Fathom: An Uncovering of Trauma by LisaDart. Published by Free Association Books, London, 2019; 163 pp, £11.99 (paperback).

The paradoxical title of Samuel Beckett's strange and despairing monologue, from 1965, is given in the first sentence: 'imagination dead imagine'. By contrast, Lisa Dart's Fathom (2019), which she describes as a creative memoir about trauma, begins with a seemingly more straightforward, single-word paragraph that, in a benign circle, is repeated at the beginning of the fourth and final part of the memoir: 'Imagine'. The contrast is telling. Meaninglessness provoked Beckett at the most profound level: For his narrator, there is 'no trace anywhere of life', all is lost finally either in the dark or in the unchanging whiteness. On the other hand, Dart's female narrator is a writer and a published poet who, even as she spirals into psychosis, moves ever closer to the 'subjective certainties' of an imagination the death of which she does not entertain. In the aftermath of her breakdown, she dreams, reminisces and tells stories. Above all, she creates from a series of evocative objects a vivid pallet of madness at the interface of colour and meaning: White snow, a royal blue duffel coat and a red scarf. The groundwork of Fathom is chromatic, and the centrality of pictorial imagery links it to Dart's other work. Following the publication of her first poetry pamphlet, The Self in a Photograph (2005), Dart, for whom 'colours yawn the movement of things', brings her longing for light more clearly into view in The Linguistics of Light (2009), which includes a sequence on the paintings of Edward Hopper. Alongside Hopper (his world in her imaginative reworking shot through with 'longings' closed' and 'errant echoes' as well as the momentary 'brilliance' of morning light), Dart counts Francis Bacon, Paula Rego and Frieda Khalo (a formidable triumvirate of modern painters preoccupied with the body in extremis) among the many artists about whom she is most passionate. She believes her fascination with colour is rooted in her infants' school classroom, where the proverbial wax crayons and powder paints of childhood invigorated her sufficiently to withstand a secondary school education, throughout the entire duration of which she appears not to have been shown a single painting. The inextricable link between past and present lies at the heart of Fathom, and the anecdote about art and education not only testifies to the resilience of the imagination but also highlights the connection between childhood experience and how the narrator of the memoir uses paintings as an adult to help her discover feelings as well as the words for what she feels. Driven as she is by the impulse to reclaim the past (historical and psychic), what has happened matters as much to the narrator as what is happening in the here and now. What she refers to in her therapy sessions as the 'event' took place when she was 4 years old: Her father, who was 39 at the time, attempted to commit suicide. His black scarf and her red scarf represent the central chromatic contrast in what I would describe as the biography of an event. About two-thirds of the way through the book, the narrator imagines her father in the lonely 'sunlit brilliance' of an Edward Hopper painting, before finally (some 2 years after coming out of hospital the second time) splicing two images together: A photograph of her father and a reproduction of Francis Bacon's 'Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X' (1953). What does this pictorial condensation reveal about the narrator's unconscious motives? It drew my attention to the family romance in which Dart embeds the memoir and made me think of the primal scene and the child's murderous revenge fantasies towards a beloved father who betrayed her by giving her mother a baby when she, the narrator, was 18 months old. One can speculate only so far about what the narrator does not tell us. But the painting she chooses to overlap with the image of her father is hardly incidental. Among Bacon's finest achievements, the work belongs alongside his numerous pope paintings, the oedipal interpretations of which the artist reinforced by attempting to dismiss them, claiming that his violent reworkings of the seventeenth-century masterpiece had nothing to do with the symbolic killing of the father but were intended rather to 'triumph over' Velázquez. The narrator compares the montage effect that she creates by the act of splicing together the two images with the 'gentler, subtler, more meandering' work of free association, both of which facilitate the ongoing 'uncovering of trauma.' The juxtaposition of the cut-up portraits is also consistent with what she tells her psychotherapist about her passion for images, the fact that she is drawn to the 'disruption of realism' in Picasso, the violence of which goes all the way down in her perception