Identity and Perception in the Works of Siri Hustvedt

Faculteit Letteren & Wijsbegeerte

Nikki De Grave - Geeraert

Processes of Becoming Identity and Perception in the Works of Siri Hustvedt

Promotor: Prof. Dr. Gert Buelens

Vakgroep Letterkunde

Masterproef voorgelegd tot het behalen van de graad van

Master in de Vergelijkende Moderne Letterkunde

Academiejaar 2015-2016

Processes of Becoming De Grave - Geeraert !1

Verklaring in verband met auteursrecht

De auteur en de promotor(en) geven de toelating deze studie als geheel voor

consultatie beschikbaar te stellen voor persoonlijk gebruik. Elk ander gebruik valt onder de

beperkingen van het auteursrecht, in het bijzonder met betrekking tot de verplichting de bron

uitdrukkelijk te vermelden bij het aanhalen van gegevens uit deze studie.

Het auteursrecht betreffende de gegevens vermeld in deze studie berust bij de

promotor(en). Het auteursrecht beperkt zich tot de wijze waarop de auteur de problematiek

van het onderwerp heeft benaderd en neergeschreven. De auteur respecteert daarbij het

oorspronkelijke auteursrecht van de individueel geciteerde studies en eventueel bijhorende

documentatie, zoals tabellen en figuren. De auteur en de promotor(en) zijn niet

verantwoordelijk voor de behandelingen en eventuele doseringen die in deze studie geciteerd

en beschreven zijn.



Contents

Word Count: 22 335 Words

1. Introduction 5

2. I: The Constructed Identity 9

2.1. Narrative situation 11

2.2. The Double 15

2.2.1. Iris and Klaus(ina) 16

2.3. Masks 22

2.3.1. The Artificial Mask 22

2.3.2. The Natural Mask: Harriet Burden 27

2.3.2.1. Harry’s Notebooks 28

2.3.2.2. Richard Brickman 31

2.3.2.3. Maskings and mixings 32

3. Other: Esse Est Percipi 35

3.1. First, Second and Third Person Perspectives 36

3.1.1. Mirrors and Mirrorings 36

3.1.2. Alienating and Embodied Looks 37

3.2. The Double 44

3.2.1. The Double Through Another’s Eyes 44

3.2.2. Imposed Doubles: Harriet Burden 46

3.3. Maskings 50

4. Inter: Zones of Metamodernism 55

5. Conclusion 59

6. Works Cited 61



1. Introduction

All abstraction comes at a cost. If there is one thing Siri Hustvedt wants to show us it’s

exactly that. In her novels she taps into multiple sources of knowledge to build a story world

that is complex, layered and compelling. In the introduction to her essay collection Living,

Thinking, Looking (2013) she mentions that her essays reflect her desire “to use insights from

many disciplines for the simple reason that (she has) come to believe that no single

theoretical model can contain the complexity of human reality” (x). It is precisely this

interdisciplinarity that is the focus of the recently published Zones of Focused Ambiguity in

Siri Hustvedt’s Works (2016). Lauding her ability to “bring together otherwise separated

genres and branches of knowledge in a broad spectrum between literature and philosophy,

historiography and art, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, narrative and medicine”, these

essays analyze the writer’s works from various interdisciplinary perspectives. Apart from this

volume, her work has not yet attracted a lot of scholarly attention, despite the fact that the

author has published eleven books of fiction and non-fiction over the last twenty-four years.

A quick look at the contributors of the aforementioned volume shows that there are

nineteen women versus seven men, not counting the three editors (two women and one man).

That means that 73 percent of the contributions in this book were written by women. This

imbalance is not only true for scholarly articles. In an essay that will appear in the

forthcoming collection Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and

the Mind (Fall 2016), Hustvedt writes that “a survey in 2015 by Goodreads revealed that on

average 80 percent of a woman writer’s audience is female as opposed to 50 percent for a

man writer’s” (“Knausgaard Writes Like a Woman” n. pag.).

I tried to bring together as many reviews of her six novels as I could find, limiting

myself to the ones that were written in English, using ProQuest online databases and libraries.

Only The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1997) had more reviews written by men. Reviews for

the other five novels were mainly written by women. You can see the balance tip over more

heavily when the main subject of the novel is perceived as dealing with 'women issues'. The

percentage of reviews written by men dips under 20% for both The Summer Without Men

(2011) and The Blazing World (2014). Both of these books have an enraged, scorned and 1

older woman in the spotlight. Yet to claim that these books are feminist parables (the latter) or

There is a margin of error because I’m not taking into account the anonymous reviews.1


just stories about wronged women (both) is an abstraction that reduces these books to

something they are not and more importantly, it fails to take note of the complex realities

Hustvedt builds. Part of my endeavor will be to show why these abstractions are reductions

that fail to account for Hustvedt’s inclination towards the ambiguous.

These are just numbers and anecdotes, of course, and they are not the story I want to

tell, nor do I want to claim that her being a woman accounts for the lack of scholarly interest

in her work. But these numbers, for example, can be indicative of what Hustvedt repeatedly

calls ‘the masculine enhancement effect’ (“Knausgaard Writes” n. pag.)—an effect she

explores in her book The Blazing World. I give these examples because gender and labels are

some of the many ways in which categories and distinctions (un)consciously guide our

perception and delineate our identities and desires. Furthermore, these examples provide me

with the perfect way to introduce the two recurring themes in Siri Hustvedt’s work that I want

to examine further, because in both her fiction and her non-fiction Hustvedt continuously

explores the concepts of identity (the self) and perception from very different points of view.

She quotes Merleau-Ponty and then Winnicott, places Mark Solms next to Baudrillard and

threads them together into one multifaceted narrative.

She incorporates different perspectives and disciplines precisely because she doesn’t

believe one single theory can contain the Truth. In an interview with Lauren Walsh for the

Los Angeles Review of Books, Hustvedt claims that this is the reason she is “interested in

science and philosophy, because if you begin to look at the same problem from different

perspectives, you will get different answers” (“Gender, Art, Perception” n. pag.). This is not a

new perspective: not believing in the Truth and the relativity of viewpoints are decidedly

postmodern tendencies. She seems to show more of these tendencies herself when she says

that

categories, borders, distinctions, and metaphors such as ladders, roots, theaters, computers, blueprints, machinery, or locked rooms are both necessary and useful, but they have to be recognized for what they are: convenient images to aid comprehension—which necessarily leave

out or misconstrue or distort an ambiguous, shifting reality. (Shaking Woman 185-186)

My interests lie in examining how Hustvedt translates or transposes her

interdisciplinary approach into her fiction while never losing sight of our shifting reality.


Hustvedt explains in her essay “Borderlands: First, Second, and Third Person Adventures in

Crossing Disciplines” that she has “actively worked to blur hard and fast borders”, trying to

create “zones of focused ambiguity” (105).

I will focus on the recurring themes of identity and perception and see how they fit into

these multiple zones of ambiguity. The multitudes of strands that come together in Hustvedt’s

work suggest that she draws from a vast web of knowledge. I will argue that, much like Leo

Hertzberg in What I Loved (2003), who has a drawer full of objects he rearranges by making

different associations, Hustvedt rearranges/reconfigures her knowledge into varied but similar

patterns.

In “I: the Constructed Identity”, I will examine those literary devices pertaining to

identity and the self, paying special attention to how Hustvedt uses the hidden, the uncanny

and the double in her novels. In the following chapter, “Other: Esse Est Percipi”, I will

proceed with the theme of perception, where I will focus on objectivity and subjectivity,

expectations and image, seeing and being seen. Are identity and perception fixed concepts or

are they processes? How does she play with seeing and being seen? It is in this chapter that I

will also make room to discuss the reception of Hustvedt’s work, comparing fictional reviews

she has written in her novels with actual reviews written about her books.

It is my hope that in the tension created between these two chapters, I will shed some

light on the continuity and coherence I find Hustvedt is consistently building into her oeuvre,

all while never losing sight of the complexity of reality. I will try to fit my findings into the

narrative of new cultural theories, that have recently emerged trying to fill the gap that

postmodernism left. I will argue that Hustvedt, although her works might seem to be

embedded in the postmodern tradition, voices a decidedly unpostmodern sensibility.

I have chosen to highlight this particular set of various but connected repeated motifs

because I think they echo the writer’s aversion to categories and because they help her in

actively blurring those hard borders. How does Hustvedt create friction between her

characters and what is the nature of these conflicts? Do the processes of becoming challenge

our notions of identity, perception, and postmodern narratives, and if so, how?



2. I: The Constructed Identity

In “Yes, There Is No Crisis. Working Towards the Posthumanities”, the philosopher and

feminist scholar Rosi Braidotti says that “the idea of the 'Human' implied in the

Humanities . . . is the image of Man as a rational animal endowed with language” (10). This

notion of 'Man' “includes both an ideal of bodily functions and a set of mental, discursive,

and spiritual values” (10). The concept stems directly from the Age of Enlightenment, and is

a typically Occidental notion. Over the last couple of decades this idea of the Universal Man

has lost some of its shine. Under influence of, among other things, phenomenology,

existentialism, postcolonialism the unshakeable belief in universal/empirical truth and values

has been put into question and “claims to universalism were critiqued as being exclusive,

andro-centric and Euro-centric” (11). Braidotti goes on to say that “new critical

epistemologies” (e.g., gender studies, cultural studies) have given rise to “alternative views

about the human and . . . new formations of subjectivity” which not only “oppose Humanism

but create other visions of the self” (11). The literary scholar Christine Marks also explains in

“I am because you are”: Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt (2014) that the idea of

the ‘human’—which she refers to as “the Cartesian self”— and human identity in the

Cartesian tradition “relies on the dichotomy of self and other, on the partition between inside

and outside” (2). She claims that “the very definition of identity, in the sense of a distinct,

single self, is grounded in the exclusion of otherness and difference” (2).

In her book The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2011), Hustvedt talks

about an uncontrollable fit of shaking she experienced for the first time while giving a talk in

honor of her father in her hometown two years after his death. “The shaking woman felt like

me and not like me at the same time. From the chin up, I was my familiar self. From the neck

down, I was a shuddering stranger” (7). She couldn’t make sense of what was happening, so

she chose to “go in search of the shaking woman” (7). She talks about the woman shaking in

the third person, as not belonging to the self she imagines herself to be. Who was she, and not

“who am I”. According to Eric T. Olson in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Olson,

“Personal Identity” n. pag.) “Who am I?” is one of the most familiar questions relating to

Personal Identity. It states that “‘personal identity’ usually refers to certain properties to

which a person feels a special sense of attachment or ownership” (n. pag.). In this sense, we

see that Hustvedt regards the shaking as something that is alien to her, detached from and not


belonging to her ‘self’: “But who owns the self? Is it the ‘I’? What does it mean to be

integrated and not in pieces? What is subjectivity? Is it a singular property or a plural

one?” (Shaking Woman 47).

One of the other questions listed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s lemma

of Personal Identity is the problem of population. “What determines how many of us there are

now?” Olson recounts that it is sometimes disputed that “the number of people at any given

time is simply the number of human organisms there are”. (Olson, “Personal Identity” n.

pag.) Olson then explains that some philosophers believe that a disconnection between the

two cerebral hemispheres “results . . . in two people shar[ing] a single organism”. Still others

bring up split personality and conjoined twinning. Hustvedt asks the same question in The

Shaking Woman: “Are we two or one?” (51). These questions that challenge our notions of a

stable and unitary self haunt Hustvedt’s work. She repeatedly threads these questions of

identity through her novels. In this section I would like to examine the ways in which she

explores the theme in her fiction. I will argue that the concept of identity she puts forward in

her novels disputes again and again the idea of the universal 'Human' and 'Cartesian self' that

Braidotti and Marks referred to. Like Marks has argued, “the bounded self as idealized in a

Cartesian worldview, safely detached from the body it inhabits, does not exist in Hustvedt’s

oeuvre” (“Hysteria” 2).


2.1. Narrative situation

A first thing I would like to focus on are the implications of choosing first-person

narration. Throughout her novels and her essays Hustvedt repeatedly makes use of the first

person and this appears to be a very deliberate choice. I will then discuss the way the

different first-person narrators speak about themselves and I will argue that by resorting to

first-person narration, Hustvedt can address some of the central issues concerning identity as

mentioned above. Through the different narrators’ language, Hustvedt undermines the idea of

a stable, cohesive self.

In the author’s note to Living, Thinking, Looking, Hustvedt makes a case for the

personal essay and its narrative situation:

Like the novel, its form is elastic and accomodating. . . . [T]he first-person point of view is not banished but embraced. For me, this is more than a question of genre. My use of the first person represents a philosophical position, which maintains that the idea of third-person objectivity is, at

best, a working fiction. . . . No one can truly escape her or his subjectivity. There is always an I or a we hiding somewhere in a text, even when it does not appear as a pronoun. (xi)

Hustvedt further explains her somewhat suspicious stance towards the use of the third-

person narrator in her essay “Borderlands: First, Second, And Third Person Adventures in

Crossing Disciplines”. She claims that it is easily forgotten that “the absence of the 'I' or 'we'

in academic writing—whether in the sciences or the humanities—is a bid to cleanse the text

of subjective taint, of ‘squishiness’” (85). This “voice from the clouds” is frequently used in

the novel as well, in the form of the omniscient narrator, but the difference according to

Hustvedt is that “the novel asks for the reader’s leap of faith, which the science paper . . .

does not” (84-85). It should come as no surprise then that Hustvedt almost exclusively makes

use of first-person narration, highlighting her subjects' subjectivity. In her six novels to date,

four of them have an autodiegetic narrator: The Blindfold, What I Loved, The Sorrows of an

American and The Summer Without Men. The bulk of the narrative is set in the past, and the

narrator writes in retrospect. In The Enchantment of Lily Dahl we are dealing with a limited

third-person narrator that is actually a disguised first-person narrator, since the information

we receive is limited to the protagonist Lily Dahl’s thoughts and actions. The Blazing World


constitutes as the biggest exception and the biggest example: eighteen narrators tell their

story from their own point of view and the narrative situation differs from chapter to chapter.

