1If transitions often symbolise change, hope and open possibilities, contemporary literature sometimes qualifies this vision in a radical way. In this respect, Daisy Johnson’s 2018 novel entitled Everything Under offers a fantastically weird case in point. It was summarised by Johnson herself in an interview whose title, ‘Weeping in Coffeeshops’, perfectly sets the tone:
It’s about a woman called Gretel who is looking for her mother. It’s been a decade since she saw her and the memories are indistinct, unclear. The more she looks though, the more comes back. She remembers living alone on the river with her mood-swung mother; remembers the winter a strange, lonely boy came to stay with them. Remembers also that there was something in the water, swimming upstream towards them, getting closer by the hour. It’s a rewrite of a myth . . . It’s about family and language and memory (in Hirshman 200).
2What needs to be added is that Gretel’s mother, Sarah, suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, that the whole novel is a rewriting of the myth of Oedipus, and that the ‘lonely boy’ is actually a transgender man called Marcus, who was initially called Margot, Sarah’s first-born daughter that she abandoned when still a newborn, and who then fled her foster home after an equally transgender oracle named Fiona told her that she would kill her father and have sex with her mother. Besides, the novel exhibits a profoundly non-linear structure, constantly shifting between chapters focusing on Gretel on the one hand and Marcus on the other, as well as between different temporal frames: when Gretel was still living with her mother, when she was looking for her after having been abandoned, and once she finally found her and went back to living with her.
3As a result, everything in this novel seems to be both in constant transition and metamorphosis, and inexorably pulled by the mythicgal weight of destiny that guides the characters towards their fate, in a novel where ‘everyone feels awfully, mythically doomed’, to quote Johnson (in McReynolds). Therefore, this paper explores how far such instability presents destiny as a hopelessly inevitable force, where transitions are always headed towards fate, and where voluntary change is never enough. I shall first explore how the landscape as a metamorphic environment actively draws the characters towards their fate. I will then analyse the way shifting bodies and identities only represent the fantasy of escaping destiny, before ultimately considering the fundamental literary paradox of this novel, which sheds light on the instability of language and fiction themselves as a necessary, inescapable force.
4In Everything Under, the river acts as a core element primarily defined by its paradoxical nature as both a flowing and immutable entity. ‘Water comes into everything I write and often some sort of fluidity is not far behind’, as Johnson explains (in Elkins). However, no possibility of change is offered: the characters never cross over towards some other place or state of existence, and the river always acts as a force drawing everything back to where it ought to be, not where it could be. For instance, the boat where Gretel and her mother live ‘is not tied to the bank but in the middle of the river, the mooring ropes drawn tight towards the shore’ (Johnson 48–49; emphasis added). As a result, and despite the boat being on the moving river, the ropes act as the physical reminder of a greater existing force emphasised by the adverb ‘tight’: its natural movement is to be taken back to its theoretical position near the bank. In this respect, Everything Under follows the century-long tradition of ‘Gothic ecology’, which states that ‘[j]ust as nature is always reclaiming its space, . . . it will always be victorious in the end’ (Kröger 20).
5Likewise, the flowing river does not offer any transition towards more clarity, but rather foregrounds ‘the materiality as impurity, hybridity, mixture and fluidity’ (Kuznetski 10). This eerie place’s transformative power actually blurs any understanding of the characters’ lives and surroundings. On the contrary, its metamorphic quality transforms purity into darkness, as expressed by Gretel, according to whom ‘[t]he water has a way of making anything that was clear murky’ (Johnson 165). This ‘messy river’ (Johnson 126) seems to willingly prevent any possibility of ever reaching any clear vision of what used to be and what was to come. It acts as what Gloria Anzaldúa calls ‘a borderland, . . . a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary [that] is in a constant state of transition’ (in Capancioni et al. 5). Consequently, every natural element is eternally ‘draining away, dissolving into liquid and becoming formless’ (March-Russell 36): transitions lead to a state of deterioration that bars any feeling of progression or positive transformation.
