/ 17 October 2014

Beyond the boroughs of genre

Geoff Dyer: A mix of brio and self-deprecation.
Geoff Dyer: A mix of brio and self-deprecation.

‘I’m surprised that you describe The Ongoing Moment as ‘a true history of photography’,” declares Ivan Vladislavic. “For me, the genius of that book lies with your ability to lift photographs out of their contextual frameworks, to juxtapose one image with another, to cut across conventional notions of historical progression.” 

Geoff Dyer nods thoughtfully. “That’s true,” he replies. “It really is just the most extraordinary book!”

By this stage the audience, packed into Love Books in Melville, Johannesburg, has warmed to Vladislavic’s pragmatic yet searching approach and to Dyer’s engaging amalgamation of brio and self-deprecation. They make a peculiarly odd yet perfectly matched couple, and their conversation — in its commitment to eclecticism and digression — recalls Oscar Wilde’s suggestion that “conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate on nothing”.

Over the course of an illuminating hour, Dyer and Vladislavic talk about pulp fiction and “experimental” literature, the surprisingly enabling anxiety of influence and collaboration, photography, and real and imaginary forms of travel. They contemplate the fine line between art and exploitation as they discuss the images of car crashes taken by the Mexican “snapper” Enrique Metinides and they wonder whether inner-city traffic might be usefully regarded as a metonym for urban identity. They suggest, with mock seriousness, that a place like Varanasi proves that India was actually colonised by Italy rather than Great Britain, or that it might be fun to imagine Pretoria as a woefully impoverished version of Moscow.

It is frequently difficult to tell whether or when Dyer and Vladislavic are joking. A question about genre, for instance, leads Vladislavic to praise the impressive range of adventure fiction writer Leslie Charteris’s vocabulary and to bemoan, with what one suspects to be mock irony, the absence of a similar commitment to lexical range in contemporary forms of pulp or genre fiction. 

Dyer, for his part, registers his bemused admiration for the extraordinary intricacy of the plots of Alistair MacLean’s popular thrillers. Is he being entirely serious when he describes MacLean’s Where Eagles Dare as a “masterpiece” or when he suggests that he himself is “hopeless at plots”?

One suspects that Dyer and Vladislavic are being mildly and perhaps gamely disingenuous.

Vladislavic, for example, leaves Charteris far behind as he recalls his early attempts to imitate the “exquisite corpses” pioneered by practitioners of Dadaism and surrealism and popularised by the “cut-up” narratives of William Burroughs. 

Fortunately, the acuity with which he once felt the anxiety of influence seems to have mellowed with time. “Now,” he observes, “it seems almost inevitable that I will find my own ideas in someone else’s book.” Vladislavic’s delivery is so deadpan that it is almost impossible to tell whether this line is suffused with irony, resignation, or a form of ironic resignation. 

Dyer, by contrast, suggests that a writer’s “originality” comes about after attempting and failing to assimilate other writerly “voices”. Despite his best attempts to sound like Roland Barthes, he explains, his version of “Barthes” always ended up sounding, lamentably, like someone from the west of England. 

“At this stage of my career,” he concludes, “I feel that I am my own most important influence”, yet he remains alert to the danger of “self-karaoke”.

Yet conversations, unlike karaoke, are exercises in collaboration rather than imitation. For Vladislavic the “magnetic field” of collaboration proceeds from a series of creative misunderstandings, which, in turn, generate surprisingly creative misreadings. 

Dyer, for his part, readily admits that collaborative projects tend to confront him with the paucity of his own knowledge and that this realisation, in turn, prompts an almost obsessive immersion in research.

Dyer and Vladislavic’s intellectual and artistic divergences are less fascinating than their commitment to immersive or absorptive forms of reading. Their deep investment in diverse forms of aesthetic and cultural production, however, spurs their paradoxical interest in mar-ginalia and ephemera. If a flirtation with “the collaborating muse” informs the ease with which they glide between and across the borders and checkpoints established to police the boroughs of genre, it also invests their conversation and their work with particular and peculiar charm.