lightbulbs

Sometimes in a long book I forget who's who and then one note in the juxtaposition chorus goes dung in a baffled space, the present is supposed to echo deeply off the past but it does not; there is a deadness in some aspect of the character's behaviour when they appear after a long time away and speak again, when I can tell (by the way the author has made a phrase) that their conversation is supposed to have extra meaning due to who they are, whatever the hell that is.

And sometimes I only realise that I could tell in retrospect when the clues mount up, memory hits me, and I think, Wait, this is so and so. Then I see that there have been clues for pages and that I was disturbed by them without knowing what I was disturbed by: it was disquiet, it was a stranger coming up to you fervently and calling you by your name and Hey, yes, hi, hello! you say, while you wonder, Who are you?

That happened last year when I was reading Pynchon's V. and there was a character who was supposed to have resonance when she turned up again, but I thought she was new, and didn't realise that she had been there in the beginning, chapter one or two, then gone underground, the buzz of juxtaposition not there, the character dead, or not dead but subdued. Here was a woman who had been brought in, I thought, to fall in love with one of the male leads, a fresh existence in the book, but then I realised after she said a few words about gear sticks that she had to be the one who had appeared at the beginning, and then she was also that woman; they were not separate, and this new doubled-person had a different point of view on everything; she was more tomboyish than she had been a moment earlier (though her behaviour on the page had not changed) and in an instant this behaviour made no sense, ladies and gentlemen, or else seemed too convenient (for the plot) and too warped from what she should be (in my mind: suddenly she was out of character), and not even aging a few years and shifting to another part of the country (as she'd done) accounted for it I thought, this abrupt girlfriendishness in which she had become engaged, and which I had been following tamely and which I imagined she had been introduced to conduct (so she had, but earlier than I had imagined).

And she was left there by her creator, who had to finish the book somehow, sending off his characters or abandoning them when they were still in the middle of an action. Some books will kill their characters, some will chase them away (Christina Stead does one or both), some will summarise their fates (Dickens), some will philosophise (Middlemarch), some will present themselves with a problem, as does Yambo Ouologuem when he spends the book, Bound to Violence, describing massacres, armies, wild huge actions, then finishes the manuscript with two people sitting alone and holding an unrushed discussion; some will fade their people out gently, like John Crowley in Little, Big, when everybody is at a table among trees and the book looks over the weather that attacks their house, the lightbulbs going out (darkness setting in as the story prepares to vanish); then there is Titus Groan and everyone in a procession, going inside the castle -- the book ends -- they go in and the book ends at the same time; they have walked themselves out of the book. Inside the castle and outside the book they are still walking; they continue on, they are going past the spine, they are off the edge of the table, they are out of the room, they have found their way into the kitchen and they are heading past the cockroach traps into the area under the fridge with the crumbs and shadows and those hard objects like springs and boxes that hide under there, the workings of the machine.

decadence

"You romantics," say the detractors, "you're anthropomorphising this underlining pen, and why don't you think about it this way: the person didn't have personal feelings about decadence, they had a teacher or a lecturer standing there telling them, 'Write an essay about the book you're reading, give me the key ideas,' so they wanted to find phrases that would sum up the author's unifying or driving notion, or, hang on, here's another idea, there were no teachers, they're just a reader who prefers to remember what their novels are about.

'They underlined these words so that if they came back in the future they could search through the pages until they saw those lines, and then their future selves would know what their current selves think Pynchon's point of view is, ultimately; the old self is saying to the modern self, 'This is how you can sum up this novel: it's about 'the tag-end,' it's about 'decadence,' it's about decay.' Then a memory of the details comes back to the modern self, that's the plan, and they remember that parts of the book are set in the twilight of the British Empire, an island is being bombed, a man began a marriage but then it disintegrated, a gang respected a woman then they didn't, and there was this failed attempt in the sewers, to Catholicise rats before the world ended; this was the insurance of the Faith and it didn't work. All summed up by the word decadence: decay, decay, decay, and rot, and the slaughter of the innocent crocodile in the underground church, the pet is betrayed because it has been ruined by adulthood, and then the coloured monkey frozen under the ice, the beautiful terrible place that tantalises you and you fear it: perhaps this place is an inhuman extremity that does not die, but all human things die.

