It moved.
It turned. It jogged.
With even the slightest current of air – a door opening, a person breathing near it,
just heat – it could quiver, lift, and change direction.
(from The Long Form, by Kate Briggs)
Images, pages featuring bold shapes based on Italian Modernist Bruno Munari’s mobiles, are scattered throughout the 400-plus pages of writer and translator Kate Briggs’ debut novel The Long Form. In theory, a reader could cut them out and build a mobile similar to the one built by the book’s main character, Helen Strong, for her infant daughter, Rose: “a gentle turning scene – a place of contrast, of involvement,” which can occupy and intrigue the baby, but also, when it seems to encroach, “stress her, bewilder and oppress her.”
The plot is both straightforward — a new mother spends a day caring for her infant daughter while occasionally reading a novel — and wholly unsummarizable. Once Briggs has established the characters (Helen and Rose) and the scene (their apartment), “the setting for an improvised daily practice with all the workings laid bare,” Helen receives a delivery, a copy of the novel Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, and begins to read. From this point on, The Long Form dilates and warps (as does Tom Jones, a collage of a novel full of essays and digressions, as does our own mental experience of time in an ordinary day) to include Helen’s memories, as well as Briggs’ inimitable, delicate analysis of the elements and possibilities of “the long form,” i.e., the novel, or a day, or a life spent in relation to others.
Kate Briggs’s first single-authored book, This Little Art (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), a marvelous, influential essay on literary translation, was, like The Long Form, a deeply (and widely) intertextual blend of anecdote and analysis that explored, with generous intelligence, the pleasures and intricacies of (re)writing and reading. Both books explore genre while also rendering it in some ways superfluous: This Little Art is an essay that “reads like a novel,” and, in choosing the hybrid form of the “part-novel” or “novel essay” for The Long Form, Briggs invokes, via quotation, Mikhail Bakhtin’s “conviction that ‘There is never any problem, ever, which can be confined within a single framework.’”
Notably, prior to the publication of both of these works, Briggs translated two lecture courses by Roland Barthes: The Preparation of the Novel (Columbia UP, 2010), which focuses on the problem of writing a novel, largely through the exploration of one of literature’s shortest forms, haiku, and How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces (Columbia UP, 2012), which takes up the idea of “idiorhythmy,” the ways people, while coliving, can attune to one another, or fail to. Briggs drew on the experience of translating these works in writing This Little Art, and in The Long Form, she seems to reckon with the ideas themselves, threading together their two concerns as she simultaneously enacts the form of the novel and focuses intently on the rhythms and mutual attunement of her main characters: “Two possible people: one habituated to maintaining the edges of her body, the other like an open field. All the time conscious of each other.” Helen walks around the living room, holding Rose, and muses, “what are we doing together – if not world-forming? Engaged in our own practice of social creativity?”
Briggs teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, where she cofounded a writing group and publishing endeavor called Short Pieces That Move. While reading The Long Form, I contemplated that use of the word “move”: a text can move us, emotionally, move us to action, move copies, make moves, or move at a fast or slow pace. The word “mobile,” move’s cousin, appears more than 40 times in The Long Form, often referring to the Rose’s mobile, which, like Rose, attunes not just to human interaction but even to the air, to subtle changes in the room’s atmosphere. Helen’s description of human behavior, like Rose’s shifting in her arms, “the rhythmed actions of a live creature responding to its environment, adjusting to it” or “synching, desynching, stressing, resisting, yielding, resting,” echoes her description (above) of the mobile’s own adjustment and improvisation.
Early in the novel, Helen, in an internal dialogue, tries to explain to her dear friend and former housemate, Rebba, both that she “could not do without” Rebba’s “small, relatively unpredictable stretches of company and support,” but that, paradoxically, they do “almost nothing to smooth out the hard angles of” her days with Rose, “the weird loneliness” of their “wide long nights.” The profound wonder and loneliness of caring for an infant, the intensity of the demands, feels incommunicable, but Helen considers a way to try:
Set stories around it, tell stories about it. Keep saying it in different ways. Ask the narration to help by setting other materials around it – drawing the problem out by setting it on a different plane, or by phrasing it in the language of other projects, developed in other, connected spheres.
