Kevin Breathnach

Brian Dillon Interview

There are other few critics at work today more consistently interesting on as wide a range of subjects as Brian Dillon. Born in Dublin in 1969, Dillon is a regular contributor to the Dublin Review, the London Review of Books, Art Forum, frieze and Cabinet, the indefinable conceptual quarterly where he works as UK editor. Come of age under the influence of Roland Barthes, Dillon is a writer whose revelatory criticism – often quietly engaged in transcending its own form – wears the weight of its theory lightly. Since leaving academia a decade ago, Dillon’s voice has become steadily more apparent and more authoritative. He is perhaps the closest Ireland has come to producing a Susan Sontag.

Dillon is the author of five books, including In the Dark Room (2005), Nine Hypochondriac Lives (2009) and I Am Sitting in a Room (2011), a Oulipian-style study of writers’ rooms written before an audience in just 24-hours. His work does not necessarily take place within the form of the essay. Yet even his novella, Sanctuary (2009), is notable for its sense of ‘alertness’, ‘attention’ and ‘transcription’, three qualities Dillon says ‘justify the miscellaneous essayist’s way of being and working’. Dillon’s work is always essayistic, in other words, even when it’s not. And so the forthcoming publication of Objects in This Mirror, a selection of essays written over the last ten years, makes for a particularly welcome addition to his growing catalogue. With essays on contemporary art, ruin aesthetics, photography and the essay itself, Objects in This Mirror reflects a core set of Dillon’s interests. At the same time, essays on the Common Cold Unit, the Dewey Decimal System and Victorian gesture manuals work to deflect the idea that a merely core set is ever adequate.

My interview with Brian Dillon appears in the May edition of Totally Dublin.

Tao Lin: Taipei

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In Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, a group of synthesised images is described as ‘less deceptive’ because ‘at least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images’. No such precaution is taken by the narrative voice of Taipei. The ability of language to convey thought in never called into question; in fact, the text often removes itself from free indirect style to directly quote Paul’s apparently verbalised thought-process. ‘Paul, staring at her calmly, thought “she’s definitely drunk” and “normally I would be interested in her, to some degree, but currently I’m obsessed with Laura.”’ Taipei may well be a thematically modish novel, but formally it amounts to a near-anachronism: a unitary psychological novel, told by a reliable third-person narrator willing to spell every last detail out in neutral tones that affect an impossible objectivity. Taipei is not what you’d call a writerly text. Everything is included, processed, and diagnosed.

My review of Taipei by Tao Lin appears over at 3:AM Magazine.

Georges Perec: La Boutique obscure

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Subject to a host of new translations and literary studies, the Oulipo is enjoying a spell in the fickle spotlight of current literary trends. Championed by some as the solution to that other theme of the hour (literary failure), the Ouvroir pour la littérature potentielle was established in 1960 by a group of experimental writers, each of whom had at the core of their artistic process the notion of constraint, exactitude and mathematical rigor. Georges Perec, who died in 1982, was perhaps the most prominent member of the group, widely renowned for A Void, a full-length mystery novel that eschews all use of the letter ‘e’, and Life: A User’s Manual, a masterpiece of composition whose plot follows the pattern of the famous ‘Knight’s Tour’ around a chessboard.

Consisting of 124 accounts of varying length and lucidity, La Boutique obscure is the strangely intractable result of Perec’s attempt to make faithful written records of everything he dreamt between 1968 and 1972. It is a project whose seemingly unrestrained subject matter places it in stark counterpoint to Perec’s widely celebrated Oulipian output. There, writing is forced to obey its own arbitrarily imposed laws. In La Boutique obscure, by contrast, not even the empirically observed laws of time and space are obeyed. ‘The alarm clock is unusable,’ he dreams in February 1971. Tenses merge: ‘Your party is, was a smashing success.’ The laws of mathematics are likewise ignored: ‘My boss pays me 82 francs (3x16) instead of 45 (3x15) for having served for three days as a fake subject of his experiment.’

