What's more natural than... "Natural Light" by Kathleen Alcott

As I dove into reading Kathleen Alcott's "Natural Light," I was a little like the story's first-person narrator who goes to an art museum in New York looking for one thing and finding another. "That day I had come into the museum for a show of paintings, landscapes of Maine refashioned with a particular pink glow the painter must have felt when he saw what inspired him." She's looking for a sentimental kind of art, one that shows "nature," but nature with the artist's feelings changing nature's organic complexion into what the artist feels it should look like. It's nature pruned by the imagination.

On the way to that set of paintings, however, she passes through a retrospective of photographs. The narrator is somewhat dismissive of it, saying it's one of those shows that "cater to nostalgia for a certain era in New York." Funny, because she was on her way to view nostalgic art, but she is accusing the art she stumbles across of nostalgia.

How was my situation like the narrator's? I, too, have my predilections with stories. I prefer Danielle Evans elevating a Confederate flag bikini to high art over a story that actually has high art shows in it. I like a narrative voice that feels like it just came out that way in one take (even if it took a hundred drafts to get it that way) rather than a voice that sounds so polished I know it took months of painful editing. But just like Alcott's narrator found herself forced to deal with unexpected art and how it changed her perceptions of the world, so I am looking on at art I wouldn't normally choose to encounter and trying to learn from it.

Granted, my situation isn't the gut punch Alcott's narrator faces. The exhibit is a collection of gritty photos featuring realistic depictions of past New York drug culture (I can't tell if it's from the 60s, 70s, or 80s, but I'd guess 60s based on what I think the timelines here are). The photos feature "bare mattresses on the floor, enormous telephones off the hook, the bodies always thin but never healthy. Eyes shadowed in lilac, men in nylon nighties pour liquor from brown paper bags into their mouths. A woman with a black eye laughs, her splayed thigh printed with menstrual blood. These photographs are in color, the light strictly natural."  (Emphasis mine. Roll credits!)

Unlike the beer the title of this story makes me think of, this story is on the high-brow side

She was looking for sentimental lighting in her art, but she got natural light instead. Having gone in looking for the truth she wanted, she is going to get raw truth instead. Is she ready for it? Well, kind of. By nature, she is open to truth spoken in the world's own terms. In arguments with her much older now-ex-husband, she would speak "quietly and practically about the empirical world." And as much as she was not really looking forward to the photo exhibit, she resolved to give it an honest look: "Whatever my feelings about the work, I never want to be one of those people rushing through a museum, intent on immunity."

There's an irony slipped in right before the big reveal of the story. She is looking around at younger women and wondering what lesson she might have for them now that she is in her early thirties. The best she can come up with is that life doesn't really prepare you for what it throws at you. It doesn't give you the chance, as in school, to "show what you learned," because it's always changing the lesson. "Your real self was mostly revealed in negotiation with the unforeseen element."

The irony is that she is thinking about how much life is about being prepared for things you can't possibly prepare yourself for seconds before something profound happens to her she wasn't prepared for. So in a sense she was prepared...to be unprepared.

The big reveal

Her mother is in one of the photos. Like a lot of modern literary fiction, the narrative tries to avoid revealing this as a shock, because shock is viewed as an element of genre fiction. The reader is warned in the opening sentence of the story that the mother is in a photograph the narrator finds shocking, so it doesn't seem as abrupt when the narrator places the revelation back in its natural sequence.

In that opening sentence, the narrator promises that she "won't tell you what my mother was doing in the photograph." Nonetheless, we get an awful lot of hints in the rest of the story about what's in the photo, and nearly everything around her mother that's in the shot is revealed. The narrator says that this revelation about who were mother was after she is dead "broke an explicit promise, the only one we keep with the deceased, which is that there will be no more contact, no new information." The narrator shares so much about the photo, she barely keeps her own promise not to tell us what her mother was doing, "or rather, what was being done to her."

I wrote out a long list of all the passages that give hints or descriptions of what's going on around the mother, but I've decided not to put it all in this analysis. Probably the best description comes from the photographer herself, whom the narrator meets near the end. The photographer describes not what is in the photograph, but what the opposite of the photograph would be: "a woman taking the thing she wanted, a man doing something for her." That, plus the fact that the narrator talks about the photo to her father by using a euphemism, leads us to assume it's something sexual, perhaps something vaguely violent, and definitely done because of the mother's former drug addiction.

So that's what gets the action going, but what else is happening in the narrator's life? 

