Airini Beautrais’ new collection of essays in some ways meets her stated goal of creating a “trainwreck” with her art. She relishes in smashing together seemingly discordant elements. The essay “No Scrubs” puts TLC’s 90’s hit in dialogue with classics of the English literature capital-C Canon, such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit. Do I want Austen and TLC’s Kandi Burrus to meet across time and space? Not really. As an English literature major and teacher invested in decolonising the canon, I have heard more than enough about Austen in my life. Am I fascinated by this collision, the mechanics of it? Yes.
While several of the collection’s essays, especially early on, are in the traditional camp of the personal essay, many move into pop culture analysis inflected, oftentimes joltingly, with the English literary canon. This effect recalls Camille Paglia’s Glittering Images: a journey through art from Egypt to Star Wars (2013), a work that situates current pop culture images within their art historical context and creates bridges across time. There’s a risk in taking texts that are so well-known they have created grooves in our brains – Star Wars, for example – and trying to look at them new. Our arguments about them must be audacious, extreme, as Paglia’s are (George Lucas is the greatest living artist, she argues) or they risk falling flat. Too often The Beautiful Afternoon treads a well-trod path – right through Middlemarch and into the “secret garden” of the European courtly love lyric.
Beautrais’ engagement with classical literature does become adventurous when she investigates the monstrous and the depraved. She analyses mermaids as creatures of horror, sea monsters who have the potential to represent divergent sexualities (though, as is often frustratingly the case, this line of thought is not followed very far), and archetypes of older woman-as-witch in “Reborn as a Sea Hag”. “I am no longer young,” she writes, “Never, never again do I want to be fucked by someone who hates any part of what I am.” And “I was drawn to the sea hag as an emblem of female power. Instead of being an object of male desire, she is an independent figure, a maker of potions, someone to be feared.” Fantastic. That’s the energy we need applied to Dorothea, primming her way through Middlemarch.
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This collection also showcases the sheer potency of Beautrais’ sparse prose, just as Bug Week did in 2021. The power lies not only in the reckless, constant incongruity of the writer’s subjects, but her extremely direct language. She has mastered the short sentence – staccato, one-line jabs that hit the reader over and over: “Then there were the throwaway comments my partners made. You could strip paint with your breath. You fart a lot. I can hear you shit.” Beautrais embraces the abject throughout, a la Julia Kristeva. “You have a longish torso. Your hair is crazy. You don’t have a full mouth. You have a wrinkly mouth.” The impact of a single sentence is a repeating punch – right in the gut, in this case as the insult itself was intended.
Her paragraphs are not short, however – she builds short sentence after short sentence into sometimes very long, unrelenting passages, with reference after reference. This is economy with substance, even if sometime the sheer number of references leaves the reader disorientated. Take one paragraph in “Silent Worship,” for instance, where we get six discrete references (Philip Sidney, Robert Herrick, William Carlos Williams, Philip Larkin, and T.S. Eliot). One sentence from each of these authors is not nearly enough to unpack their use of botanical metaphors for womanhood. Even so, Simon Schama, who famously said that there is nothing dirtier than a one-sentence paragraph, would approve of the paragraph length.
There can be a cost to such sparse, economical prose. The essays in this collection rely heavily on exposition, telling, reciting, and reference after reference that impress on the reader the sheer, virtuosic scope of research this writer has undertaken, but risk sacrificing depth. “The rhetoric around ‘toxins’ and ‘chemicals’ is also simplistic,” she writes in “Products We Didn’t Know We Needed.” “We are made of chemicals, as is the world around us.” Do tell us more! Is it that simple? The next sentence moves on to a momentous question: “If a rejection of capitalism also involves a rejection of technology, and of chemistry, what would a post-capitalist future look like?” If Beautrais slowed down and made this question, for instance, the topic of an entire essay, we would have an entry point to a nuanced, thought-provoking journey. But at times I do not know exactly what it is we have essayed through. Too often clipped prose, clichés and figures of speech are easy outs: “For reasons I have never fully understood…” And “…for reasons I still can’t comprehend, I went along with that.”
