A Castaway from his Surroundings
Kevin Breathnach, Tunnel Vision
Faber, 304pp, £12.99, ISBN 9780571340088
reviewed by Mathis Clément
Tunnels are both ways into and out of trouble, dug around obstacles or right through them. Vision is indispensable, but few would say they had had visions. Like a waiter carrying drinks on a tray, the balance of opposites in each word collapses when they are compounded; ‘tunnel’ and ‘vision’ each mean several things, ‘tunnel vision’ means one thing.
The essays that make up Kevin Breathnach’s debut collection are interested in the question of what it means to be one thing, and at the same time be something else without knowing it. Autobiography and art-historical criticism run alongside one another like strangers sharing a carriage, without ever acknowledging that they are on the same train.
The book’s second of three prologues describes the entry in 1971 on a slow train from Leningrad of Lev Kerbel’s 7.10m bronze bust of Karl Marx’s head, which was delivered in 95 separate pieces.
Breathnach is proposing the possibility of inverting a gestalt, which though this book resists being programmatic, could be read as a manifesto for his method. As a narrator he is different things at different times – naïve tourist, incisive critic, truant student, self-aware junkie, promising grandson – but these parts do not attempt to add up to a cohesive whole. It is in the juxtaposition of their discrete points of view that the book creates its narrator, without his realising it.
In the essay entitled ‘Death Cycles’ Breathnach describes his time in Munich, where his girlfriend had found a job, while he walked the city un-intent on doing the same. On the one hand the essay is autobiographical: it describes Breathnach’s day to day periods of isolation and gives an account of his relationship with his grandfather, who had trained him in his youth as a promising footballer. We also learn about Liam Whelan, his grandfather’s brother, who had played as a professional for Manchester United and been killed in the Munich air disaster of 1958; while in the city Breathnach makes a commemorative pilgrimage to Manchesterplatz. Seemingly unrelated to all this is Breathnach-the-critic’s discussion of Munich’s post-war reconstruction and the debates over whether the city’s former monuments, now tainted by association with recent history, ought to be rebuilt: had existing architectural standards been compromised, and if so did that mean a totally new style was required to make a clean break with Nazism? No direct comparison is ever drawn between these two subjects, but each is about how interpretations of the past are used in the creation of a present.
Breathnach’s grandfather leads the effort to reconstruct Whelan in the person of his grandson. But this effort fails. Breathnach did not become a professional footballer. His growth spurt came too late, he was bullied by teammates for his size, he lost interest in the game.
The reconstruction of Munich on the other hand, succeeded in resurrecting the old. Most of the Nazi and pre-Nazi era buildings were rebuilt without modulation, a more conservative decision than was taken by any other German city. At first it seems that ‘Death Cycles’ is distinguishing between public and private relationships with history: for cities and nations history is ever-present, whereas for individuals it is irrecoverable. When the narrator sees a poster asking ‘wer hat ihn gesehen?’ he recognises it as ‘the same question I’d been trying to answer all day’ and we cannot help thinking that it is not Liam Whelan as represented by the Manchesterplatz memorial that he has in mind, but himself.
There are similar affirmations throughout the book, where Breathnach asserts that he is a castaway from his surroundings. In ‘The Lot’, he has scarcely a word to say about the million-strong anti-austerity march taking place in Madrid during his stay, and admits to being ‘[un]conscious of what I would not say until I heard myself not saying it.’ The text however works against the narrator’s self-presentation. At the end of ‘Death Cycles’ as he is taking a photograph of the Manchesterplatz memorial, a motorcyclist crashes ‘just four or five feet away’, ‘bawling in pain’ and clearly in need of urgent attention. He flees the scene, but cannot escape the thought ‘roaring through my mind’ of ‘an inherited memory of my grandfather’s death on this spot fifty-five years ago’. Just as the decisions taken during Munich’s reconstruction form the way its residents see themselves today, so Breathnach cannot, as isolated as he may feel, escape his own family history.
