For a friend’s book club we recently read Emma Cline’s The Guest, and while I disagreed with much of the effusive praise printed on its cover, I did find its themes compelling after discussing with the group. I had my heart broken at the beginning of the year by a man who convinced me that humanities scholarship necessarily included the action of living, of thoughtful, emotional existence with others and the insight gained from such experiences that comes to bear upon more publishable forms of research. Easily taken as an artsy justification to fuck off from actually working (as if grad school wasn’t already that), his words really resonated as someone who has long struggled to balance work and social life, or more fundamentally, to understand my own identity as both academic and non-academic. Academic work (including teaching) is the only work I’ve ever found truly fulfilling; I also think the academy is a terribly toxic space structured in such a way that the vast majority of people within it struggle emotionally. Having been both fully invested and fully divested from academia, always unhappily, since returning to my PhD program I have often floundered about in an attempt to find some third way, joining communities that reflect different aspects of my interests and values. While in the past I often felt as if I did not fully belong to any one place or people, I have lately been trying to embrace this multiplicity, finding meaning and joy in the existence of so many avenues of connection I share with others.
Cline’s protagonist Alex is also a girl who doesn’t belong anywhere, her existence wholly defined through transactional interactions that meet immediate needs from one moment to the next. She has no real personal history, no dreams or aspirations, no personality other than who she needs to be to get what she wants from the person in front of her. Often in a haze of pain killers, her only consistent feeling is fear that someone will see her for who she is — not only that she doesn’t really belong in the world of the rich and leisurely men who pay her bills, but more than anything, shame that she is nothing more than a collection of manipulative behaviors. Whereas other characters in the shadows of high society seem to have accepted the role they play, Alex constantly self-sabotages through small, destructive acts of protest, as if to prove to herself that she is more than whatever object of desire she is currently playing. But Alex is never portrayed as a victim — as readers, we are very aware of the choices she is making and those she avoids. A guest in her own life, she lacks any self-knowledge that might ground her increasingly desperate delusions.
I mention that the guy broke my heart because, like Alex, and seemingly like so many New York singles, he was at sea in a life he had chosen and worked for. New York is just so full of distractions and novelty, it is easy to be taken with the tide. As in academia, transience, precarity (for some), and busyness provide justifications for rootlessness. There is the feeling, always, that after just one more hoop or benchmark, finally things will make sense, will feel at peace, will feel like home. These delusions propel us through a series of actions which we willingly perform without any sense of agency, all the things that must be done and are expected. We all make poor decisions when we feel powerless. Having to account for pain caused by simply trying to meet our needs, to feel seen, and loved, and real, can be unbearable. Shame is a very heavy anchor; I, too, have tried to swim away rather than drown.
There’s an argument that could be made here about late capitalism and alienation and liberal modernity, but I’m not interested in laying blame with systems or power structures or of utilizing the binary language of victims and perpetrators, however abstract. We’re always both, aren’t we? Perhaps the drive for singularity and concreteness is part of the problem, the quest for a coherent, univocal, fully agentive self-image doomed to fail regardless. We are and are not the sum of our actions and intentions, responsible for their consequences while not fully defined by them. What ethics become possible, what space for the self and others is created, through the acknowledgement of contradiction and contingency? Only by letting go of the delusion of absolute autonomy and embracing the reality of interconnectedness can we see the many choices we have already made, the ways in which we already exist, have already been forgiven, are already loved, and have always belonged. Always in the process of formation, there is no one point at which we will finally be whole, or good, or enough. We already are, and we deserve to act like it.