Wonder women
Two new novels, “The Book of Joan,” by Lidia Yuknavitch, and “Isadora,” by Amelia Gray, make use of the lives of radical historical figures in distinct ways. I wouldn’t call either a historical novel, exactly. “Isadora,” while faithful to much historical fact in its portrayal of the life of modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan in the run-up to World War I, achieves something far more ambitious than documentary fiction. “The Book of Joan” is set in a dystopian future, and told from a large satellite called CIEL, a living environment constructed from old space stations that orbits an Earth ruined by “geocatastrophe.” Both novels, in a sense, are writing about the present — one through the lens of the early 20th century, the other from 2049.
“The Book of Joan’s” use of the historical figure Joan of Arc takes the form of Joan of Dirt, another symbol of resistance who was supposedly burned at the stake for opposing a brutal figure named Jean de Men. This ruler of CIEL, a “strange combination of a military dictator and a spiritual charlatan,” evokes a familiar political figure, the full consequences of whose time in office remain to be seen. Jean de Men’s trajectory is described as “a journey from opportunistic showman, to worshipped celebrity, to billionaire, to fascistic power monger. What was left? When the Wars broke out, his transformation to sadistic military leader came as no surprise.”
This highly literary novel does contain elements of speculative fiction — exotic technology, Joan’s otherworldly abilities and a future humanity’s radically altered biology — yet Yuknavitch does not just speculate, she extrapolates, and sheds light on our current predicament. The disasters endured by the Earth in “The Book of Joan” differ from our potential future only by a matter of degree.
The voice of the novel’s narrator, Christine Pizan, is direct, assured and intriguing; it snares the reader from the opening page. Christine is a creator of “narrative grafts,” a process of burning letters into skin that she uses to record the story of Joan on her own body. This grafting calls to mind the écriture féminine of Cixous and other literary theorists, Yuknavitch’s own workshop practice called Corporeal Writing, and Jeanette Winterson’s novel “Written on the Body.” In fact, the opening line of “Written on the Body” — “Why is the measure of love loss?” — is echoed by a line from “The Book of Joan’s” second chapter: “What is a love story?” Love, in Yuknavitch’s novel, is a form of resistance, just as we are told by the narrator: “I will write it. I will tell the truth. Be the opposite of a disciple. Words and my body the site of resistance.”
“The Book of Joan” is a novel that embodies rather than explains its philosophy of writing. Yuknavitch exquisitely renders pain, terror and ecstasy with prose that feels incised. If this novel is about our present moment and our potential future, it is also about the present and future of writing.
Both “The Book of Joan” and “Isadora” concern themselves with the body in space — in the former with outer space, in the latter with the movement of the body on the space of the stage. Gray’s interest in the body, too, is long-standing. Consider the stories (among many) “Waste” and “Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover” from respective collections “Museum of the Weird” and “Gutshot,” or the main character from her first novel “Threats,” a dentist who is “familiar with decay.” “Isadora” is no exception. Elements of the bodily grotesque appear early on; after the deaths of Isadora Duncan’s two young children, they are “unboxed and brought in holding hands.” But the arrangement of their bodies has been staged by the undertaker. Isadora reflects, “When I tried to separate them, I found to my horror the line of pale thread that stitched their palms together, holding Deirdre to Patrick and keeping them there. They were sewn and sealed with casein glue, fixed for the viewing.”
This isn’t the only instance of something planned that is made to appear spontaneous. The innovative Isadora, credited with essentially founding modern dance, is, according to her lover Paris Singer, “the singular mind behind an artistic form that aims to usher in a new kind of movement.” Her performances are meticulously planned, yet appear fluid and unrehearsed to the audience. At one point in the novel, in fact, Isadora repeats a routine several nights in a row to prove her act is memorized rather than extemporaneous. She calls the stretching of a baby a “performance to which the rest of us can only aspire,” stating that “our book of natural movement has been buried so deep within us that its pages have become general, merging ten into one, those first perfect movements fading into the story of our first words.”
Much like Isadora’s performances, one gets the sense that the novel itself is deliberately structured, despite the entrancing associative quality to many of the passages. It’s no accident that the above lines refer to “a book of natural movement,” as parallels between writing and dance abound in the novel. “Isadora” is a portrait of a revolutionary artist who endures extreme misfortune and the flow of history, a novel whose depiction of a world on the brink of horror and atrocity feels utterly contemporary, but it is also a novel about writing, about the creation of literary art. “Isadora” continues the analogy of dancing to the movements of a child: “The disease of twitching logic ruined your hands the day you learned to write your own name,” “practice three times daily and you might begin to feel it,” and, paradoxically, “Every gesture of surrender is built from control!” This suggests repetition until logic and thinking are gone, until the act of movement appears effortless. This is what is known as “making it look easy,” which Amelia Gray has accomplished to the utmost.