Narrative Loops

2The novel opens with the words: ‘The places we are born come back’. These are also the closing words of the book, starting the last chapter and thus coming to the reader as a loop, embodying the same feeling: in the opening lines, the places are said to return disguised as ‘migraines, stomach-aches, insomnia’ (Johnson 2018, 3), while in the end, their disguise is ‘words, memory loss, nightmares’ (263). In both cases, place-haunting causes one to ‘wake falling, fumbling for the bed-side lamp’ (3), ‘with a pressure in our chests that is animal-like’ (263). Thus, the novel is bracketed in the feeling of return, spiralling, circularity, which are both temporal and narrative; this circularity operates on the affective level, with physical manifestations, such as aches and chest-pressure, thus suggesting not only corporeality but animality, embodied in the sensation of place, environment and its elements. The nonsmooth, nonlinear fabric of the narrative communicates the materiality of the environments that the characters are enmeshed in, and simultaneously enmeshes the reader into an affective experience, thus dissolving the boundaries between narrative text and reading experience. Following Barthes’ differentiation between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts evoked by Walezak as acquiring a new, material realist significance, we may add a third, experiential category, in which a text appears as experientially livable, one the reader can inhabit, sense, emotionally and subjectively grasp—one which, as Caracciolo stresses, ‘suggests fragile interdependence, but also formidable complexity of pattern and connection’ (11). Another powerful concept to be employed is transcorporeality, which Stacy Alaimo (2010) defined as a reciprocal interdependence of the porous and vulnerable body with the bodies of others, with matters and textures involved in the body’s becoming. Transcorporeality implies that the human subject is transient, unfinished and thus open to the porosities and vulnerabilities of others. In Johnson’s novel, the main connecting fabric and the agent of this becoming is the river, which is at once place, environment, temporality, element, reflection and expression of the characters’ bodies, psyches and memories, woven together through the non-binary, shifting texture of water.

3The novel, set between the 1980s Oxfordshire and Oxford in the 2010s, recounts the story of Gretel, a lexicographer in her thirties, who grew up in a houseboat with her mother Sarah, who abandoned her at the age of 16. In the narrative present, Gretel has just reunited with her mother after 16 years apart, during which Sarah has lost her left breast and developed Alzheimer’s. As Gretel cares for Sarah in her final days, memories of their chaotic past resurface, together with dark and traumatic secrets, mostly connected with the sudden appearance and disappearance of a boy named Marcus, who stayed with them on the houseboat for one month, in an interlude between the past and the present. Gretel’s first person narrative flows into the third-person account of Marcus’s story, which takes place in the late 1990s and is respectively split into two: the retrospective account of his adoptive father—Roger—features Marcus as Margot, a baby found in a dustbin by the river, adopted and raised by Roger and Laura in a relatively happy home, till she turns sixteen and disappears. The third-person progressive account reveals that Margot hears a prophecy from neighbour Fiona, which makes her leave home, walk for days along the river, and encounter Charlie, a blind man moored on a houseboat. Having accidentally killed him, Margot continues along the river and changes her gender; crosses paths with Sarah and little Gretel living a wild life, sleeps with Sarah, thus fulfilling the Œdipal prophecy, from which she/he has been running away, and carries the punishment that Sarah will mirror decades later, while suffering from mental and bodily decay. Gretel pieces the story together after meeting Roger and Fiona in the narrative present, and squeezing a version from her decaying mother, before dementia takes over.

4Johnson’s starting point, as she confides in an interview, was to rework an old myth by making it ‘feminist, contemporary and wild’ (Guardian Culture). It is indeed a fresh variation on the Œdipal story, with recognisable echoes of European folklore and classical fairy tales, as well as works of English realism (Dickens’s Great Expectations) and late twentieth-century metafiction (Graham Swift’s Waterland). One obvious fairy-tale reference is the protagonist’s name, Gretel, a resourceful girl-survivor. Marcus could then be Hänsel by extension, with Sarah having all the witch connotations, starting with her turning into a hermit of sorts in the woods. Although Gretel cannot save her brother in the traditional sense, in this reverted fairy-tale cum myth, Hänsel and Oedipus, Jocasta and the witch, live on in the matter and memory, which is also matter.