'That was the old self's opinion, and now the modern self knows what its thoughts were, years ago, when they read the book, now they don't have to read the whole four hundred and, how many is it, fifty pages again, because all they have to do is look at those phrases. It was laziness on their part, or practicality: they weren't being depressed," say the detractors, "they were being practical. They were passing notes to themselves, the past self leaving its ghost behind, or a sign, or its signature, saying, 'I existed, here are my thoughts, this is how I make you pay attention to me, I give you this useful information, otherwise you will forget --' but it's already dead."

"We like our version better," say the friend of Katherine Anne Porter, "and we'll point out that if they had wanted to remind themselves of ideas that run through the book then there were other sentences they could have underlined without too much stress for themselves or wear and tear on the pen, and why not make a mark in the margin by that long description of a surgical nose-job, the detailed destruction there, and the arousal-by-destruction, destruction sexy, sex in this book generally destructive rather than generative, which might be a significant idea if they're writing an essay or remembering ... but we like to think that their personality felt itself answered in some way by the words they underlined, which seemed to have a secret shattering meaning that stood apart and away from their role in the story so that, for this person, the whole book, with its dozens of characters, was written for the sake of these words, and the father-related problems of this fictional man named Stencil do not matter, and the way these Germans torture these Africans for pages is not as electrifying as the words "Decadence, decadence," taken in through the eyes at the correct time; those words make an impression as if they are glowing in the dark or dimness, and the preference for these words, these words, above everything else, is like love, not fair or reasonable."

a clear movement

"That's right," they say, "we have been reading Heidegger on Trakl, but as soon as we saw those words we knew it was true, so it is not as if we're fishing," they say, "it's not as though we were groping for a phrase; we do believe it, and it suits and fits the feelings that we are sure were there prior. People sometimes find what they are looking for," and they pick up my phenomenally brutalised secondhand copy of Thomas Pynchon's V., lifting, along with the book itself, stains and brown leaves, which they open to page one hundred and eighty-three where an old owner has underlined the words, "what was the tag-end of an age if not that sort of imbalance, that tilt toward the more devious, the less forceful?"

"They had to wait nearly until page two hundred to find it," say the friends of Katherine Anne Porter, "but they found it eventually, and then there's nothing else until page three hundred and one --" which they show, and the words "Decadence, decadence" have been underlined at the start of a paragraph.

It says:

Decadence, decadence. What is it? Only a clear movement toward death, or, preferably, non-humanity.

"You can imagine," they say with a sort of fluttering pleasure and thrill, "the same kind of mind picking out both those sets of words; you can imagine the same person wanting to remember that their point of view here in the book, was upheld, by this author, who had expressed it so well, and so beautifully, and honoured their feelings, which may well have been paranoia, and maybe delusion, and depression, and a belief that the world was going to the dogs, and horror, and suicidal despair, but respected here by this famous writer, who lets them know that other people have conceived the bones of the same thoughts on which they have clumped the meat they have collected (this meat that cooks and seethes in their minds, the memories of atrocities in the newspapers or the argument they hear downstairs); to this meat they may now add the words of Thomas Pynchon. and if they try to explain their point of view to someone later they could quote V. for support, saying to the other party, look I am not alone, I am less mad than you think, and from these words of Thomas Pynchon's though he wrote them so long ago, they can say, today, "Thomas Pynchon thinks this" -- showing that page -- because they have never heard anything that would contradict that belief, and yet he ages, Thomas Pynchon, like the hero of the Zoshchenko novellette who will never be described because he is going to get older before the end of the story, and whatever you describe him as now he might not be today, and may have conceived the opposite point of view in secret, deciding that the world is not going to the dogs, that decadence is not a problem, and that all his old thoughts about entropy were just his body trying to warn him about an oncoming case of alcoholic poisoning because he had been drinking too much gin; the whole book could have been gin.

'We have no idea if Thomas Pynchon actually imbibes," they add, "that was just an example. Maybe he is a teetotaller." They wring their hands.