Sinthome/Sindone

John Banville is an author I came to late, prompted by the award of the 2005 Booker to his latest novel The Sea. This he accepted with characteristic doesn’t-suffer-fools-gladly aplomb: ‘It is nice to see a work of art win the Booker prize’, he said, and he was right. His writing, like his acceptance speeches, is conceited, lapidary, to the point. And better: as a writer he is a careful stylist (isn’t this the very least we can expect from any writer?): he will always turn a phrase until it catches the light.

[Incidentally, I cannot take credit for this brilliant formulation: I lifted it from Clive James, another writer whose work I unjustly neglected and have been enjoying recently.]

Spurred on by the notices Banville regularly gets in one of the blogs I read on occasion, and enjoy, The Elegant Variation, I went on to investigate a few more of his books, visiting first the Revolutions trilogy (into which I failed to make sufficient inroads before the library fines prohibited further advances), and then attacking his retelling of the Faust myth, Mefisto, in the course of reading which, a strange, hypnotic compulsion drew me on to the end, despite myself. After that I went to Shroud, mostly on the strength of Banville’s own opinion on the book. Usually authors’ judgements of their own works are to be held in the utmost suspicion, but in this case I can happily report that this is, indeed, a great book.

Whether Shroud is some kind of roman à clef – it isn’t, really – and who might be the targets of Banville’s opprobrium, I am by no means equipped to judge; nor am I particularly interested. Is it worth remarking the fact that Louis Althusser and Paul de Man, those bogeymen of mauvaise foi, exemplary livers of lives at odds with their intellectual convictions (or those associated with them by their followers), are both mentioned in the acknowledgements, since Banville reframed episodes from their writing to flesh out the persona of his novel’s narrator, Axel Vander? Persona is a word that recurs in this novel: for where does a person begin and end if not with masks: the veteran actor of the Attic drama whose mask is ‘more like his face than his face is’; Harlequin’s mask; the executioner’s mask?

‘Man and mask are one.’

*
The main setting of the novel is Turin, a town that resonates with legends: there is the famously fraudulent Shroud, which reveals an imprint, on the winding sheet that serves to wrap or conceal a body, of the image of a real body – a work of art, perhaps; and of Nietzsche, who spent his last, crazed days there.

What sets the narrative in motion is the receipt of a letter, which threatens to bring down the carefully constructed edifice of the self Vander presents to the world:

Now I was cloven in two more thoroughly than ever, I who was always more than myself. On the one side there was the I I had been before the letter arrived, and now there was this new I, a singular capital standing at a tilt to all the known things that had suddenly become unfamiliar.

The I on the page always is more than itself: ‘the I I had been’, doubling the vertical stroke, setting the I of the enunciation apart from the enunciated I; and then I, the operation of italicization defamiliarizing, setting the letter at odds with its upright counterparts.

Later Vander will describe the sensation of having left something behind, when, looking back to where one has been sitting, one imagines to see an obscene replica of oneself, ‘a limp, life-sized marionette, hands hanging and jointed limbs all awry, grinning woodenly at the ceiling’.

Cass Cleave, the writer of the letter, is in the thrall of the mysterious Mandelbaum syndrome, which condemns the sufferer to perceive byzantine patterns in the fabric of reality, to be constantly on the alert to the strangeness of how things ‘strike echoes everywhere’:

In her version of the world everything was connected; she could trace the dissolution of empires to the bending of a blade of grass, with herself as the fulcrum of the process. All things attended her.

This is very like the madness of the artist. Vander jokingly proposes that Cass write his biography: ‘You could write it in the first person […] Pretend that you are me. I give you full permission.’ But she comes to believe that her role is ‘simply [to] perform the rites in the way that was required.’ The solution to the mystery is not something she is able to pry into; she is content merely to perform, to voice the catechism, to prophesy without understanding or being understood, like Cassandra.

