Meaning at All: On Emily Hall's "The Longcut"

Emily Hall | The Longcut | Dalkey Archive Press | 2022 | 144 Pages

In an essay titled “Pretty Things: Beauty and Desire and (Sort of) Uncomplicated Pleasure,” novelist and MoMA NYC publications editor Emily Hall invokes the controversial art critic Dave Hickey, particularly his theory of aesthetic beauty as the core value of art. She writes: 

He’s not talking about empty-headed prettiness, but rather for admitting that we are, for whatever reasons, attracted to things. In a 1995 interview Hickey said, ‘Beauty’s... what makes secular art possible, since it creates conditions under which we might voluntarily look carefully at something... Beauty is what we like, whether we should or not, what we respond to involuntarily.’...I’m not easily swayed by uncomplicated pleasures. But does it matter? Hickey’s definition of beauty undoes its tyranny: We can’t be terrorized by beauty if we never apologize for our taste.

The unapologetic is not popular these days, but Hall appears to be one of those creators immune to the plague of self-censure (Sarah Nicole Prickett is another notable exception from the contemporary art sphere), refusing to kowtow or have her lip buttoned, a stealth provocateur. Her unapologetically smart, eloquent, and languagey debut novel The Longcut brings a cornucopia of connections to mind—Being John Malkovich-era Charlie Kaufman; Tom McCarthy’s debut novel, Remainder; that Rick and Morty “it’s a simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation!” episode. It’s a novel that similarly works through ideas instead of didactically declaiming them. Its genre is speculative art fiction.

If waiting in line to look at Marina Abramovich (and to be implacably gazed back at in return) makes you break out in the proverbial hives; if you look at an Agnes Martin and go “it’s just lines, it reminds me of a notebook”; if Duchamp strikes you as a clown and if Susan Sontag’s anti-interpretive musings induce eye rolls; this might not be your bag. A slim but dense 144 pages from indie imprint Dalkey Archive, Hall’s book plates a complex morsel of intelligentsia. If you’ve spent hours at art galleries, lit readings, and music venues wondering why some poser is being cooed at in the gallery, droning on at the lectern, or performing quite badly on the stage; if you’ve decided to abandon that obtuse artiste, prat poet, or overlubricated non-musician and walk out tout suite in search of the true quill; well then come join us on Emily Island.

Eddying and spiraling at both the paragraph and sentence levels, The Longcut is a formalist’s specimen, a grown-up’s think piece. Though the novel opens with a potent and symbolic egg made of granite or marble that, like so much in Hall’s prose, manages to elide, confound, and invert cliché, her traditionalist side recalls another excellent recent work that unpacks enduring art, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, where George Saunders opines: “Every human position has a problem with it. Believed in too much, it slides into error… What I admire most about Chekhov is how free of agenda he is on the page—interested in everything but not wedded to any fixed system of belief… this feeling of fondness for the world takes the form, in his stories, of a constant state of examination.” Hall’s nameless protagonist, her defining quality is that she relentlessly examines. And in the face of life’s terrors and its grind, staying open-minded has become very difficult in the modernity of 2022, to free oneself of agenda daunting. The resilience needed to seek instead of believe, an author imbibing the world and the self openly, this is what impresses most in Hall’s debut.

Our narrator-protagonist is a struggling artist with a monotonous urban office job that involves moving numbers from one column to another. The work that pays her bills provides the grind, and the work to which she’s devoted her life, her visual art, provides the terror. She’s an obsessive:

My drawing of cancerous pin-prick circles had been in fact also part of a doomed attempt to quit smoking, to discover an activity that would take the place of the smoking break in leading me to the answer to questions that presented themselves to me that I could not answer, an activity that would resultantly take me less often past the glass door of my boss’s office and his slant looks, thus a double-agent action or activity helping me to do two things at once, or three if I counted, which I was forced to do, not encouraging or amplifying the cells gearing themselves up in my lungs.

This is a book where objects and people and how they’re defined by, or defiant of, context provokes an original and unpretentious musing on Wallace Stevens’s jar in Tennessee. There are pocket-sized cassette recorders and VHS tapes, and that egg (featured as the book’s cover image), positioned forebodingly on a ledge in the narrator’s workspace—suggesting her unhatched art career, especially when contrasted with her male friend, an accomplished artist feted around NYC and the world—and hanging over the story like a precarious supra-analog, a pre-digital life-and-death femme totem looked at askance by an ever-looming bossman figure who wishes she’d stop taking so many smoke breaks and get back to moving things into the “completed” column. This “completed” column permeates the novel while the phrase “time, passage of” appears in multitude, populating the text the way “b/w silver gelatin” recurs in an austere gallery’s photography exhibit.

