Politics of the Blinding Light

Ximena Prieto reviews Vanessa Holyoak’s “I See More Clearly in the Dark.”

By Ximena PrietoDecember 31, 2024

• SF

• Fiction

• Memoir & Essay

VANESSA HOLYOAK’S NOVEL I See More Clearly in the Dark (2023) opens with a contemplation of the contrasts between darkness and corporeality, guiding us to embrace the potential inconsistencies that arise when the two intermingle and a state eluding binaries is introduced. A door to “not-this-not-that-ness” is proposed, inviting us to envision the possibility of escaping the confines of embodiment. What does such an escape entail?

At 15, I began to consider the possibility of escape. As I drifted to sleep, I would imagine hiding in an alabaster cave on the island of my ancestors, until one night I dreamed of a lighthouse and decided it was a sign. Recalling how Winslow Homer had withdrawn from society to live in a secluded lighthouse, and idealizing Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s withdrawal from the repressive society that limited her intellectual output, I wanted to follow suit, quietly constructing a life of solitude and shadows. Crucially, the lighthouse had to be far away. It also, paradoxically, had to remain in darkness. If you asked me what I sought escape from, I’d whisper “myself”—or, more accurately, the precise and limited version of self I felt the world asked me to perform.

I actually craved the vaporous structure in the distance: a damp, fecund cave dwelling surrounded by an ineffable, forested ocean in flux, neither one thing nor the other, far from the young, rebellious woman I had dutifully adopted as my identity. During the moments when the craving heightened, I withdrew to the words of Sor Juana that I never understood entirely and, in this opacity, I found comfort. I marveled at her poem “First Dream” (1685) and the potential of post-corporeality, away from the blinding illumination of waking states. Meanwhile, I diligently researched remote lighthouses. Soon, the dream of escape slowly faded, as I found no prospects due to my teenage inexperience with lighthouse guardianship, a problem compounded by the inherent and, for me, problematic purpose of a lighthouse: providing light. I eventually started sharing the lightless lighthouse anecdote with others as a humorous eccentricity of adolescent rebellion (what was I thinking, ha), though I knew this search arose from a profound calling for hybridity that still stirred within.

Now, many years later, an echo of this ineffable calling stirs in me again, from the very first moments of reading I See More Clearly in the Dark, which presents a labyrinthian trove of questions that do not demand answers. Weaving fragments of recollection and observation on the part of the novel’s narrator, who is referred to simply as I (Editor’s note: the novel’s first-person narrator is italicized henceforth for clarity, along with you), in combination with text from Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s seminal book on aesthetics In Praise of Shadows (1933), Holyoak commiserates with that nebulous something out of rational view. She captures an ambiguity we crane our necks to half recall—particularly those of us who feel incomplete within a heteronormative definition of selfhood.

Similarly, Sor Juana’s “First Dream” also denotes a distant comprehension of self beyond rationality, allowing for contradiction and boundlessness only accessed away from the confines of corporality and masculine logic, a state described as being “loosed / from the bodily chain.” As in that poem, Holyoak’s exploration feels simultaneously far-reaching and personal, describing a nameless soul on a quest toward the nebulous. In his 1998 article “The Syntax and Versification of a Dream,” Elias L. Rivers attempts to approximate the first lines of “First Dream” in translated prose, describing an initiation of the shadow as a “pyramidal, funereal shadow born of the earth […] aiming toward the sky its lofty point of vain obelisks, attempting to reach the stars,” until finally “the shadow was left to dominate only the air which it besmirched with the dense breath that it exhaled, and, satisfied with the quietness of its silent empire, it permitted only the submissive cries of nocturnal birds, so dark and heavy that the silence was not broken.”

This loosening from the bodily chain brings with it the inherent possibility of incoherence and confusion, and the search described by I See More Clearly in the Dark brings distinctive echoes of loss and uncertainty reminiscent of Sor Juana. We proceed through a similar descent toward the unknown, as the narrator contemplates fragments of memory and lets them go. The possibility of accessing an unknown element of identity is what draws me into both texts, as they echo my own struggle to find internal consistency in a world of binaries. Sor Juana’s speaker describes a search for wisdom, observing a duality between body and spirit, accepting that the knowledge she seeks exists through a metaphysical embodiment rather than a corporeal one. The speaker emphasizes interaction between shadow and light: “the magic lantern throws / on a white wall / the contours of delineated figures / in thrall as much to shadow as to light.”