Banville has Vander sprinkle his prose with moments of precarious self-disclosure reminiscent of Nabokov’s best delusionally knowing narrators, like this, a suitably twentieth-century updating of the elegiac paraclausithyron topos:

Yes, you, my most assiduous reader, will recognise the moment and its image, for I have employed it in many contexts, as a mocking emblem of the human condition: two people standing on either side of a locked door, one shut out and the other listening from inside, each trying to divine the other’s identity and intentions.

‘Professor Vander’, insinuates Bartoli, a Clare Quilty to Vander’s Humbert Humbert, ‘holds that every text conceals a shameful secret, the hidden understains left behind by the author in his necessarily bad faith, and which it is the critic’s task to nose out.’

This is a book about bad faith, and the ways language conspires against us to thwart our attempts at self-disclosure. Writing in the confessional mode is especially subject to this bad faith, because there is, ‘in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it’, writes Tobias Wolff. There is a double intention behind every utterance, to withdraw even as we set forth, to conceal even as we reveal. And at the centre of it all is the masked figure of Harlequin, whose obscene laughter mocks our every attempt to fix our self in its essence.

Bicyclette!

What is the connection between literary avant-gardism, and bicycles?

It is surely no coincidence that the front covers of two books on my shelf, Flann O’ Brien’s The Third Policeman and volume II of Samuel Beckett’s novels in the Grove centenary edition, both feature bicycle wheels.

Then you have Marcel Duchamp’s Readymade sculpture Bicycle wheel.

And what of the fact that the cyclist Paul Fournel is not only ‘provisionally definitive secretary’ but also the current President of the Oulipo?

Add that everyone knows Alfred Jarry was an obsessive cyclist, and his ‘pataphysical classic The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race is a fine example of cycling reportage.

Since that link also reproduces J. G. Ballard’s imitation ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’, I must say that despite the killer first line ‘Oswald was the starter’ it doesn’t quite have the same panache as Jarry’s original.

As these things go I much prefer his ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ short.

Have I mentioned before that I’m a big fan of Ballard’s, especially his short stories and early sci-fi stuff? I find myself slightly uncomfortable admitting that, ever since I slogged my way through his latest Kingdom Come, which really is unremittingly bad. The thing about it is, the reviews at the time of publication were all pretty much the standard reaction to Ballard, not great, not terrible, all hedging with the old ‘he’s doing something no-one else is doing’ schtick. Of course, Ballard’s made a career out of writing the same novel again and again (and why not? It worked for Beckett), but for me his latest just seemed out of joint. Ballard’s style, if it can be called a style, hasn’t really changed much since he started writing novels. ‘Kingdom Come’, for all its shock-value – consumerism as fascism? you don’t say! – just seems very old-fashioned, an attempt to say something that didn’t really need to be said.

I suppose avant-gardism in all its forms dates very quickly. But something like ‘High Rise’ is still worth reading, and still relevant today, even if it is pretty much the same novel wrapped up in a slightly different premise.

I myself am merely an amateur cyclist, and share little of Jarry’s enthusiasm for the velocipedal art.

Nested digression aside, let me get back to my topic, which was Beckett’s Molloy. Here is a short essay on Beckett’s bicycles. See also this, on The Joys of Cycling with Beckett.

Molloy says:

So I got up, adjusted my crutches and went down to the road, where I found my bicycle (I didn’t know I had one) in the same place I must have left it. […] It was a chainless bicycle, with a free-wheel, if such a bicycle exists. Dear bicycle, I shall not call you bike, you were green, like so many of your generation, I don’t know why. […] This should all be rewritten in the pluperfect. What a rest to speak of bicycles and horns. Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit.

Here the bicycle is an alien object, like all objects for Molloy, but it is one that transcends. It exists not as a possession or as a memory (‘I didn’t know I had one’), nor in the particular (‘if such a bicycle exists’), nor even in the present tense (‘This should all be rewritten in the pluperfect’). But what it offers is a temporary reprieve from the shit and the way of all flesh.