5Elizabeth Purdy has proposed a reading of Johnson’s novel through the trope of water, which is also central in my analysis. For Purdy, narrative becomes fluid due to three properties of water: its perpetual motion; its ‘shapelessness’ and ‘propensity to fill any vessel, delving into its cracks and imperfections and . . . its connective potential (Purdy 2021, 2). To these characteristics, I would add the materiality of water with all its implications: vibrancy, dirt, texture, and transcorporeal connection to all living bodies, including plants, animals, and humans.

6The central trope to express this immersive materiality is the river, represented as a place of life, death, procreation and return. Young Sarah and Charlie meet on the river and this is where their union begins and ends. As Charlie ritually drops condoms into the canal (43), a loop of events unravels: baby Margot will be conceived and born; she will be dumped into a dustbin in an act of desperation by her mother Sarah, who could not bear the solidity of motherhood, being fluid by nature; she will be found, adopted and live solidly till the eerie prediction, which will send her afluid again: she will leave home, encounter Charlie and later Sarah on the canal, unaware of either of them being her parents; manslaughter Charlie and tip him into the water, from where he will keep resurfacing in her dreams; his dreams as they transition into Marcus, who will ritually wash himself in the river prior to making love to Sarah; and it will not be long before Marcus will drown in that same river, where his parents had lived and loved, conceived, fallen apart, not far from where his father is, together with ‘all the dead who live in the water’ (264). In the same way, Gretel, Sarah’s other daughter, abandoned by her mother at the age of sixteen, tries to hide from memory and the river in the world of words and structure, working as a lexicographer. Yet the past floods back to her and she is caught in the current of remembering, brought in through the reappearance of her mother, but even more so by her textured, embodied, material memories, which comprise a strong realist layer in this book.

Bodily Textures

7Bodily textures are an important motif in the novel. By evoking the characters’ reactions, the borders between the physical and the narrative are blurred, turning the narrative and its metaphors into embodied events and affective interaction with the reader. Thus, Margot is depicted as acutely sensitive and her emotions are often textured. For example, she has an olfactory sensation while thinking of the prophecy: ‘It was not in a language that could fit the hollows of her cheeks. It tasted like dust, like gone-off yoghurt or burnt toast’ (82; emphasis added). Thinking is thus not tasteless or colourless, and neither are emotions: the realisation of having accidentally killed Charlie causes a panic ‘rising yeasty, unbearable’ (99; emphasis added); and imagining Sarah’s reaction, ‘[i]t hurt his gums to think of her smelling him like that, knowing how dirty he was’ (201).

8Likewise, memory is embodied and affective, stretching beyond the limits of common sense: ‘The past did not die just because we wanted it to. The past signed to us: clicks and cracks in the night, misspelt words, the jargon of adverts, the bodies that attracted us or did not, the sounds that reminded us of this and that’ (14). Moreover, memory materialises in smells, textures, and tastes. For example, as Gretel walks by the river, olfactory memories resurface: ‘I stopped, spat again. There was a taste of that winter in my mouth’ (187). Earlier, she recalls her mother insisting that rain can be smelled, being ‘like iron’ (182), which suggests Sarah’s animal-like intuition and weather sensitivity. Smells also have an affective value, accompanying emotions, extreme situations: when Marcus is falling for Sarah who is apparently trying to seduce him as they play Scrabble, he ‘could smell her cigarette breath on the back of his neck’ (183) and as Gretel is trying to press Fiona for the truth, she can feel her own smell, ‘chlorine and sweat’ (144).

9This way, the tactile and olfactory nature of emotions and memory suggests the animality of the characters and also helps to break the pastoral idyll of social withdrawal and harmonious living by the river as romanticised ‘nature’. True, the characters often flee the civilised comforts that make them uncomfortable—tedious office and work-place harassment for Sarah, Fiona’s prophesy for Margot. However, river life is far from pleasant. It is at times repulsive and even violent: to counter the romantic idyll, intimacy comes with the smell of fried lard, slaughtered rabbits and squashed mice in one’s pockets. It is certainly not clean, both from the material and moral perspective. Yet it is this lack of propriety (as in French propre), the stress on dirt as an irrevocable aspect of material life that suggests how deeply our bodies are entangled with the environment; being open, porous, fluid, and vulnerable.

