Against Reading: Encountering the other in Claire-Louise Bennett’s The Deepest Sea.

The Deepest Sea shares with most of the short stories in Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett, the same idiosyncratic narrator. She is a solitary woman living on the West Coast of Ireland, writerly in the way she wrests with language, eccentric in her preferences, and a close examiner of her own thoughts and sensations. In spite of this consistency of voice and tone, there is a lack of dramatic action and dialogue in these stories; the woman who narrates them has no clearly established past or registered interest in her future, as if indifferent to the continuity which plotting her life, in the manner of memoir, might afford. Thus, the stories in Pond are cut adrift from each other. 

In an essay on craft for The Irish Times, Bennett wrote of the “ghastly, bedevilling, rudder”(1) of narrative drive, and we might see the framing of Pond as collection of short stories, rather than as a novel, as a structural resistance to readers who might try to impose their own unifying interpretation on the book. Yet Bennett has made no effort to disguise the many parallels between the narrator’s life and her own, and to further confound their status as short stories, she has also disclosed in an interview hosted by Shakespeare and Company, that “not many people know this […] but Pond is a love story”. That Bennett seems happy that the aims of her book are not readily apparent to readers is a clue, I think, to what she sees as most valuable in fiction: not to provide guidance or pander to expectations. What, after all, does it even mean to tell the love story of a woman who is so alone, long after the affair (or even affairs) has ended, when the possibility of requiting or renewing love is foreclosed? 

I wish to explore how The Deepest Sea operates at once as a discrete story whose narrator refuses to allow herself to be read within the context of Pond and in relation to the social and cultural expectations around her; and as a fragmentary text which yearns toward a whole, to become a “love story”, whose very incompleteness is a precondition of the offering it makes to the lover, figured here as an ideal reader. The conventions of romance are conjured only to be undermined and redefined, since these are anathema to love as Bennett conceives it. Bennett’s manifesto on the subject in her essay ‘I Am Love’, clarifies her objectives. She writes of not wanting

to contribute to a mausoleum of established ideas about love, I want whatever comes to frighten and confuse, to uplift and to comfort, to wrongfoot and enrich. I want it to be like love itself, unencumbered and emptying. Love lives and will not be contained, not by human shapes, nor by literary ones. [58]

In Bennett’s cosmology, therefore, love – by which it is clear she means eros– is the ne plus ultra of encounter with the other. It is a radically destabilising experience which directly implicates the self, and moreover ought to do so. To write about love, then, and to resist plot, are compatible aims, and I believe The Deepest Sea wonderfully explores how this might be done.

This story ostensibly concerns the narrator coming upon her own belongings being sorted on the communal drive, previously stored in an outbuilding shared by inhabitants of her own and the neighbouring cottages. Her wheeled shopping bag is among these things, inside of which she finds a pen, a battery, and a clutch bag containing a letter. She reads this love letter whilst standing on the drive, and we understand that this is the event toward which the story has been moving, the reason for its being written at all, though in another sense the real action of the story is the writing of the story. 

“This is being written with green ink” she begins “—though in fact it is not, not yet.” (109) We are immediately plunged into the moment of composition, and already the narrator is met with resistance: though the cartridge is green, the colour of the ink is improbably coming out blue black, the colour she customarily uses for negotiating “high-minded matters and bureaucratic downers”.(112) There is a disjuncture between the narrator’s desire to desire, figured by the green ink (used “for more clandestine dealings”(112)), and her helplessness before the stark fact of her encounter, through the letter, with the man who wrote it. Though words can be endlessly manipulated for pleasing affect, the material reality of objects is non-negotiable and a proof of the world outside her own mind and therefore the text.  The recursive framing (we read the story Bennett has written about a narrator, who herself is writing about reading a letter written by a man) positions reading as an action in itself, and so raises the stakes of our own encounter with The Deepest Sea. 