The photo is the change in the status quo, but what was going on in her life before that moment? Well, she is a writing instructor at a college. Her mother died a while ago, but she still gets spam emails forwarded from her mother's email accounts. Her father, like her mother, struggled with addiction before starting a family, and his language is full of AA cliches. (The narrator no sooner wonders whether her father's penchant for cliche has invaded her own thinking, because she is not able to realize when she has "left a window open" into her psyche, than she drops the cliche "dime a dozen," one of the many wry self-recursive passages in the story.)

She got married at twenty-two to a forty-year-old man. The narrator feels that he was sometimes kind, but controlling. Here, she uses a lot of imagery of nature being pruned, the same kind of thing she was looking for when she wanted to see pink landscape paintings. She says her husband "tended me as one might a garden (another cliche?), offering certain benefits and taking others away." She views herself as an espalier, a tree or shrub trained to grow flat against a wall, only in this case, the wall was her husband's rigid beliefs.

I had to look up what an espalier is. I hate yard work, and we are thinking of selling our house because I am so bad at doing it.

In particular, those beliefs centered around the narrator's admitted thoughts about suicide. She had been having thoughts of suicide for a long time, but never told anyone. These thoughts would come unbidden. She had never tried suicide, but the fact that she even thought about it was something the husband could not abide, because it seemed an affront to the happy life he thought he was living. The narrator and the ex now barely speak.

Pruning and letting it go natural

I think the theme of this story is something like this: It's tempting to want to make things into what you think they should be, but people will probably be happier if they are allowed to be their natural selves. The narrator, it turns out, still has "an obsessive thought pattern concerning various ways I might bring about my own death" even after divorce, but without her ex there to assign meaning to it, the thoughts have less menace. The narrator drops four of these thoughts abruptly into the narrative at various points, and they have gradually less of a threatening feel each time they appear. The last time they appear, as the final lines of the story, it's not clear the narrator is even talking about how she might want to kill herself. It might be how she wants to take a nap.

Why is she thinking about a nap? Because she went to see the photographer who took the pictures of her mother. She goes, hoping to learn something about the circumstances that led to the photos, hoping that it might have been something taken against her mother's will. Instead, she finds that her mother attended the opening gala featuring her. Her father knew of them, too, or at least knew about the time in her life when they were taken.

When the narrator visits the photographer, the old woman is eccentric but also oddly nurturing. She nurtures in a different way from those in the narrator's life who have tried to train how she grows. There is another revelation: the mother was the owner of the "days of the week" underwear that the photographer made into maybe her most famous picture. Then the photographer asks the narrator if she can shoot her, too.

After thinking it over, the narrator agrees, but only if the photographer agrees to do it while the narrator is sleeping. Why sleeping? Is it because it's close to death? If so, then the concluding lines of the story really are ambiguous, signifying both the narrator thinking of another death fantasy and also of where she might be sleeping: "A field, I thought. A yellow caned chair. A room up some stairs that was empty."

The photographer's willingness to allow her subjects "natural light," that is, her penchant for finding the innate qualities dormant within her subjects and bringing them out on their own rather than picking and choosing which traits to make bloom and which to prune, has played a role in both mother and daughter eventually finding their way in the world.

The narrator's attitude that helps her survive

There are two key passages that trace the narrator's journey toward developing a psychological trait that will help her survive. Early on, she is wearing a ring from her now defunct marriage. Her reason is that "its persistence on my finger was a way of matching inside to out." This is how many artists, especially in the Romantic tradition, treat the world. They often see nature as a reflection of their own internal mental or emotional state, and they read their own minds into nature. That is what the narrator's Maine landscape artist does. The narrator, trained to prune her own self by her former husband, is reading truth into nature (her own body) rather than letting nature speak for itself.

When shooting the narrator's mother, though, the photographer recalls how the mother's "face and body reacted separately. It was like the body would tell the face what was happening, and the face would say, Are you sure?" In other words, the mother, at this point, was taking in information and learning. She was still in her "wild phase," but the wild phase was not without profit for her, because wild also means "natural," and by living her life organically, she was able to find her own answers her own way.

A tiny, tiny quibble

There is a passage in which the narrator describes teaching writing at the college. It's enjoyable for its keen insight, so I probably won't get far with most readers if I say it was gratuitous, but that's how it felt to me. I'm not sure what purpose it served to the narrative. From this interview, I can see that Alcott is interested in examining women treating other women badly, but I'm not sure if that was a theme central to this story, so I feel like it could have been cut from an already longish short story. One thing I liked about the scene was the double mise-en-abyme that introduces it. She takes a photo of a photo, and then in the next sentence, she is talking about being a writing instructor, which I take to also be something of a mise-en-abyme in a short story.


Karen's Take: For Karen Carlson's take on this story, see her post here.