Criticism as Publicity
A review of Brian Dillon's Essayism (2017) and Suppose a Sentence (2020)
Sometimes one reads something that restores one’s faith in the, shall we say, slightly imperfect world of contemporary letters. Ryan Ruby’s recent review of Brian Dillon’s Affinities (2023) is one such piece for me. I read it last night while alone in a Mayfair steakhouse and my reaction was visceral. Ruby radically disenchants a whole genre of literature in his enumeration of ‘a familiar array of para-academic procedures’ and makes the strongest case I’ve read in a while for criticism as art (indeed the review is an instance of such art – one prefers it to the original). But my visceral reaction had been primed three years ago when I wrote my own review, for the drawer, of Dillon’s previous books Essayism (2017) and Suppose a Sentence (2020). This was back in my pedantic Hegelian phase, back when I had an excessive faith in pure reason alone. Fresh out of Cambridge, I was also practicing a militant method of close reading guided by George Saintsbury’s History of English Prose Rhythm (1912), my own Little Red Book. While I think that the framing of the essay in terms of publicity is a little misplaced – I was teeming with resentment after my first brushes with the literary establishment – many of the detailed criticisms remain valid, sharing a number of affinities with Ruby’s piece. I’m publishing it here, unedited, like a time capsule, for the first time.
While on the topic of criticism, I’ve reviewed another Irishman’s work, Bryan Fanning’s Public Morality and the Culture Wars for the Literary Review’s September issue (out tomorrow in print and online).
— AR
The author is far from dead: he is busy at work trying to sell his most flattering image. He is trying to look good, not just, with great difficulty, on the portrait displayed on the dust jacket, not merely through the familiar coating of complimentary blurbs on the cover – these are after all a publisher’s tricks – but often, at his own discretion, between the boards, in the text itself. In the art of publicity, associations take precedence over assertions, the author entering, like a sorceress in a baroque opera, enveloped in smoke and surrounded by thunder, only to perform a simple cavatina full of clichés. It is not the words themselves but their dazzling announcement that strikes an impression; it is not the music or the text that is being enjoyed, but the pyrotechnics which they occasion. Just as a mountain appears all the more sublime when covered in mist, so a work gains in stature the more clouded and elusive its subject matter is made out to be.
When publicity merely surrounds a book, the publisher is taking a risk – the consumer who reads beyond the blurbs may be unpleasantly surprised. It is thus not fortuitous that an influential strain of recent literary criticism has internalised the imperatives of publicity and made it easier to judge a book by its cover. This style of criticism – criticism as publicity – replaces the task of evaluating the success of a work on its own terms with reporting on the critic’s accidental responses to the matter at hand. Any kind of systematic exposition is shunned, any firm grasp on the subject is studiously avoided since, we are told, the matter at hand is inherently elusive. The author – that is to say the critic – foregrounds himself at the expense of the art he should be the guardian of, continuously insisting that what he writes is merely hypothetical, proceeding from no premises other than his own loving and suffering person. Yet he will never fully admit a fault, equivocating as he does between something being difficult and impossible. His failures are honest acknowledgements of an enlightened view of the world in which real artistic achievement is always a subjective construal, if not the manifestation of some insidious bias. To this kind of contemporary critic, there is no success; there are only lovable and detestable failures. He does not judge, he merely cites and ‘likes’.
In Essayism (2017) – the first part of a projected trilogy of books on writing – Brian Dillon offers a manifesto for criticism as publicity, beginning with a characteristic denial that it does anything of the kind. It is explicitly intended merely to elaborate the author’s preference for a form of writing and a writerly practice that he calls ‘the essay’ and ‘essayism’ respectively. What this form and practice are, however, is difficult to say. ‘I have no clue how to write about the essay as a stable entity or established class’, Dillon writes, ‘how to trace its history diligently from uncertain origins through successive phases of literary dominance and abeyance, to its present status as modest publishing revenant’. The difficulty here might stem from the fact that essays are, as Michael Hamburger says, games that create their own rules, though to say that such a freedom is distinctive of the essay is to define a stable class, however hard it may be to determine whether any particular essay belongs to it. It may, on the other hand, be a consequence of not having a clear idea of what one is writing about; a fault which Dillon will try to turn into a virtue.
