Maryse Meijer: On Biocentrism, the Violence of Human Existence and Her New Novel, "The Seventh Mansion"
Maryse Meijer is back with a full-length novel that examines activism, love, hierarchy and purpose. In The Seventh Mansion, 15-year-old Xie is kicked out of high school for releasing captive mink back into the wild. While spending more and more time alone in the woods, Xie discovers the relic of a Catholic saint—the martyred Pancratius—in a nearby church. Both an urgent literary call to arms and an unforgettable story about finding love and selfhood in the face of mass extinction and environmental destruction, Meijer’s unique prose demands your attention and force us to think about if we really respect and honor the nature around us.
I was very excited to speak with Maryse, for the second time, about her new novel as well as biocentrism vs veganism, the violence of human existence, the oppression of young adulthood, and vulnerability on the page.
Kailey Brennan: What sparked the initial idea for The Seven Mansion?
Maryse Meijer: There were a couple of things. One was a photograph of St. Pancratius that my sister sent to me. The guy who took the photograph, Paul Koudounaris, has done several books about relics. So she sent me this image of P., who is dressed in this incredible armor and he just looks really spectacular.
A couple of years earlier I had an idea about writing a young adult novel about a boy who was a necrophile. I don't know why I thought it had to be a young adult novel, but I think I was just trying to think of something kind of out there that I could kind of slip into the mainstream. Something really taboo, but then kind of make it not gross and not weird - Well, maybe it still be weird, but you know what I mean? (Laughs) But I could never figure out the context of why was this boy a necrophile and who he was attached to and all of that. Then when I saw this photograph a couple of years later, I thought, This is a body that somebody would fall in love with. I started writing and the voice of Xie just came out and it went on from there. I was also inspired by some young people that I knew online who were part of a necrophilia group. I was trying to figure out their whole thing. And when I realized it was really a romantic orientation and not even so much physical, in some sense. It was just this idea of the spirit of a dead body. It kinda made sense to me, I guess.
KB: You brilliantly capture the intensity and alienation of youth in this novel. Xie convictions are so important to him but they also set him apart from others, leaving him alone often. Can you talk a little more about the self-containment of teenagers and why you wanted to explore it in your fiction?
MM: Yeah, that's an interesting question because it's contradictory. I just said I wanted originally to write a young adult novel but that wasn't because I thought that there was something special about the condition of being a teenager that's so different from being an adult. It was more of wanting to subvert the genre and category of the young adult novel. That all comes from my twin and I having been child rights activists and youth rights activists. We find it problematic that people make this distinction between youth and adulthood, especially between teenagers and adults. And in a way, if you think about it, children are the most politically and socially oppressed group of people in the world because they're literally the property of their parents. They don't have political rights or have access to the law. If they need something, an adult has to advocate on their behalf. And I think what you're talking about - that alienation of youth - it doesn't come as a condition of youth itself. It's not a condition of being young, but it's a condition of being oppressed. For me, this whole concept of the teenager has a special kind of idealism, or a special kind of alienation or a special kind of enthusiasm, that goes away once they become a full human being in the eyes of the law and according to tropes in developmental psychology, is kind of bullshit. It’s really oppressive towards young people. So I wanted to write a book about a young character who may be pushed back against some of those assumptions a little bit.
When we think about dismissing the “idealism” of young people, we do so because we can just say whatever they think or whatever they feel doesn't really count as much as what an adult would feel because they're not fully human yet. Xie is interested in things that are not human or not fully human. He identifies with those things, partly because he's oppressed as a young person. He never articulates that in the text, since the book doesn't deal with youth rights and stuff like that specifically. But that was my interest. I think Xie is a character who is seen by others as extreme. Jo and Leni are in that camp as well. They're all just sort of lumped together as people who have these ideals and it's only because they don't really understand the real world. But really they're the ones who see most clearly the oppressive conditions of capitalism and anti-nature stuff. So like all the martyrs and saints that Xie reads about, he really has this knowledge of what other people don't respect or appreciate. It's more real and it's more true than the things that the adults or the people in power in the book understand or know.
The book is always described as a coming of age novel. I didn't want to put any words like that in the publicity for the book. It happened anyway, because it's just so hard for people to think of a book about a young person outside of that genre of it's about a boy who becomes a man. I hate this so much. It's so dismissive and it's a way to really keep change from happening. You have these young people, like Greta Thunberg, who are trying to fight for what they believe in and trying to fight the powers that be. And you could just say, well, they're harmless because they don't have the political right to do anything. They can’t affect laws. They can't vote, they have no political power. And you can say, Oh, they're young and they're stupid. They're idealistic. And then you just give them 18 to 21 years to just be crushed by political oppression. By the time they can participate in the systems, it's already been beaten into them that their ideas are not valid. I think that's one of the great tools of capitalism and all oppressive machines - the destruction of hope and “idealism,” which is really a way of seeing that’s pure and that's really true by the powers that be so that we can just kind of keep the status quo. Young people, in every era, are driving change and, the more that we can let them participate, the better things will be.
