58.5. The above account of the stay in Texas is pretty exhaustive too — though not conscientiously so.
But no simple, sensory narrative can master what it purports — whether it be a hitchhiking trip to Texas or the memories that remain from such a trip twenty-five years later. That age-old philosophical chestnut, the Problem of Representation (in its twin forms, the Problem of Verification and the Problem of Exhaustiveness) makes mastery as such a non-problem, with no need of haute théorie. Theodore Sturgeon’s fine insight is perhaps germane here: the best writing does not reproduce — or represent — the writer’s experience at all. Rather it creates an experience that is entirely the reader’s, forged and fashioned wholly from her or his knowledge, of her or his memories, by her or his ideology and sensibility, and demonstrably different for each — but which (according to the writer’s skill) is merely as meaningful (though not necessarily meaningful in the same way) as the writer’s, merely as vivid.
In short, writing creates not a representation of the writer’s world but a model of the writer’s purport.
(It creates a re-presentation, in a different form, of the reader’s world.)
But to model is not to master.
Finally, though, isn’t it a question of models that all narrative more or less leads to?
I’m as surprised as anyone that the totality of this narrative (§§ 58–58.51), however interim, makes such an easy fiction — that it might even be, for some, a satisfying one. Yet even as I write this I’m aware that such a totality is purely one of memory — not at all of analysis, say. (It is as arbitrary as it is interim.) What account of those days might Bob write now? Might Marilyn? Might Ron? Might Captain Joe? Might Tony? Might Sandy? (These two names are, I confess, conscientious replacements for the real ones.) What might Red say, or Billy, or Elmer, or Jake, or Tommy, or Timmy? (These last two, I hope their consonance betrays, I do not remember at all. I only assume that the fellows had them, that once I knew them.) Could their totalities be inscribed, easily and uncritically, within the interstices of mine, overlapping transparently where they overlapped at all, filling my silence with sensory articulations in such a way as to suggest a smooth and rational continuity, an accessibility, the coherence of the real? What would actual documents — old airline tickets, phone bills listing long-distance numbers, times, dates, costs, and durations, journal entries, letters, weather reports for New York and Corpus Christi, newspaper clippings (did Red’s arrest make the Aransas Star? Was there a paper of that name?) — add to, detract from, or problematize in this account? Or would the alternate columns such accounts might make, when read side by side with this one, obscure, distort, and contradict one another, producing the aporias that force into conceptual existence that mental economy which, while it is as much a fiction as any other, alone might contain them all and which can only be called history?
58.51 (When everyone “knows” what has occurred, there is no history — only a mythology that, for all its practical effects, is contemporaneous with the present.)
Some readers will certainly want, here, some reconstruction of my meeting with Marilyn. (None of it exists in memory.) She didn’t come to meet me at the airport. I believe I asked her not to on the phone, when I called her just before the flight from Houston. I probably thought a great deal, in the bus from the recently renamed Kennedy Airport, about what that meeting was going to be like. When I unlocked the apartment door, with the keys I’d carried in my jeans down to Texas and back, and she looked up, probably from the kitchen table, I’m sure there were smiles between us. Certainly there was a hug. There were, I’m sure, anxieties. There were questions about Bob. At some point I probably excused myself to type another paragraph or two on the page still around the typewriter’s platen. And, still later, we must have sat at the kitchen table, talking. Probably we took a walk in the warm Lower East Side streets that night. Probably I ate. Perhaps there was some strained argument, sulks and silences from one or both of us, that, after a while, gave way to makeshift smiles again — and more conversation, back at the apartment, late into the morning.
A psychological convention, however, similar to the narrative one by which the paraliterary detective story developed, says: Because you cannot remember it, it must contain a mystery, a meaning, an explanation, an epiphany highly significant, waiting to be untangled. Your lack of memory is precisely a sign of a unique and terrific repression of that import, intaglioed on the event’s surface, if we could only recover it.
Another narrative convention, however, declares: Because you do not remember it, the event must have been exactly one with the baseline norm toward which all such situations sediment. Your lack of memory is precisely a sign of the wholly general, the totally unexceptional, the purely ordinary and thus thoroughly historical of which all that is socially (as opposed to individually) meaningful in life is constituted. Most of life in its specificity is ordinary: that is why we forget it. There was nothing of interest on the event’s surface. Its only meaning lies at a historical depth, which can always be, somehow, reconstructed around it.
Still another, that rises almost wholly from contemporary feminist theory, declares: What you have forgotten, repressed, obliterated in the terror of its specificity, is the ideological. What you cannot remember is specifically an encounter with a woman. Your reconstruction, whatever it contains, is only ceded you by the history of other such encounters — since you admit your memory does not hold the event itself. Depths and surfaces are not eventual.
Whatever text you can peel from it — remembered, reconstructed, even invented — start by rereading:
Why did you ask her not to meet you? Call up those anxieties, those arguments. Interrogate those sulks. Articulate those silences. Who was paying for this back and forth flying — not to mention the flights to come? (Not you!) Give money, the domestic, and psychology voices equal to, and as intricately operationalized as, the totality of your homoerotic forage on the road. You will then at least begin (To write this immediately calls up two incidents that, till now, have escaped the “totality” of the account above: Ron and me pushing a shopping cart down the aisles of the supermarket after Elmer, buying a dozen steaks to stock the galley for the next trip out, as Elmer didn’t like fish, though Ron and I both could have lived off fish happily and easily — and we were both mildly unhappy about it because food money was deducted from our salaries. And, out on the water, I cooked a heaping platter of fresh-caught shrimp, hoping to persuade Elmer to reduce the beef — and the cost to us all — on the next trip out; but Ron and I ate them alone, sitting on the deck in the evening, because Elmer couldn’t abide the things) to be able to read the political unconscious of your text.
This convention tells us:
An unknown event is not a personal mystery to be solved, telling yet something else — your weakness, your power, your guilt over the discrepancies between them — about “the man” (i.e., the subject) in you. It is rather a historical text to be written about the woman you have forgotten, repressed, or never, really, known. Whoever we, today, men and women, substitute for “the man” in the previous sentences, that is what — today — ideology has become and remains.
(History arrives only when we don’t know what has happened. Only when we forget. Only when people disagree on what has happened. That is why a theory of history must always come into being at the same moment as history itself.)