In Pure Colour (2022), Sheila Heti starts at the beginning, or just a moment later. “After God created the heavens and the earth, he stood back to contemplate creation, like a painter standing back from the canvas” (3). It’s in this caesura of contemplation that we—readers and characters alike—appear to be living. And yet we’re also poised on the edge of our world’s demise, with the earth “heating up in advance of its destruction by God, who has decided that the first draft of existence contained too many flaws” (4). From this teetering place—the beginning of all things, which is also their end, and the stage for their remaking anew—Heti’s novel tells the story of Mira, its protagonist. Mira has recently taken wing from the itchy yet comforting warmth of her father’s embrace, in order to train as an art critic and live “on the knife-edge of feelings” (44). She is the kind of person to be entranced by a favorite lamp’s green and red blobs of polished glass; she loves art, which we learn must be “preserved on hearts of ice” (23). Mira has a consistent preference for coolness: she wants “to be held by the coldest hands,” fearing that a warming love would render her “too hot to handle art, to help pass it down through the centuries” (46). But then, of course, the time for cultural transmission appears largely over: “The ice cubes were melting. The species were dying. The last of the fossil fuels were being burned up” (21). Temperature is all over Heti’s book, as if the author were perpetually fiddling with an existential thermostat. She uses it to describe individual desire, aesthetic experience, and predicaments of universal magnitude. Temperature touches matters of wildly divergent scales, much like Heti’s fiction itself: a vacillation that both facilitates and frustrates her origin story’s potential to lead someplace new.
Over the course of Heti’s novel, Mira falls in love with a woman named Annie, who can’t return it in quite the same register. Mira also grows to regret choosing the world and art over her father’s company. In a moment that stretches the already diaphanous fabric of Heti’s story to a dreamy gauze, the soul of Mira’s father enters her as he dies, and she feels “the purest love and elation,” and also a little more regret (71). Mira follows her father into death, which in this case entails existing as a leaf on a tree, discovering “her right dimensions” there (96). But the “sleepy peacefulness” Mira finds in foliage eventually disintegrates (110). Her attention turns outward and she screams until Annie—who remains both human and alive—tickles her with whispered breath, pulling her out of the leaf and back into something like our world. We follow Mira through the rest of her life—a job guarding the “bright fruits” of a jewelry store (163), a midlife “moment of being stripped” (167), the sensation of whipping past trees in a “tiny yellow car” (183). Pure Colour is a book of tumbling bolts of rumination, studded with such evocative details.
The plot of Mira’s life—though it is both too spare and too assiduously contemplative for the word “plot” to quite fit—reflects her relationship to the novel’s founding mythography. According to this inaugural tale, God prepares for a new whack at creation by manifesting as “three art critics in the sky,” each of whom gives rise to a portion of the current earth’s populace (4). Bird people, of which Mira is one, have an aesthete’s bearing. Bear people, including Mira’s father, love their kin with complete dedication. And fish people, like Annie, concern themselves with the collective good, with “getting the temperature right for the many” (5).
According to writer and theorist Sylvia Wynter, “We exist in origin stories.”[1] By generating and reiterating these collective acts of narration, we can work out common values, rehearse perceptions and priorities, and sketch out the practices that form our infrastructures for living. Their heuristic value and critical power is rendered with particular clarity in scholarship on Indigenous philosophy, from writers like Susan M. Hill, Gregory Cajete, and Cutcha Rising Baldy, among many others. Indigenous creation stories are a source of orientation, writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, with a capacity for directing, or redirecting, the activities of those who heed them. I don’t mean to suggest that these are explicitly the references embedded in Heti’s cosmology, even if her schema for the earth’s population bears a passing yet conspicuous resemblance to clan naming systems used by various Indigenous nations. Rather, these intertexts register the distinctly political significance of thinking through origins. As Wynter asserts, “we are actively destroying the planet. Then for the first time we are pushing toward having to come up with an origin story which envisions a different ending for all of us. How then, can we begin to conceive of ourselves as a species? It’s very difficult.”[2]
A necessary question, then, is: what’s at stake in origins for Heti? It can be tricky to understand her novel’s concerns as really being political, or political in a way that works to address the impending collapse of our habitable world. Heti’s not writing about empire, or exploitation, or immiseration in so many words, even if her rendering of odd jobs feels apt for a reader who’s worked a few of them. Heti’s writing seems to vault over the political in its careening volley between the universal with the idiosyncratically particular. Her novel’s collision of scales is disarming and estranging; the resulting perplexity might make fertile soil for the sustained reflection origin stories ask of us. Yet this sense of puzzlement can also confound reading for the things we might really need for staving off the annihilation of everything alive on earth. Heti’s narrator pronounces, “A person can waste their whole life, without even meaning to, all because another person has a really great face. Did God think of this when he was making the world? Why didn’t he give everyone the exact same face?” (49) So many of the book’s big ideas about life feel funny and flip. It tackles problems like unrequited love on account of a face or being committed more to art than to a father. Such odds and ends of assessment add up to the fact that, in Heti’s novel, we’re in a first flawed draft on the cusp of a second. Maybe we needn’t find a solution because God the artist will make what he makes.
