Night Watch
With any crisis where one might feel somewhat removed, it takes a lot of self-imposed effort to (attempt to) understand what it’s really “like” to be in the center of it — whether that be due to time (a historical event) or location or any other seeming lack of connection with events. I find that bothersome (and I mean that about myself as well), but I suppose that’s human nature. We covet, crave, and glom on to what we know and what is familiar. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.
News media is great — and if you’ve followed here for a while you know that I’m a fan of an actual daily newspaper — but it’s hard to get at the emotion of things. (For good reason…you know, facts.) But I worry that a lot of popular attempts to address the personal via fiction are often somewhat cloying. So where does that leave us?
For me, Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips fell sort of between these fact/emotion poles. Toggling between 1864 and 1874, Phillips gives us the story of Eliza who, due to trauma experienced during the Civil War, is essentially “person-less” — out of both self-preservation and abuse, she becomes selectively mute and is dropped off by her abuser at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, where she takes on a new name/identity, as does her daughter ConaLee, who poses as a former neighbor/servant. Night Watch is quite plot-heavy (some of it with whispers of a fairy tale, although the institution was real and the book sprinkles in documents and photos), but I’d like to think that this meandering is simply a way for Phillips to effectively get to the important stuff: How it feels to be Eliza and ConaLee.
About half way through the novel, a character says this: “Our lives are small, our victories smaller.” That’s a hard pill to swallow for humans, I think. Cheers to the novels that try to illuminate these lives and victories to help us understand more.
originally published on instagram