‘There are many people in the oyster restaurant'
Joanna Walsh, Vertigo
And Other Stories, 120pp, £8.99, ISBN 9781909276803
reviewed by Dominic Jaeckle
Vertigo, as with any fear, serves as a form of post-justification. It’s a condition termed to contextualise a feeling and ground an unknown – a cocktail of responsive atmospheres charted as a measurable phobia underneath the guise of a catchall term. The word fails, of course. We think of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and James Stewart’s face will always tell us more of the nature of his bodily response than would the term ‘vertigo’ alone; the sensation is something we can only ever partially share. But that partiality seats a context for a reading of Joanna Walsh’s Vertigo and its inherent scrutiny of the connection between a sentiment, or an emotion, and its expression. What do we do with language’s failings? How do we convey the free associations that coagulate as fears, nervous ticks, anxieties and feelings that sit just beneath the surface, showing more through body than any verbal play could ever muster?
Walsh’s book, trailing after those questions, gives us a matrix of emotions – a scrutiny of the effects of affect that run through behaviour. Presented as a series of pictures, with a near photographic clarity, of that moment of thought that precedes speech – of the minute before we voice a fear – the book plays with language in its promotion of distance, distinguishing the interior from the exterior, highlighting a rendition of personality as a boundary and dictating the ways in which we’re read through our own choice words or observations. But the more fascinating preoccupation throughout Walsh’s writing is how she steps away from a feeling to examine its choice word or definition without ever succumbing to the atmospheres of cliché and conditionality that bunch up around it. This is a book that aims for digression; it’s a literary departure lounge – a zoning in on the thought that precedes its taking leave as word. The failures to reach that end – failures that preoccupy the work and its characters – silhouette the keen and acute charisma prevalent throughout Walsh’s writing. Vertigo is about beginnings – about stepping up to the edge and scarcely about hitting the concrete.
The digression is important for Walsh, as it shows flashes of the truer colours of personality and perspective. Digression here proves a couch for fantasy. Throughout the text, we’re primarily constrained to the facts at hand. We’ve a limited view, an image confined to whatever our protagonist can see from any given vantage point on the scene at work around her. As with a moment of vertigo, it’s not the fall itself that’s at play here but a fear of falling. Here the only means of measurement are personal. We’ll own a distant thing by reinventing it, by distorting it, by exaggerating it, by contextualising it within a myriad of personal insights … by imagining the ledge and by deeming the fall a fiction. How we begin to own a sensation seems be the central concern of Walsh’s work here; the maintained problem, however – and the book’s real success – is that to categorise a feeling, to name it, renders the private public and thereby liable to change. Your vertigo and mine will vary on account of a multitude of heights.
Vertigo, in that sense, is a book about subjectivity, about the ways in which we establish a sense of our place in a scene. The book collects a train of characters slowly moving through a series of spaces that force recollections, however minor, and jar the present slightly open. The recurrent concern is the objectification of experience, whether it involves a restaurant, a café, an evening walk, an eye over someone else’s shoulder at letters addressed to somebody else. How the small nudge of a sign can make manifest a fear, a betrayal, a moment of distrust, an instance of shame, and how, taken collectively, these small objects of fascination cumulatively build a character, a personality. Vertigo. Give it a word and we expect the feeling – we own it, we preempt it, knowing full well that the fall isn’t a fact but an ongoing possibility. It’s ironic, on that card, that the book ends with a near drowning of the text’s keystone – the internal life of a character. For Walsh, facts always lead to questions – to the impossible allocation of an answer – and to an effort to dissociate the immediacy of feeling from the facts of event:
The submerging of character beneath the water-line isn’t the important detail here; it’s the tenor of the ‘if,’ of the allocation of blame, of a need to position an understanding of the private life of personality against the displays of the public life of the body. We need other people to establish an accepted truth – we need other people for an action to find its anchored sense through verbiage. Walsh reduces character to a train of rhetorical questions, to statements of fact that retain ambiguity. Sensations are either spurred on by a sign or inspired by its absence. If there is a fall, the fall will feel like a fiction, but that fiction will always be dictated by beginning at the edge and only ever risking a thought on the possible ramifications of conclusion, on the possibility of hitting the ground. Never drowned and only drowning, the book is a reflection on process – about taking the picture rather than developing the negative, about the fleeting attentions of a subject rather than the recriminations of accepted definition.
