REBROADCAST: ‘The Book of Joan’

Portland author Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel, “The Book of Joan,” reimagines the character of Joan of Arc in a post-apocalyptic world where the earth has been consumed by war and the remaining humans have become sexless, genderless creatures whose main form of self expression is scarring their own skin. We listen back to a conversation from 2017.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Allison Frost: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Allison Frost. Best selling author Lidia Yuknavitch often writes complex stories about outcasts and misfits. Her last novel, the Book of Joan, is a reimagining of the Joan of Arc story in a dystopian science fiction context. When we spoke in 2017, I asked her how much she knew about the Joan of Arc story before she started writing.

Lidia Yuknavitch: My sister and I were raised Catholic. She was eight years older than me, and she took the name Joan as her Communion name. So it came into my life as a little kid who only understood the story partially. The two pieces I got the most were that there was a burning girl and the image of that, and also that there was a girl warrior somewhere, and people were hiding them from us.

Allison Frost: She was a hero and we weren’t hearing all that much about that. Well, let’s start with the world of the novel. The book opens in the floating technological world orbiting above earth called CIEL...

Yuknavitch: Yes.

Frost: ...and a woman named Christine is our narrator, for the first part of the book anyway,...

Yuknavitch: Yes.

Frost: ...and we find out that she’s doing something... well, my reaction was ‘that’s quite odd.’ She’s burning text into her body, I guess sort of related to tattooing, but quite different...

Yuknavitch: Related, but it puffs up more like grafting or soldering would do.

Frost: Scarification, and she’s burning text about the story of Joan, the hero of the wars that destroyed earth in the novel. I do want to have you read something really pretty early on, but what is the importance of storytelling in this world? Because it’s not what one might think of when you think of a future world with a lot of technology.

Lidia Yuknavitch: It’s huge. It’s probably the core of the story. What I mean by that is, a question I have, that I’m very itchy about, is who gets to own the story of reality? Who gets to tell it, and what narrative will win in terms of the listener? If any of that sounds familiar to our present tense, it’s supposed to. I was trying to inject life back into the act of storytelling and ask questions that are vital about why do we do it? When do we do it? And whose story wins and why?

Frost: Why graft the stories, burn the stories onto the human body?

Yuknavitch: That has a long answer and a short answer. So I’ll go for the shorter...

Frost: Yeah, because we have a lot more questions to get to.

Yuknavitch: I hear you. So for me growing up Catholic, and then it didn’t really take on me. I rejected it…

Frost: I couldn’t tell from the book...

Yuknavitch: So the Christ body, one could say, is a symbolic body that led to an entire belief system. For me there was no girl body that had that power except when I started to excavate the Joan of Arc story. There was another body that could rival the Christ body. So rejoining the story of who we are to a body that was female was really important to me because the Christ story takes the story away from women except as vessels for producing this figure. So it was a matter of reattaching the word to the body, literally.

Frost: Well I’d love to have you read something pretty early on in the story on page 13. Before you read this passage that’s in the voice of Christine, what do we need to know about her or do we need to know anything more than what we’ve already said before you begin?

Yuknavitch: Well she’s in her 49th year of life, and you only get to live about 50 years up there in this place I constructed because there aren’t enough resources. She’s decided she wants to create a resistance narrative. I think that’s all you need to know.

[Reading] ‘Within, a plain cardboard box. Which is not nothing: in a paperless existence, cardboard is like . . . what? Oil. Gold. I open it, and dig through its contents—CDs, videos, other ancient recording media artifacts—as if my hands are anxious spiders. I know the object I want better than I know my own hand: a scuffed-up thumb drive. I hold the thumb drive near my jugular. Our necks, our temples, our ears, our eyes, all have data points to interface with media. Implants and nanotechnology lodged exclusively in our heads, pushing thought out, fluttering and alive near the surface of our skin.

