The first time the protagonist of Madeleine Dunnigan’s Jean “disappears,” he is meditating in a meadow of wildflowers. It is early summer at Compton Manor, an alternative boarding school in the English countryside. As the sun starts to rise, Jean sits cross-legged on the campus’s grass, Dunnigan writes, and “clears his head, focusing on the first rays on his skin, the wind across his face, the grass tickling his feet.” “Jean lifts upward, evaporating from his body like steam. The universe in Jean’s hands explodes, Jean becomes nothing, and everything disappears.”
It felt similarly mystical to read Dunnigan’s debut novel, which transported me through the dull ache of a New York City winter into the dreamy heat of a 1970s June. There, we meet Jean, a seventeen-year-old Jewish boy coming of age amid an era of punk nihilism and existential disillusionment, who leaves London’s countercultural landscape to attend a rural high school for troubled boys. Even at Compton Manor, though, Jean is seen as an outcast. He is dyslexic, antisocial, and prone to violent outbursts. He is bristling and incomprehensible. The primary throughline in Jean’s life is his meditation practice. As tremors of change shake his adolescent universe, Jean folds his hands into a cosmic mudra and fantasizes about “becoming translucent, weightless.” Eventually, though, Jean meets Tom, a wealthier boy whose friendship becomes a refuge, tethered to the material plane. When things become romantic between them, a world opens up for Jean, intensifying the question of whether freedom is to be found in disappearance or in something else.
While reading Jean by the window as snow melted outside, I found myself thinking of Lia Purpura’s essay on postmortem burial. Writing for Emergence Magazine, Purpura describes how the carbon molecules that constitute us do not disappear, but rather break down and rearrange. While Jean meditates or contemplates running away, he never physically vanishes. Instead, he changes shape. He becomes “a current in the air, a single bright ray, a soft murmur,” Dunnigan writes. “He is a monk, flying through the air; he is a meditation master, still as a reed; he is a fisherman; a nomad, moving through the land he knows by touch. He is a taxi driver, the knowledge of London’s streets embedded in his body like veins. He is a boxer. He is a poet.”
“We come to be called by another’s name,” Purpura writes, “but the matter of us doesn’t slip away, and the potential energy of our bodies is perfectly accounted for.” I think of Jean here, who, as he stands on the precipice of adult life, seems increasingly aware that he is made of atemporal matter. Toward the beginning of the novel, a doctor asks after the source of his anger: “Where does it come from, she said. All this anger? He didn’t know what to say,” Dunnigan writes. “Where does the sea come from? From the rivers, the streams, the springs and deeper—from the rocks, the sediment, the fossils, the molten center of the earth.”
Jean was published in January by W.W. Norton (US) and in February by Daunt (UK) to critical acclaim. At a café in Greenwich Village, Dunnigan and I spoke about writing time through landscape, the frame of the boarding school setting, and the relationship between disappearance and hunger.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Olivia Q. Pintair: Jean takes place at a boarding school in 1976, in a culture of ‘70s nihilism. What drew you to write about this era in particular?
Madeleine Dunnigan: I was drawn to the time and setting for several reasons, partly because I think 1976 is a very interesting time in the British sociopolitical landscape. It was close enough to the Second World War that people could still feel its direct aftershocks, but far enough away that there was also a new generation coming up—the second generation of refugees or immigrants, or war survivors, who had begun to reject the liberalism of the ‘60s and the socialism of the ‘50s. Punk is an expression of a particular nihilistic moment in time, which I found very evocative and very resonant with our contemporary moment, in many ways. But I was also interested in the broader political context of 1970s Britain. There was the threat of nuclear war and a global economic downturn. There was huge unemployment in the UK. There was a real sense of the future not being bright.
That was all very evocative to me, and I think it’s very evocative to a lot of writers, but I was quite conscious that I couldn’t really write a story set amorphously in the ‘70s. When I tried to, it was like writing a bad fancy dress party. All of the characters were stock characters. They were dressed to the nines in overtly ’70s clothing. Everyone was in bell-bottoms. The tartan was red, and the pins were out. Eventually, it became quite apparent that Jean needed a structure in which the atmosphere, politics, and social movements of the time period could play out.
I’m very interested in the Zen philosophy that Jean is interested in. I read a lot of Zen philosophy books. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a big influence. So was Bruce Lee, and a wash of other 70s films. In these there is this sense of dislocation, but also enduring heat––a kind of social and political “burning up” that is often reflected in the landscape and weather.
OQP: In a recent talk, you spoke about the boarding school setting as a “container, crucible, and filter for time.” Can you say more about how the novel’s setting informed your process as a writer?
MD: It was only when I found the boarding school setting that I found the novel. Before then, I knew I wanted to write something about a character who was at odds with the world around him, but I wasn’t quite sure how to tell that story. I think that any kind of storytelling is about frame. In film, there’s a physical frame, which restricts what you can see. In fiction, one still needs a structural frame, but it can be harder to locate. There’s a reason a lot of writers use architectural metaphors, I think. They say they’re constructing a house or building a sculpture. Boarding school—or any structure—can become a literalization of a metaphorical frame, in which it suddenly becomes so much easier to figure out where your characters should be, and why, and what they want, and what they’re doing. What is a story other than the condensing of moments in order to generate meaning? Before you have the limitations of a structure, it’s just life. It’s the amorphousness of life.
OQP: The theme of disappearance resurfaces throughout Jean. How do you parse the relationship between disappearance and freedom in the novel? Disappearance and escape?
MD: It’s interesting, because Jean is a novel about disappearance without anyone actually disappearing. The novel is very loosely inspired by a family member of mine who disappeared before I was born. I was interested in why someone would choose to disappear. We don’t see Jean disappear in the novel. Instead, we see him wrestling with the materiality of his body and the presence of himself. Disappearance is a code for his desire to escape himself, in a way.
