Style, like femininity, is embarrassing. When style is deemed excessive—which for some can mean merely perceptible—it is dismissed as frivolous, distracting, deceptive, artificial, superficial, cosmetic, a bourgeois affectation, the opposite of substance, anathema to argument, at once too much (flowery, ostentatious, verbose) and not enough (the emptiness of vanity), an impediment on the way to what every writer must want: to communicate clearly.
Brian Dillon leans into these embarrassments. An Irish critic and professor, Dillon has written what he calls “a loose trilogy,” each volume sparked by the enchantments of style in writing and visual art.[1] His latest title, this year’s Affinities: On Art and Fascination, follows Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction (2017), a fragmented meditation on essayistic style that veers in and out of a memoir on depression, and Suppose a Sentence (2020), a kind of annotated commonplace book, with sentences Dillon has culled and copied from his reading heading off each chapter. Affinities, like its predecessors, often spirals around shame: he recounts a “shameful memory” of an academic paper he gave as a PhD student that was criticized for relying entirely on sheer, insubstantial affinity; he calls his attempts as “a lower-middle-class Irish teenager” to mimic the aristocratic aesthetics of Brideshead Revisited “crudely embarrassing”; he is plagued by the “constant suspicion” that he’s incapable of persuasion, a suspicion he seems not entirely to assuage by assuring himself that all that matters in criticism is “mood.”[2] Style and affinity appear as frequent touchstones across the three books, often stylized with loving, leaning italics, though Dillon declines to define either term with much specificity. Style is “that old-fashioned thing”; affinity is “a little bit stupid.”[3]
Dillon’s trilogy is an ode to such stupidity as much as to style. Dillon is, he confides in Essayism, “stupidly, ruinously susceptible to a certain artifice at the levels of structure, syntax and sound.”[4] He introduces Affinities as having come out of the “idiotic project” of staring stupidly at pictures during the 2020 lockdown in London—idiotic in the sense of “naive, impossible, disingenuous” as well as, etymologically, “uncultured, uncivil, private.”[5] We encounter the resulting selection of eclectic pictures chronologically: a microscopically magnified full stop in Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia; a 1919 photomontage by Hannah Höch; a still from a 1965 Andy Warhol film of Edie Sedgwick watching herself on video; an untitled 2009 photograph of a rose by Rinko Kawauchi; and about two dozen others, mostly photographs, many of them by women or with female subjects, most of them by white Europeans and Americans. Black-and-white reproductions are positioned on an otherwise blank page to accommodate our blank stares, followed by short essays that often insightfully reflect on the images, the artist’s biographies, and, sometimes, Dillon’s autobiography. These reflections are interspersed with numbered essays, varying in vagueness, on “Affinity.”
What, besides stupid, is “affinity”? To summarize Dillon’s multiple essayistic attempts at a definition, affinity is the feeling—the mood? the vibe? he likes the immediacy effect of trying and failing to find the right word—of something like love, or like fascination, the sense that a photograph or drawing or woodcut or film still has so arrested you with wonder and astonishment that you, as if stricken by the Medusa herself, have been rendered both completely helpless and yet, as Freud reminds us, not entirely unmanned.[6] Dillon is also attuned to the affinities between his objects. Writers and artists who’ve had starring roles in some essays return in cameos in others, both within and across the three books, as if we’re being let in on a private cinematic universe. Dillon comes across as a mostly analog Gen Xer, but in his avowed pleasure in recognition he shares an affinity with social media-addicted millennials and Zoomers who enthuse over recognizing themselves in images (“it me,” as the popular meme caption goes) and, more generally, recognizing things in other things: it’s giving affinity-coded vibes that have the same energy as other affinity-coded vibes. Dillon’s description of his viewing practices as “a mode of dumb fascination” also earns him an affinity with young women with doctorates who call themselves bimbos on Twitter and claim they “can’t stop thinking about” a celebrity quote.[7] No thoughts, head empty, just affinity.
