When I met Brian Dillon in February 2023, he seemed to have a lot on his mind. We had arranged to speak about Affinities, the newly published final instalment of Essayism, his sprawling three-part survey of literature, art and aesthetics. That morning, as he sipped decaf coffee in a quiet corner of the Barbican Kitchen café in London, he still didn’t know what his book was about. ‘At this point you don’t,’ he confessed. But even though he hadn’t made up his mind about Affinities, Dillon had already begun to think about his next project. It was to be a memoir of his education, called Ambivalence. This has now come to fruition. It’s clear from the opening pages of this aptly titled volume that Dillon is still trying to work out not only what his books, but all the books he has read, are about.
For all his protestations of not knowing, Dillon is exceedingly well educated. He holds a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin, and is something of a polymath, with a grasp of subjects that range from literature and philosophy to music and photography. His modesty places him in good company. We might recall that Socrates was pronounced the wisest man in Greece precisely because he believed he possessed no wisdom at all. In Ambivalence, Dillon sets out to demonstrate, using his life as a case study, that education is just as much about questioning things as it is about obtaining answers. For him, education takes place in the act of seeking knowledge through reading, and, as he puts it, his own youth was spent ‘searching for a future’ through books.
We meet ‘B’, as Dillon refers to himself, as a teenager facing a ‘tedious predicament’: his mother has died, leaving him at a ‘fretful standstill’. He deals with grief by hunting for reading material. Shortly after her death, he stands ‘for an age’ in a Dublin bookshop, looking at a shelf of Roland Barthes’s books and considering whether to steal them. (He doesn’t at this point know that, coincidentally, Barthes wrote his Camera Lucida while dealing with the death of his own mother.) By the end of the ensuing narrative, which spans a decade during which B also loses his father, he is studying for a doctorate in literary theory and remains under the spell of the French theorist. He is struck by the following extract from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes: ‘I spread myself around: my whole little universe in crumbs; at the centre, what?’ He finds in Barthes’s question an intellectual outlook that he resolves to adopt: one that is characterised by omnivorous curiosity, but also chronic uncertainty.
Dillon is a staunch advocate of the idea that theory and personal experience inform one another. Reading Ambivalence, one can’t help but sense that the family tragedies of his adolescence made uncertainty especially attractive as a guiding principle. ‘Ambivalence’ and its associated terms (‘ambiguity’, ‘equivocation’ and what he describes as ‘a kind of abstract androgyny’) have long been his comfort zone. A central line in Affinities is ‘I see only tatters of clearness through a pervading obscurity.’ It makes sense, then, that B is attracted to Barthes and other rather indecipherable writers such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Another of his heroes is that famously ambivalent modernist Virginia Woolf. Dillon recalls how, at a time when bereavement and its implications proved impossible to address (he was unable even to ‘wonder if the fact of his own mother’s death affected him or signified’), he found relief in Woolf’s experimental 1931 novel The Waves. Her narrative, which consists of cryptic soliloquies spoken by six characters, seemed to confirm his growing conviction that ‘depths are obfuscating’ –that is, the more we experience, the more opaque things can seem.
The problem is, ambivalence is not particularly conducive to conventional success in the education system, with its rigid focus on performance in examinations. Dillon tells us that as his private reading diverged from the work that he was expected to do at school and university, he encountered repeated failure and was even required to resit his A-levels. Nowadays, despite his writing having found admirers in academic circles, he still tends to situate himself outside the academy. When we met, he declared himself ‘incapable’ of cultivating the kind of sustained attention required for a university career. He preferred to describe himself as a sort of Renaissance curioso, engrossed in esoteric details but without a grasp of the bigger picture.
This attitude is evident in his writing. Dillon is capable of supreme linguistic precision; for instance, he uses words such as ‘curdles’ and ‘soured’ to great effect when describing subtle shifts in his own emotional state. But his work can also be, like that of Barthes, digressive to a point of frustration; flitting without warning between literary analysis, personal reflection and social commentary, his studied ambivalence at times coming across as an avoidance strategy.
What, then, does Ambivalence amount to? Perhaps simply the assertion that uncertainty has its own value. This is persuasive when we acknowledge just how often, as politicians demonstrate for us daily, people lay claim to conviction that is unearned. At the start of the memoir, we meet B as a boy who, standing at a crossroads, ‘considers his limited options’. By the end, despite considerable personal tragedy, he has accessed an open-minded way of thinking through books that, in their complex variety, carry ‘the promise of promise itself’. This is a surprisingly hopeful book. While obscurity may not automatically equate to profundity, the state of being uncertain carries with it a rich source of possibility.
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