The Relentless Anaphora of the Everyday: On Kate Zambreno's "Drifts"

Kate Zambreno | Drifts | Riverhead Books | 2020 | 336 Pages

I first begin to write about Kate Zambreno’s Drifts in the midst of a New England blizzard, and it’s hard to imagine better weather for reflecting on the ars undulatis of a book so intensely interested in the fleeting, snowflake material of life: days upon days that pile up and melt away. Gazing at the ice crystals accumulating in soft swells outside my window, I can’t help but see in them a metaphor for the tension between evanescence and tangibility with which Zambreno is obsessed. Nor can I resist the thought that such a gesture is consistent with her belief in the “vast referentiality” that underpins the empirical world (the opposite, then, of a “mind of winter,” à la Wallace Stevens, attuned to “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”). The semi-autobiographical nature of Drifts is among its most distinctive characteristics, and many readers have categorized it as autofiction. Zambreno herself, however, clearly feels ill at ease under this rubric, precisely because she cannot fully inhabit the present tense that she so desperately wants to be her subject: “how can a paragraph be a day, or a day a paragraph? But I couldn’t often exist in the room, or even in this paragraph, now. I found myself always distracted.” She envisions her project as “a small book of wanderings, animals. A paper-thin object, a ghost. Filled with an incandescence toward the possibility of a book, as well as a paralysis.” In the end, Drifts does not quite achieve spectrality; indeed, it numbers a zaftig 336 pages, of varying typographical densities (although, of course everything is relative: it is certainly waifish compared to autofiction’s outsized exemplar, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-part, 3600-page epic, My Struggle). But falling short of its own ideal of lightness strikes me as part and parcel to Zambreno’s successful treatment of her principal themes: failure and doubt. The very major-ness of Drifts, that is, seems essential to its poetics of minor-ness.

Drifts’ lowercase subtitle, “a novel,” quietly announces the self-conscious relationship to genre that ebbs and flows throughout it like a river’s current. Zambreno’s narrative “I” confides to the reader, almost immediately, that “[t]he publishing people told me that I was writing a novel, but I was unsure.” Paradoxically, it is this very confusion about the extent to which it qualifies for noveldom that lends Drifts its most typically novelistic aspects: the narrator’s quest to determine the nature of her text is the closest it comes to action or Bildung, while the most robust characters, besides her dog and her husband, are fellow writers (mostly female or trans) with whom she navigates the slippery border between friendship and rivalry as they discuss their work via email (and the infrequent, predictably awkward IRL encounter). She draws most of her stylistic inspiration from the “canon of bachelor hermits” (her words) that includes Rainer Maria Rilke and Robert Walser, with whom she repeatedly expresses a deep, albeit vexed affinity. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and The Tanners—the latter of which Zambreno periodically dips into but never aims to finish—are particular lodestars in their attention to “moods,” “digressions,” “textures,” “notes,” and “fragments” (a topic on which she, an adjunct faculty member at a hodgepodge of upstate colleges and universities, teaches a popular seminar).  

Drifts participates in a larger, primarily gynocentric effort to devise a language for forms that accommodate amorphousness or lack of intention, from Rachel Eisendrath’s “clouds” to the shapeshifting voice that haunts A Ghost in the Throat, which Doireann Ni Ghriofa likens to a “starling’s song.” Historical precedents for such magpie poetics exist, of course: the Italian zibaldone, (whose literal translation is “a heap of things”); the medieval common-place book or florilegium (whose etymological origins are evoked when Drifts begins with Rilke’s 1907 epistolary musings on the “three branches of heather placed in a blue velvet-lined pencil box before him,” linking the “splendor of these fragments” to the “impossibility of the day and its relationship to writing”); and, perhaps most notably, the Japanese tradition of zuihitsu, which dates to the tenth century, when a courtesan of Empress Teishi composed her iconic Pillow Book. Within the Anglosphere, of course, an aesthetics of miscellany is the basis of the novel itself, whose eighteenth-century rise was predicated on its capacity to cannibalize generic “others,” from epistolary correspondence to pastoral romance to philosophical discourse. 

For readers also grappling with the “problem of dailiness,” Drifts offers exhilarating possibilities for narrative that is more tidal or alluvial than strictly linear. Zambreno abandons the forward temporality of conventional plot in favor of a more recursive momentum that arises from the relentless anaphora of the everyday: caffeinating, people watching, caretaking, masturbating, doomscrolling. The beatification of Zambreno’s “prayer[ful]” attention imbues such trivia with an almost incantatory glow. Drifts is committed to the drama of “writing the day when it escapes us,” which can sometimes look suspiciously like inertia (if one is to capture it on the page, after all, “the thing is to sit still”). The iterative drudgery of writing itself, in other words—the sheer tedium that occasionally enables transcendence—is both its situation and its story.

