Brian Dillon
This text was performed as part of the event MANIFESTO!, held on March 19, 2025, at KGB Bar in Manhattan.
Brian Dillon (far left) at the MANIFESTO! event.
Hey Nineteen
He considers himself, if not a dandy—too awkward, too plain, too poor, and in the end too Irish (even allowing for Oscar)—then at least an aesthete. Everything for its own sake. He is in favor of form as a moral affront, thrilled and consoled by assertions of the revolutionary force of pure (it is never pure) style.
*
He professes an antipathy, a sort of learned allergy, to mere content, or worse: the message embedded in but detachable from a text. This is a remnant of his obsession with pop music and pop criticism. Where is “meaning” in last year’s “Sign o’ the Times” by Prince? In the lyrical effort at Reagan-era social realism or in the weirdly sparse and fleshless sound, like a skeleton had programmed the Linn Drum with bony fingers?
*
George Bernard Shaw once tried to write music criticism with no metaphors. He wants a criticism that is all metaphors. But his own feel overwrought or feeble—he could do with a month in metaphor camp.
*
How should a novel be? It should be The Waves by Virginia Woolf. And a work of criticism? Also The Waves.
*
During an argument with a classically Marxist classmate, he blurts out: “I just believe in the power of theory!” By which it seems he means: the poetic force of theory—not its eloquence, but a capacity to violently remake the world by turning concepts into metaphors: in the blink of an image, all is otherwise. As for the language of criticism, already he defends “jargon” not as necessary professional or disciplinary nomenclature, but as a spell, a curse, ecstatic idiom, a secret. Terminology, somebody will have written, is the poetic moment of thought.
*
Mastery of the critic’s object? No, complete erasure, the ultimate tribute. “There is a delicate empiricism which so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes pure theory.” He has not yet read this sentence, but when he does he will practically swoon.
*
He would not yet phrase it in these terms, but he is drawn most to minor modes. The literary culture of his country prizes poetry first, the novel and play second—there is nothing else. His favorite books are sometimes hardly books at all: collections of essays and reviews, fragments of autobiography, works of philosophy or theory that he admires, no, loves, as much for their prose as their ideas, the brashness or lyricism of voice, as much as concepts invented or applied.
*
A Wednesday morning in the autumn of 1988, he wanders out of a lecture and over to the campus canteen, where twenty minutes later a friend comes bright-eyed from the library, where he has gone with their professor’s reading list. In his hand, a mauve paperback: Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, translator Betsy Wing, introduction by Sandra M. Gilbert—University of Minnesota Press, Theory and History of Literature, Volume 24, 1986. “Brian, I have no fucking clue what it’s about, but it’s brilliant.”
*
An idea of androgyny is the guiding principle of his aesthetics—and politics. He has never been so certain of anything as he is of the necessity of this and all related terms—ambiguity, ambivalence, equivocation, paradox, etc.—which sound weak and academic compared to the god or goddess androgyny.
Prejudice, says another friend, is the purest form of opinion. He practices certain brutal exclusions. The list is long of important books in which he has no interest, and at the top of this list, objects of an almost feverish disregard, are the works of some very prominent living American and English novelists. Boredom, rather than polemic, is his first response to almost all contemporary writing.
*
In criticism he wants a writing that’s ravaged (or is it ravished?) by its own self-awareness. And in life, or in love?
*
Of course he believes in manifestos, and from his local library he keeps borrowing Tristan Tzara’s Dada manifestos; he is not sure about the destruction of art, which he knows little about, but he is for a destructive art, and for a while now has wanted to end a piece of writing, perhaps even a manifesto, with this instruction, delivered to an audience at the Dada Festival at the Salle Gaveau, Paris, on May 22, 1920: Punch yourself in the face and drop dead.
Brian Dillon’s Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism are published by New York Review Books. His memoir Ambivalence: An Education will be published in 2026.