How “Edinburgh” Reimagines Time to Tell a Story of Trauma
“Edinburgh” is the kind of book that readers talk about in whispers and pass from hand to hand. I mean this literally, at least in my case: I found it, only a year or two after it came out, because my teacher, the poet Carl Phillips—I was doing an M.F.A. in poetry, in St. Louis—handed a copy to me and told me I had to read it right away. He never did this with any other book, and I didn’t waste any time doing as he said; and so the novel took its place, when I was twenty-three or twenty-four, in that private constellation that I looked to for guidance as I started out in a life in art-making. A point on an aesthetic compass.
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What was that first encounter like? I remember the experience of the early pages as one of peculiarly intense disorientation and heat. The disorientation is easy to explain: Chee drops us right into the middle of things, and one of the book’s ambitions is to confound our notions of beginnings and ends. We know from the first words—“After he dies”—the fate of one of the novel’s main characters, though the details won’t arrive for seventy pages or so; soon we are deep in an account of generational trauma, the narrator’s family history of war and displacement (the narrator’s father is Korean, and his paternal grandparents live in his family home, in Maine); then we are immersed in myth, the story of a beautiful fox-demon who falls in love with a human man. Only after all this is a name finally attached to the voice we’ve been following: Aphias Zhe, though we will call him Fee, a nickname given to him by his best friend, Peter, the one we already know will die.
That’s a lot of disorientation for a handful of pages. But what’s the source of the heat? The story starts not with heat but with cold, in a remarkable moment of emotional notation. “Emotional notation” is a workshop term for one of the central ambitions of art: to get onto the page experiences that escape language. How do you convey a feeling there isn’t a word for, or a feeling any word for which would flatten? You might try something like this:
Not cold, exactly, or not only cold; heat is here, too—the warm water, the too-close sun. But the narrator is cut off from that, separate, stuck in the cold. It’s an image for grief, but even more for isolation, and so an image, too, for queerness in the childhood world of the novel, for a love that has to be hidden and a grief that can’t be fully avowed. How heartbreaking the second sentence, which makes us conjure a question from its absence. The presence of absence, the pressure by which absence makes itself felt, is one of the novel’s obsessions. Remainders (survivors of a lost wholeness) and reminders (pointing us to something gone) fill the text. Fee will wonder which he is; he will feel that he is himself the letter (the “A” of Aphias) that makes the difference.
From cold water we will arrive, within a page, at immolation: the fire in which the fox-demon burns herself. Fire burns throughout the novel, but it wasn’t the literal image that made for the heat I felt on first reading it. It was instead the heat of the novel’s emotions, which, for all the evenness, the placidity of the narrative voice (when it isn’t—as occasionally, spectacularly happens—turning ecstatic), are grand-opera passionate: rage, grief, euphoric love, self-undoing guilt and shame. And it was also the density of the novel’s language, lyrical and compressed, equally committed to sonic effect and image as sense. That language resurrects a strain of high queer modernism (Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes) which has almost been forgotten by the North American novel, and this allows “Edinburgh” to come, at moments, daringly close to something like pure poetry, while remaining, for all it presses at its bounds, a realist novel.
More than anything, I think, the source of both disorientation and heat—the source, too, of my passionate involvement with the novel as a young writer—has to do with the games the novel plays with time. The novel is narrated in present tense, but it doesn’t feel like any other present tense I know. Present tense is ever more common in contemporary writing, especially from North America. It has become the default tense for much narrative nonfiction, especially in the first person; and first-person present has very nearly become the default for young fiction writers as well. The excitements of the mode are clear: the gain in urgency, the lessening of distance; it compresses the act of narration and the experience being narrated, bringing us, the readers, right up to the world being narrated. It presses our faces against the pane of story.