The subject of the book, Dillon briefly suggests, is writing that combines ‘exactitude and evasion’, works which are ‘at once the wound and a piercing act of precision’. The air of paradox is deliberate, since we are told the essay is an inherently conflicted form, torn between attempting to express the ‘crux of its matter’ and insisting ‘that its purview is partial’. The conflict here seems to be a consequence of the vagueness of its terms. Very little writing – scripture and some philosophical works excepted – pretends to anything like the status of doctrine, to have anything like an unlimited purview. Yet Dillon seems to demand that the crux of a matter be the crux of some, to him, rare and unreachable whole, not the crux of some particular cultural artefact. It is not trivial to articulate the essence of a book or an event, but one does not forfeit the ability to say something definitive as a result of not taking everything – the whole world – into account.
Dillon’s conflict arises only if one treats every object as sublime, as beyond definite description. ‘There are many passages in the works of the great essayists’ Dillon states at a later point, ‘that will sanction a failure or refusal to cohere’, adding that the best essays fail to cohere as a result of their sustained attention to a single object: ‘This is the sort of attention I want from an essay: the solid thing made fully present on the page and then dissolving in all else it implies’. As an example of such a dissolution through attention, Dillon offers George Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris where Perec describes everything he sees around him – people, cars, pigeons, the sky, buses, shadows – as he sits at a square in Paris for two days. It is not clear what exactly Perec makes ‘fully present’ in his book, other than perhaps the digressive nature of people watching – a rather niche and unrepresentative activity, which Dillon nevertheless seems to treat as evidence for how the world really is. The fact that Perec chose to do something so tedious that he begins to daydream and make up stories is treated by Dillon as characteristic of all essays that involve sustained attention: the author ‘invariably departs from the objects at hand to enter realms of speculation and even fantasy’.
In his discussion of a passage from chapter sixty-two of Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities – a chapter with the term ‘essayism’ in its title, Dillon ends up arguing not only that any object does in fact outstrip our ability to comprehend it, but also that it is not desirable to take any definite perspective on it at all. For Musil’s main protagonist, Ulrich, ‘a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are … concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end’. To be fixed – to not be open to change one’s beliefs – is to be dead; an attitude which Musil, by way of his mentor Lukács, probably took from Hegel, who abhorred dead abstractions. In an uncharacteristically categorical pronouncement, Dillon calls Hegel ‘definitely non-essayistic’ and appears to read Musil’s ‘fixed’ as ‘exact’, thereby turning life from a continuous revision of one’s precise beliefs into something ineffable, something that refuses to be definite even for a moment, a person without a clue of what is going on.
Dillon’s approach thus appears to follow from a dubious assumption and a doubtful inference: that sustained attention ‘dissolves’ an object and that we should avoid having definite beliefs because every definite belief risks being revised. This theory of attention is put forward as a preference but it draws its plausibility from the eminent writers – Susan Sontag, Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, William H. Gass – which surrounds it. Dillon attempts to convince us he is on solid ground by constantly alluding to the excellent company he keeps. His unwillingness to be demonstrably wrong seems to stem from a fear of looking bad or a reluctance to make the often painful effort of defending one’s point of view. What criticism should dissolve is the givenness of objects; it should demonstrate our complicity in their construal and make us responsible for the particular perspective we choose to take. To make oneself responsible is to follow out the consequences of what one believes, making oneself open to refutation. What Dillon suggests is that the outcome of any good essay should be a Perecian confusion where it is impossible to be responsible for anything, especially one’s choice to sit and observe a square for two days.
Dillon’s insistence on the hypothetical nature of his writing reminds one of people whose voice always goes up in pitch at the end of a sentence, allowing every assertion to quietly pass under the cloak of an apparent question. Affinities and associations are taken to be attitudes for which we cannot be properly held responsible. But when Dillon claims ‘that being incomplete is a value in itself’, he advocates for his view by stating that ‘it better reflects the brave and curious but faltering nature of the writing mind.’ Far from a ‘modest’ elaboration of a personal preference, Dillon ends up elevating his peccadillos to the status of psychological law. When he writes that the meaning of ‘essay’ is ‘surmise or hazard, followed likely by failure’, he equates ‘failure’ – the perhaps inevitable, but certainly unintended consequence of an attempt – with ‘faltering’, a mere lack of power on the part of the writer. Indeed, Essayism consistently attempts to make a virtue of its deficiencies and seek sanction for the author’s self-conscious impotence. Thus the question of execution, the realisation of an intended result, becomes replaced with an elaboration of excuses, an immense evasion of responsibility.
