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Dorothy Tse (author), Natascha Bruce (translator), Owlish, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023. 224 pgs.
Many reviewers have charted a literary cartography which connects Owlish, Dorothy Tse’s bleak debut novel, to classics of European literature: for example, Katy Waldman in The New Yorker, Lucy Popescu in the Financial Times and those published in this magazine. Perhaps this is inevitable given the unmistakeable literary nature of a book filled with authorial intrusions and allusions to Western culture, which almost urge readers to look for such comparisons.
At the same time, the novel can be appreciated from a different angle when this intellectual map is stretched beyond the clues offered by the author, to include work that deals with similar issues and shares comparable preoccupations. And, given that at its heart Owlish is the story of a society at a critical turning point, the great modernist literature of the 1920s and 1930s provides a fitting reference. To be clear: Tse does not mention it, directly or indirectly, and it does not make for an accurate historical or social parallel since Hong Kong/Nevers is obviously very different from Europe in the first half of the 20th century. But, just like Owlish, these novels are preoccupied with the tension between the status quo and a socio-political transformation that feels both inescapable and as yet ill-defined. What’s more, in both this imminent transition the inaptitude of the prevailing social norms is laid bare.
So, while much less experimental in its style and much more direct in delivering its message, Tse’s novel shares the sense of sleepwalking into a changed era evident in Hermann Broch’s Die Schlafwandler, and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities’ (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) tension between present and future (not to mention that Musil also assigned a fictitious name to the place where the events take place). Similar to Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (another tale of doubles; mirrors and fractured selves; and liminal places), Tse’s protagonist is caught between two different ways of being. Also, much like Alberto Moravia in The Time of Indifference (Gli indifferenti), Tse describes the inadequacy of the middle classes, just without the eroticism—unless a naked, middle-aged professor riding a rocking horse with a mannequin is your thing.
Far from being mere intellectual indulgence, these comparisons bring out Owlish’s originality: from both its similarities and differences with this tradition, the book emerges as a scathing ironic portrait of a city at a critical point in time, with a message that is as urgent as it is specific.
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THE QUALITIES OF ORDINARY MEN AND WOMEN
The novel revolves around Maria, a government bureaucrat, and Q, a university professor, two anti-heroes who, either through scheming or maladroitness, expend their energy trying to go along with (Maria) or wilfully ignoring (Q) what is happening in Nevers.
Lost in their own banality, they are preoccupied with maintaining appearances and preserving their social status. In fact, more than the trappings of a middle-aged middle-class couple (safe, respectable jobs; an apartment in the right part of town; holidays overseas), the quality that defines them is their mental ability to disregard what they do not want to see. When forced to notice that things might not be the same (colleagues disappear; a wall is erected in their neighbourhood), they only do so to find a way to eventually carry on as nothing ever happened—which, after all, simply requires them to delete an email or decide to stay at home.
Their callousness is given away when they keep objectifying everyone around them: crowds are like water that gushes through and “seemed to have burst out from sewers and behind doors, surging around him like floodwater”; workers fall to their death; protesters “looked like black water droplets, converging to form a never-ending river”—all is briefly registered and quickly dismissed lest it should present uncomfortable questions.
And then, of course, there is the literal objectification of Aliss’s body. It is an example of the male gaze (even if a critique of patriarchy is not the novel’s main focus), predictable in how it denies agency and sexualises the female body right down to how the affair ends: Q simply goes back to his life—shaken and ill but safe and with the prospect of a tenure, his social standing restored—while Aliss is found discarded by a riverbank.
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PERVERTED LANGUAGE
This lack of a proper moral compass reveals itself in the language the professor and his wife use. If at face value what they say might seem profound and revelatory, in reality it never amounts to more than idle comments expressed in unguarded moments.
