The Sharp Side

Ann Quin’s final novel Tripticks (1972) hasn’t attracted much in the way of attention – but then neither has the novelist herself. The available critical commentary is very small and the life is elusive. Quin died in the month of August 1973 but the specific day of her death is not identified in any published material that I’ve seen.

Her fiction, by the easygoing standards of today’s corporate literary fiction, is ‘difficult’ and is now only available in American editions. On the face of it Ann Quin seems an attractive figure for a biography – the disturbed young female artist who commits suicide – but presumably poor sales and critical neglect have made a biography commercially unattractive, especially in the era of celebrity publishing. How could a Quin biography ever hope to sell as many copies as that of such an awesome cultural giant as Billie Piper? This is unfortunate as with every year that passes the chances of finding witnesses to Quin’s life diminish. The absence of a biography is particularly frustrating since her writing seems to have been energised by themes of sexuality and power which were rooted in personal experience. Although not a Catholic, Quin was educated at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament in Brighton – an experience which she hated and which evidently marked her for life. In a rare interview she described its impact:

“A ritualistic culture that gave me a conscience. A death wish and a sense of sin. Also a great lust to find out, experience what evil really was.”

No coincidence that the last two words of Tripticks are ‘The Inquisition’. Authority and language, for Quin, are always entangled with religion, sexuality, punishment and power.

Quin’s continuing neglect indicts not just corporate publishing but British literary culture as a whole. No contemporary British writers apart from Stewart Home and Lee Rourke seem ever to have shown any enthusiasm for her work, and I’m not aware of any British academic interest, even though there are hundreds of people out there employed to teach modern fiction, publishing innumerable articles and books on the topic. The situation is not helped by the fact that the major Quin manuscript collection (papers, manuscripts and publishers’ correspondence) is held at the University of Indiana.

One of the very few critics to respond to Quin’s work is the American critic Philip Stevick, in his essay ‘Voices in the Head: Style and Consciousness in the Fiction of Ann Quin’ in Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction (ed. Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs), Princeton University Press, 1989. Stevick usefully draws attention to three aspects of Quin’s writing which doubtless account for resistance to her work: the instability of the narrative voice/s, a narrow, ahistorical focus on the inner turbulence of a self in conflict with others, and indifference to storytelling and the manipulated patterns of a plot. As he puts it:

Quin’s fiction…takes place at several levels of discourse simultaneously, alternately, contrapuntally. Recollection merges with experience and observation. A conversation with one figure coexists with a remembered conversation with another. Pronouns move about so that a passage referring to “him” comes to refer, only a little later, to “I”.

…Quin’s fiction…always involves the dialectics of a highly narcissistic self and another or others, each threatening and impinging upon the other, each making unignorable claims upon the other, insight alternating with opacity, desire alternating with defensiveness. They serve as well the spatial sense of Quin’s world, a claustrophobic, hothouse world, largely cut off from history and larger patterns of social action, in which the slow dance of a very small group of egos is as important as it is because it is all there is.

…Quin, it seems clear, comes to her version of mind not from the example of someone else but from a private conviction that the mind does not ordinarily tell stories – it doesn’t even try to. Berg comes closest to being a storyteller. His novel abounds with anecdotes, most of them abortive and inconclusive. And it does, after all, have its own telos. Berg hopes to humiliate and kill his father. After that, in the remaining three novels, story virtually ceases to exist.

A good place to begin in understanding Tripticks is the review which appears on-line here at The Complete Review. The lengthiest essay on Quin that I’ve managed to find is the one by Judith Mackrell in Jay L. Halio (ed), Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 14, British Novelists Since 1960, Part 2, (Detroit, 1983), which I went to the British Library to read. Tripticks describes the narrator protagonist’s trip across the U.S.A., which occurs ostensibly while being followed by the first of his three ex-wives and her young lover. Mackrell says

During his journey, the series of bizarre incidents that occur and fantasies he experiences are juxtaposed with flashbacks from the past, all of which have a dual purpose. On the one hand, they reveal the hero’s erotic obsessions and paranoia; on the other hand, they satirize, either through style or theme, some aspect of American culture: its materialism; its uncritical acceptance of fashionable ideas and jargon; its crass notion of psychology; and the loss of individual contact and humanity within a mass-produced ideology. The ensuing collage of styles and perspectives – which are frequently exaggerated or distorted to the point where they become surreal – is thus intended to mirror the cacophony and bizarre quality of American society.

