ann beattie's "janus"
From Caroline Polachek’s witchy, weird music video for “Door.” Source.
A couple weeks ago, when the Bay Area first announced its “shelter in place” order, I dutifully gathered books to read with my now-ample free time. How was I to know that by the beginning of April, I would spend my days frantically rubbing my three remaining brain cells together, buried by accumulating readings and term papers? Novels—out of the question. Now, short stories are my bite-sized reprieves from a media diet of exponential graphs and doomsday subreddits.
I first read “Janus” during my sophomore year of college, in a fiction workshop. Though the instructor assigned it alongside a few other stories, all our class wanted to talk about that afternoon was “the bowl story.” But “Janus,” much like the bowl, is a hermetically sealed art object. It defies critique-as-dissection, and so our class discussion fell flat, each of us unable to fit words around our experience of the story. We were the people in “Janus” who, struck by the sight of the bowl, “would go immediately to it and comment. Yet they always faltered when they tried to say something.”
What was there to say? “The bowl was perfect,” the story begins. “Perhaps it was not what you’d select if you faced a shelf a bowls, and not the sort of thing that would inevitably attract a lot of attention at a crafts fair, yet it had real presence.” The bowl is not “perfect because—.” The story conceives of perfection as requiring no justification. More strongly put, justification is a doomed project: perfection simply is.
“Janus” is not really a story about anything other than this bowl. The story is told in the past tense, though there are two distinct past tenses, two eras laid beside each other in retrospect. The first section of the story describes the bowl and its inarticulable appeal. Andrea, the narrator, totes it with her to the home showings she stages as a real estate agent, where the bowl brings her good luck. In the second half, something shifts. The bowl’s mystique deepens. Andrea grows “more deliberate with the bowl, and more possessive.” Perhaps the closest thing to a plot point occurs at the end of the story, when we learn the bowl’s provenance: it was a gift from an ex-lover who had once asked her to “change her life and come to him” and who eventually left her, tired of waiting for her to leave her husband. Rather than offer any trite conclusions, like the notion that Andrea’s attachment to the bowl is the displaced relationship with her ex, the final paragraph returns to the bowl. As in the opening, the bowl is again “perfect: the world cut in half, deep and smoothly empty. Near the rim, even in dim light, the eye moved toward one small flash of blue, a vanishing point on the horizon.”
Structurally, the story’s twin sections emphasize doublings and repetitions. It begins and ends with the image of the bowl, singular, perfect. The first page is crowded with Andrea and her husband’s stuff (“a coffee table,” “a pine blanket chest,” “a lacquered table,” “a cherry table,” “a Bonnard still life”); the last page, a series of gifts from her lover (“a child’s ebony-and-turquoise ring that fitted her little finger,” “the wooden box, long and thin, beautifully dovetailed,” “the soft gray sweater with a pouch pocket”). In the first section, she employs “tricks used to convince a buyer that the house is quite special;” in the second, she thinks fearfully of “a world full of tricks.” Repetitions disturb. The re-appearance unsettles our initial understanding of the facts, gesturing instead to some invisible force of transformation, like one of those two-paneled, spot-the-difference cartoons.
Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie pinpoints doubling and repetition as characteristic of Freud’s theory of the unheimlich (the unhomely, the uncanny), disambiguating the unheimlich into the weird and eerie. The “weird” is “that which does not belong,” or the co-presence of things which do not fit together. The “eerie,” on the other hand, is the prickling awareness of some palpable but yet-unknown entity. A stylized binary: the weird is the realm of presence, the eerie, the realm of absence. Repetitions can produce a pastiche or montage-like effect, characteristic of the weird, or they can be eerie, for repetitions also underscore omissions, motifs creating a “negative hallucination” where objects and entities are registered but unseen.