‘I give myself rules in order to be completely free,’ Perec once said to account for his working methods. It is a nicely counterintuitive riff, just catchy enough as to seem completely meaningless. As La Boutique obscure will testify, however, it turns out to have been exactly right. The dreams recorded here are subject to no rules whatsoever; yet its noted anarchy enslaves the internal play of Perec’s subconscious. The earlier entries are fragmentary, varyingly nonsensical and banal. ‘Itinerary: known secret maze, doors of chest (round, armored), hallways, very long trek toward the encounter.’ By 1970 at the latest, though, Perec has become the ‘fake subject of his experiment’, dozing out full nocturnal narratives of adventure, comedy and tragedy. ‘I thought I was recording the dreams I was having,’ he writes in the preface; ‘I have realized that it was not long before I began having dreams only in order to write them.’ Where once he dreamt of ‘sleeping on the bare floor, on a mattress with no frame’, later his dreams are filled with scaffolding, structures and ornament. The stage becomes a recurring motif too, projecting the idea of something being played out for an audience. Told to dream freely for us, his sleeping mind performs as if forced. A project of this sort will always turn out great fodder for psychoanalysts and literary geneticists; what is perhaps unexpected about it is its illustration, per Foucault, that observation constitutes a more effective means of control than simple law enforcement.

This review appeared originally in the April edition of Totally Dublin.

First Book of Frags

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In what is perhaps the most obviously satirical story in Dave Lordan’s new collection, First Book of Frags, a small Irish town builds its entire economy around the tourism brought in by the Cornerboy, a local street performer who, having attracted the interest of so many ‘scientists and semioticians’, has been transformed from local pariah to community hero. Where once he was subject to ridicule and abuse, now he is the subject of ‘three separate volumes, which are available for purchase exclusively in our village’. The appropriation of culture by commercial interests is a theme typical of this staunchly political collection, where issues such as suicide, addiction and accessorial guilt are addressed in a pointedly Irish context. ‘Their techniques of silencing are even further along in some respects than our own,’ says the lively old Nazi in ‘Dr Essler’s Cocaine’.

He is just one the collection’s many narrators who seem totally impervious to obvious wrongdoing. In a sense, the mystically amoral tone within which they operate is used to mimic the sort of unfeeling, spectral anti-language of the nation’s power structures (‘Public services are being replaced by pre-recorded messages,’ says one narrator). And while it is true that this alone constitutes a worthwhile and well-worked conceit, we must nevertheless resist limiting ourselves to such a singular reading. Lordan’s stories are much larger than mere satire. Contained in the particulars of contemporary injustice, Lordan sees the universal injustice of time and history. ‘Is this what keeps us from reaching out to each other and from mutual striving – the inner knowledge that we are but plankton in the churning sea of time?’ The amorality of several narrators here mirrors that of time itself.

In the beginning there was the Word, they say, and the Word was God. But Lordan’s stories are set in a world where God is long dead, where the cosmos does not speak. Whence language, then? While planning to poison a neighbour’s dog, one narrator writes of “pain so intense it almost causes speech in dogs”. In doing so, he situates the origin of language in resistance to pain, injustice, and death – to the cold, cold silence of the cosmos. Such resistance is futile, of course. Its language always breaks down. ‘Nuttin means nuttin no moare, ift ever did,’ says the narrator of ‘At Slane McGlowan’s Funeral’. ‘Any rum thing in the world can stoned for anything else that there is.’ Grounded no more in divine authority, language contorts, contradicts itself and finally collapses. And yet, however unstable, this is the language all true art must to speak. Dave Lordan speaks it with verve.

A version of this review appeared originally in the April edition of Totally Dublin.

Anthony Walsh: Echoes

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And so we must ask: what does it mean for a novel of advertent failure to fail inadvertently? As Lars Iyer put it recently: “Literary writing can allow you to capitalise on failure – how strange!” The thing is, though, Walsh’s particular disguise fails to cover up his unacknowledged or accidental failures. Those do not belong to the narrator, they are his own. The curtain slips, and behind it we find no masterful wizard but a rather pedestrian young author, who has been using a lot of elaborate tricks and props to make himself seem great and powerful and good.

My speculative review of Eco’s Echoes, the beautifully failed first novel of never-before-heard-of Irish author, Anthony Walsh, appears over at The New Inquiry.

Lee Rourke Interview

To go back to Derrida, you mention him in the endnotes as the influence for ‘every time you sign an invoice…’, but to me the most Derridean poem in the collection is ‘words (unspoken)’, which seems to echo Derrida’s thoughts on his own mother’s senescence while also drawing on his conceptions of speech and writing and traces. Was this something you were conscious of?

