Kristen Kosmas’ Hello Failure: Notes on Setting, Relationship, and Speaking

[Hello Failure by Kristen Kosmas, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009.]

The premise of Kosmas’ play—a play that wonderfully flirts with poetry and takes realism to task—is that the wives of submarine captains gather in a support group to provide each other, presumably, with comfort and advice. The haunting failure of a particular marine engineer, Horace Hunley, inventor of early submarines, begins the play—Hunley’s submersible boat “was the first submarine in the history of naval warfare to attack and sink a shop. Unfortunately, shortly after the attack, the Hunley sank, for the fourth time, and everyone on board died . . .” Hence, “Hello Failure.”

Against this backdrop, the following things strike me about the play: the use of banal, liminal, and contested settings—conference rooms, museums, and when it’s a house, the room that is featured is the bathroom; speech is revised as it is spoken—this challenges traditional literary surfaces; comfort and programmatic “self help” structures are fleeting, maybe even failing, but, as Kosmas insists in the culminating production notes: “. . . it is important that the women are friends. They like each other. They are not miserable, crazy, or mean.”

Most settings in this play are liminal spaces. Most of the dialogue takes place in a conference room complete with a large plant, in a museum for submarines, and present also are fluorescent lights and what Kosmas identifies as “room tone.” I love this attention to sounds—something that dramatic writing insists on, so that spaces are very complete, even if staged minimally. Other spaces include a bathroom where one character, Rebecca, does all of her talking—either to her absent husband Jack, and then to Horace Hunley who appears with a movie for them to watch. Rebecca is happy to see him and suggests that they can bring the TV and VCR into the bathroom. Rebecca is agoraphobic, and so the image of her conducting a life within what might be the smallest room in the house—and contemplating submarines, talking to an historical figure who designed them—makes tremendous sense. And all this sense is achieved by placing Rebecca in the bathroom—a wonderful setting choice.

Speaking is an important part of this play—and stating this seems almost redundant: after all, this is dramatic writing. But as Kosmas writes, at the end of play, “While at first glance this script might resemble a traditional play . . .it is not intended to function as a literary drama. It is a text for speaking.” To me, the speech acts are where beautiful moments of failure happen again and again. For as Kosmas instructs, “There are errors or speech and logic in the play. Best not to dwell on them.” A character begins down a road of thought, but her speech falls short: “I’m sorry I—I’m sorry.” A clear statement is made and then instantly revised: “I like to have sex. I think.” Sentences are left incomplete and flow without punctuation: “I am trying with all my might to pull back the curtains Jack or at least.”

These markers of doubt within the speech act abound throughout the play. But the kind of doubt that’s expressed is not of the texture of the French feminist or typical narrative-application-of-semiotics variety—this writing is not like Duras or Sarraute’s narrators languishing over how to tell, struggling self-consciously over how to remember. Rather, the unsure surfaces and voices in Hello Failure come clipped, fast, and in conversation. The characters live in the present, in relationship—not in the web of individual memory reconstituted through writing. Again, I think of Kosmas’ note: “They are not miserable . . .” Yes, the struggle to speak persists—and language might evade or come apart—and though the play is a hello to failure, maybe this is a kind of new feminist text: women are presently working things out, in collaboration, in speech, and not alone.

For my current writing project called LABOR—a project that has moved me from poetry toward fiction—I take the following ideas from Kosmas’ Hello Failure:

First, move characters in and out of settings at will. Even though I don’t think I’m writing a “realistic” text, it always amazes me to see the way a playwright can simply draw the lines of the stage and then drop characters in and out of that space. The lesson is in simultaneity.

Second, when my characters in LABOR speak, they need not be precise. I have noticed that my characters don’t speak that often, actually. Reading Kosmas, I wonder if my hesitation is because I have somewhere come to believe that “dialogue” equals realism, stable voices, clever and fully formed sentences. Kosmas has opened up that door: what does doubt sound like and how often does our speech revise itself as it goes?

Last, on relationships. I love this idea of characters interacting not necessarily out of conflict, but toward comfort. I don’t know why literary works tend to magnify conflict—I suppose it is a very familiar and maybe even “natural” tendency. But I loved reading Kosmas’ characters negotiate, through speaking, big ideas and small ideas as well, with no easily identifiable enemy in sight.

Christa Wolf’s The Quest for Christa T.: Writing the I through the Other

The Quest for Christa T. is the narrator’s quest to understand another woman who is possibly the narrator’s friend, but more likely is a version of Wolf herself, which makes this novel a complicated narration of self and other.