In I See More Clearly in the Dark, the protagonist progresses through a fecund, postapocalyptic world where the government has decided to destroy the wilderness in order to construct eternally lit megaresorts and bring all citizens into enforced illumination. Early on, I contemplates how to avoid the dreaded phone call that marks the government’s imminent capture of a citizen in order to illuminate them against their will. This call precipitates the disappearance of the narrator’s partner, you, as part of the government’s plan to control the populace. I describes observing a white limo at the entrance of their shared home, noting the sound of you’s car engine, left running as the white limo disappeared into the distance. This event marks I’s subsequent decision to leave home, forsaking compulsory light and information for an unknown place “where signals and sunlight do not reach.”

The novel proceeds to depict I’s invention of escape, while rifling through a deluge of memories and desires as they internally let go of their lost partner, progressively retreating from imposed light. This reality of oppressive illumination seems eerily familiar in our own age of constant content, under the burgeoning influence of artificial intelligence. In the novel, Holyoak articulates our modern conundrum: a simultaneous desire to disconnect while also feeling the need to see what is happening outside of us. The narrator notes, “Sometimes I think it would be better if I just turned my phone off for good, but the headlines give me a sense of irrefutable certainty I cannot pass up.” Eventually, I does choose to look away—away from all that has provided containment and rationality, refusing participation and seeking uncertainty.

Holyoak’s work evokes a delightful hymn of gaps in time and space, affirming a lack of kinship with the modern world and its demands of overstimulation and overexplanation, resisting the world’s constant manufacturing and designation. The use of designators such as I and you and the melded streams of consciousness pull the reader into a state of kinetic intimacy. In the vein of “First Dream,” the procession that I undertakes presents a kind of amorphous requiem, honoring the pull toward indecipherable boundlessness that slowly unravels away from a modern panopticon that demands clarity and identification. As I recedes from the city they have known, they process the “becoming-gone-ness” of you being unexpectedly taken, brought into the oppressive brightness, as well as I’s fear of ever seeing you forcefully illuminated. I eludes the Resort Plan, the government’s quest to bring a totalitarian, light-filled sameness. The novel describes details of the plan sparsely, echoing the narrator’s desire to avoid the topic, instead painting the plan as a distant flattening of reality, taunting I. Within this world, I writes,

the headlines pop out like little screams: “Nationwide Forests Destroyed, Replaced by Glowing Resorts Where Darkness Once Held Silent Reign,” “Politics of the Blinding Light: Taxpayers’ Pockets Drained in Resort Plan with Goal of Total Illumination,” “You Can Run but You Can’t Hide: Citizens Flee Homes in Hopes of Averting All Encompassing Mandatory Resort Relocation,” “Where the Wild Things Were: Finding Hope in a World Without Shadows.” My favorite is “Light at the End of the Tunnel: Or Is It Just Another Resort?”

Within the Resort Plan, I recognized the caricatured version of Los Angeles constructed in my mind as a child. I lived in the midst of a damp national forest in the south of Mexico City before migrating with my family to L.A., a place I found unbearably bright. In Los Angeles, my ambiguous name and identity did not formulate the clarity most seemed to expect. Other children asked why my first name had to be so hard to pronounce (illegible) and what my last name meant, and they laughed when I answered truthfully that Prieto means dark. They said this did not make sense; my skin was not dark enough to merit such an identity, though I was also too different, evidently, to avoid interrogation.

