Arts
Wednesday, October 21, 2020 — 11
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
The wound that was never
fatal: On ‘The Changeling’
The first time I found a
copy of Joy Williams’s “The
Changeling,” I was 19 and
wandering around the public
library searching for it — though
I wasn’t aware of this yet. It was
a few months before summer
break and I was on the brink of a
spectacular mental breakdown.
This would be unexpected
news for everyone, including
myself, because I had my life
perfectly
compartmentalized,
my days carefully cut and
quartered and neatly wrapped.
Every day I went to class and
sat in the seats closest to the
walls, and ate the same veggie
sandwich at the same dining
hall at exactly 5:30 PM, alone.
I was working three jobs,
doing private research with
a professor, my GPA was way
above average and I was so
incredibly numb. Every weekend
I would walk 40 minutes to the
public library and pick books
at random from the shelves
— vapid romance novels, epic
fantasies, ones that promised to
teach me a foreign language in
10 days. And I would let them sit,
accusing and untouched, on my
desk until they were due back
home. Nothing really interested
me but I was desperate to find a
book to teach me how to feel so I
went back again and again.
“The Changeling” became the
first book I finished in months.
At surface value, its plot
surrounds
Pearl,
a
young
alcoholic mother of a baby boy,
Sam. She flees her first marriage
to run away with Walker, her
exciting lover, but ends up a
widow in a devastating plane
crash that only she survives.
Pearl, and a child who looks
like Sam but she is convinced
is a changeling, a child who
is
secretly
swapped
with
another in infancy. Pearl and
this child begin living with
Thomas, Walker’s brother, on
an unnamed island inhabited by
several adults and a seemingly
endless number of children who
sometimes seem more animal
than human. Pearl finds herself
becoming a sort of surrogate
mother to these children, a role
that she cannot understand.
The children appear to love and
torment her with equal amounts
of fervor, which only hastens
her loosening grip on reality
and herself. With Sam and the
other children of the island,
Pearl feels an unbridgeable gap
between them and herself as
a maternal figure. Every day,
Pearl drinks by the pool as the
children clamber around her.
They enthusiastically ask her
questions about herself, the
island, the world, but “... she
had developed a trick to take
herself out of their range … she
concentrated, she rose in her
mind, she moved of a distance.
Her body would lie there,
surrounded by the laughing
children, but she would be gone.
Having
knowledge
without
knowing, her thoughts far away,
her body there, but in darkness,
stroked by the whispers of
summer.”
This novel reads as a sort of
fever dream; with each page you
are unsure of how much of the
narrative is actually based in
fact. It is a strange and dizzying
landscape, one that captured me
as soon as I reached this line — it
was as if these were my words,
my thoughts, laid out bare on
this page:
“She felt that if she could
only get interested in and
knowledgeable about a kinky
subject, for example hockey
or sharks, she would be a more
contented person. She could not
just be fucking all the time. Soon
something more would have to
happen. Pearl did not feel that
she was a real person.”
That
summer,
just
after
coming home from college for
break, the hole in my chest
tore open and I became so sad
that it hurt to even breathe. I
stopped sleeping and eating,
went on hours-long walks every
night, just wandering around
the woods behind my house in
the dark listening to the same
playlist on repeat. The bones in
my chest and the knobs of bone
in my shoulders surfaced, the
skin on my face was peeled back
so tight it was easy to picture
what my bare skull looked like
underneath. I looked inhuman.
My skin was a gross yellow color,
eyes bulging out of their sockets,
fingers
like
claws,
jagged
spine like scales. I often found
myself
unable
to
recognize
myself as I casually passed a
reflective surface. My mother
was distraught and confused as
she held this creature, shaking
with sobs again over nothing at
all, nothing that it could name
in any language. Why are you
crying? she asked. Let me help
you, what’s wrong?
My treatment center was
quite far from us but my parents
drove me there multiple times
a week to get electricity zapped
into my brain; it was an hour and
a half’s drive across the Tappan
Zee bridge, and I remember
feeling choked up with rage and
self-hatred, overwhelmed with
guilt about making my parents
have to miss work to drive me
to a place that taught me how
to feel human, how to do basic
tasks that even infants know
how to do.
Like clockwork, I started
crying as soon as my ass hit the
car seat.
I
don’t
understand,
my
mother said.
How could you love someone
like me? I demanded. I was
disgusted by everything about
myself. I was coarse and twisted,
ugly and helpless.
I don’t know, she answered,
But I still do.
