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—The Editors
Rob Doyle’s Cameo has a distinctly “postmodern” resonance that seems almost archaic in the present moment. Three decades removed from its heyday in the Gen-X literature of the 1990s, Doyle writes in the stylistic lineage of writers like Bret Easton Ellis. The aesthetic legacy of this “postmodernism” was a recuperation of certain elements rooted in the literary “avant-garde” extended to the level of pastiche, and alluding to ideas more elevated and profound than what was actually communicated at the level of text. Ellis was virtuoso in this regard, a novelist of pure instinct and “vibe,” possessing an almost unmatched ability to imply some underlying profundity, intelligence, and depth that was more often than not absent. Most of his oeuvre, superficially brutal and unpleasant, also seems in retrospect to be curiously sanitized despite the depravity of its subject. It was a literary equivalent to concomitant processes within cinema and television that has resulted in the normalization of gratuitous violence and explicit sex even within the most staid, pedestrian, and uninteresting cultural outputs. Indeed this was avant-garde ‘transgression’ for the ordinary punter, the middle-brow aesthete, the general reader: the normie.
Ellis’ novel Lunar Park centered on the exploits of a fictionalized protagonist who bore the same name as the author, and Rob Doyle’s Cameo — and his previous novel Threshold —adhere to a similar narrative conceit. I remember going to see Ellis read Lunar Park during its promotional tour in 2005 at Oran Mor in Glasgow. It’s hard to believe now that this was a sold out event, packed to the rafters with hundreds of people. However, I don’t remember the crowd being particularly ‘“literary,”’ and in retrospect seemed more comparable to the “Influencer” meet and greets of the present, albeit for a more rudimentary internet age. My most distinct memory was that everyone wanted to have their copies of American Psycho signed. I suspect that when most people think of American Psycho they’re mostly thinking of the unintentionally comic (and surprisingly seductive) nihilism of its film adaptation, which, like Kubrick’s The Shining, is a vastly superior work of art to the literary original. Ellis’s Lunar Park was a good example of the peculiar redundancy of 90s postmodernist transgression, and the fundamental inadequacy of its aesthetic possibilities, namely, the failed attempt at a meta-fictional transgression of the self. In the end, this strategy always highlighted the author’s paltry narcissistic impulses as opposed to any real attempt to question their providence. No author has really succeeded in truly transgressing the authorial self, which in any case is an uninteresting artistic goal, and one which was effectively exhausted by the Nouveau Roman in the 1960s and 70s. Subsequently, the failure of the 90s attempt to expel the Self has had the unintended consequence of causing a manifold proliferation. This impasse is what, I assume, Rob Doyle’s Cameo is attempting to re-visit — but it is difficult to be sure to what end, if any.
I admired Doyle’s previous novel Threshold (2020), a work of autofiction. I first read it during the pandemic, when everything was in a state of flux. Threshold more overtly concerned transgression as a means to transcendence, albeit through the clichéd avenues of drugs and excess. It is temperamentally and intellectually in accordance with Aldous Huxley’s insights in The Doors of Perception (1954), refracted through the compulsory irony and dark humor of the Xillenial writer. Nonetheless, Doyle ultimately reproduces the fundamental philosophical misapprehension of Huxley. Upon re-reading Threshold, I’ve come to realize that my original admiration was spurred less by its specific aesthetic qualities (the style itself is modest, familiar, earnest — like if Nick Hornby had written about piss fetishists in the Berghain toilets). Rather, it appears that I was taken in by its frequent instances of “relatability;” a pathos inextricably bound up in some familiar imagery, or a sense of commonality felt with the author’s tastes and cultural referents, or the experiences recounted and their similarity to my own. These things are a solid basis for friendship, but less so when it comes to an honest appraisal of artistic merit. I have, no doubt unwisely, opted to pursue the latter in this review — which, amidst the general dishonesty of contemporary criticism, I will foolhardily attempt to re-brand as “radical honesty.” In retrospect, as much as I am loathe to admit it, the cumulative effect of Threshold was very much “affirmative” in the facile identitarian logic which governs much of contemporary cultural discourse, even if we allow that it was an understandable response to the negligible amount of contemporary fiction concerning the male heterosexual experience. The admiration felt was analogous to the pride of a small village towards the local boy come good, and the author of Threshold was for all intents and purposes notre homme infiltré; our man on the inside. Needless to say, I gave little thought then as to why he might have been permitted to be on the “inside” in the first place. Indeed, of all the myriad indiscreet fantasies of literary celebrity which Cameo invokes, the most implausible is also the most modest: the idea of a critical culture in which the primary considerations are artistic and intellectual, where there exists some interest in giving a writer’s aesthetic and philosophical project its proper due. In this particular vein, I have attempted to take this work seriously.
