Ur-story: The Death of Meaning (Part 3)

"For one who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God; for no one understands, but in his spirit he speaks mysteries." 1 Corinthians 14:2

The central trope around which Don Delillo's The Names revolves is a mysterious cult. It is unnamed, though Axton has reason to suspect it might be called "The Names"—ta onomata, in Greek—when he finds these two words painted on a remote boulder in the Peloponese, then subsequently painted over.

The pursuit of this cult by Owen Brademas, an archaeologist, and by Frank Volterra, a filmmaker, comprise the plot. OB winds up lacking the stomach for the truth of the cult. FV never actually gets to experience them directly.

James Axton, the POV character, manages to sort out the modus operandi of the cult. But true to unreliable narrator form, he does not infer the significance of the cult's activities, even as he is nearly murdered or assassinated (in a parallel subplot) by what he believes to be a revolutionary group as he is jogging through Athens (get it? Axton: Athens).

Yet, Axton does not fully capture the mystery. The reader alone is left to put together the images, the facts of the novel.

Axton follows OB's description of his encounter with the cult closely, even letting OB's own voice come through the narrative. OB breaks off his tale to relate to Axton an incident from his childhood, a memory which was touched off by the grain silo where he enwombs himself as the members of the cult, ta onomata, set off to consummate their murderous rite.

OB has made a life's work of learning ancient, dead languages and, more particularly, alphabets in order to be able to decipher inscriptions at various digs around the world. He speaks many languages. So do the members of the cult. Their universal greeting seems to be "How many languages do you speak?" And they always try to communicate in the language of the region where they have set up shop, no matter how obscure.

We learn in OB's flashback some of what motivated him to become so obsessed with languages. When he was a young child, he took part in evangelical "tongue speaking" services with his parents and the adults of his prairie home community. Yet, he could not speak in tongues.

Now, in charismatic evangelical churches there is a sort of hierarchy of spirituality. Those most spirit-filled are able to give over their rational selves to the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues. Others are able to interpret their gibberish. Those who can't do either are often considered "unsaved", not filled with the spirit. They do not experience true religion. Indeed, this is OB's predicament young and old: neither can he experience the cultic sacrifice of ta onomata.

Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, is the spontaneous utterance of random, meaningless sounds that seem to imitate the cadences and concatenations of sounds of real languages. It often occurs when people are in a trancelike state. The spoken languages are claimed to be the tongues of angels or spiritual languages that only the elect can interpret.

In Delillo, glossolalia is the second powerful image/metaphor for language itself. The first, of course, is the cult with its ritual murders of innocent victims who happen to wander into towns which, again, happen to have the same initials as their names. Arbitrariness, contingency, randomness are all implicated here as the cult attempts almost to hammer out a meaningful relationship of these chance occurrences.

Glossolalia is a complementary image that implicates another, almost Wittgensteinian gloss on the nature of language. Human languages in all their diverse forms are merely concatenations of sounds. That they have something resembling meanings is ultimately a contingent thing, precarious, dependent on a community of agreeable speakers.

OB describes his youthful encounter with glossolalia to Axton almost as an afterthought to his description of his encounter with ta onomata. But it is young Tap, Axton's son, who has interviewed OB extensively, created a sort of pig-latin language called "ob" in which the syllable -ob- is inserted in each word, and written a 'non-fiction novel' about one 'Orville Benton' who brings these images home, who makes us feel the true power of language.

OB, in his study of ancient languages and archaeology, is backward-looking and exhausted. He doesn't have the stomach for brute reality. Nor is he capable of spiritual experience. James Axton, by contrast, is a risk assessor. His work is entirely forward looking. Young Tap, however, lives entirely in the present. He is not concerned with grammatical correctness or valid translation. He is not concerned with the uses of language to understand the future. He is merely attempting to capture the feeling of the moment, its emotional truth.

The last chapter of The Names is Tap Axton's chapter on Owen Brademas's failed attempt to speak in tongues: the great disappointment of the literalist who can never know the ecstasy of the spirit. Its grammar and spelling are atrocious, but honest. We might even say that the language is Joycean or Faulknerian.