For example, we want to believe that the professor is sharing some deep insight when he proclaims that “words are the best medicine”—but he dozes off immediately after, the book he held splayed on the floor, which makes it clear that he will not follow his assertion with any meaningful action. And Maria mentions obliquely that the city’s landscape will not be there forever but accepts it as a fait accompli without compunction. In the lecture hall, Q tells the few students who still attend his class that “analysis and discourse are no way to get inside a poem, you have to start living! Go out there! Get in touch with the flesh and blood of the real world!”—thus spoke the professor distracted by an infatuation with a doll.
The contrast with the protagonists of modernist novels could not be starker: while Musil’s Ulrich, to name but one, articulated deeply-felt opinions about society and wider existential matters, Q and Maria only talk about their narrow self-interest. For example, the professor’s explanation of what being “owlish” means might be he at his most articulate but ultimately it is no more than a muddled attempt to justify his actions without fully engaging with the reality of a changing Nevers. Superficial and uninterested as he is, the ambiguity that he describes is simply the consequence of his own lack of principles and cannot be taken as a comment on the city’s plight, much like his observation that “everything is changing” relates to his delusional relation with Aliss rather than the events unfolding in Nevers. Similarly, Maria’s casual observation to a cleaner that they are “much too high up” remains an empty pronouncement.
Unable or unwilling to grasp the full extent of what is happening around them, or articulate what they know and think, their language obfuscates and denies—and thus makes Maria’s and Q’s pronouncements shallow, devoid of any real empathy and never followed by renewed behaviour.
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ANTI-OWLISH
That is to say, there is really nothing “owlish” about either Maria or Q. What they say does not convey any real wisdom and what they do looks ridiculous rather than dignified, motivated by the most inconsequential of aspirations: “all Professor Q wanted was a love affair, a proper love affair, for once in his life”, while Maria plans her old age so that “the possibility of anything unexpected happening would shrink to almost zero and memories would drip out reassuringly”.
Maybe then, Tse’s work should be read as an anti-Bildungsroman: not just because the two main characters are in their fifties but primarily because they spurn any opportunity of personal transformation and, unlike the tormented protagonists of modernist novels, reach the end of the story fundamentally unchanged (even if not completely unaffected) without showing much hesitation or doubt. Rather than causing internal conflict or planting the seeds of some new awareness, the challenge that befalls them simply confirms them as self-absorbed, impervious to any existential angst and consumed by their own mediocrity. That their crimes of omission are less obviously serious is precisely the point, because these apparently trivial acts end up having nefarious consequences for Nevers.
And this moral stasis provides the background for the affair between Aliss and Q. An uncomfortable metaphor on multiple levels but, in a novel that (as said) comments on social change and conformity more than on gender relations, one that primarily epitomises the distorted priorities of those citizens who, at the most critical times, become distracted by trivialities and choose to lose themselves in make-beliefs.
It is a symbol of human beings’ willingness to turn their head away from what they are uncomfortable with. And of the necessity of such acquiescence: precisely because of its absurdity and inconsequence, the time and effort invested in this affair demonstrate the lack of critical thinking and moral discernment without which the changes under way could never take hold of Nevers.
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ALTERNATIVES DENIED
On the whole then, Owlish’s protagonists are pretty much the opposite of the conflicted characters of modernist literature: if Musil’s Ulrich was defined by a sense of the possible (contemplating everything that might happen) and Hesse’s Harry Haller was tormented to the point of desperation, what characterises Q and Maria is their unwillingness to consider alternatives. This because, unlike Harry Haller (who was both attracted and repulsed by the bourgeoisie), Maria and Q do not oppose the system they find themselves in: all they want is to secure their position within it, especially as it is undergoing such dramatic changes.
In practice, they defend their social status by deliberately erasing the memory of what they were and the possibility of what they might still be. Q has all but abandoned his artistic aspirations and hides his poems on his bookshelves; Maria suppresses Owlish, the professor’s alter ego, by destroying his old writings; memories of Q’s arrival in Nevers (as a refugee or migrant, in circumstances never clearly explained) are just brief and vague flashbacks, inconvenient and swiftly dismissed. And, of course, Aliss is discarded. These attempts to edit their past and maintain a sanitised fiction of their personal circumstances are Maria’s and Q’s own private revisionism, which echoes the public sphere where bureaucrats are busy redacting history books.
