The Night-Side of Life
On Garth Greenwell's Small Rain
Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
~ Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
Leaving the hospital, he feels a shift in the weather: “It was September now, I thought suddenly, early September, soon it would be fall.” This narrator, who leads us through Garth Greenwell’s newest novel, Small Rain, has just spent several days in the ICU — so close to death and with such a rare condition that his doctors have fawned over him, fascinated. Hang on to a thing like this, he tells himself as he steps outside; don’t cling only to the horror of suffering: “Why shouldn’t the soul be made of this moment, too, this unremarkable moment, remember this.”
Sometimes I think this is what weather is for, these solicitations of shifts in attention. Small Rain is a monument to such a shift, though its occasion is admittedly more extreme. In August of 2020, a poet and professor is suddenly immobilized by pain. His partner, L, takes him to the hospital, where, with Covid protocols still rigidly in place, he must account for his presence: “They asked me to describe the pain but the pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale.” From here, as if crossing some river in hell, his journey is one of medications, treatments, scans, vocabulary, terror, boredom, and caregivers with all kinds of temperaments. It’s a familiar experience for anyone who’s spent time in a hospital for a sudden, unexplained condition.
In between injections, sponge baths, IV installations, and visits from L, the narrator, confined to his bed, wanders the expanse of his mind — a mind made cavernous, we come to understand, by a lifetime love of art. On his first night, a nurse’s name recalls that of a favorite singer, Kathleen Ferrier, whose rendition of a Rückert lieder he’d first heard as a teenager “articulated something that had been inarticulate before, but it did more than that, too, it created something; it didn’t just light some chamber of myself that had been dark, it made a new chamber, somehow, it made me capable of some feeling I couldn’t have felt before. It humanized me.” Later, recalling how he and L met, he reflects on how much larger his life is because of it: “This is what I mean when I say my impression of L was one of scope, of amplitude; I had a sense, vertiginous, exhilarating, of the world suddenly gaining in dimension, becoming larger and deeper.”
I’m hardly the first to note how the roots of “author” translate to “one who causes to grow.” Greenwell’s skill in this novel is to show this expansion at work, the subterranean rivers of obsession that carve out our rock. Each page-long paragraph unfolds with recursive, switchback sentences, many of them run-ons, adding clause after clause, broadening just a little further its own boundaries.1 Like Lispector, Saramago, Murnane, and other novelists whose unit is not the sentence or the paragraph but the novel itself, it’s this inward geometry that gives Greenwell’s style the logic of dreams — that enormous room you didn’t know had been hiding in your little apartment all along.
Later, reflecting on a poem that he’s taught over the years, the narrator understands it as “a bit of my consciousness that had somehow stumbled into the world, a prosthetic consciousness — which is something that poems can be, they can create new spaces in our interiors sometimes.” In this way, a poem “can be a laboratory for thinking, for trying out ideas, not just abstractly but feelingly, so that we can live with them and see through them.” This is, in part, what the narrator’s sickbed has become: an unexpected, prolonged exile in this laboratory. Generally, “real life” doesn’t allow for this kind of thinking, which the narrator laments of his students, who resist these efforts to appreciate poetry because they are
pressured everywhere else to be more efficient, to take in information more quickly, to make each moment count, to instrumentalize time, which is a terrible way to live, dehumanizing, it disfigures existence. But it was difficult to defend the alternative, to justify it in terms of outcomes and deliverables, costs and benefits; it was indefensible by that logic, its value lay in demonstrating the possibility of other logics, other relationships to value, I mean other ways to live.
These other rooms, then, these hidden places, carved-out places, are a way to take time outside of time — to decouple time from its neoliberal synonym, money. A poem, he says, slows time down; it solicits an alternative. “Whole strata of reality are lost to us at the speed at which we live,” he says, “our ability to perceive them is lost, and maybe that’s the value of poetry, there are aspects of the world that are only visible at the frequency of certain poems” — and, it must be said, certain novels.
