Chaos Is My Co-Pilot: In Praise of Tumultuous, Unruly Storytelling

“I feel that I am much more complete when I don’t understand. Not understanding, to my way of thinking, is a gift. It’s an odd blessing, like being insane without being crazy.”
–Clarice Lispector (tr. MJ Costa)
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It took me a decade to figure out my first novel. When asked what I was working on during those years, I would say a book set in a Civil-War-era brothel and watch my interlocutor light up, watch their expression slide from one of polite inquiry to one of keen interest. Ooh, I could almost hear them thinking, sounds sexy.

The pages I was producing, however, were far from sexy. Inspired by the true story of Nashville’s failed 1863 attempt to exile its prostitutes—a move that led to the legalization of sex work in that city until the War’s end—my idea was a good one. But when it comes to writing, good ideas litter the ground like post-ticker-tape-parade detritus. Execution is what counts, and after two years of work on my brothel book—mountains of research; my first attempt at constructing, and trying to follow, a thirty-five-page outline; three separate drafts—I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to artfully, and honestly, depict the reality of my characters’ lived circumstances.

And not because I’ve never sold my body (for cash, anyway). I’ve written successfully (or so I choose to believe) about many things I haven’t done, or even witnessed—taxidermizing a naked mole rat and assisting a mare with a difficult foaling. Assuming the identity of a man found dangling from a waterpipe in a Blitz-battered London hotel room and slaughtering foes on a field of battle. Writing what I don’t know—animating characters who are nothing like me, stepping into situations that require all my power to imagine—is, in fact, my exact thing.

So I put the novel aside for three years. Finished my PhD, dealt with my father’s death and mother’s descent into dementia, met and married my husband, took and left a full-time teaching gig in West Virginia. Then in March of 2020, when Covid drove everyone inward—both physically and psychically—I reread Lysistrata for the first time in two decades, returned to the pages of my brothel book, and realized I had to throw the whole thing out.

Well, not the whole thing; elements of my first attempt survive in Daughters of Chaos—settings, characters, circumstances. What changed most drastically, in the spring of 2020, was that for the first time, I allowed a collaborator into my creative process—a colleague known as Chaos.

Here, I’m using the word “chaos” in three ways at once. First, a dictionary definition: “complete disorder and confusion.” Next, chaos theory, an interdisciplinary mathematical-scientific field that studies the patterns chaos appears to obscure (a phenomenon I now think of as “chaos masquerading as order”). And finally, the original conception of “Chaos” belongs to the ancient Greeks. In their pantheon, Chaos is the primal deity, the bottomless abyss that gave birth to everything—Olympians, Titans, humans, earth, sun, moon, love, hatred, darkness—and the god Chaos is female.

I saw that working on a concept inspired by actual events and involving historical personages had led me to the mistaken belief that I needed to approach my subject matter directly—head-on. In life, I’m a routine junkie, but when it comes to creating, I’ve always moved indirectly—obliquely. Regardless of how much material I gather on a subject, when it comes to fictionalizing human experience, I have no choice but to write against expectations.

So I set about writing my own “lost” Greek comedy—Apocrypha—a play loosely patterned on Lysistrata, and this anarchic, and quite joyous, act led me to the missing pieces of my brothel book—those pieces I needed to construct a fictional-historical continuum vast and vibrant enough to contain an age-old secret Cult of female power, a brothel staffed by literal Sirens, three Greek Gods and one Demigod, the Aldine Press, Andrew Johnson, The Book of the City of Ladies, Moderata Fonte, dominatrices, John Wilkes Booth, the two most powerful fourteen-year-old girls ever born, and a veritable army of priestesses, bear-women, and sea-monsters.

Writing the Apocrypha unlocked Daughters of Chaos, allowing me to see the historical material in which I’d been mired in a new light. One expects to find sex in a brothel; one doesn’t expect to find magic and true love, indoctrination and rebellion and leviathans—all of which are far more interesting, to my way of thinking, than sex. My brothel book couldn’t be about a single set of “public women” and a single socio-political conflict, I realized—it had to reckon with the association upon which the “world’s oldest profession” is built—the relationship between WOMEN and SOCIETY, writ large. To explore how that conflict has echoed across a span that began centuries before the American Civil War and will continue for the remainder of humankind’s tenure on this planet.

But if I hadn’t spent all those years not understanding my novel—mired in the deepest, darkest caverns of confusion—I never would have found the exact expectations I needed to push against, to breathe life into my radical, unruly alternate history.

It turns out that chaos is as necessary as it is dangerous, and one can easily argue the same thing about order. After all, writing fiction is dangerous, making art is dangerous, standing up for your rights is dangerous—but these acts are also so vivifying. The notion that chaos can, in fact, be a force for good is a tough pill for some to swallow. But without questions and doubts, without cataclysms and conflagrations, without volatility and unpredictability and turmoil, how would we create?

Like Melville’s Bartleby, a scrivener who refuses to scribe, like Miss McCraw in Nicholas Roeg’s brilliant film Picnic at Hanging Rock, who abandons her orderly classroom for the mysteries of the universe, like Lise, who narrates Muriel Sparks’s explosive first book The Driver’s Seat, setting out on a pseudo-vacation she’s designed to end in her own murder, the characters in Daughters of Chaos push against expectations at every turn. It is my hope that in so doing, they breathe life back into the flattened historical record from whence I plucked them, reanimating stretches of our past, providing glimpses of lived experience that comment on our present, as well as our future.

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Daughters of Chaos by Jen Fawkes is available from Abrams Books.