All this takes a considerable effort, as exemplified by Maria recovering her composure in front of her friends to preserve the façade of her marriage. And while it can be seen as relatively successful (the novel ends with the protagonists’ status restored), it also points to all that they deny themselves and, most dishearteningly, it makes it clear that they could never be anything else. To even contemplate being (or doing) something different, Q and Maria would need to be what they patently cannot be: much less self-centred, much more aware and—if they cannot realistically be expected to openly oppose what is happening in Nevers—at least a little bit conflicted over the options that they forsook. Instead, the professor (the migrant or refugee who, after a difficult start in Nevers, pulls himself up in society) and his wife remain compromised in their acquiescence, are busy forgetting and never show any regret about what they once were.
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HOW IT ALL STARTS
These themes lead to the book’s central question: who makes the incipient change in Nevers possible? Or, as the narrator asks at one point, “how did all this start?”
Tse’s greatest intuition is to look for an answer in the domain of everyday pettiness. She sets her story in an all-too-normal environment to remind us that it doesn’t take especially depraved human beings, or a complete socio-economic collapse, to irreversibly alter the fabrics of society. And by not allowing Owlish to get anywhere near the level of tragedy and degradation found in modernist literature, she tells us that a society changes when ordinary citizens become preoccupied by trivialities and motivated by a myopic view of their own interests.
This is the book’s key message, and it is made more convincing by the restrain with which it is delivered. In fact, while retaining a certain dreamy tone (for example, the hall where the professor receives the mannequin brings to mind a sanitised version of Mann’s Magic Theatre), Owlish is a work of controlled imagination compared to some of Tse’s short stories, devoid of the surreal plotlines found in “Dark Things” or “The Man Who Ate Everything”. It takes the tone of, say, Pirandello’s absurdism: after all, with his maladroit ways, Q could be the protagonist of a story written by the Sicilian writer. And again, this mundanity is crucial in placing the narration firmly in the realm of the everyday and the possible: it feels close to us, it could happen to us, and maybe it already has.
In turn, this is precisely what makes Q and Maria so reprehensible. Rather than being caused by some irresistible ontological condition or spirit of time, their lack of morality is the result of their own decisions. In Die Schlafwandler and Steppenwolf, Wilhelm Huguenau and Harry Haller commit truly horrific crimes but they are also the products of a decaying society and of forces beyond their control. Besides, they are obviously outsiders, easily dismissed aberrations which in no way could be like us readers. The professor and his wife, on the other hand? Their shortcomings land much closer because they are the submissive, absolutely integral members of a thriving society: in other words, insiders rather than victims. Their ordinariness makes them much more like us—they could be us. Much less conflicted and much more complicit than the characters of the modernist masterpieces, they do not even experience anything close to angst or doubt. And since there is no possible existential explanation for their actions, Maria and Q are left without excuses.
So, this is how it all starts: from the banality of those respectable citizens who choose to ignore what goes on around them. Nothing would change without their absent-mindedness or complicity. And Owlish’s uncomfortable lesson is that, far from being monsters, the many Qs and Marias who trade critical awareness for convenience are found right at the centre of society, the perfect embodiment of those accepted values that so many aspire to.
How to cite: Griseri, Luca. “The Banality That Starts It All: Dorothy Tse’s Owlish.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 3 Mar. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/03/03/owlish-banality.
Luca Griseri (he/him) studied history and postmodern philosophy in his native Italy. After obtaining an MBA from the University of Warwick (UK), he embarked on a career in marketing and over 18 years lived in London, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. He is currently based in Penang, where he indulges in his passions: running, hiking in the forests and eating street food. [All contributions by Luca Griseri.]