How we respond to the unnamed protagonist of Emily Hall's The Longcut is primarily determined by how we adjust ourselves to her first-person narration. From the beginning, it almost seems she is speaking more to herself than to us:
I was always asking myself what my work was, I thought as I walked to the gallery. As an artist I knew I should know what my work was, I thought as I walked, still I did not know what my work was, could not stop asking myself what my work was, it being impossible to think about anything else
The near obsessive-compulsive repetition might suggest that this is meant as a "report" of sorts of the narrator's ongoing thought process (a form of stream-of-consciousness), but she is clearly recording, not merely reporting or signaling disjointedly ("I thought as I walked"), although it does remain unclear exactly how her account is being recorded. The narration seems to exist in some gray zone between and among speaking, thinking, and writing: the narrator seems to be interrogating her own "cognitive space," as she puts it, but this involves perceptions of her physical space as well, both of them often invoked in language that is both insistently detached and often hyper-aware, as if observing herself observe, or thinking about herself thinking.
What she observes and what she thinks about are relentlessly focused on coming to some resolution about "what my work was." This initial conundrum, the protagonist's confusion about what kind of artist she is or will be, is the motivating force driving her actions, as well as the narrative as a whole--the "plot" itself doesn't really move beyond the search for a solution to this conundrum, so what we are left with is the narrator's ultimately very peculiar manner of articulating her dilemma.
The central action of the novel, such as it is, does indeed take place mostly as the protagonist is walking through the streets of a city (unnamed) on her way to meet with an art dealer, although a final episode follows her right after what turns out to be a very consequential meeting indeed. During her walk we are also provided flashbacks to the various circumstances that have led her both to this interview with a "gallerist," who she hopes, of course, will exhibit her work, as well as to her radical uncertainty about the nature of that work, which she also hopes the gallerist will help her overcome. These flashbacks are highly recursive and digressive, which might tempt us to regard them as her "thoughts," but they are thoughts fully-formed and often intricately arranged. They also function as exposition, filling us in--if at times obliquely--on her artistic aspirations, as well as her experiences in a dreary office job she must endure until, presumably, those aspirations are achieved. Here she must expend her energies making sure she has "answered my share of questions and moved them into the 'completed' column," all the while suffering "slant looks" from her boss.
Even when she arrives at the gallery (for a conversation arranged by her friend, "the well-known artist who set up situations"), there are additional lengthy passages in which the narrator meditates on the efficacy of listening to music while making art, on what she has chosen to wear, on a satchel carried by a man on the subway. When she finally begins to speak to the gallerist, she suddenly utters
a torrent of open questions about bodies inhabiting garments or buildings. Most people, it had to be said, finding themselves willingly or unwillingly subject to my torrents, found themselves unprepared, the torrents producing in them --the willing or unwilling listeners--expressions of shock or immediate exhaustion. What if I photographed the expressions of shock or exhaustion, I had asked myself on several occasions. So much for my plan of avoiding blurting, I thought, even as I was torrenting along, evidently not having routed the plan sufficiently thoroughly through my cognitive apparatus.
Perhaps The Longcut itself could be taken as a "torrent" of the narrator's language, except that it is not really a torrent flowing headlong but on its meandering and serpentine way. The torrent isn't really slowed--or at least made less turbulent--until the gallerist actually does suggest to the narrator what her art is (assuming that it is an understanding the protagonist has had all along). But the gallerist's observation that what the protagonist has been showing her has an almost algebraic quality to it ("solving for x") is clearly something that the protagonist has not before considered, and what she seems to conclude is the accuracy of the gallerist's description temporarily disorients her.
After a day of brooding on the implications of this (for her) revelation, she is able to assimilate this new self-knowledge and musters her resolve to act on it, having satisfactorily, it would seem, clarified her artistic purpose, which is to proceed as if the question of purpose is always open, undecided:
to do anything I could to unfind the answer to the question of what my work was, to unaccept the fact of knowing the answer, to unknow, to uncomplete, unaccept, unclose. I would unsolve for x, I would deny there was an x to be solved. I would arrange things to my dissatisfaction in all cases, every case would be the case, I would botch every transition, every border crossing, botching every border between categories or realms, dwelling in the botched transition, the hiccup, the glitch. . . .
This seems like a perfectly good credo upholding a practice of art as radical possibility, but these final flourishes of refortified purpose, so quickly following the protagonist's moment of recognition with the gallerist, at the least seem rushed, so much so as to verge on melodrama. Some such rededication to art lurks beneath the novel's attenuated quest narrative all along, and the terms of the protagonist's pledge to avoid narrowing her scope is conventional enough that it doesn't escape coming off as predictable.
Perhaps to extend the narrator's monologue much farther risks decreased readerly patience with the narrator's eccentric discursive habits, although at a time when the prose of a writer like Thomas Bernhard has become increasingly influential, such a move would not seem particularly extreme. However, even if the protagonist's enlightenment occurred less abruptly, the fulfillment of the narrator's quest for artistic direction as the primary conceit seems inherently slight in a novel that introduces itself as more radically unconventional in its verbal density and formal convolution. However much the protagonist wants to "unaccept" the answer to which her initial question led her, a better answer might have been that it is less important to rhetorically interrogate one's art than it is simply to make it, rendering the question superfluous to begin with.
Still, pursuing the question has certainly prompted Emily Hall to write a novel whose narrator (and her narration) are compelling creations, reservations about plot aside. If finally her way of grappling with the imperatives of art is rather more interesting than any conclusions she reaches about art itself, this should not deflect attention away from this art the author of The Longcut has made.
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