But it has disadvantages, too. One is that it is a less supple vehicle than past tense, which is the default narrative tense for fiction in English and has developed, over the centuries, a remarkably full system for scaffolding temporal experience and moving between exposition and scene. Another is that the distance built into past-tense narration, the presumed remove of the narrating intelligence from the events narrated, serves a purpose: it allows for reflection, commentary, irony. It’s this distance which has, traditionally and in many respects, been what allows for art. Much of the value of narrative in human life, its value as a tool for making meaning out of our existence, comes from this step back from the presentness of experience. This isn’t to say that such value is precluded by use of the present tense, which has been employed by some of the greatest novels of recent decades, just that it would seem to make accessing that value more difficult. Then again, what seem like the limitations of the tense may be precisely what have made it so amenable to innovative prose.
But Chee’s first-person, present-tense narration differs from most in being, in a seeming paradox, retrospective. This isn’t exactly an innovation: the modernists experimented with it, and it’s not uncommon in French; one might think of Marguerite Duras’s “The Lover,” which is omnivorous in its tenses and makes much use of retrospective present. And, in the twenty-five years since “Edinburgh” was published, present-retrospective narration has become more common in new writing in English. Even in this context, though, I experience Chee’s use of it as distinctively radical. This isn’t just a question of tense but also of tone, and of style more generally. All retrospection divides then and now, but this isn’t true of “Edinburgh,” in which there’s no attempt to distinguish between the voices of young Fee undergoing experience and adult Fee narrating. At every point in the novel, experience, with all its confusion and intensity, feels immediate; at every point, we have access to reflection, to wisdom born of time. Time is the novelist’s medium, and in “Edinburgh” it becomes, in my experience as a reader, almost uniquely strange. It doesn’t move in the way it should; it refuses us any footing. Deictics, those orienting words (“here,” “there,” “before,” “after”), fail to do their jobs. It’s as though gravity is suspended, as though the usual physics don’t apply; time becomes vast, undifferentiated, a territory of what threatens to be irremediable lostness. There is no then in this novel. There is only now.
The book’s formal choices respond to a psychological crisis: something has happened to Fee’s experience of time; something has turned time into a question. The story the first half of “Edinburgh” tells is a distressingly familiar one of child sexual abuse, rendered here with uncommon emotional precision. Fee joins a community children’s choir; he has a revelatory experience of beauty, and of himself as a conduit for that beauty; the same man who makes that revelation possible, by introducing him to art, abuses him and other members of the choir. Chee is sparing of physical detail but unsparing in dissecting the social and psychological dynamics of abuse. We see how the choir director—the choir calls him Big Eric—enlists his victims in communal silence, how he makes them feel special, members of an elect; we see how he makes use of precisely what children need from adults (attention, affection, education) to victimize them.
Fee is physically abused, but Big Eric treats him differently from the other children, grooming him not as a victim but as a fellow-predator. He treats Fee as though they are peers, as though Fee shares his appetites. Chee produces one of the queasiest moments I know in all of literature when Big Eric shares with Fee a joke about Robin Hood and Friar Tuck. This treatment produces a deep confusion in Fee, especially about his queerness, and we repeatedly see him rehearse a false logic: Big Eric likes boys; Fee likes boys; therefore, they must be the same. Like many queer people abused as children, he will be plagued by the question of whether queerness preceded the abuse or was created by it, about whether, in an excruciatingly false binary, it was consequence or cause.
In “Edinburgh,” we see how abuse threatens to corrupt all aspects of Fee’s life: his first sexual experiences, experimentation with his friends, will be associated with Big Eric; Fee will begin to wonder if all men, even his father, like the kind of pornography the choir director shows him. Two of the novel’s most important motifs, fire and plague, serve as metaphors for the way abuse and its consequences spread, the way it feels to Fee like something that can devour the world. It does devour his world; Peter is not the only friend he will lose to its aftermath. And Fee experiences this loss not only with the victim’s sense of helplessness and rage, the sense of having been wronged; he feels, too, a profound, and profoundly misplaced, sense of responsibility. At his thirteenth-birthday party, he thinks, “Someone should kill me now . . . before the damage spreads.” The novel’s second half contains narrative revelations that shouldn’t be spoiled; suffice it to say that Chee shows how sexual abuse, which might seem like an event—something localizable, and thus containable, in a particular time—in fact threatens to contaminate all of time, past and future. What might seem to be individual trauma is revealed to be, like the grandfather’s history of wartime displacement and loss with which the book begins, generational trauma.
