From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Saturday, May 12, 2001 2:50 PM Twenty-second post Metamorphosis: Pliocene (part 2 of 3) I'll resist writing more about that O and the she-was-a-woman-of-letters thing on pg. 156 that equates his anxiety over her education to his amazingly primal anxiety over a part of her anatomy, and how both give her more power over him ... anyways, the narrator finds out that Andrea is writing articles about Russian literature, he feels "confused, almost dizzy" and hurt that she didn't tell him. She joins a feminist collective running a bookshop; hers is a "partnership, of sorts" unlike his own descriptively unqualified partnership; he feels uncomfortable there especially after one of them criticizes her for kissing him goodbye in public. The Tories win: Maggie Thatcher is in power. He reacts to this as a good reason to take his accountant's advice to buy a bigger house and another car, otherwise the Tories (and not the government, presumably) will get the tax money. She helps him decorate the house, and he feels deja vu over the time a year earlier when he'd helped her decorate her house; he is enormously happy. If this were a story or a film, this is where he'd want it to end. Unfortunately there is a saying of some Greek philosopher (Plato, perhaps?) that you can't count any man as having a happy life until you know how their life ends. Something can always happen later that makes you so miserable that it seems to invalidate what went before, or even destroys what made you happy before. This theme is also one that Banks picked up on in _Excession_, where one of the Minds wonders whether entities Sublime simply to end their story so that they can finally evaluate it without fear of adding anything else; to metaphorically calculate their score. But he can't freeze their moment of togetherness and life goes on. People ask if he's related to the lead singer who is one half of the new hit group, the Eurythmics; he says no. This is a clue that his last name is actually Lennox. So now we know that the narrator's name is actually Alexander Lennox. Does this tell us anything? No, not really; all I can think of is that it means his initials on the monogrammed scarf that Andrea gives him are "AL", which doesn't mean anything to me. I've never really liked the way that people refer to him as Lennox when discussing the book; the word "Lennox" never actually appears in it. I'm going to continue to call him the narrator, though perhaps protagonist would have been more accurate. Andrea continues to have flings: "he tried not to be jealous. It isn't jealousy, he told himself; it's more like envy. And fear. One of them may be a nicer, kinder, better man than I am, and more loving." Not to mention younger, or more exciting, or richer, or smarter, or better in bed, or... In fact there is a name for this mixture of envy-and-fear; it's called jealousy. But it does sound like the narrator is starting to be a bit more honest with himself. She has a tempestuous love-at-first-sight relationship with a young lecturer; he takes off for the hills in the second week of it. When he gets back, it's over, but she's reluctant to see him; a week later he sees that her eye is still bruised. She tells him not to do anything to the lecturer, if he does she'll never speak to him again. His answer is illuminating. "'We do not all,' he told her coldly, 'resort to violence quite that quickly.'" Instead of saying something like "I wouldn't do that" or "You should know that I wouldn't resort to violence that quickly" he's defending men as a class against a remark that he interprets as an insult, not to him as an individual, but to him as a member of the group of men. His first concern is to differentiate himself from a stereotype, one that the lecturer has reinforced by being quick to resort to violence. In some way, he feels that he and the lecturer are in this together; what they do reflects on each other in some gender-linked way. If Andrea had been struck by a female enginneer with whom she was having a fling, and told him not to hit her back, would he have said that "We do not all resort to violence that quickly" ? He realizes that just as he has never been to Paris, Gustave has never to Edinburgh; he feels curiously close to him. Andrea and her mother start having less well-off intellectuals over; he tells her that "you're starting a salon; you're becoming a goddamned blue stocking!" He goes to Yemen on business, and stands in the ruins of a place called Mocha n the desert on the Red Sea; now we know where the imagery for that dream comes from. (He tried to remember the name of the statue and guessed "Mock? Mocca?" I'll come back to this later.) The Tories and Thatcher win again. So does Reagan. The narrator fumes about how Reagan has the power to destroy everyone in a nuclear exchange, so why doesn't the narrator get a vote to elect him or not? His friend says "Still, on the subject of unelected reactionaries, what d'you think the Politburo is?" "A fucking sight more responsible than that gang of