Deconstructing Old Stories to Tell Them in New Ways

About four years ago, I started to write a novel. I knew very little about it besides that I wanted it to be a contemporary retelling of Oedipus. All writing, I suppose, is a form of retelling but more specifically, I knew from a young age that I wanted to retell ancient stories. Perhaps the impulse came from reading those Roald Dahl fairy tales in which Red Riding Hood keeps a pistol in her knickers and wears a wolf skin coat. Perhaps, it was around then that I began to feel that doing something like that was the finest form of destruction.

Truth telling: I am constantly uncertain, endlessly unsure. I am uncomfortable in my own skin a lot of the time and, often, in my own writing. On the bad days I think: I am not clever enough for this. And on good days, I do not think the opposite, only: I do not need to be clever for this. Whatever that might mean. And so perhaps my interest in retellings comes from a place of terror, too. To write from scratch feels, to me, like digging into concrete with a spoon to make a space I can lie in without being trodden on. And—at the very least—with retelling there is half a hole there to begin with.

As Claire Vaye Watkins says: let us burn this motherfucking system to the ground and build something new. Utter destruction, complete annihilation. There is nothing more frightening to a writer than that glowing blank page. And so—because we may be frightened while also being brave—we take some of the old building’s rubble; steal a doorknob or two, use the line of a window for inspiration, make a sitting room of the ancient hollowed swimming pool.

I want to speak about retelling as a way of rewriting old constructs, of taking texts and forming other texts from their bones. I want to also speak about a new style of writing that might emerge from the wreckage, and what it might look like.

In The Laugh of the Medusa, Helene Cixous calls for Écriture féminineⁱⁱ or “women’s writing.” She calls for a new style of written word, separate from patriarchal language. A style where the female body—and here let us now say all marginalized bodies—are put into the text. As I am writing and thinking about writing the questions come to me: what does this style look like? Do we know when we see it? Is it surrounding us right now? How do we write within the gaps? Within the spaces that are allowed to us. How do we push at their boundaries until they are enormous enough to contain all who are marginalized?

When I first began thinking of how to explore these ideas, it wasn’t as an essay but a story. A retelling, of course. It seemed right that it would be a retelling from a beginning. From the beginning. If Eve looks out of this essay she does so with multiple voices, with a multitude of possibilities. Horny and desperate and disappointed and loving and clever and weary and purposeful in her actions. And if we were to begin to think what this new sort of writing would be, how it would appear on her page, we can fit words into her mouth and say: see, there is something new after all.

(This garden has clematis and aster and lily of the Incas. This garden has cedar and palm and weeping willow. This garden has things I have not thought how to name yet. When I lie in the dirt I feel all the nameless things shifting and creaking beneath me. A creature with skin the color of sun and sharp teeth pillows his head on my thigh and I think: tiger. In the river there are silver movements slipping from my hold and I think: fish. In the sky something falls and regains balance just before it hits the earth and I think: bird. I think: eagle.)

It is hardest of all to find how to start. In his essay A Conversation Between what is Broken Jack Young also calls for a move towards a different sort of writing. He writes: So fuck endings. Fuck bildungsromans. Fuck smooth and cohesive novels. These constructs of patriarchy and colonialism. He speaks of Eimear McBride and her overflowing stream of unstoppable language and thought. Of novels which do not take the reader by the hand but which stick in our throats, difficult and stubborn.

(Joy most time. Unbearable grit-toothed joy hands clasped to fists spinning and spinning beneath these trees I named and this place I know as well as I know this skin-flesh. Dancing dirtied stamping feet one two one two. Other times a little   something. A little   not certain of the feeling. Teaching birds to talk. Repeat after me. Saying this and that and laughing when they speak only in the voices given to them. Lying for hours or perhaps years not moving. A little A little             alone. The tiger watches its double the birds call to one another even the snake even the snake. A little           lonely.) 

I think also of Akwaeke Emezi’s multi-voiced explosion in Freshwater wherein the narrator’s head is stuffed with voices all speaking at the same time, sometimes with one butting forward and then another taking over.

(Part of Eve—witch-eyed—says better to be alone, better to be safe and strong. This Eve moves the hands and keeps the brain busy. There are countless names to give and the garden goes on forever. This Eve keeps the hands busy to save the brain from thinking. From thinking: what if? What if there were another. Like us.

Another part of Eve day dreams what the shape might be, how the voice might sound, how she would go about it. Arguments and battles rage inside, scars made on soft skin. In the midst of the chaos day-dreaming-Eve creeps away. She sings as she goes to cover the sound of her thoughts. She counts the bones in her body. In her head no one sees her. They break one another apart, tear limb-from-limb. There can be no other, some scream and others: we are so alone we are so alone.

The part of Eve who wonders what he might be like—this creature like her and unlike—digs with her fingers until she finds a part of herself she thinks might grow. No one can need so many ribs; she can share. In her head one part turns to see and then another. The silence rings. Eve buries the bone in the soft earth and puts her mouth to the dirt and whispers: please, please. I’ll call you Adam, if only you will come.) 

We could look to innovation in punctuation. Emily Dickinson’s dashes—which Sinead O’Connor argues, convincingly, represent the interruptions caused by men—or writers who have dismissed entire swatches of punctuation, refuse to write with speech marks at all.