Yes, completely. I think out of everything in Varroa Destructor, ‘words (unspoken)’ is the one that means the most to me on a human level (even though I try to be kind of anti-humanist in my approach). I’ve read Derrida’s accounts of the way he architectured the memory of his mother. They’re very moving accounts. Again, we have the traces and the blurring of memory. A very poignant thing happened with my mother before she died. She had throat cancer. She had a tracheotomy; her voice box was removed. She could no longer speak, and so from that moment until the day she died she wrote everything down. I kept her notepad, and what haunts me are her very last words: they are indecipherable. She was so weak and out of her mind on morphine that, although the thoughts were there in her mind, the actual act of writing and language failed her. I’ve never been able to decipher what her last words were.

My interview with Lee Rourke appears in March edition of Totally Dublin.

Alejandro Zambra: Ways of Going Home

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Alejandro Zambra’s third translated novel, Ways of Going Home, switches between two narratives. One is told by a writer resembling Zambra, who is currently at work on a novel about his life growing up in Chile. This work-in-progress is presented to us as the secondary narrative. The spectre of Pinochet hangs over the entire work; its characters sense something like remorse at their own belatedness with regards to the dictatorship. “While the country was falling to pieces, we were learning to talk, to walk, to fold napkins in the shape of boats,” writes the narrator. “While the novel was happening, we played hide-and-seek.”

This distinction informs the novel in structural terms. Now that the dictatorship has passed, it has become inappropriate to portray everyday life in the terms of the traditional, unified novel. Zambra turns to narratives within narratives, the use of doppelgängers and the suggestion of pseudonymity in an attempt to turn his work into a sort of literary hide-and-seek. “The book was her disguise,” he writes, “a precious mask.” And yet, these tricks have grown old, too. Zambra’s meta-narrative seems knowingly fatigued. Little is concealed. No thrill comes upon seeing Las Maninas hanging in the narrator’s childhood home. That we all know the terrain too well is one of this novel’s many small tragedies. “Perhaps we long for the time when we could be lost,” says the narrator. “The time when all the streets were new.”

This review appeared originally in the March edition of Totally Dublin.

Amy Sackville: Orkney

A professor of 19th-century literature marries his silver-haired student who, some forty years his junior, has enchanted him like so many wild-eyed women of Romantic poetry. They go on their honeymoon to Orkney, where the sea acts as a dark, consuming force upon the pair. What is immediately striking about Orkney is its use of language. Sackville is a skilled stylist, writing in that portentous lyrical mode that is commonly referred to as ‘painterly’; indeed, by casting its scenes in the vocabulary of the visual arts, the novel asks to be read as such. “I will have no drowning, I said, however picturesque.”

With this frame of reference in place, paintings become everywhere apparent. “Her view is encompassed by mine,” says the narrator; “it is not merely the sea that I see, it is the sea that she is seeing.” This image, which to my mind recalls Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, asks us to consider the perspective of the narrator’s wife in our reading of the text. And so, when the narrator describes something as “raven, sable, pitch” and she responds “black and cold”, we start to see the narrator’s prose as excessively ornate. The perspective of the narrator’s wife subverts his beautiful but fragile lyricism; deconstruction is always already at work within the text. When she indisputably contradicts his first memories of her, it feels as if the image the narrator maintains of his wife as some mysterious enchantress is merely a projection brought on by too much book-reading. And then, just as we are about to cry Bovary, the narrator is proved right. This is not to say that no narrative subversion took place. Instead it means that, in accordance with its epigraph by Hélène Cixous, Orkney is: “…the portrait of a story attacked from all sides, that attacks itself and in the end gets away.” Sackville’s triumph is to realise that a beauty that admits itself as fragile is much less fragile for it.

This review appeared originally in the March edition of Totally Dublin.

Deborah Levy: Swimming Home & Black Vodka

Black Vodka is an inexhaustible feast. Its richness can be ascribed in part to that style of weighted reticence we sense at work in Swimming Home. The recurring motifs and metaphors of the collection, which are each put down in such a way as to resist any singular interpretation, should also be considered instrumental. Levy records telephones, sirens and car alarms like others would record birdsong, while the grotesquely close attention she pays to wrists, thighs, skulls, bones, skin, meat, veins, blood and guts establishes an extremely rich, versatile symbolic code. Black Vodka sees Levy play surgeon, dermatologist and butcher all at once.

