Maternal Aesthetics
a long form review of Kate Briggs, The Long Form (Fitzcarraldo, 2023)
Soft natural light and neutral palettes in nappy adverts, teddies with pink hearts or teddies carved from sparkling crystals, Mother’s Day cards in digitally-rendered handwriting, floral dresses, framed proverbs such as ‘all you need is love, laughter and gin & tonic’, instagrammable ‘sad beige’ interiors – the simultaneous commodification and idealisation of maternal experience continues in neoliberal society, the institution of motherhood as the poet Adrienne Rich so memorably termed it. Or to put it another way – aesthetics and motherhood share this: they are always intrinsically tied to social, economic and political structures.
In many ways the literary industry fuels this repressive vision of motherhood: on one hand prioritising parenting advice manuals, self-help books, motherhood memoirs and novels that tend to encourage atomistic views of motherhood, and on the other, demarcating innovative literary works as ‘books about motherhood’ – as if this were a specialist subject, of interest only to mothers. (As novelist Olga Ravn recently complained, this is ‘nothing more than elegant misogyny.’) Accompanying this is a notable lack – or avoidance – of critical interest in motherhood and its cultural representations in academic institutions.
In turns prose, essay, literary criticism, documentation of performance and architectural plan, Kate Briggs’ new novel The Long Form is one such innovative literary work which is very much not – or not just – ‘a book for mothers’, but a vital reappraisal of the generic novel form through the practice of mothering – and vice versa, a re-representation of motherhood through an expanded, open idea of what novels can be. In exploring an alternative aesthetics of motherhood, The Long Form is deeply invested in questioning standardised political and social values. It does so by examining what it is about the art of mothering that can be related to writing, art-making, dance and performance, and what it is about mothers and babies that complicate societal obsessions with individualism in ‘realist’ novels. In exploring these questions Briggs also challenges the idea that knowledge is something extracted like a sparkling crystal from compartmentalised thought and uninterrupted study, instead situating motherhood – entangled, relational, interrupted, messy, somatic, manual, political – as a nexus for the formation of critical thinking.
Unfolding over the course of a single, long day in a non-linear fashion, The Long Form has two central protagonists: Helen (a single mother) and her newborn baby Rose. Importantly, Rose is not a faceless baby or secondary addition to the narrative, but a detailed, witnessing participant. The relation between the two is presented as a creative co-project, a series of dances or performances, rather than one of domination and subjugation. Events or incidents include getting up, receiving a book delivery (Tom Jones: The History of a Foundling by Henry Fielding), having a nap, going to the park. And why shouldn’t these ‘ordinary’ or domestic occurrences be the central events of a novel, Briggs asks. In fact, how extraordinary they are, especially when witnessed through the rupturing event of a newborn baby, through whom everything is new and strange. In relation to this shift in seeing, The Long Form is interspersed with abstract shapes – blank circles, half-shaded circles, triangles, squares – that reference artist Bruno Munari’s mobiles from the 1930s and serve as markers for symbolic and perceptual projections by both Helen and Rose. These mobiles serve as metaphors for the novel as a whole: a composite of contrasting, moving parts – like a mother, baby and the world that they live in.
Moving back and forth between Helen and Rose and essayistic commentary on the novel form, psychoanalytic and critical thought more broadly, structurally The Long Form draws inspiration from Fielding’s novel. Later categorised as one of the first novels in English, Tom Jones was not perceived as such by Fielding who called it a ‘Heroic, Historical, Prosaic Poem’ and would be labelled an ‘experimental text’ by contemporary publishers. The Long Form similarly moves between prose and essay sections, a hybrid structure that Briggs identifies via. Tom Jones as a practice of ‘casuistry’— a way of testing and disrupting immediate theories and statements through ‘case narratives’. In The Long Form, Helen and Rose are the case study. Tom Jones, which is also in part concerned with the arrival of a newborn baby, has other functions – as Helen opens it and begins to read (interruptedly), the world of the novel comes into and overlays her domestic space, bringing in an alternative imaginal topography that expands its enclosures. But the importance of reading here is not – or only – escapist or intellectually reflective. As well as expanding space, Tom Jones provides a counterpoint: an adult presence or something to talk to and against (a voice from a different time, in different circumstances), during what for most mothers, is also a profoundly lonely time. In The Pleasures of the Text Roland Barthes writes: ‘I desire the author: I need his figure (which is neither his representation nor his projection), as he needs mine (except to “prattle”).’ The Fielding of experience. When Helen begins reading the novel, she finds herself being invited and welcomed by the narrator, to ‘Come along.’, a voice that she re-voices ‘in the silent voice of her own private reading, and it was as if she were somehow inviting herself.’