A first and obvious effect Hustvedt creates by employing first-person narration is the

reduction of the distance between reader and protagonist. As a reader you feel that the

protagonist is speaking directly to you, a fact that Hustvedt accentuates in “Borderlands”:

“By using the first person . . . I always imply the second person. I am speaking to someone

out there, a general you, but a you nevertheless. The 'I' carries its own personal

interlocutor” (89). Hustvedt's narrators indeed seem to have an interlocutor in mind, as these

examples illustrate: Leo, the protagonist of What I Loved says “[he] knew he would start

writing this book” the day that he found Violet’s letters to Bill (3). The first sentence of The

Sorrows of an American also very clearly implies a personal interlocutor: “My sister called it

'the year of secrets,' but when I look back on it now, I’ve come to understand that it was a

time not of what was there, but of what wasn’t” (1). We know that the narrations don't exist in

a void because it is very clear that the narrator is consciously choosing to tell (us) a story.

The effect of bridging the distance is further enhanced by the protagonist’s voice. The

first person allows the author to give her narrator a very distinct voice. Mia, the protagonist of

The Summer Without Men, sounds noticeably different from Iris, Leo or Erik, the protagonists

in Hustvedt’s other first-person narratives. The protagonists’ language is not filtered, whereas

third-person narration would only show us the protagonists’ language in direct quotes or

thoughts. Hustvedt takes it a step further when she cites Emile Benveniste, according to

whom “the third person is a non-person, because the third person cannot

enunciate” (“Borderlands” 90). In the same essay Hustvedt mentions 'the hard problem'—a

term coined by the analytical philosopher David Chalmers—in consciousness studies: “The

hard problem is the gap between the first-person experience of mind-brain-self versus an

objective third-person view of a working mind or brain” (86). She then goes on to explain

that the main stances, according to Chalmers, are those of the “'hard-line reductionists,' those

who believe that everything about the mind can eventually be explained by and reduced to

third-person brain science, and [those of] the soft-line reductionists . . . who believe further

explanation is needed to understand inner reality” (86).


By using a first-person narrative Hustvedt aligns herself with the second group. She

repeatedly mentions that her primary concern is understanding the big question, which comes

in various shapes but eventually comes down to the question: “What are we?” (84). The best

and most direct way to examine this is “from the inside of one’s skull” (86). By employing

the first person the distance between narrator and reader is the smallest it could be and the

way of transmitting the narrator’s inner reality through their own words is the most direct

way imaginable.

A second implication is the ambiguity that necessarily arises with first-person narrators.

Precisely because we lose the insinuated objectivity—and sometimes omniscience—that

comes with third-person narrators, the reader is forced to acknowledge that he is dealing with

a human being. The reader must take into account that the narrator at worst could be lying or

misconstruing the story, at best still remains subjective. The narrator, because he is human,

makes mistakes, forgets and remembers differently and Hustvedt constantly plays with this

subjectivity. In Living, Thinking, Looking she says that she “want[s] to implicate

[her]self” (xi): “I do not want to hide behind the conventions of an academic paper, because

recourse to my own subjective can and, I think, does illuminate the problems I hope to

untangle” (xi). I would like to argue that this is also why she uses subjective narrators. The

unreliable narrator (and the 'I' has to be unreliable) won’t offer us a ready-made truth.

Connected to this subjectivity is the suspense that comes with having a limited point of view:

protagonist and reader are at the same level, the reader knows only what the protagonist tells

him or her.

Related to this is the inevitable construction of the first-person narrative. Both Christine

Marks and Katja Sarkowsky highlight the individual’s desire “to create a coherent narrative

of life and self” (Sarkowsky, 359). Sarkowsky adds that “contemporary theories of life

writing take the genre as one of self-construction rather than self-expression” (Sarkowsky,

360). The reader needs to keep this in mind: what we see is the narrative of self as formed by

the first person. This is only slightly different from the previous point, but it is an important

nuance. The subject can lie to himself as well as to his (un)intended audience. He/she can do

that unintentionally. “The self’s need for a coherent narrative structure of personal

experience” undeniably shapes the story which is always told retroactively. Eric states that


“every memoir is full of holes . . . I knew there were many things I would leave out of my

own life” (Sorrows of an American 8). The self that is narrated is therefore always a

constructed identity. In The Shaking Woman Hustvedt talks about the shaking woman in the

third person: “The strangeness of a duality in myself remains, a powerful sense of an 'I' and

an uncontrollable other.” (47) Hustvedt’s narrators refer to themselves in the third person on

multiple occasions. Mia, the narrator in The Summer Without Men is diagnosed with Brief

Reactive Psychosis after her husband of thirty years announces he wants a pause. She is

admitted to the hospital because the diagnosis means that “she is genuinely crazy but not for

long” (1). When she speaks about that phase we see that she switches to the third person: “I

don’t like to remember the madwoman. She shamed me” (2). Mia distances herself from the

madwoman, who in this case is seen as the uncontrollable other and doesn’t fit into the story

of herself. She goes on to question this later on: “When I was mad, was I myself or not

myself? When does one person become another?” (117).

The questions concerning the fragmented self and the need for a coherent story

resurface in several of Hustvedt’s characters and in Hustvedt herself as well:

Perhaps because she was a late arrival, I have had a much harder time integrating the shaking

woman into my story, but as she becomes familiar, she is moving out of the third person and into the first, no longer a detested double but an admittedly handicapped part of my self. (Shaking Woman 190)

Sarkowsky underlines the importance of Hustvedt’s choice of the word ‘story’, which

“highlights the narrative approach to identity that underlies the entire account” (Sarkowsky,

365).


2.2. The Double

I have mentioned in the previous section that Hustvedt’s characters often see (parts of)

themselves as an uncontrollable other. This splitting of the self is something Hustvedt has

experienced herself when faced with her acute trembling: “I have come to think of the

shaking woman as an untamed other self, a Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll, a kind of double.

Doubles in literature almost always torment and sabotage the desires and ambitions of their

original and, often, they take over” (Shaking Woman 47). Hustvedt employs the motif of this

splitting or doubling of the self in her novels repeatedly.

Gordon Slethaug, author of The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction

(1993) traces the history of the double back to, among other things, Plato’s philosophy,

ancient Egyptian belief, and Jewish lore (8-9). According to him, “both Platonism and

Semitic myth stress the strength that comes with wholeness and unity” and all humans share a

desire for this unity (9). In this tradition, the double is a metaphor for a dualistic worldview

and the disunity that prevents the wholeness that is unachievable in this world: “On earth,

human beings must be content with an ambiguous relationship between body and soul,

material form and spiritual shadow” (10).

In Victorian times this disunity becomes more pronounced. Pairs such as God and

Satan, poetry and science, reason and emotion are unalterably at odds with each other (10).

The German approach “holds that dualistic views, entities, or states of being must be held in

continual tension” (11). The balance between the pairs is constantly tipping over from one

side to the other. This view allows for a more nuanced take on binary opposition.

The next step in the evolution of the double comes from the field of psychoanalysis and

the push-and-pull of the conscious and the unconscious as explained by Freud and Jung (13).

According to Freud and Jung 'the self [in its normal state] is unified, coherent, and nicely

balanced . . . ; in its abnormal state, it is split or decomposed. In Freud’s theory this is mainly

caused by the underlying tension between the id, superego and ego. In Jung’s theory of the

shadow the “ego governs one’s performance in the . . . outer world, whereas the shadow

dominates the unknown—or partially known—hidden inner world” (16). It is again the

balance between these two that constitutes a stable self. When ego and shadow are out of

balance, the shadow takes over. In Jung’s theory we need to be conscious of the shadow to

maintain that balance (16). The last evolution in the “nature of allegorical doubles” is that


“the dark side of human beings [has attained] a legitimacy of its own in recent cultural

dualism” (19), which means that the opposition between good and evil (or any other pair) has

become more blurred. Or rather, that qualities like “reason, seemliness and conscience” are

no longer a priori better than their opposites.

These separate elements are all dimensions to keep in mind when considering

Hustvedt’s doubles. Doubles speak of a desire for unity, “the need for the paradoxical balance

and resolution of opposites” (12), the psychological (power)struggle between conscious and

unconscious, shadow and ego, and the recognition in later years that a dark side has a positive

dimension. Hustvedt foregrounds another dimension of the double in The Shaking Woman

when she mentions transitivism: “the psychiatrist [Carl Wernicke] defined it as a projection of

one’s own symptoms onto a double to save the self” (121). She goes on to explain that the

word transitivism is still used in psychiatry today, but that the definition has changed to

describe “a state in which patients (often psychotic) confuse themselves with another person”

(121). The motif of the double is perhaps most prominently elaborated in Hustvedt’s first

novel The Blindfold (1992).

2.2.1. Iris and Klaus(ina)

The fragment of The Shaking Woman on transitivism quoted above reveals that doubles

in literature often “take over” the original (47). Iris Vegan, the 1st person narrator in The

Blindfold, dresses up as a man for a Halloween party. She reluctantly admits to a new and

curious acquaintance, Paris, that she “felt a certain excitement” (128) while in her costume

and later mentions that she is often “seized by an urge to wear it” (130). Iris later gives in to

that urge to feel safer when walking on New York streets. She quickly begins to enjoy the

freedom she experiences when wearing the suit and starts cross-dressing regularly. Her habits

and demeanor gradually change and she starts embodying the power she ascribes to the male

identity and the more she does so, the more she becomes a different person, or rather, the

more she regards her male persona as separate from herself.

In her article, "Pleasure and Peril: Dynamic Forces of Power and Desire in Siri

Hustvedt’s The Blindfold" Alise Jameson argues that “the transformation causes [Iris] to lose

touch with herself, and renders her powerless toward her constructed masculine identity. Iris’s

dual personality is thus read as an embodiment of sadomasochistic desires” (429). I would


like to add to that by examining this power struggle by means of the double. Iris’s

“constructed masculine identity” indeed takes over. I would like to focus on the evolution of

Iris’s second identity and trace how Hustvedt makes use of the double and the doubling of

narratives to reflect on identity.

Iris recounts her time as Professor Rose’s research assistant. He allots her the task of

translating a fictional German novella, Der Brutale Junge, written by Johann Krüger. The

novella’s story is about Klaus, a 'good' boy, who is “troubled by cruel fantasies that appear in

his head without warning” (Blindfold 134). The daydreams delight him, but he feels guilty

afterwards and the boy starts to fear that he might act upon those fantasies. He starts praying

and reciting the multiplication tables to keep himself in check. He eventually starts roaming

the house at night, and later ventures outside and starts wandering the streets of the city. He

feels the compulsion to hurt an injured cat but is caught in the process. He goes home and

tries to come clean to his mother, but she does not understand him. He wakes up after a few

days of feverish sleep and seems to have been cured. He is no longer tortured by the desire to

roam the streets and seems to be freed from his cruel impulsions. The story ends with Klaus

having another daydream (134-138). As Iris translates the story, she has an 'uncanny feeling

of intimacy' (138). This choice of words gains importance if we regard Sigmund Freud’s

short study of das Unheimliche, the ‘uncanny’. He puts forward that the uncanny is “nothing

new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has

become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (“The ‘Uncanny’”, 4). He

mentions that the phenomenon of the double is often used to create the feeling of uncanniness

in literature, claiming that one way the double manifests itself is “by the fact that the subject

identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or

substitutes the extraneous self for his own” (4). Once Iris starts transcribing Klaus’s fantasies,

“brief but vague memories surfaced and then were gone” (Blindfold 138):

To the extent that my text grew, the German one disappeared, and I claimed the new narrative. It’s mine, I said to myself, my reinvention. I’m making it. And so I struggled over the sentences, polishing them until they seemed perfect, and I recall that once when I paused from the translation

to go to the bathroom, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and was taken aback. I was grinning like a half-wit. Good God, I thought, you don’t even look like yourself. (138)


Iris’s gradual transformation begins to take place immediately. Iris is “making it”, it is

her reinvention. The story is a “door to another place” (133). The story brings back vague

memories, and she sees the story as belonging to herself. She sees something in herself that is

familiar but not known and when she looks in the mirror she doesn’t look like herself. If we

follow Freud’s theory of the uncanny, it is no coincidence that Iris’s second identity is an

incarnation of Klaus: she feels an intimate connection—one she cannot place—to the story,

precisely because she recognizes something in herself that has been hidden and untapped.

From here on out we observe a doubling of narratives to accentuate this connection: Professor

Rose asks Iris whether she likes Klaus (139), and Iris is caught off guard and reacts

defensively. This directly echoes her acquaintance Paris’s question when he asked Iris

whether she enjoyed dressing as a man (127). Both of those times Iris is lost for words and

she admits to feeling discomfort answering those questions. Paris immediately suggests that

maybe she feels that she’s finally “come home” (128).

Iris’s story completely mirrors Klaus’s. Both Iris and Klaus are 'good’. For instance,

when Iris starts cross-dressing and she becomes aware of the freedom that comes with feeling

safe, she begins to wander around the city. She says: “On my walks I witnessed many small

scenes of love, hate and indifference. My intention was to watch only, to keep myself at a

distance, . . . ” (164-165). When Klaus starts to venture out at night “he is happy just to walk

where he should not walk and see what he should not see . . . The night is a chaos of sights

and smells and sounds, and the child becomes a tiny voyeur of the city’s secrets . . .” (135).

Character-traits or features are repeated: both “suffer from perverse impulses” (170), and both

eventually act on them: Iris-as-Klaus by speaking gibberish to a stranger (170), Klaus by

committing “small acts of domestic abuse” (135). The situation escalates: the brutal boy is

caught when trying to strangle a cat (136), Iris-as-Klaus is caught when trying to steal a gun

from a policeman (174). After this escalation the both of them seem to be cured: Klaus finds

himself “free from wicked thoughts” (137) and Iris buries away the suit and takes matters

into her own hands again (176). We know the cure is not absolute, though, because the

novella ends with Klaus daydreaming again and when Iris eats a hospital bill she cannot pay,

she notes that “he’s back” (180).


