by Ann Quin
PASSAGES
Ann Quin
Introduced by Claire-Louise Bennett
CONTENTS
Title Page
Introduction
Dedication
Passages
About the Author
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
In his introduction to Ann Quin’s first novel, Berg (1964), Giles Gordon wrote ‘Here was a working-class voice from England quite unlike any other.’ What set her apart from the mainstream was that Quin eschewed the sort of gritty realist stuff being produced at the time by writers such as Arnold Wesker, John Braine and John Osborne – ‘they frankly stink’ said Quin, ‘with their dumb 19th century prose.’ Quite often writers with working-class origins are expected to write in a straight-up kind of way about the lives and struggles of working-class people, which does and should occur of course, though still not nearly enough of it finds its way to publication. It shouldn’t be presumed however that because your socio-economic situation is constrained, your interests and imagination don’t extend beyond it, envisioning alternative selfhoods and experiences. You’ll never not see inequality and disadvantage if that’s where you come from, believe me, and you’ll never stop feeling helplessly apoplectic about it. Being from a working-class background will always be a part of how you see and are seen in the world, but you might also realise that it needn’t define you, nor what you write about. That writing – exploring the complex relationships between language and experience and reality – can gradually and lastingly put forth a way of interpreting and being in the world that is quite indifferent to the ways allotted you by so-called class distinctions.
It occurred to me some time ago that growing up in a working-class environment may well engender an aesthetic sensibility that quite naturally produces work that is idiosyncratic, polyvocal, and apparently experimental. The walls are paper-thin; you rarely have any privacy. Neither do you have the safety nets, the buffers, nor the open doors which people from affluent backgrounds enjoy from day one. Your own skin is paper thin. When you are living from one measly pay cheque to the next with no clear sense of a future, day-to-day life is precarious, haphazard, fragmented, permeable, and beyond your control. In Quin’s essay ‘One Day in the Life of a Writer’, there’s no romantic talk of pottering off to the shed at the bottom of the garden in order to write in hallowed seclusion. There’s a landlady hollering up the stairs about kippers and lamb stew, a window cleaner up on his ladder peering in, unemployed men along the Front, spitting and muttering, burn holes in the carpet, burn holes in the lampshades. It’s all so very raw, and visceral, and impossible to shut out. Elsewhere Quin mentions the ‘partition next to my bed’, how it ‘shook at night from the manoeuvres, snores of my anonymous neighbour’.
Quin’s prose is atomised, kaleidoscopic. It evinces a perspective that is constantly shuffling the distinction between objects and beings, self and other, and conceives of the world in terms of form and geometry, texture and tone. These characteristics led some critics at the time to suggest that Quin was indebted to authors of the nouveau roman. In a brilliant essay on Quin for the Times Literary Supplement, Julia Jordan unearths some predictably sniffy assessments: ‘Ronald Hayman charges her with “borrowings” from Nathalie Sarraute; she has been “infected” with an “idiosyncratic disdain for inverted commas” – or, equally, unconscious imitation: Robert Nye calls Berg “nearer the early work of Graham Greene than the fashionable French new-wavers its author … imagined she was imitating”.’ To my mind these derisive evaluations fail – of course they do – to take into account the impact that one’s domestic set-up has on what and how one writes. Discussing how her short-story collection, Fireworks, came about, Angela Carter, for example, said, ‘I started to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in.’ Boom! When I read Quin I experience her fidgeting forensic style as a powerful and bona fide expression of an unbearably tense paradox that underscores everyday life in a working-class environment – on the one hand it’s an abrasive and in-your-face world, yet, at the same time, much of it seems alien and is completely uninvolving. Overwhelmed and understimulated all at the same time. Is it any wonder, then, that such a paradox would engender a phenomenologically oriented sensitivity that is as acute as it is detached?
Quin has an eye for minutiae, the ‘smudge of egg at the mouth corners’, no doubt about it, but she doesn’t dwell long on the strata of reality those sorts of details typically delineate: she knew there was more to life, more to people, than that. The two characters we encounter in Passages brush up against a totalitarian regime on their travels abroad, an oppressive, unpredictable presence which throws them back onto themselves – ‘the mind goes out to meet itself,’ writes Quin – and they begin to experience a deepening of consciousness that brings about a voluptuous dissolving of self. ‘She says she knows no limits in/for herself,’ says the man about the woman. She explains that her ‘frenzied intensity’ prevents her from being ‘eaten up by reality’. The man meanwhile favours obscurity over intensity in order to stave off reality; there is ‘something to be said,’ he muses, ‘for remaining in a place far off, without name, without identity’. Quin’s extraordinary, shifting prose charts this dissolution and the existential conundrums it gives rise to with breathtaking insight and dexterity. To what extent is it possible to remain distinct and intact when identity has been given the slip? ‘I have no sense at all of who I was yesterday,’ the man notes. He has become a creature of his imagination, and in doing so he has also become: ‘More and more unable to observe, determine the truth of things, share an experience.’ Can two people be as circles from two stones thrown into a pool and ‘increase equally, one within the other, without the one destroying the other’?
