it can fight or ransack

The Porthole is against ideas of coherence and secret enormousness (Modernism and Bleak House – what did modernism mean in Italy?); it's a splitting-apart that works consistently throughout its length to maintain the split; the detail in the first paragraph preparing you to know this mother-character better – there must be a reason why she is being filled in with this remark about the pencil behind the ear – but then she is removed and there is nothing to connect her to except the word "mother" again, attached to something that is not her.

"Mother" is placed in impossibility, not by any quality of itself, but by the restrictions of bodies.

If the author writes "mother" again in a distant future chapter then what is he referring to?

He has addressed Guglielmo's mother so that the phrase "Guglielmo's mother" is not restricted to a phenomenon with recognisable habits such as tucking a pencil behind its ear; so, instead, it is attached to an absence or impossible overabundance of character, so impossible that it negates or even ignores its own constituent parts. I want to say that this makes her non-monolithic. In the Love Novel chapter Spatola might be arguing for the power of the anti-monolith and the paradox, but on the other hand he might be asking you to regard everything that is being said as "All the clichés of political debates," because he places that phrase roughly in the middle of the mass of points, some of which are repeated in ways that could make you interpret them as ridiculous things to say* though I prefer to read it as the author's own fidelity to his idea of vital paradox and certainty-repulsion. The point of the book is given priority over the points in the book, in my understanding. If the Porthole pointed to a larger form (a definite political statement, a set of well-drawn characters) then it would not be true to its own faith in paradox. Deducing that the author is thinking about this consciously as he writes and that the paradox is not the byproduct of a desire to write nonsensically.

You can imagine him adjusting his paradoxes to make them more paradoxical.



* e.g., making a point in a calm mode, "a society would not be capable to establish its economy on a large scale, by domesticating man, if it could not find weaker societies, which it can fight or ransack …" then again in a frantic tone: "Do we find weaker societies within reach? Do we destroy them?"