Tamsyn Muir’s lesbian space opera, Harrow The Ninth, utilizes first and third-person perspectives to dictate a severed narrator punctuated by psychosis, false memory, loss, and a self-mutilated mind. In the preceding tome to Harrow The Ninth in Muir’s sapphic celestial triptych, Harrow’s lover, Gideon, is forced to sacrifice her life in order to save Harrow’s. Gideon’s soul combines with Harrow’s to birth a conglomerate immortal necromantic “lyctor.” Harrow alters her own memory with necromancy in order to numb her grief, erasing any traces of her deceased love. This queer erasure invokes a radical shift in Harrow’s consciousness, establishing and “shaping [her] world” as a realm defined by and “orientated” around death and sentient non-living entities including Gideon, The Sleeper, The Body, and several ghosts and necromantic constructs. As Harrow escapes death within her immortality, she remains defined by her communion with the dead she carries. If one applies Sara Ahmed’s theory of Queer Phenomenology to Harrow’s plight, one can trace Harrow’s flickering instances of queer “orientation” and “disorientation.” Muir’s intersectional portrayal of a queer and disabled fictive phenomenology allows readers to dissect the manner in which Harrow clings to “orientation devices” and “lines” of orientation to consistently navigate around madness, cyclically reorienting the self in a choreography between insanity and sanity in order to discern false memory from augmented reality.
Since Harrow’s youth, she had known the uncertainty of madness woven within unreliable memories as “she [often] would hear voices just out of her hearing, or see things in her periphery that were not there…she would forget where she was and wipe out a whole morning’s scholarship with false memory.” After Gideon’s departure, Harrow is plagued by a metacognitive hallucinated “Body,” a ghost conjured to symbolize death, loss, queer trauma, and mental illness. The passages in which The Body appears are told in the second person perspective in order to irrevocably link the narrative to Harrow’s queer grief, as it is indicated that Gideon is the omnipresent narrator. The Body materializes as a physical manifestation “shaped” by Gideon’s absence. Harrow subsequently falls in love with the specter during her descent into madness, simultaneously orienting herself around psychosis and two “anchoring points” of sapphic desire.
The Body’s arrival aligns with Harrow’s surrender to the deterioration of her mind, as “the sound of [The Body’s] voice meant the madness had returned to [her] in full.” As Ahmed defines, in regards to a queer phenomenology, there are
lines [of orientation] that allow us to find our way.What is available is what might reside as a point on this line. When we follow specific lines, some things become reachable and others remain… out of reach. Such exclusions - the constitution of a field of unreachable objects- are the indirect consequences of following lines that are before us…The direction we take excludes things for us, before we even get there.
For Harrow, madness becomes an orientation line that houses phenomenological “homing devices,” hallucinations including, but not limited to, The Body. Harrow ultimately becomes a vehicle in her own haunting, possession, and eventual demise, as she assumes The Sleeper- a reanimated villainous corpse which slips into Harrow’s waking world- is simply another hallucinated “orientation device.” Harrow cyclically intertwines her orientation around the phenomenological lines of death or insanity. As she selects madness over grief, she constitutes her own “field of unreachable objects,” including her sanity and her lost lover.
Although Harrow’s self-inflicted alteration of her mind is not revealed to the reader until one of the final acts of the opera, her memories are exposed as false by providing a rectified history in scenes derived from Gideon The Ninth. Readers of Harrow The Ninth encounter intentional disorientation within the modified segments, mimicking rather than mirroring the first book with glaringly noticeable adjustments in plot and cast. Thus, the form of the space opera simulates the content as readers simultaneously undergo disorientation with Harrow during chapters that take place within her immersive liminal abyss, “The River.” Vignettes that occur in The River traverse through a “bubble” within “an enormous liminal space formed from spirit magic, populated with ghosts gone mad from hunger” housed in Harrow’s drifting imagination. These chapters are told from the third person perspective to differentiate the dream space from the chapters anchored to The Body in the present, polarly oppositional to The River’s alinear domain which “doesn’t flow through the time and space [that the characters] experience.” The River transfigures into a stage that only exists when [Harrow has] limited or no conscious awareness” that elevates a cast of Harrow’s own creation, including ghosts of characters that passed away in Gideon The Ninth and necromantic constructs representing living souls. In hopes of reawakening Harrow’s dormant memories, the agents within The River consistently inquire, “is this really how it happens?” As Harrow encounters these inquiries, she encounters successive revelations that her memory has been diluted. She orients herself away from insanity, causing the hallucinated Body to become an “unreachable object,” consequently finding herself disoriented, once again. While the intracorporeal capsule of falsities dissipates, Harrow observes that “The Body was gone. Little clusters of bone set over the cockpit window tinkled musically with the displaced air.” Each time Harrow returns to the River, she becomes increasingly aware of her own augmentation of her reality, “[scanning] around,” unable to locate “the Body [which] was nowhere to be seen.” As Harrow traverses through the metaphysical domain of her psychosis, she exists within a liminal space fluctuating between reality and delusion.
Ahmed defines “queer moments” within phenomenology “as moments of disorientation that… involve not only ‘the intellectual experience of disorder, but… the awareness of our contingency, and the horror which it fills us,”continuing on to delineate that queering phenomenology involves “redirecting our attention toward… objects… that deviate or are deviant.” Harrow constantly orients herself around deviant entities, centralizing the carnality of horror. Harrow orients toward death to escape insanity, “[following] any blind precept, if the alternative was madness,” and inversely, orients herself toward psychosis to evade death.