The One Body Problem
Katy Carl’s collection of short stories takes up the themes of her debut novel, including the question of what it means to be human.
Review by John-Paul Heil
We are more haunted by bodies than by ghosts. This is probably because bodies are uncomfortable, horrific things: they ooze strange-smelling liquids and let out even fouler-smelling gases, they make strange cracking noises whenever they move too quickly or in the wrong direction, they ache, they tire, they aren’t efficient, they rarely do what we want them to do (especially in the moments we need them most), they seem to have a bunch of extra parts that don’t do anything useful, they never really update to fit with the needs and interests of the current moment, and they break extremely easily. Bodies are everything we tell ourselves we aren’t: we are clean, sanitary, silent, nimble, resilient, tireless, reliable, adaptable, and unbreakable. While bodies are brute facts, heavy reminders of history and age and the concrete and all that we can’t do, we are marked by pure potential. We can do anything we set our minds to—to which the body whispers, no you can’t. And, because we don’t like that answer, we punish the body, forcing it into uncomfortable hunching positions looking at blue bright glowing rectangular things of different sizes for hours at a time for the sake of both work and nominal relaxation, all the while trying to forget that the body is there.
Into this self-delusion steps Christianity, dispelling it with the force of revelation, unveiling for us what we desperately don’t want to hear: we are our bodies. Our souls and our matter are so profoundly united that to separate the two from one another when talking about ourselves risks easy slippage into incoherence. Though Christianity believes in the persistence of the soul after death, it is only when the soul and body are reunited in the Resurrection that human personhood reaches its eternal fulfillment in complete, embodied communion with Christ. The Christian tradition tells us that to discount our bodies is to disregard the very seedbed of grace, the locus of our relationship with God. In moving the depths of our souls, grace moves the depths of our bodies, which keep the score of every movement we make towards or away from the divine.
Carl takes particular interest in how violence done to the body profoundly wounds the soul yet can also, through grace, be transformed into a profound and deeply rich openness to relationality.
Katy Carl sees and articulates the workings of grace in the body with an attentiveness that surpasses perhaps any other author writing today. Her new collection, Fragile Objects, explores this theme through Carl’s own twist on the Southern Gothic in short stories purposefully evocative of Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, and, of course, Flannery O’Connor. Though O’Connor’s influence could easily have threatened to overshadow a less adept writer (and the influence is present—unlike her novel, Carl’s short stories always leave room for eucatastrophe, but never conclude in it outright), Carl seems to have taken to heart Randy Boyagoda’s critiques of the Catholic literary tradition as too obsessed with writers like the hillbilly Thomist. Instead, Carl uses Southern Gothic to develop her distinctive contemplative realist style and explore more deeply central insights about the human person introduced in her 2021 debut novel, As Earth Without Water. In both, Carl takes particular interest in how violence done to the body—which always means treating the body as an object without dignity, a means to an end, something manipulable—profoundly wounds the soul yet can also, through grace, be transformed into a profound and deeply rich openness to relationality, even with others one has wounded.
Fragile Objects takes up this paradox through the lens of family and especially motherhood. Carl depicts with remarkable clarity the grotesqueness that can emerge when we come close to, but do not quite see clearly, the most essential aspects of the human person, especially the call to make a full and complete gift of one’s self to another and to the family that union produces. Carl’s characters are like first-time visitors to a carnival’s hall of mirrors: they see their bodies twisted out of proportion, yet not in ways absurd enough to be unbelievable; because they have no true vision of what they actually look like, they take the misshapen image to be reality and try to hold on to this alien understanding of themselves even when they are finally confronted with a true reflection. Carl’s ruminations on the body reach their crescendo in the collection’s centerpiece, the novella “Sequatchie Valley,” where the dangers of self-delusion, alienation from one’s own body, and the desire for mastery over reality are taken to their logical conclusion: horror.
In every one of Carl’s stories, characters try to do the right thing in the wrong (and most frequently worst) way possible, and their misapprehensions often stem from an inadequate view of the body. Sometimes this leads to comic absurdity, other times to immense tragedy, but always to a certain disquiet, not just in the narrative’s conclusion but in the reader—the haunting discomfort of, in the words of one of Carl’s protagonists, an “uneasy kinship.” Carl’s characters are funhouse versions of ourselves. And yet, in the shape and the contours and the strange beauty of the form of the fragile objects that are these bodies and our bodies and ourselves, Carl always ensures we see in the mirror and hear in those bodies’ whisper the sight and the voice of the one in whose image we were made, the archetype of man, whose fragility led to the salvation of the world and the revelation of man to himself.
John-Paul Heil is a Core Fellow at Mount St. Mary’s University. He received his PhD in history from the University of Chicago and his writing has appeared in Time, Smithsonian, and Los Angeles Review of Books.
Fragile Objects: Short Stories will be published by Wiseblood Books on August 22, 2023. Fare Forward appreciates the provision of an advance copy. You can preorder your own from the publisher here.