At this moment in my writing, I am coming from poetry toward fiction. The whole idea of “characters” and their relationship to the self has been an object of my interest, consideration, and joy lately. My current project, entitled LABOR, requires bodies moving around inside institutions—and I need a variation of responses, a range of possibilities. I need bodies to also do things that are impossible for me to imagine doing. So, in comes fiction, but from what I can tell, autobiography still lurks.

Broadly, reading The Quest helped to reinforce the idea that characters are often versions of ourselves. Christa T. is a writer; Christa T. shares Wolf’s first name; Christa struggles explicitly with writing the “I.” All of these are clues to one of the most important aspects of fiction: the possibility that through imagination, we create versions of ourselves and new windows into self-awareness. I can say with absolute certainty that the characters in my book, LABOR, are versions of myself, my own psyche. Yet imagination also allows me to have these characters perform acts and display certain responses that seem impossible or unlikely for the realistic “me.” This reminds me of something Susan Sontag said—and I am paraphrasing: “Art strengthens the adversarial consciousness.”

For me, in the face of power at the workplace, fiction has been a liberating and expansive tool, helping me to decide literally how I want to be, how to create myself, my work life, my responses. I wonder about Wolf: in East Germany, it is quite likely that fiction would provide a kind of veil between the writer and her story, a veil as a place of fiction in which to express the doubts of the artist, the purpose of art, and a woman writer interacting with state institutions—The Quest performs these interactions with subtlety. Fiction, I would argue, allows for this.

But Wolf’s approach to this narration—using the 1^st person to relate to another character without building long and realistic scenes of interaction—is useful to me and my project, a project where up until now, I have struggled with the narrative act of having characters relate to each other. I am not interested in a linear, realistic, “real time” narrative. Yet I want moments of contact between characters in my book. Wolf’s novel gives me a way forward.

Following are what I take to be five key elements of Wolf’s narrative approach, as well as narrative structure:

1. Using documents to speculate about Christa T. The narrator mentions her diaries, manuscripts, short stories left behind, and certain passages indicate that she is researching Christa actively: “The institute sent me the thesis” (94). This is very compatible with “going in to the archive” to learn about a character, or perhaps even to conjure a sense of a person, beyond what writings they leave behind. This is very applicable to my project that started in the archive, and began, really, with a discovery of a labor activist named Sadie Van Amter.

2. Using death as a narrative device that drives the quest. In the very first pages of the book, the reader learns that Christa T. will die a somewhat early death. This serves as a motivation, almost, for the reader as well as the narrator to learn what they can, to try to understand where her life meant, even if it seems to be “a film of shadows” (4).

3. One event, one action, can structure a book. In chapter 1, the narrator notes an action that attracted her to Christa, that made her want to get to know her: “she blew her trumpet” (9) and again, much later in the book, this event is a touch stone, a way of marking the narrator’s interest in a woman who makes such a loud noise. This might also be a metaphor for writing, for saying something that breaks through the hum of everyday life, for authorship.

4. Touching lightly on the larger social context and the individual’s relationship to state power and ideology. I enjoyed The Quest for this lesson. The context, at the onset, is war—and this is clear in the earlier, childhood portions of the book, in the very arrival of this new person, Christa T., in the village. The event of her arrival points to the larger trend of folks needing to move about during war. And when Christa T. announces that “the forest” is her favorite subject, Wolf later describes a scene where a “rotting gas mask in the forest” is found (22). I think this is brilliant—a light touch, a delicate way to provide social, historical context—but with an image that is quite memorable and astounding. Later in the novel, posters on walls are featured (42), and the building’s “falling masonry” could be read as a critique of institutions or the institution embodying an ideology (46).

5. The narrator speculating about a character; folding this speculative language into the book itself. The narrator actually addresses Christa, her creation, directly, asking, “What are you going to be?” (34). There are times, also, that the narrator revisits her own memory, and questions the way she has constructed Christa T. in the writing itself. For example:

When I got up I saw the sheet of paper there with my own eyes; but now it has disappeared. Writing means making things large. Yes, it’s possibly so: she didn’t say it, I read it. (169)

This quote is also a key into the text that merges autobiography and fiction—and of a narrative stance that questions the solidity of the position of “I.” In fact, “The Difficulty of Saying I” appears as a phrase again and again toward the end of the book, and seemed to be one of Christa T.’s central intellectual problems as a writer—a quest that the narrator then takes up, via Christa. In the East German context, Wolf might be undertaking something political; that within communism, the indulgence of autobiography is something to question, and yet Wolf has created a text where a woman engages in the discovery of self, through writing, and through “the other.”