A Floorplan of the Self: Memory and Body in John Elizabeth Stintzi’s Vanishing Monuments

In the last act of John Elizabeth Stintzi’s Vanishing Monuments, the protagonist, Alani Baum, recalls a photograph their mother, Hedwig, took of them as a child, a picture of them digging holes in the backyard: “when Mother printed the photo, she printed the negative inverted […] Looking at the photo feels like staring into a mirror, except that in the sky above me, Mother added a black, jagged sun” (235). Alani notes that this is typical of their mother’s renowned photography, clarifying that “she would often make small, unnecessary modifications to her shots in the darkroom” (234). This scene, a brief exploration of the fallibility of memory—conflicting recollections from different perspectives, how memory can be altered deliberately or by the passage of time, and the dangers of confronting the past—encapsulates the ideas pulsing at the centre of Stintzi’s elegant debut novel.

We learn in the opening pages of Vanishing Monuments that Alani is, by nature, someone who flees: before the novel’s opening, they’ve almost made a career of it, taking off from Winnipeg to follow Genny to Minneapolis, fleeing to Germany when they find out Genny wants to break up, and, when the hospital calls about Hedwig knocking on death’s door, they depart Minnesota without notice to return to Winnipeg for the first time in decades. The non-chronological plot follows Alani’s life story, albeit in fragments: it begins near the end, when Alani gets a call that Hedwig is dying, the mother they haven’t seen since they fled Winnipeg at age 17. We later learn that Alani has set up shop in Minnesota, living across the street from Genny, the woman they left Winnipeg to follow years ago. There, they teach photography at a university, mentoring Ess, another nonbinary artist at work on hir undergraduate thesis. But when they’re told that their mother doesn’t have much longer to live, Alani’s flight instinct kicks in and they’re headed back to Winnipeg, where they must navigate the pain of old memories even as they swim through the difficult present of wrapping up the loose ends of Hedwig’s life. This fight-or-flight instinct that drives so many of Alani’s big decisions is a visceral one, a rush of adrenaline to the nerves that sparks panic. That they so often experience this deeply embodied reaction to so many situations shouldn’t come as a surprise, since one of the most potent threads in Stintzi’s novel is the idea of fleeing from the self. Before the call from the hospital, it seems, Alani has been able to set up a life that allows them to settle in: “I’d […] found a way to make my body become a thing I could hide in again,” they say (20).

To be alive in their body is to carry with them the accretion of all that they have been before this moment—maybe it’s not possible to ever truly settle into a body, Vanishing Monuments argues, because it is always something that changes, a past from which the present self must always flee.

But this is the tale of someone so haunted by their self that they want only to escape it by whatever means necessary, even if that means inventing new identities. Upon arriving at the hospital to see their mother, for example, Alani assumes two new personas: Hedwig’s daughter Allie one day, and Allie’s twin brother Al the next. We also see Alani invent new personas elsewhere in the narrative, like when they meet photographer Erwin Egger in Germany: when they introduce themselves, they supply a fake name, Sofia, and take on a female identity to match. Perhaps this is solely an effort on Alani’s part to avoid the confrontation of explaining their gender identity to hospital staff or to Egger; in Stintzi’s hands, however, it points to a fundamental crisis tearing at the threads of their novel’s protagonist, a crisis spurred by more than just chaos and upheaval. Sometimes, Alani’s flight mode becomes triggered just through the cruel reality of existing in their body. All of this suggests Alani’s deeper discomfort with their own corporeality, with the inheritance and baggage of embodiment. To be alive in their body is to carry with them the accretion of all that they have been before this moment—maybe it’s not possible to ever truly settle into a body, Vanishing Monuments argues, because it is always something that changes, a past from which the present self must always flee. Stintzi even equips Alani with a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the ur-text about fleeing one’s own body through transformation. Much like how their mother’s art deliberately manipulates memory through inversion and addition, Alani’s own work blurs and, to use Benjamin Sher’s term, enstranges the body, their artistic preoccupation reflecting their inner turmoil: “I incorporated sculpture, painting, anything that inspired me,” they tell us (215). “I had a shot where I held a mirror, hinged at my abdomen, to reflect myself into a kind of four-legged, double-vagina’d aberration” (215).

