I want to talk to you about horses. Or at least the idea of horses. I want to talk to you about Plato’s idea of horses – the horseness of horses. The idea that all real horses – the ones that drop steaming platts in fields and swish flies with their tails – are instances of an abstraction. We recognize a particular horse in the real world because it corresponds to a form we carry around in our heads. But I wonder if Plato went further and asked about the word “horse”. I don’t know enough about the history of philosophy to answer that question. Does the word “horse” refer us to an ideal horse or to a particular horse? Or does it mediate between the two? Or does it do something entirely different? I don’t have an answer to these questions either. What I have is an intuition about the word “horse”. It’s an intuition that comes, maybe, from my experience as a longstanding user of words. I intuit that the word horse is like an empty vessel. Somebody offers me the word like a glass from the cupboard. I take it and fill it up with my own notion of what it means to be a horse. The word’s truth is a slippery thing. A sneaky person might use the word “horse” while thinking of cats and trick me into thinking one thing while they’re talking about something entirely different. For example, all this time, I’ve been talking about horses when, really, I’ve been thinking about Jac Jemc’s first novel, My Only Wife.
Set for release on April 10th from Dzanc Books, My Only Wife is a sneaky book. It guiles the reader with clean prose and apparent simplicity into believing that it’s a novel about the narrator’s only wife. It may be about many things – about absence, emptiness, and loss – but it really isn’t about the narrator’s only wife. It’s more like an empty glass from the cupboard, an abstraction, a form, and it invites us to fill it with particulars from our own experience.
My Only Wife is the account, long after the fact, of a relationship between two nameless people, the narrator and the wife. Now, she is gone, and the narrator tries obsessively to give substance to a memory. If you want to be technical about it, the novel is a tragedy. Even from the outset, we know that the wife will leave. We also know that the narrator’s efforts will fail. Words just don’t work that way. Words are inherently tragic: the more we use them, the more they reinforce our separateness, one from another.
Even by the second page, we get a sense of what Jac Jemc is doing. We learn that the wife is clumsy. We watch her scatter the contents of her purse when she bumps into another girl. From that chance encounter, she connects with the girl in what becomes an impromptu interview: “She would ask questions that might have seemed otherwise uncomfortable coming from anyone else, but in the initial whirlwind that seemed to constitute the large majority of my wife, the girl would offer up her secrets with open palms, and, like that, my wife would be gone.” There we have it: the wife is a whirlwind; we are witnesses to her constitution; she bears other people’s secrets; and she will be gone. In a sense, the remainder of the novel is an elaboration of this one sentence.
The wife does not write out the stories. She keeps them recorded on cassettes which she locks in a closet. She “felt those tales needed to be spoken. She liked being a medium. She thought the stories became fraught with error when she retold them …” The narrator has an insight about his wife’s story-collecting: “These stories were not about anyone other than my wife. That’s what I discovered. I found that when you got to the bottom of them it was my wife that remained the essence, that I could scrape from the sides of the crucible. The rest was filler.” Extrapolating from this, we might suppose that this is not at all a story of a wife, but of a narrator. It is “fraught with error” which is to say that it’s written with words, and we should grind away the words to get at an essence of the narrator. Extrapolating further, we might suppose that our reading engages us in precisely the same way. What we read of the narrator is really the story of ourselves in our own moments of emptiness and loss.
We find other instances of this tension between horses and horseness. When the wife learns that her engagement ring has come from a generic mall jewelry store, she insists that her future nameless spouse “return the emptiness of that ring” in favour of a ring from an antique store, “something old and—imperfect” where things “are unapologetically broken and incomplete”. She says: “Give me wood and fiber any day.” When the narrator’s father hears of this, he doesn’t understand: “A ring is a ring.” This engages us in a paradox. The “emptiness” of a generic ring is precisely what makes story-telling possible. It may be impossible to describe a ring with enough specificity, with enough “wood and fiber,” that it can become unique enough to rise from the page and assume an existence in its own right. Instead, its uniqueness comes from the emptiness which summons the reader to fill it.
But Jac Jemc does not shy from paradox. The episode of the wedding ring opens with a brilliant line: “I loved that we could avoid it without talking about it.” As if to suggest that most people avoid things by talking about them. We scratch our heads and wonder: what exactly are words for anyways? Maybe we have to accept the fact that the more we talk about things (constitute them with our words), the more they recede from us.
Writing on htmlgiant, Christopher Higgs has noted a stutter at the end of the novel, a duplicate word that appears to be an error. Higgs has come out swinging in defense of the error, hoping with all his might that it is intentional. The novel seems better for the error.
I note a similar error and make a similar plea. I have already quoted the beginning of a broken sentence. Here it is in full: “My wife said, ”Things are unapologetically broken and incomplete in antique stories.”” Antique stories? In the context, we expect the wife to talk about stores. I would like to think this is intentional – part of the brokenness, the wood and fiber. I would like to think this is a crack in the empty glass or crucible or whatever, and it leaks a little of what My Only Wife is really about even though the story claims to be about something else. A sneaky book indeed!