Drifts fulfills the formal conditions of oscillation and amplitude promised not only by its title but by the Riverhead edition’s cover art: a black-and-white photograph of the Hudson River, taken in the mid-70s, from the Peter Hujar Archive, which shows a square of wind-rippled water. Indeed, the text itself resembles nothing so much as a wave unfurling in crests and troughs: clusters of paragraphs are combined with caesuras of blank space to create the impression of fluctuation. Zambreno herself prefers to define her project as an exercise in Blanchovian désoeuvrement: “the state where the writing of the fragment replaces the work,” or “what prevents the book from being written becomes the book itself.” If we typically think of autofiction as an attempt to monumentalize individual experience by unapologetically (even obscenely, as some have argued of Knausgaard) inhabiting it, Zambreno’s narrator treats her own life with beguiling obliquity—as if, in ways she cannot fully articulate, it is not her own. She has followed her husband to New York City for his job as a rare books librarian, and she commutes from Brooklyn to various appointments in the gig academy, where she meets with students in cluttered offices borrowed from tenured professors on sabbatical. All this “temporary occupancy of other lives” leads to the sense, as she at one point confesses, that: “I sometimes don’t even feel in the shape of a person.” 

But what feeling could be more human, after all, at the dawn of the third decade of the twenty-first century? 

Wandering helps to alleviate disembodiment and alienation. And Drifts is also nothing if not a tale of the urban flâneuse. The titular use of the plural invokes the word’s nominal form, but this does not diminish the verbal significance of aimless strolling (the cultural-historical and etymological links to the Situationist dérive are implicit but palpable): “walks in the city turn time into space.” To drift is to follow a capricious directionality that, paradoxically, is oriented more toward an integrated selfhood than “the impulse to search for my name online, to see whether I still existed.” If the condition of modern “presence” is that it be “scattered… in fragments” across the internet, there is some solace in aleatory movement through physical space: “my walks that fall were the opposite” of autogoogling. Of course, Zambreno does not ignore the class dimensions of the flâneur’s alter ego, the drifter (the narrator expresses a particular sense of kinship with street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat), whose social marginality—not to say invisibility—mirrors that of the artist within the capitalist system at large. Drifts is blunt about the ways in which the literary writer exists at the fringes of the “free market” economy—unsellable, overlooked, and only eligible for haphazard employment. One of the most compelling aspects of the book lies in its ambivalence toward its own potential to diminish this precarity. For writers like Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, and Maggie Nelson, documenting abjection or liminality has led at least to professional legitimacy, stability, and modest fame. Zambreno, for her part, seems simultaneously enamored with, and skeptical of, the possibilities that commercial publication opens up for a broader audience. This painful irreconcilability between niche-ness and canonicity animates Drifts. 

If there is any teleology to be found in these pages, it has to do with the inevitability of the question toward which a preponderance of women is drifting: whether or not we will become mothers. The crisis of fertility is at the center of Zambreno’s work, though it is only made literal (in the sense of uterine) in the final third. She is 37 at the time of writing (the age that her friend, Suzanne Scanlon, memorialized in Her 37th Year: An Index; the age that I happen to be now, at least at the time of writing): an age that is decidedly closer to menopause than to puberty—yet still dominated, for many women who have not yet borne a child, by the question of whether and when they might. It is exactly midway between the current official cutoff for “geriatric pregnancy” (35) and the age (40) past which most women have felt the need to resolve any ambiguity surrounding their own reproductive futurity. When Zambreno conceives her daughter, the reader is suddenly able to grasp—if not appreciate—the lifting of this overwhelming (but unspoken) burden of uncertainty and the magnitude of the pressure it has exerted.

Astute readers have objected to invoking parturition as closure, at least on a structural level, in a text so preoccupied with narrative ongoingness and the anxieties of artistic fecundity, for which there is no relief commensurate with childbirth. While I am sympathetic to this critique, I also wonder if it misses how acutely alert Zambreno herself seems to the problem of whether and how matrescence can count as dénouement. When the postpartum narrator finally returns to her desk, she reacquaints herself with a sixteenth-century engraving by Albrecht Dürer, which she has been staring at for years without recognizing that it is a portrayal of motherhood in the midst of intellectual ambition. This epiphany is her valediction: “When did I realize that it is her baby in Melancolia I—her baby, their mess, the day.”  Whether domesticity and genius can coexist is thus the question on which the book ultimately rests, and its millennial persistence bodes anything but neat resolution.

In 2009, while reluctantly living in Akron, Zambreno wrote a blog with a cult following called “Frances Farmer is My Sister,” which served as raw material for her first book of not-purely-fiction, Heroines (2012): a series of recuperative meditations on Modernist women whose posthumous legacies are complicated in large part because they struggled to reconcile the artistic and biological spheres of creation. In concluding Drifts with her own “fourth trimester,” I want to suggest that Zambreno is situating herself within this genealogy, which includes Zelda Fitzgerald, Jean Rhys, and Jane Bowles: all of whom are often seen to have failed, in different ways, at being both a “good mother” and a “great artist.” 

Within evolutionary science, the term “genetic drift” denotes the mechanism by which the diversity of a gene pool diminishes in non-infinite populations over generations, depending on who passes along their DNA. It can be especially potent in colonial contexts, a phenomenon known as the “founder’s effect.” Drifts seems to manifest a new phenotype of the “great American novel”: a long-overdue variation on a male-dominated, formally homogenous tradition. The fixation of such a rare allele in the republic of US letters is certainly an invigorating prospect.