gung-ho shitheads" the narrator answers about the opposing gang of completely unelected gerontocrats with their finger on the button. Thus proving that the religion of one's youth is never easily given up, even when one has a big house and lots of expensive sports cars. The narrator's father dies of a heart attack, like Andrea's father had. He asks Andrea not to come to the funeral. (Why, exactly?) His company expands, he argues with his partners about their employees' salaries, saying they should all have a share. His partners, SDP supporters, say "a workers' collective? Why the hell not?" They say no, but start a bonus scheme. I have to admit; I found this to be very funny. A bonus scheme is one of the classic tools of capitalist motivation; tell people that the harder they work, the bigger a bonus they will get, a token sharing-out as the carrot that is supposed to make people think that oh no, they are not generating excess profits for the bosses. Then we go from comedy to tragedy. Andrea returns from Paris and looks sad. He wonders about calling Gustave but doesn't; finally Andrea's mother finds out that Gustave has MS. He asks Andrea why she didn't tell him, she says she doesn't know, and that she doesn't know what to do, Gustave doesn't have anyone to look after him properly. A chill settles in the narrator. And well it might. Having someone to look after you properly during severe illness is, in our societies, not a given. Ideally, it takes one-on-one care from someone else who loves you or at least personally cares about you. It is in fact one of the big things that people who get married commit each other to do ("in sickness and in health..."). It's not the kind of thing that you can really do well for more than one person at once. Therefore it is one of those zero-sum-game economic entities; Andrea taking care of Gustave necessarily means Andrea not taking care of the narrator. If Andrea, Gustave, and the narrator were in some kind of functional communal family, this might not be the case, but our societies don't support such arrangements well. And the narrator and Gustave certainly haven't tried to remedy this lack by getting in touch with each other. Andrea spends more time in Paris; when she comes back, he feels that their sex is less fun but more tender, with a sense of how impermanent such moments are, as if it has become in itself a kind of language. He feels self-pity but then thinks about how many people are worse off than he is. He finds out with "righteous dismay" that the bridge was not painted over a neat three-year period (i.e. the period over which Andrea was originally going to stay in Paris), it's done piecemeal in a cycle lasting from four to six years. He tries to assuage his dismay at this messiness of human relationships by his usual remedy; he buys a fantastically expensive new car. It's now 1985; Andrea's thoughts are never really all with him; he tries to talk about Gustave's MS but she won't. "It was his own fault; he had never wanted to talk about Gustave. You couldn't change the rules now." Rather, she can change the rules, but he can't. He dreams about the dying man, and sometimes thinks he can see him lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by machines. This line is the main thing that I can find to support a suggestion that when Orr turns on his TV, he's really seeing Gustave in his hospital bed, not the narrator. I don't think this really works; the TV image is too detailed, the correspondences between the man in the bed and the narrator are too great (the man in the bed looks beaten up initially), there is interaction between the dream narrative and when Andrea appears in the TV, and later the narrator and the man on the bed are explicitly identified with each other. But symbolically the two are being equated; first the narrator sees Gustave in the hospital, in dreams, later he will, from dreams, see himself in the hospital in reality. And we can take this as evidence that Gustave's situation is certainly known to the narrator's unconcious. The narrator starts to get disgusted with his situation -- something which never struck him as incongruous while he was happy with Andrea, though it certainly struck me often -- he makes money for oil companies, he's a boss, he employs. He gives up drinking and starts doing coke, quitting when he sees African famine pictures and realizing how much money he's throwing away. (I note that he never seems to think this about his car, however.) Finally, Andrea tells him that she's going to stay in Paris, to look after Gustave. "They might have to get married, if his family insisted. She hoped he understood. 'I'm sorry kid,' she said, dull voiced." This is the crowning blow; she turned his proposal of marriage down, and now she's going to get married to Gustave. Because he's sick. The family insisting on it is an obvious excuse; if they were that interested, they could look after him themselves. Now the narrator's car crash is pretty much inevitable; he's going to beat Gustave at this competition, damn it, even if it kills him.