It is difficult to argue with Dillon’s distaste, across the three books, for argument; in Essayism, he announces that he is “allergic to polemics.”[8] By effusively insisting on his embarrassing tendencies, he makes it difficult to criticize them; it can feel like there’s little for the reader to do besides share the embarrassment, little to do at all besides feel, or succumb to stupefaction. But it’s hard to avoid the impression that Dillon’s apologizing for directionless aestheticism is a tacit tactical move; it’s an apology in the sense of a passive-aggressive defense. For affinity, it turns out, has enemies: academics. Claiming to have been found wanting by the disciplinary demands of academia and deciding he wants nothing to do with it, Dillon, who received his PhD in English from the University of Kent and teaches creative writing at Queen Mary University of London, aligns himself with a growing contingent of academics and ex-academics who like to pretend that there’s no room in academia for love, no place for humanity in the humanities, painting their peers as joyless, robotic, and anesthetically ideological.
In Affinities, academia is a fuzzily personified buzzkill, a supervillain superego who periodically emerges from the shadows to threaten us with a bad time. After acknowledging that approaching art through affinity might constrain our scope to artists and subjects of our own identities and backgrounds, Dillon stages a little drama to summon and summarily dispel that risk: “A voice intervenes—the voice of the academy, perhaps—and says: Yes, but what are the politics of all this? And I want to answer: As yet to be determined.”[9] The heart wants what it wants, and Dillon often wants to want, a confession of desire that also reads as an admission of lack. “Affinity insults the academy,” he announces at the beginning of another essay, as if English professors working in fields such as cultural studies, Black Studies, and even plain old Renaissance literature weren’t producing celebrated books that implicitly or explicitly eschew traditional disciplinary methods of subject matter selection and argumentation.[10] The enthusiasm of academic departments and university presses for creative nonfiction and “hybrid genres” that mix literary criticism with memoir has done nothing to dampen the persecution complex of those who insist that academia has declared their love illegal. In some of its permutations, the academic humanities’ reductive conflict between affinity and argument smacks of gender, casting what David Kurnick has called literary studies’ “method melodramas” as a battle of the sexes: the merciless forces of logic, history, and other forms of phallic linearity accosting the soft, fragile, ethereal flittings of affinity.[11]
And many of the images and artists Dillon finds himself attached to are nothing if not fragile, ethereal, and imbued with feminine mystique: the blurriness of Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs, due to a technical incompetence that her contemporaries scoffed at but Dillon finds charming; “the dark miracle” of Dora Maar’s art; the “inhuman blur” of Francesca Woodman’s self-portraits; the sitter for a William Eggleston photograph who looks “as if she might disappear”; the “signifying ooze” of actress Billie Whitelaw’s voice in her performance of Beckett’s Not I (“I felt I had no body,” Dillon quotes her as saying after collapsing following the first rehearsal).[12] He “cannot quite shake the suspicion that [architect and designer Eileen] Gray did not exist,” perhaps a manic pixie dream girl all along.[13] He is frequently drawn to androgyny.
Dillon’s uneasy and largely unavowed alignment with femininity, his fascination with women’s ungraspable bodies and bodies of work, always seeming to oscillate between identification and desire, was for me both the most compelling and the most frustrating aspect of Affinities, and I kept waiting for his signature self-consciousness to kick in, for hands to wring and embarrassments to pile up, for him to say something like, “Wasn’t this all a bit—what’s the word?—feminine? Or perhaps just a little queer?” His affinity for women artists seemed to me a perfect opportunity to explore what it means to see oneself in someone different from oneself, to begin to determine what the politics of all this might be. It could also perhaps lead him to ask why the men and women whom he considers, though they represent a variety of gender expressions, sexualities, nationalities, and class backgrounds, are overwhelmingly white—not necessarily an indictment, but nevertheless a potential limit on the reach of apolitical affinity. But Dillon never explicitly remarks upon the overrepresentation of women as his subjects in both Affinities and Suppose a Sentence, as if we’re meant to congratulate him for the unthinking naturalness with which he came to affiance himself with a majority-female roster.
