Quantum Girl Theory and a Twisting Metaphor
Erin Kate Ryan's novel Quantum Girl Theory starts with a true story of a missing girl, but instead of centering those left behind, the novel imagines the many different lives she may have lived. It's a beautiful book that is clever and subversive but also suspenseful.
I want to examine a passage from one of those lives, one with a gorgeous image and a twisting metaphor.
My teacher says that I am too much a girl painter to scrape a copse of trees on canvas without knowing what someone will see there—Alice, bounding after the rabbit. Little Red, slipping the path. Ophelia, scratching purple welts onto her own soft neck as the vines wrap round and the creek water thunders down her throat. Your woods must be unmanned, my teacher says. My little jars of paint suddenly heavy in my lap.
I knew a girl painter, once, short brown hair and green paint smeared on the edge of her left hand. I followed her into the high school art room one day, as though I were some lost little lamb. I sat beside her, the instructor not noticing I didn't belong, a spare dry paintbrush loose in my palm. I remember a line of bluish sunlight slicing across her chest, the crystal of her wristwatch bouncing the refracted light around the room, into my eyes, down my shoulder. Like she was painting me with sunlight.
Wind sighs through the trees: Wise.
The trees I slash with my palette knife don't hide someone else's tragic fairly tales but the tiny bead of perspiration behind that girl painter's ear, the bend in her back as she walked away from me.
There is much that is lovely about the passage—the lyricism, the precision of detail, the allusion to other stories and their resonance with this one. But I want to look at the way the imagery twists to reflect upon itself and what that does for the reader's experience of it.
We learn quickly that the narrator is a painter—not because she claims to be but because someone else claims she is not. This is already a sort of inversion. But then instead of countering with how or why she is not a girl painter, she gives us a different type of "not I" by showing us someone else who is. It's a type of literary bait and switch—a new story tumbles in to layer atop another. It also means that both possibilities—she is a girl painter and she is not—remain intact.
When we see this other "girl painter," the green slash of paint on her hand is at least as vivid as any other detail—it trounces the short brown hair because of its brightness and its placement in the sentence. In this detail—which is of course perfectly realistic—the painter has become the painted upon.
The narrator follows the girl painter, hoping, we suspect, to catch at least her attention or more probably her love. I anticipate another inversion—expecting the narrator/painter will become the model. Isn't that the trope? But then the narrator is painted in a different way. "Like she was painting me with sunlight." She is not the image inside the painting but the canvas for one.
I love not just the subversion of my expectations but the way the abstract is made bodily in this moment. She's not an idea in the painter's head, or a smear of paint representing that idea, but a person with touchable skin that is alive and tingling. The wind sighing through the trees—the painted ones or the literal ones?—also plays with making tangible what would otherwise not be. And the wristwatch reflecting light creates new shapes, pushing what is seen and felt deeper into the space of the room.
Finally, the narrator paints the girl painter (an inversion) not as the primary subject but as a "tiny bead of perspiration" and not in the foreground but behind the trees in the background. The girl painter is there not because she is seen but because the painter has imagined her. To live in another's imagination is more intimate, I think, than to live in their vision.
Magically, it seems, this also keeps either girl from being just object. Of course, the painter is the subject. Usually in a painting, the subject of that painting is also the painter's object. (A twisting before we even get there.) But if the other girl is there but not perceived, she's something else entirely. She has escaped.
Another twist is the change in the story of what is behind those trees. First it is the fairy tales and then it is something else—not because we see it but because this narrator/painter says so. Nothing is still in this passage. The shapes, relationships, and power dynamics are always shifting.
All of this resonates beautifully with the larger themes of the book and the questioning of subject-object relationship. This is a novel about who is erased and how to undo that erasure. It makes sense to find imagery like this throughout. Easter eggs, of a sort, pointing us back to the idea of subjectivity and who gets it. It doesn't provide neat answers but problematizes the way we think about such things.
But as the image flips again and then again, what's created for the reader is something more than the metaphor. It's a sense of depth. We spin this metaphor to see it from another side, then another. Instead of a solid flat surface, which is impenetrable, the web of imagery is spun behind and above and below. Suddenly we are inside the story instead of gazing at it through glass.
If an image (or an object) can see itself reflected back, it problematizes who is object, who is subject. Which is interesting! But it's also incredibly useful. It creates space between subject and object. It's where the reader can sit and not only perceive but feel the perception from either side.
Note: This post is in direct reference to Erin Kate Ryan's Quantum Girl Theory novel, publishing by Penguin RandomHouse.