In place of whodunnit reveals, witnessed crimes, or unearned epiphanies comes the point at which the artiste-narrator realizes that the most interesting status position in her day-job columns is not the initial question or value, nor the “completed” column, but the “pending” column. She starts to explore why humans are so damned uncomfortable with the unlabeled, the liminal, the in-process. The pursuit of utopia she finds fascistic and dystopic, and that’s about as political as this book gets. There’s no onerous virtue signaling here, and there’s a refreshing dearth of “hang in there” platitudes or “it’s all futile” excoriations. The narrator worries about whether her art has meaning, and whether she should seek meaning at all. She also worries about paying the bills. For a heady book, Hall’s remains grounded in “real world” concerns, in depicting anxiety instead of whinging about it. Artists, in this book, are not trust fund dilettantes or special little aliens of twee. They’re child raisers, rent-paying adults, working-class finders of solace in nicotine.

The Longcut wonders whether clinamen expose the existence of larger patterns and should have readers wondering whether this is an example of a “systems novel.” DeLillo fans and backers of Helen DeWitt, this book’s for you. Familiar with Artforum and BOMB but irked when Hyperallergic goes too listicle? Into Elvia Wilk’s “the new weird,” Emily Segal deconstructing the art-lit tesseract, or Lauren Oyler’s razor-wire criticism? Join us! You contemplate determinism and its relevance to not just philosophy but existence? We meet on Tuesdays! If you think of art as something that points the way to something not yet alluded to, that this is the primary purpose of art, then we’ll be ignoring what Twitter insists we ought to be enraged at today and riffing on Hall’s mélange of sanity and insanity, grids and slants, lapses vs. ruptures, and how the artist must be a disruptor, must defamiliarize, must be “aloyal,” like her character’s aforementioned reference to the double-agent.

Hall is not an ideologue who wants to replace art-as-flexible-attention with art-as-inflexible-intention—the didactic goal of those who seek to weaponize art, to give it a “point” or “use,” who see it as a means not an end. Her book endeavors to stimulate, not to mollify, as she herself did in her previous manifestation as an art critic at Seattle-based alt-institution The Stranger. She seems disinterested in appeasement altogether.

Instead, Hall’s terse novel examines the etymology of rend vs. render and fills a circuitous story with video cameras, not camera phones. She references Lynchian amputations and Hitchcockian observations, Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, and Joyce’s time in Zurich. “How do you find out really what a work means, the truth about any art object, the truth that anyone looking at it would see, I considered as I slogged home after my job had ended for the day.” The artist within capitalism is her subject, though never obviously or abjectly framed. Short pages roam and ruminate but never ramble. “Do artists chase meaning or does meaning chase artists seemed to me as I slogged to be not an irrelevant question,” the narrator posits. Hall’s protagonist raises more questions than she answers, abjuring trite declamations and causes célèbre.

So is there a gap between art and life? A pertinent query for those who write and read, who attend to the culture in a devoted critical manner. But how many “creatives” in 2022 are following Bob Dylan’s dictum to stop trying to find ourselves and instead create ourselves? If the tenor of this review sounds contrarian, that’s because too many so-called critics are predecided, ultimately more invested in amassing armies of the likeminded via social media and ascending some clout-industrial complex than articulating definitive ideas about culture. This is neither creative nor critical. It’s anti-intellectual pawning to the publicity industry. What Hall understands is that we’re all situated within the world’s extant themes and contexts, contingent but not necessarily victims. Preparing to meet the gallerist who’ll make or break her, who could change her life and career for the better with a “yes” or send her reeling with a “no,” the narrator considers this concept, the Philip K. Dickian notion of “predeciding”:

Attempting not to predecide whether the meeting was an error, deciding that strongly attempting not to telegraph constituted a type of telegraphing, I gave it—the not telegraphing—up, even as I felt signaling was still the more pathetic enterprise, more pathetic than strongly attempting to not telegraph, recalling and considering how often—on the subway platform or other places where people are or seem to display themselves—I was forced to think about the ways in which what people wore was intended to telegraph or signal or alarm or constitute a batsqueak or code, of what exactly, or, I was forced to ask myself, were people simply putting on garments they liked—another way of looking at it—was it only me who guessed everything and then the opposite, was it only me flinging meaning at objects merely doing their everyday jobs.

