Dept. of Speculation – a review

Jenny Offill’s second novel succeeds in elevating what in essence is rather a pedestrian plot – that of the decay of a marriage between an ordinary couple, into an oblique and subtly unsentimental exposé of life, love and its permutations. In addition, it also serves as a satire on the hollowness of the apparent profundity prognostic of the perfidious trapdoor lurking beneath the malady of misused sensibility.

The novel is presented as a series of thoughts and memories in short paragraphs that advance the plot elliptically with emphasis on the inner workings of the protagonist, an unnamed woman. The whimsical allusions and references in the somewhat chaotic maelstrom paint the tableau of a young woman with an obvious instinct for sensibility but whose cacophonic musings suggest often a solipsistic and unironic personality. In one instance, she professes her plan (rather cringingly phrased) ‘never to get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.’ This rather puts one in mind of the story told by Stephen Spender, in his memoir World Within World, where the then young poet (forging his career in 1930), was invited to lunch by T. S. Eliot.

‘At our first luncheon he asked me what I wanted to do. I said: “Be a poet.”

“I can understand your wanting to write poems, but I don’t quite know what you mean by ‘being a poet,’” he objected.’

Spender, though with an predisposition for moist sentimentality and who remained a charming naïf throughout his 70 plus years, went on to sharpen his skills with the love for his craft to produce lines such as:

Since we are what we are, what shall we be
But what we are? We are, we have
Six feet and seventy years, to see
The light, and then release it for the grave.
We are not worlds, no, nor infinity,
We have no claims on stone, except to prove
In the invention of the city
Our hearts, our intellect, our love.

The difference between Spender and your average art student, and indeed the protagonist of the novel, aside from talent, is perhaps his unremitting love for language and prose, which allowed him to stoically maintain it through, for example, the seismic experiences of World War II, where he was a fireman. Spender also possesses the ability to position himself in the macrocosmic view, thereby relinquishing much egotism, which too often retards good thinking. Most of us, despite noblest of intentions and overflowing sentimentality, relinquish the grand and often inconvenient dreams of our childhoods as they begin to be ground down by prosaic and mundane problems. To fall out of love with them or to suffer the pains of letting go something that wasn’t quite yours. Offill’s book is able to capture these small surrenders and the way the mind copes with them, often indirectly, in an interesting and slightly uncomfortable way by accurately portraying the self-deception and self-delusion, punctuated by moments of brutal honesty that we all have tasted in our lives. These processes animated by the breadth of allusions, shallow though many are, made by the protagonist throughout the vignettes of her reflections. These qualities lend her a great dose of verisimilitude as she becomes a mirror to our own inner, hidden and shameful but inescapable selves.

The romance, the child and the subsequent crisis of love faced by the heroine are all told in a similarly realistic but opaque fashion, giving one the idea that much of it could be semi-autobiographical. The protagonist, as the story evolves, and through a couple of transitions of point of view, becomes less indigent with a regard to a sense of herself, though her whirring mind remains the lovely frazzle that has partaken but shallowly from the Pierian Springs where, as Pope says in his poem An Essay on Criticism. ‘There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain.’ In the modern world of hashtags and soundbites, it could be that the new generation of youths, more so than those of past generations, on the important subjects of love (the eros and agape as the Greeks have delineated it), will be satisfied with sentimentality and emotions without the propensity to examine them.

Offill began the novel with an exordium from Socrates, sourced from him pupil Xenophon, that ‘Speculators on the universe…were no better than madmen.’ It is interesting to reflect that Socrates was stating, in his full quotation, that the speculators on the universe and the laws of the heavenly bodies were no better than madmen. While the quote gave a sense of dread and anomie, Socrates was obviously mistaken. On the other hand, the preeminent philosopher was known for his contribution to the study of ethics, from which much of the skeleton of the novel is built. Furthermore, the Socratic method of dialectics, which, through an exercise of intellectual intuition and systematic skepticism, allows us to identify the weaknesses of thoughts. Socratic irony, a way through which the dialectic is applied, works by the pretense of ignorance to draw out incoherence of his interlocutor. It can perhaps be said that the book is laced with Socratic irony; that through the apparently fatuous jetsam and flotsam of the protagonist’s thoughts, we are able to derive our own thoughts and morals and to hone them, driven by the moral urgency generated by the protagonists’ anguishes.

Kierkegaard observed that the greatest tragedy of life is that ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’ Between the double edges of regret and remorse, possibly the bitterest pills life has on offer, the greatest antidote is perhaps humour and irony, two characteristics that could have salvaged much happiness and diverted much pain for the protagonist, and hence for ourselves as we navigate our own limited time.