The illness narrative has a long pedigree — something Sontag later acknowledged about writing Illness As Metaphor while receiving treatment for stage IV breast cancer:
I didn’t think it would be useful — and I wanted to be useful — to tell yet one more story in the first person of how someone learned that she or he had cancer, wept, struggled, was comforted, suffered, took courage… though mine was also that story. A narrative, it seemed to me, would be less useful than an idea… The purpose of my book was to calm the imagination, not to incite it. Not to confer meaning, which is the traditional purpose of literary endeavor, but to deprive something of meaning.
Greenwell’s novel, with its extraordinary enrichment of meaning, seems an inversion of this — or a reversion. As he leaves the hospital, struck by the brightness of the daylight, the narrator tells himself he’s “had enough of sickness. I wanted to be on the other side again of that gulf that separates the sick from the well — or what seems like a gulf, I had crossed it in a flash.” It’s as if the hospital, a bizarre and artificial environment, is simply too much exile: “All the people dying in this hospital over the years,” he reflects, “they had just been wiped away, which was the point of places like these, they were places for containing death, places where death could come and then be scouted away.” Here Greenwell echoes Walter Benjamin’s own observation, in “The Storyteller,” on the isolation of death, its sense of banishment: “There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died… Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs.” This too is an instrumentalized approach to life; that which does not conjugate with day-to-day tasks has no pragmatic application. Death grows as useless as poetry — which means life is too.
These alternative logics, these parallel dimensions, conjured for me the opening of Mathias Énard’s novel, Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants: “Night does not communicate with the day. It burns up in it. Night is carried to the stake at dawn. And its people along with it — the drinkers, the poets, the lovers.” This role of the night recurs in many of Énard’s novels, from the overnight train ride of Zone to the long, insomniac journey within that unfolds throughout Compass. The night has different values, different registers. Whatever’s not here is dark, unknown, a solid curtain rustling at the edges of the room. Here we can trust only ourselves to identify noises, assess threats, and assign value.
In Small Rain, this night-side of life is a welcome respite despite the overwhelming pain and fear it causes our narrator. There’s something terribly wrong, in his world as in ours, with life in the daylight, and no one seems quite sure what to do about “that weird intellectual weather we had taken to calling the Discourse, the amorphous impersonal sense of things that came from scrolling through social media.” And just because the oceanic feelings of the night — the serious feelings and their sincerity — evaporate in the hostile conformity of the day doesn’t erase or undermine their value. Instead, it separates these values: one cannot be exchanged for another. Just as the currency of the night is no good, no tender, in the pragmatism of the daytime, so too is the currency of the day worthless in the darker, more intense regions of human experience.
There is “real danger” in an ironic and scornful world, he says later, where “any word could be made to mean nothing.” To live uninterruptedly among all this daylight, the narrator seems to be telling us, “was like we had outsourced consciousness, turned inwardness inside out, we thought now in other peoples’ memes. It made me despair for my country, not just my country, for the endeavor of humanness — something it had become impossible to think of unironically, an idea that could only be mocked.” That this day side of life; that the interconnected, networked presence of the “we” in our minds, or what Heidegger called the “they-self,” has grown so loud as to extinguish or silence or humiliate what few opportunities we have to experience alternative values — this leaves us especially vulnerable to the extreme conditions that, when they do arrive, force us to acknowledge the truth, which is that life isn’t seamless or frictionless, that life abrades life and sometimes we have to suffer its heat. Small Rain is this narrator’s confrontation with such sudden darkness, such lonely night.
“Maybe everyone feels the way I do,” he reflects as he crosses back over that gulf, “that it takes an act of will to hang on to a life.” This sense of the will and its Rilkean role in changing our own lives is what’s at the heart of Greenwell’s novel. Sometimes the pain does indeed demand a different scale, and this shift in judgment betrays just how constructed, how arbitrary, is the everyday scale with which we’ve learned to weigh our choices, our options, our morals, and our lives — lives that, on such a scale of instrumentalized time, it must be said, don’t tare much value at all.
In a profile for Vulture, Sarah Thankam Mathews called it “vascular prose,” which is absolutely perfect.
This is such an extraordinary essay. Thank you.
I'm rereading "Wittgenstein's Mistress," and the singer singing in the narrator's head is . . . Kathleen Ferrier. What's with her, Nathan?