(no subject)

[proximoception]

Cities of the Plain

I drank too much of the strong tea and stayed up all night finishing the book yesterday, because I knew I wasn't sleeping, but was too tired and jittery to make full sense of the Epilogue. I liked some of the book and disliked some. All the Pretty Horses is an excellent and very fun book, The Crossing less good and much less pleasant but greater, great and haunting. This last one I need to think about more.

I wonder most of all what the exploding dog episode meant. Grady being pulled apart by the competing ties of principle/El Paso/America/Cole-ness and fate/Juarez/Mexico/Billitude? Heh, surely something, though presumably not that.

The thing with the Epilogue is I wasn't sure if it was talking about McCarthy's writing the book or Billy's having somehow dreamed Grady. Billy's story is I suppose the more dreamlike--the first two books are versions of one another--but John's is a traditional narrative, a novel, infused with how things ought to be. Realistic but perhaps ultimately unreal, where Crossing is surely meant to be symbolic but of true things.

Anyway, whoever dreamed it, it is the dreamed figure who has the gnosis--a curious one merging total freedom and contingency, as though consciousness were just matter from the inside (?; as I read it)--and is able to accept death and save the girl, who is surely named Mexico whatever her limits turn out to be. The real one can't do it, and apparently needs women to save him.

Freaked out by this coincidental IM exchange simultaneous with my writing the above:

D: i keep having really long action-movie dreams
D: last night was set in some jungle swamp, like vietnam or Southern Comfort
S: Actual nightmares?
D: there were lots of bugs.
D: they cant be nightmares cause i'm not really in it. there's a main character who i occassionally inhabit.

Like what the authorial Mexican spoke of. Like Billy I don't think I ever did this. Going to have to reread the whole Epilogue clearly.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I liked the epilogue, though I think most people don't. It reminded me (sorry!) of Lacan on the dream of the burning child in Freud. The encounter that can never take place. Also I suppose it was in some ways an adumbration of The Road. In my book I have a section on the knife fight between Eduardo and John Grady, which I think is an amazing piece of writing.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Reminded me a bit of Stevens' WW2 stuff too, and especially Eliade--and Jesus and Hamlet, as it was clearly meant to. I liked it better than almost everything else in the book, except a couple of the old Mr. Johnson scenes and yeah that fight--despite its flirting with unbearability. It just sends me back to the drawing board re. McCarthy.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Also: Blanchot?

[howlikeyouthis.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the epilogue has to do with Proust's Cities of the Plain and the role of dreaming there. Been wondering this for months, actually. The narrator's dreams of the grandmother, and his thoughts about Albertine, the shutters, the sea, his mother--they all at the end merge in ways that he doesn't allow dreams to earlier on in the book, where he's quite clear about their separability from everyday life. Finally, then, dreams create, augment, rewrite reality and it's difficult to separate them from it, with the entire topic centering on consciousness and its power to revise reality.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing nothing at all, in any direct way, since McCarthy has mentioned his failure to get Proust? And I'm leaning toward seeing all the Epilogue's dream remarks as being about art.

In Proust the merging you speak of leads up to Marcel's disastrous relationship with Albertine--maybe he should have kept those things apart? Though I might be reading Proust through Daemonomania.

But let's think. In McCarthy letting your dream dream connects you to your primordial roots and your death. Perhaps Proust is passing Marcel into the next stage by confronting him with a death that pushes him back into his own bloodline--doesn't he see his mother looking like his grandmother at the end? Young men can wander freely till a certain point, but then must come home.

In both, in dreams you are more yourself, your shape more like the shape of your life. Maybe that's the opposite of lucid dreaming? I'm finding this hard to think about. Who are you?

[howlikeyouthis.livejournal.com]

I'm just a student of poetry & the occasional novelist. Stumbled across your journal through reading others. I also write poetry, less often than I'd like to.

The Epilogue's dream remarks have to be about art-- and so are Marcel's. They are about how one's emotions, memories, fears, and desires get the better of one's will, or, how in the sorting of what's dream and what's real, in the engagement with others (ringing the bell "eleven" times vs once, and trying to sort out what really happened, what another person heard, what he dreamed and heard) in that sorting one connects with them most deeply.

Yes, that merging shouldn't have happened; it's the torture and tragedy of the relationship with Albertine, and it's what makes the very end of CP so triumphantly sad. Marriage? Hard to believe it'd be a good idea for either of them.

Yes, he sees his mother looking like his grandmother. This death, like death in McCarthy, grounds him. It's a death that's also not completely one because it brings him into the present, his own life, through his mother's comments and through his love for both of them. That love is home, but it's constantly unstable because of the effects of grief and doubt. Dreams are like the mistresses who aren't the "image" of love but who had the "faculty of arousing it": he knows what they are not, he knows what the illusions they foster are (or that they're capable of engendering them), but as an experience dreaming is much more powerful than any of the individual illusions because of how much they inform his selfhood; thereby they inform Proust's art.

You may be interested in Sir Thomas Browne:
However dreames may bee fallacious concerning outward events, yet may they bee truly significant at home, & whereby wee may more sensibly understand ourselves. Men act in sleepe with some conformity unto their wawkes senses, & consolations or discouragements may bee drame frome dreames, which intimately tell us ourselves.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Intimately tell us what self to be next, in Marcel's case. Or try to be. I like how author-Proust knows to not fully trust the pushing voice. In the great dark water we expand to our true dimensions but there are other vastnesses awake there with long designs and better-accustomed eyesight. As fatal the fascination with those as with oneself, though--maybe a lesson for McCarthy.

In the sorting one connects with the other people better? I'll have to think about that. It does remind me of maybe the best scene in The Crossing (very beginning and very ending possibly excepted), and definitely the funniest: the men on the bench discussing the old man's bizarre map--which itself seems to be echoed by the Mexican's life map in the Epilogue.