Vital Congruities

Rose Higham-Stainton reviews the reissue of Claire-Louise Bennett’s “Fish out of Water.”

By Rose Higham-StaintonFebruary 10, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• Fiction

ONE OF SEVERAL EPIGRAPHS in Claire-Louise Bennett’s 2015 novel Pond is taken from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy: “For now in every exuberant joy there is heard an undertone of terror, or else a wistful lament over an irrecoverable loss. It as though … nature were bemoaning the fact of her fragmentation, her decomposition into separate individuals.”

Pond is a book about the life of an unnamed woman in an unnamed coastal town, approximate to Bennett’s life on the west coast of Ireland, where she has lived now for 20 years. The narrator begins, “First of all, it seemed to us that you were very handsome,” allowing the voice to fragment and decompose through the strangeness of the first-person plural. While Nietzsche’s (notably feminized) personification of nature “bemoans” her decomposition into individual selves, Bennett takes it a step further and imagines that the individual herself were split apart so that, throughout her slight and tightly packed corpus, she forsakes the voice of a well-defined and singular narrator for a refractive first person. Her second novel, Checkout 19 (2021)—seven vignettes, or essay-stories, that trace the unnamed narrator from early childhood to school years to a service job on a supermarket checkout as a life seamed through with books—begins again in this vein. “We remember our first memory, do we, no we don’t, do we,” she writes, allowing the narrator’s voice to reverberate in epistrophe. It is a voice that is and isn’t Bennett’s own: the voice of someone who not only relishes but is also haunted by her own pluralism.

In Fish out of Water, Bennett’s book-length essay originally published by the now-defunct Milan-based Juxta Press in 2020 and recently republished in 2024 by JOAN, with a newly commissioned poetic postscript by Chloe Aridjis, Bennett returns once more to the pluralism of selfhood and, in particular, childhood: “We had many emotions didn’t we when we were a child that we preferred not to speak of. Mammoth emotions such as grief and longing and anger.” The author’s repertoire has, to date, been deeply invested in memory, class, sex, and identity; she grew up in the county of Wiltshire to aspirational working-class parents who had done well enough to afford a nice house, a Volvo, and matching Barbour jackets, and Bennett emulates the plummy voice of Middle England, at times bringing it near to absurdity. In the breathy, conversational cadence that she has become known for, Bennett writes: “We don’t know the precise hour do we and it doesn’t strike us as terribly important. No, we don’t give two hoots really.”

In Fish out of Water, Bennett reflects on the irrecoverable loss that occurs after childhood. Not a loss of innocence, or of self as “I,” but a loss of the imagination, something that the author retrieves one day when she stumbles across an exhibition of works by the late surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning in Madrid, or as she puts it: “I saw your name across the entrance to a large building.” Bennett was in Spain’s capital trying and failing to bring “hundreds of sham words” to life—words that would one day become Checkout 19—while also grieving her grandmother, a formidable presence in Fish out of Water and a kind of touchstone throughout Bennett’s work. Meeting Tanning’s work again produced in Bennett “a feeling of kindredness,” a sense that “perhaps seeing [Tanning], through the metamorphosis of [her] rupturing canvases and fugacious sculptures, would show me something—would in fact restore to me that essential source which had become so small and distant and faded.”

Bennett moves back in time through Tanning’s own childhood in the Midwest, and a second-person address then switches to more conventional first- and third-person narratives before slipping once more into the multitudinous first-person plural. These transitions replicate the disorientating, dreamlike quality that’s characteristic of Tanning’s work. In Fish out of Water, Bennett reimagines in prose the formal strategies of surrealist art-making such as fragmentation, containment, and assemblage, and its aesthetic registers of absurdity, juxtaposition, and contradiction. The doors and hallways that comprise Tanning’s compositions are mirrored in Bennett’s own: each line break introduces a new vignette, as if it were a space to be climbed in and out of. “In 1942, Dorothea Tanning lived in a brownstone apartment in New York,” writes Bennett. “There was just one painting in the apartment, a self-portrait, and though it was only of a modest size, it filled the room not least because it was the room.” The self-portrait is Birthday (1942), and Bennett emulates, even at the level of the sentence, its kaleidoscopic quality—the way that Tanning, in her birthday suit of ruffled violet organza and a seaweed bustle, holds open a door at the juncture to various other doors and corridors, each one turning in on another. In its brevity, shard-like form, and strange confluence of animal and human life, Fish out of Water is reminiscent of surrealist fiction by Leonora Carrington and Suzanne Césaire, for whom the short story or novella is a mere moment or fragment in which things are left unresolved.