The subtle dings of the poet’s gong sound now and again, mostly at the end of essays, and are moments to celebrate. Take a breath and watch with Beautrais as a tuī archs over the calm surface of a lake; let that feeling linger. Many of these essays are light on imagery and lyricism, which feels like a loss in the context of Beautrais’ earlier poetic works; collections in which she demonstrates herself to be a writer so attuned to the visual and sonic power of language, as well as the power of the uncanny and surreal. In Bug Week, Beautrais’ 2021 collection, I felt. I remembered. I still obsess about the failed sex scene in the room with the bodies of mammals in the titular story; would the narrative arc have shifted if the lead characters had managed to get it on beneath the beady eyes of deer? I still have under my skin the taunt minimalism that the narrator of “Bug Week” aspired to. It feels a great shame that in the service of nonfiction imagery and poetics are deprioritised here.
There’s a lot to appreciate in the collection – the humour, for one – rapid-paced, sly, witty: “cosmic cock blocking”! What a term. The “weird, giant soap opera of capitalism”! Exactly! I also appreciated the moments that invited contemplation, observation – and staring, to return to the trainwreck. I felt a repeated kind of intellectual horror at the subjugation of women Beautrais illuminates – intellectual because this is largely conveyed intellectually, through close readings, textual analyses, and occasional, sparse glimpses of the narrator’s own ex, THE ex-, who lurks in the shadows of the text never quite stepping into the light. When he does, or when other, scrub-like, leeching men appear, I begin to apply the ideas that Beautrais has stated and restated, and which, as a person born in a female body, I know intimately: degradation, insult, dismissal. Cismen will denigrate their hetero partners in ways both conscious and completely unconscious. Ciswomen’s voices are repeatedly undervalued. There are some people who need to be reminded of this. Others, perhaps those who live through such violences, don’t necessarily. Intellectualised feminism can serve to beat female bodied-people and women repeatedly with their own oppression, if it isn’t metered with feminist practices like personal experience, acknowledgement of subjectivity, and indigenous feminist practices like storytelling and the establishing of whakapapa and whanaungatanga.
This is one of the major incongruities of Beautrais’ collection: who is she writing for? It doesn’t seem to be me, though I am seemingly the target audience: the same age as the author, white, female bodied, rural upbringing, a writer with creative writing postgraduate degrees. I should share a major prejudice of mine here: while I understand the seduction of writing about the males of the English literature Canon, I strongly object to their use as a liberatory mechanism. George Eliot and Jane Austen offer no way out either as lone female voices. I dropped out of “foundations of nonfiction” classes in my creative writing MFA that used Woolf as the single, token female, and will only enter the frigid English pool of canonical western literature when forced to do so with a pitchfork; let others do their healthful wild swimming there.
Beautrais’ writing excels most where she is most clear-eyed and vulnerable in relation to her own experience. This is not to exclude insight, theory, and argument. She begins to address her Pākehā identity and reads whiteness in hers and others’ bodies in “Kylo Ren Dies at the End”, an essay that showcases the height of her powers of analysis. In “Basic Bitch” she movingly writes about childhood bullying she experienced, and how this shaped her relationship to her own appearance. The desire to look “normal” she understands as a desire for both economic and social security, and she compellingly parses looking “different” – which in the 90s manifested as looking “alternative” – as a defensive strategy, a response to not believing one has the conditions to be regarded as beautiful.
A further tension remains throughout The Beautiful Afternoon where we are told what patriarchal definitions of womanhood look like, repeatedly, “From lipstick commercials to Marvel movies, clothing catalogues to weather reports,” and “we are shown, over and over again, what [the part women must play] is. Overwhelmingly in the West, it has been young, white, able-bodied and thin”, but we don’t often get to see Beautrais playing the part, investigating her white ablebodiness, with characters (like THE ex) around her fully embodied, fully enfleshed. She has endured the monstrous masculine – like so many of us have – but she veers away from showing us its full, obliterating face except through snippets, and aside from one, breath-sucking scene. I feel this withholding stops us from moving through the pain and trauma into a work that makes space for otherwise worlds.
