Otessa
A disenfranchised hot blonde girl with a trust fund self-medicates to the point of blackout in the hopes of changing her life in her sleep.^
What does disillusionment look like, to Moshfegh? The visual field is cinematic, detached, mediation creeping: âI did feel a peculiar sensation, like oceanic despair that â if I were in a movie â would be depicted superficially as me shaking my head slowly and shedding a tear. Zoom in on my sad, pretty, orphan face. Smash cut to a montage of my lifeâs most meaningful momentsâŚâ The eyes are âcameras pann[ing]â; lives are understood through media: âYouâre like Winona Ryder in Girl Interrupted,â Reva tells the protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. âBut you look more like Angelina Jolie.â
But we really get a glimpse through the attitude the protagonist holds toward othersâher endless dismissal and condescensions, the belittlings and typecastings.
What she (henceforth referred to as âTag) finds most damning about sole friend Revaâand âTag forgives her for her narcissism, her superficiality, her pettiness and envy and âdelusional romantic projectionsââwhat âTag finds most damning is how everything she says sounds âlike sheâd read it in a Hallmark card.â Reflecting on a eulogy Reva gives for her cancer-struck mother: âReva scratched at an itch that, on my own, I couldnât reach. Watching her take what was deep and real and painful and ruin it by expressing it with such trite precision gave me reason to think Reva was an idiot, and therefore I could discount her pain, and with it, mine.âÂ
When she lists off human grievances itâs with an penchant for deindividuation, caricaturing at length boys reading Proust on the subway, âsterilized professionalsâ ordering brioche buns, and âpeople on datesâ getting no-foam lattes. But itâs delivered with the conflicted tone of someone rejecting what isnât available, like an animal whose snarl breaks midway into a whimper. âI want something thatâll put a damper on my need for company,â she tells Dr. Tuttle, a confession she never actually makes to the reader.
Putting people into cast(e)s, into starterpacks, cognitively dehumanizes them; it allows âTag to dismiss othersâ struggles, struggles which might potentially rival and therefore draw into question the exceptionalism of her own. The observerâs illusion of transparency is a common bias of overestimating the extent to which we understand others around us. Itâs a coping strategy for trauma but what comes first, the transparency or the disillusionment? The othering or the alienation?
2.
I remembered watching her âput her face on,â as she called it, and wondering if one day I'd be like her, a beautiful fish in a man-made pool, circling and circling, surviving the tedium only because my memory can contain only what is imprinted on the last few minutes of my life, constantly forgetting my thoughts.
âTag is thinking back on her mother hereâwhich, because of the similarities in the twoâs psyches and circumstances, is the closest âTag gets to imagining her own future. Itâs as if sheâs trying to understand a way forward. In her motherâs life she sees none, just wine bottles and bloated, middle-aged drunkenness.
And yet out of desperate hope it will cure or heal her, she seeks refuge in pharmaceutical sleep. Every three days she re-doses a fictional downer called Infermiterol, which causes a 72-hour blackout and allows her to survive the tedium of living âonly because [her] memory can contain only what is imprinted on the last few minutes of [her] life.â By the ž mark of R&R, âTagâs dozing away a comparable percentage of her waking hours.  Â
Rest and Relaxation has a happy ending: âTag comes safely out of hibernation seeing a world which, once empty of value, now appears saturated with meaning. âThere was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness⌠My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things.â
The bookâs surface-level moral (appearing in a drugged-out dream-vision that rivals Taipeiâs psilocybin death climax) is something like intimacy, presentness, the acceptance of your lot:
I tried to remember my life, flipping through Polaroids in my mind. âIt was so pretty there. It was interesting!â But I knew that even if I could go back, if such a thing were possible with exactitude, in life or in dreams, there was really no point. And then I felt desperately lonely. So I stuck my arm out and I grasped onto someone⌠and that other hand steaded me somehow as I fell past whole galaxies, mercurial waves of light strobing through my body, blinding me over and over⌠I was crying.
