Through Lines: On Wanye Koestenbaum's "Figure It Out"

The cover artwork of Wayne Koestenbaum’s essay collection Figure It Out has been doing the rounds on social media since it was announced in early Spring. Perhaps this is because it looks so good, on a purely visual level. It feels like something you’ve seen before, and also something completely out of time. Perhaps you yourself have seen an image of the cover of Wayne Koestenbaum’s Figure It Out doing the rounds on social media and been taken in by its lively, intertwined lines, a caricature of confusion. With its 60s design—which reads a little like those early examples of graphic wayfinding on public transport maps— it feels boldly anachronistic, its primary colours already muted. The book isn’t about anything as obvious as understanding our current geopolitical moment, nor about understanding ourselves or each other, but it is a provocation towards understanding. An invitation, a raised eyebrow, a transaction; what do you make of all this then?

And what do we make of it? Koestenbaum’s essays, on the surface at least, are about art and the art world, the minutiae of the everyday, yearning, writing. His voice is both self-deprecating and self-assured as he oscillates between anecdote, theory, criticism and some other things as well. In the first piece “Do You Want To Touch It?” He writes “A full century after Cubism made fracture possible, why am I trying to reproduce this afternoon’s reality in sequential sequences, rather than presenting to you an asyntactic, askew distillation of the events, filtered through a presiding consciousness?” Doubt and obsession are driving forces (he often ‘steps out’ of an anecdote to discuss literary form or other writerly neuroses) but you never get the feeling that you’re in anything other than safe hands.

Passing through accumulated modes and moments, you might find yourself asking what the subject of any given is (the titles don’t tell the whole story) and what these texts set out to be. Koestenbaum is steps ahead: “Perhaps, however, my subject here is simply suggestibility—the capacity to receive suggestions”. These essays are a celebration of a hunch pursued, a line taken of course, or perhaps, a line that’s not even a line at all. He’s constantly remembering, mis-remembering and making seemingly free associations which become whole constellations of thought. The word ‘friend’ becomes the German Fremde which becomes Freidas Kahlo and Hughes. It’s a book populated by other people and their work; everyone from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Emily Dickinson to Walter Benjamin to Hervé Guibert. Literary and art historical references are abundantly available to Koestenbaum, and he he reaches for them habitually, but never in a way which seems expected or contrived, as if he were reaching for his Picasso jacket, which is named so “not because Picasso ever wore such a jacket, or because the jacket resembles one of his paintings, but because I need to discover a name for every desirable object that surrounds me.”

Speaking of the line, one of Koestenbaum’s essays turns its attention to this very subject matter, that is “I planned to turn my back on argument; but then I changed my mind”. He plans to “speak as the line’s prophet, it’s infatuated scribe”. What does he even mean by ‘the line’ here? The artist’s line? The philosopher’s? Something more intuitive altogether? We might not be sure, but we’re going with it, gleefully, moving from Egon Schele to Maria Callas to Picasso. And this is just a single, subjective thread selected from a multitude of possible routes through the essay. You end up tracing your own lines. “The line—the last survivor, always the same—resists erasure, including the erasure I might commit by deciding not to side with its wiry or fat proclamations,” he writes.

Interspersed throughout the short essays are Koestenbaum’s writing exercises. Imaginative and hypothetical prompts which turn the task onto the reader. Some are straightforward enough; go to a gallery, write about a piece of art, etc. Others are more imaginative, about harsh words uttered or collecting small objects of some kind. A reminder that one of Keostenbaum’s many jobs is that of a teacher. In his role as Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center he teaches writing. This impulse feels present in text which opens up as Koestenbaum lets us into, or at least appears to, his processes. The titular essay “Figure It Out” works in a similar way. It’s a series of 43 instructions or nudges which imply a more deliberate or grounded way of existing in the world like “categorize your crushes” or “modify your body this afternoon”. It’s an exercise in sustained thinking, and an open transaction with the reader.

Koestenbaum’s writings are often propelled by forms of desire and longing, whether it be the crush on the curator he spots in an art magazine but never speaks to, or more literal motifs of sexuality and the body. It’s no more evident in ‘The Task of the Translator’. A complex relationship between three people is plotted, they are united by their various roles in writing and translating. Their relationship inevitably turns sexual, and then macabre. But even in his forays into fiction, Koestenbaum’s autofictive voice is still strong, using a ‘Wayne’ character, an academic who is somewhat sidelined from the romantic affair, as one of his protagonists, allowing us as readers to become the audience of his performed satire. He lets us in on the joke, going so far as to make himself the butt of it.

Despite an ongoing concern with shape and form, Figure It Out performs a love of, or perhaps lust towards, language itself, especially in terms of its poetic capabilities. There’s a feeling that, for Koestenbaum, this is as fun as it is serious, and neither of those things invalidate the other. The feeling that working through a set of ideas, if you can even call them that, doesn’t mean arriving at a destination named ‘moment of revelation’. These essays feel huge and minute at the same time, which is interesting because this global moment into which they are emerging has been said to be one of huge concerns which are rendered trivial, and trivial worries which feel insurmountable.

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