“Cells interlinked within cells interlinked”: On Ambivalent Contamination

Yet porousness felt more grounded, more active, than simply being impressionable; a sponge, after all, is not fundamentally altered by any liquid that soaks it. I associated it with the sensitivity of certain female narrators, such as Jo of Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot, Anja of Elvia Wilk’s Oval, or even Faye of Rachel Cusk’s lauded yet reviled Outline trilogy. These women, especially Faye, are frequently described as open vessels for the lives of others, but their fluid demeanours and observational capacities are not to be confused with a lack of agency. Instead, they seem to exist in a flow state, cycling between self-discipline and social surrender. The ability to dissolve as easily as sugar, yet reassemble just as easily and at will, seems an indicator of secure personhood, though not so much that any one is impervious to perceived slights. “Maybe it wasn’t the house, but me that was porous,” thinks Jo. “Maybe I had to grow a thicker skin in this town.” ¹ The house in question is a poorly renovated warehouse she’d found after moving to rural England from Norway for college. Its paper-thin walls don’t reach all the way to the ceiling; its aluminum siding shudders with every window or door flung open or shut. Jo can hear her lone flatmate’s urine hit the toilet bowl, her teeth breaking the skin of an apple, even the swish of her woolen jumper as she sheds it, pulling it up and over her head. You can imagine how such relentless intimacy would draw her to her—the building’s deficiencies conspiring into something like star-crossed fate.

True to form—that is, in the contemporary feminist novel’s subversive interest in domesticity—these characters’ living spaces reflect their inner worlds; in a dystopian tale set in near-future Berlin, Anja and her partner live in a novelty eco-dwelling on an urban mountainside that is rapidly composting itself. The house’s collapse marks a breakdown in their cohabitating relationship, and and the return to nature is not a tale of embattled survival but one of relief, felt in the sighs of floorboards turning to loam, in plaster cracking under crawling vines, and the soft pop of mushrooms emerging from corners and joins. Rewilding is a process of benign release; it is civilization, with its incessant demands of maintenance and sovereignty, that is presented as the violent drive.