Be Bak in a Whale

Be Bak in a Whale: Reading Miss MacIntosh, My Darling from the Inside

Marguerite Young spent eighteen years writing Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Coral Russell has spent years reading it. This book is the record of five readings and everything they built.

Be Bak in a Whale is not a reading guide and not a philosophical treatise. Those exist: A Guide to Reading Miss MacIntosh, My Darling holds readers hand through all eighty-two chapters; AND: The Philosophy of Marguerite Young names and argues for the five-pillar system Young built. This book goes inside the construction. It takes each of the five pillars, returns to the novel, and shows exactly how Young builds them, at the sentence level, in the images, in the formal decisions that most readers experience as difficulty before they have the language for what is actually happening.

The five pillars: the plural self, illusion as primary, grief as permanent weather, the witness, recursive construction. Each chapter moves between close textual reading and the personal history that arrived at the novel's door already primed to receive it, the teacher who had built a life around a particular belief in what books could do, the reader who kept turning around after every loss to find the grave marker gone, the feminist who recentered her entire intellectual life after watching what the canon had been curated from and by whom.

Young wrote for the reader who doesn't belong anywhere. Be Bak in a Whale is for that reader too: the one who has been told their plurality is the disorder, their grief is the weakness, their capacity to see through constructions is a problem rather than a form of honesty. It is an argument, built across five chapters, that the novel Young wrote is the most complete and rigorous account of what it means to live honestly inside the conditions all selves actually inhabit.

The sentence hasn't ended. Neither has the world that made it necessary.