Half of the 12 essays in the book are critical pieces without the autobiographical perspective of the remainder. But even when Breathnach-the-critic holds the floor uninterrupted, concerns about self-presentation, self-editing and self-image as are self-evidently a part of autobiography, are central to the art he discusses, even though his own self is not in sight. ‘Shape of Silence’ is about the work of American photographer Stephen Shore, who takes pictures of motel room interiors, the inside of a fridge, a ‘spent egg’ on a plate. None of the images in American Surfaces (1972) and Uncommon Places (1982) contains the photographer; many do not even contain another human being, yet Shore ‘accepts the label of “autobiography”’ for both series’. If we too accept this label, then we must ask ourselves what is autobiography without a human subject? It is by necessity free of answers to the usual questions: when was so-and-so born, what do they think/feel, what do they look like, when/how did they die? The questions remaining relate to the subject’s being in the world: ‘who would have this refrigerator?’ leads ultimately to ‘how [does] activity define character’? Done like this, autobiography is outward-looking, ‘a commentary about your place in the world’.
Shore’s autobiography speaks through objects, and ventriloquism is one of Breathnach-the-critic’s abiding interests. Reading Barthes on the decline of the journal intime, he writes that:
‘Square Brackets’ addresses the afterlife of Susan Sontag’s diaries, kept secret during her lifetime, now available thanks to her son David Rieff. Rieff’s editorial comments punctuate his mother’s diaries ‘for the most part . . . to impart facts’ in a ‘clipped and objective, even cold’ tone. But his is a double presence; not merely editor, he is also a character whose birth and youth are tenderly described. This double presence offers one possible response to the problem of the ‘I’ no longer being ‘a stable and singular entity’. Twice at one remove from the diaries’ author, Rieff is free to become their real subject. A reader learns more about his childhood than he could know or impart in his own person, and, in the gap between the diaries’ conclusion and their publication, when Sontag is no longer alive to describe him, we infer from his notes a diligent character, a fastidious keeper of his mother’s legacy.
In talking about Sontag talking about Rieff, and Rieff commenting on Sontag, Breathnach is discussing himself. The project of Tunnel Vision is to present a narrator detached and isolated from his own life, who finds out about himself by writing about others. If history, art, literature, and film are able to reveal things about himself that autobiography alone cannot, he must not be as isolated as he feels, but in fact part of a wider chorus of voices. This knowledge may not get through to him, and even if it did may not help him feel any better, but it does propose the possibility that the part of us that feels distant from ourselves may be the part nearest to, and most readable in, others.
The essays that make up Kevin Breathnach’s debut collection are interested in the question of what it means to be one thing, and at the same time be something else without knowing it. Autobiography and art-historical criticism run alongside one another like strangers sharing a carriage, without ever acknowledging that they are on the same train.
The book’s second of three prologues describes the entry in 1971 on a slow train from Leningrad of Lev Kerbel’s 7.10m bronze bust of Karl Marx’s head, which was delivered in 95 separate pieces.
‘Considered alone, how many of the parts were recognisable as Marx? Maybe not the nondescript blocks of his voluminous hair. But a chunk of his muscular beard? Was the arched eyebrow immutably his own? Could the philosopher’s eye imply the whole?’
Breathnach is proposing the possibility of inverting a gestalt, which though this book resists being programmatic, could be read as a manifesto for his method. As a narrator he is different things at different times – naïve tourist, incisive critic, truant student, self-aware junkie, promising grandson – but these parts do not attempt to add up to a cohesive whole. It is in the juxtaposition of their discrete points of view that the book creates its narrator, without his realising it.
In the essay entitled ‘Death Cycles’ Breathnach describes his time in Munich, where his girlfriend had found a job, while he walked the city un-intent on doing the same. On the one hand the essay is autobiographical: it describes Breathnach’s day to day periods of isolation and gives an account of his relationship with his grandfather, who had trained him in his youth as a promising footballer. We also learn about Liam Whelan, his grandfather’s brother, who had played as a professional for Manchester United and been killed in the Munich air disaster of 1958; while in the city Breathnach makes a commemorative pilgrimage to Manchesterplatz. Seemingly unrelated to all this is Breathnach-the-critic’s discussion of Munich’s post-war reconstruction and the debates over whether the city’s former monuments, now tainted by association with recent history, ought to be rebuilt: had existing architectural standards been compromised, and if so did that mean a totally new style was required to make a clean break with Nazism? No direct comparison is ever drawn between these two subjects, but each is about how interpretations of the past are used in the creation of a present.
‘It was often said that I could read the game in a similar style to [Whelan’s], that I was of the same build, and that my growth spurt would arrive soon, by the time I reached twelve or thirteen, just as his had.’
