Writing about Nothing
Very few works of art are ever actually about nothing. We all know the famous pitch in Seinfeld – “a show about nothing” – but we also know that the show is very much about all kinds of things. It’s just that none of these things matter. Matt Zoller Seitz, in a cutting review of Jerry Seinfeld’s new film Unfrosted, calls this style of humor “aggressively, at times petulantly trivial,” and he’s exactly right. There’s a willful relentless irrelevance to so much of that show, but being trivial is not the same thing as being nothing. Stories can be about the act of doing nothing: “Bartleby,” famously, but also My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh and, lesser known but no less a narrative of saying no, “Dummy” by Susan Sontag, in which an existentially troubled businessman creates a lifelike clone so that he might no longer have to do the things that have lost their appeal: go to work, coexist with a family, have things expected of him and expect things of others.
Thematically, these stories revolve around the idea of trying to do nothing, or the pursuit of a radical kind of detachment, but they aren’t really about nothing, if by “about” we mean something like “generally composed of, focused on, oriented towards.” Writing about nothing is immensely challenging: can you really put nothing into a form? Can a form contain nothing and still be a form? And what do we mean by “nothing,” anyway? Is nothing an absence, or the presence of an absence, or the state of nonbeing? As the philosopher FT shows in a New York Review article on two recent critical works on the concept of nothingness, there’s something rather slippery and even unsettling about the idea of nothing:
“If you look around the room and don’t see a hippopotamus, presumably you do still see something: some kind of perception or sensory data is reaching your consciousness, which allows you to make a judgment. What is it that you do see when you see a hippopotamus not being there? Are you perceiving a nonbeing, seeing a particular thing whose nature is absence, or are you not perceiving any being, seeing no ‘thing’ at all? When you see a hippopotamus not being there, are you also seeing a whale and a lion and a zebra not being there? Is every room full of all the things that aren’t in it?”
Illness can be a lot like the hippopotamus that isn’t there. It’s certainly a thing, or a set of things: tumors, growths, abscesses, constrictions, aches, wounds. But it is also very frequently defined by a large amount of various nothings: a lessening of our capacities, the loss of physical parts (hair, limbs, organs), the gradual shrinking of our temporal horizons. And it also produces enormous amounts of grief, a feeling sharply felt about something that is now nothing. To write about illness is to select a very distinct thing as a subject, only to find that so much of it is constituted by lacks, absences, nonexistences, and emptiness. And that’s as much an artistic problem as it is an existential one.
The way artists have tried to solve this problem can be very illuminating, if for no other reason than they provide a model of how to represent the strange, paradoxical nothingnesses of illness. So much of our critical attention has been attuned to the ways authors have brought aspects of illness into perceivability – have brought things out of erasure into presence, in other words – that we haven’t always paid as much attention to the ways artists have tried to give nothing its due.
Donald Hall’s poem “Without” is one such example of an artist deeply engaged with the experience of nothing. The poem tries to grasp nothingness as a something, and for that reason is both crushingly specific and hauntingly abstract. In an effort to capture the sickness and death of his wife Jane Kenyon, Hall builds the poem around a series of repeated references to what isn’t there:
“we live in a small stone island nation
without color under gray clouds and wind
distant the unlimited ocean acute
lymphoblastic leukemia without seagulls
or palm trees without vegetation”
Things that aren’t: color, seagulls, various vegetation, and the limit of the ocean. Limitless occurs again and again in the poem, and is yet another example of the central paradox: is limitlessness a something or a nothing? But there is something here, too: Kenyon’s cancer, a definite something, sharing space with the unlimited and enjambed next to the lack of seagulls. This undeniable existence recurs throughout the poem, crashing through the nothingness but never fully stopping it: “no orioles ginger noses noses no opera no/without fingers or daffodils or cheekbones/the body is a nation tribe dug into stone/ assaulted white blood broken to fragments.” Hall drags out this violence description of the cancer for two more stanzas, deploying war imagery as well as the repetition of series of medical terms that neither rhyme nor sync but instead pile on top of one another: “confusion terror the rack screw steroids/vincristine ara-c cytoxan vp-16.”
