“I am a part of the darkness”: the vulnerable art of darkness in Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels
Résumé
Oscillating between disgust and awakening, Ottessa Moshfegh’s fiction explores the territories of darkness, both physical and metaphysical, in fables of ordinary characters whose sense of belonging is in crisis. Vesta, the narrator of Death in Her Hands, finds herself “a part of the darkness,” an existential position shared by many Moshfeghian characters. Moshfegh’s novels appear as vestibules, thresholds between obscurity and clarity and investigate murky territories: Eileen (2015) and Death in Hands (2020) respectively revisit noir and mystery fictions; My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) could be regarded as a discomforting huis clos which depicts the unnamed narrator’s existential crisis, punctuated by blackouts, in the realm of hazy sleep. Lapvona (2022), written during the recent pandemic period of confinement and isolation, is set in a feudal village where famine, death and spiritual crisis are part of the narrative’s main concerns, while darkness ceaselessly envelops the whole community. In Moshfegh’s novels, darkness implies a movement of contradictory forces that rely on the potential of ambivalence and the author seems to perceive “the beam of darkness” coming from her time, a capacity that Giorgio Agamben associates with the contemporary. Moshfegh conjures absurdity and humor in a fiction that is concerned with the contemplation of death, discomfort, abuse, purposelessness or alienation. Her characters are free to sink into the dark meanders of their psyche, which leads to the exploration of liminal spaces, liminality being often associated with death, invisibility, wilderness, or darkness (Turner, 1969). They eventually appear as the embodiment of “ordinary monsters” (Livingstone, 2017): encountering them engages the consideration of the reader and can eventually question the vulnerability of existence and the relation between self and other (Shildrick, 2002) in a fiction of obliqueness that defies expectations.