At the same time, this is an unthinkingness that was, we’re made to understand, hard-earned. In Suppose a Sentence, Dillon lists some authors he admires and then apologizes for the list’s “dismaying maleness.”[14] After expressing shame for not having read Elizabeth Bowen earlier, he quickly supplies some names of female novelists he has read, as if staving off our construal of his avoidance of Bowen as sexism. He carefully separates himself from “venerated, or formerly venerated, male essayists, those bearded oracles, orotund declaimers,” and from those who would so dismayingly venerate them, but he also wants to insist that not all male essayists are bad; some of them, after all, weren’t so rigid.[15] He ends Suppose a Sentence with an attempt at a feminist resignification of the Shakespeare quotation (“O, o, o, o,” from Hamlet) with which the book begins: citing Anne Boyer’s retelling of Rousseau’s sexist story of the illiterate little girl who kept drawing the letter O over and over (Boyer suggests the Os might have some kind of meaning for the girl), Dillon concludes, “O, o, o, o was a revolutionary code.”[16] Maybe. It also literally adds up to nothing.
At moments like these, I felt like I was on an interminable first date with a man who wanted nothing more than for me to assure him that he’s definitely read enough women writers. These gratuitous graspings for feminist approval also throw into relief the times when women aren’t brought up but perhaps ought to be. A chapter in Affinities about a wonderful nineteenth-century illustration of a migraine scotoma, and Dillon’s own harrowing first attack of migraine as a teenager, alludes to the physician Hubert Airy’s observation that the condition has disproportionately afflicted “learned men, especially scientists, more especially astronomers,” but says nothing of the fact that the vast majority of migraine sufferers—85%—are women.[17] What does it mean, this unspoken and unwilled connection not with a handful of extraordinary women artists who have managed to escape or disappear their bodies but with the many ordinary, generic women who find themselves trapped inside them? As yet to be determined.
The one time we do see Dillon at least implicitly grappling with his own complex identification and disidentification with women, or rather a woman, is a chapter in Affinities that movingly recounts his unlikely affinity with his paranoid, reclusive aunt Vera. Vera is in some ways the negative image of her sister-in-law, Dillon’s beloved mother, who died of autoimmune disease when Dillon was a young man and whose depressive sensitivity he sees, again and again across these three books, replaying in his own personality. (“To write,” he says at one point, “means to find reasons to tell you about my mother.”[18]) Dillon portrays Vera as a nasty, unveracious woman, holed up in her house and anxiously patrolling its borders, her avid photography hobby (up to and including the installation and constant monitoring of CCTV cameras on her property) spurred by a need to impose a security state on the neighborhood rather than a desire for openness to aesthetic experience. And yet, Dillon reflects, he himself is not so different: incurably attracted to images, stuck on small details, unable to look away, at risk of letting the world contract to the lens of a camera or, at least during the early stages of the Covid pandemic, the walls of a book-filled room. But with the all-too-human earthly form of his elderly aunt no less than with the heavenly sprites of modernist art, the fact that Dillon finds himself in specifically feminine form goes unremarked upon.
Vera reminded me of another female double of a male writer, her inferiority to her male counterpart also underlined by her literal limitation to a domestic interior: the narrator’s spinster aunt Léonie in Swann’s Way, confined to her sickbed but constantly surveilling the world through her window, “reading” the “chronicles” of the street, collecting details to recount later to her visitors or her maid.[19] Proust’s narrator, like Dillon, makes much of his obsession with his mother, but it’s his aunt (actually a distant relative) who plays one of the most important roles in the novel: it’s Léonie who gave the young narrator madeleines dipped in tilleul, Léonie’s house that is the first to rise up years later through the force of involuntary memory, followed by all of Combray, from that famous cup of tea. Constricted as Léonie’s physical world is, she offers the narrator a path out of the dull linearity of genealogy: the path of obliquity, of queerness, of art, an art that begins with looking. It’s Léonie who makes him a writer. “Léonie!” I wrote in the margin of Affinities, thrilled to feel my mind filling with memories of the first time I read Proust, almost twenty years ago.
