.
Ariana Reines, in her praise adorning the book’s back cover, asks, “Is it possible to survive girlhood?” The answer is yes, but the book asks an additional question: is it possible, necessary, or desirable for the historically formed category of girlhood to survive? Chris Kraus’s attached praise considers the book to be “the definitive book of The Young Girl,” but the novel is not a pure prognosis. If Kraus searches for answers, Reines understands that the book provides questions. Kraus rightfully brings up the novel’s magical forces but presents the topic with such ease that the thunder of magic is muffled.
The girls believe in magic! Magical phrases come to mind for the girls as readily as the motherly advice they receive — sometimes intermingling. The magic in their world stands ready for them, and they pick it up with ease. In fear, they remember that a light protects them.
Magic shares a similar disposition to reason in its appearance for the confused. Today’s magic knows what it is doing, and, in one sense, it is more suited to its task than reason. Traversing a forest, reason finds itself entangled in undergrowth, occasionally stopped completely by the foliage. Magic, however, ventures further, speaking its spells upon the land, finding that all things flow through and affirm it. But magic’s adventure is a hallucination caused by eating the forest’s poisonous berries. Magic does not always call itself magic. In the synopsis provided on the cover, the book is promoted as offering “a way to see through violence into an emotionally alive place beyond the myriad traps of girlhood.” This living girlhood is a category that cannot be entered by the living, but rather only glimpsed from afar. The price of seeing the alive place, through magic, is that one cannot enter.
The girls’ world is full of rules, but the rules are unclear. The characters are aware of this opacity and feel it negatively: “‘I refuse to accept the fucking logic of all this barbarity just because it’s making somebody money’”; “How could people act like life was okay if this were true?” Magic offers its services precisely because of the difficulties faced by reason. If the world’s reason appears irrational, then the world’s mysterious forces appear useful: “It made no sense or rather, it was so mystical, and therefore right.” Contemplating the direction of their lives while looking at the U.S./Mexico border, the girls share their theater director’s acting tips, which are just as worthwhile as any other advice. At least the theater seems to present a knowable totality: “The audience knows the whole of what the two characters know only partially.” But the dynamic of audience and theatrical character cannot be mapped onto their world: “Celine and Julie wavered between believing in the beauty of the play and believing in the adults who were making the play through labor and artifice.” The roles of life appear as costumes, but none is mastered, and no role productively corresponds to the girls’ essences. The relation of form and content feels inadequate, and the girls are surprised by this mismatch of appearance and essence. It seems as though people should be whole in themselves. Such partial forms cannot complete the irrational whole. This bleed-over of separate realms is not the conscious cohesion of particulars, but rather points to the inability to understand the place of broken particulars within the opaque totality: “From what she could tell many people felt radical talking about a blurring of self and other, whereas she felt like nothing but an ill-defined part of an amorphous whole.” After Julie becomes “disenchanted,” she finds her home town to be smothered in “psychic dark.” Celine hates her town “without articulable reason.” The town’s reason is stuck in immediacy, and a grasp of history meets with difficulty: “The play was nested within a history the smalltown cast strained to imagine.” The town stands as a partial system appearing as a totality, but when brought into the light of history, the town does not recognize itself. The foundation of this murky consciousness, however, is not the town: “The girls thought the feeling of suffocation was particular to their town. They learn later that it was not.” The entire world is covered in a psychic dark.
The ease with which the girls can pick up new roles coincides with the necessity of a revaluation of all roles in the world. “‘All the world’s a stage for those who want to perform transformation,’” proclaims Donna Beth onstage. This accessibility to roles in a world of transformation is not, however, merely a dead end. In fact it marks the opening up of a total transformation of the world. This unfolding requires more than a championing of every particular. The girls try many roles. “At eighteen they finally felt like performers rather than audience.” “Celine became a lover. She’d always wanted to be one, rehearsing the part year after year with different men until she finally met one who wanted the full performance.” Life is understood as a fulfilling of preplanned characteristics and movements of the human.