In his new book, Suppose a Sentence (2020), the second instalment of his tripartite project, Dillon appears to have forgotten that he ever spoke about exactitude and the work is as a consequence much more strikingly evasive. That he is carrying out the programme of Essayism in this work is confirmed at a number of places, most consequentially in his introductory admission that he has written the book without a plan: ‘I wrote, as it were, with my nose to the page, wrote for the first time in my life without a plan of the whole in my mind, wrote from one fragment to the next, feeling for the route that affinity may take me’. This is a strange admission, since most works are only worth the attention the author chose to bestow upon them. In the earlier work Dillon frequently returned to his desire for complete control of his writing, a need he explains as a consequence of his chaotic life, but what appears balanced in Essayism – ‘I want control, and I want to let go, but neither in itself is art’ – becomes explicitly one-sided in Suppose a Sentence. Critics have compared Dillon to Walter Benjamin, a writer he repeatedly references, and it may be that he finds sanction for his procedure in Walter Benjamin’s ‘method of indirection’ as it was outlined in the foreword to The Origin of the German Mourning Play and best exemplified in The Arcades Project. The aim of this method is the presentation of the ideas that shaped the worldview of some definite historical period, which in practice involved collecting an exhaustive number of quotations from the literature of the relevant era and arranging them into a ‘constellation’ that would allow for their ‘objective interpretation’; a method so demanding in its renunciation of authorial bias and desire for completeness that the Arcades project has been passed down to us as a huge, unfinished – and probably unfinishable – pile. Though Dillon mentions The Arcades Project in passing, he is being guided by his ‘affinity’, not by ideas; he accumulates an aggregate of material but does not arrange it into a constellation.
Roland Barthes provides one of the epigraphs to the work: ‘Unless for some perverts the sentence is a body?’ In A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes describes the fragments that make up the book as ‘figures’, a word which ‘should not be understood in its rhetorical sense, but rather in its gymnastic or choreographic sense; in brief … in the most vivacious manner, [as] the gesture of a body caught in action’. That there is immense pleasure in figuration should be known to anyone who has enjoyed dancing, an activity that stands in a metaphorical relation to the music which occasions it. A metaphorical passage is both interpretation and substitution; a good sentence can provide a glyphic body for what was once flesh. This eroticism of the sentence is in some sense what justifies Barthes melancholy concern with pleasure, with likes and dislikes; in short, with the subjective. ‘I still think that … an account of the world that fails to draw from it all its figural potential is therefore incomplete’ Dillon writes in Essayism. His most explicit figure appears in the long introductory sentence which begins as follows:
‘Or maybe a short sentence after all, a fragment in fact, a simple cry, of pain or pleasure, or succession of same, of the same cries that is, compounded, and spoken at the last, in extremis, or another sort of beast entirely, whose unmeaning cry is just an overture, before the sentence sets in distinguished motion its several parallel clauses, as though it were a creature with at least four legs (‘Every sentence was once an animal,’ says Emerson), so slowly but deliberately intent on its progress, so stately in its procession, so lavish in attention to the world it passes through, so exacting in the concentration it demands in turn’.
Four clauses do indeed follow the suggestion that the sentence – the sentence that is being written – might be a creature in motion, a quadrupedal mammal perhaps, or, taking care to consider the ‘Emersonian’ interjection, it had once been an animal, a roe deer ranging quietly across a wood. But the difference between being, in some sense or other, and having been appears to have eluded the sentence; a strange situation given that the quote is fabricated – Emerson’s actual statement being ‘every word was once a poem’ – so that one would have expected it to be more apposite. Is the sentence a figurative animal? The right number of legs is there, but the number of joints, if we count their rhythmic feet, are a monstrously lopsided three, one, four, two; their syntactic anatomy unnaturally varied around the complex predicate ‘so [adjective] in its [noun]’, with one leg extended in one direction by a preceding verb phrase and two others, presumably the hind legs, extended in the other. Are these clauses legs or bars for the rhythm those legs tap out while in ‘distinguished motion’? The suggestion of limbs seems figurative in the shallowest sense, counting the clauses; the sentence clearly wants us to read on swiftly rather than to linger and admire its body.
