against narrative

a love story, or an essay about love stories, or the opposite of both

Perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

— Joan Didion, On Keeping A Notebook

There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. 

— Gillian Rose, Love’s Work

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It’s been autumn for longer than usual. Most years, for most people, autumn lasts a few weeks at most; in Toronto, where I used to live with a boy who loved me, it gets cold suddenly, violently. Autumn is always over before you’ve even realized it’s properly begun. But I moved out of our shared apartment at the end of August, and I started writing the essay that would eventually become this one, and it’s been autumn ever since. If this were a story — which, of course, it is — that would mean something. 

I spent almost three years with David. We had a good story. (We met when we were fourteen; I loved him immediately; he loved me much later but with such voracity that I didn’t feel bad about it.) He got me into communism and in return I got him into being in love. He used to tell me nearly every day that I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen — he’d pause the movie whenever an actress came on screen and say, god, it’s crazy how no one else is as beautiful as you, no one even gets close — and I never felt patronized by it, not even a little, not even back when I felt patronized by nearly everything. He was the smartest person I’d ever met and he still thought I was smarter than him. He hurt me very badly sometimes, but really it’s okay. I hurt him too, I think. 

We used to say we never fought, we just made each other sad. Here’s a list of the things we made each other sad about: Music. Parties. School. His family. My friends. The suburbs. Toronto, Vancouver, New York City. (We were always sad about New York City.) The idea of breaking up. The idea of being together forever. Pleasure, and whether or not we deserved to feel it. Work. Our conflicting desires. Desire in general — his lack of it, my abundance. All the things I wanted and all the things he didn’t want. The pit in my stomach that never left even when I loved him so fiercely it made me cry to watch him sleep. (It felt scary to love someone that much, sometimes; like someone had taken one of my more precious organs out of my body and let it walk around outside, raw and pink and writhing in the open air where anything could happen to it.)

I told him about the pit in my stomach all the time. We were very communicative. I never cried more than I did one morning in the summer, when I asked him something like, does any of this ever feel off to you? Do you ever feel like something’s wrong, like we could be happier? And he looked at me, eyes big and black like an animal, and said, no. You make me so, so happy, and I can’t imagine what I would do without you. I started crying — the kind of sobs that make your body heave like you’re going to throw up, that turn you into something other than yourself — and I didn’t stop for four hours. Nine months later, I told him I had to go. 

Our breakup was so protracted, in part, because our story was so, so good, and I wanted so badly for the story of our relationship to be the story of my life — doing the dishes in the nighttime, his hands over my eyes when we watched horror movies, the love songs I wrote him on our anniversary. A math prodigy and a writer. Our children would have my eyes and his bone structure, my laugh, his freckles. 

I used to press my palms into the hollow under my browbone while I cried silently in bed next to him and tell myself those stories again and again, praying to believe them, trying to convince my body to feel something different than what it did. Desire, I realize again and again, is like death and taxes — certain and inescapable and constantly reaffirming of your smallness and powerlessness inside mechanisms much larger than yourself. When I was little, my father used to deal blackjack for me on the kitchen table while I gambled with M&Ms, knocking on the table as he flipped the cards over in front of me, doing the math but pushing my luck. I won, sometimes, but never stayed winning for long. In the end, the game always made a fool out of me. He meant it as a lesson: you can play the tables as long as you want, telling yourself another kind of story about how you’re the one in control, but the house always wins. Desire always wins. Isn’t that embarrassing? 

When we first realized we would have to break up — it was my decision, but we made it together, just like we did everything else — David talked about the idea of us ending up with each other again sometime in the future. He said, it just seems like it doesn’t make sense to get rid of all of — he paused — this. He was gesturing vaguely to something like our love, or our history, or the life we had built together, and I’m not sure if even he knew exactly what he was talking about, but I knew what he meant. Some people spend their whole lives looking for a good story. 