"I reread Tap's pages that night. They were full of small incidents, moments of discovery, things the young hero sees and wonders about. But nothing mattered so much on this second reading as a number of spirited misspellings. I found these mangled words exhilarating. He'd made them new again, made me see how they worked, what they really were. They were ancient things, secret, reshapable." (313)

"He felt retched, he mumbled in his mind. 'Yeeld' came another voice and it was none but the old cantankerus man with the crooked face and laim leg, known as a nefariot skeemer and rummy, natural born for bone picking. 'Yeeld' he followed up. Everywhere the others were speaking, but he didn't know what they were saying. The strange language burst out of them, like people out of breath and breathing words instead of air. But what words, what were they saying? Right next to him was his father bursting forth in secret language which the boy could not decifer in the least. It sounded like a man who talks to owls. ... 'Yeeld' his mother said to him with a wiry look that was like a rathful warning to mind his manners, there was company coming. He wanted to yeeld. This is the point! There was nothing in the world he wanted than to yeeld totaly, to go across to them, to speak as they were speaking.

'Do whatever your tongue finds to do! Seal the old language and loose the new.'" (335-6)

It is through language that we connect—or, as in the case of the fictional OB, fail to connect. Language is religion. Language is culture. Language is civilization. And yet, it is based on such precarious contingencies, such fragile agreements.

"When he tried, it was poor at best. All his words were poor clattery English like a stutterer at the front of the class. He didn't even know how to begin, where was the whurl of his ignorant tongue. A spidery despair loomed over him. It seemed as if all the worlds ills and evils had come screaming into his head. ...

He tried to stifle his sobbs. He felt done in and then some. It was a dream but not dream. The gift was not his, the whole language of the spirit which was greater than Latin or French was not to be seized in his pityfull mouth. His tongue was a rock, his ears were rocks." (337-38)

The young OB panics and flees into the night, a prairie night of thunder and lightning, rain and deepening mud.

"Why couldn't he understand and speak? There was no answer that the living could give. Tongue tied! His fait was signed. He ran into the rainy distance, smaller and smaller. This was worse than a retched nightmare. It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world." (339)

The Names works at the level of images, not logic. Profoundly.

The Ur-story, the term I've used in this on-going series of literary posts, concerns the meaning of death. Delillo turns this concern on its head: the central theme of The Names is the death of meaning. Meaning is a precarious thing, a dream but not a dream, dependent like civilization wholly on our willingness to yield to it and to each other. Our spirit of cooperation. And, like the relationship between James Axton and his estranged wife, Kathryn, it is easily sundered where this spirit is missing.

Ur-story: The Death of Meaning (Part 2)

"It will often prove useful in philosophy to say to ourselves: naming something is like attaching a label to a thing." (§ 15)

"We may say: only someone who already knows how to do something with it can significantly ask a name." (§ 31)

"And now, I think, we can say: Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one." (§ 32)

"This is connected with the conception of naming as, so to speak, an occult process. Naming appears as a queer connexion of a word with an object." (§ 38)

"a name ought really to signify a simple." (§ 39)

"For naming and describing do not stand on the same level: naming is a preparation for description. Naming is so far not a move in the language-game—any more than putting a piece in its place on the board is a move in chess. We may say: nothing has so far been done, when a thing has been named. It has not even got a name except in the language-game. This was what Frege meant too, when he said that a word had meaning only as part of a sentence." (§ 49) L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

"for the letter killeth..." 2 Corinthians 3:6.

Wittgenstein wanted to show how problematic the relationship between language and reality truly is, how meaning is by no means a simple, necessary thing. As we all know, language is slippery. Languages evolve over time, incorporating other languages, and die. Within a given language, entropy reigns: the meanings of words change over time and across space and, if we follow Frege, with usage—one thinks here, e.g., of the simple semantic slippage in the usage of the word 'enormity' from meaning strictly 'great evil' or 'extreme wickedness' to meaning 'large' or 'of great size' by virtue only of its similarity to the word 'enormous'.

