Permission to do more

By Jeff Bursey

In Permission we read a sequence of emails from a female letter-writer who identifies herself first by the initials FW, then as F. Wren, and eventually Fearn Wren, to an unnamed male filmmaker/writer who is told in the first letter that responses and acknowledgements aren’t needed: “That is to say, I want nothing in return, nothing tangible—only permission to continue this spectral writing, so disembodied and out of place, so easily disavowed.” In the preamble to the book, a narrator (possibly Wren, since as time goes on she mentions that these letters are a book) outlines how the letters were sent at regular intervals and speculates on what the recipient, at one point called “Dr. Nettle,”  would make of the one-sided correspondence: “One imagines also that initially he was too put off by their intellectual arrogance and posturing to have genuine interest in them.” There would also be “increasingly cursory attention” paid to the notes.

Towards the end of the book, slightly over nine months since the first email in July 2007, Wren writes that

it would not surprise me if you once felt closer to me than you do today. Without knowing a thing about me, you might have even thought me a kindred spirit. But now—now that I have made my strangerhood explicit—I feel you do not know what to make of me anymore. And could I expect you to trust anyone under a false name—this ludicrous moniker that may or may not have roots in a fondness for ferns (!) and wrens (!), ferns and wrens (!)? Personally, I would not trust such a person.

Trust is given over in the choice of the recipient, however, that he may be willing to go along with Wren’s conceit. It was also present in S.D. Chrostowska’s writing process, as she explained in an interview with Dalkey’s Cailin Neal:

CN: Were there ever times when you wished your reader would break his or her silence? Were there ever times of paranoia when you were convinced that your words weren’t being read or the reader disliked your notes? Or did you always have this sense of “permission” from your reader?

SD C: This was the exciting part of the experience. Any day I could be told to stop, or worse: asked about my identity. I was never sure whether or not I was being read—except maybe once. In any case, the only way the addressee could prove they understood me was by not replying. But perhaps I did not understand myself. Perhaps if they wrote something back I would have dropped the conceit and continued the book together. I’ll admit that was sometimes a wish. But day to day it was crucial to be deprived of any recognition, maybe forever. This worked well. All the doubts one had concerning permissiveness, poetic license, made it into the book: what’s inherently permitted to writers, or to artists generally, where should they draw the line, how do they respond should someone draw that line for them…

During an interview with 3: AM, Chrostowska elaborates on what her book attempts to do:

I imagine that countless so-called postmodern novels draw attention to the limits of the novel and in that sense expand it. My book does not. Permission does borrow the trappings of the epistolary novel, but its aim is not to expand that genre. It’s to expand the art of letter-writing.

I wasn’t writing a novel.

As readers of the finished book, not participants in its construction, how we respond to the novel’s purpose is our own business.

It’s soon clear that there will be no easily graspable centre, no drama, nothing in the way of likeable or rounded characters, little about scenery and scant foreshadowing; on the other side of the aesthetic ledger we are given aperçus, presentations on the Holocaust, Solidarity, solitude and death. Like emails generally, there are parts that can be skimmed, some that have to be read twice, and some whose contents at first appear trivial but, over time, grow in importance. There is a rarity to sheer physical activity, apart from a few references to walking and the senses. Often mediating with her mind what comes from her body and her heart, Wren lives in her head. In talking about illness she writes that we should “become an instrument of our disease; the way to do it is… by sowing discord between mind and body.”

Such broad statements are typical in the emails as they introduce a theme, and then take one of three paths: into theory, complete with quotations from this or that thinker, into sweeping generalizations, or into personal material (as we keep up the façade, as readers, of believing what we’re told by any writer).

At times Wren is a crank and bore (in earlier times, she would have written letters in green ink) and delves into matters in a way that comes off as pretentious and overly sensitive. (One thinks of those gentlemen who, upon retirement, send a stream of letters to the editor of their small-town newspaper.) She repeats what she has read somewhere and believes to be her own thoughts, such as the connection between books and the flesh as a “lost art,” though by 2007-2008 most people in Wren’s profession would be familiar with hyperlinked texts and ebooks.

A reader can be inclined to prefer that Wren had spent less time at the computer or conducting research in a library and more time in a park, or surfing, or giving blood. She co-opts the recipient of her opinions into her epistles: “Since I owe this solitude to your fellowship (fictive, to be sure), I cannot call it—any more than this writing—fully mine; I must also call it your solitude—and your writing. And, insofar as it is not entirely make-believe, my fellowship is anonymous and virtual; as is this solitude, I fear.” An assertive letter-writer is not an always-wonderful read.