The appeal of the bicycle resides in that strange hybridization of man and machine, which combine to produce an aesthetically pure and fluid mode of locomotion. Flann O’ Brien’s The Third Policeman is clearly not about the main character’s experience of hell, as some have claimed, but about the fundamentally strange object that is the bicycle: once we understand that the whole novel is from bicycle’s point of view, all becomes clear.

The simple but precise engineering of a bicycle (I shall not call it a bike!) can cause ontological confusion, as with Moran: ‘I forget which wheel it was. As soon as two things are nearly identical I am lost.’ This speaks of philosophy’s and literature’s obsession with dualities and with cyclical forms, from Dante, through . . . Bruno, and . Vico, to . . Joyce.

The links between the cycle and the psyche are well established, and the velocipedal art is rich in cycle-logical archetypes: from the great chain of being to the wheel of fortune, the dérailleur is de rigueur. The problem of the bicycle has exercised the greatest minds, from Empedalcles through Sir Walter Raleigh to Mikhail Bike-tin. But now, to brake this never-ending cycle of tire-ing puns, with apologies for saddling myself with more than I can handle – bar the occasions when I mis-spoke – I am geared up to take a stand and e-clips this freewheeling reflection on biking.

Gras c’est, d’or c’est

In the prologue to his Gargantua, Rabelais states:

[E]n icelle bien aultre goust trouverez, & doctrine plus absconce que vous revelera de tresaultz sacremens & mystères horrificques, tant en ce que concerne nostre religion, que aussi l’estat politicq & vie oeconomicque.

[In the perusal of this treatise you shall find another kind of taste, and a doctrine of a more profound and abstruse consideration, which will disclose unto you the most glorious sacraments and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth your religion, as matters of the public state, and life economical. – trans. Urquhart]

Readers of Rabelais have over the centuries been fascinated with the idea that the linguistic exuberance of his text encodes secrets to be read only by an initiated élite. The above passage seems to offer a justification for such an approach, which became particularly widespread in the nineteenth century, an age obsessed with the occult, with secret histories and with mystical claptrap of all kinds. One such interpreter, the much and justly maligned Claude-Sosthène Grasset d’Orcet (1828-1900), went further than most.

I was put onto the works of Grasset d’Orcet some time ago by an online acquaintance; I had never heard his name mentioned in an academic context, and was entirely unfamiliar with this particular mode of reading Rabelais. But it so happens that his complete works are even now being edited and republished, and I was quite easily able to pick up volume I of his Oeuvres décryptées, which contains his work on Rabelais and on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or rather, Béroalde de Verville’s translation of it, Le Songe de Poliphile.

It’s quite a read.

Grasset d’Orcet’s method in decoding what he calls ‘la langue des oiseaux’ consists in breaking French words and phrases down into their constituent phonemes, then recombining them to form new words and phrases. It is basically a variation on the rebuses or blasons used in devices, in heraldry, and in cathedral decorations. Indeed, Grasset d’Orcet confidently claims that Rabelais’s texts are constructed exactly like Gothic cathedrals.

There are a few different subdialects of this language (bear with me here): the ‘grimoire blanc’ is the blason properly speaking: these must form eight syllable lines in French, which must always end with an ‘L’ sound (Grasset d’Orcet entirely spuriously derives ‘blasonner’ from ‘bé [bien] L assoner’). Then there’s the ‘grimoire noir’, which admits Latin, Greek and Hebrew also. ‘Patelinage’ is a method of expressing the blason with actions instead of words or images. ‘Lanternois’ (‘Lanternish’) does not require the ‘L’ rhymes, and is the most common language Rabelais uses to encode his writing. We are told us as much in Pantagruel Ch 9, when Panurge is asked by Epistemon (in Urquhart’s translation): ‘Do you speak Christian, or the buffoon language, otherwise called Patelinois? Nay, it is the puzlatory tongue, said another, which some call Lanternois.’ Lanternois must be the language spoken in the ‘pays Lanternois’, which makes an appearance in the Quart livre.

