The most hard-wearing and commonsensical of writerly truisms is the avoidance of cliché. It’s hard not to think he’s being damned by faint praise, then, when all of his obituarists seem to agree that Martin Amis made his most enduring contribution to literary culture when he wrote (or, as he put it, idealized) that all writing is a “campaign against cliché.” “Not just clichés of the pen,” he went on idealizing, “but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.” These are important qualifications, showing that Amis’ remonstrations are not only against familiar phrases (perhaps too easy a target, but also one, however implausibly, unliterary—Amis was big enough a fan of Saul Bellow’s not to admire, or at least know to admire, such “bad” prose stylists as Dreiser and Dostoevsky) but also against over-worn paths of thought and unrefined emotional reserves. What this does not clarify is the campaign itself, the writer’s task in light of these hazards. After all, isn’t it most often not only good, but great writing that becomes cliché? In language, like in music, habits and patterns form, innovations become staled by repetition, mis- and overuse, so that what was once a bracing or transportive phrase becomes just another saying, just another ditty. But it only takes an attentive reading to give back “to be or not to be?” its world-shaking power, just as any competent orchestra can move audiences to awe-struck tears with Beethoven’s Ninth. What has happened to that crust of overfamiliarity, the tarnish of long, repetitive years? And what does it mean for us, when we come upon a fugitive cliché, which has slipped past edits and copyedits, and appears to us, a cornered animal on the page?
Irish critic Brian Dillon finds one in the work of German social theorist Theodor Adorno. He is reading Minima Moralia, Adorno’s fragmented treatise on the possibility of culture in the wake of Europe’s murderously self-destructive midcentury. The cliché in question comes, fittingly enough, from a fragment that appears to offer advice to writers. Dillon shows Adorno recommending length proper to content, as well as a certain kind of conceptual attentiveness: “Anyone wishing to express something,” Adorno writes, “is so carried away by it that he ceases to reflect on it.” Dillon finds this more or less sensible, if somewhat banal, but he brings us through the passage to an image which “both condenses this truism and seems to open up the whole problem once more.” Here is the Adorno:
Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them.
And here, at length, is Dillon.
At one level, there is a cliché at work in this passage: etymology informs us that text (thus also texture and textile) derives from the Latin textum: a web. Which means, as Adorno puts it, that the text has a power of attraction, that it holds all it captures in a delicate, murderous tension. But we mean something else too when we say that a well-constructed text is like a web—we mean that it may be filled with all manner of heterogeneous matter, it’s a container for all airborne things, and its maker must wait vigilantly for the right prey to happen along. The web is a means, a process, a tool, not a finished work. A trap is by its nature temporary; no matter how effective, time will run out and you will have to lay others, further afield.
As for the etymology: Is this a cliché, and of what Amisian variety? I suppose etymology was once a shopworn tool, and though Dillon will later describe it as “a sentimental habit of the critic and essayist,” how often does one come across it anymore, never mind used as evocatively as it is here? And if cliché depends on a kind of elastic temporality, old and new sliding in and out of focus in turn, who is to blame: Adorno, fifty years dead, or Dillon, for pointing it out? As it happens, Dillon seems to have these questions in mind (if only in the back of his mind): here, “cliché” is not a term of opprobrium. Rather, it is both a critical device and an element of the text, which does a certain kind of work, namely, to draw attention toward and enact an idea about writing in real time at several layers of reading, which, in turn, is precisely the process Adorno himself is describing. All this, because of a cliché. Would such rich, speculative thinking be possible if the prohibition—whether ambient or made-explicit—had been followed? I’m inclined to say no, at least not in this case. The more interesting question, however, is whether it would be noticeable if no such prohibition had appeared.
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Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. He set out in his young adulthood to become a scholar, attending University College and Trinity College (both Dublin), but changing tacks in his late twenties, becoming instead a critic, editor, curator, and lecturer. He has written nine books, beginning with 2005’s literary memoir of parental death, In the Dark Room, and hundreds of essays, reviews, and articles, for such venues as Artforum, Cabinet, The London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Yale Review. His most recent offering is Affinities: On Art and Fascination, a collection of short essays organized around the eponymous theme. Affinities completes an informal trilogy of books Dillon has published with New York Review Books in the US and Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK, beginning with 2017’s Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction (from which the above discussion of Adorno is drawn) and 2020’s Suppose a Sentence.
Such is the resumé, and so is its recitation: necessities both of the form and the life that emerges around the form. Dillon draws attention to these nuts and bolts of the trade frequently throughout the trilogy, noting that by leaving academia, he entered into a world of commissions and deadlines, fixations which adhere and detach according to publication seasons and paychecks. The tension is obvious, even if it is often forgotten or explained away: in a time of increasing economic strain, rampant anti-intellectualism, and distrust of art for any sake, never mind its own, what life could be less accommodating to the soul drawn simply to reading and writing, to taking note and recording what one notices, than the life of pitching, of chasing down pay, of apparently (and sometimes truly) endless precarity?