Iris’s transformation into the brutal boy is total when she lies about her name. She

effectively creates a second personality by naming her persona and constructing a story for

'him'. Jameson notes that “once Iris names her new identity, she begins to lose control over it

and her life” (430). “Klaus was born in a bar, my Klaus anyway. The brutal boy found his

second incarnation in me, and as soon as I took his name, I knew that from then on, the nights

belonged to Klaus. In fact, he had been around for some time. The lie was a kind of truth, a

birth announcement of sorts” (Blindfold 166).

Klaus—short for Klausina— Krüger is both Iris’s double and the incarnation of the

brutal boy from the novella. If Freud’s notion of the double in the uncanny has made clear

that the story of the brutal has opened a door to Iris’s unconscious, I believe Jung’s theory of

the shadow as explained by Slethaug can further account for Iris’s loss of control. According

to Slethaug, Jung’s shadow is also a double. “The shadow dominates the unknown—or

partially known—hidden inner world”, it constitutes the “socially unacceptable” (16). It is

“unseemly, antisocial, emotional, and spontaneous” and it is kept in check by the “rationally

governed, orderly, and socially acceptable ego” (16). When the balance in this push-and-pull

between shadow and ego tips over, “the necessary tension breaks down, the personality

disintegrates, and a syzygy or split figure develops” (16). Iris says that from the moment she

named him, the nights belong to Klaus (Blindfold 166). She recognizes her loss of control,

but has stopped seeing Klaus as part of herself. The lack of self-knowledge can also be found

in Jung, who claims that this lack of self-knowledge is due to the fact that both ego and

shadow refuse to recognize „the dark aspects of the personality as present or real” (Slethaug,

16). The ego would lose the idea of having the upper hand, while the shadow “projects its

characteristics onto another person” to “resist the moral control of the ego” (16). Iris never

finds a way to incorporate Klaus into her daily life. She gives him up when she crosses a line

(stealing the gun), and he returns with a vengeance when she crosses another (eating the bill).

She gets rid of him for a longer time only because Professor Rose tells her to, but we do not

know if she succeeds in finding balance. When Rose tells Iris that he doesn’t understand her

borrowing Klaus’s name and says that the story obviously got under her skin, Iris responds by

saying “our skin” (Blindfold 190). She cannot take responsibility for it. When she teaches The

Brutal Boy in her class, she roars “into their surprised faces”: “Who is Klaus?” (211). When

she returns the suit to her friend Ruth, she fails to tell her about Klaus, holding back because


of Ruth’s pregnancy (213). When she finally comes clean to Paris, she punctuates all her

statements “with the moronic refrain ‘I don’t know’” (217). By portraying Iris’s failure to

incorporate Klaus or her inability to even question the reason for Klaus’s appearance,

Hustvedt highlights Iris’s inability to know herself and successfully challenges the idea of a

cohesive self and the subject’s difficulty in acknowledging that fragmentation.

A last aspect that is significant when discussing Hustvedt’s use of doubles is the fact

that Iris creates her double herself, and in part consciously constructs this new identity. When

Iris starts her walks and names her character we read the following passage:

It was during these walks that I filled the blanks in Klaus Krüger’s life (I had given him his author’s last name)—working out his narrative very carefully, trying to get the dates to correspond

to some historical reality. For me Klaus remained a young man, despite the fact that those who knew me as Klaus never mistook me for a boy. (169)

Iris willingly brings Klaus into existence. She invents his story, she cuts her hair to look

the part; it is Iris herself who effectively blurs her gender. In the early stages—as Jameson

has argued—Iris uses the cross-dressing as a survival strategy (Jameson, 430). When Iris

starts cross-dressing more often, it becomes more than that: it becomes an act of rebellion and

the means for escaping the troubling aspects in her life (poverty and loneliness). Jameson

quotes from Marjorie Garber’s book Vested Interests: “the extraordinary power of

transvestism to disrupt, expose and challenge, put[s] into question the very notion of the

'original' and of 'stable identity’” (430). Even Slethaug states that the double serves a similar

purpose:

To extend Rosemary Jackson’s assumptions, the double, like other devices of fantasy, opens a window onto psychological and social disorder and illegality, onto what lies outside the structures of dominant value systems. It is transgressive and exposes an uncontrollable and unpleasurable

side of the individual often concealed behind the facade of cohesive selfhood and social and literary convention. (19)

By saying that Klaus(ina) is created and constructed by Iris I am not implying that

Klaus(ina) is a random character chosen at will. It is clear that Klaus is inseparable from Iris’s

self, even when the cross-dressing started as a conscious decision, and that her second


identity couldn’t have taken the form of a bodybuilding real-estate agent, for example. As

Klaus, Iris embodies something that was and remains hidden within herself: “The voice just

came. I made no effort, and because of this, I felt my speech was neither theater nor delusion

or at least no more than any other talk is. I was that boy” (Blindfold 170). She equally agrees

to not knowing where he came from: “Klaus had been constructed long ago in an

underground place I couldn’t reach” (170). I would like to note the ambiguity that exists

between the conscious construction of an identity and the subsequent loss of control to that

identity. Hustvedt subverts the idea of a cohesive self by playing with the Doppelgänger

motif, but she also subverts the motif of the double by incorporating the element of

performance. Iris dresses up as a man, and it is in part because she is seen while being

(performing?) Klaus that the double becomes more manifest. This is something Hustvedt

repeats in other novels.


2.3. Masks

[I]t’s true, isn’t it, that we’re always looking for one person when there’s more than one, several contentious voices in a single body. Time is part of it. We have different selves over the course of a life, but even all at once. Max was several people. He had hundreds of masks—all his characters—but day to day, too. (Sorrows, 253-254)

Inga, the protagonist’s sister in The Sorrows of an American, gives voice to our desire

to think of others and ourselves with a fixed identity. She acknowledges that her husband,

like everyone else, was more than one. Through the characters he wrote—he was a famous

novelist—but through the day too.

According to Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary a mask is “a covering for all

or part of the face that protects, hides, or decorates the person wearing it” and/or an

“appearance or behaviour that hides the truth” (“Mask.”). According to this definition a mask

can serve three distinct purposes: protection, concealment, and/or performance. Yet,

paradoxically, the mask can also serve the purpose of revelation. Phineas Q. Eldridge, a

character in Hustvedt’s latest novel The Blazing World quotes Oscar Wilde: “Man is least

himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the

truth” (121). Earlier in the novel the fictional editor I.V. Hess cites an excerpt from one of

Harriet Burden’s notebooks: “One can deceive a person out of what is true and—to recall old

Socrates—one can deceive a person into what is true” (36). She is quoting Kierkegaard, and

adds that “[T]he path to the truth is doubled, masked, ironic” (36).

When faced with Hustvedt’s masks we need to take into account the conflicting

meanings the masks can carry: hiding/ revealing, protecting/deceiving, artificiality/

authenticity. Throughout Hustvedt’s work masks are used in a variety of ways. I will

distinguish between two very different types of characters Hustvedt puts forward in her

novels and discuss the different implications of the mask(s) they don. I will then proceed with

an analysis of Harriet Burden’s masks.

2.3.1. The Artificial Mask

Nearly every single novel Hustvedt has written contains one duplicitous character that

never seems to show his/her true self. The art critic Paris in The Blindfold, the artist Teddy

Giles in What I Loved, the artist Rune in The Blazing World, and—albeit to a lesser degree—


the photographers George in The Blindfold and Jeffrey Lane in The Sorrows of an American;

these five characters by Hustvedt never show their ‘true’ selves, they are players and

pleasureseekers, and seem to care about nothing and no one but themselves. The first thing

the four characters have in common is that they are all part of the New York art world. This

does not seem to be a coincidence: Heike Schwarz mentions that one of the characters in The

Blazing World defines the “superficial art scene” as a “postmodern vanity fair” (398).

Schwarz argues that Hustvedt makes use of the art scene as a “major platform for individual

yet stereotyped performances of its participants” (399):

These participants struggle at the same time with their own desire for authenticity or at least their own viability and survival as acknowledged individuals. The performance character within this habitat is obvious; individuals transform themselves into actors, and the world is their stage where

performance and performativity rule. (399)

Hustvedt indeed seems to return to the art scene as a battlefield where artificiality and

authenticity are placed next to each other. Paris, Teddy Giles and Rune have completely let go

of their desire for authenticity. They use their masks for concealment and performance,

becoming only surface. The four characters lack in humanity because of their elusiveness.

The photographer Jeffrey Lane in Sorrows of an American is the only duplicitous character

whose mask shows cracks in the end, and it is only through his connection to his daughter

that his humanity shines through. The other four are surrounded by admirers but don’t have

actual ties to the world or the people around them, making them even more detached.

Christine Marks describes Paris’s character very aptly in her book I Am Because You

Are, stating that “[h]e is the embodiment of fluent and incongruent identity, . . . fully

embracing the ‘circus’ (220) of life; his ‘true’ identity is forever out of reach since he has

embraced the maxim of a world stripped of coherence, a world in which self-creation is

boundless” (89).

When Iris first meets Paris at a Halloween party, he is one of the only guests not

wearing a costume, but he is wearing makeup. Her friend tells her he always wears makeup.

He uses no last name, saying that ever since he legally changed his name he’s been Paris. He

is figuratively and literally masked, the name hiding his identity, the makeup concealing his


face. Iris then asks him what his name used to be, and he refuses to answer: “‘That’s a secret,’

he said, . . . My only real secret. I tell people everything, except that’” (Blindfold 125). When

Iris tells Paris about everything that has happened to her—including Klaus(ina)—and he

thinks it’s funny, Iris sees his lack of empathy and questions their friendship: “I can’t believe

it. An hour ago you were the sympathetic friend, oozing charity. Who the hell are you

now?” (218). She gets increasingly angry and asks him again what his real name is, and he

still refuses to answer. By not showing his true self, or anything resembling a true self, a real

connection is impossible. Iris then says that “[e]very life can be turned into a bad joke—

mine, yours—but why do it?” (219). Paris dismisses her by saying she’s fooling herself: “You

never liked me for my sincerity. I fascinate you. That’s the only thing that counts, Iris. You’re

not as high and mighty as you act. There aren’t any rules, not really. Who makes them?

God?” (220). Paris’s speech makes it clear that the relativity of life allows him to distance

himself and to view life as a game to play. He implores Iris to “have a little perspective, a

little humor”, saying that if she would only “look at it in another way”, it would

“evaporate” (218).

The other players and chameleons change their names or stories as well. Teddy Giles,

the provocative artist in What I Loved, says something different every time when asked about

his birthplace and age. The first time the protagonist Leo meets him, he notices that “[i]n the

dim light his complexion looked very pale,” but he “couldn’t tell if it was caused by ill health

or an application of theater makeup” (What I Loved 192). Leo notices his shaking hands and

is later told by Mark that “Teddy shakes because it’s part of his act” (195). Leo later goes to

his show at the Finder Gallery and he describes the four self-portraits hanging on the walls:

In three he was performing. He wore a hockey mask in the first and held a machete. In the second

he was in drag, dolled up in a blond Marilyn wig and evening gown. In the third, he sprayed his enema. The fourth photograph presumably showed Giles as ‘himself.’ He was sitting on a long blue sofa in ordinary clothes with a television remote control in his left hand. His right hand

appeared to be massaging his crotch. (201-202)

The narrator’s use of quotation marks exposes his suspicion towards Giles’s ‘true’

persona. The four photographs show some of his masks, and the fourth brings to light the

artist’s ability to control. The remote control reveals Giles as a master puppeteer, while at the


same time his right hand suggests detachment, nonchalance and power. He derives the power

from his masks and revels in shallowness: “‘I’m not interested in meaning, I have to tell you,

I don’t think it’s important anymore’” (288). He expresses his aversion of depth: “‘But you

see, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with shallow’” (288). Christine Marks’s description

of Paris equally fits Teddy Giles; like Paris, he “has embraced the maxim of a world stripped

of coherence” (I am 89).

Hustvedt’s depiction of Rune in The Blazing World echoes both Paris and Teddy Giles.

Like Teddy Giles, Rune finds himself in the limelight. He has shed his last name, tells

different versions of his life story, reinvents himself constantly, suggests that he “actively

fight[s] against every trace of originality” (180). He, like the other players before him,

regularly suggests that he is just “playing around” (298), accusing the other of being “too

serious”, and saying that “games [are] meant to be fun” (244). Like the other four players he

refuses to take life seriously. I would like to argue that this distinct type of character that

Hustvedt revisits regularly is the postmodern subject she has grown tired of: “I have found

myself intellectually and emotionally dissatisfied with the airy post-modern subjects that

seem never to put their feet on the ground” (Living 91).

In her essay “The Rich Zones of Genre Borderlands”, Gabriele Rippl connects this to

the emergence of ‘post-postmodernism’ in American literature, announced by various

scholars (27). She recapitulates Nicoline Timmer: “Rebelling against the first generation of

postmodernists and the sarcasm, cynicism, and irony which permeate their works, this new

generation of writers ‘re-humanize[s] subjectivity’” (27). According to Timmer, they do so

through “the emphatic expression of feelings and sentiments, a drive towards inter-subjective

connection and communication” (27). Hustvedt’s primary concern with the postmodern

subjects is their lack of connection to the sensory world and the other. She criticizes both

Foucault’s “socially constructed bodies”—where “the body is an entity created by the

discourses of history” and thus a linguistic construct—as analytic philosophers’ disembodied

abstractions (“Borderlands” 91-92). The airy postmodern subject knows there is no Truth, he

has become increasingly cynical and noncommittal and often sees life as if it were a game in

which no narrative really matters, precisely because every grand narrative can be debunked.


The five protagonists I have just described are poster boys for postmodern relativity.

Aside from their repeatedly expressed views that life is meaningless, a circus, a game waiting

to be played; these characters go as far as to find the concept of identity relative and

meaningless. In the article "The Self Is a Moving Target: The Neuroscience of Siri Hustvedt’s

Artists", Jason Tougaw argues that “[i]f identity is not fixed, there is no self to value” (127).

