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For a phenomenon that occurs so rarely in nature, conjoined twins are popping up at an alarming rate these days. Don't believe us? Flip through the paper. In the last nine months alone there have been two sets born in Minneapolis (one of the Twin Cities!). Kendra and Maliyah Herrin, 4, conjoined Salt Lake City twins were separated during a 26-hour surgery last week. Head to the cinema and catch "Brothers of the Head," a mockumentary that chronicles the rise and fall of Tom and Barry Howe, conjoined twins who briefly become punk-rock stars in the mid 1970s.
At the bookstore you'll find not one but two novels about conjoined twins, "The Girls" by Lori Lansens and "Half Life" by Shelley Jackson, whose brilliant and funny book tells the story of 28-year old Nora and Blanche Olney. Set in an alternate-reality present where nuclear testing on American soil resulted in a spike in conjoined twins, the novel's "twofers" now constitute a thriving minority complete with their own I'm-OK-you're-OK subculture. Nora wants nothing to do with it. In fact, she wants nothing to do with her sister Blanche, who appears to have been asleep for the past 15 years. Of course, just when Nora commits to ridding herself of her other half, she realizes nothing is quite as it appears.
What's a singleton to make of all this? NEWSWEEK's Brian Braiker put that question to Jackson in a recent interview. Excerpts:
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NEWSWEEK: There's a little conjoined-twin moment happening right now.
Shelley Jackson: Isn't that curious? It really brings to a head some issues about what constitutes individuality, what constitutes the self that we just can't quite resolve. They create this problem about the distinction between the self and the other, between me and you and the singular and the plural that isn't fixable. One of the problems I have with the surgical solution is that it posits this cure for the problem of individuality that doesn't work in every case.
So you're saying that in some cases being a conjoined twin is not something that should be fixed?
If you ask conjoined twins themselves, some of them would choose separation. But a lot of them have proudly said they prefer to be the way they are. And why not? Why should our culture define that as unacceptable? I think it's because of some anxiety about what counts as a person at all. Our language doesn't have room for a two-person "I."
Well, it does now, thanks to this book.
[ Laughs. ] I'm working on it.
You do a pretty thorough job of creating a whole conjoined-twin subculture, and you definitely have a little fun lampooning identity politics.
I certainly do. A lot of it comes out of my childhood. I grew up in Berkeley in the early days of the women's movement and racial politics and sexual politics and so on. So I was immersed in the language of identity and the problem of finding yourself and defining yourself as part of a group or distinct from a group. I was shaped by it and at the same time reacted against it in some ways because I had a strong negative reaction against what I perceived to be indulgent and nonsensical.
We see that in Nora.
Yeah. There's definitely a love-hate relationship to that entire mode of discourse but not something I wanted to write about in any kind of direct and realist way. I think it actually reveals its strangeness a little bit more interestingly if you put it into an unfamiliar light. Once I started writing, I almost gave myself a logical puzzle: what would identity politics do with this issue. Everything just flowed so naturally out of that.
In a lot of your work, most explicitly in " Skin ," [a novella published entirely in tattoos on volunteers], you seem fascinated by the places where language and writing intersect with the body.
I've always felt that language and the body both have a kindred issue, which is that they have a kind of physical dimension that's literal, which in language could be described as the sound of language, the music of language, the way it looks. Even in the body of books—its papery, stitched, glued, bound aspect. But its conceptual apparatus is something like a spirit or a soul. How the two communicate with each other struck me as an unresolved problem in the same way the self and the body seems to me an unresolved issue. A lot of my work is thinking about that middle space.
That's even inherent in the structure of your book—there's the present and flashbacks to the past, but then there's this vague middle ground where you have the Siamese-twin handbook, which is very funny. So the plot structure is very much like a conjoined twin in a way.
Indeed, yes. I'm glad you noticed. [ Laughs. ] There's also a sort of thinking about the writing process itself that comes up most strongly in the journal section, in the latter part of the book, where the problem of who's who is being played out right there in the grammar itself.
Although this book feels like a subversion of the established novel form on the one hand, on the other hand the unreliable narrator device dates to Jonathan Swift and even further back than that.
It's an old favorite of mine. But I would say that another very early model is Laurence Sterne and "Tristram Shandy" where there's a play with the form of the book itself.
That's an interesting point, because quite a few critics have observed that you're pioneering new ways of approaching the novel, but now that you mention it …
"Now that you mention it, you're not very original at all!" [ Laughs. ] Absolutely. I'm actually interested in writing in the conscious awareness that everything you write takes itself apart on some level and seeing what happens if you play with that in a deliberate sort of way.
Are you worried about alienating readers at all?
I guess in a way I expect to alienate readers. I'm surprised when I don't. It's not that I have a grudge against them, certainly. I do think that some of the best things in literature can hurt in a way that's positive. The "Skin" project was a way of literalizing that for me, this idea that we take language in. We take literature in and it damages us in a sense and we have to reformulate ourselves to cope with the breach in our sense of self.
You have a sister, Pamela, who you've worked with before. Is one of you Blanche and the other Nora?
Certainly not! I have to reject that out of hand. [ Laughs. ] I am the older sister, so there is a sense of Noraness in my relationship to my sister in that as a kid I dominated the games that we played together and declared what the stories were that we were going to act out with our dolls. But not without feeling, and this is where my sister takes up the Blanche role, that at times my sister was capable, while seeming to subordinate her vision to mine, of controlling me. I think the negotiations of a very close relationship between two kids who are a lot like each other to begin with, there's a lot of ambiguity about whose will is moving each body.
Other than the fact that this mutation was caused by nuclear testing, why "Half Life" and not "Double Life?"
Someone just asked me that question.
And yet you don't have an answer.
I don't. You cut off my avenue of escape—I wanted the interplay with radioactivity. In fact there's more to it than just the literal science-fiction premise that radiation caused the mutation. I also wanted that sense of radioactive waste that you can try to bury but keeps coming back, keeps leaking and poisoning the world that has tried to shut it out of sight and out of mind. It's like your body is telling the world something you yourself don't even know.
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