These are the two polarities of the novel – a fractured sensibility engaging with – or overwhelmed by – American reality. The cover of the first edition (Calder and Boyars, 1972) privileges some aspects of this narrative friction. It consists of three partitioned vertical panels beneath the title TRIPTICKS, printed in red inside a wavy frame, in a font suggesting a blur of speed. At the top of the first panel on the left is the sketch (in black and white in a black frame with a shadow effect suggesting depth) of the back of a man’s head – that of the mysterious narrator, presumably. Below it is a drawing of what looks like a falling raindrop, in scarlet, on a white background. Beneath that, forming the base of the panel, are the words Nipples completely bitten off above another raindrop. The central panel is split in two. The top panel consists of three scarlet falling drops. The shorter base panel contains the words She undid her leather bikini. The final panel begins with a single falling drop, beneath which is the sketch of the upper torso of a woman with her face blanked out by a white rectangle. This, presumably, is the narrator’s ‘Number 1 X-wife’. The sketch is contained within a thin frame above which are the words Lashed together with rawhide. The base panel is blank, apart from the words a novel by ANN QUIN drawings by C. ANNAND

The three quotations indicate that this is a novel which is interested in sexuality. The first one suggests extreme violence with a sexual dimension, the second one a prelude to consensual sex and the third bondage. But these teasing fragments also evoke the language of sensation. ‘Nipples completely bitten off’ might come from a newspaper report of a shocking crime. ‘She undid her leather bikini’ could be found in pornography or the sex scene in a popular novel. ‘Lashed together with rawhide’ evokes tying someone up, either in a western or in sadomasochistic activity. Tripticks is not simply interested in these subjects. It is also interested in how they are represented.

As for those red drops of falling rain. They could be so much else. Tears of grief or rage. Dripping blood, perhaps. Drops of lysergic acid or LSD – an hallucinogen used to take people on trips through inner space. (Drugs are a theme in Tripticks and we hear of ‘amphetamine trips’.) And inside each identical drop is an identical tick. ‘Tick’ in the sense of ‘small mark’. Tripticks as an inventory, every item duly noted. And the opposite of a tick is an ‘X’. And this is a novel of three ex-wives (or X-wives). A tick is also a parasite or, figuratively, ‘an unpleasant or despicable person’. Tripticks is over-populated with such types. We ask what makes a person tick. A trip into the mind supplies possible answers. But to trip is also, sometimes, to fall.

Most obviously, Tripticks puns on the word ‘triptych’, a painting done on three panels. Alluding to the narrator’s memories of three X-wives. Although Quin, whose second novel is Three and whose third novel Passages includes three narratives, was always obsessed with clusters of three. At its simplest: three characters. Three competing perspectives.

Tripticks is not so much an anti-novel as what I’d call counter-fiction. Anti-novels can often be hugely entertaining and readable (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, say, or The French Lieutenant’s Woman). But Tripticks declines to entertain. It refuses to conform at every level to orthodox readerly expectation of what a novel should be or might be. Its form offends the eye. Most obviously, as a novel with illustrations. But in other ways as well. John Calder’s cheapskate production values serve a useful aesthetic function in Tripticks. The book has a crude, coarse appearance. The font is ugly. The text is ragged and shapeless – the technical term for which is ‘unjustified’. And Quin is not interested in supplying justification for her characters and what they do. The text is fractured, short blocks of prose which end in lists, or turn into verse, or snap shut in the face of a void, a gap, a fissure.

As for those illustrations. Some seem to have been photocopied out of books or newspapers. Most are original line-drawings. But they are fairly crude and not particularly original. Some are reminiscent of the work of pop artist Roy Lichenstein. One or two seem to have their origins in Magritte’s work. They have a second-hand, second-rate quality. They show figures, face, American scenes. But they are either cropped or incomplete. They flaunt their inadequacy as illustrations. They do and do not illustrate. And I wonder if the ostensible illustrator ‘C. Annand’ really existed. Another joke at the expense of authenticity, perhaps? Could the illustrations, perhaps, be by ‘Ann and C.’? Who might they be? Ann [Quin] and Carol [Burns], say? Carol Burns, one of the two people to whom the book is dedicated. Just a wild, blind guess. In the absence of a critical biography, Quinland is a sparse, bleak terrain covered in a thick fog.

The first sentence of Berg throws down the gauntlet to Brighton Rock. The first sentence of Tripticks nods in the direction of Moby-Dick: “I have many names. Many faces.” Identity fractures,overwhelmed by memory, fantasy, the lurid, ersatz quality of American reality. It’s the narrative style Joan Schuman calls multi-voice staging; sentences begin and end indeterminately, making the reading a delicious, slow, confounding process.