6Such a process feels all the more irresistible since, in this novel, the river is frequently associated with the ultimate, inescapable destiny: death. Paradoxically enough, water is initially a force of hopeful transformation, insofar as the character of Margot initiates her transition towards becoming Marcus in the water. Hence Johnson’s idea of ‘the . . . water as baptismal, making us the person we are supposed to be’ (in Coldiron), which ought to be approached through the perspective of material ecocriticism, which ‘posits that, endowed with meanings and thick with stories, matter is a site of creative becomings and dynamic expressions’ (Oppermann 89). However, such rebirth is only temporary, since nothing can resist the deadly quality of this element. ‘Water always flows, always falls, it always ends in horizontal death’, to quote French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (13; translation mine). This may be why, once Marcus fulfils the prophecy and kills his father Charlie on Sarah’s boat, he then throws the body into the river. Likewise, Marcus himself ultimately dies in this very same place: ‘The river dug him down, held him under. . . . No one did find him. The river carried him as far as it wanted and then buried him’ (Johnson 246). The two prepositions ‘down’ and ‘under’ reveal the fact that any change involving the river can only lead to a fall, while the expression ‘it wanted’ grants some tragic, mythical agency to the river that has now become an ever-moving grave.
7In this respect, space is to be approached as a shifting entity over which no control can be applied, thereby acting as a constant reminder of the inevitability of destiny. This unsettling feeling is first rendered through the fact that the characters always seem to live and to go nowhere, wherever they move and whatever they may attempt. As Gretel explains about her mother: ‘I remember how you used to say that we were nowhere, that we were outside everything. As if the place we were moored wasn’t on the maps; geography didn’t apply to it’ (Johnson 61). Likewise, she later says: ‘we came back to the river without warning. I couldn’t find where we were on the map’ (Johnson 187). The motif of the map that resists localisation and clarity suggests that the characters live in constant limbos despite their trying to reach fixity. Destiny, like Laplace’s demon, is the only force in the novel that can reach omniscient knowledge, to which the characters are refused access. In this respect, the unsettling atmosphere perfectly plays its role, insofar as ‘the weird de-naturalises all worlds, by exposing their instability’ (Fisher 41). Everything Under exhibits an environment where nothing can be fully controlled because all changes are already decided in advance. ‘Human agency is not erased altogether, but it cannot be conceived as separate from the organic processes within which it emerges’ (Leblond 208).
8Such metaphysical truth is made obvious through the circular structure of the novel. The characters and the plot always come back to this changing river, until reaching a state of ‘topophobia evoked by the spatial dynamics of “folk horrorism”’ (Thurgill 33). As Gretel argues, ‘The places we are born come back. They disguise themselves as migraines, stomach aches, insomnia’ (Johnson 1), ‘the places we were born came back to us. Still, it did not feel right to be there’ (Johnson 205), ‘the places we are born come back to us. They disguise themselves as words, memory loss, nightmares’ (Johnson 263). The sentence ‘come[s] back’ throughout the text, suggesting that the novel itself is submitted to the almighty, inescapable power of fate, while the notion of ‘insomnia’ on the first page is still echoed by that of ‘nightmares’ later on. Such a structure grants an almost supernatural quality to the land, which reminds the characters and the readers of the fact that any transition, any movement, is decided by forces that lie beyond their will, at the heart of the ‘topographical instability of the land’ (Lojo-Rodríguez 55).
9Beyond the shifting settings, the novel epitomises a more general reflection on the changing limits of the body in the definition of one’s identity, as well as the necessity to envision body and identity fluidity under a renewed light. To quote Alex Clark, ‘[Johnson’s] books also reveal a preoccupation with physical and emotional fluidity, being attracted by the idea that the limits of our body are not necessarily the limits’ (Clark), a vision that points to the broader contemporary concept of ‘transcorporeality’, 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’ (Kuznetski 2). This focus runs throughout her works: for instance, the main character of her short story ‘Starver’ published in her first 2017 collection, Fen, deliberately transforms into an eel, while the two sisters in her 2020 novel Sisters seem to share control over each other’s body. As a result, Johnson’s writing fully embraces 21st-century fiction and its preoccupation with the redefinition of physical limits and norms, as explored in Ali Smith’s short story ‘The Beholder’ for instance, where the equally female narrator discovers a woody lump on her chest growing into a rosebush; to quote Johnson, contemporary fiction ‘should feel that way, that gender is fluid, that sexuality is fluid’ (in Lea).