Predeciding alludes to a psychological formulation, the self-fulfilling prophecy, usually the result of that overused buzzword “anxiety.” Yet the meaning of clothing and the telegraphing of one’s aesthetic as an attempt to control perception, to prevene the opinions of others, is a philosophical question more than a psychological one. And women, of course, are objectified more often, taught or programmed (by society and biology alike) to ensnare attention of a certain sort and deflect or armor against an undesired corollary breed of attention—the sociology of self-defense, or survival in the most Darwinian sense.

What’s the difference between attempting to manipulate the opinions and receptions of others and “fraud” anyway? Hall’s narrator wonders. What’s the alternative, not trying to make an impression? A refusal to issue a “statement”? The protagonist’s deceptively simple line “was a garment a private or public space” evokes a timeless political question while remaining neutral. Object/nonobject and voyeur/exhibitionist dualities proliferate in The Longcut, but political correctness does not.

An April 2001 column of Hall’s titled “Laughter Permitted” begins with the lines: “No one wants to talk about feminist art. People wince nervously, or cough and change the subject. It’s not, I think, just that the idea has the icky tint of unshaven legs and goddess painting. It’s simply because the proposition is full of contradictions.” Hall’s vision of the art life is thus necessarily comic because real art (and real feminism) is vocational, is the opposite of a shortcut.

Hall left Seattle to escape deadline journalism and work on a novel. “I like art that’s motivated by ideas. Some care about the visual end of visual art. I care more about the conceptual end.” Conceptual art appeals to her “because it leads us toward thoughtful relationships with objects whose meanings aren’t easily, dopily accessible.” In The Longcut, technique serves ideas while language pursues intended effect—to promote and promulgate deep thought, serious-minded deliberation about the worth and substance of art.

Despite its apolitical vibe, or at least its political exasperation, The Longcut remains an ideological redress to fascism. How? By asking whether or not metaphors are inherently fascist. The artist is stuck in a bind: transgress or conform, realism or avant garde. Pulitzer-winning poet Vijay Seshadri has said, “what’s at the heart of writing poetry is making metaphors and I don’t quite know if that can be taught.” Hall’s gifts are those of a metaphorist, her transition from art critic to museum archivist to novelist imbuing her own artmaking with an awareness of the binary prisons of point/counterpoint, representative/abstract, highbrow/lowbrow, male/female, beautiful/ugly.

Nor is literature reducible to plot/character. The Longcut is treatise-like and manifesto-y but its minimalist characters and pencil-sketch plot are effective, addictive, and gamified in the best way, studiumed and punctumed like accomplished still photography. Hall’s book works because it won’t be confined. The plot hinges on a protagonist’s desire and tension stems from whether it will be fulfilled. The characters are archetypical yet new (or, creatively mimetic): a serious British printmaker with her young son, a downtown professor of visual and media studies, that successful artist friend who makes a killing setting up “situations,” the boss who side-eyes the narrator and would have her relinquish the abstract for the utilitarian, the gallerist who hoarsely interviews the narrator and deems her art (insult or compliment, it’s up to the reader) math-like.

We’re all and always participants in life and observers of life. At perhaps the apotheosis of this text, the narrator finally gets out from behind the glass of her work window to enter the grid, to perpend a road sign that’s fascinated her from afar. The artist, as a signifying figure, is eternally in-between, Schrodingered and Frankensteined, mediated: “I was the botched transition between one and the other,” says the narrator.

Freedom or commitment. Liberation or constraint. What does the artist need and in what measure? Is there a difference between realization, validation, and abreaction? Art and life both consist of near constant options where one pursues a thing and thus discards all others, incepting infinite multiverse versions (all the time!). Learning to live with abiding restlessness, the intrinsic value of the quest, the fusion of order and chaos, are these overarching goals? Or are goals, especially idealist or purist ones, the problem?

The Longcut provokes fundamental questions. Hall’s book is a mobius strip, more glitch than matrix, both existential and Heideggerian, portraying life as absurd and life as inescapable, until death anyhow: a spiral, a loop, an infinity sign, a doing + being plasma state, a vibrating string. The capital-R Real artist’s duty? Make and unmake alike.