Men and Apparitions, a speculative novel that easily employs multiple narrative registers, begins with a quote from Flannery O’Connor: “Mystery is a profound humiliation to modern man.” Humiliation perhaps because of the fascinating helplessness that mysteries still have in women today and men. What secrets does the author of this book, Lynne Tillman, professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York and author of several novels, talk about? First, how an essential invention of the modern world, the capture of images, the fixation of time in a moment, namely photography, has influenced the construction of the separate consciousness of women and men in the last century.
Zeke, a young man from the wealthy middle class generation, creates a theoretical framework for this iconographic “ethnography.” While the image itself is “an experience,” photography sees it as “a fact, an object.” And it is on this path between the experience and the object that sustains (reveals) it that the mystery occurs. But the characteristic of “mystery” is its unknowability. And here something else arises, the relationship between man and woman.
We see Zeke fall in love with a college friend, whom he eventually marries to live out this “captive” love, until one day he finds out that it was all a misunderstanding when she leaves him for his best friend.
We see Zeke fall in love with a college friend, whom he eventually marries to live out this “captive” love, until one day he finds out that it was all a misunderstanding when she leaves him for his best friend. And all the while, Zeke’s family background begins to come to light: elusive parents busy with their own things, a sister who is also a mystery and is tragically revealed in the end. This is the most interesting part of the book because it revisits a historical figure: Marian Clover Hooper, who married Henry Adams, both Bostonians and always surrounded by artists and writers. She was a pioneer of photography in the second half of the 19th century, and Henry was a major historian who wrote a paradigmatic book about his education in America and Europe, a model for a very American genre. In this book he makes no mention at all of his wife Clover – whose “new femininity” Henry James used in several of his novels – who swallowed his development chemicals one morning in 1885. On a trip to Spain on the “Grand Tour,” Clover wrote to her father that “the Spanish are the kindest, most compassionate, childish, impractical, incompetent, and desperate people I have ever seen,” in this sharp description and in Clover’s one can think of Virginia Woolf.
“The words suggest, the images doubt,” we read at one point in ethnographer Zeke’s monologue, a speculative, descriptive and sometimes colloquial, jocular, intimate monologue. But you can also say the opposite: the pictures imply (for example what is not in the picture) and the words doubt or raise doubts. This book is peppered with relevant and some less relevant photos. A very compelling image is that of Adams, taken by his wife in the cabin of the boat on the Nile: a dejected, helpless man. From there begins a confusing investigative discourse about the “new masculinity” resulting from the gender equality forged since the post-war period. It collects statements from these men who have no idea and sometimes work in a company that seems to outdo them. One of them tells the ethnographer recording his words, “The more I trust the idea of women as equals, the less mysterious they become.”
Lynne Tillman
Translation by Alberto Moyano Muñoz
Zapa Leather, 2023
348 pages. 23 euros
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