It would need a new form,” she concludes, “One at least part-defined by length. (By which she meant: Amplitude. Flexibility. A capacity to stretch and make room.)” Thus, “the long form,” and the formal property of time (and its partner, space) is a primary concern to the protagonist, Helen:
TIME: different portions of imagined time as well as her own future time. But also,
SPACE.
TIME plus SPACE.
TIME as it plays out in lived-in, occupied spaces.
What period of a story’s time is explicitly described in a book and what’s glossed over (often babyhood), and how does a novel’s time interact with our own lived experience of time, as we dip in and out of a book, and in and out of our own memories and future projections? As Helen considers Gertrude Stein and E.M. Forster’s different ideas of narrative time, “the interplay of durations,” she muses on spatial metaphors for our elastic experience of time, in life and in books, writers (or readers) sometimes “repeating or extending the strategies of the narration. By skipping a bit of it. Or staying with it. Thickening it by reading a passage again. Not only folding it and unfolding it but knotting it.”
While attempting attunement with the needs and sleep cycles of an infant, or a “beginner,” as Briggs beautifully puts it, Helen experiences the violence of a rupture in her relationship with time. She imagines Forster holding forth about narrative time in a lecture hall full of (and open only to) men, and imagines herself, with Rose in a baby carrier, bursting in from the street to interject. “Rose SMASHES time,” asserts Helen, who has rarely slept more than three consecutive hours in recent weeks, as she contemplates the demands of caregiving, which “could slide without warning from easy to a bit awkward to challenging to hard to difficult to touching at the very limit-edge of the humanly possible.”
She describes “Rose’s provocation,” the baby’s invitation to deny clocks, schedules, cycles of light and dark, “the most basic and structuring principles of a human life,” and ultimately declines:
I can’t. She shook her head.
But, she re-stated her point: the original time-signature offered by a baby, her wild
a-rhythmia synched only to the rise and fall of tensions, the gathering and dissipating of
intensities – it could be an alternative. I can see how it might represent, for others, if not for
myself – a new structure, a new intelligence, an emancipation, a sort of freedom.
Briggs’s balancing, or really blending, of the vividly realized narrative of the book with her searching intellectual work (and play) is a rare feat, one infused on every page with her characteristic warmth and energy. In a conversation between Briggs and the artist and writer Renee Gladman, published in the Yale Review, Gladman states, of This Little Art: “the book seemed very unapologetic about the time and space it took to do what it wanted to do. The pace of the writing was utterly nourishing. It’s slow and presencing …” and the same holds true of The Long Form, perhaps even more so. There’s a simultaneous complexity and clarity in the work that invites the reader to move slowly, to fully experience the duration, a duration like a day of caring for a baby. This pace resonates with the aesthetics of care so fundamental to the book: a mother cares for a child, the character of Mr. Allworthy cares (with the help of domestic workers) for the foundling Tom Jones, and the author, Briggs herself, demonstrates care as a form of inquiry, always connecting ideas back to things, to lived and thus felt experiences.
Unlike his contemporary, Alexander Calder, Bruno Munari, we learn in The Long Form, created mobiles from light materials — cardboard and thin wooden dowels — to allow for maximal movement, writing: “Whether or not Calder started from the same idea, the fact is that we were together in affirming that figurative art had passed from two or at most three dimensions to acquire a fourth: that of time.” A mobile, to be fully experienced, requires time to move. And yet, a long book, with a mobile as an underlying energetic structure, or an animating ideal, might slightly defy time, in some of the ways Gertrude Stein attempted to, by offering a constellatory array of words, images, questions, and ideas, and inviting the reader to set them into shifting relation, into motion.
[Published by Dorothy, a publishing project on October 3, 2023, 448 pages, $18.00 paperback]