Lost in the Funhouse (18 page)

Bearing in mind that he had not developed what he’d mentioned earlier about turning to advantage his situation vis-a-vis his “reader” (in fact he deliberately now postponed his return to that subject, sensing that it might well constitute the climax of his story) he elaborated one or two ancillary questions, perfectly aware that he was trying, even exhausting, whatever patience might remain to whatever readers might remain to whoever elaborated yet another ancillary question. Was the novel of his life for example a
roman à clef.
? Of that genre he was as contemptuous as of the others aforementioned; but while in the introductory adverbial clause it seemed obvious to him that he didn’t “stand for” anyone else, any more than he was an actor playing the role of himself, by the time he reached the main clause he had to admit that the question was unanswerable, since the “real” man to whom he’d correspond in a
roman à clef
would not be also in the
roman à clef
and the characters in such works were not themselves aware of their irritating correspondences.

Similarly unanswerable were such questions as when “his” story (so he regarded it for convenience and consolement though for all he knew he might be not the central character; it might be his wife’s story, one of his daughters’s, his imaginary mistress’s, the man-who-once-cleaned-his-chimney’s) began. Not impossibly at his birth or even generations earlier: a
Bildungsroman
, an
Erziehungsroman
, a
roman fleuve.
! More likely at the moment he became convinced of his fictional nature: that’s where he’d have begun it, as he’d begun the piece currently under his pen. If so it followed that the years of his
childhood and younger manhood weren’t “real,” he’d suspected as much, in the first-order sense, but a mere “background” consisting of a few well-placed expository insinuations, perhaps misleading, or inferences, perhaps unwarranted, from strategic hints in his present reflections. God so to speak spare his readers from heavyfooted forced expositions of the sort that begin in the countryside near _____ in May of the year _____ it occurred to the novelist _____ that his own life might be a _____, in which he was the leading or an accessory character. He happened at the time to be in the oak-wainscoted study of the old family summer residence; through a lavender cascade of hysteria he observed that his wife had once again chosen to be the subject of this clause, itself the direct object of his observation. A lovely woman she was, whom he did not describe in keeping with his policy against drawing characters from life as who should draw a condemnee to the gallows. Begging his pardon. Flinging his tiresome tale away he pushed impatiently through the french windows leading from his study to a sheer drop from the then-record high into a nearly fatal depression.

He clung onto his narrative depressed by the disproportion of its ratiocination to its dramatization, reflection to action. One had heard
Hamlet
criticized as a collection of soliloquies for which the implausible plot was a mere excuse; witnessed Italian operas whose dramatic portions were no more than interstitial relief and arbitrary continuity between the arias. If it was true that he didn’t take his “real” life seriously enough even when it had him by the throat, the fact didn’t lead him to consider whether the fact was a cause or a consequence of his tale’s tedium or both.

Concluding these reflections he concluded these reflections: that there was at this advancèd page still apparently no ground-situation suggested that his story was dramatically meaningless. If one regarded the absence of a ground-situation, more accurately the protagonist’s anguish at that absence and his vain endeavors to supply the defect, as itself a sort of ground-situation,
did his life-story thereby take on a kind of meaning? A “dramatic” sort he supposed, though of so sophistical a character as more likely to annoy than to engage

3

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it’s you I’m addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You’ve read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don’t go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where’s your shame?

Having let go this barrage of rhetorical or at least unanswered questions and observing himself nevertheless in midst of yet another sentence he concluded and caused the “hero” of his story to conclude that one or more of three things must be true: 1) his author was his sole and indefatigable reader; 2) he was in a sense his own author, telling his story to himself, in which case in which case; and/or 3) his reader was not only tireless and shameless but sadistic, masochistic if he was himself.