“We were born on a Friday,” begins Fish out of Water, embroiling us in Bennett’s traumatic nascency—born, like me, breech and with the cord pulled tightly around the neck—and her efforts to absorb and make sense of this information as a small girl: “The further we inched out of our mother’s body the tighter the cord became around our neck and the more difficult it was for us to breathe. To breathe our first breaths.” Bennett’s affinity with Tanning’s paintings could be predicated on this image and sensation, entering the world upside down and being pulled back towards one’s source, again and again. “We were standing upstairs on the landing opposite the window, between the airing cupboard and the banister,” writes Bennett, emulating the child who recognizes the furtive and liminal spaces between things, which adults fail to see: the elliptical openings in garden hedgerows, the undersides of dining tables, the backs of sofas, and the indefinable chasm between doors and windows and curtains. “On winter evenings,” she says, “we used to get in behind the green velvet curtains […] Very soon the dense velvety darkness that gathered closely behind the curtain was coaxed loose by the expansive and mischievous outside.” For the young and imaginative, those liminal spaces are also spaces in which the inside and outside commingle, “necromantically exchanging their store.” Bennett describes how the thin glass between the inside and outside glitters and “dissolve[s] like snow,” allowing things to pass through: “Hats! Big black hats, yes,” writes Bennett, “floating violins their strings hopping, dusky moths […] and sparks and spider-line and flashing blades […] and wood-smoke, feline eyes.” Bennett’s text, like Tanning’s paintings, engenders an exchange between the imaginary and the quotidian, what is fantastical and what is to hand.

In Pond, physical objects take on near-human, or animate, qualities, in the unruliness of the narrator’s oven or the bodily register of her bathtub. The things in Fish out of Water function within a surrealist tradition, and in contradiction to their purported function. Curtains are portals, breasts are eyes, fingers transform into threads, returning us once more to the ever-expanding field of the imagination that surrealism has always been so good at inhabiting. “Who knows from where the decrees that guided the arrangements of my grandmother’s world came,” writes Bennett of her grandmother’s flat, “a surrealist trove of disparate objects, some mysterious, some commonplace, some utterly useless, [that] tickled and irked her children in equal measure.” In Fish out of Water, as in Checkout 19, Bennett assigns the notion of strangeness not to the object but to the viewer. She lets the unbridled space of a child’s imagination loose on the page the way Tanning does with the canvas, without infantilizing the subject or the reader.

The crushed velvet curtains, doorways, and landings of Bennett’s childhood in the early pages of Fish out of Water mirror the lustrous textures and hues of Tanning’s paintings and prepare us for her to enter. “You were born in 1910 in a small Midwestern town,” Bennett writes, “where ‘nothing happened’ you said ‘but the wallpaper.’” Tanning was a sick child and, often confined to the home, lost herself in fantasy stories and gothic tales, “the morbid webs of Poe.” Like Bennett, Tanning rendered fantasies from within the home and from what was to hand. “[T]he big comfortable house there now became a castle,” said Tanning, and Bennett imagines it surrounded by enchanted forest rather than arable crops. Over time, Bennett writes, Tanning detached “with reckless finality from the warm and comfortable quotidian,” what she imagines as the “Midwestern world of pecan pies, lazy-daisy comforters, cone-shaped paper cups, fluffy afternoon dresses, white gloves, Sunday cigars, and too-tight satin shoes.” Despite her physical severance—moving from Galesburg, Illinois, to Chicago and then New York in the 1930s—that world was never far away in Tanning’s paintings. Throughout the 1940s and ’50s she continued paint from within its material confines and nascent memories. “When I look at those paintings, I like them, but I feel they’re the work of a very young person, even naive, someone who lives almost solely in her imagination,” Tanning said in an interview in BOMB in 1990. Tanning died in 2012, but Bennett is not mired by that fact. In Fish out of Water, she replaces the dialogic intimacy, and sometimes insularity, of her first-person plural by speaking to Tanning in the second person: “I came to understand very quickly that you live in a world of your own making, fired by both intellect and intuition, the rational and the unknown, the quotidian and the marvellous.” It is precisely what Tanning dismissed as the work of someone who lives “almost solely in her imagination” that excites Bennett so much, and for this she departs plurality for moments of blunt certainty.

In lieu of Tanning as flesh and blood, Bennett embarks on a correspondence with the artist’s work, moving in and out of the frame, rubbing up against the limits of ekphrastic writing. Bennett begins by realizing, in fragmentary, staccato sentences, one of Tanning’s most revered works, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943). Two little girls appear on a landing—not unlike the one Bennett summons from her childhood in the early pages of Fish out of Water—and are confronted with the “enormous torn head of a sunflower.” Bennett writes: “A series of identical doors again. They are numbered this time. I am in a hotel it seems. […] We are little girls, yes, we are little girls. You, little girl, are leaning on the door jamb of room 207 with your eyes closed.” Both girls are dressed in puritanical white, their hair flaxen. Bennett describes how she was drawn to Tanning because the shape of their breasts was alike—a girlish desire for likeness, for the ability to split easily in two (or three, or four). Without it, we are cast out from playground games or break-time secrets, as Bennett reminds us anecdotally, describing the cruelty of the girls at school because she hasn’t yet gotten her period. While superficially the girls in the picture bear all the likenesses of Western girlhood, there is something defectively doll-like about them: the one that Bennett identifies as Tanning is reclining against the doorframe, her cardigan split open and chest exposed and eyelids drooping closed. The Bennett-like girl has her back to us, her arms positioned at a strange mechanical 40-degree angle. “We are waging a desperate battle with unknown forces,” Bennett has Tanning say, and then mockingly, knowingly: “Girls are supposed to be passive.” Bennett retorts: “Yes! Yes! And I am ready for battle! I am ready for anything!” And then they run, hand in hand, through a door into the “galvanising effulgence.” The “striking and intimate” similitude between Bennett and Tanning is based not on textbook girlhood, but rather on their desire to get inside and rupture it.