This can be seen clearly when Teddy Giles says he is “offended by all the pretensions people

have about how deep they are. It’s a Freudian lie, isn’t it—that there’s this big unconscious

blob in everybody” (What I Loved 288). This devaluation of self is also clear in The Blazing

World when we read that Rune knows he’ll get boring when he sticks to “some story” about

himself: “My reinventions mean that I have no looks, no style. I’m bland, a bland

blond” (180). His reinventions defy a fixedness of self, and serve to highlight his blandness.

I would like to conclude two things about this type of character. That Hustvedt’s

characters do not believe in the notion of a cohesive self, is not what makes them ‘airy

postmodern subjects’. A first thing that separates these players and chameleons from the rest

of Hustvedt’s characters is that they don’t ask questions, nor do they look for answers.

Hustvedt’s other subjects are intrigued by the problems concerning identity and are constantly

questioning their notions of self. The postmodern subjects I have just discussed couldn't care

less. A second difference is that these characters use masks to erase any sense of self. By

doing so, they become a third person much in the way that Benveniste envisioned it: a “non-

person”, because he “cannot enunciate” (Hustvedt, “Borderlands” 90). The masks make it

impossible to establish connections with others. Christine Marks says something along those

lines when she says that Paris, “by basing his existence on a continuous series of lies and

evasions, . . . denies himself the possibility of any real connection with his environment,

which ultimately means that he does not possess an identity either” (I am 89). As I will

discuss later on, Hustvedt believes the other is needed to gain a sense of self. These

characters distance themselves and live life in the third person, making them spectators and

not a ‘feeling I’. The distance they create through their masks gives them an advantage in the

games they play. And they are mostly portrayed as superficial, ruthless tricksters who never

intend to unmask themselves. Instead they create “illusion upon illusion upon illusion”, as

Phineas states when he is talking about the “grubby human comedy” that is the New York art

scene (Blazing World 134). Rune says it loud and clear when he outsmarts Harry: “It’s


disguise and more disguise, Harry, he said. You lift up one mask and you find another. . . . I

win. (299)”

2.3.2. The Natural Mask: Harriet Burden

The postmodern masks serve as a counterweight to the other type of mask Hustvedt’s

characters choose to wear. I have chosen to refer to them as “natural masks”. Maisie, Harriet

Burden’s daughter in The Blazing World, makes a documentary about her mother called The

Natural Mask. She explains that the title comes from a conversation she had with her mother

about Alice Bradley Sheldon, who wrote under a male pseudonym—James Tiptree—and

successfully hid her identity and gender for years. Before she ‘came out’, the writer “took on

another persona, a female one she named Raccoona Sheldon . . . ” (198):

The writer, who had been praised as a man who could write feminist science fiction, now had a

female mask, too. My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don’t wear but simply have—the ones given them by nature. (199)

“The masks given them by nature”: Hustvedt seems to suggest that there is such a thing

as an authentic mask. Where the duplicitous characters employ masks to conceal and create

distance and ultimately erase their identities, the authentic mask is employed for other

purposes. It can be used for deceiving someone into the truth, for an exploration of (the own)

identity, for protection or for play. The difference in nuance lies in the person’s motivation

and in the manner in which the mask is constructed. I will try to show, through an

examination of Harriet Burden’s masks, that there can be such a thing as embodied, natural

masks.

Hustvedt’s character who most notably constructs other selves is Harriet Burden, the

artist at the heart of The Blazing World. Right off the bat it becomes clear that Harry (her

nickname, given to her by her father) wonders about what might have been. She admits that,

as a young woman, she had “cravings for a future that somehow involved both fame and

love” (29). As an artist, she feels frustrated that the art world never accepted her, that being

married to the successful art dealer Felix Lord outweighed being an artist. Her work had


never sold well, nor had it attracted a lot of attention. After her husband dies, she leaves

Manhattan and the Manhattan art world she has grown to resent. When her psychiatrist-

psychoanalyst tells her she still has time to change things, she understands that her ‘freedom

has arrived’ (28):

I did wonder about other paths, the alternative existences, the other Harry Burden who might have, could have, should have unleashed herself earlier, or a Harry Burden who had looked like April Rain, petite and pinkish, or a Harry who had been born a boy, a real Harry, not a Harriet. I

would have made a strapping young man with my height and hair. . . . The thought of another body, another style of being haunted me. . . . The fantasy that began to take shape revolved around possible trajectories for me, an artist of multifarious shapes. (32)

She lets her hair grow—it was her husband who liked it short—and starts working

again, newly energized. Feeling that she can’t return to the art world as a middle-aged

woman, she fantasizes about returning as another person. She quickly decides that she

doesn’t want to work with actual costumes: “No, I wanted to leave my body out of it and take

artistic excursions behind other names, . . . I wanted my own indirect communications à la

Kierkegaard whose masks clashed and fought” (35). After that, Harry actively starts creating

masks. In her artistic endeavors, Burden tries to integrate the different roles she has played, as

well as “the protean artist selves that popped out and needed bodies” (25). She looks into the

effect of those different roles upon her sense of self and she thus tries to answer the questions

Hustvedt has raised before. Who are we, why are we, where do we begin and where do we

end and how many are we? She does so in three distinct ways, which are analogous to my

discussion of Hustvedt’s examination of identity.

2.3.2.1. Harry’s Notebooks

The Blazing World is edited by the fictional editor I. V. Hess, a professor of aesthetics.

He/she—the gender is not specified—first learns about Burden’s project Maskings from a

letter published in an issue of an interdisciplinary journal: “Three solo shows in three New

York galleries, attributed to Anton Tish (1998), Phineas Q. Eldridge (2002), and the artist

known only as Rune (2003), had actually been made by Burden” (1). Hess becomes intrigued

by the controversial project and a couple of years later he tries to track down the letter’s

author—Richard Brickman—to find out more. When that doesn’t work, the professor tries to


contact Burden herself, who at that point has been dead for two years. Burden’s daughter

invites Hess and he/she tries to reconstruct the story behind the project. The result of said

investigation is the book we read. Hess’s primary source are the twenty-four notebooks

—“each one labeled with a letter of the alphabet”— that Burden has started after her husband

died (3). The book is comprised of excerpts from her notebooks, written and oral statements

from people that knew Burden and some other material like review, interviews, etc. Hess

states that many of the notebooks were kept simultaneously, some entries dated and others

not. Her system of cross-referencing was sometimes clear and other times not. The notebooks

contain notes on her reading, her life, her work, etc. The two notebooks that are missing are

Notebook O, which is later found by Burden’s children, and Notebook I.

The unreliability of the first-person narration in the notebooks is explored in multiple

ways. Firstly, the excerpts that Hess has included into the book “directly or indirectly relate to

the pseudonymous project” (7). The reader thus only sees a fraction of what she has written,

and we only get Harry as an I-narrator in those passages that Hess deemed relevant. We thus

get her first-person narration at twice remove. She has written it down (first removed) and

Hess has selected and put it in more or less chronological order (second removed). Secondly,

Hess mentions in her/his introduction that some people have doubted Burden’s sanity (9),

which leaves room to distrust what she says. Because her project of the male masks was

carefully planned and well hidden, there is no actual proof to support her claim that the art

shows are really her work. This is especially contested in the case of the third and most

successful show, which also featured the most famous artist. A lot of the controversy exists

precisely because she might be lying or that she might just be delusional. Thirdly, Burden

herself is aware of what writing about the self entails. In Notebook B she writes that “[s]elf-

examination results in confabulation. . . . But the neurologists are wrong; we all confabulate,

brain lesions or not” (146-147). Burden herself knows that she might be “explaining things

away”, remembering things “all wrong”. She underlines her own unreliability. Realizing that

first-person narration is always a construction, means that it is also her first mask. Lastly, her

awareness of this suggests that she might be using it to her advantage and might be playing

with this unreliablity. Hess confesses to having—when trying to make sense of her notebooks


— “the uncomfortable feeling that the ghost of Harriet Burden was laughing over [her/his]

shoulder” (10):

She referred to herself several times in her journals as a ‘trickster,’ and she seems to have

delighted in all kinds of ruses and games. . . . There are only two letters missing from Burden’s alphabet of notebooks: I and O. The letter I is of course, the first-person pronoun in English, and I began to wonder how Burden could have resisted keeping a notebook under that letter and whether she hadn’t hidden it somewhere, if only to tease people like me, whom she had obviously

hoped would eventually take notice of her work. (10)

Hess suggests that Burden wrote her journals with an imaginary ‘you’ in mind, like we

discussed in the section on first-person narration. For an artist who proves to be so

preoccupied with the concept and examination of self, it is indeed strange that she shouldn’t

have written a Notebook I. When Notebook O is eventually found, Hess feels certain the last

notebook exists as well. He suggests that should the notebook ever be found, he might have

to revise the entire book. From page 12 on, the reader knows that he is reading an incomplete

story.

There are multiple possible readings of the missing notebook. If Burden did write it,

she either decided to hide it or to destroy it. In both cases, the explanation can be that the

journals are also her works of art. In the interview with Hustvedt for Zones of Focused

Ambiguity, Susanne Becker suggests that Burden’s “own various voices” have been

“separated into notebooks” (412). In this sense, each of the notebooks contains multiple

constructed masks/multiple constructed selves she wanted her audience to see and know. The

suggestion that she tried on multiple personas can also be found in Hess. Hess too mentions

in his/her editor’s introduction that in the hundreds of pages Burden had written “[s]he

continually shifts from the first person into the second and then to the third” (6): “Some

passages are written as arguments between two versions of herself. One voice makes a

statement. Another disputes it. Her notebooks became the ground where her conflicted anger

and divided intellect could do battle on the page” (6-7). In the case that she destroyed the

notebook it would mean that she chose to keep an ‘inner core’ of self to herself. Heike

Schwarz seems to suggest that the notebook hasn’t been written, “indicat[ing] that the core

self is not totally detectable” (395). Schwarz seems to state that Burden shied away from


probing too deep, suggesting that the true ‘I’ can never be told. What holds true, though, is

that Burden—through her notebooks and through her artworks— constructs and explores

multiple voices to tell her story and chooses different masks to address her audience. In the

words of Burden’s best friend, the psychoanalyst Rachel Briefman, who recalls a

conversation with Harry:

That’s why she was interested in multiple personalities, because she thought plurality was human, she explained. She didn’t get dizzy, black out, or lose people inside her. She knew perfectly well

that she was Harry, but she had discovered new forms of her self . . . (Blazing World 258)

2.3.2.2. Richard Brickman

Burden, like Iris and Burton before her, also creates an alter ego from the opposite sex.

The first time Richard Brickman is mentioned, is in Hess’s introduction. He is the writer of

the letter published in the issue of The Open Eye, in which Brickman unveils Burden’s project

Maskings. When Hess gets his hands on Notebook O, his presumption that Brickman is

actually Burden’s pseudonym is confirmed. In Notebook O we learn about Brickman’s birth.

Harry has made two masks, and invites Rune to play as part of the experiment for their work

together: “When he saw them, your man face and your woman face, when he saw your face

masks, he smiled, and then he ran his finger over the woman and took her up and put the face

over his own” (235). The ‘your’ that Burden uses is significant; she has made them, but it

also suggests that both belong to her self. The masks are blank and there is not much

difference between them, but “[t]he mask changes everything” (236). Echoing Iris’s

transformation, the mask changes her posture like Iris’s suit changed her. Burden also gives

her persona a name: “Richard, I said, Richard Brickman. The name appeared in my mouth,

and I spoke it. . . . But he came, Richard Brickman came, coming like a wind blown from old

Harry’s blue lungs into the purple space between him and Ruina . . .” (237). Like Iris’s Klaus,

Burden’s Brickman appears to come from within. Burden is shaken by her performance,

feeling that it was too “authentic”: “Are we not all malleable beings made of putty, who can

be pulled and pressed and reconfigured? Doesn’t all art partake of this extension into others?

What’s the big deal? . . . Why worry? Because Brickman was there, fully formed. Who is that

man?” (240).


Richard becomes Harry’s uncanny double. Like Iris, Harry keeps Richard secret from

her friends and family, feeling ashamed. She feels that Richard personifies “the dark thing,

the inexplicable lump of a thing” inside of her. Harry later talks to her friend Rachel about it

and tells her that Rune or her experiments with Rune brought out some thing in her: “The

thing, the person—whatever it is—is ruthless, cocky, loud, cold, superior, cruel, dismissive

and untouchable. The thing is not polite. It has never been polite” (253). She eventually refers

to him as her cold mask, and explains her need for him: “a cold, hard, indifferent mask, an

imperious persona that will rise up and smash the stupids” (258). Burden creates a male

double that is hard and stable, which isn’t malleable or permeable like herself. His character

is the embodiment of the strong and strict, rational man. When Burden is playing with Rune,

we see Richard’s reactions to Ruina’s (Rune’s persona) shy, ‘feeble’ and ‘feminine’ behavior:

“I am not mean, I am reasonable. You hear me. I am just speaking rationally. You on the other

hand, are acting like a hysterical child. I ask you to stop right now, immediately” (238). Her

male mask serves as the yin to her yang. She fuels it with ‘the dark thing’ inside her, but

seems to overcome her initial shame by choosing him to reveal Maskings. The letter

published in The Open Eye is included in the book. This letter shows that Burden has found a

way to integrate him into her life. In the letter Brickman dismisses Burden several times,

calling her mode of expression “fervid, exclamatory, and vulgar” or her argument

“hyperbolic” (266, 269): “The woman flirts with the irrational” (272). Using Brickman as a

pseudonym suggests her mastery over him. She parodies the rational male’s discourse,

addressing stereotypical gender roles and her own insecurities in the process: “She had

discovered new forms of her self, forms she said most men take for granted, forms of

resistance to others” (258). Unlike Iris, Harry learns how to use ‘the dark thing’ instead of

being taken over by it. The created mask becomes double becomes mask again.