Following such a line, finding category for the book has proved meandering. Some critics have probed Vertigo as a collection of short, interlinked stories; others as a novella, as leaning in ambiguously towards argument and the essayistic. Genre swallows meaning in this context – form is just another modal post-justification; a lot can be hidden in vocabulary; an emphasis on subject will lead to objectification. But there are two terms that vitally give the book its atmosphere and confuse its classification: desire and doubt. These playthings to Vertigo’s relationship with constraint and confinement nudge into view and, thematically, fasten an eye on both the book’s form and its content, emphasising the trappings of desire and doubting its possible fulfilment, allowing Vertigo to prevail almost as an expanded Oulipian treatise. We’ll desire an endpoint; we’ll doubt its promise.
Any movement forward is fuelled ironically onwards by retrospection. This theme is arguably best set through Walsh’s use of the restaurant as a trope. Throughout the book, her insistence on the prescribed sense of possibility that persists within a restaurant renders the space literary. In the restaurant anybody’s hand proves forced by circumstance, anybody’s choices bred by constraint. In our sense of the space, we exist with the allure of a freedom; we’re there by choice – choices determined by the day we’ve had, the company we keep, the various conclusions that we’ve come to and termed them as arrangements. But the illusion of freedom in our arrangement of choice is the restaurant’s gambit – the restaurant becomes a contrary fiction of chance and determinism, an image of subjectivity in slight decay. The camera pans from table to table – capturing a brief montage of questions and statements, answers and retorts – but while a multitude of different arms undulate around different tables, the restaurant maintains the same name. The menu commands a kind of language game: as we try and parse our choices, needs and wants relative to the various phrasing of dishes, we’re all caught speaking in the same vocabulary – a view dictated by the organisation of tables and chairs as a kind of edict.
In Walsh’s restaurant, our choices are all determined, marking a submission to that particular theatre at that particular time of day. We wait to be entertained. Satiated. To remember the various processes that spur on digestion. The eating for the sake of eating or the eating for the sake of hunger. Although the space celebrates the possibility of difference, subjectivity is haunted in Walsh’s restaurant. We’re all at the mercy of the restaurant’s choreography as it becomes a prop for self-examination and a prompt to promote the examination of others:
Any talk of a ‘they’ is parried by the ’I’ that does the eating, however. In chewing the fat, the plate’s contents are changed irreparably – digested and termed as something more totally and inherently ours before it’s put away. The menu becomes fiction, or the prelude to its authorship at the very least. But in this instance the food doesn’t arrive. The service is slow. Consumption is regularly maintained over the text as a trope with which to frame the division between the internal and external, between the past and present. Shifting attention to alcohol, drunk becomes code for reminiscence, a way of looking backwards: ‘Drunk. Something that happens to you, like a glass of water, and that happens in the past tense, even as you are drunk in the present, as the action taken to provoke the state was taken in the past. You drink and then you are drunk.’ In the bath, the water aids in a simulation of old age: ‘That will be when you have ended up,’ Walsh writes; the rest ‘is a fake, a mere waiting.’ The onus of expectation marks the brilliance of Walsh’s writing, framing her efforts to deliver an expanded view of a ‘literature’ that drifts between public and private points of determination.
Across Vertigo Walsh structures and dismisses various fantasies on distance. That we can never measure the distance between the page and our own perceptions – that we can only think on a possible impact – is key to the book’s pertinence. Vertigo is a play on the negative function of expectation, of the slippage of thought into language, of an inability to pin thinking down in writing, of an inability to hit the floor. Although her prose may veer towards melodrama on occasion, Vertigo reads as an important tract on observation and how we entertain ideas rather than simply settle for entertainment. Walsh dissects the ways in which we personalise space by passing through it. She focuses on an alienation of symbolic value, and how we alienate ourselves from others; she focuses in on the ways in which we’ll own a fear by fantasising on the fall itself and never on the ramifications of having fallen. On the ways in which we avoid the reality of ever hitting the ground.