Rob Doyle is nominally an Irish Novelist™, but one who is clearly ambivalent towards this designation. His palpable discomfort provides one of the more interesting aspects of Cameo; an underlying contempt towards the idea of Irish literature as global brand, comparable in certain ways to the ubiquitous Irish pub, paradoxically provincial and cosmopolitan. Every man has two countries, Henri de Bornier once proclaimed: his own and France. But many people hate the French, whereas the Irish are an almost universally beloved people. They are, however, loved for specific reasons; openness, kindness, humor, warmth, conviviality … abject historical suffering. Such attributes make it difficult to cast oneself in any role that goes against the national stereotype, such as imperious literary enfant terrible. I suspect that this is a source of great frustration for a writer such as Rob Doyle, and one painfully evident — to an intentionally comical effect — in the speculative autobiographical elements of this novel’s alter-ego Ren Duka.
The basic philosophical conceit of Cameo is given to be Nietzschean. The final section — an interview with the “author” — attempts to convey some hint of this overarching framework:
To quote an author I long ago stopped reading, Friedrich Nietzsche, I can say that the entire Duka series stands as a monument to a crisis. Only, the crisis turns out not to have been mine alone, as I imagined it was when I wrote the first pages of the original novel. Ren Duka is the window through which I’ve viewed the world’s catastrophes and mutations. He’s the microcosm that contains the macrocosm.
The actual author may attempt to claim some semblance of ironic distance here, echoing the customary and inadequate defense of the 90s “post-modernist,” but the later reference to Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo seems to confirm a specific connection. It was this text which our man Friedrich was composing when he had his mental breakdown in Turin. We may assume that the enfant terrible Doyle is similarly attempting to parse what he believes to be a comparably profound philosophical crisis: being a middle-aged bohemian hedonist. It is here that the outline of a rather crude intertextual pastiche emerges, a book which was also famously invoked the eternal recurrence of Nietzsche. The Turin episode also constituted the most powerful fixed ideas in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and “Ren Duka” appears also to be a perfect anagram of “Kundera.” If this level of meta-textual detail seems a tad on the nose, it also appears quite apposite and logical in sum. For despite some initial appearances, Cameo is itself very much a recurrence; a continuation of the auto-fictional thematic focus of Threshold. Fredric Jameson, writing in 2018 about Karl Ove Knausgaard, described his work as “surface writing” for “surface readers:”
We have, in postmodernity, given up on the attempt to ‘estrange’ our daily life and see it in new, poetic or nightmarish, ways; we have given up the analysis of it in terms of the commodity form, in a situation in which everything by now is a commodity; we have abandoned the quest for new languages to describe the stream of the self-same or new psychologies to diagnose its distressingly unoriginal reactions and psychic events. All that is left is to itemise them. . . . (Jameson, London Review of Books, 2018)
On first glance, the exasperating itemization of quotidian reality employed by Knausgaard seems to differ significantly from the narrative apparatus of Cameo, which is largely comprised of book summaries of Ren Duka’s novels, written in the flat prose of a synopsis one might email to a literary agent. These summaries become more and more outlandish and picaresque as the narrative progresses, and we are to assume that many of these themes and plots could, in some parallel universe, have been written by Rob Doyle himself. But this conceit is quite similar in affect to the itemization Jameson describes. As such, its “estranged” effect is no more salutary for being ostensibly more “literary,” since it does nothing to lessen the “distressing unoriginality.” Indeed, a writer can attempt to transgress the “self” through verisimilitude, through honesty (“radical” or otherwise), through banal diarization, or through the invocation of shop-worn literary devices, but ultimately one must possess sufficient means to actually transcend the ‘self.’ This is where Cameo ultimately comes up short.