Likewise, things change; they evolve (as does our understanding of them), they come into being and pass out of existence. Situations change and contexts alter things. There can be, in other words, no necessary relation between the names we use for things and the things themselves. There is no foundation in reality for meaning—where, by foundation, we mean an actual point of connection between reality and language—only our agreement or mutual consensus.

This is language demystified, deromanticized, deconstructed.

The haggard cult at the heart of Don Delillo's The Names exists in reaction to this contingency and has devised, albeit intuitively, a solution to this quandary. The cult, believed by the POV, James Axton, to be called the Names, or Ta onomata in Greek, has really only one rite: human sacrifice. They settle in some remote, desolate area (an island, a mountain, a desert) where there are few legal or institutional structures in place, identify a potential victim—usually someone lame or retarded or mad and near to death, learn his/her name, keep up with their victim's whereabouts, and wait for the victim to enter a town that has the same initials as the victim's name where they ritually kill the victim by smashing in his/her skull with such primitive tools as hammers or stones.

It is as if they are attempting to affix the person to the place, based solely on the quite arbitrary coincidence of the initials. In the context of the novel, this is a larger metaphor for stemming the ineluctable leakage of meaning. Naming, which Wittgenstein (and Frege before him) identified as at the heart of meaning, should somehow be necessary to the thing, to the person, this bedraggled cult seems to be crying.

It's really quite simple. This connection between the victim's initials and the site of their ritual sacrifice is the central truth of ta onomata.

Two key characters make it their mission to uncover this obscure cult. One is Frank Volterra, an indie filmmaker. The other is Owen Brademas, an archaeologist interested in deciphering ancient writings and inscriptions. A shorthand way of viewing these characters is to think of Volterra as Francis Ford Coppola filming "Apocalypse Now" based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and to think of Brademas as an aging, world-weary Indiana Jones.

Delillo makes a point of showing us how Volterra is unable to penetrate the mysteries of the cult. He never actually locates them, though he does manage to meet an escapee. Volterra wants to film the cult in the midst of its grisly ritual from the air. An aerial shot, with the wash of helicopter blades kicking up dust and sand, held steady on the group as they do their deed. This would be the crowning filmic commentary on the Twentieth Century.

"He had no plans to shoot in sequence except for the ending. The ending would be the last thing he'd shoot. He told me how he'd do it. He wanted a helicopter. He wanted the cult members and their victim arranged for the murder. The pattern has been followed to this point, the special knowledge you talk about. The old shepherd is in place and the murderers are in place, with sharpened stones in their hands. Frank shoots down from as close in as the helicopter can safely get. He wants the wind blast, the blast from the rotor blades. They murder the old man. They kill him with stones. Cut him, beat him. The dust is flying, the bushes and scrub are flattened out by the rotor. No sound in this scene. He wants the wind blast only as a visual element. The severe angle. The men clutched together. The turbulence, the silent rippling of the bushes and stunted trees. I can quote him almost word for word. He wants the frenzy of the rotor wash, the terrible urgency, but soundless, totally. They kill him. They remain true to themselves, Jeem. That's it. It ends. He doesn't want the helicopter gaining altitude to signal the end is here. He doesn't want the figures to fade into the landscape. This is sentimental. It just ends. It ends up-close with the men in a circle, hair and clothes blowing, after they finish the killing."

I stayed in the living room for a while after she went to bed. I thought of Volterra in the mountains, hunched in his khaki field jacket, the deep pockets full of maps, the sky massing behind him. Sentimental. I didn't believe a word she'd said. He wouldn't follow it that far. He'd followed other things, gone the limit, abused people, made enemies, but this hovering was implausible to me, his camera clamped to the door frame. The aerial master, the filmed century. He wouldn't let them kill a man, he wouldn't film it if they did. We have to draw back at times, study our own involvement. The situation teaches that. Even in his drivenness he would see this, I believed." (248-49)

The filmic art, Delillo seems to be saying, stops short of reality. It objectifies—and nicely—that which the camera sees, but it does not and, more importantly, cannot capture our own complicity in the reality it seeks to present. This is the novelistic art, the prerequisite for meaning.

