Chloe Aridjis’s Night-Sea Journey
In the Jungian lexicon, “night-sea journey” refers to a voyage into the unknown, a descent from the day-lit world into murky regions of the unconscious where one interacts with spirit guides and confronts one’s worst fears. It’s an arduous ordeal, but if all goes well, the voyager returns transformed. A cousin to the “dark night of the soul” in Christian mysticism, the night-sea journey is at its core an intensive interrogation of the self; a desperate groping for guidance; a metamorphosis.
Collecting short stories, nonfiction essays and a “portrait gallery” of biographical narratives, is ’s first major book that is not a novel. In the day-lit world we might observe that reflects the publishing-industry preference for releasing collections of short works after the marketplace has sufficiently celebrated an author’s novels. (Aridjis’s most recent novel, won the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.) We mightand Aridjis’s novels, both in their prose style—languid, detached, poetic, precise—and in their shared fascination with the strange, the magical, the revelatory. But as the daylight fades and the prevailing mood of the collection begins to supersede the textures of its component parts, we might come to recognize as the haunted, perilous night-sea journey that it very much is.