So why is Lanternois so similar to middle French (albeit a version with very loose grammar)? Well might you ask, since Grasset d’Orcet contends that it is not just texts written in French that should be decoded in this way but also the symbolism of the visual arts and architecture. And Latin texts also render into French in this way: Louis XIV was the unwitting target of satire when he adopted ‘Nec pluribus impar’ as his device; for in Lanternois, this reads ‘Ne que plus ribaud, sans pair insolence’ [‘There is none more ribald or more insolent’]. The reason is quite simple: it is because French is the language of Freemasonry, and has been since the sixth century, although the ‘langue du blason’ was only widely adopted in the eleventh...

Rabelais’s works are vehicles for the transmission of messages between those initiated into the secrets of freemasonry. Insofar as they deal with ‘l’estat politicq & vie oeconomicque’, they are mainly concerned with the machinations of several prominent court women during the reigns of François I and Henri II – notably Catherine de’ Medici and Diane de Poitiers – and their efforts to take control of the destiny of the French monarchy and Catholicism. Often the historical facts must be manipulated to square with the phonetic constraints of the method. Quite a lot of significance, for example, is given to the fact that Eleanor of Habsburg (second wife of François I) had a particular taste for lobster (homard), sometimes indulging in it to excess.

What I have described as Grasset d’Orcet’s method might appear not dissimilar to another, more everyday linguistic operation, namely, punning. And indeed, that’s pretty much what it is. This page gives a psychoanalytical account of the ‘langue des oiseaux’. Lacan was an inveterate punster in the best Rabelaisian tradition: consider his ‘le nom du père’/’le non du père’/’les non-dupes errent’. Same thing. Grasset d’Orcet’s madness is not so far removed from the post-structuralist manias of the late twentieth century.

The way this all actually works with Rabelais’s texts can be seen from the following example, Grasset d’Orcet’s decoding of the genealogy of Gargantua (Ch 1). Grasset d’Orcet takes a section of text, picks out certain words of significance using some sort of ‘grid’ (whose underlying algorithms are not revealed), then shuffles them around a bit until they form eight-syllable lines all ending (more or less) in ‘L’ sounds (again, according to some mysterious algorithm to which we are not a party); he then smooshes the words together phonetically and ‘translates’ them into French by resolving the sounds differently and altering the vowels.

Retournant à nos moutons, ie vous diz que par un don souverain de dieu nous a esté reservée l’antiquité & genealogie de Gargantua, plus entière que nulle aultre, de dieu ie ne parle, car il ne me appartient, aussy les diables (ce sont les caffars) se y opposent. Et fut trouvée par Iean Audeau, en un pré qu’il avoit près l’arceau gualeau au dessoubz de l’Olive, tirant à Marsay. Duquel faisant lever les fossez, touchèrent les piocheurs de leurs marres, un grand tombeau de bronze long sans mesure: car oncques n’en trouvèrent le bout, parce qu’il entroit trop avant les escluses de Vienne. Icelluy ouvrans en certain lieu signé au dessus d’un goubelet, à l’entour du quel estoit escript en lettres Ethrusques, HIC BIBITUR, trouvèrent neuf flaccons en tel ordre qu’on assiet les quilles en Guascoigne. Des quelz celluy qu’on my lieu estoit, couvroit un gros, gras, grand, gris, ioly, petit, moisy, livret, plus mais non mieux sentent que roses.

Using the grid method, this gives:

Jean Audeau, pré arceau gualeau,
Sous olive, Narsay tirant. airain sépulcre.
Signé Goubelet. Ci l’on boit, latin.
Neuf flacons quillés, mi base livret
Gros, gras, grand, gris, joli,
Petit, moysi, sentant plus ne mieux roses.

Which in Lanternois means:

Janus, dieu pairé arche Gaule,
Seul vénère Saturne, Touraine sépulcre.
Signe: Goubelet, Colon boit, loi tient.
Haine au Faulcon! colombe ose lève haste.
Guerre, gare, Guérin, doit grege loup.
Petit musicien, tient Apollon, marsye.

