Partial List of People to Bleach
Gary Lutz [Future Tense Books]
Gary Lutz’s penchant for verbal twistings can at first simply seem weird for the sake of weird, yet they are anything but gratuitous quirks of style. The dyspraxic effect of his ‘incorrect’ – but entirely apt – alterations to affixes and prepositions codes displacement into the very rhythm of his sentences. His insistence that the sentence be the cellular unit of his work is no MFA piety, though. The sentence, as he reminds us, is a tight, lonely place, just like all places are becoming. Every interior space in this collection either is or feels windowless. The same is true of what passes for his characters. In fact, Lutz doesn’t really do characters: they’re windowless monads, stuck in the one long grope after respite, their consciousness and even speech shredded by the friction of their environment.
The parallel between their windowless spaces and their windowless consciousness conflates the human with the material. Relationships appear as either waystations or bombsites along their mad track, their interior monologues a ‘running interpretation’ told in ‘shot’ language. The cracked feel of the voices rhymes with Lutz’s sense that desire sets us on a course with all the logic of the crazes left in a broken pavement. We get no revelations: only subsidence; no turning-points: only ‘pointless turnabouts’. The most obvious touchstone may initially seem to be Samuel Beckett, but really these ‘witnessless’, ‘unpivotal generation[s]’ tell themselves with a discomfiting intimacy straight out of the dank, mushroom life of Derek Mahon’s ‘dereliction’ poems. When Lutz’s people speak they only confirm their oppressive materiality. Even pores ‘confide’, even onions leave a ‘scribble’. Cars ‘scoff’ and ‘razz’, conflating expression with mere noise, person with matter. Speech comes to seem like the insistence that we don’t really speak at all: we just add to the world’s thoughtless noise. Partial List of People to Bleach is an atlas of lives and places reduced to things. Any counter-argument Lutz’s people muster against this twists around, like the sentences do, to cement them ever more firmly in the fact of their matter.
– Tim Smyth
Warrenpoint
Denis Donoghue [Dalkey Archive Press]
Sometimes, though rarely, in remembering the trickle between childhood and adulthood, Warrenpoint veers towards the insightfulness we have come to associate with Denis Donoghue, the critic. As memoirist, he is distinctly less impressive. Memoir carries an implicit claim for the intrigue of its subject. The idea is that in overhearing some notable figure talking about their former selves, we will come to understand ourselves better. Memoir is not the essay, it is not ‘a curve of having something to say, a trajectory of seemly words’: in Warrenpoint, moments of special revelation seem less profound, more like window-dressing.
This is a border narrative of patchy remembrance and glib citation, yet in the space between the two something unspeakable mushrooms up. The greatest part of the text is spent reminiscing about the writer’s father. Sergeant Donoghue, an Irish Catholic raised to the power of an RUC uniform, was a taciturn policeman who would not himself ‘engage in reminiscence’. Warrenpoint is about a boy who turns towards books and away from himself, by turning towards, not away from, his father (away from Freud, away from Oedipus). Though his erudition remains, in writing about himself Donoghue forces his analytic skills into exile. What is unusual about Warrenpoint is the extent to which it proffers, then silences, the voice we most want to hear: that of a woman who, every few weeks, was given to ‘a long high-pitched wail’, preempting a ‘collapse’. There is an unwritten book that lurks beneath the surface of Donoghue’s pristine prose. It is one about his mother.
– Joanne O’Leary
Triptych: Three Studies After Francis Bacon
Jonathan Littell [Notting Hill Editions]
Nobody remembers just how fucked-up the work of Francis Bacon is. Sure, we might remember his paintings being disturbing. We might even remember what it was about a particular painting that disturbed us. Some might remember enough about the experience to describe in what way it made them feel disturbed. But there is an essential quality to the work of Francis Bacon that evades memory. His efforts to make paint come across not onto the brain, but ‘onto the nervous system’ were, in this sense, successful. With every viewing, the work appears fucked-up anew.
Triptych is the novelist Jonathan Littell’s short, confused meditation on Bacon’s sensational oeuvre. Divided into three ‘studies’, Littell bookends his most interesting chapter – an interpretation of recurring motifs in Bacon’s work – with two chapters positioned against exactly such an interpretation. ‘Commentary is useless,’ he says at one point. ‘The subject […] is the paint itself.’ Still, within thirty pages, he has commented so hard and fast on Bacon’s work that he deems it necessary to warn us: ‘I don’t have an easy answer for the umbrella.’ Tonally consistent but polemically at odds, these three ‘studies’ invite us to treat them as a collective gesture toward the mimetic. But even the whisper of such a conceit forces us to recognise that, dwarfed utterly by its subject, Littell’s Triptych will not be remembered either.
– Kevin Breathnach