And Brademas, though he ultimately finds the cult and stays with them and learns their secrets, cannot bring himself to join them or, for that matter, even witness the act.

"The world has become self-referring. You know this. This thing has seeped into the texture of the world. The world for thousands of years was our escape, was our refuge. Men hid from themselves in the world. We hid from God or death. The wrold was where we lived, the self was where we went mad and died. But now the world has made a self of its own. Why, how, never mind. What happens to us now that the world has a self? How do we say the simplest thing without falling into a trap? Where do we go, how do we live, who do we believe? This is my vision, a self-referring world, a world in which there is no escape." (297) ...

[As the men of the cult head out for the kill] Owen entered one of the silos and sat in the dark. It was the smallest of the structures, five feet high, and he watched the night sky rapidly deepen, stars pinching through the haze. That was the universe tonight, a rectangle two and a half feet high, three feet long. At the lower edge of the opening he could see a narrow band of earth losing its texture to the night. (303) ...

"You stayed in the silo through the night."

"Yes, of course. Why would I come out, to watch them kill him? These killings mock us. They mock our need to structure and classify, to build a system against the terror in our souls. They make the system equal to the terror. The means to contend with death has become death. Did I always know this? It took the desert to make it clear to me. Clear and simple, to answer the question you asked me earlier. All questions are answered today."

"Is this what the cult intended all the time, this mockery?"

"Of course not. They intended nothing, they meant nothing. They only matched the letters. What beautiful names. Hawa Mandir. Hamir Mazmudar." (308)

The archaeologist, the scholar is afraid to confront life, death. Affronted. He hides from things, picks up hints from afar, tries to infer meaning, and tells us as best he can what they mean, though from his narrow, indirect perspective: "If you wanted to compose a mighty Homeric text on my life and fortunes, I might suggest a suitable first line. 'This is the story of a man who was not serious.'" (300)

Life just is this hammering out of meaning, and scholastic practice, though necessary, is disengaged. Unserious. The reality of life and death cannot be allowed to penetrate the silo of systems and structures he has surrounded himself with and curled up into for comfort and shelter.

[to be continued]

Ur-story: The Death of Meaning (Part 1)

Jacobus, James, Hamish, Seamus, Jaime, Jamie, Jimmy, Hymie, Hamie, Ham, Shem, Jim, Gem.

Vladimir Nabokov famously said:

"It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass." Vladimir Nabokov, "Good Readers and Good Writers," in Lectures on Literature pp. 5-6.

The latest novel to send that telltale tingle up my spine is The Names, by Don Delillo. I remember reading it soon after it was first published. I remember some of the characters. I remember some of the images. I remember the sense of mystery and foreboding. I remember not being quite able to put my finger on what was going on. But, mostly, I remember that, after a certain point, the novel grabbed me by the spine and did not let go until the very last page. It lingered in my imagination all these years. It also solidified my appreciation of Delillo's artistry—it made me a fan.

Immediately after The Names (1982), Delillo published arguably his four most important novels: White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), and Underworld (1997). That's a line-up you can stack up against just about anybody's run of four novels. The Names tends to get overshadowed by this incredible series of novels, swallowed up in the veritable critical cottage industries these four books have spawned. Still, one can make a pretty strong argument that The Names sets the table for their reception, prefiguring some of the themes. And it remains one of my favorites of his books. Perhaps it's time for a re-evaluation.

After the laser intensity of Carpenter's Gothic, The Names is like a palate cleanser or, better, a decompression chamber. At first. There is context. There are explanations. There are character descriptions. Characters have histories. There are settings, meaningfully depicted. The action is almost languid. The dialogue is direct—though, make no mistake about it, original. There is continuity. Compared to the Gaddis, the language is lush, practically lyrical—though not overwritten. Where the Gaddis feels focused and systematic, The Names comes across as the proverbial Jamesian "large loose baggy monster." Until the last chapter, that is.

