The reader of these pages will hardly need to be told that a third unattributed monologue or, rather, a third written report of an unattributed monologue followed the second. I cannot recall how many such reports I read before I gave up reading the highly praised book, but I recall that I looked ahead in order to satisfy myself that the hundreds of pages yet to be read comprised nothing else but report after report of monologue after monologue from some or another nameless thinker, or mutterer, or rememberer or daydreamer.
At some time when I was trying to read the highly praised book, I learned from the publisher’s advertisement on the dust-jacket that the novel, so to call it, was written in a spiral of time. Perhaps, being gullible and ignorant, I decided that a great deal had now been explained; that I was at fault for not having recognised the invisible whorled structure that gave coherence and meaning to what I had found incoherent and meaningless. Perhaps I even searched for evidence of time’s being arranged spiral-wise in the jumble of text. (I surely understood at the time that a close study of events and places and persons referred to in each monologue could have told me who was the presumed speaker of each and when, in the time-sequence of the whole work, each speaker could have been presumed to have delivered his or her outpouring. But I was just as surely hindered from doing so by the fact that each of the monologues, as I call them, was made up of the same unrelenting prose. Authors of fiction purporting to come from a medley of voices are seldom skilful enough to compose a distinctive prose for each supposed speaker.) If I did thus search, I could hardly have found anything to justify the publisher’s absurd claim. I recall only that I put the book away unread and have never since looked into it or felt any desire to read any other work by the celebrated author.
In an earlier paragraph of this section, I tried to compare my situation among the circular paths in the grounds of this building with the situation of a reader content to know in detail about only the chief character of a work of fiction. Elsewhere in this section, I tried to describe a sort of narration that I could wish to achieve and a sort of narrator that I could wish to become. Am I being too fanciful if I end this section by describing myself as standing again among the paths and the box-hedges but this time being reminded of a bewildering diagram in a book of several hundred pages on the subject of narratology – a diagram of concentric circles and diametrical axes – and regretting that I, a fictional personage myself, have never yet seemed a part of such complexity? Or, should I simply report my pleasant confusion when I look away from the hedges and paths and upwards towards the nearest wing of this building and the window of the room in which these words are being written at this very time?
I am writing again about a supposed author, as I might call him: someone at a desk in some or another room at no great distance from here. He is struggling, if I know anything about him, to compose a few pages of fiction based on, or relating to, or derived from, or inspired by a few weeks that he has never been able to recall. Those were the weeks during his seventeenth year when he sat beside a certain young woman, hardly more than a girl, in a suburban railway train and when they talked together for perhaps ten minutes on every weekday afternoon. If the supposed author, so to call him, believes that a writer of fiction is obliged to explain why his characters, so to call them, behave as they are reported as behaving in his fiction, then he has much to explain about his chief character, a young man, hardly more than a boy, who talked for a few weeks with the young woman mentioned in the previous sentence. He, the supposed author, has to explain, for example, why his chief character had previously travelled regularly for two years in the same railway compartment with the young woman and had glanced often in her direction but had made no attempt to speak to her. Alternatively, if the supposed author feels no obligation to explain what might be called the motives of those who might be called his characters, then his readers, whoever they might be, are free to devise their own explanations. One such reader, for example, might suppose that the chief character, although he would never have used such terms, had always preferred fictional personages to actual personages. That same reader might suppose further that the chief character, soon after he had first exchanged glances with a certain young female person in a railway compartment, had met up with a certain fictional female personage, so to call her. The reader might further suppose that this personage, on a certain afternoon during her fictional life and when she was still a young woman, hardly more than a girl, had met up with a certain fictional male personage, a young man and hardly more than a boy. The lives of the two fictional personages had then seemed to go forward not as the lives of actual persons go forward but as the lives of characters in works of fiction are enabled to go forward, which is to say that the deeds and words and thoughts of the personages seemed not to occur in what is commonly called time but in what was called earlier in this work the narrative dimension. In that dimension, events, so to call them, that might have occupied a year of actual time, so to call it, are reported in a single paragraph whereas the contents of a few moments might need for their full appraisal a chapter that might detain the reader for an hour and might have occupied the writer for a week. In short, while scant details might be said to have been noted from the years when the two young fictional personages chatted in railway compartments or on outings together, details abounded from their later years. Their intimate conversations were transcribed, as it were. Sentences and whole paragraphs were quoted, as it were, from the letters that they wrote during their brief times apart. And, given that these two personages were far from being characters in an actual text, their behaviour was explained in minute detail. And the subject-matter, so to call it, of this fiction-in-the-mind, as it might be called, included the courtship of the two personages, their engagement, their marriage, their honeymoon, and year after year of their life together as husband and wife and parents.
