Four Inspirations for Push Process

Below is a piece that was originally published on the website of Lunate journal. Since Lunate is sadly no more, and the website seems to be defunct, I'm reposting it here.

My novel with photographs, Push Process, is about Richard, a postgraduate student researching in Venice, who abandons the archive to take photographs. It’s a work of autofiction, based in part on the years I spent as a historian of that city around the turn of the millennium.* Here I want to acknowledge some of the book’s fictional inspirations: four novels and one film.

 

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner 

One of the unwritten rules for autofiction is that it cannot be an exercise in wish fulfilment: the protagonist cannot be more talented, attractive or successful than the author, and indeed, it’s better if they are obviously less so. In some cases, this commitment is taken further: the protagonist is presented as the worst possible version of the author. Their selfishness and weakness are exaggerated instead of their talents. There's a perverse kind of integrity in this approach, but it has its own pitfalls. I subscribe to Aristotle’s view that a protagonist should be admirable to excite our interest: that is, they must have some admirable quality alongside their flaws. 

Leaving the Atocha Station is a modern Kunstlerroman – a variation of the coming-of-age plot that tracks the growth of a young artist to maturity. As such, it is/was an obvious model for Push Process, not least because it has an Anglo protagonist, Adam, muddling his way into a European culture whose language he’s having difficulties with. Indeed, the best parts of Leaving the Atocha Station are its dramatisation of the suspension or deferral of meaning that occurs when trying to understand and communicate in an imperfectly understood language. 

Lerner was already an accomplished poet when he wrote this novel, with several published collections to his name, but the same cannot be said of Adam, who is on a Fulbright scholarship in Spain as a poet, but spends most of the book avoiding writing, though perhaps ‘he’ has subsequently written the novel we are reading, which is told in the first person – there’s always some ambiguity about the ontological status of a first-person fictional narrative that does not directly dramatise the circumstances of its own production. Indeed, we have little evidence of Adam’s facility as a poet: the novel contains only two short extracts of his work, one self-consciously a cobbled-together fragment, the other a short published piece presented without comment. 

The word ‘fraud’ recurs frequently in Adam’s narration – for him, there is no possibility of living an authentic life: the limit of his ambition is instead for his fraudulence to become ‘a project and not merely a pathology’. His admirable quality is perhaps simply that he is able to express this dilemma with brutal honesty in the book we are reading, but in a sense that’s a problem, because of the contrast between his inarticulacy in person and his belated eloquence on the page. 

There was an interesting thread on Twitter a while back about fictional works of art (or literature) within novels, and whether these ever really work. The person who started the discussion was of the opinion that they are always bathetic: better to suggest the content of such works by allusion or paraphrase rather than attempt to reproduce or describe them in detail, especially when the art in question is visual. In other words, whenever a character is successful in their artistic career, reproducing their work in detail undercuts the verisimilitude of that plot point, because it is never convincing enough on its own terms. 

There are several possible counter-examples to this: Doctor Zhivago includes numerous poems by the protagonist, though interestingly many of them are presented as paratexts in an appendix outside the narrative proper. And like Lerner, Pasternak was a successful poet before he was a novelist. I am an admirer of AS Byatt, whose major novels all include lengthy extracts of work attributed to her protagonists: poetry, novels, and ekphrastic accounts of pottery, painting, theatre and even television programmes. Though even she does not attempt to create examples of the visual art, but limits herself to describing it. 

I was a photographer before I was a novelist: that is, I spent several years working on the project that forms the basis for Push Process before I ever thought of using these images as the basis for a fictional narrative. But I was not a success. So Push Process is taking a risk by including not only a few samples of the protagonist’s photography, but ‘his’ entire body of work: that is, the 48-image sequence that concludes the novel is (more or less) what I would have put together if I’d ever had the opportunity to publish a photo book under my own name. It seemed to me this risk could only work if I fully accepted the ban on wish fulfilment. That is, Richard, my protagonist, could only be as (un)successful as I was. So his admirable quality is not that he’s a talented photographer. Rather, it’s that he gives himself totally to his work. 

The features of Leaving the Atocha Station I've emphasised here are presented as comical: it’s a funny book. And Lerner didn’t need to shoehorn his poetry into the narrative, since he’d already published it elsewhere. So likely all I'm expressing here is the anxiety of influence. But I spent much of Leaving the Atocha Station frustrated with Adam: I just wanted him to do something, to commit himself. And so, in response to this, I wanted a protagonist who did things, who risked failure, and thereby exposed himself to the reader’s judgement. 