2.3.2.3. Maskings and mixings

The third type of mask is the kind Harry invents for her project she will eventually call

Maskings. For this, she asks male artists to be her front. They will pretend to be the sole

creator of the exhibition. Like Harry (as Richard) explains it: “Her articulated motive is

simple: ‘I wanted to see how the reception of my art changed, depending on the persona of

each mask’” (268). It goes further than that. Hess tells us that Brickman “insisted that the


pseudonym she adopted changed the character of the art she made” (1-2): “Each artist mask

became for Burden a ‘poetized personality,’ a visual elaboration of a ‘hermaphroditic self,’

which cannot be said to belong to either her or to the mask, but to ‘a mingled reality created

between them’” (273). The main difference is that the mask itself is another human being. If

every mask influences the person who wears it, we get the added ambiguity that Burden

creates new personas that are already people of their own accord. This type of mask

introduces what Christine Marks has called Hustvedt’s “philosophy of mixing”. Marks’s

theory of mixing is first explained by Violet in What I Loved:

“I’ve decided that mixing is a key term. It’s better than suggestion, which is one-sided. It explains what people rarely talk about, because we define ourselves as isolated, closed bodies who bump up against each other but stay shut. . . . What matters is that we’re always mixing with other

people. Sometimes it’s normal and good, and sometimes it’s dangerous.” (91)

The mixing occurs when people interact. Harriet takes on the experiment not only to

deceive the art world; she also wants to see where the mix might lead her. In a conversation

with Rune she explains that it’s about “a question of becoming” (Blazing World 233): “You

want to wear me for one exhibition. . . . I told him yes, that was it exactly, except that by

‘wearing’ him I might find something else in myself” (234). The three masks Harriet chooses

for herself, all generate a different mix. As Violet suggests, there is good and bad mixing, and

Hustvedt shows us this through Harry’s masks. Marks states that “Hustvedt’s interest lies in

those moments when what is usually perceived as a barrier established between inside and

outside collapses and when identities get absorbed by the outside and overwhelmed” (I Am

9). Hustvedt states that “the danger . . . lies in the place between Harry and the persona she

dons, in the ‘mixing’ of herself with the other” (Becker, 411).

Harry dominates her first mask, Anton Tis(c)h—she decides to change the spelling of

his name so that it becomes an anagram for ‘shit’. He feels he has lost his “purity” after their

collaboration, because “her ideas had intruded upon his”. He tells her he couldn’t recognize

himself in the mirror anymore (Blazing World 114-115). Harry is surprised when their

collaboration turns sour, her friend Rachel calls her out on her naivety, saying that she had

wanted


an empty male vessel to fill with art” (118): “She had imagined she could borrow the husk of a man for her revenge, but human beings aren’t disguises. If Anton had found himself caught in the net of Harry’s fantasies, she, in turn, had discovered that her protégé had his own dreams (118).

Her second mask is a more equal mix. Phineas and Harry understand each other and

make a ‘good mix’: “‘You know, P., my dear,’ she said, ‘I like playing with you. I feel as if

I’ve found the real playmate I wanted all those years ago when I was a kid, not imaginary, but

real’” (132). Maisie explains that “[i]t worked because Phinny loved Mother. They were

comrades in arms. He believed in the eventual revelation, in payback day, in

vindication” (203). Harry loses her balance in her collaboration with Rune. It becomes a

struggle for power, one that Rune easily ‘wins’ because he is his artificial mask, which makes

a real mix impossible. It is Rune who invades Harry. His mask makes him a distant third

person, a non-person who is impermeable. The difference between them couldn’t be greater;

when Rune quotes from Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto and tells her he loves fire, hatred and

speed, Harry argues with him: “It was a fascist aesthetic, I said, and in order to see beauty in

maiming and bloodshed, one had to be far removed from those involved” (247).

According to Hustvedt the counterweight to the postmodern, closed-off relativity of

characters like Rune is the embodied self:

We all bodily inhabit the first person, and it is a phenomenological truth that what you see

depends upon where you are. Personal perspective is crucial to experience, . . . We can literally move around other people and objects and get multiple perspectives on them. And this very dynamism assumes an openness to the world of others and things that changes what we do and what we are. (“Borderlands” 91)

This openness Hustvedt mentions requires a bridging of the distance between self and

other, self and the world. This is what Rune and the other artificial masks avoid. Hustvedt

explains that the masks for Harry are “a means of exploring aspects of her masculinity in

ways she has never done before” (Becker, 411). Her natural masks are a means to get

multiple perspectives, as well as a means to examine how human perception works. Her

masks always arise between the space of a ‘me and a you’, and her experiment with Rune

goes wrong precisely because he is too distant to become a ‘you’.


3. Other: Esse Est Percipi

Identities, identifications, and desires cannot be untangled from one another. We become

ourselves through others, and the self is a porous thing, not a sealed container. . . . We do not author ourselves, which is not to say that we have no agency or responsibility, but rather that becoming doesn’t escape relation. (Living 70)

Becoming doesn’t escape relation. In the previous chapter, I have focused on the

construction of identity and the fragility and multiplicity of the ‘self’. I have mostly left ‘the

other’ undiscussed, although Hustvedt underlines the importance of the other and

intersubjectivity repeatedly. In my analysis of Hustvedt’s construction of I’s in her fiction, I

have zoomed in on first-person narration, the double and masks. All of those are interrelated

because they are constructed—at least in Hustvedt’s oeuvre—and because they have the

added element of performance to them. This performance implies an audience. In this next

section, I will discuss how the identity constructions I have just discussed are perceived by or

imposed on the other.


3.1. First, Second and Third Person Perspectives

3.1.1. Mirrors and Mirrorings

I have already discussed the implications of first-person narration. Yet Hustvedt

regularly stresses that the word ‘I’ wouldn’t exist without a ‘you’. In The Shaking Woman she

talks about the difficulty of the words ‘I’ and ‘you’, because they depend on who is speaking:

The word ‘I’ appears rather late in children’s speech. As Merleau-Ponty points out, “the pronoun I

has its full meaning only when the child uses it not as an individual sign to designate his own person—a sign that would be given once for all to himself and nobody else—but when he understands that each person he sees is an 'I' for himself and a 'you' for others.” (93-94)

Hustvedt revisits this theme in "Borderlands": “The body is at once the ‘I’ and an object

in the world that can be seen by others; it has interiority and otherness simultaneously, and it

has an implicit relational tendency toward a you” (105). Seeing and being seen are an

important part of identity formation. Hustvedt regularly mentions Lacan’s ‘stade du miroir’.

Lacan’s mirror stage explains the “turn in human life . . . when a child looks at her own

reflection and sees herself as an externalized whole, as if she were gazing at herself through

the eyes of another person” (Shaking Woman 50). In her essay “Freud’s Playground",

Hustvedt also brings up William Preyer, “one of the first to research a child’s relation to the

mirror” (Living 205). He concludes that “mirror recognition marks the emergence of the ego

(Ich), which allows the child to distinguish both himself and others from his and their images

in the looking glass” (205). Marks elaborates on Lacan’s mirror stage by explaining that the

infant “is enraptured and identifies with this newly found representation of herself” (I Am

75). The child is attracted to the mirror image because it suggests an “individuated totality

which stands in stark contrast to the child’s own physical fragmentation” (75-76). Related to

that is the concept of mirroring; from very early on infants imitate the facial expressions of

adults, we later learn to suppress this imitation. This mirroring precedes Lacan’s mirror stage

(so it precedes a sense of self). It proves that the view of “the newborn as egocentric, asocial,

solipsistic, autistic” doesn’t hold, and that the newborn is actually “an innately convivial

being” (206). Hustvedt then explains (with a variety of scientific sources) that it’s through

these early mirrorings between mother and child that the child’s brain develops, and because


it is a combination of both a “mirroring neural mechanism” and a back-and-forth between

mother and infant, the distinction between nature and nurture disappears:

Without dwelling too excessively on the neurobiology which is still in a state of flux, it is fair to

say that what has emerged is a psychophysiology of the Between, which involves neither nature nor nurture, but both at once, merging without demarcation—genetic temperament and a specific human story become personality over time, a personality shaped by its affective story: the “reproductions of very early . . . experiences of vital importance.” (Living 208)

Simply put: the self develops only through interaction with and embodied imitation of

an other, and the boundary between self and other is only fully comprehended after the mirror

stage, when the child learns to see itself as a whole.

“What becomes an I is embedded in a you” (I am 338). In her book on relationality in

Hustvedt’s works Christine Marks explains that to Hustvedt “mirroring between self and

other constitutes the foundation of self-consciousness” (27). She quotes Hustvedt: “Without

the ability to conceive the viewpoint of others—to imagine being that other person—we

could not be self-conscious” (28). This is related to the fact that it is only when looking in the

mirror that we can begin to see ourselves as others see us. In a key passage in What I Loved,

we read a conversation between Leo and his son Matt in which they discuss what Marks has

called “the self as a hole in vision” (72). Because I am looking out from my body, I am

always missing from the picture. Hustvedt specifies that this is also a good thing: “Were I to

see myself in medias res, my critical faculties might never shut down, and I would barely be

able to lift a finger without crippling self-consciousness” (Living 52). Because everyone sees

from their own body, from their own distinct point of view, we can never see the exact same

thing. Seeing is always subjective and limited to a very specific perspective because the

center is always missing. This also means, as Marks has argued, that “[t]he image

representing the self in its totality is a méconnaissance; therefore identity is based on a

misrecognition of the self as unified” (77).

3.1.2. Alienating and Embodied Looks

Christine Marks states that “ideas of recognition, desire, and mirroring are closely tied

to the mechanisms of seeing and being seen. Looking at somebody else, the individual sees

part of herself reflected through the eyes of the other” (I am 69). She states that “[t]he look


can be both an instrument of subjection and a mediator of affirmation” (69). She bases her

views on—inter alia— Sartre’s “Theory of the Look” (80) and Merleau-Ponty’s

phenomenological look on perception (105). Broadly speaking she distinguishes between the

objectifying gaze (informed by Sartre’s theory) and “the reciprocal gaze” (as informed by

Merleau-Ponty) (105).

According to Sartre, “the alien gaze has the power to hold command over one’s

identity” (82). According to Merleau-Ponty, there are only two possibilities in the Sartrean

logic, I either become an object to the other and am no longer the center, or the other

becomes an object to me, orbiting around the center that is me (82). Sartre thus stresses “the

inevitable process of objectification originating with the other’s presence” (83). Merleau-

Ponty, as explained by Marks, “does not focus on the self as the center where the world is tied

into a unified representation; rather, he conceives of vision as developing in an energy field

between the object and the perceiving self” (105). Marks quotes from his work Signs:

“Everything depends . . . on the fact that our glances are not ‘acts of consciousness,’ each of

which claims an invariable priority, but openings of our flesh which are immediately filled by

the universal flesh of the world” (105). For Merleau-Ponty seeing becomes a way of mixing

with the world. Violet in What I Loved says that “mixing is the way of the world”: “The

world passes through us—food, books, pictures, other people” (89). Marks states that Sartre’s

model maintains “the spatial distance between self and other”, while Merleau-Ponty and

others “erase this gap” (I am 105): “The visual sphere. . . is intersubjective and shared” (105).

It’s interesting to examine seeing and being seen through Hustvedt’s depiction of artists

and their subjects: the artwork being a tangible product of those looks. Christine Marks

analyzes photography in Hustvedt’s works through Sartre’s theory of objectification. Both Iris

from The Blindfold and Erik from The Sorrows of an American experience extreme

disorientation when faced with a photograph of themselves. In the first moment they see the

picture, both of them say that they couldn’t recognize the person in the photograph at first.

Both of them feel robbed of something dear to them. Iris and Erik both deal with people in

their surroundings that have a different perception of them after seeing the photograph. Both

of them feel a strong aversion to the image that represents a distorted reality, in the sense that

it “singles out an isolated fragment, stopping the flux of images that usually comprises our


appearance” (I Am 91). That single moment constitutes a “(mis)representation” containing

nonetheless “a certain reality about [the subjects’] identity” that “contradicts [their] own self-

image” (91). Marks quotes both Sartre and Barthes to argue that because of the objectifying

gaze of the other, Iris feels alienated from herself: “George, in taking control over Iris’s

representation in the photograph, gains power over her identity, since it is he who captures

her presence in an image of his choice” (96). In Marks’s theory, Erik and Iris have become

objects through the gaze of others, the photographs forming a “nexus drawing on the looks of

others to create a counter-identity overshadowing the real person” (92). Although I mostly

agree with Marks’s assertion that George takes control of Iris’s identity, I feel that she stresses

the passivity of Iris and Erik too much and fails to account for some of the ambiguity by only

looking at it from the point of view of objectification. While the objectifying gaze is a

clarifying tool to account for the alienation that arises, I would like to add to her reading by

arguing that the photographer—and by extension the camera—take on a third-person

perspective, in which there is still a form of mixing. Marks herself states: “In looking at one

another or at a piece of art, spatial distance and personal boundaries can be overcome, and a

mixing of identities becomes possible” (104). However, Marks is missing an opportunity by

only applying this to the positive moments of looking and being looked at.

In The Sorrows of an American Jeffrey Lane explains to Erik what he does:

“It’s not what you think. I’m an explorer taking trips into the wilderness, documenting what he

finds, and then remaking the trip when it’s over.” He waved his right hand. “Every biography, every autobiography is make-believe, right? I’m creating several in real time, but it’s all staged, if you see what I mean. I’m staging it. You’re one of the players.” (218)

Jeffrey documents and remakes. He highlights his own subjectivity by saying that he

intentionally manipulates what he sees by fitting his pictures into his own narrative. His show

is called “Jeff’s Lives: Multiple Fictions, or an Excursion into DID” (260). He has taken a

photograph of Erik, the narrator, with a hammer in his hand: “Anger had contorted my face to

such a degree that I was almost unrecognizable. Like a rabid dog, my eyes bulged and my

teeth shone” (263). Erik was angry because Jeffrey had intruded into his home in the middle

of the night, making Jeffrey the instigator of his anger. In other instances, Erik is also


provoked by Jeffrey’s words: “My heart beat faster. I seized him by both shoulders from

behind, pulled him backward and then shoved him into the mirror. . . . Still gripping him, I

was flooded by a sensation of joyous release . . .” (217). The photograph hangs in the Father

section, “mixed in among many other pictures” (262). Iris willingly has her picture taken by

George: “There is a pleasure in being looked at, and I seemed to discover it all over

again . . .” (54). She explains that they (George and Iris) “found a rhythm”: “He squatted,

stood, knelt, and I moved with him. He laughed, and I danced, carefully at first . . . seeing

myself in a mirror, but then I forgot myself” (54).