We are not asked to establish truth, however, and the narrator sets aside questions of reliability by foregoing any attempt to convince us of anything, except in a way that seems to parody the higher stakes of plot driven fiction. She tells us that her fountain pens “were not interchangeable” and that when carrying them in a front pocket, she “did not have the clips of the pen lids fastened over the pocket, ever, by the way.”(112). These unsolicited clarifications register her reluctance to submit herself to the vagaries of our reading, and are a reminder that writing cannot, without consuming itself in minutiae, replicate the world. If Bennett’s narrator does not aspire to verisimilitude, because this would be dishonest and futile, then she is free to be as subjective as she pleases. One might see her solitude, and the latitude it gives for her thoughts to range uncontested, as a stringent curtailment of narrative’s presumption that it can replicate reality. She has not withdrawn from society in order to shore up a sense of self, but rather to revel in the indeterminacy of this uncorroborated ‘I’. It is a position which strips readers of our utility as interpreters.

Within these redefined parameters, relative value ceases to exist, and the narrator’s inconsequential details become precious touchstones:

I didn’t want for anything connected with him to be inaccurate because I knew I’d only get to have one or two things about him to remember and so naturally I was very keen for those one or two things to be limpid and precise. (124)

Seen in this light, the seemingly irrelevant details she provides about herself, also “limpid and precise”, feel instructive: they are those small things that a lover might remember, and their inclusion is an expression of her yearning to be noticed, and so replicated and reconfigured in another’s imagination. Yet to demand we care and embezzle our attention is to pre-empt desire, and perhaps this is why she never directly solicits ours. 

The narrator’s passivity is a condition of her finding the ideal reader. Bennett often introduces an action in the passive voice: “some of my belongings had been shifted”(114), a rhetorical device which elides the subject, as if the impetus for the action lay within the object itself. “This is being written with green ink”(109) gives the impression of speech compelled, somebody else’s hand writing--the narrator disowning a part of herself in order to observe herself in the same way she observes, startled, her “personal effects shifted without my say-so from the outbuilding to the driveway”(114): as phenomena. The subject of the story is held apart from the narrator, who avoids it with digression (discoursing variously on Parker and Sheaffer pens, ring binders, and her obsession with the stains on a woman’s coat):

This is all a preamble really, of course it is, going on and on, as much as possible, so as not to ever get to what it was I really came across. (118)

The passive voice functions in part to obscure from the narrator her own agency. In doing so, the text is transformed into a living entity, unwieldy because it is not under anybody’s control. For this narrator, to intentionally estrange herself is a precursor to seeing, and she delights in incongruity, visual anomalies, and cultivating her own anachronistic presence: from using a fountain pen, for example; through to her language and syntax: “the last thing I ever wanted was to look highfalutin.”(113), “I’d occasionally appraise something or other rather favourably and thereupon take whatever it was back into the cottage”(116).

The first-person narrator is also, in a sense, in and of itself a disembodied voice, and Bennett takes advantage of its inherent ghostliness. Her narrator seems to seek and resist embodiment through a restless contemplation of the concrete objects around her, moving them about with the intention of returning some utility to them, a process which highlights their provisionality. After discovering and reading the letter, she is compelled to find a new place for it, bringing it back into the house because it “belonged somewhere else now—though I’m not sure the new place I put it is an entirely satisfactory place.” (121)

Changing the physical relation of objects, and herself to them, alters and enlivens her response to the world, and this seems to be a driving force behind this narrator’s mode of being in the world, and even her motivation for writing. Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, in The Ecstatic Quotidian, writes that

The quotidian is that background in contrast to which new discoveries emerge and we are surprised; and more pointedly, it is a necessary condition of surprise, the regularity in contrast to which something new and unexpected occurs.(1)

Against the background of the quotidian, anomalies capture the imagination of our narrator. She writes of a fascination she once had for the stains on a French girl’s “filthy corduroy coat”, which she found “quite exquisite and exciting somehow—as if she were brandishing a glimpse of herself in process; they were so vivid and unashamed.”(114) This “glimpse of a self in process” is,  I think, the very thing which this narrator is daring herself to convey by writing, and yet she has until recently been

the sort of person who didn’t feel at all easy about having any of her belongings interfered with—and by interfered with I mean anything so much as looked at actually. I’m terribly secretive you see so that kind of attention just doesn’t suit me”.(115)

To announce her secretiveness is to invite reading, since it alerts our attention to an area of interest: thus the attention it solicits is not ordinary, but rather forensic, or even erotic – a veiled invitation to be undressed. As the narrator opens the envelope, she describes the process in physical, almost sensuous detail:

and on the back was a small strip of sticking tape, that was still, actually, quite sticky, so I had to pull at it a bit in order to get the envelope opened. And there it was, from him, in my hand again.” (118)

As well as alerting us to the role desire plays in interpretation, Bennett reminds us that what precedes the letter’s contents is its material fact. Traces of the presence of another body (in the handwritten name on the envelope; in the sticking tape) establish a chain of touch between the sender in the past and the recipient here and now: in holding it, she receives it again, and is touched anew.