The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis 

For such a short, uncomplicated story, Push Process had a very lengthy and difficult gestation. First of all, there was the photography project itself, which has existed in several different iterations since 2008, one of which was actually published in an academic journal in 2011 (though in retrospect I’m not happy with that version). Then a first attempt at a novel that was too effective at presenting the protagonist as the worst possible version of myself. I submitted this version as my thesis for an MFA in creative writing in 2014, and one of the examiner’s comments was, ‘What does this character want?’ And I had no answer to that question. Because that version of the character had many compulsions, but no desires. For him, even photography was a compulsion. And the difference between a compulsion and a desire (at least in narrative terms) is that the former produces repetition and the latter results in change.

That first version of the novel was written in the middle of a long relapse that I wasn’t able to acknowledge as such at the time (because I wasn’t drinking, so I could kid myself I was sober). It is therefore a book mired in the thought patterns of addiction, condemned to reproduce those patterns without ever being able to stand outside them. In fact, about fifty per cent of that version is included more or less verbatim in Push Process. And yet Push Process reads very differently: because it has a direction, and Reciprocity Failure (the title of the previous version) did not. In other words, in Push Process, the protagonist wants to take photographs, and that desire constantly evolves, and changes him as it does so. 

Anyway, The Queen’s Gambit: a book about the queasy interplay between addiction and art – in this case, chess –, between compulsion and desire. And it’s one of the strengths of the novel that chess remains a compulsion as well as a desire for Beth Harmon (I have therefore simplified this dynamic in my novel). But what I took from this book was the conviction that a single desire, if sufficiently complex, and if explored with sufficient commitment to that complexity, is all you need for a compelling story. Chess does have the advantage of external markers of achievement that involve direct competition with others: that is, to progress you have to defeat other players. So conflict (and hence drama) is built into it, and The Queen’s Gambit is really a sports story with a relentless forward movement: climbing the ladder, defeating opponent after opponent, each more formidable than the last. It’s a very simple and repetitive structure, but it’s never boring because of the purity and intensity of Beth’s desire. 

Photography isn’t agonistic in the same way, even if it sometimes seems that one must compete for attention or likes in the brave new world of Instagram (or the old one of galleries). But there aren’t really any opponents (or if there are, you’re doing it wrong). The drama is internal: the conflict is against the medium itself, or against our own limitations in encountering its possibilities, and one of the challenges is that (as Richard puts it to himself) you can’t define a winning move in advance, but only retrospectively. So the movement of the story isn’t as clearly defined as in The Queen’s Gambit; nonetheless, in every single chapter of Push Process, Richard sets himself a new challenge and attempts to figure out how to meet it. So it becomes a kind of puzzle-posing and puzzle-solving structure.

Pickpocket by Robert Bresson

   

Reciprocity Failure, the abortive first version of Push Process, was an attempt at an existentialist novel, in the tradition of Notes From Underground, Nausea or Good Morning, Midnight. I think changing the protagonist’s orientation from compulsion to desire has attenuated its links to that tradition. But it retains a connection to Robert Bresson’s film Pickpocket, ‘the story of a man who loved to steal, and sacrificed everything to his passion’. If one replaced ‘steal’ with ‘take photographs’ this tagline fits Push Process equally well. 

Michel, the hero of Pickpocket, is alone. His choice to become a pickpocket is an attempt to put this condition to use: to redeem it by turning it into a vocation. And ironically, perversely, this choice actually inducts him to a devilish pseudo-community of fellow pickpockets, who sometimes work together as a team. But membership in this community is a false escape from his predicament: it only fixes him more definitively in his loneliness and causes him to reject the love of Jeanne, who offers a truer way out. 

Photography was my attempt to put my solitude to use, and thereby to accept it fully. In Push Process, I even describe the photographer as a pickpocket: or rather, this is advanced as a possible comparison, but one which is ultimately rejected. I give my protagonist a happier fate than Michel: for Richard, photography is born from a genuine social impulse – his encounter with new friends – and it forms the basis for a deepening relationship with them. And these are real friends, not devilish tempters. This was another significant change from the earlier version of the story in Reciprocity Failure, and it also separates Push Process from the existential works mentioned above, which are all committed to the idea of solitude as the arena where the struggle to create meaning necessarily takes place. 