It’s a very adolescent feeling—but I think it’s also quite a human feeling—to feel restricted by the forms we inhabit and the forms that are projected onto us. Jean is dyslexic; therefore, he’s seen as stupid and lazy in school. He’s a young white man, which is another kind of form. He’s queer, but he’s in the closet. That’s another form. As all of these forms take shape, he becomes uncomfortable with the way he’s perceived and the way he perceives himself. The story concerns the idea of disappearance from materiality and bodily forms, but also, disappearance from a world that doesn’t make you feel safe.
OQP: During that one moment when Jean feels he is about to disappear into the wilderness, it is his hunger that pulls him back: “Of course he does not disappear,” you write. “He is still a body with needs and wants and hunger. So hungry, as he pauses at the edge of a forest for lunch.” What does the body—and hunger, in particular—have to say about disappearance in the novel?
MD: Hunger is really relevant. On the one hand, there’s the idea of disappearance from materiality, but then there’s also the inescapable reality of being a young teenage boy with so many visceral, sensory desires. I wanted there to be quite a lot of pleasure in the book. I wanted sensory experiences to have an intensity that made them both pleasurable and kind of disgusting. There’s a lot of food in the novel. There are a lot of smells, a lot of touch, a lot of sound, a lot of sex. The physical reality is a reminder that you can’t really disappear from yourself. I think one of the sad realities is that even if Jean gets out with his life, he will still be him. You can run away or move to another country, but you’re still stuck with yourself. You’re still hungry.
OQP: Jean occupies an in-between age in which he is old enough to fantasize about the future but too young to fully conceptualize or fear it. What did this liminal register of time allow for in the novel that might not have been possible otherwise?
MD: The age of seventeen is such a particular moment, particularly if you’re in the UK. I don’t know if this would have the same resonance in the US, but once you’re eighteen in the UK, you are a legal adult in all senses of the word. In matters of sex, booze, and crime, you are a legal adult. If you commit a crime before you’re eighteen, it will be wiped from your record because you’re still a child. So there is this sense, at seventeen, that you can still wipe the record of your life clean. Things are in perpetual motion before they are solidified. Jean’s like, Well, I could go to China. I could do this. I could do that. He’s still held within the sense of possibility and able to dream, but he’s also beginning to feel anguish and rebellion about becoming an adult and so rejecting some of the structures of care that have held him back.
OQP: The novel is, in large part, about change. It’s also a love story. Do you think there are certain kinds of transformation that are only possible via love?
MD: There are very particular transformations that can come with love, but it’s also one of the most dangerous things. One of the things I say about the book is that it’s about the different ways people try to love each other, and the ways that, inadvertently, they hurt each other. There are many different kinds of love at play—there’s familial, there’s erotic, there’s paternal, there’s fraternal, and all of them interact with each other. Each character is a planet with a different sort of orbit, and then at some point they collide, and they have their different motions and energies, and they don’t quite align.
OQP: Can you talk about the role of fighting in the story? What do moments of conflict illuminate or make possible for Jean?
MD: There’s so much in this book that is quite alien to my experience. I was not, you will be unsurprised to hear, a big fighter. I was not a teenage boy. But I am interested in these expressions of fear and anguish, as I read them. Adolescence can be a dangerous time in a physical sense, but violence can also take the place of language. Not having the language to express how you feel and understand what’s going on can lead to a different kind of danger. I think it’s also related to teenage boyhood being a very physical space, and in Jean’s case, a homoerotic space. Everything is slipping between modes all the time. A wrestle can become an embrace. Danger can arise because nothing is ever stable and nothing’s ever sure.
OQP: Even as Jean’s story unfolds in the present tense, he seems always to be surrounded by reminders of what is ancient: stones, the sea, and, to a lesser degree, the tradition of boarding school itself. “As Jean breaks the rocks, he contemplates this: how he is literally cracking through time.” What informed your approach to writing in various time scales?
MD: I wanted the novel to feel both very out of time and very grounded within the concept of time. On the one hand, Jean feels like the summer will never end. He has no real sense of the future. But at the same time, there’s this existential feeling of time burning away. I wanted to generate these overlapping relationships to time through Jean’s relationship to the land and the way the temporal significance of the landscape affects him. Thus, there are the rocks. There is the history of the school. All of these elements contextualize how Jean thinks about himself in the world. They ground him, and they also kind of let him slip away into other layers of time.
OQP: What was your relationship with the unknown like while writing Jean?
MD: I think I have two modes of writing. One is a kind of excessive, stylized, heightened way of writing, where the material really stems from me, and it’s kind of dressed-up vomit. And then there’s another style, which is Jean, which is more about trying to understand something. This second mode requires deep research into understanding the human condition of someone who is very different from me, and I find that process very alluring. It’s very exciting to try to figure out what someone thinks, who they are, why they’re doing what they’re doing, and what it would be like to live in their time and place. The unknown is scary, but exciting.
OQP: You mentioned that the novel is loosely based on a family member of yours who disappeared. I’d love to hear about that.
MD: There are ties between my own history and the book, particularly in regard to the family member I mentioned who disappeared. For so long, I was wrestling with understanding that family material and wanting to turn it into something different, but it was only when I found the fictional space of the school that it became a book. Before that point, I was writing my own musings about what happened or could have happened to this person in my family, who voluntarily left and has never been found. In the UK, when you choose to disappear, that’s your human right. If you’re found by police and say you don’t want to be found, the police can’t even tell your family that you’re alive. It can leave behind this pulsating absence. For a long time, I think I was trying to solve the question of what happened to this family member. But eventually I stopped trying to solve it, and the book became a kind of offering—an attempt at understanding why someone might choose to disappear.