My room ignites with holographic projections: fragments of Jean de Men’s evolution. It’s a perfect and terrifying consumer culture history, really. His early life as a self-help guru, his astral rise as an author revered by millions worldwide, then overtaking television—that puny propaganda device on Earth—and finally, the seemingly unthinkable, as media became a manifested room in your home, he overtook lives, his performances increasingly more violent in form. His is a journey from opportunistic showman, to worshipped celebrity, to billionaire, to fascistic power monger. What was left? When the Wars broke out, his transformation to sadistic military leader came as no surprise.

We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power.

Our existence makes my eyes hurt.

People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can’t happen. If it doesn’t exist in thought, then it can’t exist in life. And then, in the blink of an eye, in a moment of danger, a figure who takes power from our weak desires and failures emerges like a rib from sand. Jean de Men. Some strange combination of a military dictator and a spiritual charlatan. A war-hungry mountebank. How stupidly we believe in our petty evolutions. Yet another case of something shiny that entertained us and then devoured us. We consume and become exactly what we create. In all times.’

Frost: We’re talking with best selling author Lidia Yuknavitch about her new novel, The Book of Joan. So, there was a lot in that reading, but I’d like to ask about Jean de Men, obviously very central to this story. Sounds familiar. Did you have a historical inspiration for Jean de Men in mind, or is this an archetype? Or both?

Yuknavitch: It’s not an archetype. There was a figure named Jean de Men who had a face off with another medieval figure, a woman writer named Christine de Pizan. He was the writer of courtly romances. So there was a historical figure. What I borrowed from history and dislocated was this debate between this powerful man and this powerful woman, in literary terms. Then what I injected it within our present tense is, as I was writing this, 2.5, 3 years ago, I was very upset about things like celebrity culture and capitalism and climate change. Thus Jean de Men was born both from history and our present.

Frost: Were you still writing it when the run up to the 2016 election was getting started?

Yuknavitch: No. People sometimes think books happen really quickly that it takes a really...

Frost: I do know that...,

Yuknavitch: … but other people have asked me were you thinking of Trump? And I wasn’t thinking of Trump. But he was in the back of my mind as these outta wack celebrity rich people group that has started to not care about the rest of us. So he was in there, but I wasn’t aiming for him.

Frost: I also know that there’s sometimes a lot of rewrites and there’s definitely revisions that can happen, some years later, after one starts.

Yuknavitch: Of course, although the one thing I didn’t change much of was him. So it’s really frightening.

Frost: There’s all kinds of other questions that I’d like to ask, but I’m trying to not ask any questions that are too much of a spoiler. So we will leave some questions for people to find out on their own. Well, this whole context for the world is basically that the earth is dead. Now we don’t get a lot of information about how the sea life has fared, but you can sort of imagine if you sort of have general science education that it’s not great, but certainly there’s more potential for life there. Let’s say that, in general, the earth was scorched, and it’s uninhabitable... almost uninhabitable. How important was it that the CIEL, the floating home world that Christine exists on? How important was that that it was in orbit rather than a fortified bunker-style in a dome somewhere?

Yuknavitch:  It was important because, in terms of image and lyric, I wanted it to be tethered like a fetus lengthy to the thing it’s busy killing. I found that an interesting relationship. So I’ll say that about that.

Frost:  Interesting...

Yuknavitch: Content-wise, it was important because the two worlds are both dying, so I needed a kind of double version of that. So I had to pitch them out a little ways from us...,

Frost: ,... and the umbilical cord is quite a parallel because they get supplies. The CIELers get supplies from Earth via something called a skyline,...

Yuknavitch: Right. Which is not completely bonkers or it just lodged in Lidia’s weird brain.

Frost: I wasn’t going to say that, but yeah, if you want to tell us a little bit more about the skyline...

Yuknavitch: In astrophysics, things like space elevators have been postulated for a long time now, and we may be heading towards some version of that. I just sort of embellished it and gave it some lyricism...

