Death or marriage. These are the stark options of the marriage plot. Some women get married while other women die. Often women have to die so that the protagonist can get married—just think of Jane Eyre. Susan Taubes’s Divorcing, originally published in 1969 and recently reissued by New York Review of Books Classics, suggests that the more fragmentary and regressive plots of divorce don’t make you choose: death and marriage coexist. In Taubes’s hands, the divorce plot is not a linear narrative of socially constrained choices; it is an exciting constellation of stories and formal experiments that expose the truth while questioning what truth is.
In this novel, death enables narration. “Yes, I’m dead,” the protagonist, Sophie Blind, declares in the opening chapter despite two pages of actions that make her seem alive: she opens her eyes, rushes down a busy street, laughs, sits up in bed, looks at her lover. While living women care for happiness more than either truth or power, she explains, “Now I am dead I care only for truth.” Sophie tells truths about her marriage, divorce, love affairs, parenting, endless travel, family histories, writing, in her shifting role as both a character in a third-person narrative and a first-person narrator. But all this truth-telling leads to more questions: how do you know what the truth is? Is Sophie really dead? Of course she’s dead; it’s in the newspapers. But also, she’s definitely not dead—as Sophie puts it, “I never felt so intensely alive as now.” Because Sophie is both alive and dead, and thus impossible to locate in time, space, or a grounded reality, her thoughts drive the story rather than actual events. There are no simple plotlines in this novel—it is hard to know what exactly happens and whether it happens in the world or in Sophie’s mind—but there are many exhilarating ideas.
Hugh Kenner’s condescending 1969 review of the novel suggests that divorce plots are boring. As he puts it, “All that ever does happen is the beating of Sophie’s mind against the fact that she can’t stand her husband, whom she rarely sees anymore anyhow.”[1] David Rieff explains in his introduction to this new edition that Susan Sontag, Taubes’s good friend, blamed such negative reviews for Taubes’s death. Just a week after Divorcing was published, Taubes committed suicide; Sontag identified her body. Kenner’s review shows how powerful old plotlines are in the face of bold attempts to tell new truths. He did not understand what the novel was trying to do. He thought the novel was experimental for the sake of being experimental and required a manly hand to create order out of the resulting chaos. He writes, “There’s a thin ghost of a novel crying for release, a very old-fashioned novel indeed, of a kind that transcends the with-it cat’s cradling of lady novelists.”[2] For him, the heart of the novel was not the divorce plot, which he saw as no plot at all, but rather the story of Sophie’s childhood in Budapest, a narrative about Europe before World War II.
Kenner is interested in this “thin ghost of a novel” because he wants to draw the ghost out, make it manifest, and thus stop its haunting. But such a wish entirely misunderstands what Divorcing accomplishes. Divorcing is a novel full of ghosts and ghosts of other possible novels. They cannot easily be put to rest because the haunting is the point. Lost objects haunt Sophie as she moves to different universities with her husband, Ezra, so he can complete his book; her absent mother haunts Sophie’s childhood home; memories of prewar Europe haunt Sophie’s postwar return. Sophie herself is ghostly—both living and dead, an all too embodied woman navigating her desire for men and men’s desire for her, yet only a disembodied mind.
In this novel, haunting does not simply result from pasts that won’t stay put: it introduces ways of knowing that trouble easy ontologies, forms of writing that resist easy summary. The difficulty discerning the truth in this sharp, truth-telling novel shows how literary fiction differs from Sophie’s scholarship. As the first page of the novel acknowledges, “she has studied philosophy, epistemology, published papers on the problem of verification.” Verification certainly is a problem in the novel but one that philosophy and epistemology cannot resolve. The fact that Sophie appears both alive and dead—that events seem to be both real and the mere substance of dreams—generates narrative energy rather than inviting either scholarly study or resolution. In one of many abrupt formal shifts within the novel, Taubes includes a short play that takes place in a Jewish courtroom, presenting Sophie’s ongoing fight with Ezra over whether she can end their marriage in a new form. After hearing the evidence, the judge grants her divorce but cannot decide whether Sophie is alive, dead, or even if she ever existed at all: “It has not been proven,” he concludes. She can divorce her husband, but her existence and personhood remain in doubt. Psychoanalysis adds more questions. Her father, a Freudian analyst, recalls Sophie’s childhood and offers interpretations of her life, but she doesn’t quite trust him: “What he said about her and what she really remembered belonged in two different boxes.” The novel dramatizes these different ways of knowing—philosophical study, legal judgment, psychoanalytical interpretation—while also showing their limits by describing the ghosts that they produce.
