En 2014, Eula Biss bought a house and thus entered the “spiral staircase” of theto have and to be had, as condensed in the title of his book, an articulation of contradictory elements to express feelings that are themselves complex in the face of this purchase when we also feel “discomfort in the face of this comfort”. Becoming an owner will be an opportunity for the author to think about big subjects (capitalism, art) through small things, to think about social and collective phenomena. via his particular case, makingTo have and to be had a singular text, neither really an essay nor fully a novel, a diary and collection of moments and readings, according to the very singular style that some American authors imprint on the genre of the essay (deconstructed, and as if frowned) which becomes an “experience of dismantling self “.
When Eula Biss moved in in 2014, she knew the exceptional nature of having finally been able to access the property but she was also aware that her “new extraordinary life” would end up seeming ordinary to her and she wanted to keep an archive and traces of this state. anterior so destabilizing. “This book is the fruit of this contradiction”, as she writes in the final notes ofTo have and to be hadentirely woven into the trouble of these words “good, art, work, investment, property, capitalism” whose meaning no longer seems so obvious to her, whose relationships she will tirelessly question but also the etymology and history of each. “It’s my present that I look at,” she emphasizes, nourished by her conversations with her friends, writers like her, by her readings, by her reflections on what this new state of owner changes (or not) in her representation of herself and of the society in which she finds herself. To have and to be had is thus a form of investigation which is built on “a certain way of white life”, in the double English sense of this whiteher status as a white woman like these white lies (pious lies) that we tell ourselves to tell ourselves that we have not broken with our ideals when we enter the material life.
Collection of moments (and perhaps collection of poems or essay in several episodes, as Eula Biss suggests in the final notes of the book), To have and to be had is part of a lineage, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Tokias, Joan Didion, “doubles” coming, like the author, from the white middle or upper class, to make “these women who had me served as models” of “characters with edifying stories”. It is in fact a whole relationship between women and concrete spaces and things which is questioned and supported by a dialogue with these great elders as well as with contemporary authors. Among them, Maggie Nelson who speaks of “true abstractions” when it concerns, as with a room of one’s own, a space that is both literal and abstract, real and symbolic. So what is a Place of your ownto translate Woolf with Marie Darrieussecq, refusing the systematic assimilation of women to the private sphere – since Woolf writes a room and no a bedroomor a work space like the laboratory of a thought which corrugated. Thus in Biss a voice is constructed from voices, in the “texture” and the “tone” of the “intimate conversation”, thoughts which collide with our present lives, with these spaces which tell us and (de)construct us , a book which benefits from being read in a rhizome of Anglo-Saxon feminine thoughts which, like Eula Biss, try their hand at a singular writing, fixing nothing but playing with disturbances, with powerful questions which call into question our representations and the very way of putting them into shape – Maggie Nelson, therefore, but also Rebecca Solnit, Deborah Levy, Kate Zambreno, all singular but who have the same uninhibited relationship to genres, to the types of stories they do derive, which span borders and break down aporias, are never as universal as when they are exposed. With them the home, this private and domestic space to which we wanted to reduce women, is a home in the burning and incendiary sense of the term.
At the heart of this book is a contradiction, linked to the mass capitalism in which we operate, this “I want everything and I want nothing” in which we are mired. What would be the boundary between essential goods and dispensable things? For Eula Biss, it is therefore a question of transforming a “banal portrait of wealthy life into a disillusioned critique of this same life”. The challenge will be to expose everything, to give the real figures, the real names, to say concretely what the purchase of a brick house in Chicago changed in one’s life. For example, say that the previous owner rented the house for film shoots. All you have to do is leave the house for three days and two nights to earn $8,000… It’s tempting. Walmart would like to shoot an advert in a typically African-American house in Chicago and recreate what the white director and decorator consider to be an interior of this kind… while the sister pavilion is occupied by African-Americans! The house will be the space for this type of notation, sometimes anthropological or sociological, often intimate, always disjunctive, the record of these contradictions linked to privileges, white or financial. It is not a question of accusing or exonerating oneself through criticism that would clear one’s conscience. Eula Biss recounts her own aporias, such as her passion for the poetic color chart of a famous luxury brand of paint at €110 per pot, an indecent price but this paint is also “intolerably luminous, undeniably more beautiful than the others”. Should we succumb? Biss summons Elizabeth Chin quoting Marx — capitalism “pushes people to have relationships with things rather than with others.” All consumption (consumer, seize, take control) is possession and destruction? What do we invest in buying a house and then all those objects that are supposed to accompany this purchase, furnish it, occupy the space, like the gravy boat that her husband John deemed essential for a successful Thanksgiving? He too is caught up in what the purchase of this house caused: “we had money,” John concedes, “but we spent it on this house. Now we live on our money.”
It is delicate to try to account for the immense variety of this book, also undulating around its double central question, art and capitalism (title of several chapters) and its radiant place, a house as a point of reference. view from which to map capitalism. It would be to miss his manner, his confusing analyzes of so many “details” which are corners to force our overly established representations. Thus this story of the invention of The Landlord Game by a woman, transformed into Monopoly by a man who will become a millionaire; these thoughts on his son’s Pokémon card collections (who doesn’t know how to play them); observations on capital — economic, cultural, social — and the link between these three dimensions, ratings on credit, investment, all these notions that capitalism has colonized; remarks on museums (collections of works or experiences of money?), our leisure activities (a way, like work elsewhere, of displaying our status in an ostentatious manner?). It is also all these women who cross the book, witches and ecofeminists, others who served as secretaries to their genius husband or partner… But also men like Eric, one of Eula Biss’s former students, in writing an essay on air conditioning and how our comfort is always destruction, Eric who tells him that a statue of a woman, on the wall of Wall Street, represents “integrity protecting the works of man “, but it was on the New York Stock Exchange that the first air conditioning was installed… That is the salt of this book, capturing moments and details that seem discontinuous, but always on target, to question our grand framework narratives and challenge them. And this mesh goes from Scooby-Doo to Marx, from Ikea to Anna Tsing, from Vivian Maier to Beyoncé, and these couplings are endless.
What can be the space for possible freedom (freedom of thought, freedom of action), in the so framed and standardized system that is ours? “Given the nature of the game” how can you “play according to your own rules”? Eula Biss, in To have and to be hadmakes his accounts, overthrows and undoes the course things, question our values and draws from it a storybook about our hindered presents as a way of exercising and experiencing one’s thoughts like that of its readers – “the lies that we want to believe tell us something about ourselves”. This is undoubtedly the freedom we seek so much for: “art is liberating because it does not hold people accountable”…
Eula Biss, To have and to be had (Having and Being Had2020), translated from English (USA) by Justine Augier, Rivages Poche, March 2024, 352 p., €9.50
This article was first published when the book was published in large format.
