Amina Cain is an architect of the sentence. Her two collections of short fiction, I Go to Some Hollow (Les Figues, 2009) and Creature (Dorothy, 2013), offer tiny, crystalline worlds where strange relationships unfold in spare, unforgettable prose. Like Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras, two writers Cain admires, she uses language to go to the heart of things, unafraid to twist it, deform it, or chop it off in search of a way to express experience, most often the experience of women, and especially women who write.
Cain’s debut novel, Indelicacy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), concerns a woman who works as a cleaner at a museum, and wants to transform herself into a writer. When she marries a wealthy man, she obtains the leisure to write, but she also finds that her new privileges bring their own dangers and constraints. The narrator’s struggle to build a life that is both creative and ethical takes place in the atmosphere of the nineteenth century, among candlelit parlors and carriages in the snow. Yet her direct, transparent language, interspersed with quotations from writers like Jean Rhys, Jean Genet, and Octavia Butler, makes the novel feel contemporary as well.
In an essay published on The Paris Review Daily in 2013, Cain writes that a novel can be like a landscape painting. “What if,” she asks, “you are a short story writer or a novelist interested in something other than story? What if when you look at a piece of art there is something in it you want to try in writing, because to you it seems as if a story should be able to hold something like that—hold possibilities, not exclude them.” Indelicacy, a novel of art and writing, draws its energy from this aspiration. Crossed by mysterious atmospheres and affects, it is a story of resistance against patriarchal and class oppression, of complicity, friendship, vision, and the synergy between painting and literature, that is also something other than story: a space for the reader to enter.
Amina Cain lives in Los Angeles. This conversation took place over email.
—Sofia Samatar
Sofia Samatar: Your novel, Indelicacy, opens with an invocation of space: “I thought that being in the country would help me write, with its fields and its horses, but I don’t think I was meant for that.” The narrator, Vitória, connects the wide space of the countryside to writing, but then immediately rejects the idea. What is the connection between space and writing, for you?
Amina Cain: For me, the space of writing has always been visual. When I am starting a new piece, I usually see images before anything else (for example: a tropical farm, an animal or a person, an illustration in a children’s book). Often these images are vivid, but sometimes they are blurry or faint, so that I can’t completely make them out. As I write, they begin to define themselves, coming more strongly into view. I see a short story or a novel as a space, not as a linear set of events.
That’s a good description of Indelicacy. It does have a plot, of course—in fact there’s a real urgency to the story, as your protagonist struggles to transform her life. When we meet Vitória, she works as a cleaner in a museum, but she wants to become a writer, despite the barriers posed by her gender and class. Like you, she writes through images, describing the paintings around her. Did you spend a lot of time looking at art while you were writing Indelicacy?
Yes, I did, partly because I always look at a lot of images when I’m writing, but also in a more focused way for the book. I visited a number of art museums to look at paintings I wanted to write about (and to be in the space of those museums). I went to London to spend time in the National Gallery, to New York City to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, and MOMA. I went to museums in my own city, like the Getty Center, the Hammer Museum, and LACMA. And I revisited in my mind the time I spent at the Art Institute of Chicago when I was a student there at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. We were given free admission to the museum, so for two years I went there once or twice a week, sometimes just to sit in one gallery. I had an intimate relationship to that place, which is not true for the other museums I visited when I was writing the book. It’s the inspiration for the museum in Indelicacy, and I’m sure the time I spent there influenced my desire to write about paintings, and to conjure it for this project.
And yes, Indelicacy does have a plot, which in a way is a new thing for me—the short stories I’ve written aren’t driven by plot at all. Once I had a plot, I had to deal with it, which was the hardest part for me in the whole project. I had to rewrite the last third of the book several times to get it right. Some of those first attempts were pretty terrible!
Why do you consider those earlier drafts “terrible”? What was terrible about them, and how did you address it?
Those drafts were terrible because I was trying to close in on something (the events that would lead to the end of the novel), rather than open something up. I’m not saying that writing towards an ending has to equal a closing down, but somehow that’s what I was doing. In one of the drafts I killed off one of my characters. I am embarrassed to admit that, because I think I wrote it as a total cliché. I mean, at the time I thought of it as a challenge to try to do something like that, that it was important for me as a writer to be able to write a fundamental truth of life such as death, but it was just so flimsy, and completely contrived. Maybe in another book I will be able to do it in a way that feels authentic. Or maybe I will never write of death again.
