Bluets

In Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, form is the backbone of her novel. Nelson chronologically numbers her thoughts, comments, reflections, and anecdotes. This seems to allow the reader to specifically focus on each numbered paragraph with greater attention than if it were a long flowing book. Even though the numbered paragraphs don’t always correlate one after the other, her story is still progressing as she works through her pain and answers some of life’s questions. For example, in the beginning of the book she talks about falling in love with the color blue, “And so I fell in love with a color – in this case, the color blue.”(#2) Then as the story progresses you find out a few paragraphs later that blue may have been a metaphor for a man. “You must spend more time thinking about the divine, and less time imagining unbuttoning the prince of blue’s pants at the Chelsea Hotel.”(#19) This then will be the focal point of much of her pain and searching through out the book.

Another way the formatting works is the way in which each paragraph achieves it’s point standing alone, but is enhanced the further you read on. For example, in paragraph 44 she says, “later that afternoon, a therapist will say to me, if he hadn’t lied to you then he would be a different person than he is.” This alone holds significant meaning but when you read on to 45 it suddenly adds a whole new perspective to the previous paragraph. “Instead I say something about how clinical psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable.”

As the story moves on it’s evident the author is trying to work through something. The book reads as an internal dialogue, almost a diary. It seems as though she writes exactly what she’s feeling when she feels it and then goes on to search for an answer to why she is feeling that way. Many times she ends up with stories or facts that somehow relate to her emotional state. In paragraph 71 she says, “I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.” Then the second paragraph down she uses an anecdote on Newton to further this idea of loneliness. “An assistant to Newton’s discovery, or revelation, of the spectrum. Over time, however, many have questioned whether the assistant ever really existed. Many now believe him to be, essentially, a “rhetorical fiction.”

Nelson is constantly posing a feeling or question and working through it. She does this by adding anecdotes, reflecting on her own experience, or doing simple research and including it to complement her thoughts. The reader is, in a sense, following her journey with her to discover who she is.