Four Inspirations for Push Process by Jonathan Walker
My novel with photographs, Push Process, is officially published on 6 March by Ortac Press. It’s about Richard, a postgraduate student researching in Venice, who abandons the archive to take photographs. It’s a work of autofiction, based in part on the years I spent as a historian of that city around the turn of the millennium.
Here I want to acknowledge some of the book’s fictional inspirations, three novels and one film:
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
Push Process is a work of autofiction. One of the unwritten rules for that mode is it cannot be an exercise in wish fulfilment: the protagonist cannot be more talented, attractive or successful than the author, and indeed, it’s better if they are obviously less so. In some cases, this commitment is taken further: the protagonist is presented as the worst possible version of the author. Their selfishness and weakness are exaggerated instead of their talents. There's a perverse kind of integrity in this approach, but it has its own pitfalls. I subscribe to Aristotle’s view that a protagonist should be admirable to excite our interest: that is, they must have some admirable quality alongside their flaws.
Leaving the Atocha Station is a modern Kunstlerroman – a variation of the coming-of-age plot that tracks the growth of a young artist to maturity. As such, it is/was an obvious model for Push Process, not least because it has an Anglo protagonist, Adam, muddling his way into a European culture whose language he’s having difficulties with. Indeed, the best parts of Leaving the Atocha Station are its dramatisation of the suspension or deferral of meaning that occurs when trying to understand and communicate in an imperfectly understood language.
Lerner was already an accomplished poet when he wrote this novel, with several published collections to his name, but the same cannot be said of Adam, who is on a Fulbright scholarship in Spain as a poet, but spends most of the book avoiding writing, though perhaps ‘he’ has subsequently written the novel we are reading, which is told in the first person – there’s always some ambiguity about the ontological status of a first-person fictional narrative that does not directly dramatise the circumstances of its own production. Indeed, we have little evidence of Adam’s facility as a poet: the novel contains only two short extracts of his work, one self-consciously a cobbled-together fragment, the other a short published piece presented without comment.
The word ‘fraud’ recurs frequently in Adam’s narration – for him, there is no possibility of living an authentic life: the limit of his ambition is instead for his fraudulence to become ‘a project and not merely a pathology’. His admirable quality is perhaps simply that he is able to express this dilemma with brutal honesty in the book we are reading, but in a sense that’s a problem, because of the contrast between his inarticulacy in person and his belated eloquence on the page.
There was an interesting thread on Twitter a while back about fictional works of art (or literature) within novels, and whether these ever really work. The person who started the discussion was of the opinion that they are always bathetic: better to suggest the content of such works by allusion or paraphrase rather than attempt to reproduce or describe them in detail, especially when the art in question is visual. In other words, whenever a character is successful in their artistic career, reproducing their work in detail undercuts the verisimilitude of that plot point, because it is never convincing enough on its own terms.
There are several possible counter-examples to this: Doctor Zhivago includes numerous poems by the protagonist, though interestingly many of them are presented as paratexts in an appendix outside the narrative proper. And like Lerner, Pasternak was a successful poet before he was a novelist. I am an admirer of AS Byatt, whose major novels all include lengthy extracts of work attributed to her protagonists: poetry, novels, and ekphrastic accounts of pottery, painting, theatre and even television programmes. Though even she does not attempt to create examples of the visual art, but limits herself to describing it.
I was a photographer before I was a novelist: that is, I spent several years working on the project that forms the basis for Push Process before I ever thought of using these images as the basis for a fictional narrative. But I was not a success. So Push Process is taking a risk by including not only a few samples of the protagonist’s photography, but ‘his’ entire body of work: that is, the 48-image sequence that concludes the novel is (more or less) what I would have put together if I’d ever had the opportunity to publish a photo book under my own name. It seemed to me this risk could only work if I fully accepted the ban on wish fulfilment. That is, Richard, my protagonist, could only be as (un)successful as I was. So in the novel his admirable quality is not that he’s a talented photographer. Rather, it’s that he gives himself totally to his work.