For Sophie, divorcing means giving up on hopes of knowing the truth or finding a neat interpretation of one’s life. It is an act of choosing “her own brand of senselessness” rather than a decision based on certain knowledge of herself or her desires. Divorcing presents marriage as a social fiction—a performance or “costume ready-made for public occasions.” At first, Sophie welcomes this fiction because it allows her to hide parts of herself. But then she can no longer accept the performance and asks for a divorce. She cannot explain why the performance finally got to be too much. Why end her marriage now when she already lives apart from her husband? She tells others why the marriage must end but acknowledges that “to herself she had nothing to say.” Rejecting the social performance does not give her access to a hidden truth or provide her with a new narrative arc: instead it allows her to shift away from her scholarship and start telling stories that do not make sense. Her husband cannot handle this senselessness. Even after Sophie repeatedly declares the marriage over, he refuses to accept this fact, but rather clings to the marriage plot and the clear plotlines it entails, insisting that “a marriage is a marriage.” He doesn’t really care what Sophie does; he wants to keep wearing the costume.
Divorcing, the ongoing process of ending a marriage while separating oneself from family, friends, and geographic locations, doesn’t really lend itself to certainties. Long-established realities are called into question and become fluid and open to debate. Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights (1979), a novel often compared to Divorcing, notes how divorce and separation lead still-married couples to question the seeming solidity of their relationships. More recently, the protagonist in Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014) looks back at her family home, declaring it to be “the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.”[3] Divorce plots put past and present in motion.
Divorcing is a haunting novel because Sophie Blind attempts to leave social fictions, narrative certainty, and epistemological security behind in order to tell the truth. As the sociologist Avery Gordon explains, “Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future. These specters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view.”[4] Marriage keeps ghosts at bay: expanding her description of marriage as a costume, Sophie suggests that “like an impermeable cloak it warded off the inevitable swarm of prying, talky, argumentative, interrogating people.” Her married name, Blind, reflects her desire to hide parts of herself from her husband and the world. Removing this cloak brings ghosts back into view. Alive or dead, dreaming or confronting reality, Sophie now exposes what marriage allowed her to mask: contradictory desires, competing realities, ugly truths, utter senselessness.
Ghosts represent all different kinds of trouble in this novel, most notably the trouble of living in an ontologically unstable world. Sophie reflects on this trouble when she distinguishes life from books. In life, “You can be awake and wonder if it’s a dream and not believe it.” But books work differently: “a book is simply and always a book—you can be sure of that. And with a book, whether you’re reading it or writing it, you are awake. The question does not pose itself.” Sophie deals with the uncertainties of divorce by writing—ostensibly writing the very novel we are reading. When her father asks what she is writing, she responds: “It’s not really fiction,” although elsewhere the reader learns she is writing a story about marriage narrated by a dead woman. Parallels between the fictional couple and the real one—Sophie and Ezra Blind, and Susan Taubes and her ex-husband philosopher and religious scholar, Jacob Taubes, add another layer to Sophie’s remark and another diegetic level to the novel. Although the plot of the novel describes ontological instability that will not go away, the book creates solidity that offers a brief respite from this trouble. Being located in a book confirms your existence even if it doesn’t always help with the tricky business of living when you put it down. Sophie may be alive and dead in the narrative, but the Sophie who writes a novel is alive and awake, firmly located in both time and space. As the novel puts it, “In a book she knew where she was. Because, however baffling and blundering and ambiguous, a book was a book.” Readers get the same comfort: “whether the setting is Paris or New York or the moon or not specified at all, you know you’re in a book.”
Divorcing is smart, haunting, and full of trouble. It questions plots that force characters to choose between different lives—marriage or death, for instance—and instead explores narrative forms that simultaneously tell the truth and undermine it. What results does not add up to one story. Instead, the novel reveals why people desire conventional stories like the marriage plot that allow them to hide, and it exposes the ghosts that haunt such seemingly straightforward stories.
[1] Hugh Kenner, “Divorcing,” New York Times (November 2, 1969), 127.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Rachel Cusk, Outline (New York: Picador, 2014), 11.
[4] Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xvi.