Fluidity, Non-purity and the Agency of Waste

10Fluidity is the novel’s controlling motif, occurring on various levels: the fluidity of the body; identity; relationships; familial ties, and memory. As mentioned before, it is physically and metaphorically encompassed in the fluidity of the river, but also any body of water—bathtub, swimming-pool, stream, even tea-cup. On the one hand, it communicates the idea of a human as a body of water, an element that we are culturally accustomed to perceiving as clean (propre)—odourless, tasteless, transparent, sediment-, chemical and bacteria-free, safe and vital to the effect it is not noticeable unless contaminated or depleted. As Astrida Neimanis emphasises, drawing on Barad (2007) and Linton (2010), the ‘worlded’ water crisis stems from the ‘entanglement of material water scarcity and pollution with our idea of water’ (Neimanis 2017, 20; original emphasis). This ‘idea’ dictates the perception of water in its distant and utilitarian meaning, as ‘environment, resource, commodity, backdrop’ (21), while it is not ‘out there’ but right here, as ‘the stuff of human bodies, and never separate from our own incontestable materiality’ (21). Following Linton’s concept of ‘modern water’ as a legacy of the eighteenth-century discovery of its chemical formula H2O, which led to reducing this principal element to an ‘abstract, isomorphic, measurable quantity’ (Linton 2010, 14) controlled by institutions and hegemonic discourses (Neimanis 2017, 20), we may say that we are trained into the idea of water and, by extension, materiality. Books like Johnson’s untrain us by foregrounding the materiality as impurity, hybridity, mixture and fluidity. In ‘dirt theory’ proposed by Heather Sullivan, it is ‘dirty nature’ that is always with us as ‘a process rather than place’ (Sullivan 2012, 515), embedded in the interaction of material agents that include humans as ‘actors’ among other actors, not all of whom are human or even conscious (Phillips and Sullivan 2012, 446). Sullivan sees the emphasis on dirt as an ‘antidote to nostalgic views rendering nature a far away and “clean” site’ (2012, 515), to break the imaginary boundary between ‘us’ and ‘nature’ with its ‘gritty physicality’ (529). She also links dirt to mobility, as opposed to static cleanliness, and examines dirt’s ability to recompose, due to the volatile combination of particles assembling and recomposing, moving across space and even time (as dust, sediment or residue over a period, or toxins stored in the soil or air, or slow-decomposing radiation). The nature of dirt’s components makes it hybrid, shifting, and even cyborg-related, if we think of the merging of organic and inorganic matter in it (516). It is this ‘dark’ but indispensable side of ‘vibrant matter (529), as Sullivan observes, that calls for full immersion and recognition both of ‘mystical resonance’ and ‘concrete materiality’, hiding the potential for ‘responsible care’ (529). She calls for a rethinking of the cultural ideal of cleanliness, which, she reminds, is ‘laden with gendered, racial and class connotations’ (529). This idea becomes central to Marco Armiero’s concept of Wasteocene (2021), which brings together the ecological and the social, locked in the binary of dirty-clean, and may also stand for whitewashed memory.

11We must also observe that if for Sullivan ‘dirt’ is ultimately embodied in the ‘earth’, it is in fact water that is a true hybrid containing both the clean and the earthy in its sediment. These mixing constituents are also in motion, transformation, recomposition and transcorporeality, being a blend of the organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, material and discursive. This is how water appears in the novel. Observing that a familiar part of town had been ‘developed’ since the last time she visited it, Gretel cannot help noticing the water running ‘brown and thick’ (184) in the canal, the vegetation below the water ‘half-rotting, half-growing’ with ‘roots and trees . . . bursting out through the water’ (187). This brings to the fore the ecological agenda, simultaneously presenting the river as vibrant, living and agential, capable of ‘infecting’ one with ‘watery dreams’, as Gretel fears (187), and acting as a central artery of Wasteocene.