KB: I find most of the literature that I'm drawn to usually ends up being classified as a coming of age. I love reading about younger people in that way. You can tell so many different stories through the lens of someone young. But as you said, it’s interesting that we still want to classify it as a coming of age instead of just a book about a person.
MM: The fact that we don't question that category is this society is really stunning because all of the arguments we use to oppress young people, we've used against women and people of color for centuries. But we don't question using those same arguments for oppression against 30% of the world's population. And to me, it's mind-boggling, right? We just don't question the fact that we don't see young people as fully human, that they're not developmentally, or aware enough or smart enough or whatever to, to handle the real world. If you remember when you were a child or you were a young person growing up, you were just as much of a person as you are now at any stage in your life. When you're 20 or you're 30 or you're 50 - there are changes and there are differences, and of course there are physical and biological differences between a five year old brain and a 10 year old brain just as there are differences between a female brain and the male brain - but those differences don't necessarily lend themselves as an argument for oppression. I'm just really tired of this in literature. If you write about young people, it's always about this process of becoming. That's how we have to view it and that's a way of compartmentalizing the experiences of young people and marginalizing them. Isn't the biggest readership for YA grown ups? (Laughs) So there is a fascination, right? There's an interest in young people's stories and experiences. It’s a great nostalgia for youth, which is very damaging in its way. There's also an obsession with innocence, which is also incredibly damaging to people, but there's something there that people want to read about, but we have to put this label on it that I find really gross.
KB: I’m going to switch gears here because I really wanted to talk to you about veganism. Xie’s attitude towards veganism and animal life and the protection of the environment comes from his desire to live without causing harm. This is something that feels almost impossible to do in a capitalist society that favors violence and ego, and views nature and animals as commodities. I think this book sort of demands the reader to think about their own attitude to the environment and the responsibilities we have. Do you think there is a way to live without causing harm? What needs to change above all?
MM: Yeah. That's a big question. And it's the question of the novel for sure. It's my own question for myself. Xie struggles with the limitations of everything in some ways, and even veganism. When I became vegan, it was like, Oh, here's an answer. Here's a way to shape my life, where I can make what I see as an ethical decision about how I want to live, and then I can sort of stop thinking about it. I can just say, I did this thing and made this lifestyle change, and now I'm done in some ways, right? I solved this problem of animal suffering for myself. But I always felt in the back of my mind that I didn't really solve anything. Veganism is all about challenging the boundaries between humans and other animals, but it doesn't really challenge the boundary between the animal and the plant world. So there's still a hierarchy saying eating plants is better than eating animals. Xie definitely struggles with this. When he's growing his vegetables and he has to harvest what he's grown, he realizes more and more the life that's in everything. That for him to live and to exist, you have to kill things. Those boundaries start breaking down for Xie really quickly. He spends more time in the woods and more time in his garden and more time with P, and he realizes everything's alive. Even things that we don't think of as living or things that used to be living. And so what do you do about that? The violence of human existence is something that we can't overcome completely. That's a dilemma that so many cultures have struggled with forever. And some societies have turned to biocentrism to think about this problem and solve it in some respect. I think the book is really more about biocentrism than it is veganism. The idea that humans are not in any way the epicenter of existence. They're not the top of any hierarchy, that there is no hierarchy of being. Really, when you think about it, you can't make an argument to say that a tree - which is in my mind the highest form of life, because it gives so much and takes a little from the environment—it’s so giving and so great - how can you say a tree's life is really worth less than humans? You can't. There's really no logical philosophical argument that you can make to prove that trees are somehow less than people. You can only make the argument if you're coming from a place of superiority and supremacism. When you take that notion of supremacy away, you're left in the space where things get really hard and complicated. And that’s where Xie is.