After the breakup, I took the train up to Montreal, where autumn was beginning to take hold even in the earliest days of September. I spent hours every day walking aimlessly around the city, watching the leaves curdle on the trees and trying to weave the loose threads of our relationship into a story that made sense. I felt gasps of loneliness so foreign and deep in my body that they left me bedridden. I scared my friends and family; I’d call them in the middle of the night and say, I think God is talking to me, I can feel his hands on my neck. I tried going to church, and then I tried skipping church, and neither left me feeling any more or less in control. (To have total control over my life would be a miracle; to have none at all would at the very least offer me a kind of entropic relief. I was, as usual, stuck in the perilous middle.) It got cold. I had to start wearing a jacket. I couldn’t make up my mind about anything. 

Was I a good partner, or was I a bad partner? Did I hurt him, or did he hurt me? Was the great tragedy of our relationship that we’d been doomed from the start, or that we veered off track somewhere, quietly, imperceptibly, and were too far gone by the time we’d realized it? On some days, I was certain that he hadn’t loved me enough; on others, I was sure that he’d loved me too much, that to stay would have meant being mummified in the marsh of his constant, wonderful, suffocating love. I never cried except for all the times that I did. I missed him desperately except for how often I felt grateful to be alone. I kept thinking I will never have a relationship like that again and couldn’t tell, even as I whispered the words out loud to myself on the long walk home from the fountain park, if I meant them as an expression of grief or as a kind of promise. I longed for absolutes and found that the realities of love had none to offer me. In the absence of knowledge, I made myself dizzy with stories. 

Everyone seemed to want a story from me, too — a neat, simple sentence or two that distilled our inconceivable relationship into a digestible anecdote, perhaps from which we might all learn a valuable lesson. Correlation, causation. Beginning, middle, satisfying end. I’d run into friends I hadn’t seen in a while and they’d all say the same things, like someone had briefed them ahead of time: kind, smart lines about heartbreak and feminism and masculinity and the signs they saw or didn’t see, tearful apologies, strange, taut hugs laden with meaning, reassurances about the role this experience would play in the wide and beautiful arc of my life. I could feel around me the construction of endless competing narratives. I was either a blighted, woeful woman-victim for whom comfortable life had just come to an end, or a triumphant, autonomous heroine freed from the shackles of heterosexual monogamy, or an endlessly generous and long-suffering martyr, or a flight risk, cruel and self-interested and never satisfied. None of these felt true, or, at least, none felt complete, but each pole had a powerful gravitational pull — they offered a balm of simplicity, a promise of meaning, a reprieve from the search for an answer. They offered interpretation, which is to say they offered an end to the endless work (and the endless humiliation) of muddling through feeling in fruitless search of fact. 

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In her essay Victims and Losers, A Love Story, Mary Gaitskill writes about the utility of narrative¹:

…Every boob with a hangnail has been clogging the courts and haunting talk shows across the land for the last twenty years, telling his/her "story" and trying to get redress. Whatever the suffering is, it's not to be endured, for God's sake, not felt and never, ever accepted. It's to be triumphed over. And because some things cannot be triumphed over unless they are first accepted and endured, because, indeed, some things cannot be triumphed over at all, the "story" must be told again and again in endless pursuit of a happy ending. To be human is finally to be a loser, for we are all fated to lose our carefully constructed sense of self, our physical strength, our health, our precious dignity, and finally our lives. A refusal to tolerate this reality is a refusal to tolerate life. 

About six months after I moved out of our shared apartment, David texted me: 

our sense of beauty is what allows us to cope with events that would otherwise be debilitating

It’s a more generous interpretation of Gaitskill’s idea; gentler, more forgiving, as was his way. And he’s right, of course. To tolerate life, as Gaitskill implores us to do, you first have to actually live in it — get up in the morning, take out the trash, eat breakfast, go to work, get on the train, try not to look too deeply into the faces of the people sitting across from you, walk home, call your parents, pay your rent — and you must do all of this amid immeasurable tragedy, amid loss, amid dizzying pain. This is the obvious truth that hits me over the head again and again, that I fear I’m doomed to learn and forget and re-learn in perpetuity: that nearly every person you’ll ever encounter, in love or in passing and anywhere in between, has suffered unfathomable pain; that you will rarely be able to understand or even recognize a fraction of it; that they all keep on living anyway; and that we spend most of our time, all of us, engaged in a grand collective charade to ignore the enormity of our monstrous, communal pain in the interest of continuing to live. This task — the task of continuing to live — would be nearly impossible without beauty, or narrative, or interpretation, or divinity, or whatever else you choose to call the process by which we assign meaning to the objectively absurd (although the assumption that anything can exist objectively beyond the interpretation of an observer is a heavy one, and not one that I instinctively hold true). We tell ourselves stories, as Didion would say — or, as she writes a few oft-ignored sentences later, at least we do for a while².

