I would like to begin this exploration of Ottessa Moshfegh’s narratives by first discussing the current state of the Humanities. I recently picked up a copy of Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and it brought up some interesting points about the way American society has been structured based on the liberal philosophical model. Keep in mind, ‘liberalism’ doesn't refer to the left wing in this sense, but rather relates to John Locke’s original philosophy of a liberal state which encompasses both sides of the aisle.
In his critique of liberalism (specifically its impact on education) Deneen suggests that the goal of the university has shifted in the modern era due to liberalism’s obsession with innovation. Under this philosophy, academia has become oriented toward progress, a trend that was especially pronounced during the Clinton era. In line with the way of the times, university fields that relied on archaic teaching of virtue through history and classical texts, such as the Humanities, began to fall by the wayside. Next to the STEM fields, the Humanities simply couldn’t compete. I mean, science was giving us jet airplanes, infrastructure, genetically modified food and a bunch of other amazing things. In response to this, the Humanities started shifting away from the cultivation of virtue and moved toward the cultivation of liberty through progress. Deneen writes, ‘the university structure was reoriented to stress innovation and the creation of “new knowledge.” The guiding imperative of education became progress, not an education in liberty derived from a deep engagement with the past’ (118).
This ‘new knowledge’ came in the way of critical theories. Theories had been around for a while, but they increasingly became the field’s bread and butter, making literature look and feel more like a science than an art. Professors became concerned with exploring the different ingredients of language, how language is an inescapable prison, how the meaning of words can be infinitely deferred, and so on. Moreover, the field opened an exploration of previously overlooked literature, such as feminist writing. Due to this shift, books stopped perpetuating traditional moral principles and became mechanisms that needed deconstruction through analysis. The focus went from ‘what does it mean?’ to ‘how does it work?’; this was not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, this transition opened a lot of doors and even made it possible for me to read the books I will discuss. But in my opinion, the transformation of literature into a more scientific process made writing more convoluted in the minds of aspiring authors, which brings me to my next point:
Writing Always Sucked, But Now it Sucks More
Despite what Hollywood wants you to believe, writing has never been romantic in practice. I assure you, I’m not a dashingly handsome socialite with a typewriter (as hard as that is to believe). I spend most of my time hunched over my desk, typing words and editing things I have already published because I wrote ‘complement’ instead of ‘compliment’ and somehow missed it despite proofreading the same paragraph forty-eight times – UGH! But I digress …
What writing as a discipline has always been good at is retaining the sense of freedom that comes with putting one’s feelings on a page. A freedom that, in my opinion, has become muddled in recent years due to this transformation of the literary into the scientific. Now obviously, not everyone considers the différance when putting pen to paper, but I believe that a certain anxiety has embedded itself into our subconscious writerly brains because of this cultural transformation. The emerging writer of today walks on eggshells, preoccupied with preparing for writing rather than letting their fingers and emotions flow. They seem to be obsessed with whether they’re planters or pantsers, whether their writing is PC enough, whether the fantasy setting they’re creating makes sense, and so on. Now, all of those concerns should be considered when editing a draft, but they serve to delay the actual writing process.
Personally, the greatest of my pre-writing concerns was whether my stories fit the traditional narrative structure. We’ve all seen the triangle; some of us (like me) can’t seem to erase it from our memories. Several times I would imagine where my story fit on a plot graph or whether I had enough interesting moments to fill a hero’s journey. Sometimes I would even begin with these as the bases of my stories, working from the structural level and creating really stale, formulaic narratives. At a certain point I even began experimenting with Dan Harmon's Story Circle, to no avail. When I wasn’t able to fit something I wrote into a mould, any mould that I deemed ‘correct’, I felt like it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. This really dragged me down for a while, but then something magical happened. In my last year of university, I was introduced to Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World and this book gave me permission to finally do whatever the hell I wanted.
How Ottessa Moshfegh Succeeds in Surrealism
To me, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World was the antithesis of the structured story. This simple book is a collection of fourteen unconnected short stories, each of which serves as a surreal challenge to structure. Each story features characters of questionable morals who engage in seemingly random and destructive behaviour. What set these stories apart from anything else I had read before was their seeming ‘pointlessness’. These stories don’t have a story arc, they don’t have much character development, and they don’t seem to teach any sort of lesson either. However, the fascinating thing about them is that they are not without value, far from it. Each of these stories is an exploration of human vice presented through the experience of life.
The main thing these tales have in common is that they are all surreal in the traditional sense. You see, at a certain point, people began to misunderstand what surrealism was. When it comes to this subject, the tendency is to make associations with dreams or even the supernatural. However, real surrealism is meant to emphasize life. Penelope Rosemont says it best in her introduction to Surrealist Women: ‘To start at the beginning, with what is perhaps the single most common misconception, surrealism most emphatically does not signify unreality, or a denial of the real, or a “refusal to accept reality.” It insists, rather, on more reality, a higher reality’ (xxxii-xxxiii). To tie this back to Moshfegh, each of these stories says YES to reality and thereby progresses somewhat randomly forward without losing the reader’s attention. These stories work based on causality; they answer the question of what would happen if. What if you gave in to your impulses? What if you said yes without question or forethought?