There’s a thick tension between Alani and Hedwig, one caused by broken trust and a sense of betrayal, that darkens Alani’s memories—after all, they haven’t been back to see their mother in years. Though they fled Canada, Alani learns they cannot escape Hedwig so easily, as even a physical separation of their two lives doesn’t mitigate the betrayal of the body to act as a living, intergenerational history: “When I think about Mother,” Alani says, “the first thing I remember is her body […] As much as I try not to, I can see her in my height in the mirror” (33). This moment is simultaneously a foreshadowing of Alani assuming Hedwig’s identity to sell the house and an echo, a memory of a time when Alani pretended to be Hedwig when they were younger. Alani even moves through the world with Hedwig’s Leica III, the camera they stole from her as a teenager, a weighty reminder of their mother and of the way the child has grown to be like the parent; the camera, like the body, is literally a device for recording history. Here, we see our protagonist struggling with the shackling of history, both through their physical form and through the camera they wear around their neck, a shackling not just to their own personal history, but to the cultural history of the human form as a corpus of imposed and rigorously policed expectations and norms.

In Stintzi’s novel, memory itself is like those skewed foundations—unstable, shifting, and dangerous.

Vanishing Monuments pushes Alani to understand their own self-history by scrutinizing their memory. If the body is a history, one from which our protagonist wants to flee, then their confronting the past compels us to consider how memory is the blood and organs of that body. “Tom complained to me about the skewed foundations, how he always felt that the house was trying to tip him out into the world,” Alani says about their mother’s house (87). In Stintzi’s novel, memory itself is like those skewed foundations—unstable, shifting, and dangerous. By the time Alani returns to Winnipeg, Hedwig’s dementia has progressed to the point of rendering her speechless, the conclusion to years of forgetting. Alani, on the other hand, feels compelled to remember, driven by a fear of emptiness: “Blankness almost hurts the most,” they say. “It is in blankness that intensity lies: the emotional blanknesses in your censored past, the years of quiet” (188). To escape this void, desperate to cling to all that has come before, even all the things that hurt, Alani has constructed for themselves a Ciceronian memory palace; using Hedwig’s house as a map, they curate a mental museum of their past experiences. Each chapter, bearing the name of a room in Hedwig’s house, is intercut with second-person guided tours of its namesake space: “The walls of your living room are covered in memories,” begins chapter three. “Layers of them, framed like photos, or windows. Memories from everything: your exile in Hamburg, your school days and late nights […] the countless hidden journeys into your various darks” (63). This is an exciting formalistic choice for Stinzti, a richly rewarding one that accomplishes so much for the book; the second person woven throughout the novel invites each of us into Alani’s consciousness, deceiving us into thinking that these memories have been curated just for our specific consumption. Perhaps this is because of the duality of the personal and impersonal nature of a memory palace. These are Alani’s memories, depicting the past through their experiences—the personal—but arranged for viewing in the same way that art is put on display at a museum: intentionally placed and framed, thus artificial, impersonal. The use of second person, when the rest of the book is told in first person, is such an electrifying move because it enables Alani to further their goal of fleeing their body. By drawing the reader into the role of the novel’s protagonist, we are forced to inhabit Alani’s corporeal subjectivity; when Alani displaces themselves from their own experiences, they invite us to replace them, finding yet another outlet to escape the confines of their own existence.

The novel anchors both body and memory to place, the convergence of embodiment and recollection. Place is the physical space that allows for the realization of one’s existence, the space where memories can be generated and identities can be forged. The novel’s structure, each chapter named after a room of Hedwig’s house, pushes us to consider this intertwining: it’s not just a tour of the house Alani takes us on when we stroll through the memory palace, but a tour of all the memories and identities that the house contains for our protagonist. Speaking again of Hedwig’s house, Alani says “home, where I could be myself. It’s weird how much of me that house held. How much it does. It was often a hard place to be, but it was always an easy place to be me” (46). For our protagonist, their childhood home is not just the memory palace conjured in their mind—it is also the literal safe haven where Alani was able to understand and be themselves. The longer they stay in the house as an adult, the more layers of themselves they see gliding past them on the stairs: “I woke up in the house every day to less of myself, but no fewer versions of me,” they say (124). These quasi-ghosts are manifestations of self, memory, and place for Alani, duplicates and shades of a person who no longer exists and yet has always existed. Their presence echoes across the text of Vanishing Monuments like reverberations of a crystal glass being struck gently with a knife, the sound ringing in your ears for a long time, perhaps forever. They remind us that Alani isn’t a fixed character, that their perspective and their personality is infinitely malleable, no matter how much they’ve worked to curate themselves to the world or through the memory palace.

In many ways, Stintzi’s novel feels like a guide to navigating memory and the multiplicity of our former selves contained therein. Of developing film, Alani says, “In the negative, darkness is a lack of information, which is why you tend to overexpose your photos […] to try and encroach some form onto the darkness, to get more information” (134). But Stintzi’s novel resists that impulse of overexposing, of coming to easy answers and showing us the way—it’s a labyrinth through Alani’s mind, one with pools of shadow and patches of light we must navigate carefully. It’s a masterwork, a true display of brilliance on the page.