12The narrative abounds in signs of the Anthropocene. Some comments are rather subtle, such as Gretel’s observation on the hard ground and scorched grass indicating drought in the summer she visited Margot/Marcus’s parents (119). Others imply that the characters are transcorporeally immersed in polluted, damaged and dangerous environments. In the narrative present, adult Gretel scoops water from an almost dried-up summer stream, which tastes ‘like iron, the bodies of factories, the inside of pipes’ (137; note the olfactory sensation). Factory chimneys are mentioned several times, as factories bracket the water along which Marcus is struggling to walk in his time-frame, hungry, blistered and weak. He notices signs of an industrially altered landscape—‘a sluice where the water ran hard and fast as a road’—and human-generated waste: ‘black bags of rubbish, an abandoned sofa, a fridge on its side’ (139). As he crouches and digs at the base of the trees for possible food, having rummaged in foul garbage bags, he is represented as an animal, and also as an inhabitant of Wasteocene.

13In Armiero’s discourse, Wasteocene is inseparably connected with the physical body, which he sees as a porous space (see Alaimo), operating on the boundary of ‘privilege and disposability, purity and contamination, life and death’ (Armiero 2021, 12). The discovery of baby Margot by the river is both a Biblical catharsis and a memorable manifestation of a disposable body. The discarded baby is crying in a garbage bin against the backdrop of factories and faceless blocks of flats (237). She has a bad leg, does not crawl at ten months and is contaminating her parents’ relationship, exposing their own vulnerabilities. Her disability makes her hypersensitive to the environment and elements: in winter, her bones burn and in summer, she feels ‘water gathering in her joints’ (86). She is also an ardent believer in determinism, a lack of choice (92; 112), as if in Wasteocene, some bodies are determined to live a clean and happy life and others to be hapless and discarded. Even after a safe childhood with her adoptive parents, Margot is forced to leave home after Fiona’s prediction about her Œdipal fate, which she tries to divert by means of Wasteocene products—wrapping up her breasts in cling film to dispose of them, to alter her sex. The cling film ‘moulds’ into his body, but the breasts are still there, ‘bottle-nosed, fleshy’ (202). This is one of the powerful paradoxes of Wasteocene: everything is disposable, from objects to bodies and lives; at the same time, nothing disappears from the physical environment or emotional life: waste accumulates in the ocean, toxins in the soil, past failures return as hauntings, curses materialise and the body bears the effects of its elemental, cellular life. Sarah’s breast will be lost to cancer, and a part of her brain depleted because of dementia, turning her into a sick body, embarrassing and burdening. Soon after abandoning the baby, however, Sarah returns to river life which, as mentioned, is not idyllic or romantic, but tangibly wasteocenic: the boat she can afford to buy is but a junker, and the place where the broken engine halts is full of debris carried along by a strong flow past a muddy stretch of land (238). Thus, Sarah’s fluid life continues where she had already been, on the palpable, dirty waters of Wasteocene. This stress on wasting and depletion as natural processes may be read as tool to reconsider the conventional realist agenda, as the paradigm shifts towards a new materialist-realist one.

14Fredric Jameson discusses the paradoxes of conventional nineteenth-century realism—its ‘antinomies’—by pointing out a close association of the realist mode with ‘the bourgeoisie and the coming into being of bourgeois daily life’, with its stress on individualism, inwardness, and acceptance of money (or the market, or competition) as ‘the ultimate reality’ (Jameson 2013, 5). Adopting the Jamesonian model, we may see character formation in classical realist works, most notably the nineteenth-century Bildungsromane, such as Great Expectations or Jane Eyre, in terms of capitalist progress, culminating in social mobility, financial improvement and establishing a family as a guarantee of social and economic continuity. In new material realism, however, this conventional belief is called into question through the advancement of the view that there is no progress but regress, manifested through environmental degradation and, in Johnson novel, decaying bodies and depleting relationships. This way, the narrative challenges the idea of progress in a linear, teleological sense, as it was favoured in conventional realist fiction. Transformations and volatility in the novel are nonlinear and nonsmooth, which both subverts the realist agenda and its belief in the politics of representational contracts, and suggests a new corpus of materialist-realist narrative relationships. An important part of this nonsmoothness is the volatility of identity, which again, does not aim at development through Bildung and the formation of a stable, forward-looking bourgeois in control of the world, but a self-in-relation in an unstable environment, which is a more realistic identity for a reality as enmeshment, as it is seen in new materialist realism.