Alise Jameson comments on this, saying that “[e]scaping from her confining self-

consciousness, Iris achieves power in this freedom, punctuated by a loss of

control” (Jameson, 427). She stresses that Iris isn’t the only one “responsible for reaching this

state”, it is George’s “influence and skill that trigger her transformation and draw out her

other selves”, “her ecstasy . . . dependent on George’s gaze and recognition” (427). In both

cases the catalyst for the photographed behavior is the (in)voluntary exchange between two

people and pertains to the shared and intersubjective field. Hustvedt mentions that she used to

think that “in every relation between two people, there was also a third entity—an imaginary

creature the players made between them” (Living 198). I would like to argue that the

photographs of Iris and Erik are images of that ‘imaginary creature’.

In his article ‘The Self Is a Moving Target’ Jason Tougaw mentions that

Hustvedt’s artists capture and exhibit portraits of her other characters, who respond with varying degrees of discomfort to finding images of themselves fixed, framed and displayed for others. The discomfort arises from a tension that emerges from portraiture. Artist and subject mix in the

process of creating images, but the subjects end up feeling exploited through the artists’ denial of the mixing. (115)

Erik and Iris are faced with a photograph of a mixed self. The anger and loss of control

exist because of the mixing with the artist. Both of them are aware of this at some point,

acknowledging that they have been manipulated (Sorrows 218, Blindfold 57). Both Jeffrey

Lane and George deny this. By claiming Erik and Iris are open books to them (Sorrows 157,

Blindfold 56), they imply that they have made Erik’s and Iris’s true identity apparent through

their photographs. Yet it is the mixed identity that is photographed, not the ‘core self’: the


photographer’s identity is undeniably mixed into the photograph. The alienation that arises is

thus not caused by the objectifying gaze, rather by the subjects’ confrontation with the

mutability of ‘self’. They have to try to integrate not the other’s point of view of themselves,

but rather another (part of) self that is coaxed out by mixing with the other. Just like Hustvedt

has trouble integrating the ‘shaking woman’ and Harry finds it difficult to appropriate ‘the

dark thing’ that is Richard Brickman, Iris and Erik have to come to terms with a fragmented

and mutable self that challenges their view of their own coherent identity. Both Iris and Erik

are confronted again with that fact later on: Iris with Klaus, Erik when he finds himself in his

unrequited love interest’s room and comes dangerously close to rummaging in her underwear

drawer until he sees himself in the mirror:

The man I saw had a haunted, wild look. I backed away from him and fled upstairs. My solitude

had gradually begun to alter me, to turn me into a man I had not expected . . . I’ve often thought that none of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions. I didn’t mean to lie to myself, but I understood that beneath the self I had believed in was another person . . . (Sorrows 229)

The alienation is thus not limited to seeing themselves in photographs, rather it is

caused by catching a glimpse of themselves in an unguarded moment. The photographs make

it impossible to back away from the image, though, and this is where the artists’ trespassing

becomes apparent. George mentions that there were a lot of other pictures of Iris that were

“very pretty” (59), but they didn’t speak to him. It is the photographer who chooses what to

show and at that point, Iris and Erik have little control over who sees the result. The artists

are undeniably mixed into that result. It is because of their denials of this mixing, as Tougaw

has argued, that the subjects are left “feeling exposed during moments when the world is

passing through them” (115). George and Jeffrey abuse their power by exposing photographs

they know won’t sit well with their subjects. They lack empathy and usurp the right to show

images that stand in stark contrast with the self-image that the subjects have of themselves

and project into the world.

This lack of empathy can be linked to the artificial mask of the previous section. As I

have argued before, the artificial mask allows the subjects to take on a third-person

perspective instead of a second or first-person perspective, making them a 'non-person' and

not a ‘feeling I’. In this case, it is the camera that permits the artist to slip into that


perspective, the camera serving as their artificial mask. The camera is employed by these

photographers as a screen, a one-way mirror if you will, between them and the subject. The

camera as one-way mirror allows influence from the photographer (his side being the

transparent side), but reflects the influence from the photographed side (that side being the

mirror). The mix that originates is one-sided, it is the invasion of the permeable subjects—Iris

and Erik—by the impermeable third person. This makes it, much like we have seen in Harry

and Rune’s case in The Blazing World, a bad and dangerous mix.

In her analysis of photography, Marks quotes Hustvedt’s essay on the real-life

photographer Donata Wenders. Hustvedt admires her greatly and from her essay it becomes

clear what Hustvedt feels a good photographer should do:

She mediates, she selects (cf.12), but she does not erase the other’s presence. Importantly,

Hustvedt also finds the photographer’s presence in these photographs (“I offer you these reflections, these mysterious doubles, she seems to say. I will even show you myself and my camera” [12]), which discloses the involvement of the artist in her work. (I Am 101)

The good photographer does not deny her or his involvement in the photograph, which

brings us back to Tougaw’s assertion that it is primarily the artist’s denial of the mixing that

leaves the subjects feeling exploited. Hustvedt incorporates several examples of the positive,

embodied kind of mixing of artist and subject in her novels. The most obvious example can

be found in What I Loved. The artist William ‘Bill’ Wechsler has made a series of paintings of

Violet, who would later become his wife. Leo, the narrator, recounts seeing one of the

paintings for the first time. There are three people in the painting: there is a woman walking

out of the picture—the only things visible are her foot and ankle—there is a shadow falling

over Violet’s belly and thighs, and there is Violet herself, lying on the floor (4). The painting

is called Self-Portrait:

Did that title next to a man’s name suggest a feminine part of himself or a trio of selves? . . . [O]r maybe the title didn’t refer to the content of the picture at all, but to its form. The hand that had painted the picture hid itself in some parts of the painting and made itself known in others. (4-5)


Both the title and the form imply that the artist acknowledges the fact that there is a mix

with his subject, and he makes it clear for the spectator as well since it is obvious in the

painting. Bill explains that while working with Violet, he knew he “was mapping out a

territory in [him]self”, or a “territory between her and [him]” (15). The reciprocity of their

relationship becomes apparent in Violet’s letter to Bill. She has written about being painted

by him, saying that she watched him while he painted her and that she wanted him to rub her

skin “the way he rubbed the painting” (3).

In The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, Edward Shapiro comments on the artist’s

responsibility for the subjects they paint: “I feel responsible for the people I paint, because

the portraits are not just about borrowing somebody’s body for a while” (173). In multiple

instances, the bond between artist and subject is underlined and it is clear that there is a

reciprocal gaze, a connection between a first and second person. Tougaw mentions that

“when there is a problem with a portrait in Hustvedt’s work”, it’s that there is a lack of

“communion” (123). Iris tries to connect with George after her photoshoot, but something in

his expression stops her: “I have what I want, it seemed to say. Don’t come any

closer” (Blindfold 55). Immediately, Iris’s intense pleasure is gone, and she is left feeling

used and manipulated. The end result of the photograph ends up reflecting all of those mixed

feelings and has a profoundly distorting effect on the subject’s sense of self. Faced with an

image of a mixed self that is presented by George as a representation of her true essence, Iris

feels that a false identity has been forced onto her. The fragile balance of the self is disturbed

in the process.


3.2. The Double

3.2.1. The Double Through Another’s Eyes

Throughout Hustvedt’s work, multiple uses of the motif of the double occur, and they

are almost always constructed or imposed doubles. Iris is not the only cross-dresser. In What I

Loved (2003), The Sorrows of an American (2008) and The Blazing World (2014) we see

accounts of characters dressed up as a man or woman; albeit less elaborately. There are

significant similarities, though.

In The Sorrows of an American, Bernard Burton is Erik’s old friend from medical

school. He is a medical historian and is infatuated with Erik’s sister Inga. When she seems to

be in trouble Burton decides to help by trying to get to the bottom of things. He dresses up as

a woman and eavesdrops on other characters while in disguise. When his costume is finally

revealed to Erik and the others, Burton tells Erik that “he didn’t think of Dorothy as a

disguise anymore, . . . but as aspects of himself come to light, both mad and feminine” (291).

He has constructed an alter-ego to be invisible on the street. She is a homeless woman and he

names her after Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. He admits to enjoying the transformation,

both the releasing of his manic features and the invisibility “that is the lot . . . of the unseen,

the unknown, the unsignified, and the forgotten” (291). We only see Burton’s cross-dressing

in passing, and only through the narrator’s eyes: it is Erik who tells the story, and he transmits

Burton’s explanation of his cross-dressing phase to us. The reader does not have access to

Burton’s private thoughts. The fact that Burton’s explanation seems far more sensible and a

lot less problematic than Iris’s account of Klaus needs to be seen—at least partly—in that

light, namely, that a lot is left unsaid and remains invisible for the reader.

Hustvedt plays out this ambiguity. Her characters walk the fine line between

performing and becoming what they perform and they sometimes lose their ability to

distinguish which is which. The reader has to wonder too, much like Mia has wondered:

“When does one person become another?” (Summer, 117). Or: when does something become

problematic? It depends on how you look at it. Hustvedt gives an example of this in The

Shaking Woman when she talks about her shaking fit: “If my tremulous episode had occurred

during the witch madness in Salem, the consequences might have been dire. Surely, I would

have looked like a woman possessed” (8). Time, culture, character, the discipline in which


you work: there are any number of aspects that might change your perspective from the

person next to you. In The Sorrows of an American, Jeffrey Lane is a villain. He stalks his ex

and their daughter, he sneaks into Erik’s house, he takes pictures without consent to expose

them. Burton on the other hand, dresses up as a woman, sneaks around and spies on people,

‘keeping an eye on things’. That we view Jeffrey as creepy and threatening and Burton as

endearing is entirely based on Erik, the subjective narrator who is in love with Jeffrey’s ex

and who is friends with Burton. His reaction to Burton’s adventures is to smile and think:

“The man is really coming into his own” (292).

How does this apply to the double I have discussed in the previous section? Iris gives

us just a few examples of how she is seen by others when she is (dressed as) Klaus, but they

are significant. Firstly, no one bats an eye when she is in New York: “It never could have

happened in Webster. My hometown is too small. People talk. But in the city it was easy to

change my name, to be someone else. I was just another character, and not even an outlandish

one” (Blindfold 166). Secondly, no one believes she is a man:

For me Klaus remained a young man, despite the fact that those who knew me as Klaus never mistook me for a boy. The gap between what I was forced to acknowledge to the world—namely,

that I was a woman—and what I dreamed inwardly didn’t bother me. By becoming Klaus at night I had effectively blurred my gender. The suit, my clipped head and unadorned face altered the world’s view of who I was, and I became someone else through its eyes. (169-170)

By cross-dressing, she has changed the world’s view of who she is. Hustvedt again

highlights the very fine line between performance and double. Iris herself mentions that she

becomes someone else through the eyes of the other (the world). Both location and the

other’s gaze allow her to develop her persona. Without those two conditions, things would

never have happened in the same way. Her double grows through the eyes of the other and is

made possible because she has an audience. Boundaries between performance and

embodiment, fiction and reality then proceed to blur. When she runs home after the incident

with the gun, she walks straight to her mirror. She had avoided looking at herself for weeks

(176). Seeing herself as others see her for the first time in a very long time propels her to

stash the suit in the closet and to bury Klaus. Alise Jameson states that her reflection

confronts her with her “vanishing subjectivity” (434), and it is through this perspective of

herself as a whole in the mirror that she regains a sense of self-consciousness.


3.2.2. Imposed Doubles: Harriet Burden

Intersubjective mixes, or third entities that arise in an interaction, can take over much

like the double can. Hustvedt’s character who most obviously lets constructed identities affect

her is Harry Burden. In the previous section I have shown that Harry is preoccupied with

matters of perception and identity. This is partly because she is convinced that the art world

has never shown interest in her because of her gender. Her project Maskings, which she

comes to view as a performance, is informed by this belief. She is driven by anger and

curiosity, wanting to catch a glimpse of what might have been had she been born in another

body. Her natural masks imply an embodiment, a permeability that stands in stark contrast to

the closed-off mask of the postmodern artist Rune.

I have already discussed Richard Brickman’s ‘creation’: Harry has made two masks,

one of which she gives to Rune. Together they play a theater game: each has created a

persona, and those then interact with each other. Rune has decided to film the game. Rune’s

persona is called Ruina, a name Harry thinks is “kind of funny”: “A ruined woman. Poor

ruined Ruina/Rune” (Blazing World 236). If she is shaken by her own performance of

Richard, she is equally shaken by Rune’s performance: “[h]e had captured something

feminine, and I found it terrible” (237). She wonders where Rune had found “this shy,

hopeful creature” (237). Rune’s depiction of Ruina is prototypical: she is an illustrator, not an

artist, whose ambition it is to draw for children’s books. She wants to ask Richard for a favor,

but she is shy and whispers hesitatingly. Harry, as Richard, feels contempt for the girl, willing

her to speak up, eventually smacking her.