of 'the nervous-system-shock of feeling' in the paintings of Francis Bacon. It is Bacon who exposes her to the violence of the real, which she identifies finally as trauma. Alongside her love of painting, the narrator keeps a tenuous but determined symbolic grip on the sensory fragments, distant echoes and inchoate impressions of her imaginary world through literature. She takes a copy of Sylvia Plath's second collection of poems, Ariel (published 2 years after her death by suicide), with her when she is admitted to hospital after her initial breakdown. The book assumes talismanic connotations in the narrator's inner life. Together with the snow, the duffel coat and the red scarf, extracts from Ariel (quoted throughout Fathom and particularly towards the climax) appear as so many consecrated objects. As regards the ongoing work of reclamation (what Dart calls an 'uncovering') that drives the memoir, the narrator relies on the confessional nature of Plath's poems in keeping faith with the decisively placed, albeit ambiguous word, 'between' in Louis MacNeice's well-known poem 'Snow'. For MacNeice, as for Plath, there is always more to come in what poets make of the world darkly inflected through the dramatic irony of language. Similarly, there is more in the defiantly chosen voice and mood of Dart's narrator, where the madness of 'things being various' is played out as a transitional drama of reclamation. Dart renders the threefold biographical object—evocative, talismanic and transitional—as alternately good and bad, insofar as madness animates and agonises the narrator by turn. The reader is adeptly placed by the author in the 'confusing clasp of this contradiction', borne out by the etymology of the word psychosis. Desperate to understand what has happened to her, the narrator discovers two contradictory meanings of the word: An impairment pertaining to severe mental illness marked by hallucination and delusion; and animation (from the Modern Latin psychosis, 'a giving soul or life to, animating, quickening' and that from the Ancient Greek psukhōsis, 'soul' (psyche) and the suffix −osis). The latter makes more sense to the narrator as it feels closer to her experience. The quickening of the soul allows the depleted inner state of mental illness to sparkle, albeit fleetingly, against the 'hard shade' in the morning light. It allows the narrator to picture a world haunted by something 'unsayable'. She obviously welcomes the thought of giving life to her experience, finding le mot juste for a given affect, and, thereby, warding off the threat of meaninglessness. At the same time, she clings tenaciously to the further discovery that mystics and psychotics inhabit the same (psychic) space. The collapse into psychosis does not occupy the whole of the narrator's inner experience; the foreclosure is partial, not least of all, because the word for what she is suffering in her flesh grants her a blessing: More life. Written under the auspices of this blessing, the memoir is structured around the recurrent thought my father tried to kill himself and I think I saw a lot of blood. Essentially, the memoir consists in thinking this raw, unmetabolized thought. The thinking is at once hard-won and the stuff of the book itself. In a carefully crafted and engaging work that opens a myriad of questions about madness, remembrance and creativity, Dart effectively places the threefold biographical object in four overlapping narrative registers. The first and most poignant of which comprises the memories the narrator still has of her father: His long stride, the 'vulnerable white' on the underside of his arms, the sight of him in bed with a black scarf round his eyes to shut out the light, and so on. There is a beautiful example of how these memories are overdetermined by the metaphoric effects of the narrator's imaginary. The Latin explōdere (from plaudere, meaning 'to clap the hands' or 'to beat, as in wings,' and the prefix ex-) becomes an acoustic metaphor for her father's stuttering but transcendent voice: 'gath, gath, gathering … the shamanic flight of wings'. Alongside these memories, the narrator becomes obsessed with the facts of her father's medical records, largely, as a way of challenging the suspect nature of her mother's account of what happened. In a struggle fought on the terrain of the superego (between what the narrator calls the 'puppet-master-self' and her compliant 'puppet-self'), she resists becoming a mimic or voice-imitator, merely ventriloquising her mother's self-pitying story. Finally, the fourth narrative strand is woven out of her therapeutic work with B, who makes it possible, according to the narrator, for her to dive down into the fathomful. The narrator goes mad but not entirely; nor does mental illness deaden the creative imperative to write, resulting in a memoir that consistently excites pathos in its reach for meaning.