10Yet, characters mainly rely on corporeal transitions as an attempt to escape fate and their identities. This is the case for Fiona, the oracle, who used to be a man, like Tiresias in the myth of Oedipus condemned to spend seven years as a woman: ‘Once—she was eleven or twelve—Laura sat her down and told Margot that Fiona used to be a man. . . . That’s the truth, Fiona said, like a fish still alive in the belly of a heron’ (Johnson 91). This instance of what Johnson calls her ‘love [for] metamorphosis: the stories of women turned into trees, of gods turned into cows’ (in The Booker Prizes), underscores the lingering presence of the initial identity—the one ‘still alive’—despite the transition towards another gender.
11Furthermore, identity is never liberating but suspended. The novel refuses the optimistic trope of transformation as transcendence, in that the characters’ destiny is never fully altered. While walking on the shore, Marcus, who used to be Margot, ‘saw the people on passing or moored boats looking at her and understood she did not look like a boy. She looked like something in between, uncertain, only half made’ (Johnson 123; emphasis added). Marcus’s identity hovers perpetually in existential limbo, an eternal transition that seems never to reach its ultimate, stable state. Likewise, the text highlights the underlying fantasy at the core of such desire: ‘[Margot] wished him up. Wished him from inside. A boy with her face and hands, a boy with Margot hidden at the back of him. A boy who had not killed a man. A boy who had no parents’ (Johnson 124). Despite the character’s transition, wishing cannot undo fate. The last sentence in the quote lays bare this self-delusion by highlighting a fundamental ontological truth: no one is the origin of themselves, and nothing can be done against it. As such, Everything Under stands in sharp contrast with some common representations of change as a full opening up of possibilities, expressed by Catherine Spooner’s analysis of contemporary feminist folk horror and the genre’s supposed ‘excitement about the possibilities of transformation and “becoming other” [that] often outweighs fear and disgust’ (156). Despite the characters’ apparent agency on the microscopic level embodied by gender transitions, on the macroscopic one, becoming-other heightens, rather than diminishes, the horror and the feeling of inescapability.
12Such existential entrapment also lies in the weight of familial roles, which are both in flux and irrevocable at the same time; despite transitions in the power dynamics, co-dependence remains. Gretel lives through the fantasy of moving forward and abandoning her dependence towards her mother, as if she could finally experience an ontological shift away from her status of daughter: ‘I restrained myself from wrapping you up in the sleeping bag, pulling you to the floor, pressing my face against you. You were my mother. You were my mother’ (Johnson 209). This sentence encapsulates the whole tragedy of fate: the repetition of the expression ‘you were my mother’ in the preterit form epitomises the self-delusional wish for a severance from Sarah, as if the latter could cease to be her mother, as if such status could be left in the past. However, Gretel’s urge to keep physical contact with her mother reveals the impossibility of ever leaving her behind. The possessive adjective in ‘my mother’ acts as a constant linguistic reminder that Gretel’s identity is to revolve around Sarah. Relational proximity, ‘reality as enmeshment’ (Kuznetski 14), can neither be fought against nor moved away from.