During a certain few moments of a certain afternoon, the chief character of a conjectured piece of fiction spoke for the first time, or so it would have been reported in the piece of fiction, with another character, a young female character whose name he had once misread as Dathar. He, the chief character, could never afterwards recall what he had said to the young female character while they were walking down the ramp from the railway station after having travelled together in silence in the same railway compartment during the previous fifteen minutes. Nor could he afterwards recall what, if anything, she had said to him in reply, but after she had smiled at him when he entered her railway compartment on the following afternoon he had sat beside her as soon as a seat had become available and had talked with her.
He and she, the characters or personages or whatever else the reader may consider them, had talked thus together during the next few weeks. Their conversations had lasted for a total time of about three hours. Given that a great deal of what he heard from her would have answered questions that had occurred to him during the previous two years – what siblings had she? where had she spent her early childhood? where did she go for her holidays? what were her favourite books? what were her hobbies? – he found it strange in later years that he failed to recall not only her answers to such questions but even his posing the questions. In later years he would sometimes feel such unease when alone with some or another female person that he could afterwards recall nothing of the experience, but he was never able to believe that he had been stricken in the presence of Darlene, as he would have learned to call her, with the sort of apprehension that overcame him in the presence of those others. The fact that he willingly met up with her on day after day for several weeks argues against his having been wary or uneasy with her as he was sometimes wary or uneasy in later years with certain female persons, dark-haired or otherwise. The preceding is the sort of sentence that might appear often among the notes made by an author committed to explaining the behaviour of his or her characters, so to call them. If I were reporting the strange forgetfulness of the chief characters of these paragraphs, I would report no more than wha
t is reported in such as the following paragraph.
From all that she had surely said to him during three hours or more, he later recalled only one sentence or, rather, the substance of one sentence. He had never forgotten her having asked him one afternoon, while the train was approaching the suburb where they both lived, whether he was interested in – did she say films or movies or pictures?
Among the authors who have never been committed to explaining the behaviour, so to call it, of characters, so to call them, are the authors who are committed to reporting a certain sort of detail. This is the detail that occurs unexpectedly and unbidden and as though meant to occupy a blank or an absence in the place where images of details or even of words or phrases or sentences appear to writers of fiction. A certain sort of writer, after having written all that could seemingly be written about a character unable to recall more than three words that might have been uttered by a certain dark-haired young woman – a certain sort of writer might have stared at those words themselves where they appeared at the end of a short paragraph; might have heard the words seeming to sound repeatedly in his mind; and might have seemed to feel the beginnings of an unease or discomfort or distaste seemingly connected with the words until there appeared in place of the words detail after detail of the sort reported in the following paragraphs.
If I know anything about him and his struggles to write fiction while recalling not seeming facts but absences, lacks, lacunae, he would sooner or later have decided that her asking him about films, or whatever was her actual word, had decided the future of their friendship, so to call it, and would have come as a relief to him. Since the afternoon when they had begun, at last, to talk together, he would have struggled during their absences from one another, and perhaps even during their brief conversations, to form some or another series of mental images linking their present unpredictable circumstances with the well-established series of future events that had seemed to him, since they had first looked at one another, their inevitable future. In short, he would have struggled to foresee how a young woman, hardly more than a girl, and a young man, hardly more than a boy, she in a fetching uniform of brown with blue and gold trimmings and he in plain grey with a cap of faded blue – how those two could bear to spend year after year engaged in trivial matters while knowing all the while that a notable future awaited them: that they would be in due course boyfriend and girlfriend, an engaged couple, a married couple, a pair of honeymooners, and, finally, the parents of numerous children. His relief would have come from her having given away some part, at least, of the future that she foresaw for the two of them. Her question had told him that they were not merely to talk at length to one another by telephone or in one another’s lounge-room; nor would they write long letters to one another. He had understood at once where her question about films was meant to lead them, and he had understood at once that he would not be led in that direction. She had answered in part his unasked question: how could she and he endure the many dull years before their dream-future overtook them? On many a Friday or Saturday evening they would sit together in the Plaza or the Paramount, which were the two cinemas in the suburb adjoining their own.
