The Destabilizing Force of Language

Annie Lou Martin reviews Anna Moschovakis’s new novel “An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth.”

By Annie Lou MartinJanuary 20, 2025

• Fiction

WHAT WOULD IT look like to live in a world where “motion, rather than stillness, has become the rule,” with “stillness the exception that proves it”? It would be easy, in many ways, to argue that we are already inhabiting such a world; in Anna Moschovakis’s new novel, An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, the question is posed quite literally. Set in an eerily recognizable near-future, the novel unfolds in the aftermath of a major seismic event that has physically reshaped the surface of the earth, sending out unpredictable aftershocks and starkly shifting the social fabric towards isolation.

Moschovakis’s narrator, an out-of-work Method actress, becomes obsessed with killing her younger roommate, Tala. When Tala disappears, the narrator begins receiving messages from an enigmatic group with a Pynchonesque mystique, a catalyst for her already slippery psychic hold on reality to become precariously tenuous. Shifting surfaces betray a shifting core. As the narrator’s obsession with Tala’s absence deepens, language fractures, and the basic composition of reality undulates.

Moschovakis is a writer with an impressive toolbox of techniques, and they are employed here with a kinetic precision. She invites us to move, to walk, to quake, to inhabit the universal anxiety and alienation that are characteristic of a world shaken up by collective trauma by going into the places where borders break down, easing into the gaps and finding vibrancy in that destabilization.

An Earthquake is both intricate and familiar, a hallucinatory dance between the narrator’s inner experience and the external world, her self-perception and the perception of others. It’s no small trick that Moschovakis’s first-person narrator is a Method actor. The techniques of “the Method”—which can include everything from reliving intense emotional experiences in order to conjure up an emotion to swapping out one’s soap for a brand their character might use—aim to thin the membrane between the life of the actor and the life of the character, activating conscious processes in order to influence subconscious behavior. Konstantin Stanislavski, the father of Method acting, distinguishes between the “art of representation” and the “art of experiencing.” External embodiment becomes internal experience; in this way, the actor aligns conscious desire with subconscious desire.

In An Earthquake, as in her other work, Moschovakis is clearly concerned with the way that language itself acts—as a way to construct and disrupt distinctions between self and other, as mimicry, as an object, as a way to establish direction, as a stabilizing and destabilizing force. Her sense of poetics never strays far from the material, from the body itself as an object that acts and is acted upon. Etymology is a teleology that crumbles when pressed; the narrator muses on “junk metaphors” like “go off the deep end,” pulls words apart to extract new meanings (“rehearse” contains the word “hearse,” etc.). Scratch an actor and you find another actor; scratch a word and you find another word.

Language, in this equation, is not a stabilizing force as much as it is an interactive projection. And certainly, Tala is the site of this projection: desirable, young, successful, beautiful, and, as the narrator describes her, able to “act.” We only meet Tala in flashbacks, and through the narrator’s memories. There are moments in the novel when it seems as though Tala is pure projection, to the point where the reader has to ask: Is Tala real or is she a conjured witness, a product of the narrator’s complicated relationship to her own desires and perceived shortcomings? Are the tremors themselves a collective hallucination? And, ultimately, does it matter? In a sense, truth is contained in negation, like a film negative. What the narrator projects onto Tala is an imprint of her own desire. Desire is directional; it narrows the nebulous. Like language, it can be a deceptively stabilizing force. The narrator’s desire to kill Tala, to have her gone, is also what’s keeping her stable. Tala is the “blank slate” that allows the narrator to create the “perfect death.” Somehow we know, from the beginning, that to kill Tala, the narrator would also be killing herself.

When the narrator steps into the streets of her shaky earth, it’s almost impossible not to recall the desolate streets of most major cities during the initial COVID-19 quarantine, or to draw parallels with the way the narrator’s paranoid and sparse social interactions resemble those that were common during lockdown. And it’s also easy to remember that, when COVID-19 first hit, many people experienced what the narrator experiences when Tala vacates the premises: a sudden lack of witness. “I don’t know who I am,” says the Method actress, “if no one’s looking at me.” The sudden lack of looking isn’t the cause of her alienation but rather a shifting that reveals a preexisting instability, like the removal of a mask or the sifting of top-layer sediment.