Frost: ...as writers do as, you’re totally entitled to do and you do beautifully. Joan is put on trial. I don’t think I’m giving too much away to say that that’s the context that we hear about. And she does have an execution. The first time we really get a sense of her personality is a partial transcript of the trial. Of course, we’ve heard a lot about her through Christine, burning the text of her story on her skin. But I thought it would be fun to read a little bit from that, and read with you, if you are a game…

Yuknavitch: I am so…

Frost: Do we need to know anything other than she’s on trial and she’s being questioned by the state and there’s no lawyer?

Yuknavitch: No.

Frost: Okay. So I’m going to be the interrogator and you’re going to be Joan.

Yuknavitch: Okay.

Frost, reading: ‘Will you swear to tell the truth?’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘I don’t know what you’ll ask me. It’s possible you’ll ask me things I won’t tell you.’

Frost, reading: ‘Shall this defiance be a daily exercise then?’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘Shall your redundant daily inquiries go on ad nauseam?’

Frost, reading: ‘Please record the defendant’s refusal to swear an oath to the truth.’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘That is not accurate.’

Frost, reading: ‘It is what you have stated.’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘It is not. I refuse nothing. I have stated that there may be things I will not tell you.’

Frost, reading: ‘On what authority would you swear then, if not the courts?’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘All right, then I choose the sun.’

Frost, reading: ‘More absurdity. Have you any allegiance to the truth?’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘I shall follow your rhetorical model. I shall tell lies and truths interchangeably. But I must warn you, I’m an expert, especially at one of those.’

Frost, reading: ‘Have you no respect for these proceedings nor dignity in your own person?’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘Of the first, I have nothing, of the second, my resistance is my dignity.

'

Frost, reading: ‘Continue questioning. Record that the defendant engages in resistance to questioning.’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘Record as well, that my accusers are witless cowards.’

Frost, reading: ‘Strike that from the record. When did you last hear the voices speaking to you?’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘You’re funny. Let’s say yesterday and today?’

Frost, reading: ‘At what time yesterday?’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘They are not voices in the way you are supposing. But it would be futile to give an explanation. I heard it three times, once in the morning or what I think must have been morning, once at the hour of retreat, and once in the evening, at the hour of the stars song. Very often I hear it more frequently than I tell you. So, your question is irrelevant.’

Frost, reading: ‘What were you doing when you heard it yesterday morning?’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘I was asleep and the sound woke me.’

Frost, reading: ‘Did the voices touch you?’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘Has a voice ever grabbed at you?’

Frost, reading: ‘If they have no members, how could they speak?’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘How is it that you speak? How do your beloved technology speak?’

Frost, reading: ‘Do you understand the charges against you?’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘The charges of your oddly lascivious obsessions?’

Frost, reading: ‘Strike that from the record. Are you an enemy of the state?’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘I have been charged with treason and terrorism against the state. Beyond this, the validity of my visions is under question, though notably not my military prowess. Somewhat incomprehensibly, my clothing and my hair are cited as crimes against the state. I am sentenced to death. I am to be burned and televised, sent signaling through the flames across the land as proof that my body has become ash. I believe that covers it. The only thing I’m unclear about is why we’re having this little tete a tete.’

Frost, reading: ‘Your insubordination does not help your case…’

Yuknavitch, reading: ‘And your hypocrisy and genocidal tendencies do not help yours. Out of curiosity, are any voices touching your members?’

Frost: Thank you. Thank you for that. I love how her personality just really comes out in that transcript and that is the first time we really get a sense of her and her personality, really, because we heard the narrative of her story.

Yuknavitch: That’s true.

Frost: So can you describe how this Joan got ‘the call?’ We sometimes think of that. “The call” is often used in a religious context. So who or what was the call from?

Yuknavitch: Well, I dislocated her from the theology we’re most used to. Another way of saying that is I took God out, and instead of that voice of a deity I gave her the ability to hear the cosmos. Whether people see it or not, there’s a lot of stuff in here about cosmic string theory in astrophysics, so what she hears is kind of like what we’ve heard recently of. It’d be like if you heard a loud orchestra sound mixed with what the rings of Saturn sound like, which has been online lately.

