The examined life of Brian Dillon

The intellectual memoir is a strange hybrid: at once intimate and abstract, confessional yet resistant to confession. Where the conventional memoir trades on the authority of lived experience, on the steady accumulation of “I”, the intellectual memoir disperses the self into its influences. In Ambivalence, Brian Dillon pushes this form to an extreme.

Dillon is an Irish essayist who has, over the past decade, become something of a cult writer, a reputation shaped in part by his association with the independent publisher Fitzcarraldo. His books, which include Essayism and the earlier memoir In the Dark Room, move between criticism, autobiography and philosophical reflection. Ambivalence is the latest in this sequence, and perhaps the most distilled expression of his concerns. His life appears less as a continuous narrative than as marginalia to the books and ideas that shaped him. Most strikingly, the memoir is written in the third person, creating a persistent estrangement, as though the author were annotating, rather than inhabiting, his younger self. Even Dillon’s self-designation as “B”, paired with his intellectual hero “RB” (Roland Barthes), suggests a life lived in citation, in proximity to other minds.

Ambivalence is both sentimental and impersonal. The emotional stakes are high: it is a book framed by the deaths of Dillon’s parents. Yet those experiences are filtered through a cool, analytic lens. We meet “B” at a crossroads: on one side “lie the determinations expected of him: to face the realities of learning and working and making his way in the world”, while on the other is “the flight from the facts at hand”. Education becomes a form of escape from the realities of life in Dublin in the 1980s and 1990s, but also from grief itself, which is approached obliquely through reading and thought rather than confronted directly.

Dillon’s ambivalence also extends to his romantic life. His first love, the androgynous “S”, with his blue eyes and blue hair, becomes both an object of desire and an aesthetic ideal. His androgyny, “becoming fixed into a mode of being that is more obviously gay”, emerges as a guiding principle for Dillon’s thinking, a way of resisting the rigid moral certainties of his Irish Catholic upbringing. Questions of identity, sexuality and form are treated with the same commitment to ambiguity and openness, so that desire becomes a mode of thinking.

As an intellectual memoir, Ambivalence takes its influences seriously, almost reverently. Barthes, Susan Sontag, Stéphane Mallarmé and others form Dillon’s hinterland. Faced with grief, he turns not to religion but to theory. Barthes’s Camera Lucida, a meditation on photography and maternal loss, serves as a model for how intellectual enquiry might coexist with, and articulate, mourning. Elsewhere, difficult and dense works of literature are rendered accessible by a simple question: how can this help one live? For Dillon, this is sacred: books are not objects of study alone, they are instruments for survival, ways of continuing in the face of loss.

Dillon describes The Waves by Virginia Woolf as the most important novel of his life because of what it makes possible in thought and feeling. “The Waves does not teach but confirms that everything is also something else,” Dillon writes. This is characteristic of the memoir as a whole. Texts matter insofar as they transform the reader or provide a language for experiences that might otherwise remain ineffable.

What emerges is a defence of ambivalence itself, understood as a refusal of fixed meanings and inherited certainties. Dillon’s memoir suggests that to read deeply is to change oneself, and that such change is both personal and, potentially, political. The distance created by the third person allows Dillon to examine his younger self with a clarity that a more conventional approach might not permit. If something is lost in immediacy, something is gained in precision.

Ambivalence ultimately makes a compelling case for the intellectual life as a lived practice, one that takes seriously the possibility that thinking and reading might alter not only how one understands the world, but how one lives in it.  

Ambivalence
Brian Dillon
Fitzcarraldo, 172pp, £12.97

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[Further reading: Douglas Stuart’s harsh visions]