Queer Identities and Ecologies

15Like the river, identity in the novel is presented as fluid, intensely tangible, and elemental. Identity issues surface primarily in the characters of Margot/Marcus and Fiona, their older eccentric neighbour, who used to be a man and who Margot was enamoured with. Other characters, too, appear transitory, their ephemerality being inscribed in their bodies: Charlie goes blind and place-bound; Gretel evolves from a ‘root or bulb-like’ girl with knobbly knees, looking as if ‘dug out of the earth’ (141) into a woman with a heavy bottom, turning into her mother, while Sarah, who used to be of a sturdy built, withers away into a ‘craggy shape’ (255), losing her words and her grasp of reality. Family relations are equally volatile—children are lost, found, lost again, new children and pets are adopted in their place.

17One controlling motif in the novel is the thread of animality, of blurred boundary between human and nonhuman. The pivotal moment in Margot/Marcus’s transition is orchestrated through a transcorporeal becoming, with one identity disappearing in the earth and another being born from it. Let us also note the pronominal play in the following: it is she at the beginning, followed by a no-subject limbo, as the teenager is bodily bending on the path, considering which way to move on; and now it is he, going forward:

She reached down and pressed her hands into the damp earth. She felt Margot leaving.
Stopped dumb-struck on the path, bent double. Felt a sudden, great sorrow at what was gone, what was left behind, what would never be spoken of again.
His name was Marcus. He did not remember his parents. He was walking along the canal.
(124–1255; emphases added)

18Marcus’s trajectory is also interesting to note, for its connotations of a potentially straight path, as he walks along the canal and ‘progresses’ from one gender to another. However, this is not conventional progress as Bildung. Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of direction helps to further challenge the realist teleological agenda here. Theorising direction as ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and a straight path trodden by a directing majority, as a ‘steady and solemn progress of bodies going in the same direction along a street’ (Ahmed 2017, 46, emphasis added), the way it happens in the city of London in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Ahmed stresses the importance to ‘remember that life is not always linear, or that the lines we follow do not always lead us to the same place’ (46). It is in this movement that may be nonlinear, digressive, forking or curving that the possibility of transformation lies: ‘It is not incidental that the drama of life, moments of crisis that require a decision, is represented by the following scene: you face a fork in the road, and you have to decide which path to take. This way or that one, you must decide. And then you go one way’ (46). Queer phenomenological problematisation matches queer ecology, and the new materialist-realist mode, which is reflected in the way Marcus is progressing, but not in a conventional sense of ‘progress’ as causality and evolution. It is true, he is walking along the canal; but a canal is no straight line, the forest path no straight path: ‘The river was wild and curved’ (139; emphasis added). Thus, it is the river that furnishes the digression, transformation, whereby Marcus is ‘thrown off course’, to borrow Ahmed’s pun, which can open an avenue of new possibilities, new worlds, be a gift or a loss, when there is no linearity or finality, but perpetual loops and returns. ‘We might sense how a life has a shape when it loses shape’ (Ahmed 2017, 47). Water is of course the perfect manifestation of this shapelessness, liquifying boundaries into multidirectionality. The river is also a part of material reality, which undermines the idea of linear progression and human intentionality as a feature of conventional realism. By the agency of the river, Marcus curves towards a strange encounter, a peril, a new beginning, and eternal return and becoming with water. Significantly, his drowning is not described as death (a final point in teleological progression, and end as both intention and conclusion), but as another moment in the loop of transformation, in which the river is a vital force that will carry him forward, but not toward a closure either of his story or his identity:

The current took him quickly in its arms and carried him along and away from the place by the pines. . . . it had carried bodies before, all the way to the Thames and on and afterwards to the sea. . . . The river carried him as far as it wanted and then buried him (246–247).

19We can recognise the looping trope introduced at the beginning. Gretel senses the same eternal pulsation of the river as organic life, in which everything is in motion and nothing is clean, clear, or final, with no border between life and death, human and nonhuman, beginning and end:

I remember how on the river everything’s sinking, the half-bodied shape of the locks beneath the scum, the intestines of roots and trees. . . . there is a yellowing of foam along the banks and a heron stands in the chug of weir as if he’s waiting for something (264).