Or consider the use of the blank page in novels such as Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, a novel where the spaces in-between her sentences seem almost as important as the words themselves.

(where before it was quiet now it is NOISY. Eve says can you – Adam says whatsthiscalled?whyisitmakingthisnoise?whydoesitfeellikethis? Eve says wait a second – I’ll tell you – I’ll tell you if only – Adam says whatdoesthismean?isthatatree?isthisdirt?arewereal? Eve says         until her mouth aches and her tongue is enormous and she has to press both hands over her ears to hear only)

Or is it structural innovation we need? Abandoning markers and constrictions. And here we turn to short story collections (for lack of a better word) which might seem, to start with, like separate entities gathered up and pressed against one another, but which, as we move through them, link and entangle so that we are presented with something simultaneously novel and collection of disparate parts, refusing either definition. For example The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro or You Can’t Go Home Again by Sarvat Hasin.

Unavoidably a polyphony, this style lends itself to retelling, too. And would lend itself, also, to this new writing where we are both afraid and being as brave as we can possibly be.

(Many days I miss being alone. He fills so much space, this me-shaped-himself-shaped thing. His voice is louder than everything else in the garden. He finds the things I have not had time to name and he points at them and says frog, heron, badger and laughs at the joy of it. I want to tell him that I was here before he even knew he existed, I want to reach inside him take back what I gave to him. Rib of mine rib of his rib of us. We are ribbed together forever. I think: what have you done?)

It is wise to consider here that there is nothing new to say. The idea that life is fragmentary and filled with multiple voices, and that writers must adapt their work to best show this is as old as modernism. There is no ending; well, we have been told that before. Helene Cixous says the future must no longer be the past but it is impossible, really, to prise them. We writers are working with aged and rusting tools. I think of the woman in Adrienne Rich’s poem diving down through the water alone with her book of myths and camera. Looking both for a wreck and for something new, something that no one has seen or discovered before.

Is the way forward, then, to look only forward? Should we look to writers such as Jennifer Egan who populate their novels with power point presentations? Should we turn to poetry or non-fictions for our inspirations: to Hera Lindsey Bird who writes Keats is dead so

fuck me from behind or to Maggie Nelson who takes the idea that women can only write autobiographically and runs with it as far and as fast and as joyfully as she can?

And let us also not forget the retellings that transgress. I remember the thrill of first reading Tampa by Alissa Nutting in which a female teacher seduces a student and then a review by a man calling it disgusting. How dare she?

(Years have gone past quickly and we have reached a sort of peace. Sweet Adam, careless Adam. Once you were like my child and I wanted only for you to sit and be calm. After some time passed you were like my brother and I only wanted to care for you, warn you not to touch the acacia tree or swim too close to the crocodile. Enough time has passed that you are neither child nor brother. I watch you sleeping.

There is a snake inside me, breathing as I breathe, eating what I pass down my gullet to it. It is me and I am it. A part of me says: be quiet be still be careful. A part of me says: want but not too much. Love but not too wildly. The snake says I want I love I am not quiet or careful. A part of me says: I have put this apple tree here to test you. I say: I do not need testing.) 

When I’m writing, I dwell a lot with the strange and so I am raising my hand now to say that whatever space we are creating—whatever new style—should be infected with strange. The weird the uncanny the down-right odd. I want to say: do not forget Kelly Link and Karen Russel and Emma Glass’s astounding Peach. Let us not forget that this conversation must be devoid of genre, removed from the snobbery of the literary establishment. We must look to Dianna Wynn Jones and Nnedi Okorafor and Ursula le Guin and Margaret Atwood.

(There is no ending. We live forever, we remember forever. I have never eaten before now. I have never wanted before now. I taste the rain on your face. I eat the fish live and wriggly straight from the river. I build fires to keep away the dark. I eat every apple on the tree and when they have grown back I eat them all again)

I have too many thoughts and no words to write them with. I want writing to be fragmentary and splattered with dashes and blank space; I want it to be autobiographical, to make use of the body; I want it to be haunted by the strange and by the future. I want to hold up the women who are retelling around us, that are carving new space for themselves from the past and say look: Madeleine Miller’s Song of Achilles and Circe, Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Anne Carson’s An autobiography of Red, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. And let us not forget Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, not a retelling but—all the same—a reclaiming. I am afraid but also jubilant. Perhaps this language, this way of writing does not yet belong to us, but we shall take it in both hands and wring it and wring it until something that does flows out.

I want to prescribe nothing, to proscribe even less. If we have got to the point of destroying the building, I don’t want to build new rules with the debris. I only want to bring the bulldozers in again and again and again. I want to be childlike as I pick pieces of rubble and balance one on top of the other. I want to, somehow, redeem the ugliness of these old structures, and make something new from them. I do not want fear to infiltrate my writing. But the fear and the hesitation are there, they are part of me and of it, and I sense the only way to rid ourselves of them is to write again and again and again.

This essay originally appeared in issue #4 of Somesuch Stories, which is available in Barnes & Noble stores across America from January 25th. Daisy Johnson’s ManBooker short-listed debut novel, Everything Under, is now on sale.