The weird-eerie distinction is not a strict dichotomy. The bowl in “Janus” is both weird and eerie: a “paradox of a bowl.” Its form suggests this dualism. When left intentionally empty, the bowl is both presence and absence, an affirmative creation of negative space, a half-sphere framing nothingness. The bowl, “weird” in its role as a door, beckons Andrea into the world of that-which-was, or the world of what-could-have-been. The title invites this association, for Janus is the two-faced god perched above doorways, one face looking to the past, the other, to the future. It’s telling that the bowl accompanies her to her home showings, for it is in these homes, the staged alternatives to her own stiflingly domestic household, that the bowl serves as a portal to another world, crowding her reality with counterfactuals. For Fisher, “[t]he centrality of doors, thresholds and portals means that the notion of the between is crucial to the weird…[T]he weird de-naturalizes all worlds, by exposing their instability, their openness to the outside.” Andrea refuses to re-examine the end of her affair, never openly doubting her decision. But the bowl, as a door, implicitly destabilizes the status quo without offering deliverance or resolution. It can’t bring her lover back to her.
The bowl’s presence is also eerie. The object possesses a strange hold over Andrea’s life, yet its precise operation is unnameable to her. “Could it be that she had some deeper connection with the bowl—a relationship of some kind? She corrected her thinking: how could she imagine such a thing, when she was a human being and it was a bowl? …. She was confused by these thoughts, but they remained in her mind. There was something within her now, something real, that she never talked about.” Fisher suggests that capital is the archetypical eerie entity, unseen yet totalizing, for “conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.” But love, too, is an eerie force (something Fisher acknowledges in his discussion of the movie Interstellar), particularly love that exists outside the matrix of conventional human relationships, love that evades definition, that asks for nothing in return for its bestowal.
The eerie and weird, as categories, do not carry with them an inherent normativity. They are not necessarily bad. In “Janus,” certainly, one would not pronounce the bowl “weird” with any disgust. Rather, the weird and the eerie indicate conceptual failures. They mark a cleavage between the world as we find it and our frameworks for making sense of that reality. Andrea invokes the notion of “honoring one’s prior commitments,” a straightjacket of rationality that traps her in a life that is legible and easily-justified. The bowl cracks open that reality into an imaginative space where she can begin to see how she might change her life.
My recent communications increasingly include these signifiers of conceptual failure. We live in “strange and uncertain times.” The empty streets are “uncanny.” The notion that we bake bread and binge Netflix while states outbid each other on ventilators and 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment in a single week is “bizarre.” And of course, it is profoundly weird, that on my afternoon runs around the neighborhood, the trees burst with pink blooms and California poppies are in season and the sky looks like something out of a picture book, and at the same instant, people are suffering unfathomably from a global pandemic. It is eerie, that we are being stricken by something we cannot see but whose scale and effects are unmistakable. Even more eerie—the pandemic’s damage is exacerbated by a labor market that treats its workers as disposable, a carceral state that crowds human beings into abominable conditions, and a political system all-too-willing to bail out special interests while casting only a backwards glance towards our frayed social safety net. These, too, are abstract concepts if we’re lucky, abstractions with strangleholds on our reality.
The function of the weird and the eerie in “Janus” is not only to create a lost future, a counterfactual whose absence is palpable, but also to prompt reconsideration about what it might take for us to change the way we live (“Why continue with her life the way it was? Why be two-faced, he asked her”). The point is not that we should deny what fails to fit into our concepts, but that we must reframe our concepts to fit our new reality. We remake our frameworks, then we remake our world. The project of reform, personal or political, begins as an imaginative one, possible only if we sit with uncomfortable disjunctions and absences.
Once, someone I was very fond of described me as a gift-giver, a magpie when it came to loved ones (not unlike Andrea’s ex in “Janus,” I guess). Last May, I arrived at his door for dinner carrying a plant from the farmer’s market in Union Square. Initially, a few stems of peonies drew my attention, but the shopkeeper assured me this plant would flower come springtime. I had been overly ambitious with my time scale; by June, he and I were no longer speaking. I find it weird and eerie to think of that plant, perched on a windowsill in Brooklyn, where, even there, and even now, it might be blooming.
