From Generation to Generation: On Sheila Heti's "Pure Colour"

Sheila Heti | Pure Colour | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2022 | 224 Pages

Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour begins with a nameless narrator explaining that God, after creating all of existence, stepped back from the canvas of creation to contemplate his work, and that this moment of contemplation is the one in which we are all living. He has split himself three ways, into three distinct entities, to better observe and critique creation. Fifteen pages later, the novel’s focal character, Mira, listens to a professor lecture on a painting of asparagus done by Manet. The professor claims Manet lacked something essential without knowing it, but all he would have needed to do to know that he was lacking would be to step back from his own work in a museum, see its neighbors on either side, then look back to the center. This is one of the first times the novel examines the connections and distinctions between entities. Where is the line between God and Manet, or God and anyone? Where is the line between any two people—friends, lovers, parents and children? Does such a line even exist?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pure Colour feels much more concerned with raising these questions than with answering them, as Heti’s work is known for its deep philosophical bent. Pure Colour sets up an existential conversation—the end of this “first draft” of the world, before the creation of the next (hopefully better) draft. In a sense, it is a novel about apocalypse. However, unlike much of the apocalyptic literature that has lined bookshelves for the past few decades, its setting is not post-apocalyptic, but pre-apocalyptic. It is also absent of any great catastrophizing about what this impending end will be like; almost all thought about the end of the world is more akin to a gentle mourning than it is to a great panic. This subversion of the typical response to a dying world is due, in no small part, to both Heti’s skill as a writer, and to the fundamental ideas of Judaism with which Heti seems to infuse her writing.

This novel’s scope is varied, ranging from the intimate closeness of following self-conscious young people in school, to piercing meditations from two joined spirits on the unknowable nature of the human soul. “Unknowable” might be incorrect, actually, because in Heti’s hands the human soul becomes known—or at the very least, her version of it does. The novel’s anonymous narrator explains that there are three types of people, each from one of three eggs spawned by the trichotomy of God-as-critic; there are bear people, fish people, and bird people. Bear people care most about their specific loved ones, their chosen few, who they love unyieldingly. Fish people work on a grander, but less personal scale, caring most for collective humanity rather than their own small handful. And bird people care most about beauty and nature and art, sometimes to the exclusion of human-to-human connection. Mira’s recently deceased father is a bear person; her sometimes-lover Annie is a fish person; Mira herself is a bird person.

Naturally, this sets up an expectation of miscommunication between Mira and these two others, who are not like her and are not like each other. Pure Colour makes it clear at its outset that all three types of people—all three viewpoints of life, and of creation—are equally valuable to the world and to God. But once the story focuses on Mira, it begins to focus on art more than anything else. Her very thoughts on the nature of art evoke the great artists; there is something very Romantic about Mira’s rationale of how art should work, vaguely reminiscent of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” When Mira grieves for the end of this draft of creation, she fixates on the fact that the great works of art will be gone, as will anyone who knew of that art, and so she despairs, worrying that the art itself was all for nothing.

But just as the reader becomes comfortable in the framework of the story—following Mira through life, ruminating on art and endings from the perspective of a participant in the world—Heti disrupts it. Midway through the book, Mira, accompanied by the spirit of her deceased father, temporarily ends her life as a woman and enters into a leaf on a tree by a lake. Here is where the novel’s form and function alter, a rippling and distortion central to the ethos of Pure Colour. During this shared habitation of the leaf—the spirit of Mira, the spirit of her father—half of the prose is unattributed dialogue. Mira and her father speak to each other without speech tags or page breaks, their thoughts flowing effortlessly from one to the other, and then to the reader. They discuss art and love. They discuss the end of the world and what that will mean for both of them, and for everyone else.

At this moment, the novel pivots from the ideas of divisions and categories, beginning to focus instead on merging, on connections. It does not seem like a coincidence that this is also the moment in which the influences of Judaism become most apparent.

In an interview with Guernica after the publication of Motherhood, Heti was asked to what extent she considers herself and her writing as Jewish. Her response:

I am Jewish, and I grew up with Jewish stories. I lived the stories of Judaism through enacting the rituals of the religion with my family... I loved the holidays, and how the food we ate, and the way we sat around the table, and lit the candles, was all connected to a religious story, and every gesture had meaning.

In Pure Colour, many of the conversations which take place inside the leaf revolve around the importance of following “the traditions.” What these traditions literally are is kept fairly vague—getting together for dinner is mentioned, but very little that’s more specific—and, in a way, their discussions seem to address both the micro- and macro-levels of the novel’s concerns. The traditions of home, of family, of personal faith and love; the traditions of life cycles, of beginnings and endings, of genesis and apocalypse. They are echoes of each other.

It is also worth noting that the sharing of these ideas from father to daughter could be read as a direct fulfillment of L’dor V’dor—Hebrew for “from generation to generation.” Simply put, L’dor V’dor stresses the importance of what generations of family or community pass from one to the next, to the next, to the next. It is a mindset of both tradition and growth, of honoring the old while striving for a better, fuller new. This ideal is elaborated on with further Jewish symbolism: Mira and her father being situated in a leaf calls to mind the Tree of Life; the three types of people—bear, fish, and bird—are vaguely reminiscent of the three great Biblical beasts Behemoth, Leviathan, and Ziz, the last of which barely exists outside of Jewish mythology.

In many ways, fulfilling L’dor V’dor seems to be the thesis of the entire novel. A woman learns alternate forms of love from her father, and later tries to teach them to her lover; God learns from the first draft of the world so as to make the second draft better. And this is what lends the novel its miraculous tone and emotion. This is a story about death, and about the end of things, and yes we should mourn the long goodbye. But ultimately, the feeling one leaves Pure Colour with is not a feeling of dread for the end to come, but of a gentle, almost melancholic optimism for what might come after the end.

From the same Guernica interview, still discussing her Judaism, Heti says, “I want my writing to act as a guide to future behavior. I consider my recent books both records of what I have wrestled with, and instructions for me on how to wrestle in the future.” It would be inappropriate of anyone besides Heti herself to claim to truly know her, or how she imagines this book should guide her. No one has shared space with her in a leaf. But from the perspective of an outside reader, the guidance Pure Colour has given to me is this: continue the cycles, and take comfort in them. Love the current moment for all its beauty and in spite of its imperfections, knowing that these will make the next moment, whenever it comes, all the better. It is okay to mourn an ending, but there is no such thing as the ending. Things mattered, and one day things will matter again. Be not afraid.