SELF-ISH
I am about 36 hours into a 38-hour audiobook production of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. I have run roughly three hundred miles while listening to this book and the one that precedes it in the Wolf Hall series of historical fiction centered around Thomas Cromwell. This is how I get my reading and running in these days: together, on the fly, while trying not to face-plant.
I had no particular interest in Thomas Cromwell, but as my father once said to me, “don’t take a course for the content; take it for the teacher.” Mantel herself is astounding in all the ways a parent of young children might envy: patience, depth, insight, freedom of imagination, specificity, and the time to write about a million pages.
From the mouth, body, and brain of actor Ben Miller, Mantel’s books soar. So, there are two teachers at hand, and it seems that in the face of the sense of perpetual regression I feel as a parent (basically breathing through a reed-straw while swimming to the banks of a burning castle’s dirty moat, a la Disney’s Robin Hood), I have an even greater hankering than usual to make meaning from the materials around me.
The book’s superpowers are—as I have become fond of saying both about writing and people in general—also its liabilities, and these particular liabilities recently led to an interesting exchange with some writer friends, all of whom I respect, and all of whom surprised me by bringing out the crickets when I started effusing about Mantel.
They’re not wrong. What she’s doing with point of view is weird, often jolting, and hard to follow. It sometimes feels forced or rings untrue. The way I first began to describe the point of view in Mantel’s writing is as a kite that’s tethered to the character of Cromwell—sometimes in his hands, sometimes lofting up above him, even high above him, seeing scores of other characters, or even all of England and Europe.
She writes Cromwell in the third person, but barely. He is he—but with all the other he figures in the book, this can become really, really messy. Her solution is frequently to insert the phrase “He, Cromwell, …”—she does this so often, in fact, that one begins to wonder if the third person is really such a good idea. It’s awkward and distracting for, say, about half a million pages.
What happens, though, as you lope through the woods hour after mile after chapter, as with so many awkward situations in life, is that a keen and useful rhythm arises. The repeated sound of that little tic, the clarifying “He, Cromwell,…” becomes a constant reminder that 1) every single person is just one of many, many souls on this planet, and 2) one must try to be clear, to be precise, despite knowing one will often fail—and that inside these failures there will be productive and tasty treats.
Tangling and untangling the self and the other is something Mantel does masterfully, and it works gorgeously a) for a character whose very life is bound to the mood and whim of his king, and b) for a parent, because every toddler is Henry VIII.
Mantel drifts at times into the first person voice for a few voluptuous moments, when Cromwell is reflecting, and she also moves into a mysterious “we” or “you” that began by baffling me, took me through a hundred miles or so of head-scratching, and then lofted, somewhere around mile 200, into a new understanding: these pronouns are her camera. She is panning (“he”), zooming in (“I”), and sometimes, zooming out on a high crane, or on a drone that rises, likely right past the limit of its permit (“you,” “we”).
For the purpose of helping me find my own experience and point of view in a time when I felt unusually crowded out of my own skull, someone said to me, “there is no we.” It was meant largely as a helpful thought-exercise, given that of course there is sometimes a we, in some ways, and there needs to be, in order for us not to steal our neighbors’ mail and do a lot of naked gardening.
There are certainly uses for the sense of the collective. But there’s a reason the hardest part of Mantel’s genius to understand and enjoy is her use of “we,” and a reason the phrase “there is no we” exists to help people like me struggle into their own agency like a pair of too-tight jeans.
Consider how I use “we” sometimes for less forthright reasons than the benefit of humankind: 1) to evade, as in “we can’t make it” (“I hate parties / I am a raging introvert”), 2) to crowd myself out of the picture in the art of shirking: “are we gonna watch a show or go to bed?” (“I can’t decide what I want so I’ll make you choose rather than learn my own mind”) or 3) to elide for ease of use, as in “we do not yell,” which I yell to my children.
Less savory still is how I often skip the the “I” part entirely, and move straight to the “we” when it comes, for example, to the racism built into my country and my life: it’s much easier and more comfortable to say “we can’t let this happen” than to say “if that happened to me, to my child, to my son, I’d burn the world to the ground.”
Just as the relationship between the self and the collective is set on a knife-edge and does much productive teetering in Mantel’s books, the relationship between Mantel’s words and Miller’s performance brings me to a place of awe: what’s written inside us gains much (and often, can only live at all) by how fully we commit to bringing it to sound and sharing with the ears of others. A friend lost a baby at her, the child’s, full-term birth, and reported this unthinkable hurt with such simplicity and candor that I was completely wrecked with astonishment as much by her, the mother’s, clarity as by the unfathomable loss itself. In the act of speaking there is a second life.
Is it so much to ask? To wish for Mantel’s exquisite depth and agility, and Miller’s full-hearted acuity, while locating and disposing of dirty diapers forgotten in dusty, ant-patrolled corners of my home? (WHY ARE MY KIDS NOT USING THE TOILET YET?)
In the end, which is coming in about two more hours of running, it truly is enough—it suffices, I find—to witness. I am amazed by their arts, and by them I am compelled to feel more, despite knowing the cost; to think and see and experience more, despite the entanglement that can ensue and which my husband calls “getting wrapped around the axle”; to strive towards some kind of fair and true “we,” a useful and respectful one, even while remaining adamant that the “I” is the only person who can build it.
Maybe, as for Mantel’s Cromwell, the only way to build a tenuous new order, something one might call a form of “we” that is slightly reformed from the last one, and therefore a bit truer, is to repeatedly make and violate rules. Maybe we have to cross back and forth over the boundaries between self and other in order to learn where they are—to begin to see and observe these shifting borders, and then to offer a hand right there, on the line, at the very spot where one self ends and another begins in that moment, so we might meet another human, whether they’re a tantruming toddler or a grieving mother, in their very fullest form.
