Brian Dillon - Essayism

B RIAN D ILLON was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include The Great Explosion (shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror: Essays, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (short-listed for the Wellcome Book Prize), and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for nonfiction. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, frieze, and Artforum. He is the UK editor of Cabinet magazine and teaches at the Royal College of Art, London.

Essayism

On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction

BRIAN DILLON

New York Review Books New York

This is a New York Review Book

published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

www.nyrb.com

Copyright 2017 by Brian Dillon

All rights reserved.

First published in Great Britain by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017.

Cover art: Helen Marten, Scalloped scum and tender shoots, 2016; Helen Marten, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Cover design: Katy Homans

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Dillon, Brian, 1969 author.

Title: Essayism : on form, feeling, and nonfiction / Brian Dillon.

Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2018. | Series: New York Review Books

Identifiers: LCCN 2018010226| ISBN 9781681372822 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681372839 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Essay. | Essayists. | EssayAuthorship. | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. | LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. | LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Authorship.

Classification: LCC PN 4500.D553 2018 | DDC 808.4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010226

ISBN 978-1-68137-283-9

v1.0

For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

For Emily LaBarge

Not only is it necessary to prove the crystal but the crystal must prove permanent by fracture.

W ILLIAM C ARLOS W ILLIAMS , An Essay on Virginia (1925)

Let us talk about it as though it existed.

R OLAND B ARTHES , The Pleasure of the Text (1973)

O N ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS . On the death of a moth, humiliation, the Hoover Dam and how to write; an inventory of objects on the authors desk, and an account of wearing spectacles, which he does not; what another learned about himself the day he fell unconscious from his horse; of noses, of cannibals, of method; diverse meanings of the word lumber; many vignettes, published over decades, in which the writer, or her elegant stand-in, described her condition of dislocation in the city, and did it so blithely that no one guessed it was all true; a dissertation on roast pig; a heap of language; a tour of the monuments; a magazine article that in tone and structure so nearly resembles its object, or conceals it, that flummoxed readers depart in droves; a sentence you could whisper in the ear of a dying man; an essay upon essays; on the authors brief and oblique friendship with the great jazz singer; a treatise on melancholy, also on everything else; a species of drift or dissolve, at the levels of logic and language, that time and again requires the reader to page back in wonderhow did we get from there to here?before the writers skill (or perhaps his inattention); a sermon on death, preached in the poets final days on earth, before a picture of his own shrouded person; the metaphoric power of same: the womb a grave, the grave a whirlpool, Deaths hand stretched to save us; a long read; a short history of decay; a diarys prompt towards self-improvement: To sew on my buttons (+ button my lip); on a dancer arrayed like an insect or a ray of light; love, alphabetized; life, alphabetized; every second of a silent clowns appearance on screen, dissected: We commit a cruelty against existence if we do not interpret it to death; on the cows outside the window: their movement and mass, their possible emotions; what happened next will amaze you; upon a time a dutiful thing, set and judged by teachers, proof because proof neededof what? Compliance, competence and comprehension, proper meanness of ambition; but later, discovered in the library and under the bedclothes: sparks or scintillations, stabs at bewilderment, some effort or energy flung at the void; and style too, scurrilous entertainments, a writing thats all surface, torsion and poise, something so artful it can hardly be told from disarray; an art among others of the sidelong glance, obliquities and digressions; an addiction to arduous learning; a study of punctuation marks, their meaning and morality; seven Dada manifestos, forty-one false starts, the writers technique in thirteen theses; an account of what passed through the authors mind in the seconds before a stagecoach crash, somewhere on the road between Manchester and Glasgow, in the second or third summer after Waterloo. The writing of the disaster. Confessions, cool memories, a collection of sand. Curiosities. The philosophy of furniture. An account of the late eclipse. What was it like to fly high above the capital, through silver mist and hail, when flying was yet new? The answer: Innumerable arrows shot at us, down the august avenue of our approach.

Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial. Surmise or hazard, followed likely by failure. Imagine what it might rescue from disaster and achieve at the levels of form, style, texture and therefore (though some might cavil at therefore) at the level of thought. Not to mention feeling. Picture if you can its profile on the page: from a solid spate of argument or narrative to isolated promontories of text, these composing in their sum the archipelago of a work, or a body of work. The page an estuary, dotted at intervals with typographical buoys or markers. And all the currents or sediments in between: sermons, dialogues, lists and surveys, small eddies of print or whole books construed as single essays. A shoal or school made of these. Listen for the possible cadences this thing might create: orotund and authoritative; ardent and fizzing; slow and exacting to the point of pain or pleasure; halting, vulnerable, tentative; brutal and peremptory; a shuffling or amalgam of all such actions or qualities. An uncharted tract or plain. And yet certain ancient routes allow us to pilot our way through to the source, then out again, adventuring.

I dream of essays and essayists: real and unreal authors, achieved and impossible examples of a genre (its not the word, not at all) that wouldwhat, exactly? Perform a combination of exactitude and evasion that seems to me to define what writing ought to be. A form that would instruct, seduce and mystify in equal measure. (Michael Hamburger: But the essay is not a form, has no form; it is a game that creates its own rules.) Does that sound like what one might want from art or literature in general, not from essays only? Perhaps one category stands for everything, defines what I want from all art forms. The boundaries of this thing, this entity or inclination I admirethese Ill have to determine later. For now its enough, I hope, to acknowledge that what I desire in essaysall those essays named or alluded to in the list above, almost all of which are realis this simultaneity of the acute and the susceptible. To be at once the wound and a piercing act of precision: that makes it sound as though all I care for is style, that old-fashioned thing. It might well be true. But isnt style exactly a contention with the void, an attitude or alignment plucked from chaos and nullity? Style as the prize, not a rule of the game. Style as sport in another sense too: botanical anomaly or innovation, avant-garde mutant. But dont sports get assimilated in the end? Aberrations accommodated, rogues, freaks and rarities corralled and tamed? Curiosities neatly labelled, safely immured in vitrines and cabinets.