Which, roughly translated, gives:

‘Janus, double god of the kingdom of the Gauls, the sepulchre of Touraine, reveres none but Saturn, under the sign of the dove that drinks from a goblet. It has this law: hatred of the falcon! May the dove dare to raise its standard, the wolf must keep his flock from war with Guérin. Marsyas takes Apollo for a little musician.’

A further translative operation is required to correctly decode the symbolism of this little message. I choose not to reveal it to you now, since I’m not sure that you’re ready for it yet (Odi profanum vulgus et arceo!). Also, I’m not really sure I have the slightest idea what the bloody hell Grasset d’Orcet’s on about half the time.

The names of Rabelais’s characters are duly decoded for us – but, as with all good systems of symbolization, they do not necessarily always denote the same thing. The name Panurge derives from the Greek ‘panourgos’, or ‘factotum’. But, asserts Grasset d’Orcet, Rabelais only gave the names of his characters the appearance of a Greek derivation, in order to set the pedants on the wrong track. In fact, Panurge in Lanternois signifies simply ‘peint rouge’, and therefore designates the mannerist painter Rosso. Later in the course of his interpretation, Grasset has cause to modify this reading somewhat: after the death of Rosso, Rabelais made Panurge represent Philibert Delorme instead. Later still, in the third and fourth books, Panurge came to designate Henri II (‘pas n’urge’: because he couldn’t get it up). Even later still, we are told that Panurge was a stand in for the printer Sebastian Gryphius. It seems Panurge was made to do quite a bit of semiotic work: ‘factotum’, indeed.

As for Pantagruel, that name designates none other than François I himself (‘Paix ne te guère vale’ or ‘peace avails you nothing’). Gargantua, it follows, was Louis XII, and the name translates as ‘Guère gain tu as’ (‘you win little’, a reference to his not entirely successful Italian campaigns).

Anyway, that will give you some idea of the complexity and rigour of Rabelais’s steganographical technique. But it is not primarily the linguistic part of Rabelais’s text that interests Grasset.

In chapter 20 of Pantagruel, after Panurge ‘argues by signs’ with the Englishman Thaumaste, the author informs us that he is refraining from giving us the full interpretation of the argument, because Thaumaste has already produced and published a volume in which he explains all. Grasset d’Orcet is convinced that this volume is none other than the Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel (Paris: Richard Breton, 1565), which you can persuse online here. This book is a collection of remarkable Boschian images, none of which seems to bear much of a relation to Rabelais’s work. BibliOdyssey has a post about the woodcuts here. Grasset, who is under the impression that Rabelais himself drew these pictures (after all, if he was trained in the traditions of freemasonry then he must have been a competent draftsman, right?), finds more to decode in them than he does in the good doctor’s writings. Perhaps this is because one has a bit more wriggle room with the translation of images than one does with the translation of words? Who knows?

One example will suffice to give you a sense of the messages encoded in these images. Consider this rum looking fellow:


What we have here is a ‘pot de terre’ (earthenware pot) ‘à deux anses’ (with two handles), wearing a ‘bare’ (flat bonnet) which is tied to the ground with a string (‘relié à terre par un fil’). This gives us: ‘fil lie bare’: Philibert [Delorme, the architect]; and ‘deux anses, pot de terre’: Diane de Poitiers [mistress of Henri II]. The image was therefore intended by Rabelais as a message to Diane, warning her that Philibert had betrayed her by going over to the side of Catherine de’ Medici (who is, incidentally, represented by this nice looking chap).

On the other hand, I’m not so sceptical about Grasset’s identification of this prognathous person with Charles V, since, well, there’s an unmistakable Habsburg family resemblance about her.

