From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Sunday, April 29, 2001 8:02 PM Seventh post Triassic This chapter seems as good a place as any to bring up one of Bank's strengths: formal structure. The chapters are patterned Coma, Metaphormosis (4 parts), Triassic, Metamorpheus (4 parts), Eocene, Metamorphosis (4 parts), Coda. By this chapter it's clear that the four separating chapters are about the narrator's real life and that the "meta" chapters are about the Bridge, with the beginning of each "meta" chapter a narrator's dream within the Bridge. So this chapter starts with an internal monologue of the narrator, in stream-of-conciousness as was the Coma chapter. The narrator acknowledges that he's creating The Bridge, that it's all inside his mind, and complains that the lights, tubes, and being turned over disturbs his concentration. He introduces "a friend from wayback" -- i.e. his previous self -- and the "ghost capital" location is introduced insistently just as "the dark station" was at the end of the Coda. The rest is a realistically told story of an ordinary person's past life, leading up to University. He's the youngest of his family, his dad's working class, and he's a little ashamed of him although he likes him too, his mom's a cipher. Edinburgh is his big city (hence "ghost capital", it was a capital once). He's taking courses in Geology (so that's why Brooke can know so much about rock layers) but he writes poems and song lyrics too. This is in the late 60's. And he meets Andrea Cramond. She's beautiful, countercultural, and upper-class. He gets his first date with her when she's walking in a crowd without looking around her, and he purposefully bumps into her -- on a bridge. They start sleeping together, though she occasionally sleeps with other people as well, and he's jealous though he doesn't want to be. He tries to find a class conciousness that he's satisfied with. His parents view he thought was too limited, Andrea's family too pretentious or self-satisfied. So he becomes a middle-class technocrat. He's the kind of annoying atheist who thinks that people who are interested in religion or mysticism, just for the fun of it and not really beleiving, are worse than actual beleivers. He wants to show her the "three, long red summits of the Forth Bridge", but they never see it on their trip to her parent's second house. He habitually drives too fast. So how much of this is Banks' real life story? I've wondered just how much of this is thinly reworked autobiography. It has that feel to it. I'm going to write a few words about a subject that has interested me, the limitations of dreams. When Brooke, earlier in the book, started spouting details about rock layers, I was wondering how the narrator could produce that within his dream. I find that in my own dreams, I don't have the memory or creativity to come up with certain details like that on the fly. For instance, whenever I read a book in dreams, that's usually the end of the dream, because my unconcious can't produce real writing on the spur of the moment. Therefore I can't read the book and I realize that it's a dream, or at least feel a sense of annoyance that leads to the dream ending soon. That's why I don't generally think that it's possible to create a real dream world the way that the narrator in this book has done, at least for most people. (Dr. Joyce tells Orr that he has exceptionally vivid and coherent dreams, and he's certainly right.) Detection of dreams is fairly easy, if you become a bit more concious within a dream; whatever part of you is producing the dream can't reproduce the details of reality. It's unsatisfying because it brings up the limitations of the unconcious, something that you don't normally think of as limited.