20That Marcus changes gender on the way is also notable, for its associations with famous trans accounts, fictional or autobiographical: Jan Morris’s Conundrum, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando or Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve, which are also structured as a journey, with characters changing gender on the way, though not necessarily arriving at the destination of a ‘true’ identity. As I have argued elsewhere, body, gender, identity and landscape are inextricably linked in these journeys, but there is no finality or ‘found’ identity as a ‘solid’ ground or teleological end, both in the physical and metaphorical sense (Kuznetski 2020, 79–96). Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s explication of the etymology and meaning of the word queer as ‘across’, ‘twisting’ and ‘athwart’, Greta Gaard speaks of the deeper implications of ‘trans*’ when linked to transecology: it points to inter- and transdisciplinarity and the idea of transversality, not only of gender and sexual identity, but of the human and place, human and nonhuman (Gaard 2020, xxii–xxiii). We can see this well at work in the novel: in the passage I have just quoted, in addition to the imagery of the river and water as ‘sinking’, ‘half-bodied’, with yellowing foam as a human trace (the weir is a man-made construction), the heron is a strong presence, either as a native creature in this place, or the undead Marcus who shares animal features with the other characters in the novel. Arguing for the significance of matter in defining reality, Jane Bennett insists that ‘human intentionality can be agentic only if accompanied by a vast entourage of nonhumans’ (2010, 108). This ‘thing power’, animality and impurity are part of the novel’s subversive narrative poetics, which we can recognise as material realist, expressed through narrative texturality. When trying to survive in the woods by the canal as Margot, she is likewise described in terms of animal imagery, crouching in the bushes, hiding from creepy fishermen, their voices a crescendo of the night, which includes those of an owl and a fox (57). Washing in the river as Marcus, he sees a ‘rough scaling of dirt’ on his legs, which is ‘almost reptilian’ (202). As the current passes across his body, with skin ‘coming out from under the grime’, his feet become connected to the ‘roots that grew out from the mud’ (202). This imagery adds to the poetics of dirt and waste discussed above, in which reality is not only vibrant, but dark and agentic matter. Moreover, here and in many other episodes, trees are likened to both animals and people (who are animals). Blurring the boundaries between categories suggests rethinking of our view of reality: ‘There is a curl of mist that cuts the trunks off at their knees’ (48). Water also evokes traumatic memories: as Marcus slips under water, he acts out the trauma of Charlie’s death, feeling that ‘all the rivers were connected and everything now was connected to that body’ (203). In this murky, fluid, shape-shifting, textured world, in which the human, the floral and the animal are blurred, the very idea of language and narrative are also tested as part of the novel’s subversive, material-realist poetics.

Textured Language and Subversive Poetics

21Words and language are an important theme in the novel. They are textured and belong to the material, affective realm. While living an isolated life by the river, Sarah invents a private language for Gretel and herself, to tighten their bond and create a sense of power over traumas and phenomena, over which they may otherwise have no power . Thinking back to that language ‘no one else spoke’, which made ‘aliens’ of them (136) and determined her long-term identity, Gretel employs corporeal terms: ‘language rots through the brain and . . . I am the way I am because of the language you gave me’ (136). Working as a lexicographer, Gretel is trying to systematise the chaos she grew up in through concrete, tangible methods: the materiality of index cards, their thingness and basic colour schemes (‘white for citations, blue for production reference, yellow for drafted definitions’, 135). Yet the moment she reunites with her mother after a long search, the privacy of their past, its fears and affects resurface:

. . . we find those old words sneaking back and we are undone by them. . . . You tell me that you can hear the water effing along; . . . You tell me that you need me to leave, you need some sheesh time. I tell you that you are a harpiedoodle and grow enraged or laugh so hard you cry (6; emphasis added).