Just as we begin to make sense of Fish out of Water through the similarity between Tanning and Bennett’s breasts, their strange incongruent images, their fragmentary form, a third voice enters the book at the tail end of Bennett’s story. In single lines, or short shrifts, of rhetorical prose, Chloe Aridjis’s “Self Portrait with Wings” functions as the discarded shards of Bennett’s fragments, the fine residue of what has come before. It is as if each time an artwork—be it a painting or a text—is read, it undergoes a process both of imbrication and of fragmentation in equal measure: “My own existence, harnessed to another’s psyche,” she writes, discussing Tanning’s Birthday.

Beyond what is explicitly ekphrastic about Fish out of Water—and arguably more interesting—are the points at which Bennett speaks through, not of, Tanning’s paintings, their material, textural, and spatial register. Bennett attends to the macabre, mannerist quality of light, the luminosity of color in golden hair or a pair of satin shoes, as if they were lit from the inside, and the way paint is worked in soft strokes like spun silk, and then applies it to her own memories. Recalling the childhood escapade behind the green velvet curtain, Bennett writes: “Surely we were much altered, surely our epic adventure had left its fabulous marks all over us. We stood there boldly, fizzing and vital and teeming—surely we had grown, surely our skin glistened with gold and lava and blood,” and I am reminded of the spirited protagonists of Tanning’s painting Children’s Games (1942), emboldened by their long prostrate manes as they rip wallpaper away to reveal fleshy undersides. Bennett doesn’t subscribe to the certainty of memory. She described the genesis of Checkout 19 as the desire “to create a book that sort of replicates […] going back over things, and never really arriving at a definitive place or interpretation of what happened, because I don’t think we ever do.” In Fish out of Water, she embroiders her own memory with the expansiveness of surrealist imagery. Her childhood, entangled in stories, becomes one of fairy tale: hateful sisters and frothy gowns in long, near-page-length syntax. What she describes in a conversation with Adam Biles as “the shifting terrain of memory” plays out through this strange first-person plural, impressing the fallibility not just of selfhood but also of memory upon the voice of the narrator. “We sound as if we know and we do not know. We sound as if it were a thing of the past yet it has not gone,” she says toward the end of the book, letting the first-person plurality—usually reserved for her childhood memories—transgress into her adult life, impressing the distance of time upon the reader. Bennett’s form, a series of short disparate blasts of writing—a form that hinges Pond, Checkout 19, and Fish out of Water—goes further in augmenting this sensation of memory: deregulated, nonlinear, or like a series of bubbles bursting sequentially.

In 1942, under the tutelage of her lover, and later husband, Max Ernst, Tanning began another self-portrait, which he titled Self-Portrait (1944). “That’s the one, yes that’s the one,” writes Bennett, eliciting that feeling of discovering something new, or again, in an art gallery: the image of a woman in a bathing suit at the precipice of a canyon. “We can barely move a muscle. We are holding our breath. […] We are waiting. Waiting for something to happen,” writes Bennett as she approaches Tanning standing on a precipice and watching the brow of the table mountain far off. “I’d arrived at last,” she writes, and identifies, in the spartan canyon, the low rhythmic sound of the sea. Earlier in the book, Bennett surfaces Elizabeth Smart, the poet and author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945), from her broad and roaming literary repertoire. Smart said that the body was “finite, it is unnecessary, and it is a detour, for it fences in, and tries to contain an overwhelming ocean.” What Bennett does so deftly in Fish out of Water is conjure that feeling of arriving at a work of art as if it were a form of immersion. Bennett’s part in the book closes with a reproduction of Self-Portrait, before opening up into Aridjis’s “Self-Portrait with Wings.” Unlike Bennett, who weaves in and out of Tanning’s work and her own biography, Aridjis embodies the febrile creature at Tanning’s feet in Birthday, a nocturnal lemur with wings, signifier of mortality. This body imagined twice over, first by Tanning and then again by Aridjis, is “snatched from a tree or plucked from a dream: does it matter where I come from?” This question might be applied to a work of art. Bennett and Aridjis do as great art writing does—they free Tanning’s art from its origins and from the parameters of the frame, refuse it as a fixed entity, and then imbricate its surface like the tide lapping at the shore, leaving residues, washing things away, and depositing new materials.