Grasset d’Orcet’s madness is quite clearly inflected by a strong nostalgia for the ancien régime and an utter contempt for the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French revolution. It’s an aristocratic kind of madness. Rabelais, G.-d’O. helpfully informs us, was no champion of universal human rights. He would have been as disgusted as Balzac was by the advent of democracy and the encroachments of the bourgeoisie on the birthright of the nobility. He had no time for the pedantry of Italian humanism. He rejected classical learning, and hated republicanism. He was unswervingly pro-monarchy. His Catholicism was perfectly orthodox. He was, in short, an arch-conservative: just like Grasset d’Orcet. Funny, that.

Letter of complaint

XX XXXXXXX XXXX
XXXXXXXX
XXX XXX

26 March 2007

Virgin Atlantic Customer Relations
PO Box 747
Dunstable
LU6 9AH

File Reference: XXXXXXXXXX

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to inform you of a matter that has caused me to suffer some vexation, a certain degree of irritation, and a not insignificant measure of discombobulation. This weekend just past, I underwent a terrible ordeal, and, like the mariner that stoppeth one of three, I feel I must unburden my soul to you. On Saturday evening I flew American Airlines from MIA to JFK to connect with the Virgin Atlantic flight VS 26 to LHR, which took off at 0730 on Sunday 25 March. When I got to Heathrow, your staff informed me that my bag had been lost in New York.

Now, at this point I had already been travelling for around twenty-four hours, and I had thought the worst was over. As you will appreciate, I felt exactly like Xenophon, who, after the defeat of Artaxerxes at the battle of Cunaxa, found himself and his ten thousand troops abandoned in the enemy territory of central Persia, and was forced to march overland the hundreds of miles back to the Black Sea.

Why? Well, the bag had in it my Heathrow Express return ticket, which had set me back no less than 29 quid. Now, the Heathrow Express, as you may know, is the most expensive train journey in the world. If you didn’t know that, perhaps you could make a note of it and pass it on to Richard Branson at the next business meeting. The bag also contained my keys, and my National Railcard.

Not wanting to shell out a second time for the most expensive train journey in the world, I took the tube to King’s Cross. Naturally, the train only managed to get me as far as Northfields, at which point, owing to some unexplained fault, I was abruptly vomited out onto the platform, where I was forced to wait in the bitter cold, coatless (where was my coat? In NYC!), a full twenty-five minutes for the next one. Don’t worry, I’m not about to blame you for the parlous state of TfL. Nor would I blame you for the fact that, once I got to King’s Cross, I had to wait another hour for a train to take me to Cambridge, which train only limped as far as Stevenage, where I had to transfer to a bus, which bus laboured up the A505 to Royston, at which station I boarded another train to Cambridge, my destination; no, I would not blame you for this, were it not for the fact that I had to pay the full fare of eighteen-odd quid for my ticket. Why? Because my railcard was in my bag and my bag was in New York City. That really sticks in my craw.

Happily, the bag was finally returned to me today. But even Odysseus, when he arrived back at Ithaca after ten years’ peregrinations, had still to defeat the suitors; so I too met with further misfortune: the key to my office had been in that bag, and it had arrived too late in the day for me to go in. I had been compelled to take the day off work. O blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! As I am by nature – like Sir Richard himself – an industrious and conscientious worker, this enforced indolence pained me greatly.

In conclusion, please send me some cash or vouchers or something in compensation for my emotional distress and pecuniary privation, and we’ll say no more about it.


Yours faithfully,

XXXX X XXXXX

---------------------------

Still haven't got a reply...

Remainder

It would seem, in the current book publishing climate, to be an act of unexampled folly and hubris to challenge the Fates of the Marketplace by giving one’s debut novel the title ‘Remainder’. But Clive James tempted fate in this way when he wittily, and wittingly, chose to call a collection of his poems The Book of my Enemy has been Remaindered (after this poem). Of course, the book itself duly ended up in the remainder pile – not a judgement of its merits, you understand; more likely owing to ‘a miscalculated print run, a marketing error’.

But Tom McCarthy, undaunted by this precedent, did just that. Not that the novel’s path to publication was entirely smooth – it apparently only found publishers in the UK and US after having been given a small print run by a Parisian independent (no shame in that, of course: same thing happened with Ulysses). And, although it caused a minor sensation in the book pages when it was published here last year, I was able last week to pick it up for less than half the cover price in a branch of a well-known high street book chain.