Both Rune and Harriet are performing femininity and masculinity in all their clichéd

glory. Harry notes that her and Rune’s physical traits don’t feminize Richard or masculinize

Ruina, thus endorsing Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. Butler’s theory of

performativity is based on the idea that gender is a constructed and imposed identity. Phineas

Q. Eldridge, her well mixed mask, tells us that Harry “didn’t truck much with conventional

ways of dividing up the world—black/white, male/female, gay/straight, abnormal/normal—

none of these boundaries convinced her” (130). Yet these are the boundaries and categories

that are imposed, and Harry, for one, believes that her lack of success can be blamed on the

fact that she is an (older) woman. Hustvedt talks about Butler’s assertions, saying that she

agrees with Butler


that the ‘I’ is profoundly shaped by our moment in history and its social conventions, that our relations to our own bodies, crucially to what has been called gender, are bound up in intersubjective cultural creations that for better or worse become us. For example, when

metaphors of hard and soft are applied to a person, a discipline, a theory or a text, we are binding those persons, disciplines, theories and texts in meanings that have a long and complex social history, and to deny this seems absurd. (“Borderlands” 90)

Harry’s endeavors to “live out ‘a liberating duplicity and ambiguity’” (Blazing World

272-273) through her masks seem to stand in stark contrast to the prototypical masculine and

feminine characters she and Rune create. Even if Harry “furiously denies hard binary

oppositions” (271), they have inevitably influenced her fears, desires and insecurities.

Brickman is hard, rational and stable, while Ruina is soft, irrational and unstable. Rune’s

depiction of Ruina unsettles her, she asks him if that is really what he thinks women are. She

doesn’t question her own stereotypical male identity, though. Both characters create an equal

uncanny recognition in her, precisely because they convey a reductionism she fears. A

reductionism she feels the consequences of daily and which she is trying to dispel.

Harry later reflects on their personas when she observes the film sequence:

The authoritarian Richard and the cringing Ruina were types lifted straight from melodrama or

soap opera, but their immobile, artificial faces—my empty creations—enhanced the archetypal character of their struggle, and their gestures took on a quality of pathos. . . . Master and slave locked in their contest for recognition? (242)

We learn from the fictional editor that the master and slave from the quotation above

refer to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. Christine Marks explains the master-slave dialectic

as follows: “Self-consciousness is reliant on the existence of another self-consciousness, as it

depends on the other as a source of recognition” (I am 28). Both want to dominate the other

“in order to force him to recognize their identity” (28). A struggle for power ensues, in which

one will be the independent consciousness whose nature it is to be for itself, the other is the

dependent consciousness “whose nature it is to live for another” (29). To put it (overly)

simply: between two subjects there will always be a struggle for domination. Sartre’s theory

of the gaze, which I have previously mentioned, draws from this theory. Harry and Rune’s

relationship is informed by this struggle for domination. Harry mentions it herself: “We don’t


agree, but that might be the pleasure, the sharp back-and-forth, the agon with a worthy

partner” (Blazing World 160). She also names the goal: “Recognition. Dr. F. Isn’t that what

we talk about? My greed for recognition. One to one. Tête-à-tête. You and I. I want you to see

me” (161). We immediately see that Harry is more interested in the interaction, the back-and-

forth. Rune, the postmodern player on the other hand, is more interested in winning. He has

the upper hand because he is withholding himself and knows precisely what her weaknesses

are, and because naively, Harry has no idea that there is a battle being fought.

Their struggle for recognition takes place in the performances and masked dances of

Rune/Ruina and Harry/Richard. They are performing a dualism Harry doesn’t believe in, but

fears nonetheless. In this dualism, Ruina is Richard’s specular other. In the words of Rosi

Braidotti, the woman as specular other “coincides with the disempowered reflection of a

dominant subject who casts his masculinity in a universalistic posture” (Metamorphoses 11).

Ruina is Richard’s double. If we return to Gordon Slethaug’s ‘History of the Double’, this

claim makes sense. Slethaug accounts for the new significance dualism gained in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It involved “a doubleness of spirit and matter, of form

and content, of reflection and reflected” (10): “Masao Miyoshi reminds us, each thing was

divided against itself” (10). Pairs resulting from this (God-Satan, reason-emotion, masculine-

feminine) are all considered “legitimate doubles” (10). Karl Miller adds to that by seeing

doubles, duplication and division “equivalent to philosophical dualism in which ‘the

component parts may complete, resemble or repel one another’” (11). Harry writes that

“Rune was making her up for [her], for Richard” (Blazing World 237), further implying that

Ruina wouldn’t exist without Richard.

When in the end Rune and Harry face off, and she finds out that Rune had known her

late husband (it is implied that Rune and Felix were lovers), Harry is left speechless in light

of this betrayal. As a result, Rune strikes hard. In Harry’s ‘Notebook O’ we read the words

she remembers: “Did Felix know about you, Harry? Did he know your secret? You are Ruina,

aren’t you, Harry? I was playing you, a repugnant, sniveling, insecure little cunt” (297).

Harry, in her shock, immediately transforms into the passive, disempowered reflection Rune

tells her she is. He imposes another self on her, much like George and Jeffrey imposed

images on Iris and Erik, but here that other self momentarily takes over. When Rune proceeds


to tell her he will keep the artwork that resulted from their collaboration as his own, when he

squeezes her throat gently and tells her he is just playing around, when he slaps her, Harry as

Ruina sits motionless and speechless:

Hours later, she called Bruno, and when he came, she told him some of the story, but not everything. She had to hide her shame, cover the burns that would become scars. She could not tell him about Ruina, that unhappy child who had turned to stone and then walked into the street with her head down. (301)

Ruina and Richard, who have been created as a third entity, a (one-sided) mix between

Rune and Harry, both become Harry’s doubles in a masked game that is “disguise and more

disguise” (299). Again Hustvedt confronts her protagonist with the mutability of self. This

time she does it to a subject who is undeniably preoccupied with matters of identity and

multiplicity but who has difficulty balancing her two main desires: fame (recognition) and

love. Harriet eventually finds a way to incorporate those different selves and to make sense of

the different roles she has played:

It wasn’t just about love and wanting to be loved. You were not that plaintive female bleating over the ages . . . I am not that paragon of virtue, Penelope, waiting for Odysseus and turning away the suitors. I am Odysseus. But I found out too late. I hate you, Father. I hate you, Felix. I hate you

both for not seeing that truth, for not recognizing that I am the clever hero. (346)

She eventually finds out what Rune knew already (“[a]nd knowing is power” [347]):

Harry played both parts. She has been Ruina and Penelope for two men in her life, her late

father and her late husband, because she felt that it was the role they wanted her to play. She

eventually recognizes this as “the pull of the other”. She is forced to acknowledge that she

herself had been playing along in a system she, as a firm opposer of “hard binary

oppositions” (271), was trying so hard to dismantle. By unmasking her last double and her

own complicity in playing her, she finally becomes the “complex and multi-layered embodied

subject” who Rosi Braidotti claims is the subject of feminism and who “no longer coincides

with the disempowered reflection of a dominant subject” (Metamorphoses 11).


3.3. Maskings

For this last section I would like to trace the perception of Harriet Burden’s art.

Throughout the narrative we get multiple people commenting on her work. As she has said

herself: she has wanted to see how the reception of her art changed, “depending on the

persona of each mask” (Blazing World 268). Richard Brickman quotes Burden: “More often

than not, we do not know why we feel what we feel when we look at an art object” (268). She

is trying to answer the following question: “Why do people see what they see? There must be

conventions. There must be expectations. We see nothing otherwise; all would be

chaos” (59). The unspoken question behind this question is the more personal and more

pinching ‘why won’t they see me?’ Harriet suspects that her life would have fared differently

had she been a man. That her work might have been embraced or at least “approached with

greater seriousness” (32). Her decision to return to the art scene not as herself, but behind

three male masks is informed by a strange desire for revenge and a curiosity to learn more

about the ways we perceive the world.

Throughout the novel we see various comments that back up her claim. Oswald Case,

a journalist, likes referring to her as Mrs. Felix Lord. Rune’s art dealer William Burridge

describes her as “perfect for Felix” because “she looked like a painting” when she was

younger (“an early Matisse circa 1905”) (274). The same man says that he knew she had

“dabbled as an artist” (274). Then there’s her late husband, Felix Lord, who has never

defended her work, and her father, whose only comment is that her art “doesn’t resemble

much else that’s out there” (129). Burden says that she doesn’t think there had been a plot

against her, just that “much of prejudice is unconscious” (32). Both of her dealers drop her

and she recounts a terrible review in which her work is deemed to have “no discipline or

focus”, her pieces “an odd blend of pretentiousness and naïveté” (33). Others tell her that her

art was exhibited because the gallery owner was a friend of Felix, or because “they needed a

woman in the stable” (32).

The three shows she makes in her project Maskings gather more (positive) attention.

Her first show The History of Western Art has “buffoons . . . pounding out their enthusiasm in

reviews” (59). She mentions that they have very little to say about the story boxes, though,

which, incidentally, seem to be the most obvious continuation of her early work. She also


exclaims that the work—a sculpture of a Big Venus, inscribed with quotations, reproductions,

etc.—belongs to Anton Tish. “It is a work that came into being between him and me because

it was made by a boy, an enfant terrible, not by me, old lady artist Harry Burden with two

adult children and a grandchild and a bank account” (61). Oswald Case says something to

that effect: “I am as tickled by a good hoax as the next person, . . . but a fiftyish woman

who’s been around the art world all her life can’t really be called a prodigy, can

she?” (45-46). Part of why the work creates buzz is precisely because the artist is a young

naïf, who unexpectedly surprises the art world with a work that puzzles and shows intellect

and knowledge. It immediately becomes clear that it’s not necessarily his gender that causes

the stir. It might also be that he is young, or defying expectations.

Her second show The Suffocation Rooms shows her collaboration with Phineas Q.

Eldridge, who defines himself as “nearsighted, mulatto and queer” (121). This is the masking,

the show that gathers least attention. He says that perception of the work “was read through

him”: “P.Q. Eldridge was exploring his identity in his art” (136-137). He also claims that

there was a further reading, however, when the show was mounted again after 9/11. Although

the work had been made beforehand, the interpretation was informed by recent events. Again

we see that perception is based on more than gender alone, making it difficult to draw

conclusions from Harry’s experiment. Further complicating the matter is the fact that it is

Harry who introduces Phineas to the art world: “She introduced me to the right people at ‘art’

parties, gallery owners and collectors and critics I charmed and chatted with, and I made her

connections mine” (134). Phineas says she plays the part of the promoter and collector well,

her status rising quickly as a “rich champion of the young” (135).

Her third show, Beneath, garners the most raving reviews. Rune’s already established

celebrity brings in audience and critics alike; yet it is then that Harry’s rage builds:

My whole body churns as I gorge on the reviews and notices and commentaries about the brilliant Rune’s coup. Their heads are turned. The man who has written the review in The Gothamite, Alexander Pine, does not know he has written about me, not Rune. He doesn’t know that the

adjectives muscular, rigorous, cerebral can be claimed by me, not Rune. (292)

The decidedly masculine choice of words stand in stark contrast to the words usually

employed to describe her art. Rune’s art dealer later bases his views of Rune as the artist


behind Beneath on the fact that Harry’s art “runs in a tradition—Louise Bourgeois, Kiki

Smith, Annette Messager: round feminine shapes, mutant bodies, that kind of thing” (277).

Here there are very genderspecific linguistic choices being made, much like Hustvedt has

spoken of when discussing Judith Butler’s performativity. Notions of hard and soft, wet and

dry, emotional and rational, bind people, disciplines and works of art into very specific

categories and traditions. Ironically, her experiment ‘succeeds’ most prominently when in the

end her revelation goes unnoticed because of Rune’s assertion that the work is, claiming that

Burden was “unbalanced” and “delusional” (276). Hustvedt makes sure to subvert even that,

though. The revelation, Harry’s coming out, happens by ways of Richard Brickman, who has

an equally ‘masculine’, rational voice. Yet Burridge, Rune’s dealer, dismisses him because

the article was “hardly a mainstream publication” and because “who the hell is Richard

Brickman” anyway (275)? Richard is trumped by Rune in credibility.

Burden further undermines her own experiment by writing in Richard’s letter to The

Open Eye that eventually “there are so many variables at work in the reception of any given’s

artist creations” that the performance may be “elusive in terms of what it actually

means” (270). Richard sums up the weak points of her experiment and it becomes clear that

her experiment won’t garner clear-cut results. I. V. Hess includes other voices as well, to

balance out Harry’s indignation. Rosemary Lerner writes that Harry wasn’t that “obscure or

unnoticed”. She herself wrote about her in 1976 (“the work of a brilliant and strikingly

independent artist” [70]) and she claims that others wrote favorably about her as well. When

The History of Western Art opened, she contacts Burden and says that the storyboxes in them

resembled her art so much that she “found it alarming” (74). Furthermore, her childhood

friend Rachel comments on Harriet’s “passionate maternal emotions”, saying that she “threw

herself into motherhood and domesticity” (52). It is implied that she took herself out of the

equasion. The story Harry tells us is the story she sees and her perception is equally formed

by beliefs and circumstances.

Richard Brickman tells us that “the artist’s stated ambition is to dismantle conventional

modes of vision” (272). He argues that Burden’s experiment is actually a performance,

because she “insists that it includes the reviews, notices, ads, and commentary the shows

have generated, which she refers to as ‘the proliferations’” (273). Hustvedt states that she


“realized that the reviews of the novel were embedded in and anticipated by the ideas of the

novel itself” (Becker, 416). She expresses delight in “watching the book rewrite itself before

[her] eyes” (Becker, 416). Indeed when tracing the reviews of The Blazing World, I found a

lot of comments mirroring aspects discussed in the novel.