22In these instances, the words are based on kinetics or onomatopoeia: effing along is moving purposelessly/going with the flow; sheesh time is private undisturbed time that Sarah often craved, though her only company was her daughter. There is also sprung, messin, Bonak… ‘Words like breadcrumbs’ (256). Bonak stands for irrational, unconscious fears that accompany river life and perhaps the general human condition, represented by an invented (or not) creature that Sarah sets out to hide and kill (and probably does in a phantasmagorical scene towards the end, 249–251). Working on words as an adult, hiding in the impassioned world of lexicographers who ‘rarely hug’ (105), Gretel nevertheless first perceives a word as textured, intensely physical and animalistic: ‘Dread was a word that could also be used to describe flocks of birds taking off in the sky. The mass of birds rose up in my throat, flooded out through my cracked jaw’ (12–13). This emphasis on the physical, affective origin of language as a result of the interaction of the body and its neural system (brain, vocal cords) with the sensations of the outside world contributes to the discussions of the body/mind divide, the challenge to the old Cartesian logocentrism, disengaged from the physical body and proposes a shift towards an ‘embodied mind’ (Walezak 6) as ‘a fresh understanding of realism today’ (6). In the world of this novel, words have agential texture: Margot struggles with learning to read as a child, because she perceives the words on the page as moving like ants, crawling and swimming into one another (88). Thinking of Fiona’s prophecy, the words in her head are ‘spiked with barbs, unsettling as hot coals’ (81). But the most spectacular scenes are Sarah’s desperate attempt to come to terms with the words she no longer has any mastery of, due to her Alzheimer-affected brain. Gretel witnesses ‘the words leaving’ her mother. ‘The pronouns are slippery and won’t stay still; objects go’ (257). In a desperate attempt to regain power over words, Sarah grabs the pieces of paper with quotations that Gretel is working on and pushes and presses them into her mouth, swallows them, trying to recollect a word she cannot remember (166–167). As the shock passes, Gretel considers the action in corporeal, even humananimal terms:

There is something childlike about your logic, your hands pressing the written word between your teeth, your tongue reaching out to reclaim it. The same as us on the river: eating the heart of an animal to steal its strength (107).

23Interestingly, if words and logic leave Sarah, the stories ‘stick around’ (257), as the crone’s ‘mouth gapes open and they repeat and repeat’ (258)—traumatic memories including Marcus’s provenance and tragic death. This way, memories linger as embodiments, despite ‘no words’ coming to Gretel ‘to finish the story’ as she discovers Sarah’s body hanging out of the window in the rain (263). This lack of closure resonates with the focus on experientiality, multiplicity of layers, texture and nonlinearity, which characterises Johnson’s novel, as well as materialist realism today.

24The narrative employs alternating modes, with lines switching between a progressive present and revived memories; other people’s accounts are brought upon or inside the narrative present, superimposed as a narrative palimpsest. An uncommon second person is used, when the narrator depicts her mother, either in the progressive present of their reunification or in telling Sarah’s story (evidently as she would tell it herself). Gretel’s own feelings and memories are rendered in the first person, while the sections telling Marcus’s story are narrated in a mock-omniscient third person. Purdy has argued that the use of an intradiegetic you ‘automatically aligns the text with the epistolary, putting communication at the heart of its usage’ and, in this case, the fluid use of the second person allows the text to reach beyond the utterer, serving as a connecting tissue between the characters, but also with the reader (8). However, in addition to the second person, the first and the third ones are employed, and also a multiplicity of genres—a materialist-realist coming-of-age narrative; memoir; epistolary form; rewriting of myth, subverted fairy tale, feminist mother-and-daughter story, queer fiction… The connecting tissue is the material body, which enmeshes the human and the nonhuman, extending to the reader through textural, affective engagement. Armiero stresses that ‘the struggles in and against the Wasteocene are also narrative struggles’ (23). Narrative resistance, which he calls ‘guerrilla narrative’ takes the form of ‘embodiment [that] trespasses the border of the storyteller’s body and becomes a more choral bodily narrative’ (24), including ‘voices from the underworld’, coming from ‘wasted bodies’ engaged in ‘wasting relationships’ (22) that are otherwise invisibilised in Wasteocene. In Everything Under, this is achieved by creating a mock-realist framework of big history, evoking years, dates and facts about important historical and scientific events: ‘The year was 1978 . . . a spacecraft had set out for Saturn” (38). ‘The year was 1983 and two men are in space for 211 days, the longest anyone has ever spent there’ (238). Against this backdrop, in a timeless, murky reality in a closed-off canal world, real dramas take place, as actors invest in wasting relationships, which undermine teleology, progress, causality and human intentionality as ingredients of conventional realism. Infinite space and claustrophobic locality, big history and obscure individuals, a dynamic universe, perpetually shrinking and expanding and the material, porous, fluid, unfinished, vulnerable body are mutually transforming in narrative enmeshment, bringing forth the novel’s subversive, materialist-realist, textural poetics.