The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Kitaj: Pictures and Conversations by Julián Ríos
Irving Malin

Julián Ríos. Kitaj: Pictures and Conversations. Moyer Bell, 1997. 278 pp. Paper: $24.95.

Ríos recognizes his affinity with the American painter R. B. Kitaj: both play with illusion—or allusion—and they are “secret sharers” of Kafka, Freud, Benjamin, and Borges. They see odd shadowy patterns of meaning. Thus this critical text becomes a meditation on (mis)representation, ambiguity, ghostly identity.

Ríos titles his chapters with puns (stressing duplicity): “M/Waking Dreams”; “The Grand Jewry”; “Whoroscope”; “Heads or Tales.” He writes in his preface that he enters the world of Kitaj as a “foreigner”: “A foreigner usually sees words, even their trails and entrails, for instance the strange ‘liver’ in Liverpool, with more acuity than one accustomed to using and spending them as ordinary coins. Or he even coins them for change.” But every artist is a foreigner; the world is an alien, kabbalistic maze of infinite, infernal signs—it forces him to see the unseen blinds of implication. Thus the familiar becomes unfamiliar, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. In one chapter of “conversation” Ríos and Kitaj speculate upon the portrait. Can a portrait really stand alone? Or is it a self-portrait? On page ninety there is an interesting remark by Ríos: “Nobody can portray the same face twice. The self flows continually, as the great artists of the psyche travel in their successive self-portraits. Henry James spoke, in The Ambassadors, I think, of the terrible fluidity of self-revelation.”

Both his recent novel—Loves That Bind—and Kitaj flow into each other so that it is impossible to recognize one as text or “context,” as text or commentary. And if we remember that Loves That Bind is arranged as a revelatory alphabet, a maze of letters to fictional women, we can also see it as “self-referential.” Ríos is a terrifying and comic writer because he recognizes that he suffers from “referential mania” (Nabokov’s phrase). But he understands that we are (b)(c)locked in our fictions—or that we are fictions written by an unknown deity. [Irving Malin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Kitaj: Pictures and Conversations by Julián Ríos Irving Malin Julián Ríos. Kitaj: Pictures and Conversations. Moyer Bell, 1997. 278 pp. Paper: $24.95. Ríos recognizes his affinity with the American painter R. B. Kitaj: both play with illusion—or allusion—and they are “secret sharers” of Kafka, Freud, Benjamin, and Borges. They see odd shadowy patterns of meaning. Thus this critical text becomes a meditation on (mis)representation, ambiguity, ghostly identity. Ríos titles his chapters with puns (stressing duplicity): “M/Waking Dreams”; “The Grand Jewry”; “Whoroscope”; “Heads or Tales.” He writes in his preface that he enters the world of Kitaj as a “foreigner”: “A foreigner usually sees words, even their trails and entrails, for instance the strange ‘liver’ in Liverpool, with more acuity than one accustomed to using and spending them as ordinary coins. Or he even coins them for change.” But every artist is a foreigner; the world is an alien, kabbalistic maze of infinite, infernal signs—it forces him to see the unseen blinds of implication. Thus the familiar becomes unfamiliar, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. In one chapter of “conversation” Ríos and Kitaj speculate upon the portrait. Can a portrait really stand alone? Or is it a self-portrait? On page ninety there is an interesting remark by Ríos: “Nobody can portray the same face twice. The self flows continually, as the great artists of the psyche travel in their successive self-portraits. Henry James spoke, in The Ambassadors, I think, of the terrible fluidity of self-revelation.” Both his recent novel—Loves That Bind—and Kitaj flow into each other so that it is impossible to recognize one as text or “context,” as text or commentary. And if we remember that Loves That Bind is arranged as a revelatory alphabet, a maze of letters to fictional women, we can also see it as “self-referential.” Ríos is a terrifying and comic writer because he recognizes that he suffers from “referential mania” (Nabokov’s phrase). But he understands that we are (b)(c)locked in our fictions—or that we are fictions written by an unknown deity. [Irving Malin]

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