from the editor's desk
Review of ‘Wall’ by Jen Craig
Craig, Jen. Wall. Chicago: Zerogram Press, 2023. RRP: $14, 188pp, ISBN: 9781953409119.
Jenny Hedley
The title of Jen Craig’s Wall refers to the protagonist’s long-proposed artistic project: a ten-metre wall intended to ‘give strong and substantial form to a very personal phenomenology of surviving anorexia’ (1). Wall is addressed to Craig’s partner Teun, who functions less as a fully realised figure than as a device to reflect the stubborn, single-mindedness of her artistic practice. Craig writes to Teun of tiny figures placed obsessively within ‘over-wide and cluttered spatial environments’ and ensconced within layers of glass, steel, wire netting and Perspex, ‘so that they can be seen but also not seen at all’ (8). These figures are treated not as stable forms but are distorted, obscured and layered alongside projections, holograms and media palimpsests. In this meticulous arranging and rearranging of matter—this insistence on control through accumulation—I recognise a familiar logic from my adolescence, when anorexia and obsessive ordering functioned as parallel strategies for surviving a world organised by commodification and patriarchal demands for bodily self-regulation. Even the narrator’s ‘diet company name’ gives paratextual meaning to this material collision: she describes ‘working hard to flog the “crass aspects”’ of her name on Facebook—a name that mirrors ‘the always potentially anorexic we’ in a commercialised world (8).
Without being able to see the ‘Still Lives’ that will make up the Wall, I am drawn to the methodology of the artist’s process: layer upon translucent layer of obsessive detail, each act of creation decided and performed in the moment, an active state of resistance against planning. The narrator’s mode of address—the enjoyably relentless, associative chain, chatterbox epistle—mirrors the stream-of-consciousness nature of her art, a strategy that reads less as improvisation than as a sustained experiment in how digression might carry traumatic material without naming it outright.
While living in London, Craig spies her former art history teacher Nathanial Lord at an exhibition in Hackney, where three of her ‘Still Lives’ are unfortunately installed at the back of the gallery, near the toilets. So eager is she to make Lord think that she has made something of herself since art school that she impulsively rattles off a bogus intention to produce an Antipodean version of Song Dong’s Waste Not from the contents of her deceased father’s house in Sydney. She considers her brother Angus as much a part of the problem of the house—‘another manifestation of the overwhelming mountain of things to deal with here’ (7)—as her father’s lifetime of hoarding. Craig tries to convince herself that the Song Dong approach will imbue otherwise ordinary, overlooked objects with brilliant meaning through intentional aesthetic curation. But when Craig opens the door to the red brick house of her childhood she is confronted ‘with the definite and ordinary thingness of it all’ (13). A skip is hired, the Song Dong proposal abandoned. What remains is not an installation but a confrontation with accumulation itself—its resistance to aesthetic redemption.
I am interested in the narrator’s sorting processes: how she determines what is ‘definite, useless rubbish’ (e.g., a black bag tied off with a knot at the top) as opposed to the murkier pathos of items that gesture to her father; how discarding might be seen ‘as a series of ordinary muscular contractions’, each one propelled by the previous (21). Recently, I returned to California to sort through my mother’s belongings that I’d kept for fifteen years in a portable storage cube. For eight days I entered a trance-like state of what Craig calls mindful contractions, sorting into piles the obvious rubbish, ambiguous gifts or forced donations, and that which would be freighted across the Pacific to form a more permanent archive in Melbourne. While Craig’s protagonist, and Craig herself, shift their creative practice from tangible artworks to words, my own research seeks the reverse and moves toward the materiality of inherited archives. I share with Craig the desire to want to turn what is unbearable into ‘something that I could live with’: a thing of art that she proposes might ‘make it possible for you to solve, at last, the one huge problem in your life that it has always been impossible to solve’ (56).
As much as this book is about fictional Craig’s artistic avoidances—including the vacuousness of artspeak—and her monumental task of discarding things, her relationships to people are subjected equally to the sorting process, revealing how ethics become entangled with artistic control. She examines her friendship with two other recovering anorexic artists from her school days and ultimately discovers that her ways of ‘helping’ people navigate their traumas can have harmful consequences—another instance in which control masquerades as care. She considers also her father, who shared with her a cavalier attitude toward people and things; how they each dominated conversations with endless word associations, a trouncing address in which they felt compelled to convince the listener of whatever it was that they had manufactured in the moment. Craig realises that neither of them ever got anywhere at all because they ‘were always so busy being “onto” something else’ (18); this book is a reckoning with that inherited impulse, a multi-layered self-inventorying which is a pleasure to witness. Given the spinning, unfurling patterns of the text it was difficult to locate a concise extract to illustrate one such revelation:
This way that I was always getting caught up with trying to make sense of my precipitous actions—my peculiar need to make careful and rational justifications for everything I did. As if my life were comprised of nothing but one elaborate justification after another, and each of them concocted. One at a time—just to make temporary sense of what I would otherwise be unable to account for. (160)
Read in this light, Wall’s digressive methods appear less evasive than deliberate. A version of the novel Wall accompanies author Jen Craig’s 2017 PhD dissertation from Western Sydney University: Disgusting Woundedness: anorexia and the transgenerational transmission of trauma. Craig’s abstract notes that the accompanying creative submission, The Wall of Still Lives, tests the uses of digressive strategies to access traumatic source material in a fictive account even as ‘the anxious teleology of a narrative voice works to exclude [the anorexic experience]’. I adore this book for the way it skirts around trauma without making it the focus: trauma lurks always beneath the surface and remains unacknowledged on most pages, even as it influences the narrator’s attachment to people and things. As a recovered anorexic and bulimic—both clinical manifestations of my obsessive-compulsive disorder—I appreciate the obsessiveness of the voice which ruminates upon people and things and situations, getting stuck in grooves of well-worn thought; how the protagonist is unable to move on until she has convinced herself of whatever it is that she needs to believe in the moment: to appear to be right, or to make things right, or to do things in the right order, a particular way. More than calorie counting or ritual weighing, the meanderings of the obsessive-compulsive mind more clearly register the trauma and stuckness experienced by the disordered eater than any literal showcasing of dietary habits. Wall is a masterpiece: a battering ram of words whose force I did not wish to relinquish.
Works Cited
Craig, Jennifer Ann. ‘Disgusting woundedness: anorexia and the transgenerational transmission of trauma’. 2017. Western Sydney University, Doctor of Philosophy. Research Direct, https://researchdirect.westernsydney.edu.au/islandora/object/uws%3A45999/.
Jenny Hedley is a neurodivergent writer, digital artist, critic and third-year PhD candidate whose work has appeared in Archer, Cordite, Crawlspace, Diagram, Overland, Rabbit, The Suburban Review, The Sydney Review of Books, TEXT, Westerly and the anthology Admissions: voices within mental health. She lives on unceded Boon Wurrung land with her son. She can be found at jennyhedley.github.io/