As a personal aside – an interruption – when I read this passage early into The Long Form an ache, a lump came into my throat, and everything suddenly stilled. Because, perhaps as unlikely as it sounds, this experience has happened to me – a foundational text from the long-distant past came into my life as a single mother, and provided a frame to structure (conceptually) my life during a lonely time. A distorting voice, an imaginal topography, the power of reading – of art. When we encounter an intense lived experience mirrored in a novel, it feels extraordinary and slightly uncanny. But is it – or perhaps what we have experienced is common to many others, but just hasn’t been articulated in a way that felt recognisable? That in this stance, many literary representations of motherhood have failed to fully reflect its strangeness and potentiality, as a state of critical receptiveness where – as with Munari’s mobiles – perceptions have been completely reset?
By focusing on how art-making and theory intersects with everyday life, The Long Form is in some senses a continuation of Briggs’ previous and widely-acclaimed non-fiction essay This Little Art (Fitzcarraldo, 2017), a meditation on her subjective experiences of translating Barthes, from whom the title of The Long Form is also taken, and of translation more widely, as a creative act. Conversations and creative collaborations are central to both books. In The Long Form, as well as focusing on the relationality of her protagonists Briggs thinks with, against and alongside a vast array of writers and thinkers such as John Dewey, Henry Fielding, E.M. Forster, Buchi Emechata, Mikhael Bahktin, D.W. Winnicott and Penelope Leach. As with the influence or presence of Fielding and the narrative of Tom Jones on Helen, tuning into these other voices gives The Long Form a mesh-like multidimensionality. In the way that This Little Art opened the doors in the UK for a wider conversation about the role of translators, so The Long Form aims towards not an idealising or definitive holism that re-corrals the maternal but presents it as a porous field of relations that cannot be neatly separated out and simplified. Similarly, the novel form, as Briggs observes, itself defies attempts at reductive categorisation.
In inviting us to think of motherhood as a co-constituted performance, or ‘a set of performatively delicate steps’, The Long Form like Rich’s institution of motherhood questions the ideologically essentialist notion that Mothers exist innately, and that at birth this knowledge wells up like a fountain inside a new mother and she will know what to do, feel, think. Helen, at times angry that ‘no-one had taken her aside and warned her’ that there was or is ‘no mother’, instead finds mothering ‘IN THE DOING OF IT.’ Mothering is an activity than anyone can do – this is a profoundly democratic and open vision of caregiving. The doing of it and the embodied, physical experience of everyday care cannot be separated from concepts of motherhood, to return to the idea of abstracted knowledge. Instead, in The Long Form we find motherhood to be a form of composition, paying attention to breath, measure, postures, bouncing, lifting, prancing, modulating steps and dancing. In this it reminded me of improvisational scores by feminist artists and writers published in the countercultural magazine Womens Work (1975), that re-envisioned domestic and everyday movements as performance art. Or the visionary compositions of dancers like as Pina Bauschmann and Trisha Brown, in particular Brown’s postpartum solo performance ‘Homemade’ (1966). Or La Monte Young’s Dream House (1966 – ongoing) project in collaboration with Marian Zazeela, a space of continual harmonic sound, accompanied ‘spiral-shaped mobiles, which cast dynamic shadows as they swirl subtly in passing air currents.’ Dream House is a project for a sound that could go on indefinitely – another long form. This for example, is Helen shielding Rose and herself from awakening, perilous light:
the evening sun approaching across the sheet towards Rose’s face, approaching the thin covers of her eyelids, Helen holding her hand like a parasol over Rose’s face to keep the encroaching brightness from waking her. A parasol or a stop sign: a hand gesture intended to temporarily halt the movement of the earth. STOP. Let me prolong this resting moment – Helen holding this pose until her arm ached.
