A Startlingly Detailed Map: Bookforum Reviews Brian Blanchfield's Proxies
At Bookforum, a review by Christopher Schmidt of Brian Blanchfield's Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (Nightboat Books). "He attends . . . to the subtlest registers of misfit between a queer self and its world—and with such sensitivity, he provides a startlingly detailed map to a territory we only thought we knew well," writes Schmidt. A thorough review:
...I mentioned grace earlier, and I locate this quality not in the book’s procedure, or even in its charged confessions of shame. The grace is most present in the, yes, poetic way that Blanchfield observes his own darkest qualities mirrored back to him in his surroundings—as perceptual patterns, omens, even blessings. “On Withdrawal,” perhaps my favorite essay, best exemplifies this quality. It concerns Blanchfield’s sudden retreat from an unhappy teaching position at a prim boarding school outside Boston. (He captures perfectly the severity of the campus, so blanched it is “as if the green of the lawns and the Puritan white of the wood buildings had suppressed other color.”) Withdrawal manifests early in the essay, when Blanchfield notes that he most often sits in a “rear-facing seat” on the commuter train to the school, because of the “illusion of being drawn from the present into the future.” (How fine this insight into the everyday!) Later in the essay, Blanchfield describes the day he announced his departure from the school to his all-female class. He joins them in watching a popular YouTube video of a marriage proposal, staged for the bride-to-be as a theatrical pageant alongside a slowly advancing pick-up truck. Blanchfield’s bravura description of the video takes on an epic grandeur, not unlike the vision depicted on Achilles’ shield in The Iliad: It contains all of life.
The intended bride sits on the bed of the truck facing backward, and watches agog as a pageant of acrobats, accordionists, long-lost friends, her parents, and eventually the groom-to-be appear on the roadside. “It is Bollywood in its excess, a marching version of ‘Oh Happy Day’ crossed with a Rube Goldberg contraption and an episode of This Is Your Life on wheels,” Blanchfield writes. As the truck slowly advances the woman toward her fate as a wife, she experiences a gradual withdrawal from her previous attachments. In Blanchfield’s brilliant description, the pageant becomes an unlikely allegory of his own withdrawal from his students. Supported by their teacher, they are beginning their convention-bound journeys as workers, wives, and mothers. While they look to the bride-to-be for inspiration, Blanchfield finds himself fascinated by the unseen driver. “Did he get out of the truck after parking it, careful not to close the door and jar the camera? Did he hear her yes?” Blanchfield wonders. “Was he best man material? Would he marry? Could he?” The vectors of identification between this imagined driver and the queer writer–teacher are complex and fascinating to contemplate. What person would devote himself to enabling other people’s dreams while effacing his own desires? I share and follow Blanchfield’s identification with the driver—his proxy—back to the writer himself, who in carefully arranging the patterns of his life into moving form, transports us.
Read it all at Bookforum.