I addressed each terrible draft by getting rid of everything I had written that didn’t feel true, that seemed to try to force a certain kind of feeling or reading, and just tried to live in the space of the novel again, the part of it that still contained possibility and openness.
So is the space of writing—at its best, at its most joyful—a borderless space? Or, at least, a space whose borders can’t be touched?
That’s such a nice way to think about it. Yes, I would say so. Maybe there are borders, but we can’t see them, really; they are just out of view. In that way they might affect a narrative, but not cement it in place. It reminds me of how Vitória likes looking at paintings partly because of the mystery inherent in what’s beyond the frame. The same with the sets in the plays she goes to see. A painting of a room with a hallway that’s not fully in view, for instance, contains within it the suggestion of another place we understand is a part of things, but can’t actually see. We know there is a whole apartment or house, but in this case it is only suggested. Still, the suggestion changes the room, changes how we see it.
It makes me think of that “secret center” Orhan Pamuk talks about in his book on writing and reading novels, The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist. There, he suggests that novels have a center, one that is sometimes unknown to the reader, but still deeply felt, and sometimes unknown to the writer even as s/he writes toward it. Known or unknown, it guides the narrative. Sometimes the center changes; sometimes it comes more into view.
These two structural elements, the frame and the center—both of them tricky, blurry, and mobile—seem crucial to the idea of writing as space. Let me ask you about frames first. It seems that a painting, with its frame, allows for a vision of writing as a space that also has edges, and is capable of gesturing beyond them. In other words, these paintings Vitória gazes at so obsessively aren’t objects chosen by chance, but signs of a theory of literature. After all, it’s looking at pictures that turns her into a writer. And it seems to me that you, as a writer, are working very much according to Vitória’s theory. I’m thinking of the quotations in the novel—you quote Jean Rhys, Jean Genet, Octavia Butler. This intertextuality is one way of gesturing beyond the novel’s frame, making its edges porous to a larger sea of writing. Can you talk about the quotations, both how you chose them, and how you incorporated them into Indelicacy?
I really like that, looking at paintings as its own theory of literature. When I was working on Indelicacy, I often felt oriented to something “beyond,” and when I say that I mean beyond the narrative, but also just beyond mundane experience, and beyond the self. As a writer, I’m interested in the everyday, but I’m also interested in elevated experiences (and maybe where the two intersect) and negative capability. I’m interested in entering the space of a feeling—like fear or ecstasy—without always tying it strongly to story, and without trying to define clearly what it is. I want these spaces to feel like experiences in their own right for the reader, not plot devices, beyond the explicit.
The intertextuality is definitely a part of that, of gesturing beyond the novel’s frame, as you so nicely put it. To me, each of the quotations by Butler, Genet, and Rhys are telegraphing something to Vitória, about suffering, mystery, sinister forces, beauty. In a way they are like voices, calling to her, the texts that sit on her desk, surrounding what she herself is trying to write. They call to her in that way, but they also call to her on these other levels that have to do with being alive and in the stream of the world. In terms of when the quotations entered the text, I tried to wait until I as the writer heard the voices of them too. I don’t want to make it sound too lofty—of course certain passages in those books stood out to me, and I knew I wanted to use them, so there was some forethought there, and sometimes I tried to use one and it didn’t work, either the passage itself or the specific spot in the text where I was trying to place it, and that’s when I just had to be patient to see what, if anything, seemed to want to come in and where.
These voices from other texts give Indelicacy a singular, ghostly atmosphere, partly because they make it harder to place the novel in time. You have candles in the windows and carriages in the streets, and then a quote from Octavia Butler. It’s like time travel. Can you talk about time in this novel?
I gave myself a lot of freedom with time in the novel too. So often I find myself writing a setting or atmosphere or space or time period I myself want to inhabit, that I can’t inhabit otherwise, because it doesn’t quite exist. It’s pleasurable for me to write a time that makes contact with other times. Or a setting that makes contact with other settings. I want these periods of time to exist together, or to create a period of time that is made up of all of them. There was a point when writing the novel that I worried a little about this: how will the reader receive time in the novel? Will it work? Will the reader be able to inhabit it too? Butler’s Kindred very much takes up time travel, of course, and to great effect. I’m not time traveling in that way, but I still wanted time to be fluid, and in the end I thought: it is fiction, the imagination, anything should be possible. I suppose it is a kind of speculative fiction in that way, which is exciting to consider. I’d never really thought of myself as writing it.
