One Has to Get Around Oneself
Emily Hall, The Longcut
Dalkey Archive Press, 120pp, £11.99, ISBN 9781628973976
reviewed by Nathan Knapp
Emily Hall’s The Longcut possesses no plot, unless an artist walking to and eventually arriving at a meeting with a gallery person, all the while wondering what her work is, while also worrying occasionally about her status at her day job, may be judged a plot. None of the characters bear so much as a name. Characterisation, at least as it’s generally defined both in American MFA workshops and by most Big Five editors, is virtually nil. There’s precious little in the way of story — I don’t feel I’m spoiling anything by saying that towards the end of the novel she finally arrives at the meeting, after which she tears off on another cross-city journey. The novel has virtually no social import. It is a book about the life of the mind, in this case the anxiety of the life of a mind bent on making art but not knowing what kind of art it wants to make. That mind and its anxiety belong to a person who is not described as being young or youthful but nevertheless it is a mind in the process of becoming, which means it amounts to a kind of künstlerroman.
The novel's prose rhythms are intensely Bernhardian, although significantly more flattened in affect and utterly lacking both in the Austrian’s signature spleen or in his hysterical humour, owing less, it would seem to Bernhard’s spiralling or corkscrewing than the seemingly aimless circling of Samuel Beckett, viz. its opening sentences: ‘I was always asking myself what my work was, I thought as I walked to the gallery. As an artist I knew I should know what my work was, I thought as I walked, still I did not know what my work was, could not stop asking myself what my work was, it was impossible to think about anything else. It being acceptable to make art from anything, with anything, about anything’. The Longcut is less a novel about making art than choking oneself out thinking about doing so and, more to the point, thinking about the consequences of not doing so, repeatedly tonguing the gnawing question of whether or not an artist who fails to make art can be said to be an artist at all.
This fear animates and undergirds the entire novel: ‘I asked myself if I could still be said to be an artist of any kind. Was I an artist of any kind or was I a person with an office job looking at her life with a sort of slant.’ How to tell? She borrows a definition of what art is from Jasper Johns, who defines making art as simply being an act where ‘you take something and do something to it and then do something else’. On the other hand, she wonders if ‘perhaps there should be two terms, art and gesture or merely gesture, for work that took something and did something to it but failed to do something else.’ Much of what she sees in the galleries she peruses on her lunch breaks seem nothing more than that, mere gesture, collections of objects presented as art but lacking the life which animates it, and as such, belonging to the category not of art but what Karl Ove Knausgaard calls, in the opening pages of the first volume of My Struggle, the realm of death. For Hall’s narrator, mere gesture in itself seems to belong to the same realm, and yet The Longcut taken as a whole forms an account of the accretion of many such gestures, some of them mere and some not, all of them subjected to the narrator’s ongoing expedition into those most nebulous of questions of what art is or can be and whether or not it can be made. The account itself, like much of Beckett’s work, is heroically unafraid of boring its reader — the narrator spends a frightfully large amount of time considering a small, egg-shaped stone, placing it on a ledge beside her work desk and photographing it — or merely considering photographing it — in different angles of light.
At first glance there is not a lot here, other than the spindling of the narrator’s thoughts, but the novel’s final third is incredibly generous in its ultimate reward for readers who hang in there, revealing a debut novelist striking out into the haunting territory that lies on the other side of the inner workings of one’s mind: to truly figure out what one is doing, to truly figure oneself out, or so Hall’s protagonist finds, is to have nothing to explore, nothing to say, describe, or do — and that is death. ‘I had come fully into my meaning and put my finger through’, she writes. ‘I did not, needless to say, care for it.’
There rings an echo here of the Gospel story of the risen Christ inviting the apostle Thomas, that famous doubter, to put his hand into his wounds in order to know that he has not only risen from death but is, in fact, himself. Thomas, in doing so, finds proof of Christ’s reality, but deprives himself of the ultimate creativity and strength of faith. Hall’s narrator is a kind of Thomas, and her novel an attempt to limn that fundamental doubt which can prove lethal to any artist:
One thinks of the poet John Berryman’s rejoinder to his student W.S. Merwin, as told by Merwin: ‘I asked how can you ever be sure / that what you write is really / any good at all and he said you can’t // you can’t you can never be sure / you die without knowing / whether anything you wrote was any good / if you have to be sure don’t write’. The only way to do this thing, then, this strange and frightful thing that is the work of any serious artist or writer or poet, both in the conclusion of Hall’s narrator and Merwin’s Berryman, is to operate both in the defiance of uncertainty and the refusal of its lethal bed-kin, a crippling excess of self-knowledge. One has to get around oneself to get anywhere. Not an easy task but one, in the end, pulled off here by Emily Hall with elegance and grace.
