The Farm; the Nation; His World

So I up and moved to Europe about two weeks ago. I'm still pretty wiped; it was a lot of work (over the last year and change) and also so is really learning another language once you're in a country versus studying at home. It's good luck to have done it just before Fidesz ate shit instead of just before some kind of pan-VOX-Chega-Fidesz-National-Rally-Geert neo-fascist-hyper-victory for all time or something.

This outing was The Wicked Unaware, Diana's homecoming more or less. The title frames the chapter to think about knowledge, but then delivers on that in typically involuted Dorley fashion.

Everyone is painfully aware of her own wickedness. And in that, we get to see awareness as a double-edged sword. Frankie is the prototype in this; the eventually-unwicked by virtue of her awareness.

So wickedness becomes, for the primary subjects of Dorley a kind of paradox, dispelled in part by its own perception.

An Farm

The wicked unaware, the ignorant unsaved, the British.

I love that little x-shaped wicked/unsaved unaware/ignorant coupling. I love the descending tricolon to "the British."

I think as far-removed/close-by in history as Locke the idea that "the sovereign owns the nation as the father owns the family" emerges. "Daddy's home, and he's pissed" to quote Tucker Carlson. Roger Griffin calls fascism "a populist palingenetic ultranationalism."

In the setup for all this, there are these incredibly terse breadcrumbs that resonate deeply with what we know about Adam and Edy's backgrounds. The TV in the cage, the mother who is for some reason still here.

• Populist, in the sense of being peasantry.
• Palingenetic, in the sense of a pure new project.
• Ultranationalism, in the sense of doing battle with what you might, if you were very stupid, call the Big Society; the wicked unaware.

Replacing modernity with agricultural paternal conservatism. Taking the common clay of the Old West (you know: morons) and replacing a rotten Britain overstuffed with sophisticates and weather reports.

Diana

Posing Diana as the redeemed product of Declan right after this little church vignette seems to support Hannah's reading. Even the television restrictions mirror one another.

Taken with how low-key the events of the chapter were overall, I wonder what Greaves is going to do with that in the next little while. There's definitely something in the air.

The conscious metaphor of Declan as cage as Diana returns to Dorley of her own volition is striking. There's two opposed but not necessarily mutually-exclusive things there, maybe.

Dorley as Freedom

Declan was a cage, Dorley (as-transition-writ-large) is an unconventional sort of freedom. Dorley has to be unconventional enough to be off-putting-to-me for that to not be a kind of facile read. It has to evoke some discomfort for the reader in the same way that, I'd assume, the initial idea of being a woman is uncomfortable for an egg. But the readers are more distant than that simple idea; we're removed by the irony of character and (a few of us excepted) by being trans. In this scheme, Dorley has to be a freedom that looks like a prison.

Dorley as Another Willing Cage

Alternately, Declan was a willing cage, Dorley is a willing cage, pick your poison. If that sounds like despair, it isn't really, I don't think? There's an element of that, sure. But it's just the group identity double-edge cutting again. What's the individual's duty to the collective? For Declan, the duty was, ostensibly, violence against women. For Diana, the duty is to reject that. And the collective's obligation to the individual? For Declan, the kind of stupid boys-will-be-boys solidarity that keeps growing in like an especially tenacious knotweed. For Diana, it's a duty of care and recovery.

Shame, Guilt, &c.

Aunt Bea blends with Monica, with the other sponsors, with the beatings Declan endured, with the indignities he suffered with pride and which Diana recalls with shame.

This attitude crops up a lot in Dorley, is still alien. I can't tell if this is a Certified Trans Analogy Thing or just a bump in the paradigm of the text for me. Or is it more to do with guilt? I don't feel guilty about very much, honestly, so I maybe just don't have a handle on that relationship to one's self.

You're not trapped; you can leave.

Why is Diana allowed freedom of movement here? Why is Ollie finally allowed sunlight? There's clearly a line of excessive force, after which the organization knows they've done wrong. There are clear practical reasons within the frame of the text, right? Diana can leave because she came. Same reason extended to Beth.

The organization extends freedom at the crux of the personal crises the recruits experience. That maybe/not goes to support the Dorley-as-Freedom analog.

Women of the basement unite! All you have to lose is your balls.

-- Elizabeth "Girly" Flynn

Some of this is about eggshell-self-abnegation right? You're in a prison of manhood, then in a prison of dawning realization (also what sounds like "horror at the deep pain in the ass of it all"?) and then you're in a prison of gender-performance-coercion and then you define your new identity and that's when you're free. But free in a social context that is historically at-best-ambivalent and often actively hostile to you.

So the prison is an epistemic one; you're at the bottom of the well in the dark. You can't see your hands and so you can't easily climb out until high noon.

Even so.

All of this apologia from Diana is cathartic, but it's (I think) intentionally a bit over the top. Diana is so apologetic but she's also both:

• Not Declan
• The same person as Declan

And that entanglement is a trap, as Frankie describes; you could waste the entire future because of regret. Also Frankie and Val are best friends, Frankie's just wrong on this account.

Anxiety

She looked at it for a very long time, with Declan beating against the walls of her mind, her every instinct insisting on her outrage, her disgust. So she made herself laugh at it.

Diana assigns her discomfort to the part of her called Declan, and that rhymes with a lot of the un-integrated pain we see later on in e.g. Christine. So, maybe just a touchstone. Maybe a jumping-in at the deep end. Or, like, Declan becomes the center of a belief in her own (self-supposed, not actual) irredeemable nature. Diana's predicament of identity is at its best yet in this chapter.

She's also a great character study from Greaves; how far how fast can she stretch the reader's empathy? Pretty far pretty fast, for me, anyway. What I think is additionally fascinating is the way Greaves approaches a theme of disavowal? Each of these women crawls out from some false life (natch) and they continually negotiate between the bias-that-was-them and the common soul (for lack of a better term) that still is them.

We get that in Diana's sing-song reasoning, her comparison between voice training and singing. We get it too in Melissa's disordered eating and persistent low confidence. And of course with Adam and Edy. At this point, Steph is sort of at rest, but I'm curious what Beth will decide to keep/toss from her past in the end.

Odd Thoughts

Stephanie and Leigh and

Darkly funny that it's everyone tying themselves into none-less-worthy knots over the shame-guilt-rat-trap they live in. Foxes know many things, and hedgehogs know mostly that they are all very sharp.

Diverse Needs Diversely

[W]e have bent and broken our own rules before. We re-evaluate them all the time. I’m starting to feel that every time we do not, we have failed someone.

Nice double-entendre here. We, as in "Dorley", or we, as in "each of us." Which reading leads to either failing another, or failing one's self. I like what that implies about the interplay between the collective and the person.

Three Body Solution

It's very clear that this chapter is About Diana, and I think the text might benefit from just being split into her only. How do other people feel about the Melissa/Shahida/Abby throuple? I kind of "nothing" it right now, despite thinking each of them is a pretty compelling character in their own right. Sometimes people run out of plot in a romdram or a sitcom, maybe that's what this is?

A Hole in the World Like a Big Black Pit

This is how extremist organizations get you; they start with almost-truths like "England is terrible" or whatever, and pry you off of reason one bit at a time.

Beware compassion

Tangent but this "sin of empathy" stuff feels new. People used to be more interested in being hypocrites by-and-large, instead of actively vice-signaling, I think?