Stratigraphy of Memory: On Christine Hume's "Saturation Project"
Christine Hume | Saturation Project | Solid Objects | 2021 | 192 Pages
Christine Hume’s experimental autobiography Saturation Project is about the dissolving of its subject—or maybe, even, The Subject. Weaving memoir with myth, it disperses Hume’s girlhood across time, intertwining her story of growing up and raising her daughter among wilderness with historical anecdotes of girls raised by bears, the myth of Atalanta, vignettes from natural history, and excerpts from modernist literature. Saturation Project also spreads Hume out across space, (dis)locating her in the fields, forests, and windswept mountains that shaped her. The project is, as the title suggests, a saturation. In an unusual alternative to linear narrative, Hume heaps up episodes and makes an archive of intensities. Time doesn’t “move” or “flow” forward so much as seep downward into the past, so that by the end of the experiment, one does not have the sense of any character having journeyed from Point A to Point B, so much as many people and voices having melted together inside Point A, transforming it into Point B. This isn’t a memoir about growing up in, then leaving, rural Americana. It’s about investing a place with memory.
Hume’s is one of three books from the past few years to take up saturation as a critical term for approaching the present. Two volumes of academic essays: Saturation: an Elemental Politics (Duke University Press, 2021) and Saturation: Race, Art and the Circulation of Value (MIT Press, 2020) also focus special attention on the term. For Elemental Politics, saturation is defined as a “material heuristic” that “emerges at the interdisciplinary nexus of the environmental humanities, media studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, and postcolonial theory.” If this list wasn’t already expansive enough, Race, Art and the Circulation of Value adds critical race theory, economics, and art history to saturation’s disciplines. Hume’s saturating approach to narrative similarly brings together disparate lines of critical discourse, this time intertwining feminist and ecocritical themes through a queer sense of time.
So, what’s going on? Has saturation become, under all of our noses, an indispensable tool for thinking about the present? Or is the market already, in just a year, oversaturated (sorry) with discourse on this topic? Saturation Project, with its style that blends memoir and theory, makes an even stronger case than these academic projects for the vitality of this term. Hume’s approach makes it clear why saturation speaks to our experience of time over the last decade, and why we should all be paying more attention to concepts and techniques of saturation in contemporary literature.
Saturation Project consists of three linked essays. The first, “Atalanta,” relates anecdotes—some mythical, some personal, some seemingly historical, all of them also already all three at once—of girls being raised by bears. The second, “Hum,” explores the ontological possibilities of community and co-presence enabled by resonance/vibration. Section breaks in this essay are not distinguished by white space, but by strings of capital letters running across the page:
“HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.”
An endless murmur connects the examples through time and space: the “strange sonic weather” of ATMs, security systems, and transistors; the clicking of cicadas; Hume’s daughter ventriloquizing the “tiny wood people” she plays with. Hum also veers into literary criticism, as Hume fills in her reverberating cosmology with close-readings of authors like William S. Burroughs and Virginia Woolf studying how the rhythms of prose resonate across texts and contexts. The last essay, “Ventifacts” (named after rock formations created by buffeting winds) explores the cultural significance of wind. The sections of this essay appear as lone, austere blocks of text in the middle of the page, with plenty of white space above and below them for air to flow.
The content of the three sections of Saturation Project range so widely that it is difficult to say what the book is “about.” But what connects the sections to each other is a technique, which in its consistency rises to the level of an overarching theme: the alchemy by which literary strategies translate into strategies of connecting and surviving. Chief among Hume’s techniques is an intensification of presence through the heaping up of anecdotes—for example, re-telling the Greek myth of Atalanta again and again: in rural Pennsylvania, then Kansas, then India, and so on. What connects these disparate anecdotes is a style that blurs spatio-temporalities, identities, and experiences together: “in the place of a father, a hot blush grows. I redden too, but I don’t suffocate… What kind of transformation is this?... The rampage of becoming requires: not-I, not-Atalanta, not a laurel tree, and not nothing… that quickly one person transforms into another.” Saturation commands Hume’s diverse experiments and functions across the essays, melting them together so as to transform them into another project entirely. And her method of handling narrative time evokes a certain thickening and intensifying of temporal experience that has been taking place over the past few years.
Someone in one of my graduate seminars last year over Zoom (shoutout Jack) said: it has long been obvious that it takes time to move through space, but what the pandemic has made clear is that it also takes space to move through time. The queer sense of time in Hume’s novel—the sinking into and heaping up of the past; a stratigraphy of memory, as opposed to a cartography—speaks with particular eloquence to the way we have experienced time in recent years. Confined to one place, one moment has melted into another; days have become sticky and indistinguishable, like a tower of papier-mâché. There is something, as well, to be said here about life after the end of history. There is Mark Fisher to be quoted. Also Jeffrey T. Nealon: “Following [the logic of finance capital] to its limits on the streets and gaming tables of Las Vegas, one might argue that contemporary Vegas doesn’t primarily produce either goods or services; rather, it produces what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call actual and virtual “intensities”… Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, capital of all kinds… is staked in the hope of producing more.” Deeper, more profound, more intense—a stationary intensification as opposed to a forward momentum—this is the temporality of what Nealon calls “just-in-time capitalism.” It’s also the logic organizing the episodes in Hume’s writing. Hume furnishes us with the critical tools to understand time as it unfolds after the end of history. She captures the way that our experience of modernity feels: more than a passage into the future, it’s an endless saturation of the present.