Pure Colour

Untitled, Photograph, © Evan Kaufman

Narrative is one of the oldest human technologies. The stories we tell, who we tell them to and how they circulate through the culture have been defining for our species. And as we’ve evolved so have our stories and they ways we tell them. 

While Shelia Heti’s Pure Colour contains all the elements of traditional narrative—characters, plot, themes, etc., it’s less a story than the stories that are suggested and that the reader is invited to imagine within the movement of narrative elements. In fact, the book might aptly be described as elemental. 

Image, fragment, and gesture. This is the soft tumble of awareness that is Pure Colour. As Heti writes, “pure color—not something that was coloured, but colour itself! Colour itself came in hard little circular discs, and was shiny like a polished stone or polished jewel, but with its colour deep inside it. It showed its colour on the outside, for its outside was what it was all the way through. But unlike a gemstone, it didn’t emanate colour. Its colour stayed there, turned inwards” (45).

And the book in a sense is inward. The prose glimmers, but softly, quietly, the way mind turns an experience, catching the various facets—sense impressions, emotions, images—more raw experience than a recounting. Just like life itself in the living, some facets of Heti’s prose are more beautiful than others. Some are awkward, ugly, perhaps even passe. And  Heti is not afraid to pass language through each facet and see what happens. 

Heti is a writer’s writer, which is to say that she’s more interested in the process of writing than in the finished object of the book itself. In a video interview with The Paris Review in 2015, she says, “I’m more interested in what kind of person would write that book than the book itself. That continues to be the most interesting thing to think about for me, it’s not the book itself but what needs to be done to get the book written, what kind of person do you need to be to write this book, in what ways do you need to trick yourself to write this book. I think that to me is what I think the most about. I don’t actually think as much about plot or character. I like inventing the self that makes that book.” 

I don’t know who Shelia Heti had to become to write Pure Colour, but I did experience a sense of who I was reading. I felt a flush to my cheeks when Heti observes of Mira, the primary human figure in the book:

People once valued the sky, but only because they had 
nothing better—because they didn’t have websites. It 
was hard to tell which was right: either the sky was more
valuable than a website, or a website was more valuable 
that the sky. She gathered together the amount of time she
spend looking at websites, and the amount of time she

spend looking at the sky, then her life was clearly answering 
which was the more value, for her (86).

And again, I feel Mira’s quiver when Heti’s writes: “Now, walking outside, her hands quake, and her heart quivers and quakes, and here is a quivering and quaking in her chest and heart, from the whole world breathing on her, and she had never known that it was all so alive” (72). This passage, and others like it, get at an essence of what life is, of how consciousness moves through us. 

There is a tension in Pure Colour between surface and depth very fitting of the age in which we now live. The age, Heti writes, of “feces, worms, piss, trouble” (49). I think she means to say an age mediated by networks of exchange that are slipping steadily from our comprehension, stories that are getting too complicated to follow. This element of the narrative is one where Heti writes about “the next draft of existence” and in which the book serves as a kind of elegy for what is dying from our ways of living, both ordinary and profound. One passage reflects on faces and God and how compelling we are to one other in our presence with each other. “But in the next draft of existence, Heti’s writes, “they will not understand this; how one person’s beautiful face could pull another person deep into their greatest sorrow” (50).

When Mira becomes a leaf, a magical realism reanimates the narrative anew. And there is a quality of the animate here that brings us back to our oldest stories. The ones where trees were spirits of benevolence and animals were old friends in another form, or a future self yet to be born. Stories where imagination, Heti’s considers, might be a kind of proof on par with science. Or, where, at least, what we know as real is not discovered through logic alone. And this is a world I want continue to discover, one that contains mystery and awe and flowers. “Purple flowers, scented sweet, roses and yellow flowers, and yellow roses and white ones. The entire earth will be a garden sprouting forth, opening with the sun and closing with the moon, and the plants will not remember how we cut them in the first draft. The vegetables will tell no stories” (114).