The sequence in Pickpocket where Michel trains alone in his room is justly famous, in part because of its influence on similar sequences in the work of the screenwriter and director Paul Schrader, for example, in Taxi Driver when Travis Bickle creates a homemade gun slide, and practises its use. The scene in Pickpocket is also an example of the ‘cinema of process’. This mode is characterised by the meticulous description of a sequence of physical actions, which are shown 'from outside', that is, without any explicit explanation or interpretation, and often without dialogue. These actions usually involve expertise and skill, and are directed to a specific (often criminal) end. Many of Bresson's films include such sequences. (More recently, several episodes of Better Call Saul include set pieces of this kind.) Anyway, the scene in Push Process where Richard assembles and reassembles a large-format camera in his flat in Venice is a direct homage to Michel training. Another scene in a darkroom is similarly inspired by the cinema of process.

 
A Line Made By Walking by Sara Baume

A novel about making art (or trying to make art) is not an exhibition catalogue. If Push Process is merely a backdoor way of publishing the photobook I couldn’t persuade anyone to take on in 2008 (and again, in a different iteration, in 2021) then it probably fails as fiction. Perhaps Leaving the Atocha Station is a more committed attempt to embrace and articulate this difference: to separate poetry as an independent art form from a narrative account of trying to be a poet. Or, put more positively, if photography was my attempt to do something with solitude, then Push Process is an attempt to do something with my failure as a photographer. 

There are actually a few photographs interpolated in Lerner’s novel, but they are free-floating, not attributed to anyone. By contrast, the photographs in Sara Baume’s second novel are directly attributed to her protagonist, but they are a relatively modest part of the book, more of which is dedicated to brief written descriptions of real works by other artists, which are the protagonist’s attempt to test her understanding of art history and measure her own work against the achievements of others. Insofar as A Line Made By Walking is a Kunstlerroman, it’s not about the journey towards success, but rather about doubt and failure, entropy and death. And how sometimes our only recourse when faced with these things is to look at and describe them carefully. 

In Push Process, Richard is never really troubled by doubt: that is, despite his lack of external success, he never experiences failure on his own terms. And unlike Adam in Leaving the Atocha Station, he's never distracted by the possibility that he is a fraud. I just didn't want to write about that after twenty years of false starts with this material – years in which, after my final visit to Venice as a historian in 2008, I barely picked up a camera. In 2020, I borrowed a DSLR and started photographing again, and got excited all over again by the medium. Only then was I able to revisit Reciprocity Failure and transform it into Push Process. So my novel is not about how to succeed. I am singularly unqualified to write about that. It's not really about failure either. Instead, it's about how it feels to create something. But that desire does not exist in isolation. In Push Process, photography is not a withdrawal from the world, but an encounter with it. And ultimately that’s true of Baume’s novel as well.

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* Edit: Above, I described Push Process as a work of autofiction, mainly because it includes photographs, which depict what the novel says they depict (with one or two minor exceptions). Moreover, the novel’s account of the immediate circumstances of their creation is accurate, with some fudges on chronology and the order in which they were taken, and greater liberties on the way these immediate circumstances relate to the larger fictional narrative of the novel. However, I admit I wasn’t using the term ‘autofiction’ with any in-depth understanding, and on reflection it doesn’t apply. Push Process is really an old-fashioned semi-autobiographical novel. It contains invented characters and situations, and it isn’t interested in the process by which this material relates to or transforms the circumstances of my own life. It also takes seriously the traditional structures of fiction: its protagonist has desires and must make choices in pursuit of them; he encounters other characters and is changed by the events recounted in the novel. In other words, he exists primarily as a character within a fictional world, not as an avatar of the author. 

Two Pieces About Push Process

 There are now two pieces up elsewhere about Push Process:

The first is at Lunate – the website of a great UK literary journal – and is about some of the literary inspirations for the book (plus one film): Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis, Pickpocket by Robert Bresson, and A Line Made By Walking by Sara Baume.

The second is at Ten Million Hardbacks, and is about my relationship to Venice, where the novel is set.

Inspirations: Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky

 

The clip above includes (from about 00:45) the final sequence in Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky, a (very) unorthodox biographical film about a fifteenth-century monk and icon painter in Russia. The action of the film directly dramatises selected scenes from Rublev's life in black-and-white, but after the action concludes, we enter this colour sequence, which consists of a series of slow tracking shots (interspersed with equally slow zooms and / or push-ins) over the painted surface of Rublev's surviving icons. This method of animating static paintings has become a cliche in TV documentaries about art, and Tarkovsky's production notes from 1962 indicate that it was already established as a convention even then.

In our film there will not be a single shot of Rublev painting his icons. He will simply live, and he won't even be present on-screen in all episodes. And the last part of the film (in colour) will be solely devoted to Rublev's icons. We will show them in detail (as in a popular scientific film). The on-screen demonstration of the icon will be accompanied by the same musical theme which sounded in the episode of Rublev's life corresponding to the time during which the icon was conceived [quotation taken from Robert Bird, Andrei Rublev, p. 37].