Frost: And those are the voices? That’s what she’s referring to?

Yuknavitch: She does hear something larger than life. I’ve just taken the kind of monotheism out of it.

Frost: You said obviously she doesn’t believe in God, and you’ve said you’ve taken God out of it. Does that go across the board for this world? I get the impression that it does.

Yuknavitch: Well, yes and no. When I talk to people who are devout, I find all kind of crossroads with what they’re saying story wise as an atheist. Because when I look up into the night sky or when I read about astrophysics, I find wonder and a kind of faith in a certainly, a place where storytelling is among the most important acts we can do as humans.

Frost: Well, you write about this stuff so beautifully. Even some of the really horrible things that happen. One of the things that I thought was just so beautiful... beautiful, no other description required... is the time when she first, at age 10, gets this experience...

Yuknavitch: Yeah, that changes her life forever...

Frost: ...how would you describe the color? You are so specific about this color, and it keeps recurring throughout the book, The color that seeps into her head and pulsates.

Yuknavitch: Right. Anyone who has had a severe migraine sees the aura, which is a combination of colors. Not everybody sees it, but some people do. And also, epileptics have sometimes been recorded as seeing this aura. I was super interested in the idea that there is something larger than our senses that could come to a person. I gave her a blue light at her temple, and why the distillation into blue is that anyone who’s met me knows I have an obsession with water. So the blue is a little bit of Lidia mixed in with this idea of aura. That color could be talking to you. That synesthesia could be happening in a way that the sound she hears and the color that comes to her are forms of the language of the earth, and language of the cosmos which we’re made of.

Frost: I picture that as like water in a Hawaiian inlet that has that blue green…

Yuknavitch: Yes, blue-green…

Frost: It almost looks otherworldly. It doesn’t look real, so vivid...

Yuknavitch: Me, too…

Frost: Oh good. I’m glad I got that. And you can imagine human parents would be very disturbed by seeing that color in the skull.

Yuknavitch: They might be worried...

Frost: ...of their, of their child. So what is the power? Where does her power derive from? And can you explain the two sides of her power?

Yuknavitch: Her power comes from the earth and her deep connection to it. She’s a hardcore treehugger. One of the first things she experiences in touching a tree [is that] this energy sort of zaps her, gets into her. Another power that she has, and I don’t know if this is what you meant or not, but for me another power she has is an understanding. She has to radicalize what she means by love and dislocate it from the stories we’ve inherited about what a love story is. A lot of this book is about alternate love stories.

Frost: And we should say that two of the big relationships in the book, one is Joan and her female companion, Leone. How important was it that that relationship is a lesbian relationship? And then even though Christine has a partner, Trinculo, they’re both, since they’re without gender, in this world, I guess, would you call that a queer relationship as well?

Yuknavitch: Well, what I would say is that I was trying to open the idea and the body of queerness up to 100 different meanings. And to do that I had to move heterosexuality to the side a little so that these other kinds of signifying bodies could have a bunch of stories possibilities coming out of them. So the lesbian queer body, for me, was sort of this this radical question of what if we took the heterosexual, reproducing body out as the center of the story and replaced it with a queer lesbian regenerating body, which is what Joan has. And I don’t think novels answer questions. I think the best novels hold questions suspended and make them alive in the reader. So I don’t have an answer about that. But that is the question I was trying to raise.

Frost: It does, it’s a lot of question…

Yuknavitch: It’s super important to me.

Frost: Well… love factors in and out and through the book. I wonder if you’d read one more for us, on page 191 about love?

