‘Reader, take care.’
For you are a newborn baby, about to embark on a very specific process of negotiation — the constant (and cumulative) dialogue that happens between the narrator and the reader of a work of fiction. The interplay, or composition, of narrative voice, vraisemblance, plot, digressions, pauses, character building, etc. that keeps us in the quasi-magical state of suspension of disbelief (or at least reading, engaged with the text).
It is a process that has been occurring at least since the advent of the modern novel. Experts might differ on when exactly it started, but that is a question best left unanswered, for what I want to say now is that Kate Briggs’ The Long Form might be one of the most explicit (and fascinating) conversations that I, as a reader, have ever had with the narrator of a contemporary work of fiction.
To structure and begin this conversation, Briggs’ narrator builds a story around one day in the life of Helen and her newborn baby, Rose. We are presented to Helen through a third-person point-of-view close to the protagonist’s mind — she remembers the fun she used to have with her former flatmate, recalls the day in the hospital ward when Rose was born, and mainly, she lives the chores of a single mother tending to a being who has just begun to experience the world, with very basic needs such as eating, sleeping and seeking comfort of warmth and physical support. Unfortunately for Helen (and for most mothers), that is not an easy task; it is a full-time (and 24/7) job, as Rose (not different from most babies) is very sensible to transitions, changes from the external world, and alternates periods of stability (e.g., sleeping for at most 3 hours) with states of intense tension.
The narrator then introduces a second important element: Helen purchases an old copy of Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, triggering a multitude of digressions around the concept of the novel and its different dimensions (e.g., theory of chapters, use of point of views, intensity, time-sequence, etc.), rendering The Long Form an intricate assemblage of fiction and essay, one that presents a very clear purpose: to create a self-expanding composition that interacts and engages with the reader.
And Briggs’ narrator initiates a very explicit process of negotiation, constantly pushing the boundaries of the novel-form, testing the consistency of the author’s own project, to the point of challenging our own suspension of disbelief — we witness changing point-of-views (e.g., access to the baby’s conscience, selective omniscience around the environment), insertion of images (a floor plan, mobile’s geometric figures), fragmentation of chapters, and essays layered over passages of fiction.
And for each new limit that Briggs’ narrator dares to cross, she offers support with the fictional story: we feel the motions that affect Helen’s baby, who is constantly going through volatile transitions, but being tended, carefully guided across the different states of her inner and outer world. Just as Helen holds her baby, strolls with Rose in the park, walks in the rain, seeks shelter in a supermarket, changes nappies, takes a quick shower, and slowly places her in a sleeping basket, always with great care, avoiding abrupt disruptions of comfort, the narrator also tends to the reader, constantly rearranging the stage for the next shift in narrative form, creating rewarding situations of tension and release. There emerges an organic rhythm that accommodates Briggs’ bold project idea.
As Helen reads a baby-care manual (and listens to recordings by Winnicott), we are introduced to what is guiding these constant transitions in the novel.
Even so, it recognized that even when handled with care, for a baby, being picked up or put down — shifted, even when a change is called for — is a form of transition that’s always ‘potentially alarming’. (Winnicott wrote poems about these ‘awful transitions’. The flush of hot then cold panic can soak a body when one form of support is removed — like a sudden, unwanted loosening, a collapse, an inner collapse, a breaking apart, an unchecked plummeting, a flailing descent — before another can be established.) The technique the book suggested was to give new babies an interval moment during which they could become aware of both kinds of support: the old one and the new one. For example, when lifting Rose up from her low chair, to arrange her hands and arms underneath the baby while the chair was still holding her weight. Creating an interval moment. How she should stay in this interval moment. She shouldn’t even begin to lift Rose from her chair until Rose had had a chance to register ‘the new security her hands’ were providing. And even then, how it was best to move slowly: ‘Keeping to a minimum the distances [the baby] must travel through empty space.’
In one of the essayistic passages on the novel-form, the book discusses Fielding’s lengthy novel and proposes one of the narrator’s (or author’s) key assertions: what the novel fully comprehends is not attributable to a given subject (e.g., the narrator), because it is knowledge produced by the interplay of the whole composition.
