Horror goes avant-garde
A woman finds herself tied to a chair in a dungeon-like basement; a man stands a few feet away brandishing a knife. After he plunges the blade into her side and murders her in cold blood, the victim finds herself unaccountably revivified, free to walk through her killer’s empty home.
That’s only the beginning of Nour Abi-Nakhoul’s “Supplication,” a novel that presents a world completely detached from the strictures of causal logic.
The murdered woman, the book’s nameless narrator, explores a shadow plane resembling the environment she once knew to be reality. She engages with her former landlord and a mysterious driver who — like the ferryman of the Greek underworld conveying the souls of the dead — takes her to various destinations. At one, a couple plies her with illicit substances; at another, a mysterious care facility in the middle of nowhere, everyone ignores her. In the course of these interactions, the narrator becomes aware that a demonic consciousness is growing within the recesses of her soul.
Blending the recollective descriptions of Marcel Proust with the inventiveness of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, Abi-Nakhoul is interested in the underexplored capabilities of the novel.
“I think there’s a lot of benefit to be found in approaching subjects from an indirect, slanted kind of way,” Abi-Nakhoul said in an interview. The editor-in-chief of long-standing Montreal magazine
Maisonneuve, Abi-Nakhoul said she wrote the book with a view to making reading a more collaborative activity.
“Meaning can come out of a text differently when you’re approaching it in a mystical, surreal way. It leaves things open to a reader’s interpretation,” she said.
In the novel, the demonic consciousness, sometimes referred to as “the child,” manifests as a sludge rising up through drains or seeping out of walls. It begins to exert a dark agency over the narrator: she begins taking greater and greater risks, procuring a gun, later crashing an abandoned house where a squatter is locked in a time loop.
The child establishes telepathic connections with anything within its reach. In one notable passage, an undisturbed reservoir of gasoline at a filling station provokes raptures of communion.
“The child wanted to place itself into its proper lineage,” the narrator says, “to harmonize with those things that had, like it, descended upon the world’s stage from behind the obscure curtain. But the child had descended willingly, had desired to come and place itself into me to fulfil its objectives here in the world; the ancient things within the gasoline had been forced to, pulled into it non-consensually.”
Abi-Nakhoul said the narrator is experiencing “completely meaningless things, but she is crafting an almost spiritual-like structure to reality.
“I wasn’t really thinking of it in allegorical terms, although I do think that there’s a lot of Christian theology from my upbringing that’s permeated into the symbolism of the book. But one of the things that I was thinking of addressing is how after violence and trauma — after something that destroys your world — there is a desperate search to impose meaning onto things.”
Abi-Nakhoul cites Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector’s “The Passion According to G.H.” as influencing the uncommon framings of rebirth and trauma contained within “Supplication.”
“‘Malina’ by Ingeborg Bachmann was also huge because of the way it’s invested in the interiority of its central character,” she said. “You experience everything filtered through how she sees things.
“These books are not interested in changing the language of a narrator’s interior states. They’re about just letting things go in a very raw, natural way. I became really interested in that style of narrative.”
Near the end of the interview, the conversation turned to how a genre evolves, with Abi-Nakhoul offering a warning that artistic works originating in the margins often move toward “the centre.” As audiences become increasingly familiar with narrative modes and subject matter hailing from the furthest reaches of culture, the threat of a kind of artistic depreciation can loom large.
“I think it’s good in a lot of ways, but I’m also a little bit wary of the avant-garde or indie esthetic being pulled into the mainstream,” she said.
“A lot of the time it’s blanching or swallowing these genre markers in such a way that the structure and values of the mainstream are maintained.”