Yuknavitch: I’d love to… [reading] '  Her mind contorts. What do we mean by love anymore? Love is not the story we were told. Though we wanted so badly for it to hold, the fairy tales and myths, the seamless trajectories, the sewn shapes of desire thwarted by obstacles we could heroically battle, the broken heart, the love lost the love lorn the love torn the love won, the world coming back alive in a hard-earned nearly impossible kiss. Love of God love of country love for another. Erotic love familial love the love of a mother for her children platonic love brotherly love. Lesbian love and homosexual love and all the arms and legs of other love. Transgressive love too—the dips and curves of our drives given secret sanctuary alongside happy bright young couplings and sanctioned marriages producing healthy offspring. Oh love. Why couldn’t you be real? It isn’t that love died. It’s that we storied it poorly. We tried too hard to contain it and make it something to have and to hold.’

Frost: That’s Lidia Yuknavitch, reading from the Book of Joan, and I hope it was clear that that was coming from the perspective of Joan.

Yuknavitch: It could only be Joan.

Frost: As we talked about a little bit, the these bodies are genderless. They’ve lost their ability to reproduce. This is taking place just just a few decades in the future... 2049. That seems to very poetically parallel ‘The Dead Earth,’ but do you have an idea based in your world and your scientific interpretation [or] projections? Why did they lose that ability?

Yuknavitch: They lost the ability because of radical changes in the environment. Say, for example, if all the earth’s calderas erupted at once, as [a] hypothetical, [and] mixed with radiation from nuclear wars that go over years and years. Radical changes in the environment really could produce radical changes in morphology. Maybe not this radical, …

Frost: That’s where the fiction comes in.

Yuknavitch: And yet stranger things have happened. One of the ideas in this book is to be looking at animals and plant life differently as well. The ways in which we’ve used animals to help us sustain ourselves and make ourselves more alive is also one of the issues this book takes on.

Frost: I was wondering if that sort of skyline was meant to make us think about the other things that we siphon,...

Yuknavitch / Frost, overlapping: ...siphon off, bingo, bingo, I love you, I love you too.

Frost: Back to the sort of religion, you sort of substituted an earth-centric... scope. Joan really... this is not a religious prophet. She’s not espousing a religion per se, but she definitely is a kind of prophet. Without giving too much away, how do you see her as a prophet?

Yuknavitch: I hear what you’re saying. So I would say, without giving too much away, that she resists the Savior story and literally steps out of it. In place of the Savior story she asks, what would it be like if we loved the planet the way we claim we love each other? I could say that…

Frost: I was wondering if that that love of the planet... since the planet’s been long dead when  the novel opens, there’s no mourning for the planet, except for Christine and Trinculo, and of course Joan, But she’s on the planet for most of the book. It’s just so depressing in many ways,

Yuknavitch / Frost, [voices overlap] ...you know, just, I mean, a lot of Sci-Fi is like that...

Frost: You’re writing a whole novel and you’re in that world. Some f what people do... the plot is quite revolting. So we could say, how do you balance this humor here? Fear and...

Yuknavitch: ...great question. It’s a great question and for me both in the creative process of writing it, but also what I hope goes into at least a couple readers, is that I feel the story of devastation with more than one love story. Only the love stories I created are weird.

Frost: I love how you say that, too, ‘it’s weird.’ Again, I hope I’m not giving too much away, but Joan has a lot of regret towards the end of the novel, that she hasn’t fully expressed her love to her beloved, to the person who anyone would interpret as her life partner, her lover.

Yuknavitch: She’s carrying all those stories in her actual body. And that probably ties into the fact that I’m carrying a grief in my body that others have shared, that my daughter died. But you go on and you endure, unless you don’t. A way I found to carry that grief with me instead of against myself is to put it into making art. So, those stories she’s carrying with her are a little bit like what it feels like to be me,...

Frost: ... and all of us,...

Yuknavitch: ...carry the stories we couldn’t change with us, and yet endure and figure out how to love each other.

Frost: You do that very beautifully and thank you so much for your work.

Yuknavitch: Thank you. It’s my pleasure.

Frost: Lydia Yushkevich is a best selling author and an Oregon Book Award winner and she teaches Writing in Portland. We spoke in 2017 when her novel, The Book of Joan was released. Her newest book is Verge, a collection of short stories.

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