But there are other psychic patterns to track in âTagâs transformation, changes in behavior and self-modeling that might point somewhere further. Where the novel opens with âTag buying two large coffees for herself at the bodegaâpart of a multi-drug choreographing of bodily pleasureâit ends with her picking up cornflakes there, to feed pigeons in the park. She gives away an entire designer wardrobe and starts shopping for basics at a Goodwill. She has a transcendent experience in front of a vanitas painting at the Met, culminating with her placing her palm on its oil surface.
Thereâs another level to the image of the goldfish. Not just the desire to turn off the self, to live without memoryâidiotic, happy, neuteredâbut to swim in a âman-made pool,â to be admired, like her mother, for her beauty and charm. For her quality and value as an object. The Young-Girl is currently the most luxurious of the goods that circulate on the market of perishable commodities (Tiqqun).
3.
@baliocâ writes:
In very broad-brush and simplistic terms:
Traditional masculinity (to the extent that itâs a thing at all) is mostly about Being a Subject, and provides lots of tools that make subject-hood work better. Â It pushes you to take action, to make decisions, to possess things and people and take pleasure in it.
Traditional femininity is mostly about Being an Object, and provides lots of tools that make object-hood work better. Â It pushes you to construct yourself into something desirable and compelling, to seek out appreciation, to be possessed and take pleasure in it. Â
People vary in the utility they get from subject-hood and object-hood. Probably everyone needs both to some substantial extent.
To some extent, identity-building always pushes towards the object side of the equation.  Itâs about being rather than doing; it involves saying, âwitness me! appreciate me!âÂ
If objecthood is oriented around being seen, an art-world rave âTag shows up to plastered epitomizes it:
Girls in dark lipstick, boys with red pupils⌠posing fashionably or simply raising an eyebrow or faking wide smiles⌠In [one], a skinny redhead flashed her breasts, revealing lavender pasties⌠Male twins dressed as heroin-thin Elvises in a slouchy gold lame suits high-fived in front of a basquiat rip-off. There was a girl holding a rat on a leash hooked to the bicycle chain she wore around her neck. A close-up shot showed someoneâs pale pink tongue, split to look like a snakeâs and pierced on both forks with big diamond studs.
The pure object ânever gives herself; she only gives what she has, which is to say the array of qualities that they loan her. This is also why itâs not possible to love the [pure object], but only to consume herâ (adapted from Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl). Hence Trevor, ex-boyfriend extraordinaire, who keeps her around to face-fuck.
Objecthood is where Tag thrives and is validated: she may not remember the art-rave, but her ability to get into it sans invite, to befriend a hotshot artist there and a hundred other navigational easings point to her prestige as an object. Money allows her designer clothes and spa trips, and via the law of costly signaling even her bad habits canât hurt her: sole friend Reva remarks with envy at how thin âTagâs gotten while medicated, and bags under the eyes is heroin-chic if youâre beautiful. Itâs on the very basisânot despite ofâher aloof indifference that she gets hired to a Chelsea gallery, which only works if everyone agrees youâre attractive. (Whatâs attraction? A quality of an object which compels others toward it.)
Reva, meanwhile, flails, Gucci knock-off clutch in hand. She canât win the game of objecthood, trying and failing to lose weight or attract a partner. Worse, she makes it look hard, making resolutions that are never followed through or tracing fad diets to their natural dialectic in bulimic binges. âBlotchy redâ and âthe shape of Florida,â even Revaâs birthmark signifies low status. When âTag visits her apartment, we get a glimpse into her cabinets stocked with laxative teas and rice crackers, bottles of Belvedere and sugarless Gatorade.