Fee tells us many times that he wants to die. But much of the novel’s pathos comes from the fact that we also see, more clearly than he does, how much he wants to live. The form this desire takes is a ravenous need for story. Narrative is how we give shape to time, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur argues; in what can seem his shapeless temporal wasteland, Fee searches for a narrative model that can make his past intelligible and his present bearable, and which can point him toward a future. He turns to history, to the myths of Ganymede and to Plato’s Phaedrus, to grand opera, all of which are resources familiar to the queer novel; and he also brings in new resources—Japanese and Korean myth and comic books.
Each of the stories he borrows becomes a part of the novel, woven into its texture, assimilated to its constant churn of repetition—of words and ideas, above all of images. As that churn suggests, none of these stories satisfies him, none proves sufficient to sustain a self. One element they have in common is heroism. Whether in the comic-book heroine facing down her foes, the Platonic lover sprouting wings, the solitary survivor of medieval plague, they all offer a sense of life as consisting of high-stakes, decisive moments faced up to and overcome—or, if not overcome, steadfastly borne witness to. Through much of the novel, Fee will attempt to make his own story one of such comic-book heroism, to take on the mantle of savior.
But “Edinburgh” seems to me an interrogation and, finally, a critique of heroism; it calls into question Fee’s hope that heroic narratives might serve as a model for bearable lived time, which seldom organizes itself into dramatic culminations or decisive moments. Fee’s attempt to serve as savior will only trigger further catastrophes. His most profound realization may be that, to minimize harm to himself and others, he will have to remove himself from someone else’s story, giving up his ideas of heroism, even the compromised heroism of undoing harm that he himself has caused.
The most durable of Fee’s narrative models is the story of the fox-demon, which runs through the novel from beginning to end. I wonder if this is because Fee first hears this story from his grandfather, who offers a different, unheroic vision of what it means to live with trauma. At the heart of Fee’s heroic narratives is the idea of a self that attains purity. The purity might consist in vanquishing one’s tormentors, even if (as with Phoenix in the comic book “The X-Men”) this entails the destruction of the world; or it might be the purity of a self scoured of desecration, even if that can come only (as often in ancient tragedy and in opera) with the self’s annihilation. Fee’s grandfather models a different way to be. His first language is Japanese, the language of those who abducted his sisters, and so he has “the print of your enemy all the way inside”; he models for Fee the possibility of living with an impure self, of seeing life not as heroic confrontation but as a “slow dance,” Fee’s description of the tai chi with which his grandfather greets each morning.
Fee will be a long time coming to a similar understanding of his own relationship to loss: the loss of Peter and other friends, of innocence, of the self he might have become had he not been abused by Big Eric. Fee’s survival will depend on many things, some of which remain in question at the book’s end; nothing about his future feels guaranteed. It may depend most on a changed understanding of what he thinks of as impurity, the remainders and reminders he’s haunted by. This is part of the point, I think, of the novel’s brilliant use of imagery drawn from mystical traditions—images of absence and presence, of presence in absence—which suggests an understanding of impurity not as consuming fire or spreading plague but instead as the color light carries after passing through stained glass, or as the change made to silence by singing that has just stopped. This is a lesson offered early by his grandfather: how to recognize the value of what’s “beautiful in the way of anything missing something else.”
There’s one final model that points toward a future for Fee. Fee remains haunted by his first love for Peter, which exerts a power over his life that feels like fate. But as an adult he forms a new love with Bridey, a man he meets in college and encounters again years later. Bridey is the novel’s most wonderful character, unlike any other in his approach to life, and also in his response to the dark forces Fee feels himself governed by and those he will find he contains. Bridey’s first response to life, even to its darknesses, is laughter. He suggests that one might do more than merely bear existence, that one might delight in it; he floods the novel with joy. He offers Fee the novel’s most compelling case for a commitment to life: a love not fated, but chosen. ♦
This is drawn from the introduction to a new edition of “Edinburgh.”