I too, after all, am afflicted by affinity. I like when things are like other things. I alliterate. Like Dillon, I copy down sentences I like in a commonplace book; I copied down many of his. When I read, I often find myself surrendering, stuck in a stupefying suspension, to the mise en abîme of echo, allusion, and self-referentiality in, for example, a simile in Paradise Lost that recalls a simile from the Aeneid, likeness squared across languages and centuries. I also love style that’s elegant and lithe, that accomplishes something like what Dillon describes the dancer Loie Fuller as pulling off with her silky, chrysaline costumes: the resolution of the cumbersome, embarrassing body into clean lines of text or textile. (Fuller’s “disappearance into the dance,” Dillon writes, “is the more impressive because physically she was far from the narrow, angular ideal” of the time.[20]) Is Dillon so drawn to women artists because they seem to best model a way out of embodied experience, to aestheticize the ungainly self into a wisp, a flash, a blur? Why does he tell us, in an appendix he calls an “imaginary collage” of images that failed to make the book’s final cut “but will not leave the mind,” that the only things he can draw are “zigzag lines that here and there suggest bodies” and “the head and shoulders, but not the body, of Betty Boop”?[21]
“What we took for Style,” D. A. Miller recounts early in his semi-autobiographical work of literary criticism, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, “everyone else took for Woman.” Miller is recounting his childhood shame upon the realization that his early love of Austen’s novelistic style, of the imperious impersonality through which he hoped to escape the awkward embodiment that marked him and other gay boys as objects of ridicule, instead marked him all the more indelibly as a consumer of women’s culture, as a Janeite. A style-struck boy like him, he learns, is doomed to wake up to the reality that, “during his intoxication, just as Lydia Bennet had done to another would-be soldier in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen had put him in a dress.”[22] Dillon’s apparent lack of concern that a similar misprision might befall him, that he might be similarly taken in by that defeminized style that betrays feminine origins, is in a sense laudable: admiring and identifying with women’s art as a man is, of course, nothing to apologize for. But then why apologize for style and affinity at all, for the passive position of letting images “go to work” on the mind, for the affective relations to art—love, appreciation, “aestheticism”—that seem less serious because of their associations with femininity?[23] What Dillon seems to sense, but cannot or does not want to admit, is that what he takes for Style, that always incomplete sublimation of the embarrassing body, others take for Woman.
Notes:
[1] Brian Dillon, Affinities: On Art and Fascination (New York: New York Review Books, 2023), 314.
[2] Dillon, Affinities, 211, 239, 275.
[3] Brian Dillon, Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction (New York: New York Review Books, 2017), 12; Dillon, Affinities, 13, original italics.
[4] Dillon, Essayism, 47.
[5] Dillon, Affinities, 15.
[6] In his essay “Medusa’s Head,” Freud compares the sight of female genitals, which the boy takes as proof of the threat of castration, to that of the mythological monster’s decapitated head. But the source of this horror also produces a counteracting effect: “The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone. Observe that we have here once again the same origin from the castration complex and the same transformation of affect! For becoming stiff means an erection. Thus in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator: he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact.” Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” in Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 264–65.
[7] Dillon, Affinities, 15.
[8] Dillon, Essayism, 13.
[9] Dillon, Affinities, 152.
[10] Dillon, Affinities, 211.2
[11] As Kurnick puts it, summarizing the dynamics at play in this debate, “In one corner: violence, aggression, mastery, delusions of grandeur; in the other, modesty, openness, attention, curiosity, receptiveness. With positions so morally overdetermined, it is easy to see on which side we are expected to line up, harder to see the intellectual meaning of a choice so motivated. The opposition is moreover exaggeratedly gendered: one critic, emphatically masculinized, threatens to overpower a vulnerable text to whose actual content he pays no heed—unless another critic intervenes to rescue it, to attend to it with the modest, patient responsiveness of the perfect mother or nurse.” David Kurnick, “A Few Lies: Queer Theory and Our Method Melodramas,” ELH 87, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 349–74, 358–59.
[12] Dillon, Affinities, 40, 127, 181, 197, 205–6.
[13] Dillon, Affinities, 130.
[14]Brian Dillon, Suppose a Sentence (New York: New York Review Books, 2020), 16.
[15] Dillon, Suppose a Sentence, 70.
[16] Dillon, Suppose a Sentence, 221–22.
[17] Dillon, Affinities, 65, and Marlene Cimons, “Why do women suffer more migraines than men?,” The Washington Post, October 13, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/why-do-women-suffer-more-migraines-than-men/2018/10/12/6ad47e8a-c66b-11e8-b1ed-1d2d65b86d0c_story.html.
[18] Dillon, Affinities, 252.
[19] Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1: Swann’s Way, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (New York: The Modern Library, 1992), 70–71.
[20] Dillon, Affinities, 76–77.
[21] Dillon, Affinities, 301, 305.
[22] D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 2–3.
[23] Dillon, Affinities, 14.