Essayism in particular is devoted to thinking, or, more to the point, writing through this dilemma. Dillon finds its deepest point in the contradiction of essayistic consolation, the strange comfort he found and still finds in not only striving, much less achievement, but in the failure the form seems to require: “I like rigour,” he writes, “but I like it to be somehow botched, impossible.” Essayism alternates, sometimes fluidly, sometimes abruptly, between reflections on his writing practice and the conditions of his life that have at once made that practice more difficult and, at the same time, possible. It is a memoir of depression, sometimes suicidal depression, as well as a letter to the writer that once was and may still be. Interspersed throughout the memoir—as often blending with as punctuating it—are critical explorations of the writing that has guided both his work and his personal formation, from Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida to Elizabeth Hardwick and Virginia Woolf. Always, or nearly always, the question of writing and of life centers on the essay, not so much as a genre but as an inflection point, where the question of the future is given shape and, if not answered, clarified.
The essay is able to carry Dillon’s aesthetic hope precisely because it does not pretend to perfection, but rather takes up its imperfection, its incorrigible contingency, and makes of it the condition of the future. He writes:
And for what it’s worth my attachment to [the essay form] seems of the same conflicted order: I want essays to have some integrity (formally, not morally, speaking), their strands of thought and style and feeling so tightly woven they present a smooth and gleaming surface. And I want all this to unravel in the same moment, in the same work; I want the raggedness, the patchwork, the labyrinth’s-worth of stray threads.
You might say I’m torn.
There is something of a cliché at work here. From its proximate beginnings in the self-reflections of Michel de Montaigne, the essay has been a byword for generative contradiction, for a style of writing and of thinking that works by turns in luxurious unfolding and severe contraction. What makes Dillon’s exploration of this well-trodden territory compelling is his willingness to linger over, even, in a certain sense, to radicalize the commonplace contradictions of what is today our most commonly practiced form.
Suppose A Sentence does just this, taking as its materials the most abbreviated element, the sentence, and allowing his mind to unfold around what it might contain. In twenty-eight selected sentences, arranged roughly chronologically from Shakespeare and Thomas Browne to Susan Sontag and Fleur Jaeggy, Dillon’s thoughts range over the personal and the historical, the conceptual and the concrete, drawing on a lifetime of writing about writing.
In the introduction, titled “Sensibility as Structure,” he tells us: “For twenty-five years, I have been copying sentences into the back pages of whatever notebook I happen to be using, using mostly for other purposes,” that is, other essays, other books, other thoughts. That a project has emerged out of the detritus of other projects won’t surprise any writer, but this is something more: it is a kind of play and a kind of attention, which takes the scattered and the worn-down and transforms it into something new, as if breaking into a distinct temporality in which things can be seen growing into themselves, past and future linked by a common becoming. Later, responding to a short sentence of Irish short story writer Maeve Brennan’s, he will write: “The sentence itself is all perspective, practically a dance of gazes.” This itself is a very good sentence, a flash of insight that is enhanced rather than diminished by its derivation from received sources. What makes this possible is its performative, even ritual quality: It makes happen what it describes.
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The name Dillon gives to what he calls this “parallel timeline,” which he uses throughout Suppose a Sentence and as the title for the most recent of the three books is: affinity. It is a curious word, in common parlance now but, as Dillon explores, conspicuously not so for much of modern history. It enters into the lexicon in the fourteenth century, to refer to relation by marriage, an early association with artifice that will soon disappear, though its influence will never entirely cease to operate. Later, as Dillon explores under the influence of Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, affinity takes on, “its most precise and profound meaning,” in the emergence of modern chemistry, particularly in the formulation of the interrelation of elements. He writes:
What did the adepts of affinity imagine they were measuring? It was not the attraction of like to like; in fact, Stengers says, the modern concept of affinity was a rejection of the idea that substances act upon each other because of some resemblance or similitude. In the affinity tables, “the order of the series is determined by the capacity of the reagents to displace and replace another reagent in the series associated with the substance in question.” In this version of the concept, affinity involves attraction and susceptibility, but also a usurping violence. It sounds like a matter of force or mechanics, but the doctrine of affinity was formulated against the quantitative world of force described by Isaac Newton. However rigorous the efforts of chemists to tabulate affinities, they still seem to be studying something quite mysterious—a sensitivity that belongs to matter itself.
