LET US START at the end, though it might feel strange at first: “Dugong.” That is the entirety of a one-word story by Joy Williams, also titled “Dugong,” which closes her new book, Concerning the Future of Souls. A dugong is a marine mammal of impenetrable placidity; also called the “sea cow,” they spend most of their time grazing meadows of seagrass, returning to the surface every few minutes before descending back into the shaggy, twinkling heaths that brush up against the surface of the sea. Their upper lip is extremely strong, like having your biceps on your mouth. They look a bit like enormous snails when they eat, sloping muzzles undulating in a determined, tactile snuffle, pulling up seagrass at the root. Dugongs choose their food purposefully, gliding down winding individual paths and eating the faster-growing species of grass while still protecting the meadow’s hidden rhizome; this promotes more nutrient-dense growth overall. It is likely that this practice is learned, taught from dugong mother to dugong child. They are quite solitary creatures, except for this dyad. They sing to one another. A dugong lives for around seventy years, if undisturbed, and they can weigh up to nine hundred pounds. Their bones are heavy, with hardly any marrow inside them. The elephant is an evolutionary cousin, a fact that chimes immediately; they share a large gray grace, as if a rain-thick cloud callused over, grew its own internal scaffolding. Their nearest relative, Steller’s sea cow, was hunted to extinction in 1768. Dugongs are the end of something ancient, something wonderful and particular, a totalizing end that we grab at insistently, drawing it closer and closer, ravaging their vast blue prairies, murdering them for meat or for nothing, hitting them with blind sharp boats or strangling them in massive nets or building military bases or hotels or factories on their coastline, polluting the warm waters where they float through the grass with their children.
None of this is in Joy Williams’s story. Or maybe all of it is. How much can a single word contain? How heavy are its bones? In some ways, “Dugong” seems to be a command to the reader: Don’t just stare at the strange sounds, look it up. I know you have your phone on you.The tiny seed of narrative sprouts reticulated tendrils of information, winding the reader’s attention onto external structures. Nineteen of the ninety-nine stories in the book are followed by a small citational asterisk that cracks open a door, a star of elsewhere in the room of the text: “*The Quran,” “*John Edgar Wideman,” “*Birds of the Southwestern Desert.” Maybe the story is the experience of typing d-u-g-o-n-g into a search bar and being met with the unfamiliar and still alive. Or perhaps the story is about the inadequacy of the word “dugong” to stand in for the animal, the real. We as a species must grow more familiar with the basic concept of limits, hard stops, final goodbyes; our world has them, as do our words. Some creatrix will not return to re-fill our planet with wondrously specific beings, a holy waitress topping up shining glasses at a bottomless world brunch. Language, too, cannot equal, let alone replace, a single life. And yet, we try to use sounds and letters to describe something like a “soul.” Maybe when you look up the word s-o-u-l, you should see an image of a dugong. Is the sentence an enclosure, or an ocean, or both?
Concerning the Future of Souls has the subtitle “99 Stories of Azrael,” twinning it to Williams’s 2016 collection, Ninety-Nine Stories of God, vignettes similarly brief, bright, and wounding. The last sentence of that book is the premise of this one. A winter question, night open: “What’s going to happen after I’m dead?” Ninety-Nine’s final story is titled “The Darkling Thrush,” borrowed from the Thomas Hardy poem about a small bird singing in the cold “to fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom.” In both books, each short-short story is followed by its title, in all caps, off to the right edge, as if the title is a caption inching like a caterpillar underneath the story’s photograph, or the punch line to its knock-knock joke. (Isn’t every writer perpetually asking, “Who’s there?”) Occasionally this ba-dum-tss quality is reversed, like the story that reads darkly, simply, “Why not?,” followed by the somber title: “MAY THE JUDGMENT NOT BE TOO HEAVY UPON US,” borrowed from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday.” When the titles don’t feel like wisecracks, they feel like grave markers, the curt RIP or favorite line of poetry etched below somebody’s name—just a line, though: stonework is expensive. Sometimes, the titles feel like clues to a riddle, the hidden code to the locked box of the text. Zingers, headstones, safecrackers—all promise the possibility of mystery clicking into sensefulness. Maybe. Sometimes nothing is revealed but nothing. The joke is nonsense, the dead are dead, the vault is empty. You have to wait till the end, scolds the page. No one gets the answers in advance.