Language development in infancy is visual and tactile – tied to signs, things and the symbolic – as much as it is verbal. Stop sign. This is a book. I am here. Here I am – a repeated refrain between Helen and Rose. Everything – gestures, houseplants, books, seating – is identified, interpreted, reinterpreted by the two, in different ways. The interpretative possibilities proliferating from these symbols and patterns emerging in the landscape of early infancy are another marker of a maternal aesthetics, as found in for example conceptual artist Mary Kelly’s Postpartum Document (1973-9). To me all these artworks from the 60s and 70s provide a kind of aesthetic matrilineage for the vision of maternal performance in The Long Form, which relates to Briggs’ inclusion of artist Madeline Gins’s WORD RAIN (1969) and whose architectural practice provides influential meditations on infrastructure, floor plans and ‘landing-sites’. I am also thinking here of the Happenings of the Fluxus movement: spontaneous participatory events affected by public settings that similarly questioned the normativities of plot and championed a de-professionalised version of the artist. The outside world, the public, is always coming into the domestic space that Helen and Rose largely occupy, whether this in the form of a delivery driver, a text message, a friend, a book, or simply in the shapes of trees, rain, sunlight. These outside influences create discontinuities and changes in unfolding rhythms of eating, sleeping, walking about, serving as both events in the novel and as temporal markers.
Time is critically important in several ways to The Long Form. It documents in detail slowed-down phenomenological perceptions, attending to the experiences of living in time. What does a baby see, or feel? Briggs’ compelling style of writing where every sentence is carefully composed and arranged heightens these minutiae – here, Rose and the mobile:
For now though, she studied it: the lilting canopy of overhead shapes. Her focus lifted towards the circle: a big bright eye.
It broke loose from the circle.
It carried back to the undulation in the direction of the great light-source of
the window. She felt the movement as a change in her insides, which were
interacting with the room.For Rose was a mass and a void, too.
She was pointed and gapped, full and empty, twisting and suspended,
spacey and closed.
And with Helen – what is it like to be a mother? There is something in transformative experience and knowledge of all kinds, not just of motherhood, which is anathema to the instant and is intrinsically tied to duration and process. If for example, we read that mothers are tired, how much can we feel – or even believe – this one-second statement that in no way reflects the actual duration of sleepless nights, weeks, months, years, experienced by mothers? To become experienced it must be repeated, expanded, re-presented, re-compared, re-considered. This observation is the preoccupation of novelists, writing in longer forms – for Briggs, a much freer definition of the novel form is that it is long – lengthy. At the start we find ‘Helen wanted to rest her head in that patched field. She was tired.’ Two pages later, ‘Helen was tired. It had felt good to curl up on the floor.’ Later, ‘She must have slept. But for minutes? For hours? For how long?’ The Long Form is purposefully long, in reading hours mirroring the progression of the hours of that single day. This also means that it’s unlikely to be read in one sitting – the reading of a long novel is full of interruptions, just as the mother-baby relation is made through extended periods of interrupted time. Just as life interrupts. For Briggs, redefining the role of length in a novel becomes a ‘a way of thinking especially about durational (which means interruptive) forms of being-in-relation, especially about its own form of being-in-relation (the order of extended, discontinuously continuous entertainment it seeks to provide.)’ Through enduring, like caregiving, even ‘where there is no clear plot’ a narrative is formed.
Duration is also addressed in The Long Form in relation to the shaping of time and space within a domestic boundary. Helen’s flat is continually re-envisioned and reimagined: a playmat becomes an open field, dewdrops on a window form into the shape of mountains and just as suddenly are wiped away. But Helen is also responsible for the creation of routine, of temporary structures of order that can allow for experiences of duration. This is a peculiarity perhaps unique to motherhood; the collapse of night into day and day into night that comes with the late hours of nursing and ever-waking babies, who have no regard for clock time. But these imposed routines are always a co-project, a structure oriented around a baby and its needs. In essence, they are a form of response to a new time – of the baby. Rose, a flow of movements of sorts in herself, vibrates surroundings, creating time: ‘She kicked her legs. Like this – sensationally, kinetically – the world hung all around her. It took shape. It changed shape.’ The creation of time in the flat then, is also ontological – weird. In a wider sense than creating a temporal routine inside the flat, Helen has opened and maintained through Rose’s being a new temporal dimension. ‘She lowered the baby ever-deeper through unresisting – wide open – space. / And through time: through stretching and unchecked: open-ended time.’
