Now the narrator’s quest.
Yes, it has to do with portals.
Portals, doors, windows, hatches, caves. There’re dozens of them.
Right. And the narrator sets the theme in first sentence:
I first saw one of the doors when I walked with my mother, my hand in hers, as a child of no more than three . . .
Immediately the quest begins, to find the right portal.
What is the right portal?
I’ll tell you what it’s not, because there are false leads. It’s not an exit that just leads to the entrance to another stage. It’s not a mirror that just gives back what is already there. It’s not a grave, because that’s the end, not an entrance. It’s not a door that leads to another door, or a scrim peeled back only to reveal another layer, because that’s endless regression.
What about a camera’s eye? That’s on the cover.
Close. You can alter the camera’s image in a dark room, but ultimately it’s opaque, its depth illusory. A different, seminal instance involving the camera’s eye is the missing frame of the film in which the narrator appears as a homeless man. That lost moment of slippage took on for me the form of longing, leaving me briefly overwhelmed by a vertiginous feeling of loss . . .
This gets scary. I marked this. Sometimes I think that the doors are the light of everything and that they only sometimes expand in ways that you can discern their apertures. Makes me wonder if there can ever be the right portal. Where would it take you anyway?
In this book we don’t get to go through the right portal. To what? The Beatific Vision, Samadhi, Nirvana, the face of Allah?
Why don’t we?
I think because our narrator is thoroughly postmodern. He can never find the right portal and so he suffers the metaphysical angst typical of our age. Look. We have seen metaphysical angst dramatized with terrifying intensity in writers like Kafka and Beckett. But I have never in any other work seen that anguish expressed in so many forms and with such powerful insistence. It’s the essence of this novel.
Hopeless?
I don’t think so. I believe that the fidelity of the novel to the idea of the right portal constitutes a tautological proof of its existence. Anything that deeply lodged in the mind and expressed with such power and beauty must by the persistent enigma of its absence guarantee its presence. So the elegiac ending we have both so admired comes not from the ontological absence of the right portal but from the realization that we cannot enter it in this life.
Tough, but Amen.
Yes, it has to do with portals.
Portals, doors, windows, hatches, caves. There’re dozens of them.
Right. And the narrator sets the theme in first sentence:
I first saw one of the doors when I walked with my mother, my hand in hers, as a child of no more than three . . .
Immediately the quest begins, to find the right portal.
What is the right portal?
I’ll tell you what it’s not, because there are false leads. It’s not an exit that just leads to the entrance to another stage. It’s not a mirror that just gives back what is already there. It’s not a grave, because that’s the end, not an entrance. It’s not a door that leads to another door, or a scrim peeled back only to reveal another layer, because that’s endless regression.
What about a camera’s eye? That’s on the cover.
Close. You can alter the camera’s image in a dark room, but ultimately it’s opaque, its depth illusory. A different, seminal instance involving the camera’s eye is the missing frame of the film in which the narrator appears as a homeless man. That lost moment of slippage took on for me the form of longing, leaving me briefly overwhelmed by a vertiginous feeling of loss . . .
This gets scary. I marked this. Sometimes I think that the doors are the light of everything and that they only sometimes expand in ways that you can discern their apertures. Makes me wonder if there can ever be the right portal. Where would it take you anyway?
In this book we don’t get to go through the right portal. To what? The Beatific Vision, Samadhi, Nirvana, the face of Allah?
Why don’t we?
I think because our narrator is thoroughly postmodern. He can never find the right portal and so he suffers the metaphysical angst typical of our age. Look. We have seen metaphysical angst dramatized with terrifying intensity in writers like Kafka and Beckett. But I have never in any other work seen that anguish expressed in so many forms and with such powerful insistence. It’s the essence of this novel.
Hopeless?
I don’t think so. I believe that the fidelity of the novel to the idea of the right portal constitutes a tautological proof of its existence. Anything that deeply lodged in the mind and expressed with such power and beauty must by the persistent enigma of its absence guarantee its presence. So the elegiac ending we have both so admired comes not from the ontological absence of the right portal but from the realization that we cannot enter it in this life.
Tough, but Amen.
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