Comfort and Its Discontents
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Triage, Claudia Rankine, Allen Lane, 2026, 208 pages, £22.00
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It is said that the couch upon which Sigmund Freud’s famous patients lay during their analysis was so pillowed and soft that it became almost uncomfortable. The poet H.D., in her Tribute to Freud, describes it as ‘slippery’, with a ‘hard headboard’, and recalls having to prop herself up and rearrange the rug underneath her, to prevent it from sliding on the floor.
Claudia Rankine’s newest book, Triage: Truth, Art and Fiction, meditates on the liberal discomfort with comfort. It is a non-linear narrative work that follows the friendship between its exhausted, passive narrator and a radical ‘theorist’, who first meet in college and then fall out of touch only to eventually reconnect in their sixties. These friends are bound by a ritual they invented in their youth wherein they both fall to the ground simultaneously as a way of ‘apprehending life and all its crimes’, an act in which ‘the burdened body just lets go of itself’. The autofictional narrator’s response to geopolitical ‘collapse’ is to write about sculptures of couches – objects that betray their function. A sculpture of a couch, as an art object, resembles a place of rest, but, crucially, isn’t one.
As tends to be the case with writing that defies genre and orbits the poles of autofiction, narrative, poetry, prose and criticism, it is hard to pick a criterion to measure Rankine’s new work against. This same formal disobedience produced Rankine’s earlier book, the luminously intelligent Citizen, hailed by the Sunday Times as the ‘book of a generation’: a brilliant, taut collection of lyric episodes interrogating the emotional life of black Americans – namely the irritation and embarrassment attending microaggressions. The critical response to her following book, Just Us, was less resounding. Critics seemed unsure of who the intended audience was, or what Rankine hoped to get out of these often masochistic conversations with white colleagues, friends and strangers about race. Kate Waldman, in The New Yorker, noted Rankine’s ‘humble posture’ in these exchanges, finding her tone ‘needlessly caressing’, thus ‘[giving] the book a tortured, insincere quality’.
If there is posturing in Triage, it comes from the book’s commitment to defying conventional novelistic or poetic boundaries: Rankine does not so much render realistic characters as she does present opposing voices. The friendship between the narrator and theorist is staged through conversational debates, voiced in the sparse, judicial style of the agon in Greek tragedy. Where the narrator advocates for the ‘resting power of silence’, the theorist is sanctimonious, chiding their friend in aphorisms: ‘You wish yet another someone to act without changing anything?’ ‘Keep on hoping for a savior until your maybes murder you’. Rankine tends to tell us instead of showing us the exact quality of the theorist and narrator’s bond: ‘I knew, instantaneously, we were kin or we were akin when we first met.’
In the book’s acknowledgements, Rankine hints at who this ‘theorist’ might be: the late Lauren Berlant, who also went by gender neutral pronouns like the theorist in the book, though was born in Philadelphia, instead of Ramallah, Palestine.
Indeed, these friends share the feeling of ‘survivor’s guilt’, having made the painful escape from their home countries to the US. There is no veil between our world and the world of Triage: we in the West, along with the narrator and theorist, grapple with the experience of watching genocide, mass migration and climate disaster unfold from our couches. Rankine writes gorgeously about this final catastrophe:
And, though, these days, the sky was full-up with weather, its light communicated only as a reddening sun bled into the aging year; its trapped temperature, human-made; Icarus, colouring everything, outsizing our human scale; runoff dusting the landscape; spores, particles, gases owning the air, still here remained our double edged existence.
There is something in these blurry, bitten-off clauses of the prescience and affective drama of a Rothko painting – like him, Rankine has a particular talent for molecular lightshows of shade and scale. This is her lyric eye at its perceptive, spellbinding best. Much of Citizen worked in this mode: painterly shades of emotive flotsam that rock us into a seasickness not unlike the queasy, dislocated sensation of experiencing racial microaggression. There are passages in Triage of equally hypnotic power, usually those that contemplate race, visual art or the climate.
More seriously, though, Triage falters in its treatment of the genocide in Gaza (one consequence of the book’s hefty ambition to produce insightful commentary on basically every contemporary geopolitical issue). After the friends reunite at a Jennifer Packer exhibition, they walk to the narrator’s apartment in New York. She frets over the city’s sinking under the weight of its skyscrapers. The theorist responds with characteristic chastisement. Rankine’s narrator reacts internally:
Shit, I thought. Gaza. I felt myself getting entangled in ‘a circuit of adjustments’ and a ‘gestural transformation’, to utilise the theorist’s rhetoric. Climate change was real but genocide was ours now. Maybe this was why I let myself collapse on the path of the High Line between the wild bergamots and the black-eyed Susans.
Who is this passage for? The collapse is deployed here as an empathetic strategy, but is it actually successful? We’re watching Rankine simulate her own – and her avatar’s – empathy by pushing the latter to the floor. This passage approximates the uneasy experience of watching somebody shame themselves for having an easy life to the point of extreme distress, even self-harm. Rather than directing our attention towards the difficult lives the passage purports to lament, the gesture risks making the observer’s guilt the most urgent object of concern – placing it, as it were, at the top of the triage. Begrudgingly, I agree with the theorist’s reprimand: ‘there exist more urgent places to put your urgency’.
