Pond
— Ariel Saramandi
The musings and memories of an unnamed woman make up the 20 stories in Pond: a series of interconnected narratives, fixed in time and place (2013, an Irish cottage on the Western coast). Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut short story collection is extraordinary because of what she manages to do in such a presumably mundane, restricted space, without using any traditional plot devices.
Read the first couple of lines and you’re strung along, feverish. Each sentence fissures the ordinary way you look at things, by immersing you in the gaze of a rather eccentric, solitary narrator: objects that are usually taken for granted become alien, to be apprehended again and again, in different ways. This is the gaze of wonder (émerveillement) according to Luce Irigaray, and it’s a useful way of getting to grips with the book.
Bennett’s narrator is an Olympic all-star in linguistic calisthenics, creating wonder through heightened, gorgeous imagery: grass after the rain looks like a ‘squandered chandelier dashing headlong down the hillside’. Benign object arrangements, which are usually just ways of setting a scene, unleash the full sensuous force of Bennett’s prose—every detail adds a layer to experience: ‘they are very nice to eat, oranges, when you’ve been having sex for ages. They cut through the fug and smell very organized, and so a sort of structure resumes’. This kind of acuity, though hilarious at times, is never ridiculous: Bennett brilliantly manages to convey those dim feelings which stay illiterate in our own selves, through the narrator’s grounded, almost august, Austenian prose.
It’s not just the descriptions of things that change, however: Pond is also a book about the way we approach ‘description’—hence, I think, the reason for the title. Bennett rejects structuralism, as does her character: she rants against the ‘Pond’ signpost firstly because of its incorrect use as a word (it’s more like a large, shallow puddle), and secondly—more importantly—because naming is for ‘moronic busybodies’ anyway. Naming prevents the emergence of another kind of language, ‘the earth’s embedded logos’ which enables one to ‘experience the enriching joy of moving about in deep and direct accordance with things’ (she never descends into facile nature worship, by the way, to the author’s credit). This deep, non-linguistic state is probably what she refers to as her ‘first language’ that ‘simmer[s] in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs’; there is a moment when she reaches this, tapping into a J.H. Prynne-like mood: ‘None wzm wzm on that here piss crater. And it being the day, still considered’. For a book so concerned with language, it’s almost necessary that the theme of human relations would crop up at some point, too. You’ve got a bit of Wittgenstein’s private language argument going on, when she tries to come to grips with the fact that an exact shared experience is difficult, if not impossible: ‘to establish by empirical increments a shared perspective was a rare thing’. In this, Pond shares some similarities with David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress.
Pond takes the stuffiness of a philosophy textbook and transforms it into lived experience; it demands a re-reading, and is remarkably accomplished for a debut. I still don’t know how the narrator manages to pay rent, given that she’s an ex-academic and doesn’t seem to work, but that honestly isn’t important at all.