The very short notice “Top Reads” that appeared in The Townsville Bulletin (a local,

not so serious newspaper in Australia) claims that the book is “not a novel”, and that thanks

to Hustvedt’s “manner of combining” Harriet's journals with the writings and interviews of at

least 20 people . . . readers will feel they know Harriet Burden”. Talitha Stevenson in The

Financial Times had the opposing view when speaking about Harriet Burden, claiming that

she is not ‘human’ enough to be a credible character: “[I]t’s just that to function successfully

as the emotional centre of a novel, she would have needed to possess more common

humanity”. It’s strangely reminiscent of Richard Brickman’s comment in his letter when he

says that he only decided to write a letter for Burden once he had made sure that Burden and

her three masks actually existed (Blazing World 266). Although the bulk of the reviews was

favorable, there was one (very) unfavorable review in The New York Review of Books (14

August 2014: 34-37). Terry Castle was not a fan, she finds it a stretch to believe that Harry is

“straight and enticing to men”, while she is oddly hermaphroditic and that “a lesbian-friendly

reader keeps waiting for the other Doc Marten to drop”. She also doesn’t seem to like

Hustvedt a lot: “Not unexpectedly, Hustvedt is also a serious feminist, much praised for her

thoughtful fictional renderings of women’s lives, especially as lived among the urban,

college-educated, Kindle-owning, heterosexual middle classes” (34). She goes on to call her

novel “a straitened feminist concept-piece”, which is “didactic, unreal and overthought” (34).

She seems oddly in sync with Oswald Case, the journalist in The Blazing World: “The poor,

neglected woman who couldn’t find a gallery! Poor Harriet Burden, rich as Croesus in five-

hundred-dollar hats, the widow of one of the shrewdest dealers ever to work in New York

City. My heart goes out to her. It throbs with sympathy” (181).

The image Hustvedt paints of criticism is rather harsh. She claims that she has “stopped

reading reviews because, to be honest, they were mostly stupid, even the ones that were full

of praise” (Becker, 416). In her novels, the critics and journalists she depicts are often not the

nicest people in town (Paris in The Blindfold, Henry Hasseborg in What I Loved, Linda

Fehlburger in The Sorrows of an American, Oswald Case in The Blazing World). Oswald


Case comments on criticism in The Blazing World saying that you can write anything “in

reviews of the arts if you spell the guy’s name right” (183). He quotes H. L. Mencken who

wrote “that if a critic ‘devotes himself to advocating the transient platitudes in a sonorous

matter,’ he gets respect” (183). Case goes on to specify what those contemporary platitudes

are. Hustvedt’s negative stance towards criticism makes sense if we keep in mind that she is

an advocate of ambiguity and criticism, more often than not, represents a critic’s view

reduced to an easy-to-swallow piece.

In Hustvedt’s essay “Embodied Visions: What does it mean to look at a work of art?”

she posits that “art necessarily establishes a relation between the artist and an imaginary

reader, viewer or listener; it is inherently dialogical”. Her claim is that when reading, or

looking at art, there is the same “back-and forth dialectic between spectator and artwork”,

(338-339) a form of mirroring, that occurs when two people look at each other:

As spectators, we too find ourselves in a potential space between us and what we see because perception is active and creative, and artworks engage us, not just intellectually but emotionally, physically, consciously, and unconsciously, and that relation, that dialogue may be, as Schelling

believed, finally indeterminable. But when we look at a work of art, there is always a form of recognition that occurs. The object reflects us, not in the way a mirror gives our faces and bodies back to us. It reflects the vision of the other, of the artist, that we have made our own because it answers something within us that we understand is true. (354)

The critics in her books, and in real life, mostly do what some of her artists do in her

novels by writing reviews. Their gaze fixes the subject and imposes an image on the reader

that undeniably projects a reductionist view of the discussed work. They take on a third

person-perspective by fixing the subjects in a short, chewable piece, that inevitably puts the

work into fixed categories. Terry Castle’s review seems to be a case in point: she mentions

Hustvedt’s husband, thereby implying that he’s part of her success, she calls her out on her

white, straight, middle class identity. Instead of taking on the dialogical, intersubjective,

embodied position, she takes on an objectifying gaze.


4. Inter: Zones of Metamodernism

“He looked at her. “I, I, I wanted your mouth to say the word ‘mouth.’”

Lily wrinkled her nose? “What?” Martin pressed his two index fingers together. He turned his face away from her. “Because,” he stammered, “the two come together perfectly, the word and what it means.” (Enchantment 63)

Siri Hustvedt’s writing exhales a pre-occupation with the ambiguous. She repeatedly

expresses her aversion to clear-cut distinctions and categories. In The Shaking Woman she

mentions the position (hard) science occupies in Western culture, acknowledging its

importance but not without sounding a note of warning: “The language we use is crucial to

our understanding, however, and many of the intellectual models used to explain how it is

with us human beings are limited, inadequate, or downright obtuse” (185). There are

limitations as to what language can convey, and to explain something or someone through

language inevitably entails an abstraction.

Hustvedt, for example, is a woman, a writer, an American. In three words I have placed

her into three categories but I have also implied what she is not: she is not a man, she is not a

psychologist, she is not a Norwegian. What I have told you is true but not nuanced. She is a

Norwegian American, she would have liked to be a psychoanalyst and has studied the subject

extensively in preparation for her novel Sorrows of an American, and as she explains in her

essay “Being a Man” (A Plea for Eros 95), in her dreams she is sometimes a man. It might go

without saying that there is more to someone than the words we use to describe them, but

reality proves that this fact is often forgotten, as I have shown in my analyses of her novels.

The language we use to explain things never completely coincides with the reality it refers to.

In the same way the 'intellectual models' Hustvedt speaks of, misconstrue reality because

they are always, and have to be to be of use, a reduction/ an abstraction. She says that this is

the reason why she is drawn to the form of the novel, claiming that “the novel may be the

most profound way of presenting ideas that exists”: “The reason is very Bakhtinian: in a

novel you are able to balance multiple, conflicting discourses at the same time. You are able

to present opposing arguments in very different voices, and to establish what is my

intellectual fantasy—multiple zones of ambiguity” (Walsh, n. pag.).


She establishes those zones of ambiguity through a variety of methods, and to make

sense of those zones of ambiguity, ironically, we need to put them within a proper frame. As I

have tried to show in the previous sections, identity for Hustvedt is decidedly 'non-unitary’

and perception mobile, embodied and subjective. She repeatedly forces her protagonists to

c o n f r o n t t h e s e w h a t p h i l o s o p h e r R o s i B r a i d o t t i c a l l s “ i s s u e s o f

fragmentation” (Metamorphoses). But what does that mean? What good do those zones of

ambiguity do? Braidotti asks a similar question in the prologue of her book Metamorphoses.

She states that “after thirty years of postmodernist and feminist debates . . . issues of

fragmentation, complexity and multiplicity should have become household names in critical

theory” (5). There is no consensus for the issues at stake, though: “what exactly are the

implications of the loss of unity of the subject?” (5-6):

What exactly can we do with this non-unitary subject? What good it is to anybody? What kind of

political and ethical agency can she or he be attached to? How much fun is it? What are the values, norms and criteria that nomadic subjectivity can offer? I am inclined to think that 'so what?' questions are always relevant, excellent and a welcome relief in the often foggy bottoms of

critical theory. (6)

Hustvedt doesn’t answer those questions; she asks them. But, like Braidotti says, “if the

only constant at the dawn of the third millennium is change, then the challenge lies in

thinking about processes, rather than concepts” (1). This calls for a transformation in our

modes of thinking. A transformation I feel Hustvedt embodies by constantly asking

(variations of) the same difficult questions she cannot answer, challenging truisms, our

notions of boundaries and categories in the process.

One of her favored ways of establishing her zones of focused ambiguity is through her

theory of mixing. Gabriele Rippl’s article in Zones of Focused Ambiguity examines

Hustvedt’s mixing of genres. She says that, although this is a typically postmodernist feature,

“[d]ue to the novelist’s indefatigable interest in topics such as the personal, the relational self,

and intersubjective bonding, the postmodernist label of her works is becoming, however,

increasingly questionable” (27). Rippl then continues to explain that recently, “the emergence

of ‘post-postmodernism’” has been announced in debates on American Literature. There have

been more attempts at theorizing what comes after postmodernism, though and there is one I

have come to find increasingly helpful. The Dutch scholars Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin


van den Akker have proposed the term 'metamodernism'. In their article “Notes on

Metamodernism” they “outline the contours of this new structure of feeling” (n. pag.):

According to the Greek English Lexicon the prefix 'meta' refers to such notions as

'with', 'between', and 'beyond'. We will use these connotations of 'meta' in a similar, yet not

indiscriminate fashion. For we contend that metamodernism should be situated

epistemologically with (post)modernism, ontologically between (post)modernism, and

historically beyond (post)modernism.

The scholars explain that they envision metamodernism as oscillating between “modern

enthusiasm and a postmodern irony”, like a pendulum “between hope and melancholy,

between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and

fragmentation, purity and ambiguity” (n. pag.). This between-ness is what interests me,

because it is a notion that fuels Hustvedt’s works. Hustvedt regularly borrows Martin Buber’s

term ‘The Between’. For the philosopher, ‘The Between’ “was an ontological reality that

could not be reduced to either person involved and was more than both” (Living 201). It

directly informs Hustvedt’s notion of the third entity that is created between two people, and

it contains her theory of mixing. Intersubjectivity lies at the heart of her ideas of self. She

repeatedly says that there can be no 'I' without a you. There are other betweens and mixings

to be found in her works as well: Rippl has discussed her mixing of genres, she is known for

her interdisciplinarity, and her novels are often interconnected. Leo from What I Loved

appears in The Sorrows of an American, William 'Bill' Wechsler from What I Loved is one of

Harriet’s favorite artists, Iris’s mother Marit Vegan is mentioned in The Enchantment of Lily

Dahl, etc. All of these together help her to examine notions of ambiguity, the non-unitary.

In metamodernism, as Vermeulen and van den Akker imagine it, the between is

conceived of as a “both-neither” instead of a more postmodern “neither-nor” (“Notes on

Metamodernism” n. pag.). They explain the differences in a couple of examples and these can

shed new or more light on Hustvedt’s literature:

Indeed, both metamodernism and the postmodern turn to pluralism, irony, and deconstruction in

order to counter a modernist fanaticism. However, in metamodernism this pluralism and irony are utilized to counter the modern aspiration, while in postmodernism they are employed to cancel it out. That is to say, metamodern irony is intrinsically bound to desire, whereas postmodern irony is

inherently tied to apathy. (n. pag.)


To make this more clear, I should say that Vermeulen and van den Akker say that

modernism is characterized by a belief in and a relation to utopism, (linear) progress, grand

narratives, Reason, etc. (n. pag.). The metamodern desire they oppose to the postmodern

apathy—in my opinion ‘apathy’ can equally be substituted with ‘distance’—can be applied to

Hustvedt’s protagonists and antagonists. Iris vs. Paris, Erik vs. Jeffrey, Harriet vs. Rune; all

three of these couples embody the juxtaposition of embodiment and distance. Vermeulen and

van den Akker conclude that the metamodern work “redirects the modern piece by drawing

attention to what it cannot present in its language, what it cannot signify in its own terms”,

while the postmodern work “deconstructs it by pointing exactly to what it presents, by

exposing precisely what it signifies” (n. pag.).

Although it may seem counterintuitive to categorize Siri Hustvedt’s work because of

her active dislike of categories, I think metamodernism allows enough room to breathe.

Precisely because it is a term that designates a betweenness and an oscillating movement

“between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy,

unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity” (n. pag.), there is less

focus on distinct borders. Vermeulen and van den Akker also seem to imply an aversion to the

clear-cut when they say that their “description and interpretation of the metamodern

sensibility” should be understood as “essayistic rather than scientific, rhizomatic rather than

linear, and open-ended instead of closed. It should be read as an invitation for debate rather

than an extending of a dogma” (n. pag.). The notion of metamodernism can provide the

blurry frame for Hustvedt’s zones of ambiguity.


5. Conclusion

My intention is not to turn all thought to mush, but rather to create zones of focused ambiguity, to

insist that “diverse points of view” when examining the same object are not optional but necessary. For me ambiguity is a rich not an empoverished concept” (“Borderlands” 105).

In my discussion of Hustvedt’s works I have analyzed the author’s strategies when it

comes to defying borders and categories, tracing her examinations of identity and perception.

I have chosen to focus on ‘I’ and ‘other’, subjectivity and objectivity, because in her

treatment of those subjects, the borderlands and crossed boundaries are most prominently

brought to light. Not only do the subjects of I and other permeate her works, it is also safe to

say that for Hustvedt ‘I’ and ‘other’ and the back-and-forth between the two provide the basis

for all knowledge and meaning.

I have argued that her characters’ identities are often influenced and infiltrated by

themselves and by others. Indeed, much of our own sense of self as unified and unitary is

informed by our own constructed and adapted narrative, although in practice the boundaries

between self and other are constantly blurred. It is this blurring that Hustvedt looks for and

creates time and again. The coherence lies in the land of between.

Hustvedt also revisits the fine line between performing and becoming what is

performed repeatedly. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: Richard Brickman tells us that

Harriet Burden “maintains that adopting the masks allowed her greater fluidity as an artist, an

ability to locate herself elsewhere” (Blazing World 272). The loss of perspective, although

always generating imbalance, is also envisioned as an “intellectual virtue” because it

“requires mourning, confusion, reorientation and new thoughts” (Living 131). It is doubt as

“the engine of ideas” (131).

I hope to have shown that things are never one thing in Hustvedt’s fiction, but are rather

always in flux and motion. It is when identity, borders, categories are fixed that problems

arise. We need different perspectives, we need the processes of becoming. This is why we

need new frames of thinking to make sense of these processes. A need that is repeatedly

expressed in Hustvedt’s fiction and non-fiction through her many different depictions of the

self-in-crisis. That crisis might have originated from within the self, or might have been

created through conflict, but the results are always the same: her characters are confronted


with the ever rearranging fragments of self, trying to integrate them and keep moving. Harriet

Burden’s incessant creativity and her unwillingness to die (her last word before dying is the

word “No” [376]) despite having been ‘defeated', very much echoes the will to keep moving

that is envisioned by Vermeulen and van den Akker as one of metamodernism’s prime

characteristics: “Metamodernism moves for the sake of moving, attempts in spite of its

inevitable failure; it seeks forever for a truth that it never expects to find” (n. pag.), as

opposed to postmodernism who has long let go of the chase. Hustvedt shows the same

resolve to keep asking and examining, trying to summon, for us all, “a willingness to lose

perspective” (“Excursions” 131).


6. Works Cited

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