I felt guilty for my contradictions. Alas, I was the lightless lighthouse not wanting to be found. I See More Clearly in the Dark makes me wonder whether recognition arises from wanting to escape or find refuge within the body, away from the patriarchal and colonial definitions placed upon it. As the narrator describes, this would be “a place where my life will no longer be locked into the bright parts of language, or memory.” I feel a specific kinship to I here, particularly with the contemplation of an internal void, wherein I allows for their own contradictions to coexist in opposition to the external pressure that demands consistency: “I was a private person, I was a public person. Often I wanted to hold everything in like a wet wad of paper, at once gushing and compressed. Other times, just as frequently, I wanted to dazzle.”

As a child in Los Angeles, I was asked if Mexico City had electricity (light) and how many famous (recognizable, definable) people I knew. This was a place with confines I found myself simultaneously rejecting and attempting to contort to, something within me retreating. I remember swaying back and forth with my sister on a swing set when she turned to me and declared, speaking only in English for what might have been the very first time: “We will not have accents anymore. We will speak in English.” In other words, we would erase any contradictions we could, so our hybridity could not be so seen. In Holyoak’s telling, I eventually rejects any such demands: “I hadn’t been feeling that connected lately, the Resort Plan was making me feel more and more opaque—not the me that was always in plain sight but the dark parts; I couldn’t reach into them anymore and rest in their sticky silence.”

Toward the end of the novel, when I describes their observations at the bottom of the sea, I read words that captured what the lightless lighthouse had represented to me, and perhaps still does: “I too, am vulnerable. I, too, am trying, wanting to hide. To live out my life, to enjoy my own prehistory. To reflect on the rough gem of my futurity. To hold vigil in darkness, undisturbed by all light, all language.” I realized that, even before the lightless lighthouse dream, I saw all the apparent pains that came with being a woman in this world of bright legibility, and I sought to opt out altogether as my own femininity began to manifest. I did not want to become but instead to dwell in becoming, in hybridity, never in finitude or clarity. I sought an internal void I could not name, and as the forest was too far away, I closed my eyes, lightheaded enough to imagine colorful silhouettes descending into darkness. I describes a similar chasmed craving born in childhood: “When I was a child I used to stare in the mirror naked for hours, imaging the interior of my body. I pictured it hollow—a layer of skin coating empty darkness.”

The segment continues with a commemoration of such an imagined emptiness:

I loved my emptiness. No organs, no joints, tissue, bone, or blood. The idea of my hollow body, skin concealing nothing, gave me a thrilling sense of power. It set me apart from everyone else, plagued with the reality of their own meat. If I was empty of organs, it meant they would never fail. Darkness lasts forever.

Within these recollections, wall-less corridors of opacity invite us to question the empire of legibility and information. Delicately depicting a pull toward a contradictory infinite interiority, I proposes a postcolonial hybridity. A stirring arises as the reader’s perception and memories begin to blend with I, and the delineations of identity soon feel inconsequential. Parsing through these descriptions of undoing, we are transported into what could be past or future interiority; the text lets us in, intimately, allowing for thoughts that exist between identities we may hold in our bodies, as described in Sor Juana’s “First Dream”:

she is nearly free of all
that binds her, keeps her from liberty,
the corporeal chains
that vulgarly restrain and clumsily
impede the soaring intellect that now,
unchecked, measures the vastness of the Sphere

This echoes how I reflects on their contradictory body in the novel:

Clumpy chunks of flesh made up my form, which equated to a totality, an ambidextrous, prehistoric continuity—I was gelatinous enough to slide but too solid to fall apart. My body was perched on the edge of dissolution but refused to come undone. It was a permanent entity, at least for now.

When I opens their eyes and finds darkness pressing in on them, instead of feeling fear, they conclude that “it was a different kind of darkness […] imbued with a certainty that was impossible to dilute.”

After reading the final lines of “First Dream” in a car as a teenager, I succumbed to hormonal carsick weeping. A friend asked why I cried, and I could not answer clearly. I did not know anything other than the desire to give in to that forest of darkness or not knowing. I wanted to recede back into the dark, damp earth of my childhood, into the void within that I imagined could awaken in that place, no longer categorized and comprehended as someone with an identity full of seemingly unpronounceable hyphens. Instead, I laughed it off and said I was dizzy, all the while imagining a descent into the place the dream evoked.

