The Brooklyn Rail

Collected books of writing are often hard to characterize, with pieces pulled from different publications and contexts from different times. For Lynne Tillman, this is even more the case, as her writing already blurs the boundaries of genres. She writes fiction, non-fiction, autofiction, and criticism; most of her work is a combination of all of the above. Striking across all the essays in Tillman’s most recent collection of criticism, Paying Attention: Essays on Art and Culture, is her attention to interdisciplinary arts—particularly the connections between the written and visual arts, including writings on painting, dance, film, fiction, contemporary and modernist literature, and even poetry.

Stripped of their original publication contexts and collected in a thick, trade-sized softcover, the collection is without illustrations (which is either a testament to Tillman’s illustrative writing or to the difficulty of image permissions). As the title suggests, the book is full of moments in which Tillman pays excruciating attention. In her essay on Etel Adnan, she describes one of the artist’s tapestries as:

Woven modernist paintings. … Metaphorically, weaving draws loose ends together. It is a complicated form, composed of many pieces that are meant to unite. It creates a pattern of inseparable parts. Weaving is a way to consider entanglement, say, of love and hate, of small events and great ones, of an individual in culture.

Her descriptions and attention to materials evidence her mastery of the craft of writing, and a certain style of cultural criticism—one that winds around the subject, slowly getting closer and closer to it, only to pull away at the last second and connect it to something much broader.

The collection is edited by Elizabeth Schambelan, who offers an introduction to the book. I confess that I read Tillman’s essays before Schambelan’s opening, which highlights, much as I do, the unusual nature of Tillman’s critical style: “her syntax-breaking strategies operate and interact at a resolution too granular for brief summaries.” Her reflections and selections from the collection read well as an afterword—better, I think, than they do as an introduction. Tillman’s writings in Paying Attention, and their unusual pacing and flow, are best experienced without preconceptions.

Another title of the book could have been “Close Reading,” since again and again she returns to this method of analysis—one that I too favor in my writing. “Close readings aren’t popular,” she writes in an essay on Carroll Dunham, “but I like doing them.” She goes on to give examples of how she close reads: she counts the time between film shots, or looks for the edges of the frame in photographs, counts beats in music, and argues that “what’s left out in writing is key.” In her essay about Dana Schutz, she writes nearly as much about the trouble of objective analysis (and how even close reading cannot be fully objective) as she does about the actual paintings.

The essays on Dunham and Schutz, separated in the book by several hundred pages and by nearly a decade in their original publication dates, are both seemingly first about criticism, before it becomes clear what it is Tillman is criticizing. Often while reading, I found myself constantly flipping to the back bibliography to find out where and when each essay was first published (many in monographs, which perhaps explains why Tillman felt no need to make the subject explicit in the opening paragraphs). While I wanted Schambelan’s essay at the end, I wanted the sources for each essay at the beginning. As a writer and editor of criticism, I find that there is a difference in writing a review versus an essay for a monograph—not just in length, but in the approach of analysis. Additionally, the titles of each essay in this collection, out of context, don’t immediately indicate their topic. Starting each essay is a bit of a puzzle to determine when the subject will appear. This is a feature of a collected anthology and of the design and organization selected for this collection.

While this design may make the reader who is looking for subject-oriented criticism feel frustrated, it does provide a broader view of the critic herself. Certain influences and interests emerge across many essays. Tillman returns frequently to Gertrude Stein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Andy Warhol. The best moments are when Tillman steps gently away from her subject to comment on criticism itself (and by extension on herself). One might be surprised to come across lines such as, “pure description does not exist,” and “interpretation is a problem also” (which appear in her essay on Schutz) in a book of collected criticism. In an essay on Warhol, she writes, “If one accepts the role of the critic, one should first be self-critical. If one uses history, one should historicize oneself. These are daunting, half-possible tasks—pulling yourself out of your thoughts while in them.” But this collection begs the question as to whether Tillman herself accepts this role. There is no doubt she is a prolific critic, but what that role holds for her, and how she finds herself in it, is the more interesting discovery of this book.