Heti finds her way to origins, in part, by stripping the prefix “auto” from her fiction. Her prior two novels, How Should a Person Be? (2010) and Motherhood (2018) emerged, self-consciously, from her own life, even while remaining, by the author’s own assertion, works “of imagination.”[3] Pure Colour is a departure, or rather a return to the more overt fictionality of Heti’s short stories. While the oddly allegorical timbre of Pure Colour recalls the 2001 collection Middle Stories, it feels especially akin to the 2015 short story “My Life Is a Joke.” Like Pure Colour, “My Life” takes a long look at death. In the former, Mira commits a temporary sort of suicide. “She threw her heart out. She threw out her brain, her arms; her hair, her feet; she threw all of herself into the water hoping the lake would catch her, save her, hold her, and return her refreshed to the shore. It did not.” In the latter, the narrator, bruised from a fight with her boyfriend, lives up to his snarled prophecy and becomes a joke: the chicken (figuratively, this time) who crossed the road to get to the other side. Both stories declare their investments in life or creation, yet they each end up fixated on how these things end. They shuttle characters across death’s door and back in order to chew on unlikely visions of that unknowable nothing.
Across the course of her last three novels, Heti moves from the question of being a person, to being a (non) mother, to being a daughter. This isn’t a regression, but something more like a winnowing down—like finding a topic with the “right dimensions,” or the correctly sized picture frame for what she now wants to ponder (96). Maybe by following this trajectory Heti has found a way to move from being in life, to seated alongside it. Through the logic internal to this latest novel, the writer throws off the exigencies of writing from life, and takes a stab instead at sketching its contours—however imaginary or falsifiable.
Pure Colour deviates from much of Heti’s prior fiction by swanning into free indirect style. In the chunks of the text that span Mira’s cohabitation with her father’s soul in a leaf, Heti’s writing amps up its perspectival slipperiness. Pressing into her narrative mode, she moves from rendering an intersubjective situation between two characters to crafting an increasingly intra-subjective scene, where the speaker and addressee can hardly be distinguished from each other, the narrator, or the reader:
You have love in you, but that part is extra-human, and that part is in the plants, and the animals, and the clouds, and the seas and everything. What is lovable is not humans, but life. And life will always be here? Yes, there are cycles, and if the earth gets sick, it will get well again, in maybe a million or two billion years. (121)
Here, the difficulty of attributing the question and answer to particular voices parallels the fuzziness of the grand topics at hand. Love and life are located and distributed in a conceptual swirl, as the speakers both reveal one another and blur together.
In eddying away from recognizable subjectivity, Heti’s narrative answers an injunction that literary scholar Anna Kornbluh puts to fiction facing the climate crisis. While prose is often called on to make the stultifying enormity of our cataclysm feel tangible or accessible, Kornbluh speculates that this is not literature’s strength. The novel’s unique aptitude, she wagers, is a capacity for mediating disparate conceptual scales. This literary form may be less well suited to humanizing the immensity and “far-off problems” of climate change, than to modeling the synthetic method of thought needed to grasp it.[4] Pure Colour toggles between the celestial and the intimate; it molts the usual containers for perspective and identification. Even the pages that Mira spends as a leaf are less interested in stoking some sort of immediate botanical empathy in the reader, than in prodding at what a narrative viewpoint can imagine. “In the cosmic landscape,” Heti writes, “plants have front-row seats… But for us to imagine ourselves in their place would be utterly horrifying to the humans, who would not want to be living that way: life as an eternity of enjoying plays!” (115). If free indirect narration is uniquely suited to dissolving “the conventional subject positions associated” with literary reception, Heti’s novel capitalizes on this affordance.[5] As readers, we’re the onlookers to what Heti’s text describes. We are, in a sense, made to play-act as plants, given the task of observation “for no reason” beyond God’s own egotism (115). But we’ve also just traveled with Mira into a leaf. And later, once Mira is out of the leaf, she dons a leaf costume, in a theatrical spectacle that apes what the plants themselves watch in this increasingly twisted allegory. The tasks of being, representing, and perceiving bleed into one another in this vegetal circuit, each coming up short on any extravagant promises: “Naturally her costume wouldn’t accomplish anything, but who expects a leaf to accomplish a thing? The best thing that a leaf can do is release a bit of oxygen into the air” (199).
Unlike Kornbluh’s own exemplar, Heti’s text does not wield its literary maneuvers toward a cognitive map or diagnostic acuity. It leaps over the material causes of the catastrophe it paints against. “The last of the fossil fuels were being burned up,” Heti writes, yet all the remarkable stakes of this fact dissolve into the fine mist of her novel’s cosmological speculations (21). Pure Colour demurs on the origin story’s promise to meet an apocalypse and try at another path through it, however unlikely. The novel swerves away from diagnosing, evaluating, or retooling our world’s machinations. Rather, it attempts to size up the negative space outside all that, fashioning a container for thinking life’s mysteries by spitballing on its edges. Heti’s novel stops short of marshaling its imaginative faculties toward envisioning “a different ending for all of us,” in Wynter’s words. It sits, instead, in the irreconcilable knowledge that all of us will end, whether cataclysmically or mundanely. The political urgency of origins drifts toward the palliative, yet there is something potent in that too: a literary mediation between scales of comprehension still worth reckoning with.
Notes:
[1] Sylvia Wynter, Joshua Bennett, and Jarvis R. Givens, “‘A Greater Truth than Any Other Truth You Know’: A Conversation with Professor Sylvia Wynter on Origin Stories,” Souls 22, no. 1 (2020): 126.
[2] Wynter, Bennett, and Givens, “A Greater Truth than Any Other Truth You Know,” 136.
[3] Claudia Day, “The Child Thing: An Interview with Sheila Heti,” The Paris Review, April 26, 2018, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/26/the-child-thing-an-interview-with-sheila-heti/.
[4] Anna Kornbluh, “Ecocide and Objectivity: Literary Thinking in How the Dead Dream,” in The Work of Reading, ed. Anirudh Sridhar, Mir Ali Hosseini, Derek Attridge (London: Palgrave, 2021): 261.
[5] Timothy Bewes, “Free Indirect,” Political Concepts, May 24, 2017, https://www.politicalconcepts.org/free-indirect-timothy-bewes/.