My review of Swimming Home and Black Vodka by Deborah Levy appears in The Stinging Fly (Issue 24, Vol. Two / Spring 2013 ).

Extreme Metaphors: J.G. Ballard Interviews

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J.G. Ballard is one of only a few really interesting literary writers of post-war Britain, but his influence is felt as heavily upon popular culture as it is upon so-called ‘high’ culture. References to his work dot the landscape of popular music like so many wrecked cars of the apocalypse. Joy Division named a song after The Atrocity Exhibition, his early experimental collection of condensed novels. The Klaxon’s first album, ‘Myths of the Near Future’, borrows its title from a collection of Ballard’s short stories. Radiohead’s ‘OK Computer’ was heavily influenced by Ballard’s most controversial novel, Crash, and David Bowie’s ‘Always Crashing the Same Car’ was clearly influenced by it, too.

With all this in mind, one of the funniest moments in Extreme Metaphors, a collection of some forty-four excellent interviews with the great man, comes when Jon Savage, speaking to Ballard in 1978, enthuses at length about The Velvet Underground and punk rock. He notes the way both attack “media and technological conditioning” before pausing to allow Ballard to comment. “To be honest,” he says, “I don’t listen to music. It’s just a blank spot.” Speaking to The Paris Review four years later, he comments: “I think I’m the only person I know who doesn’t own a record player or a single record.”

Despite this, he listens to Savage with interest, and speaks with as much consideration and insight about the sociological aspects of contemporary music as he does elsewhere about his own personal obsessions – the suburbanisation of the soul, surrealist painting, his notion of ‘inner space’, consumerism, urban decay, the sexual fetishisation of car crashes, etc., etc.. He will return to these themes again and again and again over the course of these interviews. The fact that his doing so never once grows tiresome is a testament both to Ballard as a speaker, and to Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara as editors. Ballard was a very generous subject, speaking a combined estimate of 650,000 words in interview, often to tiny fanzines that never came to be made digital. The editors of Extreme Metaphors immersed themselves so thoroughly in this discourse that they actually end up unconsciously borrowing from Ballard’s store of recurring metaphors. Sellars writes at one point about something serving “as a kind of grit”, a metaphor Ballard revisits several times throughout the collection.

Many assessing these interviews have focused – and will continue to focus – on Ballard’s success rate as a prophet of the near-future. In 1963, for instance, he predicted that Ronald Reagan would become president of the United States. In 1978, he predicted that homes would one day be transformed into mini-television studios. He even saw social media coming and, more obliquely, the destruction of the Twin Towers. And yet, impressive as such prescience no doubt is, there’s only so long we can sit gawping at a man speaking in the past describe our present condition before it comes to seem like a very limited, almost provincial, sort of reading. “Look everybody! Look! He’s talking about us!”

As Ballard’s predictions become our lived reality and, later, our past, it is important that we draw some sort of method from Ballard’s thinking, so that we, too, might see so clearly. His vision of the future seems to have come as a side-effect of the close attention he paid to his own present. “What I’m trying to do,” he said, “is to look at the present and to get away from the notion of yesterday, today, tomorrow.” He observed his present with a clinical eye, dissecting it like the corpse he worked on as a medical student in the early 1950s. In 1968, he noted how the media landscape of “advertising, TV, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as advertising” had made it almost impossible to distinguish between the real and the false. “It’s not necessary for the writer to invent fiction,” he concluded. “It’s the writer’s job to find the reality.”

A shorter version of this review appears in the February edition of Totally Dublin.

Lars Iyer Interview

Citing works by Enrique Vilas-Mata, Thomas Bernhard and Roberto Bolaño, you conclude your manifesto by suggesting that the only thing left for literature to do is to explore its own passing, to mourn itself. Could you speak about your own work in this context?

In my own work, I try to pose the questions I mentioned, concerning marginality and neoliberalism, not simply at the level of content, but at the level of form: in the unusual narrative structure of my trilogy that you mentioned earlier. W. is someone who believes in the power of philosophy, of literature, of politics, more than his frenemy Lars does. Lars satirizes W.’s hyperbole, his extravagant power of belief, but also celebrates it. Lars presents W.’s enthusiasms as derisory, laughable, but also as somehow admirable. My work mourns the passing of a certain conception of philosophy, literature and politics; the passing of a certain hope. But remembering what was once possible is itself a form of hope, and a writing which mourns is still a kind of writing.