One way of interpreting the references to Kenyon’s cancer is that they are a grounding “something” at the heart of the poem, functioning as a corrective against nothingness. And there is never a “without” or “not” attached to these descriptions, allowing them to form a more concrete presence in the poem as they no doubt formed a concrete presence in Kenyon and Hall’s life. In this interpretation, the poem would not so much be about nothing as it would be about the things that stand in nothing’s way. But Hall’s poem understands these definite somethings as inextricably tied to nothingness. The poem’s linguistic structure refuses to allow cancer and drugs and pain to remain distinct and apart from a defining nothing. The sections detailing Kenyon’s cancer are united to the descriptions of nothingness through the consistent, formalized lack of punctuation throughout the poem in what Ken Lauter calls Hall’s “language-splintering rhetoric.” Words don’t occur or follow after one another so much as they cascade, and it doesn’t matter much what is being described. Language endlessly flows, instantiating in the poem’s form its repeated references to limitlessness. The ocean is “unlimited,” time “endures without punctuation,” the “book” of their lives is “a thousand pages without commas,” the gray sea is “unrelenting.” After all, limitlessness is its own kind of nothing. It’s the nothing that comes from undifferentiated experience, or the lack of the boundaries and breaks that help give meaning to what is, that helps divide the here from the there, the this from that. This even manifests in several lines where the relationship between the preposition and its object is blurred: grammatically linked lines seem as if they will continue after the poetic break but new negations and nothings begin instead. Nothingness becomes a condition of the language of the poem, a defining state that, like the illness, is unpunctuated and unrelenting:
“unpunctuated without churches interrupted
no orioles ginger noses no opera no
without fingers or daffodils or cheekbones”
Kenyon’s cancer, as portrayed in “Without,” is a something that feels like nothing, an overwhelming presence that is also an erasure of presence. Something can become so totalizing that it becomes nothing. The line between everything and nothing is very thin indeed, if it exists. In Hall’s poem the line disappears.
Of course, there’s no such thing as only one nothing. Hall gives us a very specific version of nothing: in his poem, nothing is what it feels like when illness is no longer something that can be escaped, when boundaries and forms break down. It’s the feeling of realizing that an illness has fully transformed from a singular thing into a relentless, undifferentiated wave: “intolerable without brackets or colons.” But we can find other versions of nothing elsewhere, from The Cyborg Jillian Weise’s poetic investigations of what it means to lack something that others expect you to have, to graphic explorations of sensory transformation in works like Judith Vanistendael’s When David Lost His Voice or The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott by Zoe Thorogood. These works try and capture a different form of nothing, but are interested in nothing nonetheless, especially in the cultural discourses that transform absence into moral deficiency. All these artists, in their different ways, invite us to dwell on the capacity of art to initiate serious considerations of all the things that aren’t. All of these efforts fail, of course, in a technical sense: something can’t be nothing. But art can make us observe nothing in new ways. There is a compelling richness, worthy of our critical attention, to works that try very hard to keep nothing in their grasp just long enough to capture the feeling of fully confronting nonexistence. These works, as Wallace Stevens once said, describe the “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
Works Cited:
FT. “Apropos of Nothing.” New York Review of Books, 21 July 2022, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/07/21/absence-and-nothing-stephen-mumford/. Access 8 May 204.
Hall, Donald. “Without.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=39448. Accessed 9 May 2024.
Lauter, Ken. “My Debt to Donald Hall and the Gaiety of Without.” Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 57, no. 1, Winter 2018.
Zoller Seitz, Matt. “Review: Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story.” RogerEbert.com, 3 May 2024, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/unfrosted-2024. Accessed 9 May 2024.
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