If God is the one who was there at the very beginning, Azrael is the one who closes the curtains, switches off the overhead lights, locks up shop. A psychopomp who appears most solidly in Islam, but also noncanonically in Judaism and early Christianity, Azrael is the angel whose work it is to guide the soul as it detaches from the body and moves into its next iteration. He is the ferry between this and that, me and ???, reality and whatever happens outside of it. (Textually, he also exists in this interstitial place, both canonical and not, hopping between orthodoxies.) In Williams’s version, which draws heavily on the Hadiths, he has four thousand wings with innumerable feathers, a thousand eyes, and a well-meaning sweetness, “appreciated for his punctuality and beautiful manners.” The Devil (another angel, lest we forget) is a big-brother figure, wryly teasing, perpetually critical as an expression of abiding affection. They quibble and differ. The Devil rambles, Azrael is thoughtfully quiet; the Devil likes mazes, Azrael “prefers labyrinths which the Devil finds comically sentimental.” He is privately surprised by his own attachment to Azrael’s unshakable innocence. Their bond is deep; they both manage the thankless maintenance of an increasingly messy cosmic order, without much parental instruction. In the idling chatter of an odd friendship, Williams offers a remarkably insightful moral dialogue on the state of death after life, the changing shape of mortality in our killing-addicted world. This is where great wisdom so often materializes—the chummy wit and unlikely allegiance born from impossible jobs. It begs the question: Do angels have class solidarity?
Azrael’s job is growing more and more impossible, whereas the Devil’s work has become more irrelevant, taxing in its uselessness. “Everything he stood for was running along on its own, requiring very little involvement on his part.” As the Devil’s tasks diminish, Azrael’s have boundlessly multiplied. The first story that describes his exhaustion is titled “HE’LL COME TO YOUR HOUSE AND HE WON’T STAY LONG, YOU’LL LOOK AT THE BED AND YOUR MOTHER WILL BE GONE,” followed by “* the Reverend Gary Davis,” the blues and gospel singer also known as Blind Gary Davis. The title is a lyric from Davis’s song “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” and the song’s next line is the seed for Williams’s perspectival shift: “Death always in a hurry in this land.” The story opens with Azrael on scalded earth, in a silence of tree stumps. Williams writes, “The sky seemed lifeless as well, a monstrously staring eye. Rain was falling hesitantly and sliding off the soil as if it were striking wax. More and more Azrael was arriving too late for the world.” The logging was months ago, and Azrael, overwhelmed, has missed his chance to take the hand of the forest’s soul. “He was still more or less on time with humans but was finding it harder and harder to keep up with everyone else. . . . His methods were being disrupted by the sheer precipitous magnitude of it all.” Williams torques the song of the title away from individual human fear and toward the exploitation of angelic labor via our increasing industrialization of mass death; as Davis wrote, “Death never takes a vacation in this land.” In a later story, Azrael quotes poet Gerard Manley Hopkins lamenting a row of trees in 1879. (His wings remember all the poetry he’s ever read.) “All felled, felled, are all felled.” The clusters of “l”s look like standing trees on the page, as if one could half reconstitute the poplars in small, mournful shapes. The allness and the felled-ness merge. Williams explicates Hopkins: “He compares the land of which they were a part to a sleek and seeing eye which by a slice, a nick becomes no eye at all. The trees have become unselved. Their home of earth and sky unselved as well.” Later still, some of Azrael’s eyes begin to close on their own: “Was it rebellion? He didn’t know how to talk to his eyes. He lapped the shut ones a little with a tongue. . . . Had they been weeping?” The heavens shed unseeing tears over what was once a forest. Every patch of cloud and ground is one eye on a many-eyed being called the world.