The implications of this world-making are material and metaphysical – another hallmark perhaps, of critical thought that emanates from or draws on the maternal. But how often is motherhood commonly represented in this way? In the novel flowers and plants likewise emit a kind of metaphysical brightness and these alternative temporalities related to by maternal experience are also fundamentally ecological in terms of their inextricability from bodies and interdependences. They are also anti-capitalist in their refusal of discontinuous and linear time – necessary conditions for production of goods and services. Rest or at least set periods of it, is discontinuous and integral to production.
Which leads me onto the other central question that preoccupies The Long Form: what it is about mothering that complicates the idea of individualism, one that has also been championed by anglophone novels as a model for neoliberal subjecthood? This is a subject explicitly addressed by Briggs at length, writing of Forster’s dismissals of babies as central characters: ‘What is implied by this criterion of ‘talking’ or ‘otherwise’ assisting in the events of the novel: who and what it excludes from the spheres of meaningful and consequential (which is to say, political) action: the value that the novel (at least in its English language presentation) typically places on the fantasy of the self-determining individual.’
‘Self-determining’ is a term often associated with single mothers, particularly when condoning us. This is a paradox: in some senses single mothers are individualistic in terms of mothering outside heteronormative values, but in a way that is singular as in particular, rather than autonomous or self-serving. I do not think that the single day-ness of The Long Form, Helen’s single mother-ness and that the singularity of Tom Jones as one of the first novels in English are a coincidence in The Long Form. In some ways, given that mothering is in ‘the doing of it’, every mother who has ever been is also the first mother, who is learning a unique movements of motherhood particular to their own bodies, babies, situations, experiences and so on – like composing a novel. Or like reading a novel for the first time – ‘Of all the novels, this one’. Like many contemporary mothers, Helen’s parents are noticeably absent, and she instead seeks advice from the internet, YouTube videos and paediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. A single mother is also, to their child, their only mother – like Helen is to Rose. Just as there is no repetition in a Steinian way, a single day is always singular. These are conditions of possibility and the renewal of perception, as previously mentioned.
But in relation to autonomy, as cultural theorist Jane Juffer outlines in her excellent study Single Mother: The Emergence of the Domestic Intellectual, ‘all single mothers are asked to prove their ability to govern themselves as subjects of freedom—freedom from any kind of dependency—in order to qualify as “normal.”’ While she creatively structures her domestic space, Helen as a single mother does not live out a kind of individualistic pioneer-type fantasy of a homestead because that space is co-constructed around Rose’s needs: a navigating a day with Rose is a ‘co-project’ and as Briggs via Winnicott notes, ‘a baby cannot exist outside of a social relation.’ This social relation, which is in many ways the foundation of The Long Form, includes not only Helen’s friend Rebba and the cultural influence of artworks such as Tom Jones, but the structures of the world outside – most notably housing and public space: the whims of neighbours, landlords, corporations, town planners, governments. In this sense, motherhood is inherently political and collective. As said, motherhood shares similarities with aesthetics – we could delineate further here, to say both as a practice (the art of mothering) and as a perceived form of subjectivity (to be a mother). Cultural theorist Sianne Ngai suggests that aesthetic evaluation is a performance directed towards the communal, a judgement, an utterance formed in the telling. While single motherhood in The Long Form is presented as an intensified creative-critical practice, an ongoing collaborative performance, in terms of subjectivity this goes both ways. Single mothers are one of the categories of mother who are most frequently ‘evaluated’. Time and again, Helen hears her landlady moving in the flat above her, and wonders if the noises she and Rose make are being judged.
