Fractal and Fracture of the Feminine Experience: Jesi Bender
Boundless as the Sky, by Dawn Raffel, Sagging Meniscus, 2023.
In the interest of exploding the lede, Dawn Raffel’s Boundless as the Sky is the best book I read in 2022. A hybrid collection of flash or short stories, images, dictionary entries, and a novella, this work oscillates between lyrical experiments and more traditional storytelling, all centering around Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair. To me, it lives in a pocket of experimental historical fiction where its magic is captured in revealing (and/or retelling) the same story from myriad angles.
The publisher’s website says that “Part One,” the more experimental flash pieces, is a response to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. These pieces examine what it is to live and age in the polyphony of an urban environment. “Part Two” is composed of a novella that ties the earlier stories together and centers them in one space, the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, which was called “The Century of Progress.” Its main event was the culmination of a 7,000-mile flight of an Italian fleet led by General Italo Balbo. There is a lot to unpack in these pages but it is Raffel’s exploration of mortality and impermanence that is most resonant to me.
A consistent element is the image of an aging woman, a character who occupies the least amount of space in the Western
literary or cinematic canon. In the very beginning pages, we are told that “every old woman wears a mask” but ”[d]espite their wild hues, no one sees them at all.” This woman, or these women, move throughout the stories and the author laments “[w]ho . . . will pass an ancient woman and recognize her beauty?” The aging woman is the perfect fractal: at once a child and a woman; at once mothered and mothering. In these cities, we see women aging and dealing with the repercussions of time on our gender: losing their mothers to memory, losing their cultural value as bodies change, and losing their literal places as cities transition around them. The invisible older woman becomes a tree that grows from the concrete. It sustains life but its produce is often imperceptible as air. As life continues beneath her shade, time runs “rings around her heart.”
That tree at one time bore fruit. Raffel writes: “[t]he apple and the hand are inextricably connected, ripe with intention.” A woman is the hand that moves, that makes, that touches. And she is also the apple, the sin, the thought that wrests. She acts as signified and signifier. The aging woman remains in contrast with this younger woman in several instances, most notably with the fan dancer. The young woman, exemplified by the fan dancer, lives within the irony of her overt sexuality being an illusion. Audiences “believe she is indecent and they can’t get enough.” The young woman is valued, vilified, and commodified for her sexual currency (time and money). Whereas the aging woman becomes nothing physical and only mind, youth stands at the entry point of existence. The young woman’s value is in her new body and how that body can be used. Even corporeal anomalies, like those in The Double, hold value in their newness. In a story about a young girl who has additional limbs, people line up to gawk at her on the midway. The impact of gaze here is reversed, with this young woman feeling “as if she had another child inside of her, faceless, craving escape.” This performer imagines
another part of her that doesn’t carry a face, a physical identifier. It is inextricable from her, this desire to escape being seen. These young women stand in stark contrast to older women who stand at the edge of their cities. We only recognize them through their thoughts. We’re only able to see them in small, obscure moments like: “Spray hit the surface. Her face, in light, faded.”
As women, hand in hand with time, move through their places in life, their cities invert in relation to their social worth. These pages show many cities upended, often under water. Raffel paints beautiful surreal scenes, like: “Everything I loved was in the water. The sky overturned, his life in my hands, me towing him through another element, a ripple.” The poignancy in these pages are found in the fact that, no matter the story or image, the city endures beyond its inhabitants. The place endures though “the old ways would be completely forgotten.” Raffel reminds us that “[e]cstasy,” which is rooted in the physical, “is fleeting” and that “[p]ride outlasts the body.” The cities become monuments to ourselves and our existence. As cities accumulate monuments, they change but they don’t die. As we move through time, across place, we change and we die but the same problems, the same thoughts we etch into stone, remain, trapped in these human spaces, unburdened by time. The city is the fruit of civilization. The root of the problem, acutely feminine, is the burden of being seen and then the burden of being unseen. Then, overarchingly, there is the human problem that anything we do, no matter how monumental, is significant only as footnote, as memory or monument. Raffel rends this memento mori at a perfect pitch: these pages revel in equal parts poignancy, philosophy, and stark reality. What makes it so successful is how each story finds beauty in the fleeting moment. As Rufus C. Dawes, overseer of the fair, contemplates “this Century of Progress” and its success, he realizes:
In the blink of an eye, he has become an old man. He is a product of a world that no longer exists. . . . He has written in invisible ink on the future he will not live to see.
The whole book work s well as each piece is sewn into the next, but particular gems include: “The Author”; “Atlas, Abridged”; “Aquarium”; “Saviors”; “Pre-serve”; “What Would It Cost?”; and, “Congratulations.” Boundless as the Sky is a masterful work that marries lyrical language, hybridity, history, heartbreak, and effusive imagination. Through shifting form and perspective, Raffel has created something that is at once specific and still, somehow, beautifully boundless.
