Alyssa Quinn, Habilis. Dzanc Books, 2022
A hallucinatory exploration into the origins of humans and human language perfect for fans of Brian Evenson and Eimear McBride.
Lucy, a young woman with an uncertain past, finds herself thrust into a mysterious anthropology museum that converts into a disco club each night. Moving through its labyrinthine galleries, she tries to construct an origin story for herself and for her species. But as the night progresses, her grip on language and identity slips away until the exhibit captions rupture the text, transporting us to East Africa, where the lives of three people—British anthropologist Mary Leakey, an Indian indentured laborer building the Uganda Railway, and a curator with too many secrets—interweave to reveal the darker side of the search for origins.
Surreal, spiraling, and daringly innovative, Habilis is all at once a historical reconstruction, a psychological horror, a mystery, a ghost story, and a creation myth. But above all, it is a meditation on language, desire, and the stories we tell about ourselves—especially those that might unravel us.
“Habilis is a brilliant literary kaleidoscope, in which fragments of human framing of our ‘natural history’ leap, jostle, abut, overlap, and all with a keen sense of entertaining and colorful storytelling! Maybe I’m exactly the perfect reader for this book, but I smiled, nodded, gasped, laughed, and felt the poignant sting of pathos the whole way. What’s one more Lucy to stand in for all that we don’t understand? What’s one more attempt to make sense of eons of evolution, or one evening’s adventures? The collapse of scale and time here is impressive and unwaveringly illuminating, even if only of shadows. Huzzah!” —Thalia Field, author of Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction) and Personhood
“Flickering between taxa, Alyssa Quinn's unclassifiable book maps the shadows cast by the museum and the archive, pointing again and again "to that which isn't there." It imagines the tenseless ghosts who haunt the straight steel line of colonial logic and enacts a multi-directional movement that pleats time, the sentence, and meaning itself. Habilis is a record of bright fractures and irresolvable symbols, an anti-history, a poem that's a mirror, a stratigraphy of gaps.” —Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan and Field Glass
“‘In the archive, I forget my name.’ Alyssa Quinn's artful, nimbly-made novel is studded with vital archaisms, from the DNA-ribbon of Mitochondrial Eve, blurry in its vitrine, to the Poughkeepsie train station, a remnant of Victorian red-brick optimism plunked on the Empire line. The contemporary protagonist, orphaned as a toddler, has come unstuck from time, drifting between incidents in her own life and historical and pre-historical narratives unspooling from specimens and artefacts from the unsavory history of anthropology. As insight, connection, shame and regret trade places across axes of colonialism, sexism, racist exploitation and personal loss, Habilis considers what it means to have a human hand, and to use it to comfort or to harm, to point to what is and isn't there.” —Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne
“An ambitious and dynamic novel that collapses time and space, author and character, imagination and historical record, Alyssa Quinn's Habilis is a book about the affordances and limitations of language, museums, relationships, science, systems of classification, and—above all—storytelling. Here Quinn vacillates between fiction and fact with grace and nuance. Cerebral and sophisticated yet also full of pathos, Habilis is prismatic and shimmering with linguistic fervor, as much about Mary Leakey as it is about the ethics and aesthetics of what it means to compose a story -- and what remains in the wake of that act. A haunting and heartfelt debut.” —Lindsey Drager, author of The Archive of Alternate Endings
“With great intelligence, compassion, and confidence, Alyssa Quinn's Habilis dazzingly remixes the fossil record of sometimes anxious, frequently pernicious fictions we tell ourselves about our place in the world, about who is genetically suited to hold positions of power and privilege, and about how, under a patriarchal, imperial rubric, the body's evolving morphologies equate to social destiny. Quinn's ingenious concept and challenging imagination engagingly transform the museum of so-called natural history into a surreal and unsettling house of mirrors, its glass eyes and vitrines no longer capable of distorting the human subject they seek to define, but rather making newly visible generations of suppressed narratives of ambition, care, and desire that provide a fresh perspective on our species' pasts and possible futures.” —Michael Mejia
Disorientation is the rule in Alyssa Quinn’s Habilis, right from the first sentence: “The museum is a discotheque.” That strange business gets sorted out quickly, when a woman with the museum explains to her guest, “it’s radical I know, but we were facing bankruptcy.” Yet at the same time, the developing narrative has already started to fracture. If there’s a primary action, it’s getting to know the visitor, Lucy. As she drinks and drifts around the fundraiser, a sketch of her troubled past emerges; abandoned as a baby, raised a foster child, her lone sustaining connection seems to be this museum staffer, Dina. But how does Lucy’s childhood matter tonight, and what does Dina mean to her? A line or two suggests a romance, but then another passage maintains that Dina’s dead, and her name was “Danielle” anyway, and overall the dance floor offers few fixed points: “display cases slosh violet with light and the wall text bulges and strobes.”
