Sydney Gordon
The Definitions
By Matt Greene
Henry Holt and Co. 176 pp. $17.99
No writer gunning for widespread commercial success wants his readers to finish his book and say, “I don’t understand.” Yet I suspect that is exactly what Matt Greene intended with his new novel, The Definitions.
The plot unfolds entirely in a mysterious rehabilitation facility known as “the Center,” which houses patients, or “students,” who have fallen victim to a peculiar virus that erases their memories, senses of identity, and much of their vocabularies. Students enroll in classes, such as “Politeness” and “The Appreciation of Poetry,” that purport to teach them how to express themselves and live correctly, with the ultimate goal of reintegration into the outside world. Told from the perspective of an unnamed female patient, the novel never discloses what is really going on. All we have to work with are the patients’ own theories: perhaps there is no virus, and instead they are all survivors of a chemical attack; perhaps they are not actually people, but robots.
What is clear is that there’s something sinister at play. Students are taught, for example, that “avuncular” is an adjective meaning “of, or resembling, the avuncule, a spongy but delicate valve that connects the lungs to the heart’s second chamber.” A quick Google search will inform the reader that these are blatant lies: “avuncular” really means “relating to an uncle,” and “avuncles” do not exist.
Greene gives us plenty of reasons for alarm but no definitive answers, just as he does the students. We might simply call this a classic case of imitative fallacy, a mid-century critical commonplace that describes an author’s intentional but unconvincing use of form to parallel the experience of a character. Here, we have a vague and confusing book about vague and confusing circumstances. Preliminary backlash against The Definitions on Goodreads seems to revolve around this indeterminacy. Greene’s 2013 novel, Ostrich, about a young boy navigating adolescence after a brain surgery, received similar feedback. There is a long critical tradition that claims imitative fallacy is virtually never justifiable, a refrain I’ve also heard from my fiction-writing professors. The more confused a character is, the more certain the reader should feel.
That view is not without a basis—who isn’t at least a little bothered by a lack of clarity?—but to focus on fallacy in a work so obviously concerned with the limits of language is to tragically miss the point. Sure, it is not enough for a writer to spark feelings in the reader; he must communicate as well. And yet, Greene’s book seems to ask, what if language is somehow at odds with communication?
It is impossible to miss the narrator’s impatience with language’s inherent inability to express exactly what she feels, an impatience that comes to the fore when she rubs up against the endless rules the Center imposes upon her expression. In Politeness class, she is taught proper speech etiquette: “It was extremely rude to ask for what we wanted. If we were hot and wanted someone sitting near it to open a window we were not to ask them to do so: instead, we should remark that we were hot.” Perhaps more jarringly, the students are also instructed to think in particular similes. For example, palm creases should appear to them “like channels of ocean carving rivulets through a beach on their way back to the shore.” The narrator frequently expresses her annoyance that “things both were and weren’t what they seemed.” She is fed all kinds of communicative shorthands and rules of thumb that are meant to clarify, but all they do is confuse and disappoint her. Later, this frustration matures into acceptance:
I’ve come to understand that language is like the molds in the trays we use to bake muffins: that without it everything flows into everything else. The molds are necessary but are also a compromise: language allows us to communicate ideas and feelings that are not quite our own. But we rarely notice this: that we’re walking around in someone else’s shoes.
If this passage waxes essayistic and clichéd, too obviously trying to tutor us on the boundaries of language, we forgive it because it comes from the mind of the narrator. Unlike us, she is not steeped in the everyday usages of words. Her memory has been wiped; she is learning all these rules for the first time. Her innocence lends her observations a certain appeal, like hearing a child remark for the first time on some fascinating aspect of the world we tend to dismiss as ordinary.
The most vital insights of the novel, however, are not its meditations on the limits of language in general, but instead as they apply to the narrator’s attempts to define herself. During a fight scene with her roommate Maria, the narrator has her gender inadvertently revealed to her:
She shoved me! Maria shrieked.
She repeated it, louder, putting unusual emphasis on the first word, she. I didn’t know what this meant, but my anger spiked and roiled a fleet of fireflies that flitted in front of my vision.
We learn later that the narrator’s “anger” is due to her awareness that, by using the word “she,” Maria is labeling her, and though she does not know what “she” means at the time, she hates the idea of her roommate getting to “decide [her] borders and shade [her] meaning.” To fix her identity, the narrator seems to feel, is to compromise it.
Language polices identity. We are fooled by its convenience, constantly reaching for descriptions or labels we might use to understand and summarize ourselves, when in fact there is much of ourselves that those labels leave out—and that we ignore as a result. When we realize the labels we have selected are wrong, inadequate, or misrepresentative, we are forced to confront our own ambiguities. It’s uncomfortable, but it leads us to learn things that we otherwise would not.
Students at the Center are taught in English class that “ambiguity [is] the enemy of sense.” But the experiences of our narrator suggest that, on the contrary, ambiguity may be the essence of sense. That is why Greene is justified in denying us clear answers. His book only succeeds because it does not attempt to bridge the gap between language and its subject. One may find it hard to buy into the world of The Definitions because it is hard to make sense of. But if that difficulty mirrors the experience of the narrator, it is only because her experience, in turn, mirrors that of most users of language. To buy into the world of this book means to accept that there are things you cannot understand. Words behave much the same in real life as they do at the Center. When we use them to communicate, we are at best approximating what we mean. And paradoxically, the more specific we try to be about a given subject—often ourselves—the more removed we may feel from it.
One night, the narrator is in bed staring at the ceiling, unable to fall asleep. She recalls, “I felt if I could do this, express just one thing perfectly, then I could die because my happiness would be complete.” It’s a fallacy that we can ever express even one thing perfectly, though many novelists have tried. Matt Greene seems to know better.
Sydney Gordon is an English major in Saybrook College with the synesthetic ability to taste words.