Tripticks has been hailed as satire:

As innovative and abrasive as the very best of William Burroughs, Ann Quin's Tripticks offers a scattered account of the narrator's flight across a surreal American landscape, pursued by his "No. 1 X-wife" and her new lover. This masterpiece of pre-punk aesthetics critiques the hypocrisy and consumerism of modern culture while spoofing the "typical" maladjusted family, which in this case includes a father who made his money in ballpoint pens and a mother whose life revolves around her overpampered, all-demanding poodle. Stylistically, this is Quin's most daring work, prefiguring the formal inventiveness of Kathy Acker.

But true satire is informed by rage and a sense of something better. Tripticks mocks, but the mockery has an exhausted, apathetic feel. Depletion is the word that comes most often to mind reading the book. An epic journey begins – but it ends nowhere. The human drama fizzles out, catches fire, then fizzles out again. Repeatedly.

The narrator anticipates his end in cinematic terms:

I saw their car off to the right. But I could see no sign of either my X-wife or her lover. Hiding perhaps in the back, the gun loaded, waiting, ready to leap out. The bloody ending as inevitable as the climax of a Greek tragedy.

A cinematic ending.

But though the narrator visualizes high drama, the narrative invests no energy in recreating one. It is animated by flickering images without depth – some ‘real’, some surreal, some cinematic or theatrical. The entire book is ‘A hotbed of unrest’. It’s hard to pin down. The reader is overwhelmed by narrative possibilities which raise themselves, then fizzle out. Whoever wrote the explanatory blurb at the start of the book seems overwhelmed too. The reader is informed that Tripticks is about a ‘strange network of convoluted interpersonal relationships’ involving the narrator, his in-laws, ‘plus an assortment of three pepped-up, freaked-out culturally-confused X-wives, the weird, zonked Nightripper and a retinue of bizarre aunts, mothers, retainers etc.’

That terminal ‘etc’ attempts to put a stopper on a narrative that won’t stop flowing in all directions. It submits to every reader’s instinct to make sense of narrative by explaining it with a short description. It’s what readers, reviewers and blurb writers all do: they say what a novel is ‘about’, before going on to evaluate its merits. But attempting to summarise Tripticks is like attempting to summarise Tristram Shandy or Finnegans Wake. The text wriggles free of any attempt at confinement.

This blurb is reproduced on the dustjacket, with additional material:

This, her fourth novel, is a riotous spoof on the evasive, hypocritical and maladjusted inter-familial relationships engendered by a society which has been overtaken by the mechanisms of its own development. The staccato superimposition of image upon image recreates, with the flickering fascination of a home movie, a society gone mad – a society in which cars are more important than legs, drugs than peace of mind, and success more important than anything. Read this and you’ll never be able to look at America with a straight face again!

But that final tired sentence replicates the kind of text which Tripticks confronts. It’s a novel of image and information overload, but the images and the information lack depth or meaning. It replicates a condition of modernity which hasn’t dated. When I look around me I see people sealed in one-ton metal bubbles; I see bipeds in the street with white wire emerging from their ears, others shouting into plastic wafers. There’s teevee, games consoles, the internet, newspapers, CDs, DVDs, the news, music, interviews with celebrities, cookery programmes, charity events, festivals. Information overload.

But where does this all end? In Tripticks it ends with the narrator retreating into a church. But the calm of that place allows only ‘a space before the scream inside’ – an explosive Munch-like scream combining alienation, revulsion and an acute, claustrophobic sense of oppression.

I opened my mouth. But no words. Only the words of others I saw, like ads, texts, psalms, from those who had attempted to persuade me into their systems. A power I did not want to possess. The Inquisition.

The narrator gives up and becomes mute. Words and writing are associated with power and persuasion. The systems which are rejected are capitalism and religion but also writing. Persuasion is somehow bound up with oppression: language is a device for interrogation but interrogation can also result in punishment. Language is itself punishing and oppressive. So, by implication, is literature. Tripticks not only confronts and resists the dominant discourse – the texts of America – it also resists the condition of modern fiction. It declines to offer consolations and satisfactions. As a good read it doesn’t work. It ends in obscurity and silence.

Ann Quin seems to renounce fiction in her final novel. She gave up on the aspiration to fail again, fail better. Her suicide the year after Tripticks was published seems humanly consistent with the last page of the novel. Tripticks ends not with language but with drawings. On the last page, after the final words, are six small framed sketches. One shows a hilly rural landscape, five show a mysterious exotic building with a balcony. Two of these sketches include a tower like a phallus. These landscapes are empty. They could almost be storyboards for a strange surreal movie.

In one, the sky is scored with four vertical lines, as if marking the descending passage of someone who has just jumped from the balcony to the ground far below.

The end.