The glimpses of Lucy’s past are only more strobe-flashes, and never allow the narrative to settle into some well-worn groove, like overcoming childhood trauma or repairing a broken relationship. Rather, this “radical” night at the museum⎯ a museum of natural history, as in Ben Stiller’s movie⎯ either puts Lucy through some violent change, at one point robbing her of speech, or ignores the woman altogether. Can she be considered the protagonist, at all? When the novel leaves so much about her unresolved? Rather, Quinn devotes many brief chapters, typically a page of unbroken prose in a sophisticated authorial voice, to some diorama or skeleton.
A lot of these show the development of the human hand, its defining thumb and index finger. The text also examines its evolutionary forebear, the antelope’s ankle (“metapodial”). Over an irregular series of paragraph-chapters, the antelope material continues roughly to mid-novel, reaching a kind of climax in a nightmare of taxidermy:
Dina cross-legged on the floor, a bloody mass of animal in her lap. Has a blade and is scissoring away its skin, lifting it from muscle like a pale glossy peel. Connective tissues stretch like cellophane. Blood vessels bulge. Around her are skeletons of wire and wool.
Quinn’s style can bedazzle us with its effects, her skillful verb usage vivifying what’s surreal, but her narrative imagination offers nothing Hollywood-friendly. Rather than story, she has her stops around the museum. The displays featuring a hand or wrist raise issues of wordless communication, while other exhibits present bones of the throat and jaw, the development of language, and these linked notions make Habilis a novel of ideas, if dreamlike and intense. It’s an investigation of how people communicate, and this also reaches a kind of climax at about center-point: “The sign repeated, pointing to objects of desire in order to speak about them, and in speaking, survive.”
But as I say, that’s just half the text, all particolored philosophy and inconclusive tragedy. Throughout, there have also loomed certain wholes, dioramas with fully assembled figures. These include of course the original “Lucy,” our human prototype, brought to light by the anthropologist Donald Johanson. Just ten years earlier, anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey discovered “Olduvai Hominid 7,” known as “handy man,” Homo Habilis. A toolmaker who must’ve had the rudiments of language, he combines the major elements of the novel that bears his name⎯ until, roughly a hundred pages in, the book undergoes a wild metamorphosis.
Talk about disorientation: at the turn of a page, with the reiteration of a few lines from beginning, Habilis becomes a biographical novel. Quinn turns her hand to a fictionalized life of Mary Leakey, rich with historical detail. Of course, details out of the distant past surrounded Lucy and Dina too, as they tumbled around the funhouse, and the text’s second half has other points in common with its first. The authorial voice doesn’t change, allowing earlier insights to turn up again, sometimes in the same phrasing, and this omniscient observer also shows the anthropologist tumbling and fumbling. Born to the manor in England, Leakey found her life’s purpose in the dust of Olduvai Gorge, and amid a whirl of lights and noise far worse than any disco.
The Second World War didn’t spare Kenya or Ethiopia, the Leakeys’ territory, and among Quinn’s more eye-opening tidbits is the story of Louis’s gun-running. The couple needed the money, and more disturbingly, the guns went to hapless natives who served the Allies as cannon fodder. So the incident links up Mary’s biography with the other plotline of the novel’s second half: the history of the first rail line across British Africa. White men didn’t do that work, of course. Rather the colonials brought in “coolies”, and their hardscrabble sets up a counterpoint with the Leakeys’ comforts, starkly illuminating the racist structures within which turned up proof that all humankind has the same⎯African⎯origin.
