4 - Tripticks: Impoverished Style as Cultural Critique

Summary

A Surface of Screens

We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

Days were nights. Dreams were reality. Reality seen through a rear-view mirror.

Like Passages, Tripticks is a travel narrative. But in place of Mediterranean trains, this is a road trip across the highways of a post-Second World War, affluent, post-Beat, and verging on post-modern America; and while search predominantly motivates the former, here it is chase. This fourth book's unnamed male protagonist is pursued by his ‘No. 1 X-wife and her schoolboy gigolo’ (7): ‘It was when hitting Highway 101 I noticed they were following’ (10) – actually, as he later admits, ‘who was chasing who I had forgotten’ (136). The protagonist drives a Chevrolet – ‘as soon as I climbed into the Chevy they began the chase again’ (19) – his ex-wife and her lover follow in a Buick. As in these examples, much of Tripticks is viewed through the front windscreen and rear-view mirror of a car and accompanied by its protagonist's ‘I’ drawl. Its scenes are also seen in and through a variety of other screens, from a two-way mirror (10), to IBM computers (53), to the television – ‘tube’ (52) or ‘boob tube’ (53), and these various screens are used to scrutinise American consumer culture. Such surfaces magnify, filter and distort what the protagonist sees: ‘faces, glass faces behind me, twisted into grotesque shapes by the Pacific winds’ (12).

The book is a triptych of three sections: the first and third are from the protagonist's perspective and primarily consist of loosely connected streams of an often ironic first person narrative, paratactic paragraphs, lists, headlines, an interview, and illustrations; the middle section takes the form of subtitled letters to the protagonist from various other characters including his ex-wife and parents. Together, these sections create a confusing and increasingly anxious text where, like Berg, it is not quite clear what is fantasised and what takes place outside the protagonist's mind. Of all Quin's oeuvre Tripticks has been the least discussed. It is also the most overtly formally ‘experimental’ – not least because of the inclusion of Carol Annand's pop art illustrations – and the resulting mixed form text is ambiguous, cacophonous and allusive.