In 1937 Vladimir Nabokov was writing his first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, on a typewriter balanced on top of the bidet. It was the only place he could work in a cramped Parisian studio apartment without waking up his infant son. They had recently fled Nazi Germany because of his Jewish wife, and a recent affair with another woman had come close to ending his marriage. Desperately poor, and looking for a way out of the European mainland to either England or America, he sensed that switching to English would allow him to keep working as a writer. The son of a Russian aristocrat and anglophile, he’d learned English as a child before he knew Russian. However he was deeply attached to the Russian language, in which he had written nine novels that were well regarded within the emigration. Though fluent, he was so unsure of his English prose that he had several acquaintances proofread the manuscript for him. The novel concerns an attempt by a narrator named V to write a biography of his recently deceased half-brother: a Russian-English novelist named Sebastian Knight. He had little contact with Sebastian since their childhood, and V’s overriding purpose is to counteract the effects of another, flawed, biography written by his brother’s former literary agent. V wishes to understand his brother’s books as a means to discover the mysterious truth behind his tragic “real” life. Needless to say, this undertaking is doomed to failure. Sebastian Knight’s novels are summarized in not entirely dissimilar ways to Ren Duka’s novels in Cameo. Interspersed with the descriptions of these non-existent books, and within the wider narrative, are various elements of Nabokov’s own ‘real life’; the pain of exile, the assassination of his father, the prospect of losing his language, the hate and resentment he felt toward the Bolshevik revolution which had deprived him of his motherland, the antipathy he felt towards his homosexual brother who would eventually die in a concentration camp, the passionate affair with another woman that caused him to contemplate suicide, and all of the other ways that his life had come perilously close to resembling the tragedy of Sebastian Knight. Was Nabokov then writing autofiction? Indeed, personal memory, the singular and subjective vision, was for Nabokov inextricable from his essential conception of art. But the “absolute solution” to the overwhelming effects of an undesired historical reality was for Nabokov a defiant restatement of the ideology of aesthetic autonomy. He would remain faithful to this ideology until the end. It was, however, a thoroughly modern aesthetic autonomy which abhorred regurgitation and pastiche, scoffed at cliché — one that strived constantly to attain an uncompromising uniqueness of style. Taken in this context, the hidden presence of such intimate and traumatic details from Nabokov’s own life begin to cohere. To write such intensely personal work at that particular historical impasse, when the majority of other writers and artists were swept up in the world historical political conflicts of the era, attests to the unrelenting individualism at the very core of the Nabokovian aesthetic. Yet it was individualism that was always in the end subordinate to the aims of art, that always transcended the self. He excoriated the programmatic literature of ‘social intent,’ yet possessed a gift of style so unique and persuasive — across two languages — that no one, not even his enemies, were capable of denying it. For Nabokov there was only one school, that of talent. If one wished to be a writer of style, and not of social intent, it was necessary to be a writer of pure style.
I’m unsure if Doyle aspires to be such a writer. However, it was a strongly held motivation for Martin Amis — whose work is a clear influence on Doyle. Amis’s strategy was extra-literary and more related to public relations and advertising than literature itself — partly involving name dropping Nabokov constantly and hoping that an association repeated and parroted by compliant journalists might somehow realign the cosmic order. In the actual practice of “pure” style, Amis always in my view fell tragically short: the most he could muster was the very English reliance upon “humor” and a torturously “correct” prose. Amis also wished to be an enfant terrible, to perform transgression for the middlebrow reader, but he could scarcely rise above the role of teacher’s pet turned ‘naughty’ public schoolboy. The Doylean strategy similarly takes recourse to this associative method, a form of manifestation and conjuration intended to deflect from the actualities of a rather familiar and ordinary style. This comes specifically from his constant invocation of “avant-garde,” which is repeated like a mantra throughout Cameo, when not hinted at through various hackneyed tropes.
This fantasy of the “avant-garde,” which bears little resemblance to actuality, is evoked throughout Cameo’s bourgeois bohemian landscapes. It is one redolent of Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr (published in 1918), but unlike that book — Doyle’s avant-garde fantasia, though at times ironic, is far from satirical, and is even at times painfully earnest. Much of the aesthetic touchstones of this fantasy are obvious and cliché, revel in the valorization of cheap transgression, and unsurprisingly — the geographic and spiritual focus doesn’t seem to have shifted too far away from Berlin, the contemporary bourgeois bohemia par excellence; a grimy and increasingly expensive theme park of drugs, techno and kink filled with mendacious mediocrities, where lifestyle and excess is seen as an adequate replacement for genuine artistic vitality.
The writer Adam Lehrer coined the term “Crypto Transgression” as a theory of how work within mainstream culture can show a superficial adherence to the lexicon of progressive liberal politics, whilst allowing for certain elements of cryptographic aesthetic subversion and transgression. It must be admitted that such a theory could only occur to a critic for whom transgression is the end goal of any worthwhile artistic activity. It’s difficult to disentangle the causes and motivation behind such a conviction, which appear to be the by-product of more than half a century of aesthetic revolutions that promised some radical departure — social, political, ontological — but in almost every instance, failed to deliver on its promises, and betrayed those who believed in them. There is a family resemblance between this Crypto-transgression described by Lehrer, and the normie transgression practiced by Rob Doyle — but they differ on the level of provenance. The former maintains some defiance, since it retains elements of plausible deniability, of legitimacy through covert oppositionality. But the latter is markedly more obsequious and compliant.