The novel's prose rhythms are intensely Bernhardian, although significantly more flattened in affect and utterly lacking both in the Austrian’s signature spleen or in his hysterical humour, owing less, it would seem to Bernhard’s spiralling or corkscrewing than the seemingly aimless circling of Samuel Beckett, viz. its opening sentences: ‘I was always asking myself what my work was, I thought as I walked to the gallery. As an artist I knew I should know what my work was, I thought as I walked, still I did not know what my work was, could not stop asking myself what my work was, it was impossible to think about anything else. It being acceptable to make art from anything, with anything, about anything’. The Longcut is less a novel about making art than choking oneself out thinking about doing so and, more to the point, thinking about the consequences of not doing so, repeatedly tonguing the gnawing question of whether or not an artist who fails to make art can be said to be an artist at all.
This fear animates and undergirds the entire novel: ‘I asked myself if I could still be said to be an artist of any kind. Was I an artist of any kind or was I a person with an office job looking at her life with a sort of slant.’ How to tell? She borrows a definition of what art is from Jasper Johns, who defines making art as simply being an act where ‘you take something and do something to it and then do something else’. On the other hand, she wonders if ‘perhaps there should be two terms, art and gesture or merely gesture, for work that took something and did something to it but failed to do something else.’ Much of what she sees in the galleries she peruses on her lunch breaks seem nothing more than that, mere gesture, collections of objects presented as art but lacking the life which animates it, and as such, belonging to the category not of art but what Karl Ove Knausgaard calls, in the opening pages of the first volume of My Struggle, the realm of death. For Hall’s narrator, mere gesture in itself seems to belong to the same realm, and yet The Longcut taken as a whole forms an account of the accretion of many such gestures, some of them mere and some not, all of them subjected to the narrator’s ongoing expedition into those most nebulous of questions of what art is or can be and whether or not it can be made. The account itself, like much of Beckett’s work, is heroically unafraid of boring its reader — the narrator spends a frightfully large amount of time considering a small, egg-shaped stone, placing it on a ledge beside her work desk and photographing it — or merely considering photographing it — in different angles of light.
At first glance there is not a lot here, other than the spindling of the narrator’s thoughts, but the novel’s final third is incredibly generous in its ultimate reward for readers who hang in there, revealing a debut novelist striking out into the haunting territory that lies on the other side of the inner workings of one’s mind: to truly figure out what one is doing, to truly figure oneself out, or so Hall’s protagonist finds, is to have nothing to explore, nothing to say, describe, or do — and that is death. ‘I had come fully into my meaning and put my finger through’, she writes. ‘I did not, needless to say, care for it.’
There rings an echo here of the Gospel story of the risen Christ inviting the apostle Thomas, that famous doubter, to put his hand into his wounds in order to know that he has not only risen from death but is, in fact, himself. Thomas, in doing so, finds proof of Christ’s reality, but deprives himself of the ultimate creativity and strength of faith. Hall’s narrator is a kind of Thomas, and her novel an attempt to limn that fundamental doubt which can prove lethal to any artist:
I saw that the way past death was to do anything I could to unfind the answer to the question of what my work was, to unaccept the fact of knowing the answer, to unknown, uncomplete, unaccept, unclose. I would unsolve for x, I would deny there was an x to be solved.
One thinks of the poet John Berryman’s rejoinder to his student W.S. Merwin, as told by Merwin: ‘I asked how can you ever be sure / that what you write is really / any good at all and he said you can’t // you can’t you can never be sure / you die without knowing / whether anything you wrote was any good / if you have to be sure don’t write’. The only way to do this thing, then, this strange and frightful thing that is the work of any serious artist or writer or poet, both in the conclusion of Hall’s narrator and Merwin’s Berryman, is to operate both in the defiance of uncertainty and the refusal of its lethal bed-kin, a crippling excess of self-knowledge. One has to get around oneself to get anywhere. Not an easy task but one, in the end, pulled off here by Emily Hall with elegance and grace.