The features of Leaving the Atocha Station I've emphasised here are presented as comical: it’s a funny book. And Lerner didn’t need to shoehorn his poetry into the narrative, since he’d already published it elsewhere. So likely all I'm expressing here is the anxiety of influence. But I spent much of Leaving the Atocha Station frustrated with Adam: I just wanted him to do something, to commit himself. And so, in response to this, I wanted a protagonist who did things, who risked failure, and thereby exposed himself to the reader’s judgement.
The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis
For such a short, uncomplicated story, Push Process had a very lengthy and difficult gestation. First of all, there was the photography project itself, which has existed in several different iterations since 2008, one of which was actually published in an academic journal in 2011 (though in retrospect I’m not happy with that version). Then a first attempt at a novel that was too effective at presenting the protagonist as the worst possible version of myself. I submitted this version as my thesis for an MFA in creative writing in 2014, and one of the examiner’s comments was, ‘What does this character want?’ And I had no answer to that question. Because that version of the character had many compulsions, but no desires. For him, even photography was a compulsion. And the difference between a compulsion and a desire (at least in narrative terms) is that the former produces repetition and the latter results in change.
That first version of the novel was written in the middle of a long relapse that I wasn’t able to acknowledge as such at the time (because I wasn’t drinking, so I could kid myself I was sober). It is therefore a book mired in the thought patterns of addiction, condemned to reproduce those patterns without ever being able to stand outside them. In fact, about fifty per cent of that version is included more or less verbatim in Push Process. And yet Push Process reads very differently: because it has a direction, and Reciprocity Failure (the title of the previous version) did not. In other words, in Push Process, the protagonist wants to take photographs, and that desire constantly evolves, and changes him as it does so.
Anyway, The Queen’s Gambit: a book about the queasy interplay between addiction and art – in this case, chess –, between compulsion and desire. And it’s one of the strengths of the novel that chess remains a compulsion as well as a desire for its heroine Beth Harmon (a complexity I have therefore simplified in my novel). But what I took from this book was the conviction that a single desire, if sufficiently complex, and if explored with sufficient commitment to that complexity, is all you need for a compelling story. Chess has the advantage of external markers of achievement that involve direct competition with others: that is, to progress you have to defeat other players. So conflict (and hence drama) is built into it, and The Queen’s Gambit is really a sports story with a relentless forward movement: climbing the ladder, defeating opponent after opponent, each more formidable than the last. It’s a very simple and repetitive structure, but it’s never boring because of the purity and intensity of Beth’s desire.
Photography isn’t agonistic in the same way, even if it sometimes seems that one must compete for attention or likes in the brave new world of Instagram (or the old one of galleries). But there aren’t really any opponents (or if there are, you’re doing it wrong). The drama is internal: the conflict is against the medium itself, or against our own limitations in encountering its possibilities, and one of the challenges is that (as Richard puts it to himself) you can’t define a winning move in advance, but only retrospectively. So the movement of the story isn’t as clearly defined as in The Queen’s Gambit; nonetheless, in every single chapter of Push Process, Richard sets himself a new challenge and attempts to figure out how to meet it. So it has a kind of puzzle-posing and puzzle-solving structure.
Pickpocket by Robert Bresson
Reciprocity Failure, the abortive first version of Push Process, was an attempt at an existentialist novel, in the tradition of Notes From Underground, Nausea or Good Morning, Midnight. I think changing the protagonist’s orientation from compulsion to desire has attenuated its links to that tradition. But it retains a connection to Robert Bresson’s film Pickpocket, ‘the story of a man who loved to steal, and sacrificed everything to his passion’. If one replaced ‘steal’ with ‘take photographs’ this tagline fits Push Process equally well.