To âTag, to whom being a desirable object comes literally naturally (blonde, imperviously thin), this grubbing is embarrassing, low, clumsy. Ironically, [Revaâs] desire to be classy had always been the dĂŠclassĂŠ thorn in her side. âStudied grace is not grace,â I once tried to explain. In other words, grace isnât something done by a subject but a quality which is possessed or isnât. âCharm is not a hairstyle,â âTag continues. âYou either have it or you donât.â ^1
Class rears its head. At Revaâs motherâs wake, there are âHuge pots on the stove steam[ing],â full of chicken, spaghetti, and ratatouille. â[Reva] was oddly unembarrassed. It seemed like she had dispensed with her usual uppity pretentions. She made no attempt to excuse herself for being homey, folksy, or whatever word she would have used to describe living in a home like hers.â (On her own upbringing in an âun-culturedâ home: âThere were no cut flowers around the house.â)
And though Reva, unlike âTag, is actually trying at subjecthood, she falls short yet again: a meeting note-taker at her corporate job, her main narrative arc over the book is a failed attempt to materialize a relationship with her married boss, which results in a pregnancy and her transference out of office. Her last act of subjecthood, which comes on the bookâs final page, comes as she throws herself out a WTC window and is caught on a news camera. More than anything else, âTag is surprised by how much she admires the act, rewatching the footage of the plumet on lonely afternoons, or âany other time I doubt that life is worth living.â Each time she is âovercome by awe⌠because [the plummeting girl] is beautiful⌠a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awakeââthe direct line drawn in our language between being and awakeness, between consciousness and the making of decisions, that exertion of the body onto the environment such that it does not merely extinguish, passive, into an office building, into anonymous soot but splatters singing onto pavement.
4.
There is a blatant kind of feminism in Moshfeghâs casting of misogynies and degradations suffered at the hands of âTagâs ex-`boyfriend Trevor, in the descriptions of Bushwick âsensitive typesâ or the pressures towards beauty and fitness as they manifest in Revaâs bulimia and pilates class. But the real sex politics are more ingrained and foundational, relating to how âTag perceives herself in the world and how that self-image as object lends itself to a specific and perhaps primarily female mode of suffering.
Might it be possible that, in an undercurrent of cultural commentary, Moshfegh is in fact arguing against objecthood culture? Moshfegh told the Atlantic sheâd spent âa lot of yearsâ in her twenties in some stage of âbulimic blackoutâ eating a slice of melon a day for calories. At twenty-five, the same age as âTag, she decided to sober up. (We could see Reva and âTag as a bicameral split, a schizophrenic, nuclear division of their authorâs past.)
Then, in her late twenties and sober, Moshfegh applied to Brownâs MFA program. Sheâs written prolifically since, giving up not just drugs and alcohol but clothing labels and makeup for a more protestant ethic. According to interviews, Helen of Troy â the most successful, desired object in human history â is Moshfeghâs least favorite fictional character. She admits to endless vanity while keeping a sign in her car window to remind her: Vanity is the enemy.^Â Fiction as self-help is an established literary tradition by now (Acker, Camus, Krauss, Nelson, Sartre, Wallace...), and shouldnât count against Moshfegh, but it gives us an idea of where her politics stand. And we might alternatively be suspicious that the fictional inquiry succeeds so cleanly, resolves with tight answers instead of opening up into more contradictions and questions. Â
5.
Tagâs thought turn again and again to (fictional artist-friend) Ping Xiâs taxidermied animals-as-artworks, and to the fur coats she and Reva wear around the city. How many foxes had to die, I wondered. And how did they kill them so that their blood didnât stain their fur? When Ping Xi turns his artistic cathexis toward âTag in the novelâs last chapters, itâs no great conceptual leap, a movement from beautiful object to beautiful object. And what is the cost of objecthood? How do you kill them in a way that doesnât stain their pelts? The freezer, or so she hears from a coworker at the gallery.
Trevor had told me once he thought I was frigid, and that was fine with me. Fine. Let me be a cold bitch. Let me be the ice queen. Someone once said that when you die of hypothermia, you get cold and sleepy, things slow down, and then you just drift away. You don't feel a thing. That sounded nice. That was the best way to die, awake and dreaming, feeling nothing. [emphasis added]
At low temperatures, or low rates of caloric consumption, metabolic processes slow. In heat, flesh is worn, decays, churns over, is broken down, turned into new life. Away from heat, turnover slows, time stops. To an object, getting frozen is an ideal way of beingâit preserves you, in a single perfect state, indefinitely. To the subject, being frozen stops you from getting things done; churning heat and energy are necessary to acting, as opposed to merely existing.
6.