13Besides, Sarah’s Alzheimer’s—like the narrator’s mother’s brain aneurysm in Sarah Hall’s 2021 Burntcoat—does induce a reversal of mother and child roles, but not a release from the force keeping the two together. As Gretel explains: ‘I haven’t been to the office for nearly a month; not since the day before I visited the morgue and, afterwards, began searching for you. It’s time I went back. Take-your-deranged-mother-to-work day’ (Johnson 103). The last sentence epitomises the unwanted reversal of roles, where the traditional take-your-daughter-to-work day is now turned into its full opposite. Roles have not been suppressed, they have just been switched, far from what Rosi Braidotti considers becoming to be, namely ‘neither reproduction nor imitation, but rather empathic proximity and intensive interconnectedness’ (in Spooner 156). Ironically enough, the archaic meaning of ‘deranged’ signifies a disturbance, a perturbation in the pre-existing order, while the metaphysical rule keeping the two characters together can never be broken. Likewise, the power of such an inescapable bond is rendered later on in the novel, when Gretel tells Sarah: ‘I wanted nothing more than to cut you out, cut you right out of my insides the way Alzheimer’s did to a chunk of brain the size of an orange. You populated me; you ran the spirals of my thinking’ (Johnson 135). The repetition of the expression ‘cut you out’ conveys the full extent of the underlying violence in Gretel’s understanding that there is no escaping her mother, that no matter how hard she tries, no transition will be effective enough to break the bond that ties her to her mother, and to her fate. ‘Later, when they’re older and Sarah is sick, the relationship swaps places, and Gretel is the mother and Sarah is the child. So in a way they are always trapped in this, as you say, primal place’, to quote Johnson (in Coldiron). Family relations, therefore, are not simply the beginning of the characters’ lives, but their whole frame.
14As a result, the novel dramatises a transition from a state of blindness to a state of clarity regarding the inevitability of fate and the illusion of considering one’s identity as mutable thanks to free will. Talking about her mother, Gretel says: ‘You become obsessed, also, with thoughts of inevitability, unavoidability. There is a sense of doom about you, dragging your wretched hide around my house. I know, you keep saying, what will happen’ (Johnson 47; emphasis added). The apparent antithesis between the state of becoming and the unavoidability of destiny sheds light on the horizon of transitions in Everything Under, namely the painful realisation that such freedom is an illusion. A few lines later, Sarah explains that ‘there is no escaping, that the way we will end up is coded into us from the moment we are born and that any decisions we make are only mirages, ghosts to convince us of free will’ (Johnson 47; emphasis added): destiny, being part of the characters’ genetic identity, can never be silenced.
15Ultimately, the unfolding of the novel itself embodies the overarching power of destiny, given that the whole plot leads to Marcus having sex with his biological mother Sarah, thereby fulfilling Fiona’s prophecy: ‘She was naked beneath the blankets. His hands were shaking. She was undoing the buttons on his shirt, one by one. . . . It was always, he thought, going to happen. This is why I came here. This is what I’m here for’ (Johnson 229). At that moment, Marcus fully acknowledges his submission to fate, while the narration shifts to direct speech to make such realisation even more explicit. Besides, his last two sentences move from the preterit to the present tense, as a final admission that the arrow of time and all the transitions in his life had always been targeted towards this fateful situation, where Marcus is faced with the inconvenient truth: ‘the desire to escape the self is endless because it is impossible’, to quote philosopher Jill Stauffer in her essay Ethical Loneliness (79).
16Such impossibility is precisely what the mysterious character of the Bonak embodies, and why it is so crucial throughout the novel. Indeed, this legendary monster looming in the water without anyone knowing exactly what it looks like gradually shifts from an abstract, mysterious entity that can be ‘anything’, ‘what you’re afraid of’ (Johnson 250) to the sheer embodiment of the immutability of destiny. Indeed, Gretel slowly realises that this shapeshifting creature could actually be her mother herself: ‘The river was safe for the first time in decades. . . . You were stripping the rough, scaly hide away from the flesh, tugging it free. . . . You were up to your arms in Bonak. . . . I watched you and—for a moment—it seemed as if you were turning into it. As if you had been it all along’ (Johnson 250; emphasis added). This passage exhibits a paradoxical transition towards what had always been, lifting the veil of change to reveal the underlying force of fate.