Then, unexpectedly, Wren sets down a thought that catches one up in its perception or its wording, as in this passage where she recapitulates what she felt, as an only child, about her parents as she grew up in Poland:

You can’t expect much from a nail merchant (father) and a cardboard merchant (mother), and previously a wire merchant (father) and a textile merchant (mother). You cannot count on folks with a mercantile bias for a good upbringing. No books in our house either. But, in fairness, they neither joined nor signed. If I were to give their politics a name, it would be isolationist nuclear-family politics… I sensed I was growing up without being brought up, and that, much as this situation was liberating, it also impoverished me, driving me to seek allies in surrogate families, to room with friends whose home-life was more congenial, whose parents were more alert instead of sleepwalking through life, and I slept and ate better at these houses, and generally felt better—so the inevitable return home was a return to solitary confinement, driving me to distraction.

Whatever the overall accuracy of those remarks may be, surely we have seen such children, not only belonging to the mercantile class. In a more aphoristic vein, when Wren reflects on snow she attributes interpretations to those she observes: “Everyone loves the white landscape for its purity, for briefly ‘erasing’ all squalor, but they are addicted to squalor, unwilling to part with it, they wouldn’t dream of going that far.” And: “Each infant grave is a yawning abyss; you are reminded by it of the absence of memory, the tenuousness of meaning.”

Later letters reveal the manic depression that rises up now and then in Wren. By this time we have argued against her despondent view of the world. In one email midway through the book she begins a sentence with the words “I suspect everyone,” and it’s no effort to break off there and consider that she does indeed distrust everyone.

We (or some readers) find we have been arguing with her broad assertions and now, suddenly, realize we have not been in a privileged position but in a state of ignorance. In a later letter Wren compares prisons and schools. “To be sure, the educational system makes formative claims where the prison system makes reformative ones, but at the very core, the educational system is carceral and the carceral system educational.”

Tipping her hat to fellow Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969), she refers to a lax school “run by a breakaway collective… Only the most progressive could set their children loose in this menagerie, which had no library to speak of and hardly any books. At the graduation ceremony, a great bard furiously strummed his acoustic, mesmerizing us with political songs.” If we consider her education and home environment, in a country that moved from the totalitarianism of her infancy to the post-Cold War liberation of her teenage years, in addition to her mental illness, we come away chastened. Pushed by her eisegetical commentary, we (or some of us) had instinctively adopted an adversarial stance towards her and the narrative.

“This work is a structure without foundations,” Wren tells the recipient, speaking of the emails (complete with photographs and footnotes) that will become this book, but she could be speaking of herself. Didn’t we make judgments based not on foundations but on circumstantial evidence? To repeat a phrase from a letter quoted earlier: “now that I have made my strangerhood explicit—I feel you do not know what to make of me anymore.” Everything we had thought of her requires re-examination, and the narrative surprises by what it says about us.

Permission is not flawless. There are word choices that seem less apt or fresh than they could be; the figure of Anne Frank seemed overused by 1979 when Philip Roth invoked her in The Ghost Writer; and, typical of many experimental works, there is a lack of humour, which is like meat with no salt. While these features weaken the impact of the novel they do not undermine it. Chrostowska has Wren say: “A brute fact: even great books are bought and sold by the pound.” Soon into Permission we become aware that this is not a novel that will be taken up by many readers. We run once again down that sharp divide between the writerly and the readerly, and into the continuing debate among publishers, readers, and the literati as to what side of this widening gulf a writer should be on.

The mention of pauper burials in the province of Quebec comes as a shock, as this is one of the very few references to Canada. Chrostowska teaches at York University, and her decision to stay in the Polish head, if you will, of Wren and remain aloof from Canadian features is to be commended (that the publisher is not Canadian says something about Canadian presses, and you can read about that here, especially in the comments section), as it helps keep distant the parochialism that afflicts some of our writers, publishers and art commentators and mandarins. There is none of that navel-gazing that advertises, like a badge, this country’s cultural insecurity, best exemplified by Canada Reads (and its participants, judges and host), which is little more than an effort to build a self-esteem shelf for the nation. The negatives listed above mean that Permission will not be a Canada Reads choice, but it is a book that speaks to more than Wren, or perhaps even S.D. Chrostowska, might imagine, and deserves a wide readership.

Permission, by S.D. Chrostowska | Dalkey Archive Press | 201 pages |  $14.50 | paper | ISBN #978-1564788580