Here is an example from the story Malibu. It begins like this:
‘In order to collect unemployment benefits, I had to fill out this log of all the jobs I’d applied for. But I wasn't applying for any jobs. So I wrote down 'lawyer' and made up a phone number. Then I wrote down 'lawyer's assistant' and put down the same phone number. I went on like that. 'Law-firm janitor.' I looked at the number I’d made up. I tried calling it. It rang and rang. Then a woman got on the line (37).’
The protagonist speaks with the woman (who happens to live in Lone Pine), sets up a date and goes to meet her. Interesting? Yes. Random? Very. Are you invested yet? If so, why? Well, this is what a surreal tale reads like, it follows a string of affirmation. Each possibility is taken and explored to the nth degree in a split second. Thereby, the story doesn’t require a buildup, or a climax, or a resolution per se. Rather, it simply needs a series of causal events to keep it chugging along. This kind of narrative, along with the others like it, are what make Moshfegh’s writing a standout among the current literary crowd. There is no ‘story’ to tell, rather there is simply the absurdity of life, and I’m all for it! But wait, there’s more …
How Ottessa Moshfegh Succeeds in Transgression
Where Homesick for Another World succeeds in surrealism, Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation succeeds in transgression. Keep in mind that both texts feature both elements, but Relaxation as a full novel asks the reader to consider a simple question, ‘What if you slept through an entire year?’, and answers it with an affirmative YES lathered in a topping of NO MATTER WHAT.
Like Moshfegh’s other narratives, the story begins with movement. The main character wakes up, heads to a bodega, buys two large coffees with cream and six sugars each and drinks one in its entirety before reaching her apartment. The action is there in the beginning, keeping us hooked on the protagonist despite her apparent lack of motivation. As we stick with her through her journey, we uncover several transgressive elements:
The protagonist is nihilistic: ‘The only news I could read were the sensational headlines on the local daily papers at the bodega ... Somebody important died, a child was kidnapped, a senator stole money, a famous athlete cheated on his pregnant wife. Things were happening in New York City - they always are - but none of it affected me’ (3-4).
The protagonist is anti-social: ‘Reva would show up at my apartment with a bottle of wine from time to time and insist on keeping me company. Her mother was dying of cancer. That, among many other things, made me not want to see her’ (6).
The protagonist takes drugs regularly: ‘Within a few weeks, I’d accumulated an impressive library of psychopharmaceuticals. Each label bore the sign of sleepy eye, the skull and crossbones’ (26).
All these elements weave a narrative of grief. At the heart of the matter is the main character’s inability to come to terms with her parents’ death and more philosophically, her inability to accept herself. The transgressive act is guided by a subconscious desire and often defies normal, reasonable explanation. Moshfegh captures this perfectly in the story as her protagonist is determined to complete her hibernation despite not fully knowing why. She writes:
‘I can’t point to any one event that resulted in my decision to go into hibernation. Initially, I just want some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgements, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything. I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me (17-18)’.
In the mind exists a guide that we can’t fully fathom. We know it’s there, we know how to appease it, but we are often hard-pressed to identify why it begins speaking to us and why it suddenly stops. In Relaxation, Moshfegh succeeds in transgression by alluding to this guide without revealing its secrets to the protagonist. At the end of the story, the protagonist finally completes her hibernation cycle and regains a rich appreciation for life. It could be that prolonged deprivation from life allows her to experience novelty again, or it could be that through sleep, she experiences a metamorphosis of character. In either case, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is an example of transgressive fuel in a surrealistic engine. The story is guided forward through action that deviates from the norm to uncover the secrets of that strange voice that appears, from time to time, to distort our reason.
Writing Liberated, At Least for Me
I heard it said once that the creative person is one who willingly enters the dark forest of the psyche in search of answers and emerges to detail the findings to the rest of their tribesmen. In this sense, both transgression and surrealism serve as an integral part of the narrative structure of life. We are guided by the voice that circumvents reason, speaking directly to the soul. We listen and act without structure and often without clear purpose until we have appeased this voice.
On my personal journey as a writer, I have liberated myself from the bonds of scientific reason when creating narratives. For this, I owe a big thanks to Ottessa Moshfegh and her stories. The books discussed may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you are interested in stories that keep you engaged through action that deviates from what is socially acceptable, these are the books for you. There is far more I can say about them and the general topic, but I’ll leave you with this: creativity is a balance between structure and feeling. Don’t get hung up on structure or formality, let your words flow and don’t be afraid of creating something that appears pointless on the surface. Below the story is the richness of life delivered naturally and unapologetically. Set things in motion and the structure will come later if it needs to.
Bibliography
Deneen, Patrick J. Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press, 2019.
Moshfegh, Ottessa. Homesick for Another World. Penguin Press, 2017.
Moshfegh, Ottessa. My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Penguin USA, 2019.
Samvel Aleksanyan (Sam Aleks) is an Armenian-born, American artist and writer living in Los Angeles, California. Sam earned a Master's Degree in English from California State University, Northridge in 2018 and his writing has been featured in The Northridge Review (Spring 2014) and Pif Magazine (July 2014). His artwork was featured in the Canyon Voices (Winter 2018) and displayed in the Northridge Annual Student Art Exhibit (Spring 2014) as well as in The NOVA Frame and Art Gallery (Fall 2014).