Of course, Rankine is too intelligent to full-heartedly invest in this. She knows the characters in this book are all talk. Even the purportedly action-driven theorist likes ‘extended thought almost as much as actual action’. Triage was, Rankine said at a lecture, inspired by her experience of falling and being triaged in the emergency room: ‘It was interesting because they come around, and they don’t do anything. They just assess. I am interested in this moment because it seems like what we are all doing is assessing without action.’
At the end of the book, Rankine implicates herself as a part of this passive generation of assessors. When the theorist asks Rankine’s avatar to house a Palestinian couple fleeing the genocide, she uncharacteristically declines (‘My lack of generosity felt alien to me.’). After this act of self-incriminating hypocrisy, the narrative voice lifts out of this character, and becomes the disembodied, authoritative voice we know from Citizen, fissuring into a series of hallucinatory prose poem-like reflections on our collective inaction. The narrator’s position on the radicalism of passivity, rest and silence is revealed to have been a foil; the theorist was right all along. Rankine, it turns out, has merely been affecting her own sacrifice for the sake of promoting self-critique in her readers.
This turn lands ambivalently, given that the entire book so far has been devoted to waterproofing the narrator’s argument against the stormy disapproval of the theorist. Drawing on pieces by Jennifer Packer, Kaari Upson, Martine Syms, Michael Beitz and Sarah Lucas, Rankine’s deft analyses of couch-related artworks have been deployed throughout to synthesise her politics of collapse, rest and tentative recovery. Not only this, Rankine’s entire body of work preceding Triage supports the idea that there is radical ambivalence in passive resistance, to paraphrase Marxist theorist Sianne Ngai.
Is Triage Rankine’s disavowal of a lifetime’s work? Probably not – the end isn’t even the first bait-and-switch in the book. Throughout Triage, the narrator’s repeated acts of self-undermining do little to diminish the fervour of the ‘passivity-is-radicalism’ argument whenever it resurfaces. Rankine here is mimicking the mental gymnastics and ideological vacillations of her own liberal readership.
Some may argue that this is not critically interesting in its own right, though in this case I would point towards Rankine’s history of identifying with her audience in order to cushion the blow of her critique. While it must be stressed that Rankine’s lyric practice is capacious and stylistically thrilling, that her insights are always valuable in isolation, I am left slightly unsure of what Triage’s greater intentions are. Perhaps this is simply a consequence of its resistance to formal classification: Ben Lerner’s blurb contribution suggests that it is under the weighty ‘catastrophes of the present’ that traditional genre conventions buckle in the book – so that ‘new possibilities of form and feeling might emerge’.
If the expectations of the poem, novel and essay do not govern Triage – or even a book like Lerner’s Transcription – they still hover over them. Triage’s frustration of these expectations is not necessarily critically exciting: at times, it merely generates dissatisfaction and an atmosphere of passivity in a book already concerned with dissatisfaction and passivity. The book risks coming across as only an assessment of us as a generation of assessors. I am riffing, here, on Adrian Nathan West’s mixed review of Transcription in The Baffler: ‘A writer can’t just be boring in a book about boredom […] aimless in a book about aimlessness, sidestepping the hard tasks art poses to announce afterward, like Pee-wee Herman, “I meant to do that’’.’
Indeed, when Rankine engages with genre more attentively, Triage flourishes. In an especially moving prosaic sequence that follows her reconnection with the theorist, Rankine’s avatar recalls the enigmatic, neglectful figure of her late mother. Theirs is a relationship of few words. The narrator is raised by her aunt after her mother immigrates to New York, and she receives unsigned birthday cards from her mother throughout their separation. When together, they do not touch one another or hold hands.
Decades later, the narrator remembers visiting her mother to collect her birth certificate. It is then that her mother tells the narrator that she, her daughter, was the result of rape. The revelation is indirect, harrowing, and Rankine renders the interaction mostly through soundscape: things are ‘stated flatly’, sentences are ‘managed’ as if each word must be unwrapped, while water from the kitchen ‘crash[es] into the stainless steel sink’.
Throughout these segments concerning the narrator’s mother, there is the sense of Rankine’s avoidance. She superimposes the figure of Mary Seacole, another Jamaican diasporic nurse, onto her, and relays particularly painful speech in the third person, rather than in direct speech. This narratorial slantness has the effect of averting the gaze, or retraining it onto something that resembles the loss, but is crucially, relievedly, not the loss. She admits that it is all too upsetting to remember:
My mother’s death returned me to memories of my childhood and I didn’t wish to be texting the theorist, or anyone else for that matter, about the cruelty she made room for in the lives of her children by simply doing nothing.
For all its self-awareness, Triage spends too much of its energy dramatising the hypocrisy and self-interest of burdened intellectuals. When it moves beyond this preoccupation, however, it offers more meaningful and ambivalent insights: a psychoanalytic excavation of negligence and its wider political reverberations. In moments like this, Rankine is not tying herself in knots trying to trick us, nor is she distracting us from the suffering of others with her guilt. She is transparent about the kind of couch she lies on here: the Freudian one, where memories and revelations unfold with dreamlike uncertainty.
Even though the passages of aimless debate are commentary on the aimlessness of debate, the book’s less nervously metatextual writing is the more perceptive – it makes for better ‘truth, art and fiction’, given Rankine was going to lie on the couch either way.
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Devki Panchmatia writes poetry and criticism. She is beginning a PhD at King’s College London, where she will research fashion and affect in the American novel.
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