Our sense of beauty is what allows us to cope with events that would otherwise be debilitating. And beauty, writes Becca Rothfeld, is a lot like a story³. “That’s what a story is: a false promise of fulfillment that we know to be false and yet swallow wholesale time and time again, not because it’s plausible but because it’s irresistible. But when a story ends and presumes to gratify us in precisely the manner we claimed to want, it disappoints us in being over, which awakens a whole new appetite… in this respect, stories are like beauties, which promise without making good on what they pledge, which also interest us for precisely as long as they evade and oppress us.” This is the paradox of narrative: it is both existentially necessary and necessarily insufficient. We can’t escape the story (to think that we can is, in the end, another kind of story), but the story is also never enough. 

The culture that has developed around this kind of auto-analysis (a culture I’ve touched on before) can be understood as a narrative about the efficacy of narratives: it tells us a comforting story about the idea that the pains of our lives can be separated into discrete and solvable arcs — arcs that, if they cannot bend towards justice, can at least bend towards conclusion. But in real life, at least until we complete the march towards death, the micro-narratives of our lives rarely reach satisfying end. The same old pains, griefs, and gripes pop up again and again, ebb and flow, recede into background noise and reappear just when you were getting used to silence, and you are left powerless, again, with little recourse but to try and mutilate the incomprehensible into something small and simple. Applying the structure of a story to our necessarily unstructured lives can be tricky in part because of the inherent friction between the two modes of being; the great appeal of a story, after all, is that it ends. The great injustice of grief or pain or love or feeling at all is that — against all logic, will, or circumstance — it endures. And as Rothfeld suggests, would we even want completion if we got it? 

In Susan Sontag’s seminal essay “Against Interpretation,” she argues for prioritizing the sensuous experience of art over the attempt to determine what it represents. Rather than trying to plumb it for a message or a meaning, Sontag wants us to try and reckon with art’s ability to evoke overwhelming, frightening, unintelligible feeling — to develop an “erotics, rather than a hermeneutics, of art.” This is hard because it is painful, and valuable because it is hard. “Real art has the capacity to make us nervous,” she writes. “By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”⁴ 

Just as Sontag’s consumer of the 60s sought to numb the terrifying erotics of art by reaching for the anaesthetic of interpretation, so do we reach for personal narrative in order to avoid the sensual, intangible, somatic experiences that sit just beyond what the mind can rationally understand. It can be tantalizingly easy in hindsight to let a complex relationship slip into a series of algorithmic calculations: I did this because of my father, he reacted like this because of his mother, he couldn’t get hard because he couldn’t see you as a sex object once he saw you as a person, that’s also because of his mother, and you can’t take responsibility for yourself because your parents never cleaned when you were little and now you need someone else to manage all your messes. Okay, that’s a good story. It’s compelling. It’s so clean and neat and tidy that it might make you forget how dirty and messy and maddening it all actually was. But what about how it feels? Did it hurt? What about how it hurt? 

A relationship, notably, is not an algorithm. It is a gestalt. Far be it from me to say that I’ve figured out what relationships really are or really mean, but I know there is an intangible force formed between the centres of people that sits beyond the limits of interpretation, that is larger than itself and both of you, that cannot be explained satisfactorily by the rational mind or by language. This is not to say that it’s not worth it to try; the attempt to describe the unbearable, knowing that we will fail but hoping to fail with dignity or beauty, is not only the engine of all art but, perhaps, the engine of humanity. But trying is not everything. It is important, I think, to accept the limits of the attempt rather than to try and make our experiences smaller to fit comfortably within those limits. 

