5 Questions with Swati Sudarsan
Today, we published the final installment of Swati Sudarsan’s story, “Sparkling Creature.” Michael Colbert and Emily Lowe spoke with Swati about art within capitalism, the erotic, and striving to become a muse.
The Rejoinder: When I heard you read this story, I was so taken by the voice and gallery girls as a subject. What drew you into this story?
Swati Sudarsan: Finding your way into a story is a mysterious process, isn’t it? I am at the mercy of what the story wants. Sometimes I feel the most I have a say in is naming my characters. But it’s not like naming a child. Imagine if I had a child named Giancarlo…
In the very beginning, I was just trying to listen to the story. This is from the earliest draft:
“That was the real calamity of the job: the kitchen door. It swung both ways, and slapped my ass each time I did not scurry through urgently enough. It was vulgar. It was degrading. It once even made me drop an entire tray of glasses over my feet. The men of the kitchen had rushed to my aid, crushing glass with their close-toed shoes while my feet in strappy kitten heels had been sliced to ribbons.”
This had to be cut early, as it turned out to be a dead-end to the plot. Yet by writing it, I discovered the type of person I wished Hanneli to become. Someone who knows the people around her. Has robust, organic relationships. Takes help when it is given. Since this is her transformation, I had to write the Hanneli before her journey. She became a character with a real holier-than-thou attitude, but there is this thrumming sadness that permeates her every thought. So that’s the question. Why is she so sad with an attitude like that? And how is she going to solve it?
Then somehow, the idea of her desire to be a muse came into my head. It was funny to me, because no one gets to choose to be a muse. So that’s where the art gallery setting came to me. And as I built out the setting it revealed itself as perfect. It’s a place where every night you see hundreds of new people, work intimately on a team that can be built out by aesthetics, and also, there can be workers you never see or interact with. So there are worlds within the gallery you are not even aware of, and you can meet a sexy stranger.
Then finally, the propulsion came from allowing Hanneli to have such a burning desire that it overrides the god-given logic of her brain. This is where I got character. She had to be analytical, perhaps overly so. But she must also want this thing, to be a muse, so badly, she is open to illogical things. This was the permission that formed Giancarlo. He is sleazy to anyone but her. So then, I must write in the first person perspective. The reader must enmesh with her psyche, so they also don’t fully see what anyone else would see. Otherwise, where is the surprise?
Then came the rest of the story. The hotel. Ross. The sexual healing conference. Whatever. It’s like playing tetris. You make things up that fit once you have the basic foundation. That’s the joy of fiction for me.
But to answer your question, it started with that door.
TR: The plot and language in "Sparkling Creature" are so dialed into the relationship between art and capitalism. What did you want to untangle through Hanneli's ennui in this space?
SS: I wanted, on the most basic level, to explore how it is possible for a job to threaten your personhood. Not on an “ugh, I hate my boring job, I wish I didn’t have to work,” level, but on the level where the job actually drains something irretrievable from you.
It’s pretty common right now. This existential ennui, tied up in our jobs. I think it’s more than recessions, being underpaid, general insecurity…though that can contribute to it. I think some jobs threaten our capacity for radical imagination by requiring our allegiance to them. I used to work in a field where we constantly reaffirmed our commitment by stating, “we would rather be here, saving the world, than making more money elsewhere.” But were we really saving the world? Or was the economy of prestige feeding the cruel optimism of my desire to have a job that allegedly made me a good person? Here’s another one: I have a friend who is training AI to do her job in copywriting for her, but to do it faster and more cheaply. So, to be valuable in her job, she must undermine her own utility. Her cruel optimism is that if she is good at her job, even as she actively makes herself obsolete, her job will recognize her ability to be even more thorough in her obsoletion, so they will need her until there is truly nothing to improve, the AI she has trained is perfection.
The mechanisms of how this all works can be clandestine, but it is exploitation to assign an identity onto you. A job is a role, not an identity. In the story, Hanneli is being assigned the identity of the gallery itself, which puts her in quite a bit of danger. The longer she stays in her role and accepts this treatment, the sooner she loses her capacity for radical imagination. This happens as she is siloed into a particular display of femininity. One that is intoxicating and seductive, but ultimately debilitating. This is her autonomy that is under siege.
Ultimately, what I wanted to untangle from this is the power and necessity of recognition. To remove the danger, Hanneli didn’t actually need to change her entire life, as she feared. She merely needed to see that she had her whole life, her entire personality, her entire aura, her entire soul, intact inside of her, despite the job. So this is the journey of the story, trying to find her intact imagination and originality within the world of art.