Did he never, while they talked in the train, enjoy for a little the awareness that an actual future was now before him; that he could rest for the time being from his strenuous day-dreaming and watch actual events unfolding around him and her? He recalls no such pleasant interludes. Words, words that had him constantly adjusting his assumptions of two years past, were issuing from the mouth of someone who had been during all that time as silent as a statue and had seemed to speak only when he had willed her or, rather, her image to speak what he had composed on her behalf. Did he never, while they talked in the train, try to persuade himself that his two-years-long dream had come true: that he had now gained the friendship of a flesh-and-blood person and had no longer to court a creature of his own devising? At his desk in the house of many windows, he recalls no such efforts. All he recalls is his having decided, whether soon or late during the few weeks while they talked, that his earlier state had been preferable to his later; that he may well have been in love with Dathar but he could never be in love with Darlene.
Their suburb was a new suburb that had been a few years previously a cluster of industrial buildings surrounded by swampy paddocks and bisected by a railway line. His and her families were unusual, the parents having paid deposits on cheap weatherboard houses after having lived for years in rented cottages in inner suburbs. Most families in the suburb were young couples, as they were called, with two or three small children. Hardly any householder owned a car. Buses carried women to the shopping centre in the adjoining suburb, families to church on Sunday, and, on Friday evening and Saturday evening, a mixture of persons to the two rival cinemas mentioned earlier. His mother had occasionally taken him and his brother on the picture bus, as it was called, to watch some or another comedy film at the Plaza or the Paramount. The bus had been always crowded – these were the years before television – and the pairs of passengers who had seemed to him boyfriends and girlfriends were dressed in what were almost certainly their best outfits and conducted themselves as though an evening at the Plaza or the Paramount was one of the chief events in their lives.
Only four years after Darlene had asked whether he was interested in films, he had begun writing in a journal long essays meant to decide how he could best express the wealth of meaning that he felt urged to express: whether the best means available to him was film or live theatre or prose fiction or poetry. The writer of the essays thought highly of film, but the young man, hardly more than a boy, who was asked about his interest in films thought at once not of a screen covered by images expressing a wealth of meaning but of the dark interior of the picture bus late on a Friday or a Saturday evening. The young persons in the bus, some of them no older than himself and the young woman who had questioned him, had seemed to expect much from film while they had travelled in the bus, a few hours earlier, towards the Plaza or the Paramount but had seemed on their journey homeward to have been disappointed. The young man who had been questioned and who had sometimes himself travelled with his mother in the picture bus could not have explained the disappointment of the young travellers homeward, but some or another man in the same wing of this building where I presently sit writing – some or another man may be about to write that the travellers homeward had earlier looked forward to seeing images of actual persons in actual places by definition more worthy of notice than the streets through which the picture bus travelled; the travellers had been able for a few hours to study the behaviour of their betters and to learn superior ways of dressing, of speaking, of kissing, even. Now, the travellers were back in the picture bus, and even if they turned away from one another and looked hopefully outwards they saw only vague images of themselves in an image-bus travelling through actual darkness.
In a work of fiction intended to provide its readers with the sort of experience available to watchers of film, a young male character might well be reported as seeing in his mind image after image of himself and a young female character while he and she travelled in the picture bus from their suburb to a neighbouring suburb, while they sat together in the Plaza or the Paramount, and while they later travelled homeward in the bus. The images would have appeared to the young male character soon after he had been asked by the young female whether he was interested in pictures; by which she meant sequences of images shown in places such as the Plaza or the Paramount. The same images would have appeared again to the young male character on the afternoon after he had been questioned and while he was walking with deliberate slowness through the streets of the inner suburb where he attended school so that he would arrive at the railway station after his usual train had left.
He recalls little. He may even have travelled with Darlene on a few more afternoons and talked with her as before, but within a few days he was travelling home alone on a later train. He had simply withdrawn; he had fled; he had run
away from her. He doubts whether he felt any shame. For many years afterwards, he could not conceive of any different course available to him, given the sort of person he was at the time. He went on living in the same suburb for four more years. He travelled often by train and shopped often in the adjoining suburb and even went occasionally with his mother or his brother to the Plaza or the Paramount but he always remembered to look out for her in the distance. Sometimes he saw her from far off and loitered or changed direction. If they had suddenly come face to face, he would have dropped his eyes and hurried by.
One of the daily newspapers at that time included a weekly column offering advice to persons with problems, mostly of the sort that might have been called romantic. He read the column sometimes. The persons with problems used pen-names such as ‘Puzzled’ or ‘Confused’ or ‘Heart-broken’ and no detail of their addresses was ever published, not even the name of their suburb or town, so that he thought of them as belonging to an adult society almost as remote as that depicted in films. At some time during the first months after he had ceased to travel with Darlene, he had read the following answer to a questioner. (Not even the actual questions were published – only the columnist’s answers.) ‘What a churlish fellow! Seemingly he did not wish to continue the friendship but lacked the moral courage to say so. Forget about him. You are well rid of him.’
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