17On a metafictional level, the ontological instability of language in the novel paradoxically highlights the inexorable power of destiny, over which no control can be exerted. This linguistic dimension is first made clear when Gretel, who is asked ‘why don’t you like words?’, answers: ‘They move’ (Johnson 88). Contrary to the belief in language as a vehicle of transformation, opening up infinite possibilities, her reaction reveals a need for de-finitions, as her job as a lexicographer implies. However, words are not fixed units of meaning, but shifting forces that ‘wriggl[e] away like shoals of fish’ (Johnson 182). In this respect, presenting words as an uncontrollable current stands in radical contrast with Bachelard’s poetic vision of water as ‘the mistress of liquid language, of smooth language, of continued and continuing language’ (209; translation mine). In Everything Under, words resist any fantasy of submission as a tool, they are a raw entity with a will of its own.
18In that sense, the unfolding of the novel reveals the linguistic nature of destiny, as is visible through Sarah’s disease and her loss of language: ‘Being out of the house seems to have a worsening effect and your sentences are peppered with mistakes or misunderstandings which I, quietly, correct. I am becoming your mouth’ (Johnson 103), ‘Your language decays without any attempt at reforming it. . . . You speak of yourself in the third person and seem to have lost the letter M entirely’ (Johnson 107). Beyond the heart-rending, realistic description of Alzheimer’s disease and the pain it causes, these two passages show how language loss presents existence as a state of ‘decay’, against which fiction cannot fight. On the very contrary, Everything Under uses metafictional reflections to reject any escapist desire. For instance, Gretel tells her mother: ‘The word you were looking for is egaratise and it means to disappear yourself, to step out of your past. I tell you there is no such word and show you the place in the dictionary to prove it’ (Johnson 51; original emphasis). Just as there is no word, there is no possibility to escape from one’s origins and choices, and therefore no hint at that illusory potentiality in the novel.
19Consequently, the whole plot inexorably leads the characters to the realisation that language is an irresistible force, a component in the unfolding of fate. ‘Occasionally we find those old words sneaking back in and we are undone by them’, as Gretel argues (Johnson 6). Similarly, she gradually understands that language is inherited and inhabited: words can never fully be chosen, they always remind the individual of the defining power of their origins. To quote Gretel again: ‘And the language I grew up speaking was one no one else spoke. So I was always going to be isolated, lonely, uncomfortable in the presence of others. It was in my language. It was in the language you gave me’ (Johnson 136; emphasis added). The preposition suggests some form of physical entrapment within family ties and language itself, as confirmed by Johnson herself when she explains that she ‘also wanted to write about language and how the language our family speak to us in a way makes us the people we are’ (in The Booker Prizes): family becomes a self-contained linguistic world from which there can never be any real escape. Once again, Everything Under seems to embrace fatalism, which offers a strikingly different vision from what is usually associated with literature as a ‘power to undo oppressive practices imaginatively, turning them into sources of self-awareness and agency that promote change and transformation for individuals and communities alike’(Capancioni et al. 9).
20Beyond language itself, the very nature of the novel is in constant generic transition, hovering between ‘a materialist-realist coming-of-age narrative; memoir; epistolary form; rewriting of myth, subverted fairy tale, feminist mother-and-daughter story, queer fiction’ (Kuznetski 23) to highlight its ungraspable nature. The very fact that Sarah should call the main character Gretel for instance, or even sometimes ‘Hansel though she won’t tell [her] why’ (Johnson 147) is a clear echo of the famous tale by the Brothers Grimm and a first sign of generic fluidity in the novel. Furthermore, the riddle Charlie asks—‘There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other and she, in turn, gives birth to the first. Who are the two sisters?’ (Johnson 69)—is the second one asked by the Sphinx in some versions of the myth of Oedipus (the usual answer is day and night, by the way). This mythical dimension is made explicit when Fiona tells Margot: ‘You will kill your father, she said when she had enough breath. You will have sex with your mother’ (Johnson 243).