There have been many contemporary writers and artists in the “normie” transgressive mode that have managed to carve a niche for themselves within the liberal cultural apparatus because of a certain calculated cynicism. This exists alongside their putatively transgressive impulses; a careerism, political reliability, and a public neutrality or deferment of judgement towards what has become an utterly compromised, incoherent, and morally bankrupt centrist liberal consensus (“Slava Ukraina!” but: “it’s complicated” in Gaza). Nevertheless, even if we allow that Lehrer’s fixation with transgression is also, at base, rather unsophisticated — his own take on the auto-fictional genre Communions (which I edited and published through Hyperidean Press in 2021) was more interesting than most. It had such an unwieldy, energetic, and shamelessly egomaniacal honesty, was so un-ironically self-regarding and megalomaniacal that it was difficult to believe it was not parodic. The effect was quite thrilling; an unashamed and unapologetic work of “ego-fiction” as opposed to “autofiction,” one which dispensed with the flimsy pretense common to the ’90s postmodernists. Furthermore, Lehrer seems genuinely committed to transgressing and offending sensibilities, to highlighting obvious inconsistencies and blatant hypocrisy. Over the years he has gone from vocal Bernie Bro to irascible MAGA fanatic in the blink of an eye, only following energies and instincts, never holding back or moderating his oppositionality of expression. Despite the clearly protean nature of his views, how silly they might appear at times, and the distinct possibility that they will likely change in the future: he is nevertheless a faithful acolyte to the prevailing ideological aesthetic and “vibe” of any given moment, and an unfiltered practitioner of “radical honesty” in criticism. What is hard for most to admit is that this attitude — though foolhardy, absurd, indelicate, and at times cringe and embarrassing — is much more purely transgressive than the polite, calculated, media-trained careerism of most journalist/novelists. I’m unsure as to what Lehrer actually believes in other than himself, but I do believe in his commitment to the principle of transgression. If one must be transgressive, isn’t it better to commit to it fully? As far as transgression goes, isn’t it better to be an intensely loathed pariah, than a mildly tolerated prankster? Isn’t it better to be among the barbarian hordes of swinging dicks marauding against the battlements, than some solitary giggling eunuch within the hermetically sealed harem of contemporary culture? But transgression — whether “crypto” or Normie — is ultimately an infantile pursuit when pursued as an artistic telos. It is the mark of an impoverished and unrefined aesthetic sense that is, paradoxically, more compliant to the existing order because it is so easily satisfied and contented. The unruly child, after all, is easily and swiftly quieted when his irrational desires are indulged.
I believe the most salient expression of Rob Doyle’s philosophy of “normie” transgression is to be found in the following:
I wrote a story from the perspective of Mr. Manly; in a dungeon of hell, he recounts his last night on earth as a suburban echo of Christ’s ordeal at Gethsemane. I kept quiet about all this at school, but a strange tenderness, even a kind of love, grew inside me for Mr. Manly. In my final school year, under the influence of transgressive French Literature, I developed a private mythology that venerated the paedophile as the last existential outlaw, thrown into a world where he is universally despised, an object of revulsion whom the community can hate without restraint. I imagined Mr. Manly as an abject saint who dwelt in a zone of truth inaccessible to the human family from which he was a born pariah.
This is the darkest and the most representative example of the essentially “normie” transgressive aesthetic and philosophical qualities of Cameo. These are the adolescent musings of a Doyle alter-ego Henry K. Dillon, author of the Ren Duka novels, writing about a pedophile teacher at their school who committed suicide after his crimes were discovered. The adolescent context is intended to dissuade any outright judgement. But this puerile quality is essential to the novel’s counter-cultural and avant-garde pretensions. In its weak allusion to transgressive French Literature, almost in the manner of a product placement, we cannot help but note a characteristic indolence that pervades the novel. The entirely deliberate and reflexive lack of specificity anchors the text firmly within the realm of the middle-brow. What transgressive literature is being alluded to exactly? To be specific here would risk alienating the intended audience for this work, who are content with the half-hearted allusion, and the broadly deterministic narrative implications (if one reads weird French books, one starts to have weird ideas!). More significantly, it might also risk revealing the extent of the author’s own apprehension of the value of transgression, thereby revealing its lack of sophistication. It is apparent nonetheless.
