Allegory is an Attitude: On Katrina Palmer's 'End Matter'

by Karen Whiteson

The shadowy quality of the work’s documentary vestiges will act as a memento to the missing body of the book. Printed as a statement of intent on the back cover of the sculptor Katrina Palmer’s book ‘End Matter’, this extract underlines that which the title suggests, i.e. this is a book constituted entirely of its own supplementary material. Whether or not the main corpus ever existed in the first place is one of several riddles which serve to baffle and fascinate the collective figure of the Loss Adjusters. A metaphysical version of the insurance agent who assesses the amount of compensation to be paid following a claim, the Adjusters’ main remit is to account for the loss of land mass from the isle of Portland, and attempt to counterbalance it with presence. The title of one their (missing)dossiers is ‘Compensating for the Depletion of Real Things with Fictionality’. Here, the idea of fiction as a hallucination arising out of emptiness is embedded the landscape. Portland stone supplies the building material for the bulk of London’s civic edifices; a million square feet was quarried for Saint Paul’s cathedral alone. The hollowing out of the bedrock renders it a site acutely vulnerable to fabulists. And, one might add, allegorists; at least going by Walter Benjamin’s aphorism that Allegory is in the realm of thought as ruins are in the realm of things.

According to Benjamin, the gaze, charged with a sense of transience, falls upon its object, hollowing it out of any meaning except that which it acquires through interpretation.  For Benjamin the melancholic gaze is the essence of the allegorical mindset. Hence The Loss Adjusters are at all times woeful: an inherent disposition confirmed by their proximity to Portland stone. The allegorical emblem par excellence is the ruin; through its re-absorption into the landscape the built environment becomes memento mori. In allegory, Benjamin states, the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Only here, the ruin is not the crumbled edifice but a terrain hollowed out by the quarrymen and convicts; those who cut the stones which go to build the capital, leaving behind a negative space, an ancient landscape palpably charged with loss. The landscape as its own ruin and memorial in one: the ruin as readymade. At least, so it becomes as witnessed by the Loss Adjusters: What is not here is commemorated at the site of its disappearance. The entire island is a Portland stone memorial, carved out and immense, shaped by convicts and quarrymen, sliced and dissected by the machine, and perceived as an ongoing sculptural production created by loss.

In ‘End Matter’ missing bodies comprised of both text and flesh – dislodged stones and the sound of implements hitting rock – are some of recurring motifs embedded just under the surface of the narrative, where the threads of the story merge and loop to form a subterranean labyrinth. Dense with ideas, the book also delivers a rattling good yarn.

These tales are presented as deleted fragments, retrieved and pored over by the Adjusters; the work of a writer in residence who has herself gone awol. These fragments concern the quarryman’s two “deviant” daughters, a Carniter and his dealings with a Rogue Loss Adjuster and Ash, a young convict. The first tale features sisters Celestine and Hazeline, themselves supplementary creatures who having outlived their father’s traditional occupation of quarrying, have no place in the social structure. But here we are. As Celestine says. Displaced by time yet stubbornly present in space they’re like the mound of earth which appears when Ash buries the Rogue’s corpse. Their excessive love of the landscape binds them to the island. One day Hazeline recounts to her sister a peculiar encounter with the Adjusters. The encounter begins with them questioning her in the interests of their bureaucratic research, but this soon turns into a group sex scene described in terms of a machinic assembly of moving parts, a merging of flesh with stone. As Celestine wryly comments: There’s a long history of banging and cutting on this island. I hope they thanked you. The link between the sex scene and the exertion of labour required to extract the stone is continually evoked throughout the book, underlining its theme of sacrifice and expenditure.

This orgiastic scene triggers the event of a runaway horse whose mad dash across the island culminates in the dislodging of a huge boulder which crushes Hazeline’s hut, along with a human inhabitant of the island, (the identity of the crushed remains supplies one of several story hooks). The elemental force of the runaway horse is conjured in a singular sonic image: Its heavy hooves powered down and into the ground. Those hoofbeats sustain their echo in the recurring descriptions of men working stone: Co-ordinated sound resonated throughout the arena; the repeated impact of iron against rock. The power required for a human body to force a pickaxe through stone required this rhythm.

This book is part of a tripartite work commissioned by Artangel and these interlocking tales have been repurposed for an audio piece which accompanies a site specific walk, as well for a broadcast on BBC Radio 4. This juxtapositioning of the written with the spoken word is intrinsic to the dynamic tensions of ‘End Matter’. For Benjamin too, this tension was key to the liberating potential of allegory, which he saw as a space where: [W]ritten language and sound confront each other in tense polarity. The writer-in-residence leaves behind an audio file which records her speech and footsteps in real time; its immediacy mediated by the Adjusters bureaucratic method and presented as a forensic exhibit. Benjamin continues: The division between signifying written language and intoxicating spoken language opens up a gulf in the solid massif of verbal meaning and forces the gaze into the depth of language. This stratifying device is active both in terms of both ‘End Matter’s’ formatting and its narrative strategy, producing a text as compressed and richly layered as the geological formation of Portland stone. It evokes a vertical temporality, a coexistence of all the different eras inhabited by this slim book, ranging from the Jurassic to the contemporary. This vertical sense of time lends itself to a belief in reincarnation and the Adjusters suspicion the Rogue Adjuster has evolved into an inextinguishable life force is an irrational possibility which seeps out to encompass all the characters.

In Craig Owens’ essay ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism’, he states: Allegory is an attitude as well as a technique, a perception as well as a procedure. It occurs whenever one text is doubled by another. One text is read through another. The paradigm for the allegorical work is the palimpsest. In ‘End Matter’ the allegorical attitude is so intensified, it conjures the supersensible as Palmer calls it. In Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime novel ‘The Heat of the Day‘ there’s a phrase which evokes the atmosphere of collective hallucination of London during the blitz, which allows for fleeting moments of intense, erotically charged, telepathic communication between the characters. She calls it: the thinning of the membrane between this and that. The thinning of the membrane between this and that, bringing lost layers of duration into stark relief, is the latent force at work in ‘End Matter’.

In other story threads produced by the writer-in-residence, the allegorical attitude is played out in a way which highlights the absurd, Kafkaesque quality of its endeavour. Most strikingly, in the case of the Rogue Adjuster where the logic of absence counterbalanced by presence is enacted in terms of the law of supply and demand. As well as stone, the island also boasts sheep which yield a particularly sweet mutton and which the Rogue exports for profit. As the Loss Adjusters summarise the situation: The Rogue realises that an overlooked consequence of quarrying is the removal of grazing land for Portland’s native sheep. In his degenerate mind, he understands that this delicacy will become rare, so he attempts to secure a supply of it for himself, to fulfill an improbable level of demand from some unspecified market. Paradoxically, the Rogue needs the land to continue to disappear in order for the sheep to become increasingly valuable. At one point the Rogue, in his greed, is compared to a pig–whose meat he himself disdains on the grounds it will happily eat human flesh. His own corpse ends up being fed to these very animals, so embodying the self-consuming cycle of supply and demand which drives market forces. This aspect of ‘End Matters’ is a cautionary tale that turns on the thinning of the membrane between human and animal, between stone and flesh. As if, beneath the skin of the landscape, there stirs an endless chain of being.

An earlier version of this review was previously published by 3:AM Magazine.

End Matter by Katrina Palmer was published by BookWorks in 2015.

https://bookworks.org.uk/publishing/shop/end-matter/

Works consulted:

Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998).

Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949).

Craig Owens, 'The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism', October, 12 (1980), pp. 67–86.

Katrina Palmer, (London: BookWorks, 2015).