The work of Christopher Hanrahan
Life is the purest, clearest, darkest, most crystalline hopelessness… Along the way is nothing but a snowy, icy path of human confusion, along the way, where one has to go; through adulterations of understanding.
Thomas Bernhard
In the first novel Frost, by the Austrian Thomas Bernhard, the narrator is sent to report on Strauch, an erstwhile painter who has fallen into rapid mental decline. The narrator finds a psychologically decrepit figure, ridden with misery. Tirades such as the one above are a mark of all of Bernhard’s main characters who seem to have an incurable complaint against the world’s pitilessness. It is a relentless tendency that would be pathological if not for the way the intensity collapses into farce; the world is a lapsed experiment on which grandiose plans are wasted. This oscillation between tragedy and comedic hysteria tends to divide Bernhard’s readers, and it is a division that is at the core of his social commentary. For one either has a sense of irony or one does not. The people who misunderstand his writing and who can easily do without it are essentially the people that the novels are written against. You either get it our you do not. A similar metaphysical divide exists in the work of Christopher Hanrahan, playing out a series of contradictions: laconic-engaged, smart-stupid, ignorant-aware. In Hanrahan’s world Alfred E. Newman declaims his ‘What, me worry’ in a Shakespearean costume. Or rather, as one typical text in one of his pieces declares, ‘I wasn’t worried anyway’.
With Hanrahan, as with several other of his contemporaries such as Todd McMillan, Marley Dawson, Soda_Jerk and Sam Smith, Duchamp’s famous phrase of ‘stupid as a painter’... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline