Luisa Just Returned From a Recent Family Gathering at the Beach or Ocean
The Strange Beach Novel That Would Brand Mallarmé Proud
Chloe Aridjis's Sea Monsters doesn't care much for plot, instead seductively gathering energy through images, repetition, and metaphor.
Chloe Aridjis is not a novelist who appears to care almost plot, so allow'southward go the story of Bounding main Monsters, her third book, out of the fashion. Its protagonist, a moody, Morrissey-loving teenager named Luisa, meets a boy named Tomás and lets him persuade her to run away from home. The two take the bus from Mexico City to Oaxaca, where they campsite in a beach town called Zipolite and where Luisa rapidly loses involvement in Tomás, replacing him with a silent, mysterious-seeming effigy. After a while, her father tracks her down, and she returns to Mexico Urban center.
These events are less plot, in truth, than scaffolding. Sea Monsters derives picayune energy from what happens to Luisa, or from how she changes during her travels. Instead, information technology works like a poem, gathering steam through image, repetition, and metaphor. Aridjis deploys set pieces the way a poet might, and seems particularly attracted to performances: peacocking Goths in a nightclub, a man building an elaborate sandcastle, lucha libre fighters soaring through their choreographed moves. She riffs like a poet, as well, letting each paradigm twist and grow into the adjacent.
These tendencies aren't surprising, given Aridjis's groundwork. Her father, Homero Aridjis, is among Mexico's well-nigh celebrated poets, and the surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington was a family friend. Aridjis curated Carrington'south retrospective at Tate Liverpool in 2015 and writes fine art criticism in add-on to fiction. Her art writing leaks into Sea Monsters, though not equally forcefully every bit it may accept into her graduate dissertation, which compared the autobiographies of 19th-century French magicians to the symbolist poets who were their contemporaries. In Body of water Monsters, both of those influences are equally clear. Like a sorcerer, Aridjis is obsessed with elusiveness; similar a symbolist, she far prefers imagination and metaphor to plain sight.
Aridjis alerts readers to this preference early and oft. Sea Monsters begins with Luisa on the beach at Zipolite, contemplating the aboriginal Greeks, to whom she returns often. She muses that they "created stories out of a simple juxtaposition of natural features … investing rocks and caves with meaning." Aridjis does this, too. Nature comes alive in her easily. She reserves her fullest imagistic powers for the water: Early in the novel, Luisa watches the surf "write and erase its long ribbon of foam," and later, in an image I accept establish impossible to milkshake from my mind, the waves become "rows of muscular men with interlocking artillery that came closer in with each roll."
Aridjis tends to wearable her influences lightly, but she makes an exception for Baudelaire. Before Luisa runs away from home, her French instructor assigns Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal. Luisa latches on to "Un voyage à Cythère," a dour verse form in which Aphrodite'southward native island transforms into the deserted site of a hanging. At outset, Luisa, wanting an airtight explanation, tries to explain the verse form: "The poem's heart was a carbonized black, and Kythera a somber rocky identify where dreams got dashed against its shores." Only her teacher steers her away from that reading: Amend, he suggests, to focus on what lies beneath the text. Or as he puts it, better to remember that "events were the mere froth of things, and one'southward truthful interest should be the sea."
If at that place is a moment when Aridjis herself appears in Sea Monsters, this is information technology. From this scene on, she adheres fully to the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé'south dictum that literature should "evoke picayune past lilliputian an object in order to bear witness a state of soul, or inversely, to cull an object and release from it a state of soul through a serial of unravelings … In that location must always be enigma in poesy, and the goal of literature—there is no other—is to evoke objects." In Sea Monsters, Aridjis translates this thought finer from poesy to fiction. As Luisa roams Zipolite, Aridjis invests her full literary powers in sketching the beach around her. She rarely writes nigh Luisa's emotions explicitly, but her descriptions slowly guide readers into Luisa'south "state of soul."
Perchance the most important descriptions in Ocean Monsters are of seashells. When Luisa arrives in Zipolite, she learns that its proper noun might be Zapotec for "'Lugar de Caracoles,' place of seashells, an bonny thought since spirals are such neat arrangements of space and time." Later, she recalls a political party in Mexico City with "a large spiral of white pulverisation … [its] whorls and so thick information technology looked like the ghost of an ammonite." At that party, Luisa accomplished a state of happy pause in time, a state she struggles to summon in Zipolite. As she roams the beach boondocks, hunting for shells and examining crushed toads on the sidewalk, it's clear that she's not content. Merely by just letting Luisa express her unhappiness obliquely, Aridjis evokes dual longings: Maybe Luisa wants time to pass more chop-chop, or possibly she wishes to no longer care whether time is passing at all.
This duality of pregnant squares well with Mallarmé'southward disdain for single interpretations. In an 1891 interview with the journalist Jules Huret, the poet claimed that writers who "have the object in its entirety and testify it, lack mystery; they take away from readers the succulent joy that arises when they believe that their ain minds are creating." Luisa seems to pursue that same joy, but the narratives she creates are personal. Twice in Bounding main Monsters, she falls briefly in honey with a human being, or rather, the idea of a human. First, there's Tomás, with whom she travels to Zipolite, but once there, he bores her. Then there'due south a man she spots at a beachfront bar, "a ring of silence effectually him," who she imagines is a merman. When Luisa discovers that he'south a local boat operator named Gustavo, her interest again fizzles out.
This, and so, is Sea Monsters' true arc. A moody, Morrissey-loving teenager named Luisa sees magic everywhere. Repeatedly, the magic dissipates, just she doesn't mind. Hither, nosotros can see the 19th-century magicians' influence in two ways. A magic pull a fast one on is meant to elude its viewer, and it isn't meant to terminal. One play tricks should requite manner to the next, and, later, to a vague simply lingering memory of amazement. Luisa views her trip the aforementioned way. On her render to Mexico City, she has no regrets, no real want to talk most her time in Zipolite. She'south happy to let it float abroad.
Every bit a result, the novel's satisfactions come not from character growth or plot resolution, only from the evoking of emotion through symbols. As Luisa wanders through Zipolite, she returns to a scattering of images: iguanas, breaking waves, shipwrecks, the island of Kythera, an ancient Greek predictive device known every bit the Antikythera Mechanism. Each one shifts in significant, like the seashells, and tracking their evolving significance pulls readers deep into the novel'due south interpretive project. Few novels operate this way, but many poems do. I found that Body of water Monsters often conjured Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish," with its rapt attention to the fish's real and imagined body. The victory at the poem's end comes not from catching or keeping the fish, only from having beheld information technology. Ascertainment and beauty create significant.
The same holds true for Sea Monsters. Often I wished to watch it, or examine information technology like a sheet. Bounding main Monsters would lend itself beautifully to flick adaptation, and notwithstanding on picture, Aridjis'southward gifts of evocation would be lost. A shot of waves could not bring the aforementioned pleasure equally those "rows of muscular men with interlocking artillery." Hearing the word Kythera is no match for Luisa debating whether she prefers "the cackle of Kythera or the sorceress C of Cythère." The novel'southward strength lies in its ability to turn to the next magic pull a fast one on, the next detail, the adjacent sight. Those sights are all the more impressive when conjured solely from language. By opting out of fiction's conventional prioritization of plot or graphic symbol development, Aridjis foregrounds her ability to develop images and metaphors. The effect is seductive in its multiplicity. Mallarmé would be proud.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/02/chloe-aridjiss-sea-monsters-strange-symbolist-novel/582535/
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