It is by way of this mysterious interaction that the term makes its way back into human affairs, in Goethe’s famous 1809 novel, Elective Affinities. In that text, intention and a certain degree of artificiality reemerge in the definition of the word, which he uses to describe the complex and sometimes ephemeral social and romantic decisions among the emergent bourgeoisie (though by the time of Goethe’s writing affinity connoted the inevitability of a law and his characters are the landed gentry—a contradiction well-suited to the eponymous term).
This path from the natural sciences into literature is, if not unique, remarkable. Goethe was in his way an accomplished scientist, and at the end of his life assumed that his lasting contribution would be his theory of colors (hope for Amis yet, then). Another scientific practice of particular interest to him was botany: Still bearing a greater mark of Enlightenment desire for cohesion than his younger Romantic contemporaries, Goethe became convinced of not only an underlying structure for all flora (he made important contributions to morphology which would later influence Darwin’s thinking), but a single, still-extant point of origin, as well, which he called the Urpflanze, or first flower, in search of which he roamed the Italian countryside during his famous visit in 1786–88. Yet it was under the influence of the more radical elements of Goethe’s Romantic peers that affinity would live on in criticism, especially, a century later, in the writings of Walter Benjamin. For Benjamin, after his reading of Friedrich Schlegel, criticism constituted a mutually-constitutive relation between the work of art and the critic, operating on a conceptual plane that accommodates only their finite interactions, rather than any enduring ideal. The distinction here, it is important to note, is not between transcendent rule-following and contingent play, but between a notion of reality as static versus one that is fundamentally dynamic and participatory. The religious connotations here are striking, if not obvious, as the incorporation of German Pietistic enthusiasm into the post-Enlightenment rationalism of the nineteenth led to a rediscovery of a religious plurality within the Christian tradition, as well as beyond it.
I rehearse this potted and incomplete and messy history because all of its strands are active in Dillon’s rediscovery of affinity as a potent resource for critical encounters with art. The longest of the three books by far, Affinities is both a kind of manifesto for his contemplative engagement (or engaged contemplation), as well an ongoing experiment in that form. Ten “Essays on Affinity,” are scattered throughout reflections on specific works of art or particular artists, which seem to be random but are intimately bound, if by nothing else than Dillon’s principled gaze. The essays are almost invariably a mixture of biography, memoir, and critique, such that the images and lives become like icons, returning the gaze of the observer with even greater, if only partially comprehensible intention. Affinities itself, in this light, becomes a kind of Book of Hours, the essays within it dynamic prayers for recitation in the canonical hours of art’s parallel timeline.
The so-called freaks of Diane Arbus’ arouse a particular fervor in Dillon. Again he begins with a cliché, this time split in contrary reception history of the genius, nearly sui generis photographer’s work. Arbus’ early reputation as “sensationalist and exploitative,” has since given way to her being understood as a kind of representative mediator, an advocate and guardian of her peculiar, presumably ostracized subjects. “But of course, no artist,” he idealizes, “is all one attitude, and in the case of Arbus the work seems peculiarly the product of conflicting impulses, interests, and affinities.”
Dillon follows Arbus through her life as a commercial photographer, a life she came to find unbearable, and rather than speak of the development of her sensibility, he searches instead for when the freaks began to speak to her, to draw her eye toward them and draw out of her the singular perspective for which she remains justly famous. The answer remains, by the end of a particularly long chapter (fourteen pages, which is approximately four thousand words, long for a jobbing critic) somewhat obscure. We find Arbus in the context of lurid newspaper photographers, refined New School professors, peer artists, compelling friends; New York City in a time of radical possibility. All contributing factors to Arbus’ work, no doubt, but instead of offering a final account of that work’s strange power, we are given simply Dillon’s experience of the work itself, both through its reception history and critical possibilities, and as mere, superabundant images.
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Elsewhere Dillon writes: “A constant suspicion, unchanged since I was a student: that nothing I write pursues an argument or is built to convince.” But, however much he may continue to fret over this, he also admits that he has come to love the contrast between contemplation and commerce, the necessity borne in upon the writer by simply having to write. Essay writing is not simply argument, even as it must, in some sense, draw the reader in a direction, if not toward a conclusion. It is rather a form of speculative thought, which proceeds not only by logical ordering, but by opening avenues of reflection by whatever means and materials are available, be they well-known or obscure, fresh or hackneyed.
And because it also draws us inexorably into reflection on the conditions of that thought, an unexpected but unavoidable personal and political reformation, it is also something more than mere thought, mere noticing. The tarrying with fragments, the brushes with embarrassment and shame, the ongoing suspicion that the task may not, after all, be worth the struggle; these are features of Dillon’s devotion, not deviations from it. Certain faiths are marked by wild swings between enthusiasm and despair, and criticism is a romantic religion.
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This essay appears in print in Cleveland Review of Books, Vol. 01.
Jack Hanson
Jack Hanson is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at Yale and an assistant editor at The Yale Review.