Affinities
Brian Dillon
Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions
London, 2023

The third installment in a trilogy by the Irish writer Brian Dillon (following 2017’s Essayism and his 2020 masterpiece of comparative literary criticism Suppose a Sentence), Affinities (2023) assembles 30 or so monochromatic images that he deconstructs not so much for their artistic value but for their biographical details and imbedded narratives. Less a collection of art criticism then, or even “historicity,” the book tries, and often fails (by Dillon’s own self-deprecatory admission), to make connections between affinities, and to attempt, in the author’s approximation, to “render the obtuseness of the image with some but not too much acuity.” He even argues in his introduction that to have an affinity for something is not so much “a question of beauty or quality or taste, or other external aesthetic values,” and that the book is something discursive, exploratory, expansive. It is also a leap in the dark, an “idiotic project: naïve, impossible, disingenuous,” the undertaking of a “monkish task . . . while the world went to hell.”

Affinities opens with an engraving from Robert Hooke’s 1665 Microphagia of objects as seen under the microscope (“even the most elegant, precise or selfsame forms are revealed as monsters”), and proceeds chronologically: an 1838 photograph of a cityscape by Louis Daguerre, its four-minute exposure ridding the image of all but one ghostly human figure; a drawing of an astronomical observation of stellar nebulae by John Herschel in South Africa in the 1830s which made Thomas de Quincey think of skulls, death, Milton; a discussion about Dillon’s own history of migraine attacks, with reference to an abstract illustration of scintillating scotoma, “one of the many manifestations of migraine aura.” And then there are essays on the practices of a number of overlooked artists from the 20th century: the studio portraiture of Julia Margaret Cameron; the Dadaist collages of Hannah Höch in the 1920s; the role playing, gender-defying photographs of Claude Cahun; the uncanny self-portraiture of Francesca Woodman. And finally, essays on works by pioneering titans: a William Klein photograph from 1955 (“Klein makes Henri Cartier-Bresson look like an artist of the 19th century: still hooked on picturesque urban anecdote despite the city’s acceleration into cinematic blur”); an infamous Diane Arbus photo of one of her “freaks”; actor Billie Whitelaw’s spotlit, babbling mouth in Samuel Beckett’s maddeningly sublime Not I from 1972; and a 2008 film by Tacita Dean of a pear rotting slowly in a jar.

Between these are ten separate texts in which Dillon wrestles with the meaning of the word affinity and explores the essay as literary device: its form, its function, its use. In one, he ponders whether an affinity is “somehow unserious. Equivalent to, or maybe slightly stronger than, a pathetic appreciation”; in another, he cites Susan Sontag (that other master essayist) who wrote in her diaries that essays do not persuade as much as they produce an effect. Dillon, it would seem, agrees: “The work of the critic is itself a mood, with its own urgency, its own delirium, its own evanescence when its time has gone.”