In I See More Clearly in the Dark, I describes such a moment, revisiting their letter to their lost partner you: “I glance back at my letter, recognizing the future I had imagined for us: … a shadow world, a world below the world, or above—in any case, outside.” Reading these evocations, those of us who know this feeling can recognize that familiar welling in the throat relating to this necessity for refuge in not knowing, in a society that celebrates quick and constant answers. Akin to the nonrational understanding in Sor Juana’s “First Dream,” what Holyoak’s narrator seeks to depart from echoes desires of obfuscation stirring within an othered body processing loss: “[I]t makes more sense to me to dwell in what came before, as if it’s the only time I can still inhabit.”

My own dreams of escape arose from finding myself grieving this pre-identity of childhood, grieving who I was becoming in Los Angeles while aching for the sense of noncorporeality I had when running in the forest as a child, running with my eyes closed so I did not know where the forest’s humidity ended and my sweat began. Meanwhile, I escapes to process loss on their own terms, making true their imagined future within a shadow world:

To write a character out of the dirt. To write a character into darkness, remove her from the scrutiny of the light and allow her to put her feelers out in the damp belly of the forest without witnesses. To give her time. Without light, sensation takes precedence. Something so sweet and green it could only crawl, using its body as a beacon.

Through I, Holyoak invites us to interpret the incorporeal world through a hypnotic pilgrimage toward the unsaid and unseen, questioning what it is about the darkness and distance that beckons: “I guess somewhere in the back of our heads we knew it might be our last chance—for what? To inhabit a shadow world […] A world filled to repletion with sleep, silence, memory, emptiness, desire. Desire that never revealed itself fully, that never saw ‘the light of day,’ as the idiom goes.” Delving further into such a desire, as one “that only became an object in brief, fugitive flashes when its darkness was made visible,” I recalls a fragment of In Praise of Shadows that describes removing the lid of a lacquerware soup bowl, revealing its dark depths: “What lies within the darkness one cannot distinguish, but the palm senses the gentle movements of the liquid, vapor rises from within forming droplets on the rim, and the fragrance carried upon the vapor brings a delicate anticipation.” Through this recollection, I finds solace, proclaiming that Tanizaki “was right to think of darkness in this way, not only as a luxury that comforts as it overcomes, but as a prerequisite to existence.”

I proceeds into the recesses of their prehistoric or posthuman mind, not in search of an external world in opposition to the decay around them but as a descent into the nonvisible, nonverbal, and nonconclusive potentiality of the shadow. Often, the recollections and observations shared by I feel like gaps between thoughts we share out loud; they are the stream of consciousness that arises in states of liminal solitude, once we are undertaking a journey and an as-yet-unknown landscape unfolds before us. Similarly, Sor Juana’s “First Dream” inevitably draws parallels to the mystic elevation of dream states. Mysticism, ultimately, aims to see the world in ways that the world is not but could be. The experience feels like looking out to sea from a boat and reminiscing, bittersweetly, on the gaps between what we have presented to the world and what we have hidden of ourselves. We experience the deluge of an essence that is not buoyed by the limitations of rigidity.

In this vein, I interrogates the delineation of their desires and recollections, descending into the sea, descending into the in-betweenness of lived experience and the morphing nature of recollection. As we melt into the words of I recalling their explorations, their “became-gone” partner, their cravings, and their whims with a mix of poignant recognition, parallels unfold. We come to feel that anyone who has felt a desire to reject the demands of a hyperconnected or defined world in favor of the darkness that holds a glimpse of the eternal could relate to Holyoak’s I.

My own melodramatic mourning and idealization of my childhood embodiment of the unknowable, before I could even label it as such, feels inverted and delicately extended into an imagined future of glorious opacity through Holyoak’s words. I am sure I will not be the only one to open my own deeply held longing through them, finding a eulogy-turned-pronouncement, allowing for internal yearnings and contradictions. In the last phrases echoed by I, one feels that, wherever they descend to, perhaps even a lightless lighthouse could emerge in the distance, perfectly out of sight.

¤

A second edition of I See More Clearly in the Dark will be published in 2025.