In the colour sequence, the music fills the entire soundtrack and thereby assumes an importance that recalls the ending of Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped: i.e. it seems to signal transcedence even as it literally emphasises immanence and materiality (the surface of the painting).

Robert Bird describes the significance of the colour coda to Andrei Rublev in the following terms (p. 10):

[It] consummates the halting narrative, retrospectively revealing its underlying logic and transforming its deep textures into glorious surfaces. However, the icon display also suspends the complex weave of dialogue, music and ambient sound in a pious supplication. In effect, it dissolves the film's heavy temporality in its eternal patterns, as if Tarkovsky was ceding authorship to St Andrei Rublev. Several of Tarkovsky's subsequent films end in a similar confusion of temporal and spatial planes, a feature which irks some viewers as an 'easy transcendence' of the characters' otherwise torturous progression across the dolorous earth. However, by extending his searching gaze into the transcendent plane, Tarkovsky is also raising the stakes of his aesthetic gamble. Instead of the certainty of faith, he contemplates the possibility that there can be no true ending, possibly no true story at all, under the weight of time [Bird, Andrei Rublev, p. 10].

I first saw Andrei Rublev in about 1991. Its coda had a transfixing effect on me, and I have spent the twenty years since trying to re-enact this effect in one way or another. One of the immediate, enabling ideas it seemed to suggest was that the dialectic of realism vs. abstraction was a question solely of the scale of observation: that is, any image becomes abstract if you zoom in close enough; and any apparently flat surface is revealed to be sculpted if you blow it up large enough. I have therefore engaged in numerous attempts to photograph the surface of historical paintings in microscopic detail. Below are two attempts at this: close-ups of the surface of paintings from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, which are part of icon-like renditions of gold fabrics, in which imprinted abstract patterns achieve their effect by textural means.

In Five Wounds, Dan and I do something similar by isolating a fragment of Tintoretto's Paradise, and then translating it into a collage of abstract shapes of different colours, which are juxtaposed as if in an insane painting-by-numbers exercise. This exercise combines the literal and abstract within the same scale of representation: i.e. by means of a mosaic effect, it combines the perspective of the 'establishing shot', which shows the whole painting, with the isolation of particular details or fragments that characterises the close-up.

In the endpapers of the first edition of Five Wounds, this manipulated visual citation from Tintoretto was rendered even more abstract by being presented as a blown-up fragment of a fragment, thus:

Many icons are literally mosaics of course, and Tarkovsky compared the unusual structure of Andrei Rublev to that of a mosaic:

You can stick your nose into some fragment, beat it with your fist, and scream: 'Why is it black here? It shouldn't be black here! I don't like to look at black!' But you have to look at a mosaic from afar and on the whole, and if you change one colour the whole thing falls apart [quoted in Bird, Andrei Rublev, p. 38].

The mosaic is an ancient pictorial technique, but the ending of Andrei Rublev is - despite its eschewal of dramatisation and mise-en-scene - intrinsically cinematic, or rather, photographic, because slow-motion and the close-up are both quintessentially photographic effects, which initiated a new way of looking at the world by giving us access to what Walter Benjamin called the optical unconscious. Photography also revolutionised the way we think about paintings, not only by making it easy to reproduce them, but also by making it easy to isolate details from them (and even, via X-rays, to analyse their constituent elements).

'Blade Runner' by Ridley Scott, and The Cinema of Robert Bresson

My novel, Five Wounds, has two alternative, and mutually-exclusive, conclusions. One is a ‘happy’ ending, and the other is a ‘not-so-happy’ ending. In the next two posts, I’m going to discuss some of the implications of using multiple endings, and of imposing a happy ending on a story that does not seem to support such an interpretation.

There are several precedents for alternative endings in literature, most notably perhaps The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, but the most obvious example from my own personal artistic canon is actually a film: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. In this case, the two alternative endings are never present together in any single iteration of the film, but rather belong to two different ‘cuts’: the initial commercial release, which imposed an explanatory voiceover throughout, and a happy ending, and the subsequent ‘Director’s Cut’, which removed both. The latter did not, in fact, ‘change’ the ending as such: it just removed from the first version the final couple of minutes; but, in doing so, it radically altered the tone of the film.

SPOILERS FOR BLADE RUNNER

Above is the ending of the initial release. The Director's Cut simply stops instead at about 0:12, and removes everything that follows.