In describing this seemingly passive moment, of rereading a letter, in such lavish detail, Bennett marks it as a heightened encounter, and suggests that there is nothing passive about writing and being read. Bennett shows that there is no real escape to be found in either activity. The story itself, therefore, could be said to dramatise the ways in which reading and writing, as attempts to know the other, are ethically implicating. 

Though at one time the narrator could barely read the letter without “panic and recrimination” which “followed and obscured it”, now she is able – not only to go “right along with him”--but to come “into contact with his mind in motion”(120):

I did not plunge through it headlong but took it word by word, moving steadily, from one word to the next, without once slipping. Consequently every line I came across seemed different beneath my eyes—closer, much closer. Closer than how they had appeared to me the first times I’d read it years ago. (119-120)

She is even able to see herself, as if out of her own body: “I could see my new sweater and the bright colours of its haphazard design, and I could even see around to the back of my neck and the loop of hair”(119). Paradoxically, it’s the very fraught and messy nature of the letter—the other mind it evinces (“I knew they were his words only, coming from him”(119)) that makes him present to her now. Distance is the curious agent of this renewed presence since she is only able to read dispassionately because she is geographically, temporally far from the time and events it pertains to. The abatement of her original feelings reproduces the surprise of discovery that activates the feelings again. Zlatan Filipovic, in his Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas, wrote of Levinas’ distinction between ‘the saying’ and ‘the said’, which in this scene, and in the story as a whole, is beautifully illustrated:

‘the said’ is the constative and essentialising reification of the other person to a theme or identity […] and ‘saying’ is precisely the performative, ethical opening and exposure to the other as other.”(69)

In reading the letter again, and in writing—not to produce factual proof, but as a mode of approaching the other—the narrator experiences this ‘saying’, and so stands in the revelatory presence of the other. It is a startlingly vivid experience: “what I held in my hands felt so alive it seemed unthinkable that it did not prosper. Why does he not come through the trees right now?”(121)

Though he does not come through the trees, of course, the reward for seeing the “other as other” is not, for Levinas, and for Bennett’s narrator, that he is returned to her. There is no attainment of the other, no acquisition. In fact, the recalcitrance of the other seems to be what animates and enlivens her:

Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that’s not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in the fervid primary visions until I am entirely my unalloyed self again. (122)

What she seeks is a way of reading the world which preserves this otherness: without this otherness, there is no meeting, and no world. Yet the challenge of writing about love is that the language available is freighted with familiarity which, given the authority of a first-person narrator authored by a single author, threatens to render the other just a figment of the self, and the story just an echo-chamber of wish-fulfilment. When wishes are not fulfilled, Bennett suggests, the alterity of the other is illuminated. The uneventfulness of the story, and the quotidian objects which fill it, are preconditions for Bennett’s exploration of ethical concerns. In The Company we Keep, Wayne C. Booth writes that

It is not the degree of otherness that distinguishes fiction of the highest ethical kind but the depth of education it yields in dealing with the “other”.(195)

If we can allow the other to remain the other (or rather concede that we have no power or right to do otherwise), then we accept our own otherness in relation to them. This narrator a self-confessed daydreamer, and for all she claims to need solitude in order to daydream, she depends upon the other in order to be ungraspable and ungovernable; unknown. In the absence of the other, her imagination—her “fervid primary visions”--is her only stand in for this otherness, and therefore her means of resisting plot. To activate this imagination, however, she must suspend the critical faculty which has allowed her to read the letter with new insight, as “indiscriminate workings out, notes that sought to give shape to a struggle" (121)

Exercising what extant authorial control she possesses- , which is scarce, she shifts her and the man into an imaginary scene: “near the sea in a cove with the tide coming in too fast. Other times we sat on great big rocks that struck out over a lake”(122-3). It is only here that they can meet. Imagination is the place where bodies, like coordinates, can be moved so that endings become redundant and new outcomes revealed.  Here, there are lots of                            

incredibly fit and attractive [people] in a fluorescent and bronzed sort of way—I wonder if we weren’t in L.A., actually. Perhaps we were heading out of LA—I think that’s more like it.(123)

The incongruity of this scene when set against her customary backdrop in the West of Ireland is precisely the point. It is only by totally defamiliarising herself, by putting herself out of context that this impossible romance can play out. 