Walsh’s book, trailing after those questions, gives us a matrix of emotions – a scrutiny of the effects of affect that run through behaviour. Presented as a series of pictures, with a near photographic clarity, of that moment of thought that precedes speech – of the minute before we voice a fear – the book plays with language in its promotion of distance, distinguishing the interior from the exterior, highlighting a rendition of personality as a boundary and dictating the ways in which we’re read through our own choice words or observations. But the more fascinating preoccupation throughout Walsh’s writing is how she steps away from a feeling to examine its choice word or definition without ever succumbing to the atmospheres of cliché and conditionality that bunch up around it. This is a book that aims for digression; it’s a literary departure lounge – a zoning in on the thought that precedes its taking leave as word. The failures to reach that end – failures that preoccupy the work and its characters – silhouette the keen and acute charisma prevalent throughout Walsh’s writing. Vertigo is about beginnings – about stepping up to the edge and scarcely about hitting the concrete.
The digression is important for Walsh, as it shows flashes of the truer colours of personality and perspective. Digression here proves a couch for fantasy. Throughout the text, we’re primarily constrained to the facts at hand. We’ve a limited view, an image confined to whatever our protagonist can see from any given vantage point on the scene at work around her. As with a moment of vertigo, it’s not the fall itself that’s at play here but a fear of falling. Here the only means of measurement are personal. We’ll own a distant thing by reinventing it, by distorting it, by exaggerating it, by contextualising it within a myriad of personal insights … by imagining the ledge and by deeming the fall a fiction. How we begin to own a sensation seems be the central concern of Walsh’s work here; the maintained problem, however – and the book’s real success – is that to categorise a feeling, to name it, renders the private public and thereby liable to change. Your vertigo and mine will vary on account of a multitude of heights.
Vertigo, in that sense, is a book about subjectivity, about the ways in which we establish a sense of our place in a scene. The book collects a train of characters slowly moving through a series of spaces that force recollections, however minor, and jar the present slightly open. The recurrent concern is the objectification of experience, whether it involves a restaurant, a café, an evening walk, an eye over someone else’s shoulder at letters addressed to somebody else. How the small nudge of a sign can make manifest a fear, a betrayal, a moment of distrust, an instance of shame, and how, taken collectively, these small objects of fascination cumulatively build a character, a personality. Vertigo. Give it a word and we expect the feeling – we own it, we preempt it, knowing full well that the fall isn’t a fact but an ongoing possibility. It’s ironic, on that card, that the book ends with a near drowning of the text’s keystone – the internal life of a character. For Walsh, facts always lead to questions – to the impossible allocation of an answer – and to an effort to dissociate the immediacy of feeling from the facts of event:
On my head is my mouth, which is above the water-line, and with which I could call someone on the beach to my drowning. But my mouth is connected to my lungs, which, being below the water-line, are cold, and so constricted by water as to make the action of shouting difficult. If I stopped swimming to tread water enough to raise my head, if I inflated my lungs enough to call them, I would no longer be able to push against the current, and then the shouting would not be loud enough, not in the right language, and do no good, and, even if they are good people, and attentive, they may not be able to act in time. If I drown whose fault will it be? The fault of the waves, the lack of a sign, the fear inspired by the sign, lack of sufficient muscle?
The submerging of character beneath the water-line isn’t the important detail here; it’s the tenor of the ‘if,’ of the allocation of blame, of a need to position an understanding of the private life of personality against the displays of the public life of the body. We need other people to establish an accepted truth – we need other people for an action to find its anchored sense through verbiage. Walsh reduces character to a train of rhetorical questions, to statements of fact that retain ambiguity. Sensations are either spurred on by a sign or inspired by its absence. If there is a fall, the fall will feel like a fiction, but that fiction will always be dictated by beginning at the edge and only ever risking a thought on the possible ramifications of conclusion, on the possibility of hitting the ground. Never drowned and only drowning, the book is a reflection on process – about taking the picture rather than developing the negative, about the fleeting attentions of a subject rather than the recriminations of accepted definition.