My interview with Lars Iyer appears in February edition of Totally Dublin.

John Calder Interview

In nearly sixty years as the foremost British publisher of controversial and avant-garde literature, John Calder put out work by some twenty-three Nobel laureates, including Heinrich Boll, Ivo Andrić and Samuel Beckett, whose life and work he is still consumed by. He brought Burroughs, Miller and the nouveau romanists to a British audience, and took gambles closer to home as well with experimental writers such as Ann Quin. As a publisher, writes Aidan Higgins, “he was sometimes tight with royalties, though the last time he visited me he brought two bottles of wine.” Retired now, Calder is touring with the Godot Theatre Company giving post-show talks.

My interview with John Calder appears in Totally Dublin.

Gert Jonke: Awakening to the Great Sleep War

When a novel takes as its epigraph, as this one does, a quote by Flann O’Brien’s fictional philosopher, De Selby, the reader should have a fair idea about the road it plans to go down. Time will be derailed, objects usually considered inanimate will be brought to life, and there will be much confusion as to whether the described experiences of the protagonist are occurring on an interior or exterior level. No surprises, then, that in the opening pages of Awakening to the Great Sleep War, the protagonist, Burgmüller, befriends a group of “telamones”, those blocks of stone and marble supporting the city’s every structure, for whom days and years pass at an “infinitely slow pace”. As an acoustic interior designer, Burgmüller works to create spaces in which music, a temporal art, can exist and flourish. It is a job that resonates clearly with the themes of this, a fugal comedy whose every episode has at its core a question concerning the representation of time and space.

When Burgmüller goes in search of his lost girlfriend, he finds that maps are “unreliable aids to orientation” because “the landscape depicted on them was in the process of changing.” Worse still, “the land immediately imitates everything shown by its superiors, the maps.” In other words, representation is not descriptive, but prescriptive. Equally, when Burgmüller’s latest girlfriend sits down to write her Portrayal of the World, we find that her narrative takes charge of time and space as inhabited by Burgmüller. Here we come to the wider comment Jonke wants to make about how writing works. In life, narrative is a framing device clumsily imposed on time and space, the media in which we all exist. Fiction reverses these roles: time and space become framing devices, each clumsily imposed on the medium of narrative. In fiction, where nothing exists unless described, “the typewriter [is] a reality-producing machine”.

This review appears in the January edition of Totally Dublin. Photo by Marko Lipuš.

Anakana Schofield: Malarky

Moving between the first- and third-person, Malarky is a novel told in twenty fragmented episodes about Philomena, a woman from Ballina attempting to come to terms with the infidelity of her husband, the onset of old age and, finally, the loss of Jimmy, her homosexual son who, upon having his college funding cut-off by his father, joins the American military and dies in Afghanistan.

The ‘malarky’ of the title refers to a sexual encounter Philomena witnesses in the barn between Jimmy and one of the neighbour’s sons. To better understand her dead son, Philomena seeks to put herself in his position. “She wanted to be both her son and the man who hupped him.” The ensuing scenes of awkwardly executed seduction are among the funniest in the book, but to my ear the Irish brogue, laid on especially thick in the first half of the book, sounds clichéd, patchy and at times a little patronising. (Nor does it translate particularly well to text-language.) When, in the second half of the book, the thick sheath of Irish cultural and commercial references comes loose, and the rate of brogue slows down, the novel comes into its own. Though there are definite shades of a deus ex machine at work in Jimmy’s death, Philomena’s breakdown is very well-captured, the non-linearity of the narrative putting paid to conventional notions of grief and its ‘stages’. “See how I went back and forth?” Philomena asks the reader. 

This review originally appeared in the January edition of Totally Dublin

Danilo Kis: New Translations

A text that accepts itself feels paradoxically grounded in reality. Whereas fictional accounts in the style of the nineteenth century novel have what Umberto Eco calls an “interior ontological legitimacy”, the fiction of Danilo Kiš is always striving to achieve an exterior ontological legitimacy—to be “unhistorical though no less real,” as Kiš says of a character in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich.

My review of new Danilo Kiš translations is in The Quarterly Conversation.