David Constantine (2019) The Dressing-Up Box The Comma Press.
The reader views the page; and the composite shape, the juxtapositions, the relations between parts and the whole, are static. The medium insists on fixity. But the spirit of the whole endeavour is quite he opposite: it is the principle of eternal instability, od ‘everything moves and flows’. The fixity of texts and photos on the page allows us to see a particular shape, but the imagination and the heart and the pulses feel its undoing, its return to the matrix, its rising again into another and different fleeting incarnation.[1]
Constantine, D.(2019:78f.) from ‘bREcCiA’ in Constantine, D. The Dressing-Up Box UK, Comma Press 75-98.
Constantine is a great poet and great short-story writer. His reputation took a popular turn when one of his short stories was filmed. His reputation is limited in quantity by the quality of his attention to repeated everyday events about which most people probably think better not thought about at all: what it is to write and what it is to read.
For that reason, he is loved by other writers, especially those who see reading as an important activity that cannot be divorced from the act of writing. Hence many of his book are about readers and about the constraints and freedoms that being read imposes on writers. This means too that barrier between fiction and non-fiction are blurred since the access to any writing (whether it calls itself factual or not) is through mechanisms of reading that have their own pre-structured characteristics and characteristics which evolve different formal characteristics for each reading. This is what the quotation from the wonderful story bREcCiA above says – in part. I rush to say ‘in part’ because reading is an embodied skill that projects the various introjected forms of what for each of us the embodied means.
Of the book at the centre of bREcCiA, Constantine says – in describing its ‘physical’ features:
‘It might more easily be read (if ‘read’ is the word) propped up on a high desk such as clerks in Dickens use for their vast ledger’.
Ibid:75
What this makes clear is that ‘reading’ (whatever that is) is a complexly determined thing dependent on the body’s posture, attitude and weight-bearing dynamics (even the fit of a ‘volume into the hands if that is possible which it isn’t in bREcCiA but also of related cognitions (perception and memory at base of course) which also includes the read, as this quotation includes Dickens and our memories of Wemmick’s stoop. A wonderful moment in the story includes consulting a dictionary about the term ‘breccia’, but this ‘word’ doesn’t of course read like the word,bREcCiA. The senses, cognition and memory do something different with the particularities of that second’s words written form. But don’t be put off that story. It is a wonderful study of what psychological and physical (perhaps biopsychosocial) processes enter into the act of reading and tell a story of obsession, madness and the accommodation of those features of the known and unknown world drive us.
Constantine’s stories are troubling. Psychosis and neurosis are all necessary in fiction but in Constantine we have to notice them, not least in his retelling the story of Gerard de Nerval – a kind of wondrous ‘faction’ (to use Truman Capote’s word)– called Rue de la Vielle-Lanterne.[1] The various virtues of that story I won’t try to look at but only to show how it captures the particularity of psychosis, neurosis and normality (often projected into the built environment) in ways necessary to allow us to think about the unthinkable visceral, emotional and intellectual effects of other stories, in all their silences and lack of comfortable closures (best represented by the haunting Ashton and Elaine).[2] That last story is the last word on love, care and responsibility but I’m not sure I can tell you why. Just read it and be as disturbed by its ending as its beginning.
My favourite ‘reading’ story is A Retired Librarian, about which one of its characters makes his own judgement, in describing the bound copies of The Record made by its main witness Fay:
‘Prettier than roadkill, he observed. But less of an earner, in the short-term at least’.
Constantine, D.(2019:145) from ‘A Retired Librarian’ in Constantine, D. The Dressing-Up Box UK, Comma Press 137-151.
But for its wondrous understanding of how history, visceral experience, memory and perception everyone of my age (65) should read Rivers of Blood.
I say of my age but one thing the story does is reanimate what it means to resurrect the metaphor that was itself resurrected by Enoch Powell. It’s a descriptive metaphor from the classics he knew so well and his aim was to reconstruct it’s present day relevance as the British Empire receded. Our present day is also implicated since it is a day when a politician very much of Powell’s type, Boris Johnson, is now a current fact. The story ties rivers of blood into the viscera of the reader’s experience such that the politics of racism are virtually lived and acted out. It also forces us to see that not realising that force of visceral violence and disgust is a wilful forgetting and wilful misperception. It is a story to wake us up – hopefully before December 12th, 2019.
…the inescapable, all-pervasive knowledge of the shedding of so much blood: …, the consciousness, the unexpungeable knowledge of what we have done, of what we let happen. Look at us that way, we are steeped, steeped, steeped in blood and our waking and dreaming lives are brimful with the knowledge of it.
Constantine, D.(2019:65) from ‘Rivers of Blood’ in Constantine, D. The Dressing-Up Box UK, Comma Press 55-68.
I realise I am not analysing any of this.
First that would, in this case, be a spoiler, since these are stories where analysis so often fails to convey the significant effects of reading. The Dressing-Up Box story itself is important but it irritates until one accepts that we are not looking here at a story where belief in the world and character are of primary importance.[3]
Rather it is about a fantasy as sharp as George Macdonald’s adult fantasies about a world made up of inescapable realities and the means we use to role-play some bounded comfort in it. Read again, it seems a larger story than any analysis would reveal unless the reader had not responded at all to it with significant discomfort and which they were willing to take as a serious and legitimate response to faction, just as we do in Capote’s In Cold Blood.
I’d meant to write a lot about this book but I won’t. It really is a great book. You should read it. You may not. If you do, don’t use discomfort as a way of exiting the reading. You’ll miss so much.
[1] In Constantine, D. The Dressing-Up Box UK, Comma Press 153-172.
[2] Ibid: 223-247
[3] Constantine, D.(2019)‘The Dressing-Up Box’ in Constantine, D. The Dressing-Up Box UK, Comma Press 1-28.
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