‘Men and Apparitions’ by Lynne Tillman

In an interview about her latest novel, Men and Apparitions, novelist and art writer Lynne Tillman notes that “people have been saying forever that we live in a glut of images. I thought to myself, how would you tell that story?” Thus begins the fictional memoir of 38-year-old Ezekiel Stark (Zeke), an assistant professor and ethnographer of family photography. Outlining the theme in his own words, Zeke writes, “I view society through images, in words and pix, in how individuals see themselves, in past and present tenses, and with what they identify, which are also images. That’s my gig.”

Images are central here, but so is anxiety. Some (Laura Kipnis in a scathing New York Review of Books review) have found Zeke’s endless intellectualizing and recourse to image fetishism annoying, but you would have had to have lived a life far from this kind of solipsism to avoid feeling that Zeke is something of a tragi-comic-anti-hero for the Twitter-intellectual age. In her review, Kipnis fell upon the “unedited” nature of the writing, but this excess is precisely what makes Tillman’s prose so pressing—mirroring the ubiquity of photography in the 21st century.

The character Zeke developed out of an essay Tillman wrote for curator Ralph Rugoff’s exhibition “Shoot the Family” in 2006. Outlining his position on the first page of the novel, Zeke writes, “I’m all about my lop-sided self-defining tale. How I came to be me, not you, how I’m shaping me for you, the way my posse and other native informants do for me, how I’m shape-shifting.” This process is described by Zeke on the following page as akin to “conjugating breakfast.” This conjugation is the content of a life, a sign of a life lived in images, in observation—a focus on the verb tense as a way to move past and through the events that make up a full life. Zeke’s analytical distraction in the face of his own life provokes his attention to images as clues to outline his own existence. Zeke’s family becomes a series of (often less than) ideal forms: “mother,” “father,” “Little Sister,” and “Bro Hart.” His sister suffers from selective mutism, becoming a moving image for him to interpret.

This method of image recall as self-narration allows for fanciful tricks, with images of his ancestors as fair game to be included in the timeline of his own life. When his wife leaves him (ostensibly for someone less self-involved), he moves through a period of intense disassociation, undoing the life of the “new man” that he has authored for himself. He comes out on the other side fixated on an image of Clover Adams, a 19th-century writer and photographer, wife of the historian Henry Adams and friend to the novelist Henry James. Zeke characterizes the transition as being from one image to another—the first being his life as one half of a heterosexual academic couple, towards that of psychosexual ancestor worship mediated by a photograph. As pithily outlined in one of Zeke’s abortive characterizations of 21st-century personal hagiography: “Booming ancestry biz. Roots r u.”

Photographs are interspersed throughout the pages of the novel, as if to remind the protagonist of moments in which action has occurred—if only the one-time clicking of the shutter. Family photography was the subject of Zeke’s dissertation and first book. He signals his interest in contemporary photographers who explore (and, it would seem, push) this thematic: Carrie Mae Weems, Catherine Opie, Mary Kelly (singling out her Post-partum document) and Mitch Epstein. The artist snapshot or “vernacular” is another interest, listing Warhol’s Polaroids, Stephen Shore’s “visual travel diary,” Susan Hiller’s postcard collection and Gerhard Richter’s Atlas. In a summative analysis of this genre of photography, he comes to one of his main conclusions about the vernacular: “When artists incorporate or appropriate unsophisticated or naïve work in their work, a double consciousness plays that game. Or, to say it another way, the artists are presenting visual meta-fictions.” To argue that artists employ the vernacular as “metafiction,” Zeke (and, I would think, Tillman) acknowledges that life’s snapshots are akin to the fiction of art, the self-framing, the narrative construction. In this way Tillman’s ethnographer Zeke is similar to the voice of the critic, evoking comparisons with the voice taken up by Tillman as Madame Realism in a series of articles, many published in Art in America (and republished as part of The Madame Realism Complex by Semiotexte’s Native Agent series in 1992).

As Zeke proclaimed in a conference paper, “We are The Picture People … most special and obvious about our species is, our kind lives on and for pictures, lives as and for images, our species takes pictures, makes pix, thinks in pix.” In the first part of the book, the images pictured are digital reproductions of analogue photographs, but a continual (and familiar) refrain emerges: “The ubiquity of images has made picturing selves less significant. With the speed of the digital, a casual attitude arrived: this wasn’t going to be the only picture, loads would come, and many to delete. Our fast images: tossed away, worthless.” Although claims to ubiquity have characterized photography since its emergence in the early 19th century, images have become meaningful both because of and despite their modern god-like ubiquity. We are left asking: Do photographs really become more insubstantial in their multiplicity?

The tenuous delicacy of modern masculinity is the pendant theme to that of photography (men and apparitions after all), and the last 100 pages or so of the novel consist of excerpted responses to a real survey Tillman sent out to men aged 25 to 40, on the subject of contemporary masculinity. More than anything, this novel feels like culture right now—full of hot takes, overflowing with images. Capital-T theory looms large, while ideas half-formed are given centre stage. As many reviewers have noted, Zeke’s observations are sometimes trite, but isn’t this just the point? ❚

Men and Apparitions, by Lynne Tillman, Soft Skull Press, 2018, 416 pages, $24.50.

Emily Doucet is a writer and PhD candidate in the history of photography at the University of Toronto.