At first, the title, Concerning the Future of Souls, made me think it was a book about the afterlife. My mind went immediately to the divvying up of the naughty and nice, the fate of the blessed or sinful. “Where will your soul go next?” is the question that is supposed to motivate our morality, not “How’s your soul doing today?” Too retail sounding, I guess. Even the existence of a soul at all proffers a through line between worlds, an energy not created or destroyed. The concept inherently points to the before and after of this visible universe, glaringly adjacent, as if the physical body is like wearing one big “I’m with stupid! ◊” T-shirt. But Williams is not at all interested in heaven or hell. The cosmology of the book is about the logistics of transport, how to move around nothingness, balancing sheets that have become laughably unbalanced. It is concerned with the overburdening of fragile systems of spiritual exchange, held together by spit, glue, maybe even a prayer. “I am so fond of metempsychosis!” Azrael says. “I wish I could do that exclusively. But times have changed so. The possibilities just aren’t there anymore.” The Devil answers, “Other forms of being becoming unavailable, are they? Extreme Biodiversity loss? Species winking out right and left. 70% of this gone. 70% of that. It adds up.” Many of the stories are about people’s futile anticipation of their own place in the cycle, overinvested in the “after” of their individuality and not the “after” of anything else. Burial rituals, last rites, near-death experiences, and dark nights of the soul reappear, ranging from the goofy to the sublime. Pets leap across the book, often to their demise, proof of our picky grief, the wonky allocations of precious spirit we allow. The narcissism of humanity is ever-present. One story lifts a headline from 2007: “Washoe, chimp who learned sign language dies at 42 without signing goodbye.” The title is classic Williams humor: “DISAPPOINTING.” Isn’t it just.
WILLIAMS IS RIGHTFULLY CONSIDERED one of our most brilliant American writers, particularly of the short story, a form that meets her pithy, astonishing, chimerical content as if their union were preordained. Her novels, too, feel like one long short story at times. I know that doesn’t quite make sense. Maybe I simply mean they are also works of genius. Maybe by “short” I mean “having a sustained awareness of sudden, inexplicable, inevitable end.” Her novels know they are going to die, even if some of her characters don’t. “Life is long!” my friends and I say to each other when something or someone comes back around in a mysterious way, or when our past selves seem especially unrecognizable, and we need to remember that such unrecognizability is flowering inside of us all the time. Perhaps the best short stories remind you that life is long, and the best novels remind you that life is short. Perhaps they all gesture toward that paradox: the long-and-short of it.
For Powell’s Books in 2015, Williams wrote a list, “Eight Essential Attributes of a Short Story and One Way It Differs from the Novel.” She also slipped this (slightly adjusted) guide into her correspondence in an interview with Lincoln Michel for VICE in 2016, which was highly circulated online. Number four, “An animal within to give its blessing,” strikes a chord; it suggests that the short story is a shelter with no door, surrounded by wilderness. What if writing came from a place of humility, bowing one’s head to a sparrow? But I think the attribute that is the most telling, and perhaps the most easily misinterpreted, is number two: “An anagogical level.” In medieval methods of exegesis, there were four registers by which every biblical narrative could be understood: the literal (what happened in the past: a true story), the allegorical (what happened then hides within it what happened later: every story mirrors another story), the moral (what action we should take today: a story that guides us in the present), and the anagogical (what will happen next: a story that knows the future). This four-pronged star of interpretation—I just typed that and realized the shape I was trying to describe, which I imagined as a kind of swiveling Calder-esque mobile, is, um, a cross—positions the reader on a turning axis, able to see forward, backward, inward, and upward. Every sentence can transform its function under a different critical lens, and no temporality can be fully divorced from any other. Some theologians viewed the anagogical as a kind of subcategory of the allegorical, a coning of time: if every story mirrors another story, then the deep future will similarly repeat the past and the present. (Williams does have a penchant for Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence throughout her work.) Not a cross then, but an endless circle. Not a maze, but a labyrinth.