This irony also informs the questions that nag at Lucy and Dina, the roots of human communication, since those roots burrow far beneath anyone’s skin-color. In other words, Habilis has a conceptual framework rather than a plot, one reasserted at novel’s close, when it returns to its museum wonderland. With that, the whole proves prettily interwoven, as well as threaded throughout with pretty prose, a complex thought experiment that achieves rare integrity. But is it literature? Does it engage the passions and create catharsis? Aristotle wouldn’t say so, and I too have reservations, mostly concerning the first half. I grew weary of the two women forever teasing out some drama and then losing it among the bones and stones. But then again, any vibrant artform must from time to time wow us with just such improbable, not to say miraculous, bricolage. - John Domini
https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/books/Alyssa-Quinns-Habilis
Alyssa Quinn: I recently learned that it is—astonishingly—possible for bacteria to fossilize. Some bacteria do this by coating themselves in a fine layer of clay, which helps their decomposition slow. So I guess I like the idea of my bacteria—my gut flora, and so on—being preserved. Another fun fact I learned recently is that our bodies contain approximately 30 trillion human cells and approximately 39 trillion microbial cells. We are less ourselves than we are other, which is something I’ve been writing about lately.
GS: Speaking of your creative efforts, what is the one sentence from Habilis you’d want to survive eons into the future?
AQ: “What is lost always forms the boundary of what is.”
GS: The copy on the back of Habilis (Dzanc, 2022) invokes the likes of Brian Evenson and Eimear McBride. Did these writers provide you with inspirational fuel for this novel? If not, what writers or specific books did?
AQ: Actually, I hadn’t read any Brian Evenson until after Habilis was completed, and I still haven’t read any Eimear McBride—that was my editor’s comparison. The texts I drew on for this book were largely books of nonfiction (biography, history) and books of theory (semiotic, linguistic). As for my biggest aesthetic inspiration, that was actually not a book but an album—Calling Out of Context by Arthur Russell. I listened to that album on obsessive repeat while writing the book. It’s strange, ethereal music that provided the perfect atmosphere for this surreal book.
GS: What is a novel you’ve read and think deserves more readers?
AQ: This is an easy one for me—Triptych by Claude Simon. I read Triptych well over a year ago and still have not managed to pick my jaw back up off the floor. It’s a book I want to say nothing about, other than that everyone should read it. What I will say: Triptych’s prose exemplifies the style of the Nouveau Roman, a certain kind of novel experimented with in 1950s France. In his essay “A Future for the Novel,” fellow Nouveau Roman writer Alain Robbe-Grillet criticizes the idea that the job of the novel is to get to the depths of things, that its goal is a “sacred vertigo” or transcendence. He argues instead for an attention to surfaces, to the careful description of objects. A recurring theme for him is that “things are there,” and the simple fact of their presence ought to be astonishing. He wants to reawaken us to “the shock of this stubborn reality we were pretending to have mastered.” To that end, the Nouveau Roman authors attempt to describe objects without insisting on their significations—attending to their sensual qualities rather than collapsing them into symbols. The result, in Triptych, is some of the most exquisitely attentive prose I’ve ever encountered. Pair that with an ingenious novelistic structure, in which three narratives unfold, not consecutively, but simultaneously, the connections between them gradually forming twisty, wormhole-esque tunnels, and you’ve got a truly breathtaking book that deserves far more attention than it gets.
GS: Where do you draw the line between “true” history and imagination?
AQ: I don’t. At most there’s a highly permeable membrane between the two. Of course, some things are true and others are not—and in an era where so many important truths are doubted, it becomes increasingly important to affirm that fact. But even true things come to us filtered through imagination. We can’t access history any other way. And so my work is interested not in drawing a line between truth and imagination, but in playing within the space of their overlap and mutual exchange.
GS: What about the line between exposition and narrative, especially considering the scientific themes within your debut novel, Habilis?