Rest and Relaxation takes upâs alt-lit mantle of unselfconscious self-conscious contemporary lit. Mosfegh at once tosses out literariness and performs the Young-Girlâs analysis detailed transcription of transitory cognitive-affective states. There is nothing in the Young-Girlâs life, even in the deepest zones of intimacy, that escapes alienated reflexivity, that escapes the codifications and the gaze of the Spectacle. Noted Young-Girl Tao Lin comes to mind with his obsessive logging of drug dosages, except less autistic, less male. âTag prefers guestimating: her pill smoothiesâmeasured less precisely than your average amateur cocktailâare mixed at whim, with little regard for duration, on-set, or any other info youâd find on an Erowid chart. âReading up on a drug sapped its magic,â she tells us. â[I]t made sleep seem trite, just another mechanical function of the body.âÂ
And despite being hailed as âa pioneer of a new genre of slacker fiction,â Rest and Relaxation feels, in sensibility and in scope, more like a late-entry contemporary to the days of HTMLGiant than a successor. Nor is it as interesting, structurally, as many of alt-litâs entries. Where Boyle, Lin, and co. let their novels loose to devour GChat threads, Skype sessions, and subtweets, Moshfeghâs novel is toothless, tethered, slobbering at the gumsâeverywhere the novel seeks to devour, and everywhere it is in chains. Thereâs little reflection, formally, of the present moment except in the unselfconsciousness use of low and non-literary language. The difficulties of distinguishing between the unnecessary conventions of literariness, on one hand, and the necessary dignifications of language, on the other, require at least twenty years of hindsight to properly evaluate. Still, âWhen I opened the freezer, smoke billowed out. The thick frosted inside was crowdedâ is probably poor prose.
Even more than most, âTagâs personality is schizophrenic and in flux, not just minute-to-minute but month-to-month. But I canât help but imagine sheâd find writing a cover level either impossible to finish or amusing to fabricate (âAs long as I can remember I've always wanted to work in a gallery⌠I'm passionate, hard-working, and a go-getter.â) The difficulty is genuineness, the ease is that of performance. âTagâs like a caricature of late-90âs, Po-Mo ennui: besieged by television, low on meaning, abusing substances left and right. (Think the decade Infinite Jest and OK Computer came out.) Which is just, again, to say that the strangest thing about Rest and Relaxation is how, despite being talked about as so 2018, a kind of post-Bluets fiction so ânowâ it hurts, the book feels more like a product of the fin du millĂŠnaire itâs set in, discursively homeless. Instead of being on the â at least emotional or affective â avant-garde, it comes off as a late-game entry into a style that was, well, not especially impressive to begin with.
(Even the astrology discourse is weirdly, made a mockery of in the Pynchonsque therapist Dr. Tuttle: âIâve heard from several esteemed colleagues in Brazil that regular Infermiterol use can activate a profound tectonic displacement. Followed up with some filigree work using low doses of aspirin and astral projecting, itâs proven to be quite effective in curing solipsistic terror.â Doesnât anyone want to tell Moshfegh sheâs alienating a her sub-demo of Reines readers?)
* fn1: In aristocratic societies, where status is equivalent to itself, the pure object loses even their qualities. The Earl of Wendover, from Barry Lyndon:Â âMy friends are the best people. Oh, I donât mean that they are most virtuous, or indeed the least virtuous, or the cleverest, or the stupidest, or the richest, or the best born, but the best. In a wordâpeople about whom there is no question.â
Good artworld jabs: A particularly excoriating portrait of the New Yorker via a diegetic short story in its pages, damning not only because itâs Reva who praises it:
[Reva] pulled the rolled-up issue out of her enormous purse. The story was called âBad at Math.â It was about an adolescent Chinese American in Cleveland who bombs the PSAT, jumps off his two-story junior high school, and breaks both his legs. After the school guidance counselor pressures the boyâs family into group therapy, his parents tell him they love him in a supermarket parking lot and they all start to cry and wail and fall on their knees, while all the other shoppers wheel their carts past and pretend like nothing amazing is going on. âListen to this opening,â Reva said. âFor the first time, they said the words. I think it pained them more than the cracking of my shins and femurs.âÂ
Bad artworld jabs: Ping Xi, the hot Damien Hirstish artist who works as âTagâs jailer, suggests she rip up her birth certificate and burn her passports while he films it. Low-hanging strawmen.