TR: Amid the story's critique on capital, there emerges a powerful idea surrounding the humiliation of women, which then combines with Hanneli's artistic realization at the sexual healing conference. How do you see those two ideas sitting alongside each other?
SS: As a woman, every day I tread the gossamer-thin line that divides humiliation from power when it comes to feminine sensuality, pleasure, and the erotic. It’s very easy to distort this humiliation to look like power when there is a product to sell. Women are told that they should invest in their beauty, because increasing your desirability increases your value. And to have a handle on your own value is allegedly powerful. It’s a wonderful distraction from the fact that there is no actual power to be gained, because there is no bar of Ultimate Beauty that can be reached. It is an illusion meant to keep femmes striving, and money moving.
I wanted this story to look at that through the lens of a young person, and really deal with what’s at stake when we confuse the erotic with the pornographic. I needed this story to show me a way out of the mess, because I am so troubled by the way heteropatriarchal capitalism undermines the idiosyncrasies of the erotic in the art world. Art under the regime of capitalism transforms the ineffable and inimitable beauty of art into a commodity, the same way it mutilates women into such a product.
Have you read Audre Lorde’s essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”? Lorde says on the very first page, “On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.” It is clear that humiliation is a tool of desecration, ultimately necessary to keep power in the hands of this false erotic, one that is devoid of feeling and meaning; one that has artificial value assigned to it in order to advent a product.
So, the art impinges on Hanneli’s dignity, simply by existing. The inundation of it frustrates and infuriates her, but she can’t put her finger on why. Lorde’s essay suggests that a genuine interaction with the erotic is a source of feminine power. Not just power, but the source of self. Lorde says, “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.” So ultimately, what Hanneli needed is one genuine experience of internal satisfaction while experiencing art, to believe in its possibility, and to have something new to strive toward. This is her release from handcuffs of the pornographic, into the wisdom of the erotic.
TR: Much of Hanneli's desire to be a muse seems to actually translate to her desire to be seen. How do you feel art obscures or reveals our true selves?
SS: Bad art obscures, interprets, or overly-metabolizes. Good art reveals.
However, I think what the story contends with isn’t good or bad art. I hate calling whatever is in that gallery art, even bad art. I think bad art would be more earnest. What’s being sold there is a commodity under the guise of art. The more overt version is the products her friends show off to each other. But all this crap is on the same spectrum. Maybe this is why she looks to the moon so much. No one can desecrate the moon.
It’s actually the industry of art that is the problem here. And how it deals with beauty. This is what informs Hanneli’s arc as a person. It takes up so much of her brain space, because it is a viscerally upsetting experience for her to see what she considers the literal desecration of beauty be supported and lauded. This is happening at basically every turn of her life, so the places one would normally seek comfort are not available to her. And for what? You have to remember she’s a young person. A recent college graduate without financial or emotional support from her family. I don’t specify a year, but it’s modern. She’s probably graduated into a recession of some sort. She wants simple things, but she can’t afford any of it. We live in a world where the inherent value of art is manufactured by gate-keeping it. It has to be exclusive to be worth something. But to Hanneli, this gate-keeping removes her access to the one thing that should be available freely: beauty. So she’s feeling cornered, and she’s trying to sell her sexuality (or harness it). But you can tell, she doesn’t really understand sex. She thinks having sex means you are understood. But it’s not working, because she has yet to understand that this manufacturing of meaning/value is false! Thus, the industry of bad art is the heartbreak of her life.
TR: What's exciting to you in fiction right now, whether with your writing or what you're reading?
SS": When I love something, I evangelize it. Right now, I can’t shut up about The Coin by Yasmin Zaher. That is a novel. Not a regurgitated plot. Not a story constructed to make a point. Zaher gives us, wall to wall, a whole world. And it’s written in the first person, my favorite. While it is literary, it is also propulsive, like a thriller. There is a lot going in this book, but it’s deftly handled. It stays tight, but the way it deals with post-colonial violence is by looking away from it. This isn’t out of laziness, but baked into the character. Also, it’s funny as hell. Chef’s kiss.
Also, I wanted a summer project. A long book. I chose La Batarde by Violette Leduc. I am excited about the project, but I am nervous. What if I picked something terrible that will bore me, or alter my brain in some irreversible way? No, no. It’s a book, not black magic. Though sometimes I think they’re one and the same.
What else … I got a little bit possessed when I read Either/Or by Elif Batuman. I haven’t had that feeling since, though I read a lot of things in every genre. All of it is a mild thrill. But a lot of new stuff isn’t that exciting to me. I think the publishing industry as a whole needs to meet their quota of books to sell, so they are always churning things out that aren’t very good. That stresses me out. Oh, I loved I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel.
And God bless anyone who can call their own work exciting.
