Theorising Geoff Dyer theorising
An Essay about an Interview about a Journey to a Memoir
I begin with a P.S. – a quick reminder that I shall be chatting with the Times columnist James Marriott at Special Rider Talks (£3 and there are drunks), in Shepherd’s Bush Market, just by that station, under the arches, about reading, writing, criticism, English studies, and my recently published novel The Boys:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/author-leo-robson-in-conversation-with-james-marriott-tickets-1414658003169
b) The main event of this week, at least from the narrow perspective of this Substack (though perhaps not only), is the New Left Review’s long interview with the writer Geoff Dyer, which I conducted a little while ago with some editors from the journal, and which has just dropped under the title ‘Theory in the Air’ on the NLR’s widely discussed, no-longer-new website outpost, Sidecar. I have put a link to the interview – which I think is fascinating and also funny – at the bottom of this page, after some supplementary or contextual thoughts on Dyer’s relationship to the kinds of Marxist and theoretical writing which we discussed at our encounter. . .
Theorising Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, ends with the future writer in his late teens, leaving grammar school with the three A grades required to take up his place at Oxford – the moment which more or less provides the starting-point for our interview about his intellectual education.
As an English student at Corpus Christi, Dyer received his first exposure to continental ideas as well as to English Marxism. On graduating, he moved to London, where he started buying works of cultural theory and criticism from Compendium in Camden, where he picked up books by Terry Eagleton and Theodor Adorno, among others, and Collet’s on Charing Cross Road, where in March 1983 he bought a copy of the book-length interview which Raymond Williams, Francis Mulhern, and Anthony Barnett conducted with Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters, for which Dyer wrote an introduction in 2015. (The introduction is terrific, and the new edition, a dark green, with orangey-yellow and white writing, a pleasure to hold.) Homework is more or less book-ended by quotations from key writers in the NLR tradition: Williams’s The Country and the City is the source of epigraph, while E P Thompson provides the conceptual climax. But this is not generally typical of Dyer’s work. His taste for analysis and subject matter of the kind explored by post-war historians and theorists – a very loose bunch, a nuance made clear in the interview – was most evident in the essays and reviews, the majority of them uncollected, which he published when he was in his mid-to-late twenties, the period of his career closest in time to the one that the new book recalls.
In ‘Anatomy of Brixton,’ which appeared in New Society in late 1987, shortly before it folded into the New Statesman, Dyer described the area’s mixture of immigrants and bohemians as ‘an emergent culture’ – a concept derived from Williams’s The Long Revolution – and expressed the belief that this community would produce ‘the seeds of new progressive political formations.’ A review in the New Statesman around the same time ended by asserting that the advent of the Angry Young Man scene of the 1950s was ‘a literary event that occurred at a particular moment of socio-historical conjuncture’ – a key term in Marxist writing in various languages, and cognates of which both Williams and Thompson used in the NLR. He also made the illuminating point that the ‘jaded and impatient militancy’ of that period, being ‘rooted in a loss of faith in politics in general,’ was therefore expressed as ‘personal disgruntlement’ – i.e. as an individual, more than a collective, struggle. It followed that because the phenomenon was in fact ‘general’ it was manifested in the work of a number of writer, but ‘variously rather than consistently’. In a moment jarring or at least notable to readers familiar with Dyer’s later priorities as a writer and reader, he also notes in passing that Kingsley Amis was ‘sometimes pretty funny’, before adding ‘big deal.’ (He would possibly still hold by the argument that Amis was ‘a writer whom anyone seriously concerned with literature can take pride in not having read.’)
For a brief period, ideas of engagement and conscience were to the fore in Dyer’s writing. His first book, a study of the socialist writer and activist John Berger, Ways of Telling (1986), started life as an interview in Marxism Today. Writing about Eagleton’s novel Saints and Scholars, he was keen to stress that ‘there is no other academic in Britain whose fiction I would have read so eagerly.’ He called Andrei Tarkovsky a ‘politically necessary artist’ and Tony Harrison – another figure who, like Williams and Thompson, quite rightly reappears in Homework – ‘exactly the kind of poet the English left has always wanted.’
Dyer never became a go-to reviewer on political topics or writing in the Marxist tradition. Though he wrote about C L R James’s book on Melville for the weekly listings magazine City Limits, the editors found other reviewers for, say, Gramsci’s selected writings, Thompson’s The Heavy Dancers, Hal Foster’s Postmodern Culture, the reissue of Sartre’s Nausea, and Noreen Branson’s History of the Communist Part of Great Britain 1927-1941. At this time he was beginning to write regularly about what became his pet subjects: jazz, music, photography, war, sport (football, boxing, tennis, athletics), and what, writing about Martin Amis – another recurrent concern – he called ‘American writers, themes, and places.’
1989 seems to have been a turning-point. This was when Dyer put his library into storage. It was also when he started to write for the Guardian. Dyer himself – writing in 1993, in the Guardian – identified as a catalyst or flashpoint the moment in 1990 when he was flying back to England from New York when a friend gave him a book, ‘complete with black endpapers,’ published by Zone Books and purchased at the St Mark’s bookshop in the East Village. Foucault/Blanchot contained two essays, one by Foucault on Blanchot, one by Blanchot on Foucault, which, he was convinced, were published never to be read – a book so short as to be ‘almost textless.’
His relationship to more arcane – primarily French – approaches had always been ambivalent, an English scepticism that stopped far short of incuriosity or disdain. In 1984, writing about Peter York, he contrasted him with commentators who, instead of wearing their learning light, clomp around in it: ‘(signifier this, Saussure that)’. But later the same year, he talked about the ‘complex synchronic pattern’ that John Berger’s arguments form in the reader’s mind, invoking one of Saussure’s central ideas – the atemporal (non-diachronic) process whereby the signifier is able to signify. And reviewing John Carey’s collection Original Copy in 1987, he ridiculed the inaccuracy of the book’s ‘expected swipes at structuralism,’ the approach derived in large part from Saussure’s posthumously assembled course of lectures on linguistics.
But it wasn’t just the textless texts that Dyer turned against. In another article published in the Guardian in 1993, he announced: ‘I no longer take dense theoretical tomes to read on planes’ – an extremely rare use of the word ‘theoretical’ in his work. Still, he has never changed his mind about the pleasures of his early predilections or tried to slight its influence on the formal freedom and discursive fluency – and occasionally the subject matter – of the many books he has published in the three decades since, as is amply demonstrated in this interview.
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/theory-in-the-air