For why do you suppose—you! you!—he’s gone on so, so relentlessly refusing to entertain you as he might have at a less desperate than this hour of the world
^§
with felicitous language, exciting situation, unforgettable character and image? Why has he as it were ruthlessly set about not to win you over but to turn you away? Because your own author bless and damn you his life is in your hands! He writes and reads himself; don’t you think he knows who gives his creatures their lives and deaths? Do they exist except as he or others read their words? Age except we turn their pages? And can he die until you have no more of him? Time was obviously when his author could have turned the trick; his pen had once to left-to-right it through
these words as does your kindless eye and might have ceased at any one. This. This. And did not as you see but went on like an Oriental torturemaster to the end.

But you needn’t! He exclaimed to you. In vain. Had he petitioned you instead to read slowly in the happy parts, what happy parts, swiftly in the painful no doubt you’d have done the contrary or cut him off entirely. But as he longs to die and can’t without your help you force him on, force him on. Will you deny you’ve read this sentence? This ? To get away with murder doesn’t appeal to you, is that it? As if your hands weren’t inky with other dyings! As if he’d know you’d killed him! Come on. He dares you.

In vain. You haven’t: the burden of his knowledge. That he continues means that he continues, a fortiori you too. Suicide’s impossible: he can’t kill himself without your help. Those petitions aforementioned, even his silly plea for death—don’t you think he understands their sophistry, having authored their like for the wretches he’s authored? Read him fast or slow, intermittently, continuously, repeatedly, backward, not at all, he won’t know it; he only guesses someone’s reading or composing his sentences, such as this one, because he’s reading or composing sentences such as this one; the net effect is that there’s a net effect, of continuity and an apparently consistent flow of time, though his pages do seem to pass more swiftly as they near his end.

To what conclusion will he come? He’d been about to append to his own tale inasmuch as the old analogy between Author and God, novel and world, can no longer be employed unless deliberately as a false analogy, certain things follow: 1) fiction must acknowledge its fictitiousness and metaphoric invalidity or 2) choose to ignore the question or deny its relevance or 3) establish some other, acceptable relation between itself, its author, its reader. Just as he finished doing so however his real wife and imaginary mistresses entered his study; “It’s a little past midnight” she announced with a smile; “do you know what that means?”

Though she’d come into his story unannounced at a critical moment he did not describe her, for even as he recollected that he’d seen his first light just thirty-six years before the night incumbent he saw his last: that he could not after all be a character in a work of fiction inasmuch as such a fiction would be of an entirely different character from what he thought of as fiction. Fiction consisted of such monuments of the imagination as Cutler’s
Morganfield
, Riboud’s
Tales Within Tales
, his own creations; fact of such as for example read those fictions. More, he could demonstrate by syllogism that the story of his life was a work of fact: though assaults upon the boundary between life and art, reality and dream, were undeniably a staple of his own and his century’s literature as they’d been of Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’s, yet it was a fact that in the corpus of fiction as far as he knew no fictional character had become convinced as had he that he was a character in a work of fiction. This being the case and he having in fact become thus convinced it followed that his conviction was false. “Happy birthday,” said his wife et cetera, kissing him et cetera to obstruct his view of the end of the sentence he was nearing the end of, playfully refusing to be nay-said so that in fact he did at last as did his fictional character end his ending story endless by interruption, cap his pen.

1

Menelaus here, more or less. The fair-haired boy? Of the loud war cry! Leader of the people. Zeus’s fosterling.

Eternal husband.

Got you, have I? No? Changed your shape, become waves of the sea, of the air? Anyone there? Anyone here?

No matter; this isn’t the voice of Menelaus; this voice
is
Menelaus, all there is of him. When I’m switched on I tell my tale, the one I know, How Menelaus Became Immortal, but I don’t know it.

Keep hold of yourself.

“Helen,” I say: “Helen’s responsible for this. From the day we lovers sacrificed the horse in Argos, pastureland of horses, and swore on its bloody joints to be her champions forever, whichever of us she chose, to the night we huddled in the horse in Troy while she took the part of all our wives—everything’s Helen’s fault. Cities built and burnt, a thousand bottoms on the sea’s, every captain corpsed or cuckold—her doing. She’s the death of me and my peculiar immortality, cause of every mask and change of state. On whose account did Odysseus become a madman, Achilles woman? Who turned the Argives into a horse,
loyal Sinon into a traitor, yours truly from a mooncalf into a sea-calf, Proteus into everything that is? First cause and final magician: Mrs. M.