In Xie's mind, he's probably thinking he should just not exist at all because the best thing is to make myself food for other things to live. But of course, everyone's life is important to them. Even though I think human extinction is probably the best thing for the earth in general, that's going to happen anyway, we don’t need to speed it along. This idea of mass extinction, where we are all gonna die in a hundred years. That's really scary. But we also really want to live and want to be in community with each other. We also want to be within a larger community. And veganism definitely is a step towards that in our culture, I think. But I don't think veganism makes sense outside of capitalist patriarchy. It's only in some ways a consumer choice and you can only become vegan if you live far from the earth. If you live closer to the earth, veganism often disappears as an option because your choices are limited. I think it's a good bridge for some of us who can do it and want to do it. I think it's great. But it doesn't solve the larger problems of violence and suffering and cruelty and just the basic conundrum of life, which is that you have to take life to live. I would hope that people would read the book and think about these issues and whether it makes someone decide to be vegan or not is less the point. It’s more about making people think about what is alive, what's not alive and what are our responsibilities to our fellow creatures.
KB: These are some pretty hot topics that can cause a lot of negative emotions to arise. Did you have hesitation when writing a novel about these issues?
MM: I think I hesitated partly because in some ways it's like a more personal book than my other work. I share a lot of concerns with Xie. He's like my role model in a way. I wish I could be more like him or more like a lot of the people in the book. I'm totally a failed activist. I'm super half-assed about so many things and such a willing participant in the systems of my own oppression. That sucks. So in a way, Xie was this voice saying, okay snap out of it. Think harder, think deeper, think better about these issues. He is so passionate and very vulnerable. He has so many feelings and he's really raw. It made me feel vulnerable writing about him because I wrote a book that was extremely sincere and usually in my work - because it's not about my life and I don't write about people I know or things that have happened to me - there's a lot of distance. But in this book there was a lot less of that. It was more emotional for me writing it and I would cry while writing sometimes. (Laughs)
It just always felt really over the top in a lot of ways. The language is over the top, the things that happened -it’s very dramatic compared to the other stuff that I've written. It's all very uncontained. And I think that, more than like a specific issue, made me feel vulnerable because I was showing people that I care about these things through these other people, caring about things in the book. Not to say that I don't want people to know that I care about all these things in my daily life, because I talk about this stuff all the time - probably to the great dismay of most of the people that I know (Laughs) But to do it in your work is really different because you can't have that one on one conversation and you don't know how people are going to take what you wrote. So yeah, it makes me feel pretty vulnerable, but that's good. I think all writing should do that in some way. All my other books scared me in different ways. And this one was scary for different reasons. It was hard to make a decision to just let the book be as emotional as it is. And it was uncomfortable because I usually try to suck a lot of emotion out of my work in a certain way. With this book, the voice was different from the beginning. I just had to let him be a mess, I guess. All my characters are a mess all the time, but he is a different kind of a mess, you know? (Laughs)
KB: I wanted to ask you about the writing in this novel. Your prose flow as sort of a stream of consciousness, yet demands attention with fragmented sentences and unexpected punctuation. I felt like it sort of demanded my attention. Can you speak about this choice?
MM: Yeah. It just came off that way from the beginning and it was much more extreme in the first year that I was writing it. There were periods everywhere. It was almost like I'd write a word and then I would just put a period after it because that's just how his voice sounded in my head. He just gets it stuck in his own feelings and his own thoughts. It’s hard for them to come out so the punctuation seemed necessary. But I think I pulled back from that a little bit because it seemed so extreme. I don't know if it was the right choice or not to smooth it out as much as I did in the book, but it does stop you, right? That's what periods do. They say, okay, stop this idea and start another one. And Xie is so bottled up inside of himself. He has had a hard time communicating with other people. So those streams of consciousness, those run on sentences, get broken up by his own stuff. Some people can't read it. Some people have a really hard time with it. People have said that they can't finish the book because it just doesn't make sense to them. It doesn't sound right. So I did worry about that and I think that's why I ended up moving out as much as I did, because it's so interesting how you hear the text in a certain way in your head as the writer, but there's no way for you to guarantee that someone else is going to hear it the same way. You don't want to shut people out with your work. That's never my intention, to make something difficult on purpose.
I was talking to someone for an interview a couple of weeks ago and he said that the effect of the language was like a hammer on nails. And I loved that because of course it has a resonance in the book in another way, as a metaphor. I was hearing Xie speak and there was a rhythm to it in a certain way that I wanted to get across. And then also that sense of the reader having to stop and really think about what they're reading. The book is not that long, but I think you can't just read it really quickly. You don't always know who's speaking. Everything's shoved together. But I wanted to make the text democratic in that way. So taking the biocentrism ideas, and then transmitting them to language so that in some ways there's no hierarchy in the text itself.
Maryse Meijer is the author of the story collections Heartbreaker, which was one of Electric Literature's 25 Best Short Story Collections of 2016, and Rag, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Pick and a finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, as well as the novella Northwood.