Sontag, for one, agrees that it would be an overcorrection to condemn interpretation altogether: “In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping a dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling… Once upon a time (a time when high art was scarce), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art. Now it is not.” There was a time for me, too, when it felt like radical and difficult work to interpret the self, to search for correlation, causation, subtext, and meaning rather than acting and feeling blindly. Likewise, the cultural effort that has gone into providing many of us with the tools to better understand ourselves hasn’t been for nothing. I have seen it make relationships healthier, parents more patient, friends more generous; it can also be very fun. (None of us are monks, and I love to gossip.) But I consider it a good rule of thumb to question my impulses when they start to become default, and I have therefore begun to question the purpose and the efficacy of the endless search for personal narrative — particularly when it comes to love and pain, two phenomena that have never submitted easily to intellectual capture. It has begun to feel much more radical and much more necessary to put in a new kind of difficult work: the process of exploring blindly again, of searching without hope of satisfaction, of sitting indefinitely in the discomfort of feeling without reaching for the balm of interpretation. 

As Sontag says, it’s all the kind of thing that has the capacity to make us nervous. To love someone, after all, is absurd: it humiliates you, it debases you, it removes you from yourself, it leaves you as alienated from your own thoughts and actions and impulses as you might be from a stranger’s, it takes your organs out of your body and forces you to watch them sleep (do my organs really look like that, you might wonder eventually — so wet and ugly, so foreign even though they belong to you, even though you need them to survive). You will feel things you can’t understand, and work to convince yourself of facts that your body doesn’t feel; you learn lessons and forget them just to re-learn them again, reminded unendingly of your frailty, your impermanence, your childlike self-delusion. Love laughs at you, makes you weird, makes you naked, makes you mean; Mary Gaitskill might say it makes you a loser, which is mostly just a cynical way of saying it strips you of your precious illusions and reminds you just how little control you actually have. 

At least, this is what it has done for me. My relationship with David, like nearly all relationships, felt cataclysmic, world-shifting, inconceivable to anyone outside of it, incomprehensible even to ourselves. We felt certain, like nearly everyone in nearly all relationships, that no one in history had ever experienced anything like it. (If this is what love feels like for everyone else, I wondered, how does anyone get anything done? How does the world keep turning? Who keeps the lights on?) We recognized this as silly and naive but knew there was no point in resisting; to desire, as we know, is to submit to being made a fool. 

That you can love someone like that and then somehow stop, for reasons that neither of you can understand or control, leaving the once-precious viscera of your relationship somewhere where no one can access it again — this is a kind of tragedy both banal and unbearable, a type of murder experienced by everyone, everywhere, all the time. The more debasing the experience, the more desperately we reach for shreds of meaning; the story is an attempt to establish control that is abandoned in the process of loving. But, if love has taught us anything, it’s that there are things known to the body that cannot be grasped by the mind. The things I’ve felt, I realize, don’t belong to my rational self any more than anything else does. To think that you ought to understand something just because you lived it — that you are owed an explanation for your feelings just because you happen to be the one who felt them — strikes me as a supremely naive kind of power play; the little dog that thinks it’s a big dog, or the toddler that acts like a dictator because it senses, perhaps, exactly how beholden it is to the whims of people and systems much bigger and more powerful than itself.

The Swan, No. 2, Hilma Af Klint

Through the narrativizing of feeling into supposed fact, Sontag argues, we deplete the real world in order to set up a “shadow world of ‘meanings’” where we no longer have to bother with “experienc[ing] immediately what we have.” The appeal of this way of seeing is obvious. Sontag calls interpretation “the revenge of the intellect upon the world.” In a world like this one, so full of little cruelties, humiliations, tragedies of hope and horror — who wouldn’t want to take revenge? 

