From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Friday, May 04, 2001 8:53 AM Eleventh post Metamorpheus: Three The narrator dreams that he's on another bridge, he doesn't know where, because he did something wrong. This bridge goes a small river, but it's actually the top quarter of a giant hollow iron wheel that rotates as the narrator walks, so that he can never reach either bank of the river. He can't swim the river because there are carnivorous fish in it. In short, he's trapped. On one bank, there are pavilions and wagons with a number of ladies living in them; they put trays of food on the bridge for the narrator every now and then. They are young and beautiful, and do everything possible to excite the narrator; call to him, undress, make love to each other, occasionally have full orgies with men who come running out of the forest. But the narrator can never reach them. He's tormented by lust, anger, jealousy and so on. He "recall[s] that witches cannot cross water." It's interesting to note at this point that jealousy has been mentioned exactly once before in the book that I can remember; the part set in the real world where the narrator is jealous of his girlfriend Andrea sleeping with other people. This is also the second time that the concept "woman with control over sex = witch" has shown up; the last time was with the queen in the barbarian dream. One day the mist clears and the narrator sees that the river goes on forever, and along it are spaced an infinite number of bridges with men in them and ladies on the shore, just like his situation. The man downstream looks at him, runs a little on his bridge, then jumps in the water and is eaten by the fish. The narrator decides to run and run until he dies; his ladies watch, sad-eyed but "somehow resigned, as if they have seen this all before". They start crying, but he's happy, "They are caught, trapped, transfixed, heads bowed; but I am free." Here we start to get to the reason why the narrator crashed his car in the first place. We don't know much about that yet in the course of the story, just that he thinks it's his fault, and that he likes to drive too fast. But in this dream the narrator says "I am the keystone of the bridge" and this chapter is in the center of the book both by chapter count and page count. So this dream is the key to why the whole thing is taking place. To explain why, I'd have to use information I know from reading the book once before; at this point the reader is only supposed to suspect why. So I'll just leave it at that for now and come back to this later. Orr wakes up in The Bridge, screaming, believing he's encased in ice (he is, he's in a coma). But the scream isn't his own, it's the "sheet metal works"; metaphorically he can't even scream. He finds out he's going to be on half allowance for a month till he pays off what he owes for the handkerchief and the hat. Maybe that's why people on The Bridge are so careful to return soiled clothes that they borrow, it's all a relatively closed system. Orr gets a new doctor, and gets to see what kind of great medical care the poor get; the doctor is overworked, undersupplied, and can't do anything for him until he's reviewed the case. Lynch gives Orr a forwarded letter from Arrol inviting him to a date. He calls her and tells her what happened, expecting her not to want to see him anymore because of their now divergent "places in society". But she asks to help him, oh joy. Of course we've seen a relationship between a lower-class guy and an upper-class woman in this story once before; the narrator and Andrea. She arrives and gives him her brother's cast-off clothes; when he changes clothes and comes out she's actually getting along with Lynch and telling him -- a dirty joke! Why, what a regular gal she is. Maybe it's because I'm an American, and we don't have the same feel for social class, but this seems faintly ridiculous. Are Orr's class fantasies supposed to be typical? I mean, here the narrator has created a lower-class guy who is nothing more than a stereotyped cipher, whose only purpose is to show what a great person his girlfriend is when she treats him "like a normal person" -- actually, in a rather condescending way. Does she really tell dirty jokes to many of the upper-class men that she meets casually for the first time? Arrol asks Orr which is more important, regaining his social position, or getting back his lost memories. He says that having lost his memories is like having a sealed, forgotten chamber, she's says that it sounds like a tomb, and if he's afraid of what he'll find, he says "It's a library; only the stupid and the evil are afraid of those." The narrator is obviously afraid of the library, he causes a disaster to happen whenever he gets close to it. So which is the narrator supposed to be, stupid or evil? We know he's not stupid, since he has the ability to make this incredibly detailed internal fantasy, so by his own standards he must be evil. He does think that the accident was his fault, ergo in some sense he wanted something like this to happen, so we can start to see why this judgment of himself is implied. At this point the planes come flying by again, the lights go out, apparently turned off by the people who run the Bridge so that the planes can't be seen. They are flying from the direction of the City. That, according, to our previously worked out symbol set, is a sign that the narrator is slipping deeper into coma/fantasy, perhaps because he's now even more interested in Arrol. Joyce set him up to be lowered in social class, for the purpose of disenchanting him with The Bridge, now Arrol (who Brooke introduced him to, remember) is re-enchanting him again. The smoke from the planes is just detectable as a smell "blown through the structural grammar of the bridge, like criticism." Arrol sets him up in a disused apartment that her father owns but never uses. He's now the equivalent of a "kept woman". To reinforce this, Arrol needs something to reach the light switch with, and asks him to give her his stick. Orr says that she's being very kind, but the basic structure of the fantasy remains whether he's conscious of it or not. And that basic structure seems designed to give him unconscious cause to feel that she is controlling him.