It’s tempting, when reading a novel so clearly written by a poet, to elevate every image to the representational. The physical shifting of the surface of the earth betrays an unstable core, just as the narrator’s unstable sense of self manifests in her shifting facades as an actor. The reader is clued in to a deceptively simple set of conditions: there’s a relationship here between the surface and the core, between what’s said and what’s meant. But to read this novel as a clean metaphor would be reductive, and like any good poet, Moschovakis is concerned with the physicality of language on the level of both image and form. The form itself is unstable, shifting, and becomes increasingly less “stable” as the novel goes on. Each section breaks down, at the end, into a poem, like a sudden running up to the edge of language itself, causing friction, refusing a stable sense of meaning making. It’s a breakdown of structure to the point where even the sentence “disintegrates.” As the novel progresses, the language mimics the process of a mind engaged with an increasingly defamiliarized environment—obsessive, associative, and anxious.

But Moschovakis never strays far from the body, or the physical qualities of language, a fact that anchors the novel’s psychological intensity. Language appears, frequently, as a physical object in the narrator’s environment, and often these language-objects have a blunt, darkly humorous, almost irreverent quality. After a career-ending moment of abjection, the narrator notices the words “Innerwelt” and “Umwelt” graffitied on a dumpster. In another scene, she drools on a brochure while she sleeps, causing the words to blend and morph into other words—“subjects” becomes “subtexts,” for example. Like the shifting sands that coat the surface of the earth, language is both an interactive material and a playful stage for a dance of traces. The momentary impression of a footprint or the trail of a stabilizing cane is just as quickly effaced by the wind; all traces are unstable, all language edged with borders that can thicken and thin, like any object.

Moschovakis’s anxious Method actress seems to be primarily motivated by the desire to align her inner and outer worlds, in an attempt at some sort of stabilization. She frequently returns to the moment that ended her career as an actress, a moment that aligns chronologically with the start of the earthquakes. It’s a moment that the narrator explicitly describes as “abject”—a term that seems to have so entered the mainstream in relation to body horror that it’s difficult to untangle it from this affiliation. And while the moment of “abjection” does involve the narrator freezing, mid-performance, and vomiting off the stage, Moschovakis is not concerned with horror as much as she is concerned with the abjection of selfhood in the traditional Kristevan sense, as that which “disturbs identity, system, order” and “does not respect borders, positions, rules.”

Moschovakis is certainly concerned with the body’s borders. Vomiting may materially evoke a certain kind of breakdown of the self, the “I” that is spasmed and violently expulsed. But the heart of what’s “abject” about this moment is the narrator’s experience of the total dissolution of borders, a moment when, as she puts it, “all separation between myself and others vanished.” “Others” here doesn’t just mean other people but also objects: the outdoor stage, the props, birds in the park, sounds. What is abject is disobedient in that it is disobedient to boundaries. “No borders,” says the failed Method actress. “No nations. Not even the nation of the self. Especially not that.”

An Earthquake is a disobedient novel, a novel invested in what it means to be a bad actor. This disobedience is necessarily about boundaries, about respecting the limits of what constitutes a “self” when there is no essential self. If “shaking” is an unearthing, then “self” is ultimately a gathering, a congealment of objects, directed by desire, positioned in time. Every shift, in atmosphere or affect, is also an excavation, the shifting of sands revealing layers beneath. If assemblage is the act of gathering, this novel is both an assemblage and an unspooling that underscores language and atmosphere as unifying, if tremulous, foundations for collective (and individual) experience. The surface quakes, but at the core, Moschovakis maintains an expert sense of control: the result is a novel that’s endlessly rereadable, continuously shimmering at its edges, generating new meaning with each slight shift in tone or light.