But perhaps this is a sentence that satisfies Dillon. Writing admiringly about Elizabeth Hardwick’s prose in Essayism, he says that ‘The prose in this piece seems to me perfectly to justify Benjamin’s claim that the greatest sentences are those in which the whole having been perfectly composed and polished, some element has been botched or excised’. This is a misleading account of what Benjamin is saying. In One Way Street he writes specifically about rhythm:
‘A period that, constructed metrically, afterward has its rhythm upset at a single point yields the finest prose sentence imaginable. In this way a ray of light falls through the chink in the wall of the alchemist’s cell, to light up gleaming crystals, spheres, and triangles’ (SW I 457-8).
Nothing in Benjamin can sanction a botched figuration, an incompetently handled metaphor, an unhonoured promise.
Readers familiar with the authors Dillon frequently references will probably compare his work with the essays of William H. Gass. In Essayism, Dillon writes that ‘much or most of Gass’s self-conscious experiment is going on at the level of the sentence, its style and especially its sound.’ In such essays as ‘Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence’, ‘The Music of Prose’, and ‘The Architecture of the Sentence’ Gass provides some of the most exquisite and exact demonstrations of the figurative possibilities of language. Metaphor, as he argues in ‘In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life’, is a way of seeing something through something else; the wind through a dog, a man through a mouse, love through a flea. The closer you look at a successful figurative passage, the more you should be able to see in the verbal surface of the text.
Dillon’s new book does not reward the kind of close reading he has previously exalted: ‘I think that the essays I most admire are those that pay the minutest or most sustained attention to one thing, one time or place, one strain or strand of existence’. Most of the essays in the book spend little time attending to the sentence cited at their head, practicing instead various forms of journalistic evasion. The best essays – on a sentence by De Quincey and one by Joan Didion – are those where the writing is elucidated by an account of the social conditions in which they were produced. Dillon does not seem comfortable with sustained attention to the text in front of him. When he does he is either prone to over-interpretation, as in his essay on Shakespeare’s ‘O, o, o, o’, or to an admission of failure, as in his essay on a sentence by Anne Carson, where an examination of the sentence is shamelessly replaced with an ‘ambiguous doodle’. The most disappointing essay is the one on Thomas Browne, a writer much admired by Dillon in his previous work. It consists mostly of quotations of other writer’s opinions of Browne, numerous sentences giving Wikipedia-like biographical epithets (‘the seventeenth-century physician and essayist’) and equally numerous blurb-like epithets about his style (‘prose of astonishing stateliness’; Hydriotaphia is described as ‘an erudite, searching essay’). He even provides an excuse for this faltering exploration of Browne’s work when he states that ‘it is hard to escape clichés about his ‘ornate’ or ‘baroque’ style … Hard to stick close to the sentences themselves’.
The issues concerning execution are regrettable because they are to a large extent a consequence of Dillon’s ‘nose to the page’ approach. There is no good reason given why Dillon choses to examine individual sentences as opposed to longer passages of prose. Some of the shorter sentences, such as Charlotte Brontë’s ‘The drug wrought’, give both the author and the reader material of too scant a quantity to be interpreted, let alone examined for form and function. Nor does there seem to be any principle guiding the selection of sentences except the author’s ‘affinity’. In his masterful essays on sentences mentioned above, Gass does not constrain himself to linguistic units marked out by punctuation but quotes as many verbal sentences as the author had used to express a complete thought or a whole picture. The passages he selects for examination are furthermore chosen for their figurative qualities.
The most interesting essays in Suppose a Sentence are those that tell stories about other people – editors and readers of magazines, critics and photographers – while the most disappointing are those where Dillon talks mainly about himself. The alluring effusion of admirable quotations and misquotations function at times as mere distractions, at other times as opportunities for misreadings. In Essayism, Dillon has produced an apology for writing that does not even try to succeed, that perversely aims to fail; his new work has the merit of being much more forthright about the fact that evasion, untempered by exactitude, is its method. Spectacular pyrotechnics always carry with them the risk of burning the theatre down. Dillon’s approach carries the risk of being unfavourably compared to the company of writers he has pretended to entertain, that his personality will take centre ground and force itself to be examined. When a book is treated as a commodity, what is being consumed are the gaseous effusions of publicity itself. The modern critic will only look good to someone who abides by its rules. It is a game that real critics should refuse to play.
Your diary continues to be one of the most striking works of writing. I eagerly await each missive.