Eventually, turning the page, you encounter a mouth – or more precisely, a pair of lips, a set of shining teeth. The image is a still from a filmed performance of Samuel Beckett’s short play Not I (1972). The lips belong to the English actress Billie Whitelaw, one of the Irish playwright’s most frequent, and committed, collaborators. During the play’s second production at the Royal Court Theatre in 1973, as Brian Dillon explains in his latest book, Affinities: On Art and Fascination (2023), Whitelaw performed the monologue ‘sitting down, strapped in place and with her face masked, black makeup isolating the mouth.’ In photographs, Dillon observes, Whitelaw ‘resembles nothing so much as one of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes.’
The oddness of the image, the obliquity of the critical angle pursued and the leap into striking comparison are typical of Affinities, the concluding volume of a loose critical trilogy that began with 2017’s Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction, and continued in 2020 with Suppose a Sentence. It would be difficult to succinctly describe this project, which is partly by design – Dillon’s criticism proceeds without a self-conscious program. His texts are limber, probing things, obsessed with the potentialities of form, with the smallest units of prosody, and above all with style and its performance. ‘I want each book I write to be an affinity of sorts, and within it each essay or fragment in turn an affinity of ideas, images, moods and citations,’ he writes. ‘It is not enough to want this – you have to perform it, and one of the perils of writing is that I may only describe my affinity, and fail to embody it.’
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