Having seen the initial version of Blade Runner in the 80s, and then the Director’s Cut on its release in the early 90s, there was some debate amongst my friends as to whether the revision actually constituted an improvement. We were all familiar with the story, but would first-time viewers have any idea what was going on without the voiceover? It not only clarified events; it also clarified Deckard’s role as protagonist. Without it, he was a much more morally ambiguous character. Indeed, everything was murkier and more confusing.

In the video above, Frank Darabont puts the case for removing the voiceover, but it was also clear that the original ending was an arbitrary addition, not least from the contemptuous way in which Harrison Ford intones the relevant voiceover text, as if he can barely bring himself to say the words. But for some of us it was necessary to relieve the unmitigated gloom of the film up until that point. The original ending was like opening a window onto Scott’s fictional world, and letting light enter into it from outside.

The original version of Blade Runner is a classic example of a deus ex machina ending. Deus ex machina literally means ‘god out of the machine’. It originally suggested the introduction of divine intervention as a story device to resolve intractable plot complications. The phrase refers to the stage machinery that was used to frame such divine characters in theatres, where they descended (literally) from above, and the implication is that this kind of resolution was entirely alien to the logic of cause and effect that governs the succession of events within a realistic narrative mode. The gods descend from above: that is, from outside the sphere of the story itself. Thus the deus ex machina is a cheat, by definition, and the last resort of a desperate writer. While modern stories rarely resort to divine intervention, they do introduce such related, arbitrary devices as outrageous coincidence, or, in the case of the initial release of Blade Runner, the hitherto unsuspected revelation that Rachel, the android replicant with whom Deckard has fallen in love, is ‘special’: that, unlike all other models, she has an open-ended lifespan.

This is a deus ex machina move because absolutely nothing in the story thus far has prepared us for this eventuality. Indeed, the rules that give this fictional world its integrity would seem to actively preclude this possibility; and thus the revelation destroys the credibility of everything that precedes it. This impression is only reinforced by the visuals in the tacked-on ending, which reveals vistas of unspoiled nature, whose existence is similarly inconceivable in the polluted city that has been so meticulously constructed over the previous two hours (the final longshots were, in fact, borrowed from outtakes of Kubrick’s The Shining).

The whole concept of the deus ex machina implies a secular world view, in which divine intervention can never be the real subject of a drama, and so its introduction is always evidence of a failure of human imagination. But what if you actually want to say something about the nature of divine grace? By definition, it is arbitrary; by definition, it violates the laws of cause and effect; by definition, it is unmotivated and unforeseeable. Its true manifestations never provide closure. Rather, they radically destabilise narrative logic. That is what is implied by a conversion experience: that the entire story is rewritten retrospectively.

And this brings me to the films of Robert Bresson, which almost always conclude with some kind of deus ex machina. Or rather, the ending invokes divine intervention without dramatising it explicitly, as in The Trial of Joan of Arc. God does not actually appear; the contradiction is not actually resolved. It is up to the viewer to complete the story by making the requisite leap of faith (or not, according to one's personal beliefs). In Bresson’s earlier films, this invocation is presented as, generally, successful. Whether or not we choose to believe in it, the protagonists of his films experience that transformation as real.

This is a kind of negative theology. God is not a presence in Bresson’s films. He does not appear as a character, wheeled in from above, and therefore inevitably trivialised. He is instead manifest by His absence. He is arbitrary in cinematic terms as well as in narrative terms: that is, he is a non-diegetic effect, and as such, is associated with similarly non-diegetic cinematic effects, notably music, which in Bresson is often confined to the climax of the film.

This sounds like a radical Augustinian, Protestant theology, and Bresson’s background was Catholic, but perhaps of a Jansenist persuasion: that is, from a group within Catholicism that emphasised the unmotivated nature of divine grace, and the consequent inability of man to ever earn it. This allies him with Pascal, among others, for whom divine grace can never be an effect with a human (or a scientific) cause, and thus divine intervention can never be necessary in narrative terms.

In Bresson’s later films, this negative theology is taken to its pessimistic conclusion. These films are about failed attempts to invoke transcendence, most obviously in Lancelot du Lac, which begins with the return of Arthur’s knights from their unsuccessful quest for the Holy Grail. Here the Grail is, like the ritual of communion (itself, in Catholic theology, a miraculous, inexplicable transformation), a kind of metonymic substitute for the Body of Christ, and thus a symbol of divine immanence. But in the world of Lancelot du Lac, as in Bresson’s subsequent films, the divine presence is always out of reach.

[Continues in the next post:]