AQ: All of my work is interested in blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction. While I am primarily a fiction writer, all of my fiction is heavily researched, and the research does not simply form the backdrop against which my stories take place—the research is itself the story. So I hope to undo the binary between exposition and narrative. Exposition is interested in background—establishing information that is taken as a given, the static landscape where narrative unfolds. I am interested in work that abolishes the idea of a “background,” abolishes the idea of “landscape,” abolishes the idea of “setting.” When history and science don’t just supply context or metaphorical resonance to a story, but are in fact elevated to the status of characters, then it becomes possible to truly explore their limits and affordances. When plants and animals and minerals and weather and buildings and furniture and cities don’t just form the setting where human events take place, but are instead viewed as vibrant actors in their own right, then it becomes possible to cultivate a truly ecological imagination. This is the kind of literature that is most compelling to me right now—literature which places everything in the foreground, and so erodes hierarchies between the human and the nonhuman, the text and the world, the part and the whole.
I’m reminded here of the essay “Odysseus’s Scar” by the German critic Erich Auerbach. In this essay, Auerbach argues that Homer “knows no background.” In The Odyssey, writes Auerbach, nothing enters the story without its nature and origin being described. These digressions, which you might call exposition, in fact swell to take up the foreground. They “represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial relations.” I’m interested in a 21st-century version of this Homeric style, one that explicates all the tangled webs of which our interconnected globe is composed. Of course, to actually explicate all of them is impossible—there are far too many, and so white space, absence, and ellipsis will always be features of my work. But I hope to create the impression that anything that seems like background could at any moment come rushing to the fore.
GS: About halfway through Habilis or so, there’s a shift in tone, perspective, and structure. It’s by no means the only shift either. What informed the unique structure of this novel?
AQ: The reason for this shift has a lot to do with what I said about exposition above. Habilis takes place in an anthropology museum, and interwoven with scenes of the characters moving through the museum are a series of exhibit captions describing the museum’s artifacts. The shift you mention occurs with the caption for the Laetoli Footprints, a fossilized set of protohuman footprints found in Tanzania. This exhibit ruptures the main text, taking over with a 68-page caption that interweaves the stories of British anthropologist Mary Leakey (who discovered the Laetoli Footprints), an indentured laborer building the Uganda Railroad, and a museum curator trapped in the basement of the UK’s National Archives. The sheer length of this unruly exhibit is meant to demonstrate that “nothing that is is unconnected.” Every object finds itself at the nexus of innumerable historical threads, and to truly see an object means to trace these threads—a process that can never approach completion. The structure of the book was meant to evoke that fact. In this case, the exhibit explores the connections between the field of paleoanthropology and histories of racism and imperialism, especially in East Africa.
Also, small spoiler alert here, but although there is a shift in structure, there isn’t actually a shift in perspective—the whole book has one narrator, though it might take a tiny bit of sleuthing to discover how that is the case….
GS: Like babies and their first word, what do you imagine the first word was for the human race, or what would you wish it to be?
AQ: In Habilis, I imagine that the first instance of human language was in fact a gesture—the gesture of pointing. To point is essentially to say “this.” So I imagine that “this” was the first word. Although it may seem like a simple, throwaway word, it is in fact very important to me, and to my writing. Ludwig Wittgenstein has this great line in Philosophical Investigations: “Yet, strange to say, the word ‘this’ has been called the only genuine name; so that anything else we call a name was one only in an inexact, approximate sense.” Habilis was in large part an exploration of that idea.
The word “this,” linguistically, is an example of what’s called deixis. Deictic words are those that have fixed semantic meanings, but whose denoted meanings depend on their context—words like you, me, there, that, this, tomorrow, today, etc. You when I say it means you but when you say it means me. Roland Barthes: “That’s it! This cry is not to be understood as an illumination of intelligence, but as the very limit of nomination, of the imagination.” I love the word “this” for that reason—it runs right up against the inexpressible. It refuses all reductionism, and simply affirms—this! All this! Some of my favorite books employ deictic phrases to convey this sense of ecstasy. Mrs. Dalloway is a great example. It is chock-full of deixis: “There she was,” “That is all,” “He was right there,” “Happiness is this,” “It is this,”—and of course, the famous last line: “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.” And this is probably another reason why I so love Simon’s Triptych—in a way, it’s simply an utterance of the word “this,” extended to the length of 170 pages.
GS: What is one recent evolution in our language that you can’t stand?
AQ: Honestly, I can’t think of one. I used to be more militaristic about language, but thankfully I’ve left that tendency behind. Language’s diversity and malleability are its strength and its beauty. I have no interest in condemning people’s usage.