Concerning the Future of Souls is an explicitly anagogical book—the title itself could serve as a definition of the word. In Christian terms, the relevant “future” is often either eternal life after death, or the coming day of divine judgment. I don’t think Williams is invested in prioritizing that particular genre of storytelling; she is more urgently aware of the hyper-secular apocalypse (secular in the sense of the earthly, as well as the nonreligious) that we are already undergoing. In her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor, a writer who “enthralled” young Williams, defined her own “anagogical vision” as “the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image,” “a way of reading nature which included most possibilities . . . [an] enlarged view of the human scene.” I would say Concerning the Future of Souls is a kind of parabolic manifesto for this enlargement. (Parabolic, in the sense of a fable, but also in the sense of a bowl-shaped curve, an object thrown very high and far, a slice of the cone of time.) Williams does not stop at the possibility of the metaphysical unknown humming around daily human tribulation. She widens the boundaries of mystery to include all life—“calf, kid, spiderling, lamb,” as she describes Azrael. All beings are sites of revelation.
In a 2015 interview with Vogue, Williams says that the short story form “finds the moment in the character’s life where the past and future combine, usually in a terrible instance in the present that illuminates everything and yet shuts everything off, too. Flannery O’Connor described it as a moment of grace that’s offered and is either rejected or accepted. . . . Everything they do after will be similar to what has already happened in this moment.” The anagogical is the use of language that collapses time and hierarchy, unprivileging the officially “real,” which is as close as anyone can get to prophecy. What is illuminated is not an omnipotent creator or a consoling rule book, but, as Williams describes the original form of angels, “the whirling light of a wheel spinning within a wheel.” The calf reveals the calf, the kid reveals the kid, the dugong reveals the dugong. Every word is both a mark on paper and a lambent incarnation of something else, something elsewhere and unprovable.
A MORE CONVENTIONAL WRITER might approach hitting this octave of storytelling through beauty. Beauty as a route to sympathy, sympathy as a route to anthropomorphism, anthropomorphism as a route to self-aggrandizement, self-aggrandizement as a route to. . . . Well, eventually the reader could feel one with the universe, and everything would remind them of themselves. This is not Joy Williams’s strategy. Williams approaches the spiritual content of her work through the rough-and-ready, banal material of contemporary America: a kind of anagogical kitsch. In the first story of Concerning the Future of Souls, titled “KITSCH,” the term is defined:
His mother had confided in him once that his father’s family were rich oddballs and that their home was full of kitsch. “Kitsch,” his mother had explained, “isn’t in itself beautiful but instead elicits its emotion from the beauty it depicts. Like that black ceramic panther in the bookcase.” “I love that panther,” he said. “Of course you don’t love it,” his mother said.
Kitsch is a mnemonic device, a shoddy but well-received stand-in: it reminds one of something existent and powerful, and the imitation produces an imitative feeling. Sounds like language. (Are words just painted dogs sitting around a poker table?) We are surrounded by little dioramas of an abandoned real, makeshift miniaturized ruins—zingers, headstones. Williams has always been attuned to the flotsam and jetsam of the sinking ship called the United States, the strobing uncanny that can tip into queasy wonder. I don’t think you can separate that from her other investments—the animal, the holy. Her work is scored with the tunnels of alien language that gurgle from our television sets and then our mouths, the fog and pulse of incredible bounty and unrivaled devastation that mix into our fervent, bromidic, God-washed scenery. It is easy to take the mother’s quote in “KITSCH” out of context—see that, on your grandmother’s shelf, that’s not poetry, that’s a tchotchke, it’s not beauty, it’s just about beauty, typical humans getting it wrong, so embarrassing. But the heart-wrench of the dialogue is in the following lines, the mother’s admonishing dismissal of the way her child loves the world. The next sentence says it all: “He did and one of his great uncles had given it to him but he broke it playing with the necklace it wore and he did not cry.” Williams is not afraid of commas. She uses them abundantly. Here, there are none. This is a continuous stream: loving it, breaking it, and knowing not to mourn the already-mournful copy.
