HONESTLY, I don’t even know where to begin with The Blazing World. Longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker prize, Siri Hustvedt’s sixth novel inspires nothing quite so much as a feeling of inadequacy. This isn’t meant to be a back-handed compliment, and it’s entirely possible that many highly erudite people will read the book and sit back with a shrug, thinking to themselves “Well, that’s just really basic.”
I’m not one of them though, and while The Blazing World engenders an odd combination of rage and paralytic self-doubt, it manages to tick almost every box that makes a novel enjoyable for me. Critical theory? Check. Philosophical conundrums? Check. Art history? Double-check. Psychoanalysis? Like you wouldn’t believe. But there’s one thing that you should believe: despite picking up some of the driest, most archetypically convoluted bits of work from the world of academia, Hustvedt has crafted a novel that is mind-boggling in its pace, speed and plot.
Harriet Burden, the protagonist of The Blazing World, is an overlooked artist, the wife of a prominent art-dealer in New York. Her work has been — she is convinced — ignored by the darlings of the New York art scene for no good reason other than her gender, and in The Blazing World, we are introduced to the story of how she is determined to right this wrong. Still ignored in her 60s, and “mad with vengeance,” she decides to propagate an elaborate scheme to claim what she sees as her due.
Harriet chooses three different men with whom to “collaborate” on creating a series of works called ‘Maskings’. In this, she puts up three exhibitions of her own work, but pitches her creations as the output of three different male artists. ‘Maskings’ is part experiment, part certainty: Burden wants to test (but is already convinced of) the fact of her work as better received by the demi-monde if its authorship is attributed to men, rather than to a woman.
The triad of conspirators with whom she works is fairly varied: there’s Anton Tish, a neophyte on the arts circuit; Phineas Q. Eldridge, a mixed-race drag performer; and the “villain” of the piece, conceptual artist and darling of the art world, Rune. Each male “mask” shows one piece of Harriet’s meisterstück triptych. Harriet picks each of her men with great purpose. Tish is a photogenic doofus who’s unable to even explain the genesis of the work attributed to him. Phineas on the other hand, is a self-aware double-minority figure who genuinely collaborates with Harriet in her mission. And Rune ... well, Rune is Harriet’s dark doppelgänger, a mirror image: handsome and self-possessed while she is awkward and prone to hysteria, admired as she is reviled, and soon we realise, using Harriet as much as she is using him.
The outcomes of this experiment, which runs across a period of five years, are predictable (and this is probably the only predictable thing about The Blazing World). When presented under her own name, Harriet’s work is seen as “sentimental and embarrassing,” but the minute it’s signed by a 24-year-old male “hunk,” it’s sold out and garners rave reviews. More damning still, even once Harriet is outed as the true author, reviewers and gallery owners refuse to admit they’ve been had. The common belief surrounding her, even when her talent cannot be denied, is summed up best by a catty journalist, who notes: “A 50-ish woman who’s been hanging around the art world all her life can’t really be called a prodigy, can she?”
The shape of The Blazing World is actually far more interesting than its central conceit of misogyny run rampant; it is constructed as an anthology of texts ranging from Harriet’s own journal entries to statements offered by friends and critics, fiction written by her son, and transcripts of interviews with her daughter. It is dazzling in its scope, running the gamut from musings on Kierkegaard to a hilarious reference to “obscure essayist and novelist, Siri Hustvedt,” footnoted with a comment that the paragraph in which Hustvedt is mentioned is “so compressed it suggests parody.” Throughout the novel, we shift perspective from Harriet’s own diaries to her children’s views of her, to commentary from her friends and art critics, making for a dizzying panopticon of interpretation.
Burden’s masks have nothing on Hustvedt, who is basically at one point writing a character whose own pseudonym is writing about her own response to the novel’s original author. It’s like you’re trapped in a series of Russian nesting dolls stuck between two mirrors, on a turntable — reflecting off into infinity from a series of different angles. It’s challenging to keep track of who’s saying what to whom (is it Harriet? Is it Harriet writing as someone else? Is it Hustvedt writing as Harriet, or Harriet’s alter-ego writing as Hustvedt?).
You may think I’m exaggerating. I am not. A cross-section of allusions and references within the book will turn up Picasso, Freud, Lacan, Dante, Dickinson, Kierkegaard, LeGuin ... the list is exhaustive (and exhausting). And most impressively, each of them serves a purpose. No one is brought up just for the sake of erudition or a giant academic battle of wits. In fact, The Blazing World, despite its protagonist’s own belief that misogyny and discrimination are endemic, is too subtle to just give us a story of sexism. Harriet Burden barely registers as female, we discover, all six-foot-two-inches of her, with “long, muscular arms and giant hands.” Even the diminutive of her name, “Harry,” is tellingly gender-bending, but more importantly, she doesn’t seem to be worth sympathy. She’s loud, abrasive, “lecturing, unpleasant,” and rather brash, we are told; her moods alternate between deathly, socially awkward silence and even more socially dysfunctional fits of rage. You start off reading Hustvedt’s novel fully prepared to accept that men are pigs and Harriet is a wonderful artist, but you put it down thinking that Harriet is — more than anything or anyone else — her own worst enemy.
Yet, there’s something incredibly intimate about the portrait of the artist as an old(ish) widow. It’s rare to find a female character who steps beyond cliché, and Hustvedt excels in creating a personality which balances intellectual gigantism with emotional immaturity of the highest order, who is extraordinarily kind and warm, but also scathingly harsh and self-centred. Harriet is much like the fictional creature with whom she most identifies (Frankenstein’s monster, by the way): she is made of many disparate, mostly ill-fitting parts, but is no less a wondrous accomplishment. The same can — and should — be said about The Blazing World, which manages to sweep a multiplicity of genres, tones, styles and subjects into one giant work that if not necessarily on fire, certainly shines bright.
The Blazing World
(NOVEL)
By Siri Hustvedt
Simon & Schuster, New York
ISBN 978-1476747231
368pp.
