Quilt (16 page)

I listened without the slightest expostulation or
intervention
. What struck me most of all was the tempo and tone in which he read. It remained so steady throughout. And the rendition of each and every one of these words was faultless. It was as if he had been rehearsing it for a very long time. I kept expecting him to change tone, to make a joke, to pause to comment on a particular word, to stumble, to laugh, to groan, to give up. But he carried on in this deadpan manner, as if each word were a world of its own, with its own
raison d’être
. The cumulative effect was like a tide coming in too quickly. He sounded, as he read the thing out, so ‘entirely normal’, to recall his phrase. Yet something irrevocably strange took place in his relaying of this lexicon, and I know my involuntary intake of breath, in the ensuing blankness, was audible enough for him to pick up:

– What’s the matter?

– You were reading so strangely!

– I wasn’t reading.

– What do you mean?

– I don’t have anything written down yet: I was making it up as I went along.

Something in me gave way. Our separation was no longer to be tolerated. The strange framing of rationality, this new English dictionary on hysterical principles, this division of voices and hearts of hundreds of miles of cold deep sea made me realise that he couldn’t be left alone any longer. I told him I was coming, I’d take unpaid leave or something. I got the next flight I reasonably could, just two days later. I spoke to him only on one further occasion, when I called to let him know my arrival time at Heathrow, and he said he would meet me. It wasn’t the best line. I remember saying it’s not the best line and he thought I said best man. And at another moment he talked of a ‘real surprise’, so I thought, but actually it was, as he had to clarify, ‘getting ray supplies’. Then he said, if I heard correctly, that he was ‘after life’ or ‘after my life’ or ‘more life’: the reception was very poor. The line went dead, or possibly he hung up. I called back but got no answer.

Bizarrely, he wasn’t there. I spent two increasingly anxious hours at Heathrow waiting for his expectant face to show in that great mélange of human bodies crossing and crisscrossing the arrivals hall, calling him repeatedly on my phone, and even having his name paged over the PA system. I was sick with worry by this point. I took trains across country as far as I could. It was a beautiful early autumn day. At last I got out and dragged myself and suitcase up the main street to the Tea Party, having taken it into my head that he might just be there. I don’t know what I was thinking – that he was writing me? that he was hiding? I was shattered from the journey and felt
an unwelcome but immense desire to lie down and sleep. I took a taxi up to the house. I knew where the spare key was, but didn’t need it. Still I rang the bell and stood there a while, as the cab reversed away back up the driveway. I walked inside to what seemed at first like complete normality and put down my luggage.

Charmingly lit and clear, as if waiting to be remembered in every finicky detail, was the great ray pool. I looked into the silvery water and soon enough made out Hilary, Taylor and Mallarmé. Melted clocks, but with a military air, they propelled to the surface, breaking it one two three in a splishing so suggestive of comic applause I couldn’t not smile. And Audrey? As if on cue, prodromally precise, a modest but giveaway ruffle in the substrate just nearby where I was crouched: pancaking in reverse, gliding, jetting up, she joined the others. I realised I was already seeing them as he had supposed, a truly radical gymnastics, the pyrotechnic forecasting, irrepressibly pulsing upwardly, from imperceptible in the substrate to shooting up, happy-slapping ghosts, dreamily clowning the surface, unclear who would have been watching who or when, questions ramifying only after the winging off and away, in conversational shadowings. Jetlag was getting the better of me. For a brief interval, which might have been ten seconds or ten minutes, I stared, eyes adrift in the immeasurably engaging turns, breaks and suspensions enacted by the rays as they nuzzled, untroubled in the substrate, plooping up an occasional pebble on a spout of water, then raised themselves up, thrusting, sweeping, surging in exhortatory mime, before surfacing so soft and inhuman, full of gratulatory curiosity.