The novel’s shifting attitude is in itself a position. It chooses intermittence by refusing to choose between renouncing all knowledge of the other’s inner life (beyond what they might want to or feel capable of telling someone else about it, beyond what, despite themselves, their outer behaviour, their phrasings, their utterances, might disclose about it, in the name of our condition of separateness), and presuming to climb in and live in their brain, make a living inventory of their sensations. It is a consciously uncommitted (free-ranging) position that recognizes when the curtains between thinking and feeling minds do part, letting something pass through. Interchange. Mutual understanding. It is at other times protective of privacy — knowing when to draw back, to leave even an imagined person alone, and allow them their basic right to opacity. It is frank, finally, about its own not knowing. Blank spaces in the narration pushing against the fantasy of total command, comprehensive imagining and, from there, partial selection: this image of a novelist-narrator knowing everything about their book, the past and future lives of its characters, and selecting from there (from that complete understanding) what, partially, strategically, to disclose. On the contrary, what these patches say is this: that what the novel narrates (what it writes) is precisely all it knows. This — gapped and roving — is the fullness of what it knows. A form of knowledge not assignable to a given subject (for example — the narrator), because it is contingent upon, which is to say it is produced by, the interplay of the whole composition. Its intention may always be to intend more than its own limit-views. But that expansion will happen with the reader, the other mind in the different environment it was written for, with which it is intended to interact.
There are many other insightful passages throughout the book. Here are a few that embody Briggs’ project.
The novel-as-container which in this interesting case (also) contained its own semi-serious, open programme for novel-writing, novel-reading, for thinking about itself. A long fictional prose narrative whose compelling course would be diverted, loosened, punctuated — regularly stopped — by these chatty, provocative, digressive surrounds.
NOVELNESS was the name Mikhail Bakhtin gave ‘to a form of knowledge that can most powerfully put different orders of experience’ — competing orders of experience that might ordinarily overwhelm or seek to cancel out each other — ‘into dialogue with each other’. The part-novel, the novel-essay, its compound-form based on the conviction that: ‘There is never any problem, ever, which can be confined within a single framework.’
‘Too much distance or too undefined an interval in a novel’, for example, as likewise in a room, ‘sets attention wandering or puts it to sleep.’ Meanwhile, ‘incidents … treading on each other’s heels detract from the force of them all.’ Helen swallowed and looked in the direction of the window. ‘Pauses are holes when they do not accentuate masses and define figures.’ ‘Extension sprawls if it does not interact with place.’ The principles of aesthetic composition extending and repeating — or were they prefiguring and re-grounding — the principles of social composition. The layout of a room. The form of a book. A novel: a source of suggestion (detailed speculation) as to how — in what kinds of real or invented spaces, and under what rhythmic conditions — it might be possible for live creatures, with their ages and energies and competing authorities, their interests and their needs, to co-exist, to live together.
And finally, returning to the example of the baby, we witness the infant discovering the world at the same time as this very world intrudes into the newborn’s life, what, according to the narrator, allows the development of a new process of consciousness-building and accumulation. Or as I would say and have happily discovered by reading Kate Briggs’ work: the concept of the novel as a comfy sleeping basket, and the reader as the baby, feeling rewarded, sometimes tensioned, accepting to be surprised.
Such small events: a baby reaching out from their immediate surrounding space, making a tiny incursion into the larger space, touching at it and discovering a part of the wider world. Acting on it, meeting it: bringing to it their own newness and resistance. The world, making an incursion back into that intimate surrounding space, pressing into and opening it up, unsteadying it, before the compositional forces of holding adjust, and steady it again. The work of accommodation: providing steadiness and openness, ground and surprise. The lecture asked: Who has taken the time to describe them? Rose, Helen could sense, was breathing with soft regularity: she was falling. She was almost asleep. Helen’s arms said: I’m still here. ‘It is because the infant is being held that the baby in the space becomes ready, in the course of time, for the movement that surprises the world.’ ‘And the infant who has found the world in this way becomes, in time, ready to welcome the surprises that the world has in store.’ The world is surprising. It has undiscovered stores. It is not yet wholly given. There will be new gestures, new questions, new forms of life. The capacity to welcome them, to make room for them (to accommodate without crushing them), to learn from and be transformed by them depends on the provision of this ‘quiet yet live holding’ — in this form. Then in all its further expected and unexpected, tested and as yet unimagined forms.
Having just finished reading The Long Form, I am still in the process of assembling all the scattered thoughts triggered by this book (which even led me to produce this write-up), but I can safely assume that whoever enjoys discussing fiction, novels, and how any form of art engages with its audience will greatly enjoy reading Kate Briggs’ novel.
