Canadian writer Sarah Bernstein’s novel, on the Booker Prize shortlist, explores the agony of survival, history’s legacies, unreliability, and the effects of neutralising the past
‘I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.’ — Paula Rego
The epigraph of Scotland-based Canadian writer Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience sets the stage for her deceptively challenging novel. The narrative can be read as something of a Midsommar-like A24 production, accentuating dread from the get go. “It was a menacing time. One of the local dogs was having a phantom pregnancy. Things were leaving one place and showing up in another.” Using a decently-paced, sinister prose, it is the story of an isolated woman’s struggle to make sense of her existence against the backdrop of a world that is swiftly disintegrating. Anti-plot, ambience driven, and unceasingly miasmic, the book is rife with distressing details, invoking a sense of unease that keeps on building.
Study for Obedience starts with an unnamed narrator who moves to a “remote northern country” to manage her eldest brother’s household. She was raised in a large family and recalls how she became conscious of her outsider status and role as her siblings’ caretaker and scapegoat at a young age. She now appears to be embracing a status that has even become an artistic form. Transcriptionist by profession, the narrator seems to be stuck on words, rather than what they mean.
Her narrative often reads like an excerpt from a Freudian case study, but it also overtly references Ingeborg Bachmann, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. She seems to be confessing or bearing witness to inexplicable happenings in her own life. She continually pursues a sense of abjection via her neighbours which is often pathological and sometimes masochistic. Manoeuvring her way through the town, she second-guesses everything, over-explaining metaphors among people who are seemingly hostile, probably because she’s Jewish. Mothers are wary of her being near their children.
Unable to speak the local tongue, she is frequently seen as an intimidating presence. In one such episode, a woman starts crying while the narrator gestures towards her coffee cup, causing the people around her to covertly draw a cross in prayer. Anti-Semitism is also hinted at, although implicitly.
The woman as the other
In terms of temporality, the reader would be forgiven to think this was set in the seventeenth century, but is immediately refuted by mutterings of modern lifestyle like convection ovens, ice machines, six slice toasters, social media and YouTube.
Bernstein was essentially inspired by a Paula Rego exhibition. Rego’s surrealist paintings are steeped in fairy tales as well as in historical accounts of subjugated women, and her female characters are at once submissive and murderous. In order for Bernstein’s narrator to see herself and travel across space, ‘obedience’ is essential. As a first person character, she can’t identify with the idea of a ‘hero’s journey’, or someone who can affect change.
It is mostly the other way round; she becomes a victim of passive power, inflicted upon her by others in the most Lockeian sense. Therefore, she looks for archetypes and finds them not appropriate to her situation. Defined power structures are also established and subverted continually through the dynamic of the narrator and her brother, who relates to her through his vulnerabilities. By taking her Leda-like existence under his ‘wing’, power seems to be with the male figure. Thus, the woman is neatly sketched as the other, even a non-entity.
Telling oneself, and legacies of history
It also poses an essential question: Why do people tell their own stories? The protagonist can be seen asserting power through language and making desperate attempts to describe her life as a whole, but to no avail. She thinks she’s telling all but essentially leaves out a lot, obscuring motives and actions. Her job as a transcriptionist does not require her to work independently. The system of grammar guides her along, thus aiding to obedience. She is simply not interested in the substance of conversations. The reader, thus, only gets to see a shadowy sense of her life facilitated by long sentences with an array of dependent clauses.
Bernstein is trying to explore the limits of the absurd, stretching the limits of believability and, in turn, questioning her liability as a narrator. Do these things really happen or is there some degree of invention and pleasure on her part? As a storyteller, she is somebody conscious of creating. Bernstein’s poetic prose is deft and sonorous, “....creatures make their froggy way to the stiller pockets of water…” and takes one back to the rising and falling of the waves in Virginia Woolf. Admitting her fascination for the sound of words in the declaration of the novel itself, the prose can be seen brimming with vibrant and often grandiose passages, adding to the terrible.
Continuing the legacy of Annie Ernaux, Karl Ove Knausgård, and even an aphoristic and alienating sense of Fernando Pessoa, the novel is yet another attempt at telling oneself. “Slavery is the only law of life, there is no other, because this law must be obeyed; there is no possible rebellion against it or refuge from it…” The narrator’s oblique and revengeful approach to obedience resonates with what Pessoa says about the daily act of slavery in The Book of Disquiet.
The novel also explores the legacies of authority in society. After the Second World War, some displaced groups of people (Jews), when trying to get back home, were met with hostility, trying to find a place in society which made them feel unwanted. The neighbourhood in the novel seems to be somewhat complicit in what had happened during the Holocaust. The revelation of the narrator’s Jewish identity and the anti-Semitism that follows points at the obedience to authority, of submitting to the power that had perpetuated these prejudices. The narrator’s unreliability as a narrator comes through when she seems to be enjoying her role as a victim, looking after her brother and also weaponizing her status as a scapegoat to seek vengeance.
Study for Obedience is a demanding, unnerving and sandy book that explores the agony of survival, history’s legacies, unreliability and the effects of neutralising the past, but it’s also a deep, ambitious investigation of themes concerning women and the consequences of familial and societal suppression.
