In Search of Elsewhere: On Susan Taubes' "Divorcing"
Susan Taubes | Divorcing | NYRB Classics | 2020 | 288 Pages
After publishing his novel Salammbo, Gustave Flaubert wrote to a friend: “Few will be able to guess how sad one had to be in order to resuscitate Carthage.” He is referring to the particular sadness felt when we reflect on a past that has been cut short before the realization of its projects. Walter Benjamin famously theorized this affect as a sign of living in the present of an unredeemed past. Such a present is experienced as the incoherent sum of random historical outcomes, whereby history itself comes to feel more like a series of breaks and suppressions rather than a neat series of logical continuities. Susan Taubes’s 1969 novel Divorcing is about just such a series of discontinuities, and the sadness they produce in the individual consciousness who experiences them.
That individual is Sophie Blind, who is largely a fictional version of Taubes herself. After she divorces her husband Ezra, Sophie tries to pick up from where her life left off before their marriage. She has difficulty placing where exactly that is, however, because her life was never firmly settled even before her marriage. She realizes that she had never come to fully inhabit any stage of her life because each came to a premature end through the interference of unexpected circumstances. Here’s a passage that gives a tidy summary of Sophie’s personal history:
The first crossing by boat to America putting an ocean full of mines and roving submarines between her and her childhood in Budapest, a sea voyage, a world war, another country, another language—distances which cannot be measured in miles or years—may have helped to cancel the first decade. Growing up in America during the war, the ten years she lived as a child in Budapest broke off. As for the years in America from 1939 to 1947, they were disowned when she married Ezra.
Having no basis on which to establish her life going forward, Sophie turns to literature to find meaning. As it turns out, a certain literary quality is exactly what’s missing from Sophie’s life. “Books,” Divorcing affirms, “were better than dreams or life. A book ended not like life, abruptly; not like a dream, with a clumsy struggle and a sense of deception; but gracefully and knowingly, preparing you for the final period.” So in order to combat the messiness of life she sets out to write an autobiographical novel. Fiction, she believes, can give her life an aesthetic coherence where it otherwise lacks a practical coherence. In the wake of her divorce, Sophie’s quest to transform her experience into literature is the basic trajectory of Taubes’s novel.
But to say this much already pushes the limits of interpretation that the novel allows. Large portions of Divorcing are written in a literary idiom that is meant only to proffer its own obscurity. Sophie’s incoherent, frenetic subjectivity is not only the content of the narrative, but also its formal principle. The narration is composed as a stream of consciousness in which scenes from Sophie’s life after divorce follow one another in rapid succession, neglecting the ordinary novelistic cues that articulate basic details concerning the setting, characters, and scenario. Along the way, the reader vaguely discerns the outlines of a relocation to Paris, a conference on Spinoza, a rendezvous with a lover in New York, but not much else. Furthermore, the distinctions between past and present, reality and unreality, and even life and death are casually elided. In the opening pages it is announced that Sophie has died after being decapitated by a car outside her home in Paris—and yet, neither the chronology of events nor any established ontological order within the narrative bears out whether Sophie’s death is literal or allegorical.
Such an enigma illustrates Taubes’s preservation of a distinctly modernist literary aesthetic. The influence of Joyce especially is palpable throughout. No matter what one thinks of the question of Sophie’s death, the pretense sets up Taubes to include a dreamy, hallucinatory scene, formatted in the text as play dialogue, in which a coffin-bound Sophie is put on trial by a group of rabbis to whom she defiantly confesses her sexual perversions and misdeeds—an obvious homage to Ulysses’s Nighttown episode. Taubes also has a penchant for aping Joyce's clipped, psychologically immediate phrasing, which sometimes omits the subject pronoun entirely: “Perhaps she really is in another room, a young woman listening to Ezra Blind’s marriage proposal fifteen years ago. Must this time say no.”
Divorcing also employs a Proustian device whereby the novel we are reading coincides with the novel that the protagonist intends to write. As a result, Divorcing is filled with uncanny, metafictional references to itself. In one instance, a man attempting to guess Sophie’s name says it out loud, to which she responds: “It’s just the right name for the character I want to write about in my new novel.” The book-within-a-book arrangement also justifies the inclusion of long, minutely-detailed passages describing Sophie’s family history and personal past, which are to be understood as passages from Sophie’s own drafts. The contrast between the inexplicably lucid narration of Sophie’s past and the intentional obscurity of all the other portions of Divorcing underscores the fact that two separate books are in play: Taubes’s book about Sophie’s present state of incoherence, and Sophie’s book of sober and eloquent reflection on her past.