According to this contrarian logic, one should admire the pedophile because of his status as “bad subject,” as an outsider, because he’s hated by society, by “the man,” by the establishment; he is an “abject saint,” somehow an echo of the original and most profound scapegoat, Christ himself. He is misunderstood, hated and loathed, but permitted access to some profound and divine truth. What is this truth? If one follows the determinism also hinted at in the above, it appears to be an ultimate commitment to individual egotistical desire, loyalty to the passions of the self at all costs. But the great paradox of a narcissistic personality is that its excess of ego is merely a symptom; evidence of a compensatory procedure that attempts (unsuccessfully) to unite the disparate fragments of a fundamentally divided self. It is a pathology born from a fatal uncertainty.
It occurs to Ren that Augustine’s secret motive in writing his Confessions was to promote celibacy among the young so as to lessen the goading evidence that others were getting what he no longer could. Confessions might have been a better book, Ren decides, if Augustine found no respite in God but mediated ruthlessly on erotic regret, on being banished from the garden of earthly bliss as his biological organism underwent the cruel process of dissolution — in short, Confessions would have worked better as a Ren Duka novel.
As elsewhere, the knowingly ironic and absurdist elements of fantasy do not obviate the earnestness of these unseemly delusions of grandeur. Thus, what could have potentially redeemed this work is continually foreclosed. Doyle is ostensibly an authentic seeker of higher truths, but always reverts to a comforting projection of subjective pathologies; dismissing the divine, the “eternal recurrence” is a boundless fascination with the motivations of the Self.
On the level of Philosophical enquiry, Doyle is to some extent in his natural element. An unmistakably sympathetic facet of his fiction is the disarmingly earnest status as a seeker. But a seeker is only sympathetic insomuch as he preserves some degree of naivety and unknowing. This was the case in Threshold, but is less so in Cameo. Aside from the Nietzschean meta-text, there are references to The Bhagavad Gita, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nagarjuna, among others — all hastily grouped together as philosophers of the “void.” Nevertheless, there are certain points within the work which approach something resembling revelation and insight. In one scene, the alter-ego Henry K. Dillon, who works as a taxi driver, has an exchange with a visiting German composer about the nature of art. This section, without a doubt the best in this novel, was the moment at which I came close to apprehending some overarching purpose, since it concerned a philosophical and fictional allegory that I have also been pondering lately vis a vis the “liberal” political worldview. At first I began to rack my brain, to remember if in our discussions and conversations we had touched upon this specific parable, and what Doyle’s attitude towards it was. A very wise man, who is now sadly quite far gone, once told me that this parable concerned the fundamental question that determines what type of morality an individual follows. Stumbling upon this section, I momentarily felt the pull of comparability I had on reading Threshold, an echo of some mutual intelligibility and affability. However, the resolution only seemed to reveal how divergent our artistic sensibilities and loyalties might actually be.
Like the frequent incantation of “avant-garde,” a similarly indolent allusive technique is used by Doyle to convey the grandest philosophical questions of life and existence. Perhaps the intent is to convey these complex metaphysical questions at a level comprehensible to the general reader, an admirable quality for an artist, an act of noblesse oblige and grace. But in order to be successful in this regard, one must have stared into the burning bush and come away with some perennial and esoteric knowledge, some singular truth. However, there doesn’t appear to be any monomaniacal obsession propelled by any such knowledge, no singular adamantine resolve, hard won or otherwise. What remains are a few askew glances at the mirror, refracted relentlessly through different angles and viewpoints across the fictional threads of this work. In the end, there is only one truth, that of the persona of Rob Doyle; the sum of a single life and existence, past and future, contemplative and speculative, presented for our consideration through indiscreet fantasies. In place of hard truth there is flaccid contingency, a flailing around, and an impotent grasping for profundity. Doyle’s potential as a philosophical novelist is still to be fully realized. And yet if the style had been pure, in any way virtuoso, if it was actually avant-garde instead of content to mimic the most obvious poses, we may have been able to forgive Cameo its fateful contingency. I make allowance for the philistine pedigree of those who may have had undue influence in the final shape of this work. But one cannot be on the inside and claim to belong outside; be both arrière-garde and avant-garde. In art, as in life, there is nothing but outside.
Udith Dematagoda is a writer, musician and scholar from Scotland. He is the Editor in Chief and publisher of Hyperidean Press, and writes the Substack Immanent Dissolution.
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Great essay; much to think about. At this moment all I can think is: it’s difficult to be original, moral, unique, honest and piercingly vital all at once—but still well worth the attempt. Thank you!
The bit where you revert to shamelessly flogging your own author - the ingenious Lehrer, who responded to accusations of fascism by bravely becoming an actual fascist - had me in stitches. Also - American Psycho a “vastly superior” movie? LOL bro. You should try writing sentences with less words. A lot less. Maybe none.