At the time, I heard that as “I
have to.” Isn’t that what mothers
are supposed to do? Provide the
kind of love that blinds you, has
you reaching into the dark, but
stupidly unafraid? I was furious.
How does it make sense to
love
something
you
cannot
understand?
“The
Changeling”
doesn’t
make sense, but that was just
what I needed. Love, fear,
violence, joy all blend into an
indistinguishable
haze.
The
children quote Dante and plot
murder, a boy pulls a length of
Christmas lights and star tree
topper out of his stomach. A man
dreams of “[seizing his lover’s]
throat with his jaws (to) worry it
with joy until the bones [break]
like seeds on his teeth.” Pearl’s
vagina is compared to a wound,
“the wound that opened again
and again. The wound that was
never fatal.” This same wound
— the one that delivers Sam into
the world — allows for them to
“fold back the flaps of skin and
unfold the baby from her like a
bridal gown … her terrible dark
wound [that would become] a
nest for the flying creatures of
the night.”
When
my
mother
was
pregnant with me, she had a
dream that she was fishing and
caught three fish. The three fish
were supposed to foretell me
and my two sisters. She tells this
story whenever she is feeling
particularly sentimental.
You were the biggest one,
she’d tell me. You were the first
and the most beautiful. And you
were mine.
At the end of that summer
my poor health landed me
in the hospital with heart
complications. The first night I
had to run some tests, including
an ultrasound of my chest. The
technician smeared cold gel
on my skin. In the monitor, my
black and white heart stared
back at me. It looked like the
glassy eye of a fish, swimming
around in its fluids.
Senior Arts Editor Jo Chang can
be reached at changje@umich.edu
JO CHANG
Senior Arts Editor
DESIGN BY JO CHANG
When art meets algorithm:
artists’ dual-edged sword
William Deresiewicz sees a
crisis in the arts, and he needs you
to stop it. Unfortunately, it’s not
going to be that simple, because the
problem comes from something
that is increasingly woven into
the fabric of our daily lives: The
Algorithm. By “the algorithm,”
Deresiewicz means the coding of
apps and programs that we use
every day to consume content, that
show us certain posts or songs at
the top of our feed — the invisible
hand that, as Deresiewicz said,
“picks up things that are already
viral and makes them more viral.”
Any non-Luddite knows that
this is how the Internet works,
and Deresiewicz himself will
acknowledge that in some cases,
the algorithm has been good for
small artists who make it big
seemingly overnight — think Lil
Nas X or Rupi Kaur. But these
artists are the exception, not
the rule. Overwhelmingly, the
algorithm swallows small artists
whole, forcing them to the margins
or completely eclipsing them with
viral acts. In terms of seeing new
artists, the power tips away from
the audience and toward the big
tech companies — all the while
allowing us to think we are still in
control.
This is an uncomfortable reality
for everyone, not just artists. The
general public, the consumers
of art, don’t want to think about
art as something dictated by
the market forces of large tech
companies. After all, “the artist”
is a quasi-mythic figure in our
culture
—
moody,
mysterious
and
Walden-esque.
If
talking
about money in daily life is mildly
unpleasant, talking about it in the
arts is practically sinful. Artists
are supposed to exist outside of the
market, unmarred by capitalistic
whims. Thinking about art in
relation to money thus feels wrong,
because we want our art to be
above it all — to make commentary
about economics, sure, but never
participate in it.
A truth we don’t like to apply to
our artists, writes Deresiewicz in
his book “The Death of the Artist:
How Creators Are Struggling to
Survive in the Age of Billionaires
and Big Tech,” is that “wanting
to get paid does not mean you’re a
capitalist. It doesn’t even mean that
you assent to capitalism. It only
means that you live in a capitalist
society.” But as long as artists exist
in that capitalist society, and as
long as they want to make art, they
are part of a fundamental paradox
that “cannot be resolved; it can
only be endured.”
Here lies the tension that
today’s artists must endure — so
how are they doing it? For his
book,
Deresiewicz
interviewed
hundreds of artists from a range
of mediums, including music,
writing, poetry and visual art. He
doesn’t downplay the crisis he
sees, explaining in his book that a
title like “creative entrepreneur”
for an artist is simply “sugar for
the turd of gig work.” Most full-
time artists work paycheck to
paycheck, piecing together funding
from selling art, doing live events,
Patreon (a subscription service for
artists’ content) and other assorted
income streams. This is because, he
told The Michigan Daily, any artist
“who wants to follow their own
vision and be interesting and say
what they want to say is going to
be at odds with a system like that.”
