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?”