Following such a line, finding category for the book has proved meandering. Some critics have probed Vertigo as a collection of short, interlinked stories; others as a novella, as leaning in ambiguously towards argument and the essayistic. Genre swallows meaning in this context – form is just another modal post-justification; a lot can be hidden in vocabulary; an emphasis on subject will lead to objectification. But there are two terms that vitally give the book its atmosphere and confuse its classification: desire and doubt. These playthings to Vertigo’s relationship with constraint and confinement nudge into view and, thematically, fasten an eye on both the book’s form and its content, emphasising the trappings of desire and doubting its possible fulfilment, allowing Vertigo to prevail almost as an expanded Oulipian treatise. We’ll desire an endpoint; we’ll doubt its promise.
Any movement forward is fuelled ironically onwards by retrospection. This theme is arguably best set through Walsh’s use of the restaurant as a trope. Throughout the book, her insistence on the prescribed sense of possibility that persists within a restaurant renders the space literary. In the restaurant anybody’s hand proves forced by circumstance, anybody’s choices bred by constraint. In our sense of the space, we exist with the allure of a freedom; we’re there by choice – choices determined by the day we’ve had, the company we keep, the various conclusions that we’ve come to and termed them as arrangements. But the illusion of freedom in our arrangement of choice is the restaurant’s gambit – the restaurant becomes a contrary fiction of chance and determinism, an image of subjectivity in slight decay. The camera pans from table to table – capturing a brief montage of questions and statements, answers and retorts – but while a multitude of different arms undulate around different tables, the restaurant maintains the same name. The menu commands a kind of language game: as we try and parse our choices, needs and wants relative to the various phrasing of dishes, we’re all caught speaking in the same vocabulary – a view dictated by the organisation of tables and chairs as a kind of edict.
In Walsh’s restaurant, our choices are all determined, marking a submission to that particular theatre at that particular time of day. We wait to be entertained. Satiated. To remember the various processes that spur on digestion. The eating for the sake of eating or the eating for the sake of hunger. Although the space celebrates the possibility of difference, subjectivity is haunted in Walsh’s restaurant. We’re all at the mercy of the restaurant’s choreography as it becomes a prop for self-examination and a prompt to promote the examination of others:
There are many people in the oyster restaurant and they all have different relations to each other, which warrant small adjustments: they ask each other courteously whether they wouldn’t prefer to sit in places in which they are not sitting, but in which others would prefer them to sit. Sometimes entire parties get up and the suggested adjustments are made; sometimes they only half get up then sit down again. Some of the tables in the restaurant face the beach and have high stools along one side so that some diners face the sea and others, the restaurant, but both, each other’s faces. Because of the angle of the sun and of the straw shades over the tables, the people who face the sea are also more likely to be in the shade. Not everyone can face the sea, not everyone can be in the shade.
Any talk of a ‘they’ is parried by the ’I’ that does the eating, however. In chewing the fat, the plate’s contents are changed irreparably – digested and termed as something more totally and inherently ours before it’s put away. The menu becomes fiction, or the prelude to its authorship at the very least. But in this instance the food doesn’t arrive. The service is slow. Consumption is regularly maintained over the text as a trope with which to frame the division between the internal and external, between the past and present. Shifting attention to alcohol, drunk becomes code for reminiscence, a way of looking backwards: ‘Drunk. Something that happens to you, like a glass of water, and that happens in the past tense, even as you are drunk in the present, as the action taken to provoke the state was taken in the past. You drink and then you are drunk.’ In the bath, the water aids in a simulation of old age: ‘That will be when you have ended up,’ Walsh writes; the rest ‘is a fake, a mere waiting.’ The onus of expectation marks the brilliance of Walsh’s writing, framing her efforts to deliver an expanded view of a ‘literature’ that drifts between public and private points of determination.
Across Vertigo Walsh structures and dismisses various fantasies on distance. That we can never measure the distance between the page and our own perceptions – that we can only think on a possible impact – is key to the book’s pertinence. Vertigo is a play on the negative function of expectation, of the slippage of thought into language, of an inability to pin thinking down in writing, of an inability to hit the floor. Although her prose may veer towards melodrama on occasion, Vertigo reads as an important tract on observation and how we entertain ideas rather than simply settle for entertainment. Walsh dissects the ways in which we personalise space by passing through it. She focuses on an alienation of symbolic value, and how we alienate ourselves from others; she focuses in on the ways in which we’ll own a fear by fantasising on the fall itself and never on the ramifications of having fallen. On the ways in which we avoid the reality of ever hitting the ground.