Evocations of the sea ripple and surge throughout Quin’s books. In Passages it is referred to as the perfect malleable form; ‘waves kept their direction when intersecting. Movements of the water’s impressions penetrated each other, without changing their first shape.’ In one of the text’s most arresting lines the man asks, ‘Is it her body I hold in my arms or the sea?’ For this reader, Passages offers one of the most veracious and moving depictions of the tensions and conflicts, the push and pull, that beset a fervid love affair. Not since Sarah Kane’s unflinching plays have I read anything that just so urgently conveys the torment of desiring someone, of wanting to know their ‘dreams, needs, obsessions, demands, desires’ – of ‘wanting,’ as the woman does, ‘to take in his history while taking him in her mouth’ – while at the same time wanting to stay mutable and free, retaining one’s secrets and darker places: ‘The problem is to discover whether I can live with this woman’s demons without forfeiting my own.’
Both Kane and Quin were drawn to the brutal imagery and resounding verve of Greek mythology, Kane most notably in Phaedra’s Love. In Passages the woman’s search for her dead brother alludes to Antigone, while the man’s journal is annotated with descriptions of ancient Greek friezes of an often violent nature. This conflation with mythical elements puts me in mind of Thomas Mann’s notion of the well of the past and the idea that the many elements that make a man ‘come from the Universe outside and previous to him’. Mann suggests that perhaps ‘each person’s role is to revive certain given forms, certain mythical schema established by forebears, and to allow them reincarnation.’ Quin turns this formulation on its (Medusa’s) head by situating it in the context of female experience: ‘The matriarchal goddesses reflect the life of women, not women the life of the goddesses.’ Passages is rife with flipped prepositions; no sooner is something in than it is out, up than it is down, it is no wonder the man concludes that ‘we seem to be neither going forward or back’. Indeed, so much overlaps in Passages that there is an accruing
sense that there is no past and no future – a ‘Fold-in time/order/space’ – and the woman and the man are perhaps: ‘Emerging from obsession which hasn’t revenged itself, and which a hundred and one centuries of life would never satisfy now.’
Passages is a slim volume, but once you start to unravel its layers and combinations, its possible meanings seem endless, like a beautiful ancient puzzle. Read it in one sitting – there really is no other way of experiencing it. Dipping in and out would be a bit like eating an oyster in small intermittent bites – pointless, confounding, and ultimately unsatisfying. Imbibe it whole. Become the sea. The more attention you give it the more it will unravel you, your dreams and obsessions, your demands and demons. Returning to your ‘fleshly boundaries’, to use Mann’s phrase, you will feel rejuvenated and quite transformed, since all your mysteries have been awakened. ‘Coming back to my body,’ writes the man in the book’s final pages, ‘a sense that I was perhaps someone else, some drifting thing that at least had found somewhere for inhabiting, not to remember happiness – just curiosity.’ Curiosity. That’s the thing. Passages stirred up a certain kind of curiosity that I hadn’t felt kindling in me for so long. It’s difficult to describe – it’s almost like the omnipotent curiosity one burns with as an adolescent – sexual, solipsistic, melancholic, fierce, hungry, languorous – and without limit.
Claire-Louise Bennett, Galway, September 2020
For Ian –
in Memory
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01 Juan Pablo Villalobos, Down the Rabbit Hole, trans. Rosalind Harvey
02 Clemens Meyer, All the Lights, trans. Katy Derbyshire
03 Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
04 Iosi Havilio, Open Door, trans. Beth Fowler
05 Oleg Zaionchkovsky, Happiness is Possible, trans. Andrew Bromfield
06 Carlos Gamerro, The Islands, trans. Ian Barnett
07 Christoph Simon, Zbinden’s Progress, trans. Donal McLaughlin
08 Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods
09 Deborah Levy, Black Vodka: ten stories
10 Oleg Pavlov, Captain of the Steppe, trans. Ian Appleby
11 Rodrigo de Souza Leão, All Dogs are Blue, trans. Zoë Perry and Stefan Tobler
12 Juan Pablo Villalobos, Quesadillas, trans. Rosalind Harvey
13 Iosi Havilio, Paradises, trans. Beth Fowler
14 Ivan Vladislavić, Double Negative
15 Benjamin Lytal, A Map of Tulsa
16 Ivan Vladislavić, The Restless Supermarket
17 Elvira Dones, Sworn Virgin, trans. Clarissa Botsford
18 Oleg Pavlov, The Matiushin Case, trans. Andrew Bromfield
19 Paulo Scott, Nowhere People, trans. Daniel Hahn
20 Deborah Levy, An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell
21 Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, By Night the Mountain Burns, trans. Jethro Soutar