I’ve always felt that your work has the feeling of speculative fiction—your short stories, too. There’s that wonderful essay by Gregory Howard from a few years ago, “The Object Is Always Magic: Narrative as Collection,” in which he describes your story “A Night at the Aviary” as a fragmented, distorted fairy tale. Indelicacy has that fairytale quality, too, because of the way the images accumulate, but with mysterious gaps between them. The logic connecting them is dreamlike, never explained. Is it important to you that the objects are left to speak for themselves?
Amina Cain, photo by Polly Antonia Barrowman
On the one hand, yes. I want the objects in the novel to exist strongly; I want them to really be seen, and not just seen, but, in their accumulation, to be just as important as plot, to do their own kind of work. On the other hand, I don’t want the gaps to be so large that the objects express nothing. Vitória complains that one of the other characters in the novel, Solange, is like a wall. There is no way to reach her. Here, the mystery goes too far, into obtuseness. What I want is for the images and objects and moments in Indelicacy to be expressive, to create their own reality.
I like the story Greg tells in that essay of collecting scrap metal on the street, thinking he would one day do something with it, realizing instead that in this collecting he was learning how to be a writer, that fiction can be written through a kind of obsessive collection of objects and through “unexpected juxtaposition.” I relate to that very much. Greg also writes in that essay of buying five Victorian glass eyeballs, each one originally made for a specific client, and found in an optometrist’s shop that had burned to the ground. “Why did they never pick up their eye?” Greg wonders. I wonder too.
I feel like we’ve been talking about museums this whole time. Greg opens that essay in the British Museum. Vitória, too, circles around museums, first cleaning them, then visiting them with her wealthy husband, looking at paintings, writing about paintings. And in The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, Orhan Pamuk writes about the novel as a museum. But, he says, there’s a key difference between novels and museums: “rather than preserving objects themselves, novels preserve our encounters with those objects—that is, our perception of them.” I wonder if you have thoughts about this.
That’s one of my favorite parts of Pamuk’s book, when he talks about the novel as a museum (and he himself is a great collector of objects, filling up his studio with them to help him write). I agree that novels preserve our perceptions of objects more than they preserve the actual objects. And an object in a novel is transformed by the other objects found there too, that transformation happening in our encounters with those objects through time, as we read. When he compares novels to paintings, he says that a painting generally presents a single moment frozen in time, while a novel presents thousands of frozen moments. He also pronounces fiction writers as deeply envious of painters, which I think is funny.
Do you think it’s true?
No, not really. I might be a little envious myself at times, but I would never want to give up fiction. My desire is to try to get close to another form through fiction, not by taking up that form.
As you mentioned, Pamuk also writes about the center of the novel: the secret heart of the image-museum. I want to ask you about your novel’s title, which might point toward that center without revealing it. Why Indelicacy?
Indelicacy wasn’t the first title of the book. For a long time it had a different one, and then for a long time it had no title at all. I usually labor over titles, and I’m jealous of writers who are naturally good at them. For months I made very long lists of bad or underwhelming titles, or titles of which only I was a fan, and finally my husband, Amarnath Ravva, who is also a writer, suggested Indelicacy. There’s a line in the novel in which Vitória says of her own behavior, “How indelicate,” and suddenly that seemed right. Both words were used to describe suffragettes when they were fighting for women’s rights, to criticize them for it, and to try to hold them back, but I see the energy behind indelicacy to be positive, that sometimes being indecent is good, and necessary, to break through oppressive social codes, finding freedom on the other side. I think there is definitely some of the novel’s center in that. Plus, I like that it’s a word not used very often anymore, that it gestures to the past.
What’s next for you, Amina?
These days I am trying to finish an essay collection on the space of fiction. But I am starting to get tired of my thoughts. I want to write fiction again, not just think about it. I don’t know yet what it will be, though some images are starting to appear in my mind . . .
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Amina Cain is the author of a novel, Indelicacy, and two collections of short fiction, Creature and I Go To Some Hollow. Her writing has appeared in Granta, n+1, The Paris Review Daily, BOMB, Full Stop, The Believer Logger, and other places. She lives in Los Angeles.
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection, Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her work has received several honors, including the World Fantasy Award. She teaches African literature, Arabic literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.