Being a mother then, implodes the kind of individualism traditionally favoured by realist novels as being somehow separate from or unrelated to the social and material fabric of life. The point made by The Long Form is that perhaps ‘realist’ novels are not ‘realistic’ at all. The section ‘Life-like’ asks: ‘What is it like – “ordinary” life? “Common”, “plausible” “credible” life? On what scales of action is it to be narrated, how fast should it move? Does it exclude chance, weirdness, transformation – the imagination?’ What would a really ‘realist’ novel be concerned with, how would it read? As well as in its frequent references to housing and the laws and limitations of public spaces, this question is formally refracted in The Long Form once again through its aesthetics of interruption – by children, by delivery men, by text messages – like Fielding’s Mr Allworthy who is also continually interrupted. The fantasy of autonomous individuals found in novels, Briggs suggests via. Judith Butler, is a refusal of ‘the human conditions of beholdenness and inter-dependence’ – a moral failing. And like the term ‘experimental’, the idea of an autonomous individualism obfuscates. Juffer notes a contrast between increasingly positive representations of single mothers in culture as entrepreneurs versus increasing poverty rates: in the UK we could cite the appalling toll of austerity on single mothers.
In many ways Helen conforms to Juffers’ model of the domestic intellectual as an ‘ordinary devoted mother’, who does not transcend domestic space but endows it with meaning, and opens up patterns of collective resistance simply by traversing realms between private and public spheres – just as Helen travels to the park. Yet Helen, and The Long Form in general diverge from much maternal writing in eschewing the personal, and confessional. We might compare for example, the translator Szilvia Molnar’s recent novel on personal experiences of early years motherhood The Nursery, which opens with ‘The baby I hold in my arms is a leech.’ Though Helen is a ‘realistic’ character – a possible person with believable motives, intentions and actions and so on – she is written in the third person for a reason: Briggs does not delve into Helen’s history pre-pregnancy, nor too deeply into her internal world, thoughts and feelings. We don’t know what she looks like, except she has long hair. We don’t know who her parents are, who the father of Rose is, what job she does. The novel suggests that to do this too much would be unethical and exploitative, and a closure of possibility by making the unknown known. Perhaps hovering behind all these decisions is the spectre of motherhood memoirs that participate in the marketisation of trauma – that trauma is more frequently seen as ‘realistic’ than anything else. This exploitative practice disproportionately affects marginalised groups – single mothers, Black and minoritised mothers, Disabled and queer mothers. In Birthing Black Mothers, feminist theorist Jennifer C. Nash writes of the way ‘the literary markets that presume Black maternal trauma is at odds with what this archive [of Black maternal writing] presents and imagines.’ Instead, as a single mother Helen’s ‘situation’ serves more as a case study to crystallise or intensify questions about the relation of aesthetics to motherhood, and her demonstrative function is mirrored in Briggs’ comments about psychologist and philosopher John Dewey’s focus on the necessity of art-making. ‘Dewey’s project’, Briggs writes, ‘was not to “universalise experience”, but to show how the aesthetic impulse is at work across all categories […] “the potential for responding to and making the aesthetic is in everyone.”’
Or should we say – remaking? Too often we find in culture and literature we encounter aestheticised visions of mothers as innate, essential and ‘natural’; mothers as providers to voiceless babies that are merely proxies; mothers as engaged in uneventful, routine domestic work that is antithetical to creative and critical thinking; maternal memoirs that tend to marketise trauma and the confessional at the expense of the subject and different aspects to maternal experience; single mothers as entrepreneurial, ‘free’, but also somehow interchangeable and abject. The Long Form instead unfolds a vision of motherhood as being formed in the doing of it, an ongoing co-constituted improvisional performance with babies that is dynamised by interruption, a state of new seeing and being that is porous – an open field that can be intensely receptive to texts, voices, artworks. It challenges novelistic assumptions about ‘ordinary’ or ‘realistic’ life, the idea that maternal experience can only be articulated by the directly personal, that it’s not of value to serious literary study or critical thought. It reminds us that babies are both subjects and a social relation, that motherhood is inherently political and social, and that single mothers are not individualistic but vulnerably interdependent. That we might see single mothers as domestic intellectuals co-performing and co-creating time. Like the last shape that appears in the The Long Form – a circle that colander-like lets us back out into the world, perforated and changed from what we were.