21Likewise, the narration explains how Roger, Margot’s adoptive father, found her when still an infant: ‘There was a dustbin on the path, half in a bush, blocking the way. The child was inside, wrapped in a blanket, sucking on strips of orange peel and weeping. Something biblical about it, Roger said, something accidentally mythic’ (Johnson 84). This story recalls the Old Testament and the episode of Moses, who was abandoned in a basket on the Nile by his mother Yokheved to save him from Pharaoh’s decision to kill all newborn Hebrew males before being saved by the daughter of Pharaoh himself, while also echoing the myth of Oedipus, who was abandoned by King Laius when still a baby as well. As a result, Everything Under intermingles two different sources to emphasise the inescapability of destiny, which is never ‘accidental’ and always goes beyond the generic limits of the story. To quote Lojo-Rodríguez, ‘readers are invited to consider the collapse of traditionally fixed limits and demarcations between fact and fantasy, history and myth, the familiar and the strange’ (55; emphasis added). Once again, transitions rather lead to the understanding that change does not always lead to creative progression.
22Ultimately, the novel lifts the veil on the predominance of an uncontrollable world that exceeds narrative frameworks, no matter their constant shifts. On a metaphysical and epistemological level, something will always escape full understanding and fixity. For instance, Everything Under redefines the traditional roles of beginnings and ends: the last section of the novel is called ‘Beginnings’, while Gretel argues that ‘[t]here are more beginnings than there are ends to contain them’ (Johnson 54). Fiction is here to provide neither closure nor any illusion of control and mastery; there may be ‘so many ways to begin’, to quote the title of Jon McGregor’s 2006 novel, but Johnson rejects the escapist desire to see transitions in the plot provide the reader with any feeling of completion.
23Indeed, the overpowering forces in the novel remain death and destiny, which hold sway far outside of the fictional world. Such truth may explain why even the rewriting of the myth of Oedipus does not trigger any change in its ending. In this respect, the novel abides by the Aristotelian vision of the muthos as a structuring form to present the content of the tragedy, understood as an action that has ‘a dramatic structure and a climax’ (Moddelmog 2) governed by causal necessity. To quote Gretel:
You have taken the sheet from your bed and hanged yourself from the window. . . . I cut you down. Death has worn you smooth as a stone. I hold my hands to the side of your face, the top of your head, your ankles, your shoulders, your wrists. I want—sitting there, clinging onto your bod—to say something. To end the story. To finish what we started. But, though I stay with you for a long time, no words come to me. (Johnson 262; emphasis added)
24Sarah’s suicide mirrors that of Jocasta in the Greek myth: its contemporary version provides the reader with no real evolution, no change in the characters’ destiny. ‘Entirely new stories might even be devised to explain the same subject’, as Fritz Graf argues in his article about the Ovidian perspective on myths (115). Beyond the ‘infinite adaptability of mythical narratives’ (Graf 117), words and language retreat to give way to the silent acknowledgment of destiny’s power. Rewriting stories cannot imply rewriting the universal inescapability of death. As Johnson herself puts it, Everything Under ‘very much has a structure which makes the story feel inevitable; right from the start, there is no escape from the events, and this is something I wanted to steal and put into the book. I wanted the book to feel as if it was rolling uncontrollably to its end’ (in Coldiron).
25Everything Under is definitely ‘weird’, ungraspable, constantly shifting in its story-line and its very nature, as if in constant transition towards both a new fluid form and relation to language, and the understanding of the inevitability of fate. Interestingly enough, as Mark Fisher notes, ‘one of the archaic meanings of “weird” is “fate”. The concept of fate is weird in that it implies twisted forms of time and causality that are alien to ordinary perception, but it is also eerie in that it raises questions about agency: who or what is the entity that has woven fate?’ (15) As a result, thinking about transitions as a movement towards change and a proof of agency, and fiction as a purely hopeful force is not what this novel fundamentally relies on. On the very contrary, ‘[m]etamorphoses, shifts and transformations possess a destabilising effect by destroying “the reality around”, as Johnson suggests’ (Lojo-Rodríguez 60). Yet, destruction does not mean annihilation and nothingness. In this respect, Everything Under does offer some form of hope, a vision, a shift towards a new epistemological state, that of the necessary renewed understanding that control is always limited. Fiction, as a structurally destabilising force, cannot sustain the fantasy of complete agency; rather, it leads the reader, like Oedipus, to transition towards the pragmatic acknowledgement of the fact that ‘to be human means to lack total vision, absolute knowledge’ (Moddelmog 82).
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