And what a last chapter it is. At first, it seems almost superfluous. A gewgaw, a bauble. Nearly illiterate. But, upon reflection, it is absolutely essential to the text. It pulls the diverse strands together in a profound way. But, I get ahead of myself.

The first substantive choice the writer has to make deals with form: What form will my book take? Delillo seems to have located The Names formally somewhere between The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness, with a little smidgen of Helter Skelter thrown in for good measure. In The Names, James Axton is Nick Carraway to Owen Brademas's Jay Gatsby. And Brademas is Marlow to the unnamed [?] mysterious, murderous cult's Kurtz.

It helps to understand this going in, because the narrative works mostly by indirection until its rousing denouement.

The next choice the writer has to make is a technical one: Who is best positioned to relate the relevant facts of this narrative? Delillo has chosen to tell The Names from the unreliable, first person POV of one James Axton (a/k/a Jim), an ex-pat American centered in Athens. He is separated (though not divorced) from his wife, Kathryn, whom he still loves. She has custody of their son, Thomas a/k/a Tap. Jim is, or has been a freelance writer. He describes his current job as a risk assessor for a large, multinational insurance company. He travels all over the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Northern Africa gathering facts in order to determine the risks to businesses seeking to invest or set up operations in those countries.

In an interesting, ironic subplot, he is mistaken for a CIA agent by a mysterious Greek who is having an affair with one of Axton's friend's wives. This Greek, Eliades, is either an intelligence agent himself or a revolutionary journalist seeking to expose the operations of the CIA in support of the corrupt, brutal Greek junta of colonels. (See Richard Welch) We never find out which, though it hardly matters: the damage has been done. As it turns out, Axton turns out to have been an unwitting asset of the Agency because the information he has been gathering about all these countries has been sold or otherwise turned over to the CIA by his corporate bosses. And, just as the raw data Axton digs up is turned into coherent, operative intelligence in the hands of the Company, so the facts of his narrative cohere in our minds, creating a meaning he is incapable of grasping.

Only twice (by my count) does the narrative stray from Axton's POV, once when Brademas is relating his last encounter with the cult in India and then in the last chapter where we read a brief chapter of Tap's "non-fiction novel" about Brademas's youthful encounter glossolalics in Iowa. And in both of these instances, Axton gets out of the way and lets the speaker/writer speak for himself, a Delilloan nod to the free indirect style.

[to be continued]

Ur-Story: What is lost

Some quotes:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, 'East Coker' V. ll. 172-189

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept...
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, III. 'The Fire Sermon' ll.173-186

"The dump was roughly square, half a mile on each side, sunk fifty feet below the streets of the sprawling housing development which surrounded it. All day long, Rocco said, two D-8 bulldozers would bury the refuse under fill which was brought in from the north shore, and which raised the level of that floor a tiny fraction of an inch every day. It was this peculiar quality of fatedness which struck Flange as he gazed off into the half-light while Rocco dumped the load: this thought that one day, perhaps fifty years from now, perhaps more, there would no longer be any hole: the bottom would be level with the streets of the development, and houses would be built on it too. As if some maddeningly slow elevator were carrying you toward a known level to confer with some inevitable face on matters which had already been decided. ...Whenever he was away from Cindy and could think he would picture his life as a surface in the process of change, much as the floor of the dump was in transition: from concavity or inclosure to perhaps a flatness like the one he stood in now. What he worried about was any eventural convexity, a shrinking, it might be, of the planet itself to some palpable curvature of whatever he would be standing on, so that he would be left sticking out like a projected radius, unsheltered and reeling across the empty lunes of his tiny sphere."

Thomas Pynchon, "Low-lands"

"In his novel, Snow White, [Barthelme] tells us about the manufacture of buffalo humps.

They are "trash," and what in fact could be more useless or trashlike? It's that we want to be on the leading edge of this trash phenomenon, the everted sphere of the future, and that's why we pay particular attention, too, to those aspects of language that may seem as a model of the trash phenomenon.