I got to my feet feeling as if I’d been drugged. I called out his name, three or four times, but my voice seemed eerie and out of place. Although a part of me was worrying that he’d fitted again and fallen someplace in the house, and another part was fearing even worse, I also felt strangely sure that he wasn’t there. I was making my way towards the stairs when I noticed for the first time that there was light coming from the drawing room. Momentarily remembering, I opened the door onto that extraordinary affair to which he had (quite earnestly, it was now clear) made reference. The room had been transformed into the interior of a maelstrom, emptied and reorganised in such a way that you walked into a kind of calm, gigantic horse-shoe of water. I could see straight away that it was based on the donut from Barcelona, except that here in the centre was a circular couch, surrounded from floor to ceiling by water. On the couch lay a single sheet of paper. It was in his beautiful hand. Impersonally addressed, I could feel his eyes glittering with pleasure over it. Under the heading ‘Eagle rays (
Rhinoptera bonasus
)’, it simply offered a list of names together with a short description of their diet and where such foodstuffs could be obtained, along with brief guidelines on the upkeep of the tank. There were twelve names inscribed, as follows:

I was leaning backwards on the couch and losing all sense of my elements, staring round me into the great glass space. I counted all twelve,
bleached-bone-white,
with their pug-nosed, almost sharky heads, long thin dark spines like antennae, and stretched-out disc fins closely resembling wings. Underwater birds in a phantom aviary. The huge tank was incessantly shifting, a world of braking and accelerating, altering shapes and directions, a busy submarine airport, uncontrollable traffic of miniature chubby Concordes. At one moment they looked like water-filled white paper bags, the next they were dreaming and slow-winged as flamingos, flapping up into the ether. Then each seemed a
cloud-white
cruise missile, a disembodied flamboyant cuff brandishing a rapier, an upside-down technician with an antenna that turns its body into a walkie-talkie, a trapeze artist gathered at the end of its own tightrope. They appeared to me then more spectral than the
motoros
, or anything I had ever seen. My eyes were filming over.

Everyone knows. This is no whodunit.

My love was written in the starry sky above our heads.

As intrepid as a somnambulist I made my way to the stairs and mounted them as if for the first time, holding onto the handrail fashioned from the trunk of a young pine. It was dark, for all the doors were shut. I looked into his father’s study and hardly recognised it: glowing 
polished wooden floorboards, a new sofa and armchair, family paintings on the walls, and a filing cabinet. By the window, looking out, I realised also how much had been done to the garden. At the other end of the corridor I pushed on the door: his own bedroom was vacant, not even the bed remained. Once more I called out his name, and heard nothing but the absurdity of my own voice.

As I walked back along the midday twilight of the corridor, I felt, tingling in my eyes, virtually breaking me down at every step, exactly what lay beyond. As I opened the door of his parents’ room the light seemed at once to stream in and hold. Tears were running down my face. It was a translucent cave. It was crazier than anything downstairs, perhaps in part because of its elevated location. It is part of the law of probability, Aristotle said, that many improbable things happen. What used to be the en-suite bathroom was now incorporated with the bedroom into a remarkable belvedere. The floor must have been reinforced, I told myself. And as I did so, I felt again an estranging taciturnity in the sound of my voice, even within the space of my own head. I gazed up into the depths. The sky had disappeared. It was a manta, the biggest ray, the strangest thing I had ever seen in a house. It seemed, indeed, bigger than the house, arching like a rainbow, majestically large, its great wings black and thin, conforming exactly with that cloak concealing nothing that its name implies. It was hanging, yes, in the watery light, but not motionless. The great pectorals like a double parabola, undulating, arching, in curvy pulsions, the sweeping down of a horseless highwayman, black as night, white as forest snow, it moved at once too easily, slowly and quickly to take in. It was in motion,  
but it barely moved. Hypnotic: yes, suspended. From the eversion of its underside it seemed to gambol like a lamb. And then it was a bizarre lover fetching invisible pastry straight from the bakery, wearing floppy black
oven-gloves.
Interminably in need, wherever was I to source the plankton and the nanoplankton? As if dissolving once again, gently shrugging off into a new form, chalk verticality, raft into the shadows of the underworld, veracity in black and white, it seemed momentarily to swing towards me with inhuman inquisitiveness, nudging against my vision, proffering its paddle-like cephalic lobes, head-wide mouth and staggering great white belly with five long slashes of gills. I looked around for some kind of note, a letter, the briefest message, but there was no sign of anything anywhere.