Not that we should imagine that the vagaries of the market have any positive correlation with the literary merits of the products it spews out for consumption; indeed, the correlation is more often a negative one. That being the case, I can categorically state that Remainder has deserved none of the success that has accrued to it: this is a remarkable book.

McCarthy, author of the Tintin book I blogged about here (which I still haven’t got around to reading, alas) and sometime member of the avant-gardist International Necronautical Society, has written a novel that situates itself firmly in the best traditions of experimental literature. Echoes of the novels of Beckett, of the nouveaux romanciers (McCarthy must be a fan, as I am, of the works of Michel Butor), of Perec’s La Vie Mode d’Emploi, abound.

I won’t summarize the plot. If you’re curious you can find a synopsis here – it’s one of those book reviews that devotes more words to recounting every element of the story in meticulous detail (and spoiling it) than it does to, y’know, actually reviewing it.

The ‘remainder’ of the title has nothing to do with piles of unsold books, of course: it refers to that troubling residue or excess in our representations and self-representations, that ‘little bit repeating’. This is a novel about trauma – not necessarily the traumatic event suffered by the main character that sets the narrative into its (slow, repetitively hypnotic) motion, but the primordial trauma of the entry of the self into the symbolic order. We do not naturally know how to be in the world: we must learn how to do it. McCarthy’s protagonist is reset to this zero point, to the point of entry into the world, and he must relearn the ways we order memory and reality.

There is a discrepancy in the ‘fit’ of the self to the real: we have all experienced it, if we have ever thought about the authenticity of our actions. We have all, I’m sure, experienced that moment of extreme self-consciousness described by the novel’s narrator, when, walking down the street, it occurs to us that we must for some reason turn around and retrace our steps, and we stand there hesitant, taking care to put on a dumb-show of authentic hesitancy and decisiveness – finger in the air, nod or shake of the head, careful composition of our features into expressions of consternation or haste – for the benefit of whoever might be watching, to prove to them, to the symbolic order, that we are, in fact, acting natural. We want to replicate the naturalness and unselfconsciousness of gesture and speech that we see in the best film-actors; but acting without appearing to act takes many years of intense training.

On this point, I read an excellent article in the LRB last week on Marlon Brando. Brando, writes the reviewer, ‘didn’t believe in acting, except in real life’, and ‘for much of the time he performed on screen like a person who didn’t believe in acting’. ‘But’, he goes on ‘he also believed in acting more than he said he did, and perhaps more than he thought he did, and he occasionally worked very hard at it.’ Camus’s ideal absurd man, perhaps…

The narrative drive of the novel derives from the repetition compulsion: when the mind suppresses a traumatic event it is compelled to return to and repeat elements contiguous with it in space and time, without allowing the subject to speak of the event itself. In this case, the subject is literally forbidden to the speak of the event, according the terms of the ‘Settlement’ he has agreed with the mysterious body responsible for the accident.

Instead he strives to reach a point at which his actions, and every aspect of the relation he has with his environment, might attain to an absolute, zero-degree passivity, not ‘doing’ but ‘being done’. This may be possible by slowing down time and halting it, by extending the infinitesimal moment and fully inhabiting it; by bringing to bear on the real an artist’s eye, a meticulous focus, an expansive attentiveness to detail. This is what organizes the narrator's perspective, manifesting itself in the return of the refrain ‘as I mentioned earlier’. But the narrator in Remainder misunderstands the role of the artist, mistakes representation for re-enactment, and fails to take into account the small, excessive element (that ‘little bit repeating) that makes every iteration into something more that itself. This is the paradox of memory: there is always more in our memory of events than in the events themselves, and our representations are always bigger on the inside than on the outside.

The narrator comes to understand this, that his quest for perfection in re-enactment is a striving for something else, and that the ultimate apotheosis of the mimetic art takes place nowhere else than in death.