Breathnach’s grandfather leads the effort to reconstruct Whelan in the person of his grandson. But this effort fails. Breathnach did not become a professional footballer. His growth spurt came too late, he was bullied by teammates for his size, he lost interest in the game.
The reconstruction of Munich on the other hand, succeeded in resurrecting the old. Most of the Nazi and pre-Nazi era buildings were rebuilt without modulation, a more conservative decision than was taken by any other German city. At first it seems that ‘Death Cycles’ is distinguishing between public and private relationships with history: for cities and nations history is ever-present, whereas for individuals it is irrecoverable. When the narrator sees a poster asking ‘wer hat ihn gesehen?’ he recognises it as ‘the same question I’d been trying to answer all day’ and we cannot help thinking that it is not Liam Whelan as represented by the Manchesterplatz memorial that he has in mind, but himself.
There are similar affirmations throughout the book, where Breathnach asserts that he is a castaway from his surroundings. In ‘The Lot’, he has scarcely a word to say about the million-strong anti-austerity march taking place in Madrid during his stay, and admits to being ‘[un]conscious of what I would not say until I heard myself not saying it.’ The text however works against the narrator’s self-presentation. At the end of ‘Death Cycles’ as he is taking a photograph of the Manchesterplatz memorial, a motorcyclist crashes ‘just four or five feet away’, ‘bawling in pain’ and clearly in need of urgent attention. He flees the scene, but cannot escape the thought ‘roaring through my mind’ of ‘an inherited memory of my grandfather’s death on this spot fifty-five years ago’. Just as the decisions taken during Munich’s reconstruction form the way its residents see themselves today, so Breathnach cannot, as isolated as he may feel, escape his own family history.
Half of the 12 essays in the book are critical pieces without the autobiographical perspective of the remainder. But even when Breathnach-the-critic holds the floor uninterrupted, concerns about self-presentation, self-editing and self-image as are self-evidently a part of autobiography, are central to the art he discusses, even though his own self is not in sight. ‘Shape of Silence’ is about the work of American photographer Stephen Shore, who takes pictures of motel room interiors, the inside of a fridge, a ‘spent egg’ on a plate. None of the images in American Surfaces (1972) and Uncommon Places (1982) contains the photographer; many do not even contain another human being, yet Shore ‘accepts the label of “autobiography”’ for both series’. If we too accept this label, then we must ask ourselves what is autobiography without a human subject? It is by necessity free of answers to the usual questions: when was so-and-so born, what do they think/feel, what do they look like, when/how did they die? The questions remaining relate to the subject’s being in the world: ‘who would have this refrigerator?’ leads ultimately to ‘how [does] activity define character’? Done like this, autobiography is outward-looking, ‘a commentary about your place in the world’.
Shore’s autobiography speaks through objects, and ventriloquism is one of Breathnach-the-critic’s abiding interests. Reading Barthes on the decline of the journal intime, he writes that:
'It was for neither moral or aesthetic reasons… that writers had ceased to speak in the first person – but because the ‘I’ no longer recognised itself as a stable and singular entity.'
‘Square Brackets’ addresses the afterlife of Susan Sontag’s diaries, kept secret during her lifetime, now available thanks to her son David Rieff. Rieff’s editorial comments punctuate his mother’s diaries ‘for the most part . . . to impart facts’ in a ‘clipped and objective, even cold’ tone. But his is a double presence; not merely editor, he is also a character whose birth and youth are tenderly described. This double presence offers one possible response to the problem of the ‘I’ no longer being ‘a stable and singular entity’. Twice at one remove from the diaries’ author, Rieff is free to become their real subject. A reader learns more about his childhood than he could know or impart in his own person, and, in the gap between the diaries’ conclusion and their publication, when Sontag is no longer alive to describe him, we infer from his notes a diligent character, a fastidious keeper of his mother’s legacy.
In talking about Sontag talking about Rieff, and Rieff commenting on Sontag, Breathnach is discussing himself. The project of Tunnel Vision is to present a narrator detached and isolated from his own life, who finds out about himself by writing about others. If history, art, literature, and film are able to reveal things about himself that autobiography alone cannot, he must not be as isolated as he feels, but in fact part of a wider chorus of voices. This knowledge may not get through to him, and even if it did may not help him feel any better, but it does propose the possibility that the part of us that feels distant from ourselves may be the part nearest to, and most readable in, others.