Characters grapple with the sense that things could be different and express this sense as a lack. Twice in the book, Celine exclaims her wish to understand: “‘If I could just get around front and see the whole picture’”; “If only she could get around front and see the whole picture.” They seek the spell that might solve their problems, and allow their fragmented lives a fullness that is impossible: “If we can say the right words in the correct way, we can reorder the world. If we can reorganize our fragment we will begin to understand one another. Redeeming shitty experience is the option. This is the only experience we have.” They long for the Word or to lift the veil. Their “shitty experience” appears to them as redeemable. But, just as magic is easily picked up, so too does magic promise returns of higher quality than reason could. The ruse of magic is that it steals its ideas from the realm of gods and brings them to the realm of humans — but only in the form of promises. Julie learns of the “messianic view of history,” which points to overcoming the unfreedom of the past and present. In traditional religion, the messiah is the redeemer of “shitty experience,” i.e. misery. This redemption appears graspable within their world, but only a god could fulfill this transaction. Indeed, traditional religion is the invitation, offered in this world, to the redemption that can occur in the eternal realm. The ticket price for religion is the resignation to waiting for the messiah at the end of time. There are thus two distinct messianisms. The second — that of history — is the profane messiah, within time. Historical messianism cannot redeem past misery but only historical unfreedom. The light of traditional religion comes out of the eyes of humanity itself. A task of “modern courage” begins when one admits this profane limit — to admit that a light does not protect us, that past misery cannot be undone. As long as unfreedom continues, the world will seek religious redemption, and its attempts will be doomed.
A tragic example of the false overcoming is Celine’s self harm. Trapped in the world of unnecessary unhappiness, Celine attempts to have at the least a mastery of this misery: “Her body ultra-real and dreamt. She made a toilet paper rose then dyed it red. [...] That first night, her terror was replaced with a comforting sensation of injury. […] ‘Don’t be scared,’ she said to her mother in the other room, and to the whole town she hated without articulable reason.” The tragedy is that this unhappiness cannot be truly redeemed in this life. Compared to Baudelaire’s fleurs du mal, Celine’s flowers of blood and toilet paper do not point beyond themselves but rather remain locked in a bathroom with tears and pain.
Still from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, “Celine and Julie imagine themselves as Audrey Horne”.
The violence that haunts the book is shocking because it does not need to happen. It is avoidable but appears as an immutable condition of life. This fatalist appearance gives birth to an approach whose methodology presupposes the immutability of reality. An understanding of violence that could overcome violence is rejected in favor of the methodology of documentarians and journalists. Murder occurs, and the facts are presented. What is missed is an understanding of the meaning of the facts. Julie understands Celine’s self-harm. In fact all girls understand “girl-trauma,” but they do not understand the world’s trauma — no one does. The move from terror to self-injury is a tragic form of mastery that undermines the new master. Girl-trauma is broken off from knowledge of all and remains a partial system, ruled over by gender-studies professors, medical experts, school administrations, human-resource departments, and the state. There are specialists for every partial system. The presentation of violence’s facts is banal, but Murphy presents its banality as a critique: “She sat and listened as the reporter described a chaotic array of details about a massacre in a western Colorado town.” The truth is buried under facts. The details do not explain the situation but rather adorn it with immediate representations of pain. Police reports become the final truth on the matter of murders. With their own eyes, the characters see violence cinematically — that is, from a contemplative view. The most obvious example is that of a highway collision seen by teenagers:
So where we could see the scene, but those on the highway couldn’t see us. There had been an accident. I’m going to guess drunk driving because it was just, you know. It was this little motorcycle and a Toyota truck, head-on. Just shattered and it was all spread out like a movie shot in front of Jeff and I under those yellow highway lights. […] Because it was so late, or early, no other cars came for a little while. I don’t know. Maybe three or four minutes. Both of us were high and drunk as fuck, but also maybe in shock or something. Finally Jeff snaps out of it. ‘We should go help them.’ But it was clear. Like the motorcyclist did not survive. His body was thrown or crushed. I don’t know. It was bad.
Without an ability to change society, the characters can only experience themselves as contemplating observers.
Even the enforcers of the law appear to be driven just as easily by magic as by the machinations of the state: “The officers maintained constant radio contact. By magic or design, they expected disaster. To expect is to call into being.” The state is also lost in confusion. Military SUVs parked on the border become charms that conjure the same chaos into the world that they wish to suppress. The state’s character is ambivalent toward society in its ongoing crisis: “In a democracy individuals can’t get a piece of the action without becoming sick with poisons of nationhood. Democracy offers everyone a spoonful of the oily poison of the state. We are all just a little responsible for the violence our leaders oversee.” The demos dominates itself in its historically overripe character, and this crisis points beyond itself.
The negative gap of what ought to be hovers throughout the novel, and its refusal to speak the Word is an achievement and an extension of its content. “‘There’s something so wrong.’” //
Still from Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 Noli Me Tangere, 1962. New York Times