This means they probably won’t
make much money — “and that’s
the problem with the system.”
Aside from making a compelling
argument, Deresiewicz’s book also
manages to create a nonfiction
work
of
literary
merit.
His
writing style is direct, just like his
interviewing style; he has no time
for you to waste, and he won’t waste
yours. He writes without mincing
words in a straightforward way
that makes the reader trust what
he has to say. He describes the
Ramones, the Talking Heads and
Blondie as “the archetypal three-
chord punk quartet, a cerebral
art-school act, and a disco-scented
dance band fronted by a singer
with a cotton-candy voice.” A
bland, purely informational voice
EMILIA FERRANTE
Daily Arts Writer
Lessons from Ethnography
Can Ethical
Critique
Change
Society?
Online Event: Thursday, October 29, 2020 | 4:00 p.m.
WEBB KEANE
George Herbert Mead Collegiate
Professor of Anthropology
An online lecture. For more information, visit
events.umich.edu/event/75454 or call 734.615.6667.
wouldn’t appeal to the bulk of
people reading his work, a large
percentage of whom are either
middle class or upper-middle class
people, or are artists themselves.
His writing in the book manages
to captivate both audiences, which
is good, because those are exactly
the people he most wants to reach.
These are the ones who
have
been
conditioned
away from paying for art
but who have the means to
do so.
One thing that has made
it
infinitely
harder
for
artists, along with everyone
but the billionaires, is the
pandemic.
Deresiewicz’s
book
was
written
in
2019, but he seemed to
unfortunately
predict
the
future
when
he
wrote
“People
don’t
make
art
in
isolation,
and
online
interactions
are
incomparably
impoverished
relative
to those that take place
in real life.” This year, to
contextualize
this
new
normal,
Deresiewicz
reached out to all of his interview
subjects
for
the
book
and
completed follow up interviews
with ten. What he found was both
completely expected and very
distressing — “It’s been a disaster
for the arts.”
Deresiewicz’s
entire
book
lays out how the digitization of
art, especially music, has led to
dramatically decreased revenue
streams (think Spotify plays vs.
CD sales). This reality has led
many artists to rely on live events
for money. Without income from
those live events, many artists
now struggle to make money off of
their art, even after adjusting to the
digitized art world.
In addition, arts institutions
from museums to theatres have had
to close as a result of the pandemic.
“A lot of them might not survive,”
Deresiewicz said, “especially the
smaller ones, the independent
ones that produce interesting work
and artists that are still getting
traction.” Even revenue streams
from day jobs like food service
or Uber driving have dried up.
Deresiewicz and his interviewees
acknowledge that this could be a
chance to reset the art world, but
more likely is the notion that larger
institutions will get larger, and
smaller ones will get swallowed —
the game of the algorithm playing
out in real life.
The paradox of art and money
is,
according
to
Deresiewicz,
inherently
unsolvable
in
the
current
economy.
Like
other
systemic issues, the power of the
individual is limited. There is
hope, though, for both consumers
of art and for artists themselves.
People have already become more
conscious
consumers
of
food,
clothing, plastic water bottles and
more — so, Deresiewicz argues,
why not art? Often, he said, at
“other end of the arts economy,
of the supply chain, from you the
consumer, is not a corporation”
but rather an individual artist,
struggling
to
make
a
living.
Deresiewicz warned, “If
you’re getting something
valuable to you and you’re
getting it for free, you really
need to question that.”
As consumers of art, we
must learn to not expect art
to be free (or simply equate
exposure with payment).
There is hope for artists as
well. Young gen z artists,
for example, despite having
a complicated relationship
with self-marketing, have
a leg up in terms of pure
online experience. They
can use that experience
to their advantage, says
Deresiewicz, if they have
good art — which comes
from separating the online
self from the “authentic”
self.
Deresiewicz’s
culminating
advice for young artists is simply
this: “Instead of starting with the
question ‘What can I make that’s
going to get attention and make
money?’, start with the question
‘What do I want to make?’ and then
make it, and then figure out how to
get attention and hopefully money
for it,” he said.
Art first, promotion second.
We must learn to seek out art that
makes us think, that challenges us,
that makes us cry or laugh or feel
something — and then we have to
pay the artist who makes it.
Daily Arts Writer Emilia Ferrante
can be reached at emiliajf@umich.
edu
Overwhelmingly, the
algorithm swallows
small artists whole,
forcing them to the
margins or completely
eclipsing them with
viral acts.
ALEEZA JILL NUSSBAUM