22 SJ Naudé, The Alphabet of Birds, trans. the author
23 Niyati Keni, Esperanza Street
24 Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World, trans. Lisa Dillman
25 Carlos Gamerro, The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón, trans. Ian Barnett
26 Anne Cuneo, Tregian’s Ground, trans. Roland Glasser and Louise Rogers Lalaurie
27 Angela Readman, Don’t Try This at Home
28 Ivan Vladislavić, 101 Detectives
29 Oleg Pavlov, Requiem for a Soldier, trans. Anna Gunin
30 Haroldo Conti, Southeaster, trans. Jon Lindsay Miles
31 Ivan Vladislavić, The Folly
32 Susana Moreira Marques, Now and at the Hour of Our Death, trans. Julia Sanches
33 Lina Wolff, Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, trans. Frank Perry
34 Anakana Schofield, Martin John
35 Joanna Walsh, Vertigo
36 Wolfgang Bauer, Crossing the Sea, trans. Sarah Pybus with photographs by Stanislav Krupař
37 Various, Lunatics, Lovers and Poets: Twelve Stories after Cervantes and Shakespeare
38 Yuri Herrera, The Transmigration of Bodies, trans. Lisa Dillman
39 César Aira, The Seamstress and the Wind, trans. Rosalie Knecht
40 Juan Pablo Villalobos, I’ll Sell You a Dog, trans. Rosalind Harvey
41 Enrique Vila-Matas, Vampire in Love, trans. Margaret Jull Costa
42 Emmanuelle Pagano, Trysting, trans. Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis
43 Arno Geiger, The Old King in His Exile, trans. Stefan Tobler
44 Michelle Tea, Black Wave
45 César Aira, The Little Buddhist Monk, trans. Nick Caistor
46 César Aira, The Proof, trans. Nick Caistor
47 Patty Yumi Cottrell, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
48 Yuri Herrera, Kingdom Cons, trans. Lisa Dillman
49 Fleur Jaeggy, I am the Brother of XX, trans. Gini Alhadeff
50 Iosi Havilio, Petite Fleur, trans. Lorna Scott Fox
51 Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, The Gurugu Pledge, trans. Jethro Soutar
52 Joanna Walsh, Worlds from the Word’s End
53 Nicola Pugliese, Malacqua, trans. Shaun Whiteside
54 César Aira, The Lime Tree, trans. Chris Andrews
55 Ann Quin, The Unmapped Country
56 Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline, trans. Tim Parks
57 Alicia Kopf, Brother in Ice, trans. Mara Faye Lethem
58 Christine Schutt, Pure Hollywood
59 Cristina Rivera Garza, The Iliac Crest, trans. Sarah Booker
60 Norah Lange, People in the Room, trans. Charlotte Whittle
61 Kathy Page, Dear Evelyn
62 Alia Trabucco Zerán, The Remainder, trans. Sophie Hughes
63 Amy Arnold, Slip of a Fish
64 Rita Indiana, Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas
65 Angela Readman, Something Like Breathing
66 Gerald Murnane, Border Districts
67 Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row
68 César Aira, Birthday, trans. Chris Andrews
69 Ann Quin, Berg
70 Fleur Jaeggy, Proleterka, trans. Alastair McEwen
71 Olivia Rosenthal, To Leave with the Reindeer, trans. Sophie Lewis
72 Lina Wolff, The Polyglot Lovers, trans. Saskia Vogel
73 Mario Levrero, Empty Words, trans. Annie McDermott
74 Michelle Tea, Against Memoir
75 Cristina Rivera Garza, The Taiga Syndrome, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana
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76 Hanne Ørstavik, Love, trans. Martin Aitken
77 Tim Etchells, Endland
78 Rita Indiana, Made in Saturn, trans. Sydney Hutchinson
79 Luke Brown, Theft
80 Gerald Murnane, Collected Short Fiction
81 Gerald Murnane, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs
82 James Attlee, Isolarion
83 Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8
84 Juan Pablo Villalobos, I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me, trans. Daniel Hahn
85 Andrzej Tichý, Wretchedness, trans. Nichola Smalley
86 Yuri Herrera, A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, trans. Lisa Dillman
87 Lina Wolff, Many People Die Like You, trans. Saskia Vogel
88 Ann Quin, Three
89 Rachel Genn, What You Could Have Won
90 John Metcalf, Medals and Prizes
91 Claudia Hernández, Slash and Burn, trans. Julia Sanches
92 Ann Quin, Passages
93 Various, This Is How We Come Back Stronger
94 Eva Baltasar, Permafrost, trans. Julia Sanches
95 Norah Lange, Notes from Childhood, trans. Charlotte Whittle
96 César Aira, The Divorce, trans. Chris Andrews
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ann quin (1936–1973) was a working-class writer from Brighton, England. She was at the forefront of British experimentalism in the 1960s along with BS Johnson and Alan Burns, and also lived in the US in the mid-sixties, working closely with US writers and poets including Robert Creeley. Prior to her death in 1973, she published four novels: Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972). A collection of short stories and the fragment of her unfinished last novel, The Unmapped Country (edited by Jennifer Hodgson), was published by And Other Stories to great acclaim in 2018. Quin’s novel Berg was republished by And Other Stories in 2019, to be followed by Three in 2020 and Passages in 2021.