All of “KITSCH” is filled with facsimiles, artifices, and fragments. The boy’s father has an illness that has filled their home with machines; “he would talk to him in his strange new voice.” The boy is unnerved by this, unwilling to discuss “school or soccer or the doorman’s puppy which he had only seen pictures of anyway.” He visits his grandmother in a large house by the ocean, but actually “you could not see the ocean except for a tiny part of it and even that sometimes disappeared.” In New York City, they live in “an apartment overlooking a park. It was the park, his parents said. You were always supposed to say the park.” How tiny can a tiny part of the ocean be, and still constitute the ocean? How much does a voice have to sound like your father to be your father’s voice? What makes that park the park? Another story opens with: “As a toddler she had caused a sensation in her family when she announced she wanted to live in a little hole like the ant. Not an ant, the ant.” This confusion between the specific and the general, the partial and the whole, seems to be part of Williams’s larger treatise on soul-having. Our insistence on being the ant, rather than simply a dark fleck inside a teeming, breathing mound— that is our folly. It sounds silly to use human grammars of the individual for a creature that we deem so collective and interchangeable. In ant terms, “the” becomes a joke. How do we begin to read ourselves in ant terms? In another story, the sacred mountain of Uluru is closed, after being habitually desecrated by tourists. Some former visitors ship the chunks of rock they had taken from the mountain as mementos back to the Aṉangu people. “What the fate of these fragments would be was a good question—surely they could no longer be considered part of the aggregate of reverence considering where they’d been.” Returning ourselves to the “aggregate of reverence” is the work of our lives. It might involve recognizing the parts of us that have become kitschy relics, imitative and discontinuous—bits of stone that are supposed to act as substitutes for a 550-million-year-old mountain.
Hadrian was on his deathbed in the year 138 ad when he addressed his soul with words of endearment no one can quite agree on. The short poem has been translated innumerable times, and the opening affections have varied: From “minion soul, poor wanton thing, the body’s guest, my dearest darling” (that’s Donne), “gentle, fleeting, wavering sprite, friend and associate of this clay” (Pope), and “Thou little, wandering, witching thing, my guest, companion, on the wing!” (Byron), to more contemporary wranglings—Stevie Smith wrote, “My little soul, my vagrant charmer, the friend and house-guest of this matter.” The consensus: we are mere visitors, and we must leave with no mementos. Williams has said that it was a translation of Hadrian’s poem by poet W. S. Merwin that drew her to the topic of souls and Azrael. In the story “ANIMULA, VAGULA, BLANDULA,” Azrael and the Devil translate the poem for fun. Williams includes the poem in its entirety, in Latin, so the reader could venture their own translation. “Petted stray? Funny darling? Poor wanderer? Beloved vagrant?” brainstorm the angels. This superabundance of language in the face of the unknown and indescribable—we keep trying, don’t we? “Countless had been the versions of these five simple lines,” Williams writes. I sometimes think religious texts can elicit sublime feelings, not because they are direct messages from God, but because they are incredible concentrations of attention and translation. If you were able to cut into them, you could see the rings of time as you can in a tree trunk; every reader is cambium, hardening layer after layer of effort and understanding, expanding the text outward until it is thick like an ancient sequoia. Concerning the Future of Souls, and all of Joy Williams’s work, should be read in the same way. Not as prophecy, or proof of the divine, but as a seed of possibility, something that can grow wide, rooted, and alive. One must imagine the future—and see a forest.
Audrey Wollen is a writer living in New York City.