Norman Rush - Mortals

“Sigh all you want. This is important. I’m even leaving things out.”

Her eyes were moist. He needed to control his feelings about Rex. Questions like who in hell Rex expected to be readers for such a piece of massive self-indulgence could wait.

“Give me a second to think, Ray. Oh, another way he put it. This book is about literary significance, that’s the subject, was the way he put it. He even thought of calling it Significance. Now this is me speaking, but what I gathered is that he thinks if you read through this you’ll find here, scattered around, what narrative literature does in an extensive way, but in very emblematic or condensed form …”

“Ah, so you would never need to read another novel again, something like that? Because if you did you’d see … well … after Rex it would all be déjà vu. Is that what he meant, would you say?”

“Ray …”

“He is putting an end to literature, rendering it nugatory, shall we say. No small thing to do. It must be something like this. The most original novel or story that ever was or will be is in fact a mixture of tropes and images and connectives and trajectories that my brother has captured and pinned down in his book for your pleasure! A wonder, in short.”

“Well, Ray, you’ll have to decide if that’s a fair summary. It’s certainly a hostile one.”

“And have you read his book?”

“God no. I’ve read very little, just here and there.”

“And how do you like it?”

“Some of it is hilarious, I think. Some of it is just more or less mysterious, but you get glimmerings of … something. Some is brilliant, though, which is the case whether your anticipatory sarcasm is justified or not. A lot I just didn’t have time to really get, to concentrate on. But I’m not the one to judge, you are, I can’t judge it as a whole.”

“So this is just about stories, narrative literature. Not poetry.”

“Correct. Oh no. Poetry, I have to tell you this, he is very dismissive about. He claims he doesn’t care about it. He thinks it’s lesser . I tried to remember his exact words because I was pretty sure you were going to ask me. Here’s how he put it. Poetry is about the poet … in a way that stories are not about the storyteller. Structurally narcissistic, he called poetry. He isn’t out to vivisect poetry, so you can relax.”

“You have no idea how abysmal his notion of poetry is, how sophomoric.” He wanted that sentiment to reach me, Ray thought.

Then he said, “He is … I was going to say an idiot. For example, does he think Paradise Lost is about Milton the man? But pardon me if I point out that this is classic Rex. He hands me a literary task and what? demeans my specialty. Incredible. My life is incredible.”

“No, Ray, it’s my fault. You know how I am. This is awful. I was groping around with him trying to get a clear grasp on what I was supposed to convey to you about what this was. And he wasn’t always clear. Which is another thing, oh God, another thing … So I was the one who brought up poetry. This was not something he was volunteering for you to be sure you knew. I am trying to do everybody justice. I was the one who said does this have anything to do with poetry. I got it out of him. It is important that you believe me about this, Ray.”

“You know that I haven’t spoken to him for years, Iris. He knows that. We are not reconciled in any way.”

“You have to be, though. I’ll explain it.”

“I’m perfectly happy this way.”

“You won’t be. You’ll see. So. I’m not competent to tell you more about how the different ingredients, I guess you would call them, elements, relate, in the book. I think in the Sentences, he takes care of metaphor, as I recall, maybe similes, maybe aphorisms. Also you have your choice of how you want to read this collection. You can go randomly, like reading the I Ching , if you want …”

“Like a pillow book. Like the hugest most monumental pillow book ever.”

“I think I’ve told you everything I can, Ray.”

“And I am expected to do what, once I read this thing? Use my contacts in this hub of international publishing, Gaborone? I have nothing to offer in that department, I hope he knows. I have no connections in publishing. I never had any. There’s no one I could recommend this to who has. That is the fact. If he imagines I have literary friends in power, he is mistaken.”

“I’ll tell you what he wants from you, if you let me.”

“Tell.”

“He wants you to read it and judge it. He wants a trained literary intelligence to read it and judge it. And I don’t mean sample it and judge it, I mean read it and judge it …”

Thousands of pages, he thought. He realized unhappily that he was incorporating into his consciousness Morel’s theory of religion as a conspiracy against free time and applying it a little differently, free time being mortal time, limited, limited, applying it to other, what, entities, like family I hate you, families as blind machines using up their progeny with demands on their time, whatever was left of their lives, the progenies’ lives, the time before the toad arrives, death the toad. But I have no children, he thought. He knew through Pony that on the wall in Morel’s meeting room was a papier-mâché Mexican carnival mask with a toad or lizard occluding the smiling face.

“Ray, he wants to know if this is a brilliant thing, major, or if it’s a failure and a mistake. He doesn’t know, Ray.”

“What about the possibility he’s done something in between, something pretty good, say?”

“I don’t think you’re going to think it’s mediocre.”

Ray said, “I’ll do this. I’ll do my best.”

“Ray, look straight at me when you say that.”

He did. “I’ll do my best.”

“Because I want you to say this as your self .”

“Don’t follow.”

“There is a difference between being yourself and playing yourself, which is something we all do. You do it when you’re tired and want to get through something that’s difficult in some way. Men do it more, I think. I don’t think I do it much at all anymore, since I started going to Davis. But the paradox here is that since I started going to Davis you’re doing it more. But please don’t do it now.”

“I am now not doing it, to the best of my knowledge.”

She didn’t like that answer, clearly. All this for my brother, he thought. It was baffling that Rex was making an appeal to the bond between them that Rex himself had sought all his life to deny and destroy.

Ray’s experience of brotherhood was hardly what anyone thought. Brotherhood, or brothership, a better word for it, had been something he had gotten from being in the agency, even if, except for his friendship with blessed Marion, it had been more abstract than not, an appreciation of membership in a male alliance, it was like, he imagined, being with the Allied armies during World War II, despite pattern bombing and the betrayal of the White Russians. He had a live brother, no thank you very much, who had made brotherhood odious, gone out of his way to do that. He wondered if the attraction the agency had always had for him would have been there if his experience of brotherhood with Rex had been normal. He felt pathetic for a moment, which enraged him.

“Ray, I know I’m putting you in a hard place. You can tell I want you to think this thing is wonderful …”

“A masterpiece, if at all possible.”

“Of course. That would be my dream.”

“But of course I can’t promise to like it.”

“No, and if it turns out you don’t, I’m going to ask you to agree to something in advance. Will you?”