Proxies: Essays Near Knowing

Brian Blachfield’s first book of essays, 2016’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, contains twenty-four essays that meditate a key term or phrase. Regarding the book’s structure, Blanchfield writes, “I determined not to review again the books and other works I consulted in memory, and I did not stop thinking through the subject at hand to verify assertions or ground speculations or firm up approximations” (vii). This “formal choice” has a significant impact on how readers’ experience Blanchfield’s essays. For example, after reading and enjoying “On Owls,” I turned to the “Correction” section at the back of the book and learned that my three favorite passages were based on Blanchfield’s faulty memory.However, most essays fare better. The strongest essays in Proxies—essays like “On Foot Washing,” “On Man Roulette,” “On Tumbleweed,” “On Peripersonal Space,” “On Dossiers,” and “On Frottage” reveal Blanchfield’s struggles with poverty, coming out, his mother’s fanatical religiosity and suffocating clinginess, queer relationships, and the migratory demands of the academic job market. “On Man Roulette” and “Frottage” address the complications of gay relationships and sexuality, in the era of digital hookups and the AIDS crisis, respectively. “On Peripersonal Space” recounts Blanchfield’s fraught relationship with his mother and her critical response to his first book. “On Dossiers” reveals the deep influence of Blanchfield’s relationship with his stepfather, Frank.That said, stylistically, Proxies often reads like a book of popular essays written by a beginning literary critic instead of the work of an experienced poet. In “On Confoundedness,” Blanchfield describes his style as “peculiar,” having a “verbose musicality” and “flashes of bodily, sometimes sexual (and then only homosexual) physicality” (78). The peculiarity and attention to queer sexuality that Blanchfield professes work well in essays like “On Man Roulette” and “On Frottage,” but his “verbose musicality” makes several early essays torturous and slow. Essays like “On the Locus Amoenus” read like Blanchfield lecturing to himself in an empty classroom.In many essays, Blanchfield presents entry-level concepts in critical theory and personal experiences common to many working-class children as deep insights. In “On the Leave,” he attempts to exoticize a commonplace working-class story of domestic violence and fatherly abandonment. Likewise, his discussion of the Cartesian mind/body divide” in “On Man Roulette” (28) treats this basic concept as something profound. Throughout the book, Blanchfield drops theorists’ names, especially Roland Barthes, who appears over and over, but these references often feel unnecessary. The exception is “On Frottage” where he explores queer temporality in interesting ways. In essays like “On the Leave,” Blanchfield’s sentences devolve into faux-theory gibberish: “the magic act of the leave is that, gradually, motionlessly, the frozen scatter of independent entities are reorganized into relational possibilities along a single-point perspective, a subject position, interpellating the new next agent of the game, calling him to stand where he needs to be” (70). This name dropping may impress a New Yorker audience, but it will feel superficial to anyone well versed in critical theory.

What the form is all about. This collection of essays is a refreshing array of exquisitely textured narratives of organic thought. Get it.

Not easy to read. But very good essay.

Still moving through these experimental but accessible thought diversions. Genius writer.

A writer with a great vocabulary but no ability to engage this reader. Didn't bother to finish.

So much to say. Currently writing a review for Tupelo Quarterly. Just get the book. It's worth it.