What interests this female-bodied reader most are feminist texts that invite us to imagine patriarchy otherwise, to be surprised, astonished, moved by what we can envision, and I definitely want to see patriarchy viewed within an intersectional, decolonial framework that takes race and colonial legacies fully into account, acknowledging that this moment, too, shall pass. The Canon of English literature is such a clunky, unwieldy tool to do intersectional, decolonial, and visioning work with, and if we subscribe to Audre Lorde (as Beautrais does in “Life of Leisure,”) the “Master’s tools” of Byron, Eliot, Austen, and Eliott, won’t help us dismantle this house. This is not simply a case of the Great Authors themselves being individually problematic – Beautrais acknowledges that T.S. Eliot’s misogyny alone is no reason avoid him, fair – but that the political, imperial conditions that they wrote within and carry entirely through their language, grammars, their visions of possibility, their Judeo-Christian conceptions of “darkness” and “lightness”, of masculine and feminine, and their treatment of genres as a distinct categories, offer us, poignantly, exactly what we need to work against. Relentlessly. “Being told the same story over and over, on the other hand, with no alternatives, serves to solidify power,” Beautrais admits—so why retell the stories of Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, The Waste Land, if you aren’t tearing them apart, shred by shred? (Politely, of course. Because manners.)
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The way that Beautrais by-and-large tends to read backwards towards the classics in The Beautiful Afternoon offsets some of the unease I feel at the heavy-handed use of the conventional Canon throughout the collection. But that unease, sparked by the opening essay, is never truly assuaged.
“Life of Leisure” opens this feminist text about the false narratives of heterosexual love with Lord Byron’s Don Juan: “I would to heaven that I were so much clay”, a confusing opening, even setting aside my own expectations coming out of Beautrais’ poetry and fiction. In a generous reading, the positive impact of placing Byron’s satire in a starring role – where an epigraph, signifier of an entire work’s concerns, might sit – is to position his epic, and the Romantic tradition, as culpable in the false narratives that undermine heterosexual women’s happiness. But that critique, if present, is subtle. More obviously this essay is concerned with the conditions of writing, and the complexities and difficulties of doing it in the contemporary world, drawing on dudes from Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, to Keats, as well as the modernists Stevens, Carlos Williams, Pound, and Eliot to illustrate or read against this point. Just like the Canon taught in schools, Woolf and Mansfield are the female authors who gain some in-depth treatment. “Life of Leisure” argues that writing is an “economically unviable activity,” particularly for women and for those without independent wealth – but we still do it anyway. Yes, we do. We know this. And yet, here we are. We are ready for more – more depth, more vulnerability, and more risk – in the 21st-century, in Aotearoa.
At the end of the essay Beautrais is stuck – she can’t write any more about Byron, she goes for a walk, observes a lake, a tuī. And perhaps this is the here and now reality that we need to focus on more. Byron’s biography, both in this essay and in and off itself, offers false promises of a luxurious lifestyle of wealth, amorous bliss, and the sublime, distractions from the present. The essayist seems to be butting up against their own false promises of the “writer’s life,” and one wonders what Beautrais’ Quaker roots, written about extensively and compellingly, would make of this seduction. The most interesting creative tension here lies in the way Beautrais juxtaposes her close readings of Byron and the rest of the conventional Canon with scenes of relative abjection: having blood drawn in a Medlab in Whanganui, waiting with the metaphorical crickets chirping to sign her own books after a festival event where “There wasn’t a queue”, while Byron parties on until he dies of an engorged liver.
There may be many readers for whom this collection is a revelation, not only of the subjugations of gender roles but of the shape and form of feminist discourse in the past forty years, how it has been to exist in a female body in the peak of neoliberal capitalism, an ideology that convinces us that liberation lies in being individuals and buying shit. That ideology is being exposed for its frail roots, its flimsiness, its destructiveness, as the world gets pretty damn bonkers in the 2020s and rangatahi campaign against over-consumption and for the environment, and as decolonisation opens Pākehā eyes to the nature of collective being. But some, a lot, have missed the memo. For many, Beautrais’ words at their most abject and revealing will be a refreshing, bracing jolt. Beware the vulva, she writes, it “grows and swells, darkens and fills with capillaries, like a hungry monster…It will devour dick, fingers, hands and anything else that goes near it.”
The Beautiful Afternoon by Airini Beautrais (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide.