But I have tried for revenge and found it has nothing to offer me. I’ve spent hundreds of hours over a year and a half trying to understand the intangible life-force of our relationship and the intangible reasons why that force between us eventually changed, and I’ve tried to figure out where it went, and I’ve tried to figure out why I can’t stop thinking about it, and all this thinking has brought me no further away from the dull ache in my stomach, the buzzing in my teeth, the amorphous and unbounded pain. The rewards of feeling, it turns out, are the same as the punishments: we are forced to experience immediately what we have. This is a dangerous project — one that imbues the world with a violence and a volume that extend indiscriminately in all moral directions — but one that nonetheless also allows us to live. It is worth it, I think, to approach the unbearable. It is worth it to endure it all. 

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I have never had so much trouble writing an essay as this one. I have written and deleted thousands of words, read whole books in preparation, texted David, called David, re-read the introduction so many times I can now recite it by heart. I have a new partner now, who I love dearly, with whom I share a relationship that is beautiful and full and constantly surprising. I thought I had felt everything there was to feel at 22; I was, of course, wrong. One of the most potent surprises is how my relationship with David didn’t end when we stopped being with each other, or even when I fell in love with someone else. I still think about him nearly every day. I still feel the vibrations of forces that I can’t understand — forces, like love and grief and pain, that sit somewhere beyond the limits of language — and these aren’t just memories of feelings but new ones, always new. Our relationship exists, still, somewhere. This, like everything else, is very painful, and accepting it has brought me a kind of liberation that I didn’t think was possible.

If a traditional narrative is a structure in which events move sequentially, buoyed ever-forward by reaction and order and linear time, the realities of extreme feeling are the opposite. It has been a year since I wrote the introduction to this essay; this autumn and last autumn blur together, emotionally and physically and mentally, and I feel the echoes of other autumns as well, the autumns when I loved him, the autumns before, all overlayed and translucent, changing each other all the time even as they sit etched in the past. To interpret, too, is to engage in a kind of time travel. The past, present, and future become malleable. If that makes the timeline of this essay difficult to follow, it is only because the timeline has collapsed for me as well. I started writing last September. It’s getting cold again. 

From Maggie Nelson: “Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day's mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.”⁵

What Nelson offers here is the idea that interpretation can be a kind of forced objectification: to engage in the romance of assigning meaning can deny humanity, autonomy, a deeper and more complicated truth. I think of Nelson’s letter when I feel the impulse to close my past experiences up and hold them like an object, finite and bounded next to my chest, representing something, teaching me something, a story to tell rather than an ongoing force that meant something and means something far beyond the words we have to describe it. I never wanted our relationship to be a talisman, or a lesson, or a souvenir from the past imbued with historical meaning. I didn’t love him so that I could hold anything in my hand at the end of it. I loved him because I had something to say.  

I’ve written much here about what it felt like to love David. I could write much more. The cruelty of this project, of course, is that I’m setting out to do exactly what I aim to condemn: I am trying to describe the indescribable, to turn something sacred into something consumable and finite. So I will try to stop telling the story, for that reason and also because I find it hard to convince myself that any of it would matter — if it would really mean anything to you to hear about the morning sun in his irises, the cold showers in the heatwave, the mud, the vomit, the sex, the dinners, the dirty dishes made clean and then dirty again. It was better than all of this, and worse than this too, and the problem with telling a story about love is that the harder you try to tell it accurately the further away you get from anything that feels true. 

I don’t know, in fact, if anything I wrote here — about my life, about David, about how I felt about any of it — is accurate in the strict or technical sense. But this is how I tell it to myself. I have to, I think.

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1. thank you for reading and for understanding. more soon. xoxo rayne

2. while finishing up this essay a few months ago, i happened to read this wonderful piece by Haley Nahman that also uses Against Interpretation to make a case against self-analysis. highly recommend!

3. i would also like to say an official thank you to david, who has been perennially supportive my work even when it’s about him; this has always been a show of generosity and understanding that is much more than i might have deserved. i would be neither the person nor the writer i am without him.

1. From Somebody With A Little Hammer, Mary Gaitskill

2. From On Keeping A Notebook, Joan Didion

3. From All Things Are Too Small, Becca Rothfeld

4. From Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag

5. From Bluets, Maggie Nelson