GS: Are you familiar with any literary attempts at making an evolved language for the future or the post-apocalypse more specifically, such as Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, or the “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Evrythin’ After” chapter in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas? If so, what are your thoughts on them?
AQ: Slightly familiar, yes. Though I can’t say I’m necessarily a fan of any of those particular works, I am compelled by the idea of imagining a new language. My favorite author who speculates about invented languages would definitely be Borges. He imagines alternative languages in many of his short stories. Often, he’s theorizing the possibility of a perfect, totalizing language. For example, in the story “Funes, His Memory,” the protagonist, Ireneo Funes, has sustained a head injury that has left him with the unique ability to perceive and remember all things perfectly. “He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once,” the narrator tells us. Funes is naturally overwhelmed by this onslaught of information, comparing his memory to a garbage heap. In an attempt to deal with this heap, he contemplates a system much like one postulated by John Locke in the 17th century: “an impossible language in which each individual thing—every stone, every bird, every branch—would have its own name.” Funes, however, “discarded the idea as too general,” for he remembered “not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf.” He considers other language systems that might be able to reduce this welter of memory but ultimately gives up. Perfect languages don’t exist, and the word this can only get you so far—at some point, you’ve got to accept the imperfect names of which our language is made.
GS: Whether as a human being or another animal, what is an age you’d like to have lived in? Why?
AQ: I think I would like to have been a cyanobacterium about 2.4 billion years ago, back when they were in the process of oxygenating the earth. The air would have been so fresh.
GS: What do you imagine the last word will be for the human race, or what would you wish it to be?
AQ: I would wish it not to be one word, but many words uttered simultaneously. One word—even a word as multiple as “this”—is never enough. - George Salis
https://thecollidescope.com/2022/12/08/the-imperfect-names-an-interview-with-alyssa-quinn/
Humans have been at this for such a long while. Adam and Eve after the garden, speaking past each other; Alice after Wonderland, losing definition. Scheherazade working with broken boxes; Pandora happy to have broken them. We put birds into testing tubes. We put Dante into Hell. We put pen to paper, and in so doing lose sight of our immediate exits. How are we to make our escapes? The only way out, suggests Dante’s Cartography, is through. In these six stories, Alyssa Quinn structures worlds without obvious escape—but worlds in which we examine and identify our reflected selves. Why not, after all? This is what we know how to do.
Periodicals
“Last Days of the Bonneville Water Sprite.” Propagule. July 2022.
“Babel.” Psaltery & Lyre. July 2022.
“The Climate Suicides.” Copper Nickel. Mar. 2022.
“The Thing.” Third Coast. July 2021.
“If Birds Left Tracks in the Sky.” The New Thing. Jul. 2021.
“This Too.” Wigleaf. May 2021.
“Life History of a Plastic Bag.” Passages North. Feb. 2021.
“13.1.” Cream City Review. Feb. 2021.
“Cityscape.” Ninth Letter. Jan. 2021.
“What an Abyss Will Open.” The Rupture. Dec. 2020.
“The Shape of Grief.” Phoebe. May 2020.
“Sidewalk to the Moon.” Indiana Review. Feb. 2020.
“Beauty Tips for the Apocalypse.” Gingerbread House. Jan. 2020.
“Transcendence: A Schematic.” Meridian. Jun. 2019.
“The Heart: A Thought Experiment.” Juked. Jun. 2019.
“Creation Myth.” The Pinch. Mar. 2019.
“Mycelium.” Queen Mob’s Teahouse. Nov. 2018.
“No More Dead Women.” Psychopomp Magazine. Nov. 2018.
“The Portrait.” Monkeybicycle. Jul. 2018.
“Galatea, Self-Portrait in Fragments.” Gingerbread House. Mar. 2018.
“Naming the Salt Flats.” Frontier Poetry. Sept. 2018.
“Dictionary of God.” Punctuate Magazine. Mar. 2018.
“A Theory of Chaos and Conception.” Ninth Letter. Dec. 2017.
Alyssa Quinn is the author of Habilis (Dzanc, 2022) and the prose chapbook Dante’s Cartography (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2019). She holds an MFA in creative writing from Western Washington University, and is currently at work on a PhD at the University of Utah, where she is also the senior prose editor for Quarterly West.
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