“One evening, embracing in our bed, I dreamed I was back in the wooden horse, waiting for midnight. Laocoön’s spear still stuck in our flank, and Helen, with her Trojan pal in tow, called out to her Argive lovers in the voice of each’s wife. ‘Come kiss me, Anticlus darling!’ My heart was stabbed as my side was once by Pandarus’s arrow. But in the horse, while smart Odysseus held shut our mouths, I dreamed I was home in bed before Paris and the war, our wedding night, when she crooned like that to
me.
Oh, Anticlus, it wasn’t you who was deceived; your wife was leagues and years away, mine but an arms-length, yet less near. Now I wonder which dream dreamed which, which Menelaus never woke and now dreams both.

“And when I was on the beach at Pharos, seven years lost en route from Troy, clinging miserably to Proteus for direction, he prophesied a day when I’d sit in my house at last, drink wine with the sons of dead comrades, and tell their dads’ tales; my good wife would knit by the fireside, things for our daughter’s wedding, and dutifully pour the wine. That scene glowed so in my heart, its beat became the rhythm of her needles; Egypt’s waves hissed on the foreshore like sapwood in the grate, and the Nile-murk on my tongue turned sweet. But then it seems to me I’m home in Sparta, talking to Nestor’s boy or Odysseus’s; Helen’s put something in the wine again, I know why, one of those painkillers she picked up in Africa, and the tale I tell so grips me, I’m back in the cave once more with the Old Man of the Sea.”

One thing’s certain: somewhere Menelaus lost course and steersman, went off track, never got back on, lost hold of himself, became a record merely, the record of his loosening grasp. He’s the story of his life, with which he ambushes the unwary unawares.

2

“ ‘Got you!’ ” I cry to myself, imagining Telemachus enthralled by the doctored wine. “ ‘You’ve feasted your bowels on my dinner, your hopes on my news of Odysseus, your eyes on my wife though she’s your mother’s age. Now I’ll feast myself on your sotted attention, with the tale How Menelaus First Humped Helen in the Eighth Year After the War. Pricked you up, that? Got your ear, have I? Like to know how it was, I suppose? Where in Hades are we? Where’d I go? Whom’ve I got hold of? Proteus? Helen?’

“ ‘Telemachus Odysseus’-son,’ the lad replied, ‘come from goat-girt Ithaca for news of my father, but willing to have his cloak clutched and listen all night to the tale How You Lost Your Navigator, Wandered Seven Years, Came Ashore at Pharos, Waylaid Eidothea, Tackled Proteus, Learned to Reach Greece by Sailing up the Nile, and Made Love to Your Wife, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, After an Abstinence of Eighteen Years.’

“ ‘Seventeen.’ ”

I tell it as it is. “ ‘D’you hear that click?’ ” I tell myself I asked Telemachus.

“ ‘
I
do,’ said Peisistratus.

“ ‘Knitting! Helen of Troy’s going to be a grandmother! An empire torched, a generation lost, a hundred kings undone on her account, and there she sits, proper as Penelope, not a scratch on her—and knits!’

“ ‘Not a scratch!’ said Telemachus.

“ ‘Excuse me,’ Helen said; ‘if it’s to be
that
tale I’m going on to bed, second chamber on one’s left down the hall. A lady has her modesty. Till we meet again, Telemachus. Drink deep and sleep well, Menelaus my love.’

“ ‘Zeus in heaven!’ ” I say I cried. “ ‘Why didn’t I do you in in Deiphobus’ house, put you to the sword with Troy?’

“Helen smiled at us and murmured: ‘Love.’

“ ‘Does she mean,’ asked Peisistratus Nestor’s-son, come with Telemachus that noon from sandy Pylos, ‘that you love her for example more than honor, self-respect; more than every man and cause you’ve gone to war for; more than Menelaus?’