Much interest is also shown in "stuffing," the words which fill the spaces between other words, and have the quality at once of being heavy or sludgy, and of seeming infinite or endless. Later we are told (Barthelme is always instructing the reader) that the seven dwarfs (for the novel is a retelling of the fairy story)

...like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of "sense" of what is going on. This "sense" is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves...

Dreck, trash, and stuffing: these are his principal materials. But not altogether. There is war and suffering, love and hope and cruelty. He hopes, he says in the new volume, "these souvenirs will merge into something meaningful." But first he renders everything as meaningless as it appears to be in ordinary modern life by abolishing distinctions and putting everything in the present. He constructs a single plane of truth, of relevance, of style, of value—a flatland junkyard—since anything dropped in the dreck is dreck, at once, as an uneaten porkchop mislaid in the garbage.
...
But cleverness is also dreck. The cheap joke is dreck. The topical, too, is dreck. Who knows this better than Barthelme, who has the art to make a treasure out of trash, to see out from inside it, the world as it's faceted by colored jewelglass? A seriousness about his subject is sometimes wanting. When this obtains, the result is grim, and grimly overwhelming.

People were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia. "Do you think this is a good life?" The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. "No.""

William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life, "The Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomenon," p. 100-101.

"The construction crew had gone for the day. We stood above a hole in the earth, an engineered crater five hundred feet deep, maybe a mile across, strewn with snub-nosed machines along the terraced stretches and covered across much of the sloped bottom by an immense shimmering sheet, a polyethylene skin, silvery blue, that caught cloudmotion and rolled in the wind. I was taken by surprise. The sight of this thing, the enormous gouged bowl lined with artful plastic, was the first material sign I'd had that this was a business of a certain drastic grandeur, even a kind of greatness, maybe—the red-tailed hawks transparent in the setting sun and the spring stalks of yucca tall as wishing wands and this high-density membrane that was oddly and equally beautiful in a way, a prophylactic device, a gass-control system, and the crater it layered that would accept thousands of tons of garbage a day, your trash and mine, for desert burial.
...
Detwiler said that cities rose on garbage, inch by inch, gaining elevation through the decades as buried debris increased. Garbage always got layered over or pushed to the edges, in a room or in a landscape. But it had it own momentum. It pushed back. It pushed into every space available, dictating construction patterns and altering systems of ritual. And it produced rats and paranoia. People were compelled to develop an organized response. This meant they had to come up with a resourceful means of disposal and build a social structure to carry it out—workers, managers, haulers, scavengers. Civilization is built, history is driven—
...
Civilization did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn't discard, to reprocess what we couldn't use. Garbage pushed back. It mounted and spread. And it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics.

The sun went down."

Don DeLillo, Underground pp. 285-87.

The upper torsos of two figures, one female, one male, emerge from a pair of garbage cans:

"Nell: What is it, my pet? Time for love?

Nagg: Were you asleep?

Nell: Oh no!

Nagg: Kiss me.

Nell: We can't.

Nagg: Try. (Their head strain towards each other, fail to meet, fall apart again.)

Nell: Why this farce, day after day?

Nagg: I've lost me tooth.

Nell: When?

Nagg: I had it yesterday.

Nell: Ah yesterday!

Nagg: Can you see me?

Nell: Hardly. And you?

Nagg: What?

Nell: Can you see me?

Nagg: Hardly.

Nell: So much the better, so much the better.

Nagg: Don't say that. Our sight has failed.

Nell: Yes. (Pause. They turn away from each other.)

Nagg: Can you hear me?

Nell: Yes. And you?

Nagg: Yes. Our hearing hasn't failed.

Nell: Our what?"

Samuel Beckett, "Endgame"

The Senses of Metafiction: The Spray of Phenomena

"Warmth, gloom, smells of my bed, such is the effect they sometimes have on me. I get up, go out, and everything is changed. The blood drains from my head, the noise of things bursting, merging, avoiding one another, assails me on all sides, my eyes search in vain for two things alike, each pinpoint of skin screams a different message, I drown in the spray of phenomena. It is at the mercy of these sensations, which happily I know to be illusory, that I have to live and work. It is thanks to them I find myself a meaning."