Michel, the hero of Pickpocket, is alone. His choice to become a pickpocket is an attempt to put this condition to use: to redeem it by turning it into a vocation. And ironically, perversely, this choice actually inducts him to a devilish pseudo-community of fellow pickpockets, who sometimes work together as a team. But membership in this community is a false escape from his predicament: it only fixes him more definitively in his loneliness and causes him to reject the love of Jeanne, who offers a truer way out.
Photography was my attempt to put my solitude to use, and thereby to accept it fully. In Push Process, I even describe the photographer as a pickpocket: or rather, this is advanced as a possible comparison, but one which is ultimately rejected. I give my protagonist a happier fate than Michel: for Richard, photography is born from a genuine social impulse – his encounter with new friends – and it forms the basis for a deepening relationship with them. And these are real friends, not devilish tempters. This was another significant change from the earlier version of the story in Reciprocity Failure, and it also separates Push Process from the existential works mentioned above, which are all committed to the idea of solitude as the arena where the struggle to create meaning necessarily takes place.
The sequence in Pickpocket where Michel trains alone in his room is justly famous, in part because of its influence on similar sequences in the work of the screenwriter and director Paul Schrader, for example, in Taxi Driver when Travis Bickle creates a homemade gun slide, and practises its use. The scene in Pickpocket is also an example of the ‘cinema of process’. This mode is characterised by the meticulous description of a sequence of physical actions, which are shown 'from outside', that is, without any explicit explanation or interpretation, and often without dialogue. These actions usually involve expertise and skill, and are directed to a specific (often criminal) end. Many of Bresson's films include such sequences. (A more recent example is Better Call Saul, in which several episodes include set pieces of this kind.) Anyway, the scene in Push Process where Richard assembles and reassembles a large-format camera in his flat in Venice is a direct homage to Michel training. Another scene in a darkroom is similarly inspired by the cinema of process.
A Line Made By Walking by Sara Baume
A novel about making art (or trying to make art) is not an exhibition catalogue. If Push Process is merely a backdoor way of publishing the photobook I couldn’t persuade anyone to take on in 2008 (and again, in a different iteration, in 2021) then it probably fails as fiction. Perhaps Leaving the Atocha Station is a more committed attempt to embrace and articulate this difference: to separate poetry as an independent art form from a narrative account of trying to be a poet. Or, put more positively, if photography was my attempt to do something with solitude, then Push Process is an attempt to do something with my failure as a photographer.
There are actually a few photographs interpolated in Lerner’s novel, but they are free-floating, not attributed to anyone. By contrast, the photographs in Sara Baume’s second novel are directly attributed to her protagonist, but they are a relatively modest part of the book, more of which is dedicated to brief written descriptions of real works by other artists, which are the protagonist’s attempt to test her understanding of art history and measure her own work against the achievements of others.
Insofar as A Line Made By Walking is a Kunstlerroman, it’s not about the journey towards success, but rather about doubt and failure, entropy and death. And how sometimes our only recourse when faced with these things is to look at and describe them carefully.
In Push Process, Richard is never really troubled by doubt: that is, despite his lack of external success, he never experiences failure on his own terms. And unlike Adam in Leaving the Atocha Station, he's never distracted by the possibility that he is a fraud. I just didn't want to write about that after twenty years of false starts with this material – years in which, after my final visit to Venice as a historian in 2008, I barely picked up a camera. But in 2020, I borrowed a DSLR and started photographing again, and I got excited all over again by the medium. Only then was I able to revisit Reciprocity Failure and transform it into Push Process.
So my novel is not about how to succeed. I am singularly unqualified to write about that. It's not really about failure either. Instead, it's about how it feels to create something. But that desire does not exist in isolation. In Push Process, photography is not a withdrawal from the world, but an encounter with it. And ultimately that’s true of Baume’s novel as well.
Jonathan Walker is the author of Push Process, now available from Ortac Press, and other books, including The Angels of L19, and Pistols! Treason! Murder!, the biography of a Venetian spy. He has doctorates in history and creative writing. He currently lives near Glasgow.