But this is where the novel seems to run aground. Taubes can’t decide which of the two books Divorcing is supposed to really be. It traps itself in the complexities of its own form. The use of non-sequitur, aporia, metafiction and other modernist techniques can only do so much to hold the divergent threads of the narrative together before their meaning becomes lost. The original triumph of this approach, as practiced by Joyce, Proust, and Woolf, was the ability to arrange a seemingly random array of material in a way that revealed the instance of a larger coherence. But in Taubes’s novel, much of the content she includes feels like it is truly random. The fault, I believe, is Taubes's overreliance on her own life experience. The novel’s autobiographical nature is no secret; the author bio at the front of the book is a plot summary in itself. And yet, one of the novel’s philosophical premises is that fidelity to lived experience is not a substitute for coherence in a work of fiction. In Sophie’s case they are directly at odds with one another. After a certain point, the lengthy family histories and personal recollections—of her early school days, of her grandmother’s house, of eccentric aunts and uncles—become tedious. They check the box satisfying the novel’s metafictional turn, but beyond that they read as if Taubes has simply shoehorned her autobiography into the narrative.
Aside from Taubes’s too-close proximity to her subject matter, her view of America further troubles the literary project implicit within Divorcing. Sophie is very clearly a specimen of the north Atlantic intellectual and cultural elite. This is signified in a number of ways: in Sophie’s intellectual qualifications (she holds a Ph.D), her attendance at a conference on Spinoza, and her taste for literary modernism. But it is also conveyed geographically in Sophie’s decision (the only one she really makes in the novel) to live in Paris after her divorce, and in the fact that when she absolutely must return to America, New York City provides her a temporary bastion of culture until she is able to fly back to Europe.
Sophie’s worldview is one that accepts the perceived cultural and intellectual superiority of Europe over America (minus perhaps New York). The attempt to transform her experience into a fiction that is a recognizable product of the European literary and intellectual tradition comes to cross-purposes with itself when it concerns “the years in America from 1939 to 1947.” Sophie seems doubtful whether these experiences are fit for serious literary representation within her adopted modernist program. Gauging the extent of their treatment in the novel, the years in America were not so much “disowned when she married Ezra”; rather, they are of no interest in the first place to a doctorate used to jet-setting between lovers in New York, apartments in Paris, and Spinoza conferences in Amsterdam. Worse yet, they could damage her image.
The narrative disposes of Sophie’s three years in Pittsburgh from 1939 - 1942 in a few pages. The city is dismissed as a Babylon of consumption and excess: “Towering over the store windows and movie marquees, the giant cereal boxes, tires, tubes of toothpaste and the silly smiling faces of beer-drinking, soup-gobbling, car-satisfied men, women and children, the gods of America.” As an adult, Sophie recalls how in the suburb of Garfield “what always struck her was that the people sitting on the porch were weird in the same way as the people sitting on every other porch in Garfield; it was the same stark look of isolation frozen on all the faces that had stunned them both on their first walk through the town.” Conversely, Sophie happily recalls a six week period living with her father in a hotel in New York City, during which her life more closely resembled the life of leisurely intellectual activity that she enjoys as an adult. As an adolescent in New York City, Sophie visits the Museum of Natural History, flaneurs up and down Amsterdam Avenue, and writes anytime she wants in the hotel lounge, which, she remembers fondly, “even provided paper.”
Throughout Divorcing, Taubes shows a keen intellectual awareness of the world-historical newness of America, which manifests in some elegant and prescient passages:
She wanted to love America. The Twentieth Century Fox newsreel played behind the word, coming on with loud music, the pictures changing so fast and more happening than one could take in—ladies playing tennis in white shorts, airplanes, a boxing match, a burning zeppelin, a parade, someone doing a backdive, exploding oilwells, bathing beauties, tanks. She thought of the twentieth century not just as a continuation of the nineteenth, but as something incredible that happened, as surprisingly and mysteriously as the newsreel turning on in the dark cinema, and it happened in America more than anywhere else. America was the twentieth century.
And yet there is no attempt to explain this large idea in terms of the blank faces staring from the porches in Garfield, or the glut of consumer goods in Pittsburgh, or in her preference for New York City. Instead the greater part of Sophie’s search for lost time is a retreat into her childhood in Budapest. She deals with this subject matter, by contrast, with such earnest concern that the years of “nightmare, trash, vacuity, and stupor” in America figure as a regrettable aberration. If only they had not happened, her life experience might have fit better into her book. Yet she has set herself up to remember a past that she rather wants to suppress. Divorcing, then, reads like a novel that wants to escape its own American-ness. But in doing so, Divorcing falsifies its modernist ethos, and takes shelter in a kind of literary conservatism that bars it from imagining American life as fit for literary representation. Ironically, this is where she does not emulate Joyce. Joyce takes his own national ambivalence in the exact opposite direction, and raises it into the subject of Ulysses. Taubes on the other hand is merely content to say that “America was America,” leaving the matter behind while she goes in search elsewhere for the elusive literary meaning of Sophie Blind’s life.