[Beckett, Molloy, p. 111 (1st Black Cat ed. of Three Novels)]

"There is a stew simmering on a gas ring and occasionally Toby stirs it, listening to the chimes from the Salvation Army mission across the street playing 'Silent Night.' He remembers other Christmases, the smell of pine and plum pudding and the oil smell of his steam engine. ...

"He tastes the stew. It is flat and the meat is tough and stringy. He adds two bouillon cubes. Another fifteen or twenty minutes. Meanwhile, he will take a shower. Naked, waiting for the water to heat up, he is examining the graffiti in the toilet cubicle, running his hands over phallic drawings with the impersonal interest of an antiquarian. He is a plant, an intrusion. ..."

[Wm. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night, pp 244-45]

"Often, when I was young, last year, I walked out to the water. It spoke to me of myself. Images came to me, from the water. Pictures. Large green lawns. A great house with pillars, but the lawns so vast that the house can be seen only dimly, from where we are standing. I am wearing a long skirt to the ground, in the company of others. I am witty. They laugh. I am also wise. They ponder. Gestures of infinite grace. They appreciate. For the finale, I save a life. Leap into the water all clothed and grasping the drowner by the hair, or using the cross-chest carry, get the silly bastard to shore. Have to bash him once in the mush to end his wild panicked struggles. Drag him to the old weathered dock and there, he supine, I rampant, manage the resuscitation. Stand back, I say to the crowd, stand back. The dazed creature's eyes open—no, they close again—no, they open again. Someone throws a blanket over my damp, glistening white, incredibly beautiful shoulders. I whip out my harmonica and give them two fast choruses of 'Red Devel Rag.' Standing ovation. The triumph is complete."

[D. Barthelme, The Dead Father, Ch. 12 pp. 105-06]

"So we get near the end of the book, and nothing resolved. But then, only segments have been given you of these few people. They are in no way representative of anything, necessarily. Such the perfections of fiction, as well as that honed cruelty it possesses which makes it useless. Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can't prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness. Can you see some shattered man trying to heal his life reading Tender Is the Night? In the back files of the Ladies' Home Journal there may, at least, be found the names of various physicians who will get you to the grave with a minimum of anguish—so they say. There is more profit in an hour's talk with Billy Graham than in a reading of Joyce. Graham might conceivably make you sick, so that you might move, go somewhere to get well. But Joyce just sends you out into the street, where the world goes on, solid as a bus. If you met Joyce and said "Help me," he'd hand you a copy of Finnegans Wake. You could both cry. Why is it that this should be? It is because fiction is real. When you writhe for Christopher Tietjens or the Consul, you writhe for real things that do not live, that do not represent anything anywhere, that have no counterparts in life. It is unsupportable to be so enslaved by the writer. Many people hate it, so they will read only 'nonfiction'; they'll not be tricked! If I say that Dick Detective is a man with the qualities of the green tissue on which I am now typing, and only those qualities, what then? I make him up. What a pleasure, my pleasure, it is true. He will teach you utter failure if you try to use his chapter as a handbook for living.

"It is this fact, that fiction is an invention of the voice, that tends to make writers' lives a shambles. [pp. 215-16] ...

"That evening, the fantastic silence, branches cracking in the cold. The sunset, frigid and subtle, essence of winter. The dark trees stretch down the slope toward the shining black ice of the river in shadow. The colors of the sky are rose, blue, pale yellow, and violet—almost amethyst. Let me say that it is amethyst. A small perfection. Dick and April stand outside the house, happy in the quiet. Civilized. April stokes her husband's thigh, Dick holds April about the waist. Delicate amethyst in the sky, growing slowly indigo. They stand again, after supper, the brilliant ice-cream moon of North America comes up luminous. A portrait of the poet and his wife: you and I and moonlight in Vermont. Dick thinks this, then he sings the line and laughs. April laughs. They are in Vermont! Vermont! They are in the moonlight in Vermont!"

[Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Last culminating para., pp. 242-3]

"I made my way to the edge of the old city easily enough. From the street din of motorcycles and buses to the voices of the long bazaar. The thoroughfare narrowed as I passed through the Lohari Gate, a brickwork structure with a broad towerlike fortification on either side.

"Once inside I began to receive impressions, which is not the same as seeing things. I realized I was walking too fast, the pace of the traffic-filled streets I'd just left behind. I received impressions of narrowness and shadow, of brownness, the wood and brick, the hard earth of the streets. The air was centuries old, dead, heavy, rank. I received impressions of rawness and crowding, people in narrow spaces, men in a dozen kinds of dress, women gliding, women in full-length embroidered white veils, a mesh aperture at the eyes, hexagonal, to give them a view of the latticed world, the six-sided cage that adjusted itself to every step they took, every shift of the eyes. Donkeys carrying bricks, children squatting over open sewers. I glanced at my directions, made an uncertain turn. Copper and brassware. A cobbler working in the shadows. This was the lineal function of old cities, to maintain an unchanged form, let time hang with the leather goods and skeins of wool. Hand-skilled labor, rank smells and disease, the four-hundred-year-old faces. There were horses, sheep, donkeys, cows and oxen. I received impressions that I was being followed."

[D. DeLillo, The Names, ch. 12]

"When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to you own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. You skin aches. At last: something real.

"Here in the tail section of the 00000, Gottfried has found this clear surface before him in fact, literal: the Imipolex shroud. Flotsam from his childhood are rising through his attention. He's remembering the skin of an apple, bursting with nebulae, a look into curved reddening space. His eyes taken on and on, and further. ... The plastic surface flutters minutely: gray-white, mocking, an enemy of color.

"The day outside is raw and the victim lightly dressed, but he feels warm in here. His white stockings stretch nicely from his suspender-tabs. He has found a shallow bend in a pipe where he can rest his cheek as he gazes into the shroud. He feels his hair tickling his back, his bared shoulders. It's a dim, whited room. A room for lying in, bridal and open to the pallid spaces of the evening, waiting for whatever will fall on him.

"Phone traffic drones into his wired ear. The voices are metal and drastically filtered. They buzz like the voices of surgeons, heard as you're going under ether. Though they now only speak the ritual words, he can still tell them apart.

"The soft smell of Imipolex, wrapping him absolutely, is a smell he knows. It doesn't frighten him. It was in the room when he fell asleep so long ago, so deep in sweet paralyzed childhood ... it was there as he began to dream. Now it is time to wake, into the breath of what was always real. Come, wake. All is well."

[T. Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, p. 754]

"Rough dogs, barking, splashed into the river chasing sticks. Coats and ties had been hung in the trees and men were hurling stones at soda bottles or skimming pieces of slate and loudly counting the skips. He picked out squealing children and the laughter of the women. If there hadn't been a wall he would have seen them scuffling on the edge of the water. The land fell and the trees parted so that seated where he was the Ohio might have made his eyes blink, but the wall was eight feet high and wound in its vines like a bottle of claret. The bench was damp and cold, shadowed all morning by the elms, and he slid his bible under him. It was a poor garden, given over to ground ivy and plants that preferred deep shade, for the sun reached it only at the top of the day when it found an opening between the crowns of the trees and the head and body of the church. Absently, he felt the pores of the cement. The shadows of the elm leaves passed gently over the vines and grasses. In winter one could see quite easily through the gate at the end of the garden to the river lying placidly in its ice—leaden, grave, immortal. He had never learned when the key had been lost but the lock was rusted now and the double gates were bound. By spring, when the ivy leafed and thickly curtained the pickets, his blindfold was complete. Nevertheless he could see the sand rising in little puffs and the brilliant water striking the shore. It wasn't true, but Jethro Furber felt he had spent his life here. Certainly he had brought to the garden the little order it had, laying the walk with his own hands and clearing the graves of weeds and creepers, carefully scrubbing the markers. The rough cold bench was as familiar to him as his skin, and the garden, with its secret design and its holy significance, was like himself. He smiled as he considered it (he had considered it often)..."

[Wm. Gass, Omensetter's Luck, pp. 75-76]