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PARTISAN REVIEW
dallied in the recent literary pyrotechnics of the academy, with rather
unfortunate results: his efforts to ease the pressure of literary depiction
by translating human conflict into semantic tension ring false:
"It
is a
terrible concession to make the crossover of the white space beloved of
Mallarme." Such derring-do, like his fondness for obscurantist
lingua
franca-"telos,"
"reification," "plenum" -and his overuse of the
absence-presence dialectic-"I know the difficulty of being another's
imminence" -so dear to structuralists, shows up what could be Brod–
sky's most potentially grievous flaw: his precocity.
Detour
reeks of its
own talent; it is uneasily ahead of itself, racked by an off-putting
discrepancy between intellectual savviness and emotional naivete. Too
often Brodsky's precocity fails to rise to the occasion it sets for itself and
totters into mere showing off; see how many books I've read, movies
I've seen, paintings I've studied, records I've carefully listened to. One
pays attention at such moments the way one would to a feverish, brainy
child-wearily indulgent of its assumption that
every
permutation of
thought,
every
vacillation of emotion is of supreme concern.
"I was guilty of inbreeding," Brodsky writes, ever the astute
observer of flawed performance, his own included, just as he has earlier
commented upon Ingmar Bergman's "preoccupation with artistic,
masturbatory, pathologically detached types." In some vital sense
Brodsky's criticism of Bergman can be applied to himself:
Detour
is,
finally, pathological in its lordly detachment, its shimmering isola–
tion; it is comprehensible without being altogether accessible. But if
the novel doesn't quite "rend the tissue of solipsism," it has taken a
compelling, valiant stab at liberation. Michael Brodsky has written a
heady, compelling account of those interior lower depths in which
normative, unspoken boundaries have collapsed. "Collusion with his
captors," writes Brodsky about one of his many cinematic aliases,
"frees him from himself, his hands need no longer go through their
futile exercises, their parody of self-manipulation." Shades of Beckett,
and Dostoevsky, of all the underground men who strive to transform
impediment into grace, who write their way up into "the ration of
blear we mistake for light" and thereby provide a necessary and
difficult illumination.
DAPHNE MERKIN
