You see someone at the edge of a gathering. The desire is simple and immediate. Your glance feels returned. Have I seen this person before? An unfathomable series of impressions – yours and those of others you have absorbed – have led here. But the pressure feels specific. Where did this need come from that moves through you? A question perhaps best left unanswered; there may be no surer way of losing desire than trying to understand it. The figure approaches. You exchange pleasantries. Beyond the facts, you offer each other impressions. Nothing but impressions all the way down.

Years pass. Together you allow the idea that each of you may know things about the other that they themselves do not. Occasionally, during an argument, you wonder if you project onto the other thoughts and feelings you want to be rid of. In gentler moments something else happens: you offer fragments of introspection for the other to make something of, which, once reinterpreted, are returned to you. Your relationship takes its cues from the script you make together. Whether the story will last depends on the quality of the telling.

‘Significant other’ calls up the invitation from a host who wishes to strip away presumption. But we insist it is a fertile concept. It was propagated in the post-war decades by the American psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan. In his early work, Sullivan found that schizophrenic patients managed their lives better when they could count on regular contact with the same people. He was convinced that we cannot develop our sense of self in isolation, and that from the earliest stages the approval and disapproval of others pushes the self in radical directions. He grew up as a lonely gay boy in upstate New York at the turn of the last century, the sole Irish Catholic in his school. Certain kinds of alienation, he believed, could be manically productive, but without a sympathetic significant other, life was liable to be ruinous.

There can be any number of significant others in a life. Some we know for a long time; others are meteoric: we may see them only once.

On the fleeting end of the scale, J.M. Coetzee’s story ‘The Museum Guard’ begins with a man named Pepe who lives a content life as a museum guard at the Prado. His life takes a bad turn after an encounter with an older woman visiting the museum. (Coetzee readers have spent rather more time with this woman than we have with Pepe.) As they contemplate The Drowning Dog by Goya, Pepe tells her that the painting may have been part of a larger work. There was another panel, so the story goes, which would change how they see the dog’s distress. The museum conversation lingers with Pepe in such a way that he attributes a later road accident to their meeting. The sense of having been meddled with comes to a fine point when he thinks he discovers himself in one of the books she has published. Don Quixote-like, he and his girlfriend tear up her fiction and reclaim their independence.

The failure of fusion with a significant other is at the heart of Sophie Collins’s story ‘Private View’, an excerpt from a novel-in-progress. At the outset, Collins’s narrator finds herself in thrall to an artist ten years older. As she learns to navigate the higher rungs of culture – how to feel and talk about art – their mutually sustaining fiction starts to founder. What once came across as confidence she recognizes as woundedness. The narrator develops the kind of autonomy she once prized in her lover, while still in rebellion against this ‘need for individuation’.

Kevin Brazil’s ‘Embrace’ bursts open with a send-up of self-care, only to ease into a microscopic monitoring of a character who may be unable to fuse with others, but who, with barreling hubris, believes he carries – and may well carry – great reservoirs of love inside him.

Alexandra Tanner’s ‘Bitter North’ is a story of a superficial young North American couple of almost uncanny wholesomeness, whose care for one another is marked by an intelligence about the gaps in their pasts, though their relationship threatens to sputter out in bouts of mutual infantilization.

There may be no greater contemporary artist of the tenuousness of human connection than Mary Gaitskill. For decades, she has written some of the most exacting portraits of broken unions, of scripts misaligning, of fantasies misapprehended, whether in the form of friends or lovers. In ‘The Pneuma Illusion’, Gaitskill takes up an episode from her life where all appeared to be going well, except for a growing undercurrent of distrust of her new stability. She seeks out respite in a form of physical therapy whose practitioners are able to access and assuage deep knots in Gaitskill’s past. The piece is a sustained reflection on the double-edged procedure of submitting to people whose methods are highly questionable, whose speech even bleeds into malevolence, but who deliver undeniable results.

InGranta’s ongoing history series, Susan Pedersen hits upon an extraordinary set of documents in an archive. Behind the scenes of power in Arthur Balfour’s England, his brother Gerald and other members of the Society for Psychical Research discovered they could communicate with the dead through female mediums. Pedersen examines this post-Victorian period of ‘gender codes under pressure’ when Messiahs were thick on the ground, and when women struggled through increasingly established pathways to become more public figures. The emotional predicaments of Pedersen’s principals are as familiar as their methods of handling them are alien. The result is an exercise in humility: the romantic rituals of our own age will no doubt be subjected to similar scrutiny.

It has been a long time since Granta last published literary criticism. In this issue, Christian Lorentzen confronts a specious new form of pseudo-materialist critique – colophonoscopy, in a word – that would have taken György Lukács to task for bothering to read Balzac when he should have been modeling the outputs of Moscow’s State Publishing House. The point is not that sociological readings of literature have no merit, but that, by abandoning the notion of literary value as anything other than elite consumerism, they are misguided, even on their own narrowly sociological grounds. In the Marxist tradition from Trotsky to Jameson, the phenomenon of individual genius – an idea currently under suspicion – is not just aesthetically but sociologically richer than more ordinary production: Daniel Deronda or A House for Mr Biswas tells us more, both symptomatically and in their own words, about their societies than most bestsellers of the time. But then who reads fiction for information?

In our reportage, James Pogue follows his report from Central African Republic, from where he was deported in the last issue, to Mauritania, where a gold rush of great proportions trains the upheaval of the region into a single field of vision. In Uttar Pradesh, Snigdha Poonam follows a pilgrimage – both real and virtual – to Ayodhya, where Hindu nationalists have built their dream temple of Ram on the ruins of a mosque.

We are pleased to publish a sketch (accompanied by a pencil drawing by the author) from Fleur Jaeggy’s first novel, Il dito in bocca, published in 1968. The tumult of friendship and the conniving of love would become one of Jaeggy’s great subjects. Here we catch a glimpse of her stepping into her style, in a novel that she has otherwise not allowed to be translated or reprinted.

A great light went out in 2018 when the Brazilian author Victor Heringer died at the age of twenty-nine. Granta admired Heringer’s novel The Love of Singular Men for its kiln-hot vision of first love, and old age looking back. ‘The first love can only be the first love because there’s a second, obviously,’ as the narrator Camilo says. In Heringer’s story ‘Lígia’, an unusual affection grows between two figures who misperceive one another just enough to sustain each other’s satisfactions as they live out their days in an apartment complex in Copacabana.

We wish you a significant summer.

TM