Yet her imagination stalls as she wonders what they would talk about, and perhaps balks from supplying these details. Nothing she imagines could produce the surprise which his own voice, his alterity, produces. She goes only so far, then, as to imagine a scene and to place the two of them within it, before she falters: “the only idea, the only thing I could think of: speed. Foot down, windows down; direct sunlight, all the way.”(123) She sets a scene only to imagine herself fleeing from it – at a speed faster, it seems, than the speed of her imagination. This is the paradox of her thought experiments, and perhaps all they are useful for: to conjure somewhere other, elsewhere, even, from the imagination. From here, she has nowhere to go but to return to what little memory she has of him.

Wishing to remain the letter’s addressee, the love’s object, she knows such a position is not compatible with knowing the mind and intentions of this man. Knowledge is something she is willing to forgo and so it is apt that the story ends with a scene in which her ignorance and helplessness is re-established: in which she becomes once again the almost mute and reverent audience to this man. In this subordinate position, she reneges her power as storyteller. She recounts the man describing something to her, his efforts failing because she does not understand the word “cantilevered”. 

He explained to me what cantilevered means and it must have been that my face still looked concerned because he held his hand flat out in front of us and he took my hand and placed it vertically beneath his so that my fingertips connected with those little mounds where his own fingers began and, just like that, everything came together.(124)

Though this brief and contingent gesture “only highlighted the life he had and the hopelessness of me supposing I could ever be part of it”(124), still the story ends with the echo of his words in her mouth: 

Even so, I love the way he said it. Cantilevered. Cantilevered. I love the way he said that word. Cantilevered. I will never hear it and I will always hear it. (124)

She has taken herself to the end and become a conduit for his voice. She repeats the word as if to conjure him, and in the realm of this story, she has perhaps succeeded.  The feminist psychoanalyst, Jessica Benjamin wrote, in an essay on transference, that “submission to authority” can be “itself an erotic experience”; “a means, however problematic, of securing or freeing the self and, at the same time, finding recognition”(150) and at first glance it seems true of Bennett’s narrator that she is willing to abandon her own story if doing so might encourage this man to take it, and her, up where she left off. Yet an attempt to read this narrator and her aims through such a lens is reductive. “Impressionability”, Bennett argues in an essay on still life paintings, is

just an expression of a broader sensitivity, so that, in another context, one is not so much gullible as receptive: willing and able to intertwine with the world and all its phenomena. (Large Issues From Small, Frieze Magazine)

Bennett’s narrator, confined to the insularity of her first-person voice and the limitations of her own imagination, seeks to reawaken love because it erases her sense of being a boundaried self, allowing her to encounter the world and be encountered. This space of encounter seems to lie beyond the scope of the story, unplotted: here, anything might happen.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Jessica. Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Bennett, Claire-Louise. Pond. The Stinging Fly: Dublin, 2015

---. ‘I am Love’. Gorse 2. September 2014: 37-58.

---. “Claire-Louise Bennett on writing Pond.” The Irish Times, 26 May 2015,  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/claire-louise-bennett-on-writing-pond-1.2226535. Accessed 1 June 2020.

---. “Large Issues from Small.” Frieze, 1 October 2017, https://frieze.com/article/large-issues-small.  Accessed 1 June 2020

---. “Claire-Louise Bennett on ‘Pond’.” Shakespeare and Company, 4 May 2016, https://soundcloud.com/shakespeareandcompany/claire-louise-bennett-on-pond. Accessed 1 June 2020.

Booth, Wayne C.. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. University of California Press, 1989

Filipovic, Zlatan. ‘Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas: ‘After You, Sir!’’. Moderna Språk Vol 105, No 1 2011: 58-73.

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.

Leger, Nina. “Notes on Craft.” Granta, 28 August 2019, https://granta.com/nina-leger-notes-on-craft. Accessed 1 June 2020.