T
HERE
is something at once comforting and strange about the idea of an afterword to a novel. This would be the place where, like dust settling after the massacre, the author considers what happened. Holding out the promise of some illuminating information or ideas about the foregoing pages, the afterword is also, by convention, happily brief: it is a ‘word’, after all, not ‘words’. In these respects the afterword, the very appearance of the word ‘Afterword’ on a new page near the end of the book, is a reassuring sign: relax, everyone, the novel is over, and what follows is just an add-on. You can take it or leave it. This last bit, if you like that sort of thing, offers an easy-going transition or exit out of the book.

A number of questions nonetheless linger and complicate this enterprise. Does the afterword truly come after the novel or before, especially given its apparent concern with why or how the work came to be written? Is the author of the afterword simply
the same
as the author of the novel? What happens if he begins by solemnly declaring that he is
not
? (I hereby promise: I am not.) What happens if he starts talking or writing like one of the characters or narrators in the book and gradually convinces us that this is in fact who he is? Or if he steadily persuades us that he (or she) is a quite new and different being, but no more or less real than anyone we encountered in the preceding pages? Are we so sure, after all, that what we were reading
was
a novel? And is it so certain that the afterword is not a peculiar continuation of it?

The novel is a space of play. In the past, questions of this sort have generally been part of the entertainment. Writing in the eighteenth century, Richardson, Smollett and Defoe (or their narrators) provoke questions about the novel’s truth, identity and seriousness from the start. In those days it was the preface (or some prefatorial equivalent), rather than an afterword, that raised such issues. We tend to take the playfulness of such
prefaces for granted today, and conversely look to an afterword in expectation of a certain earnestness and authenticity. In recent decades we had the ‘death of the author’ to contend with, but we recovered from this or, at least, we like to suppose the author recovered. False alarm, folks – and, if you want evidence of the author’s vitality and genuineness, one of the first places to look is the afterword to a novel! The fact that there is today an apparent preference for the afterword might suggest a curious conservatism in reading, or a firmer policing of the way in which novels are organised and their inherent delinquency controlled. The potential of a preface to mislead the reader is dispatched; the afterword seems a more restrained, less worrying genre.

But perhaps we have not yet really begun to think about the strangeness of the afterword as a genre – about its ability, for example, to unsettle the reader’s sense of time and causality, to alter the conception of the author, and to threaten or put further into disarray distinctions between fiction and
nonfiction
. The afterword might thus begin by pointing out that it is the preface that is really the backward genre, since it is invariably written after the work to which it refers: the preface is conventionally just an afterword in disguise. Whereas an afterword (this one I am beginning to imagine here) is a quite crazy thing in which anything could happen. It might go
anywhere
. It might easily turn out to be
longer than the work preceding it
. It might even seek to inaugurate a new kind of writing and give it a name:
reality literature
.

A novel has to do what it has always done: tell a story, give pleasure, compel and surprise us. But the situation of ‘the novel today’ is singular and unprecedented. It faces challenges and pressures unimaginable in earlier times. It is difficult not to think of writing a novel as an offensive, at best risible instance of ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ – in other words, while a
world war rages all around, with the control and ownership of Jerusalem at its heart, more of the world’s population than ever before live in poverty and hunger, women more or less everywhere continue to be positioned as inferior members of the human race, the environment of the planet is being systematically and rapidly destroyed, and non-human animal species are being wiped out daily. How is the novel to respond to this, while trying to do what it has always done? What are a novelist’s responsibilities in this context?

And at the same time ‘the novel’ itself has become so much a mere product, part of the ubiquitous programme. This programme operates on multiple levels, from the creative writing workshop (‘how to get your novel published’) to the inexorable machine of the publishing industry and the so-called ‘global marketplace’ (itself, obviously, a fiction), whereby every kind of book of fiction for every age and interest group can be categorised and distributed, bought and consumed, filtered and effectively neutralised. At the core of this programme is the simple but crucial determining principle: a work of literature is merely literature; a novel is
just a novel
. A novel can be as ‘original’, ‘brilliant’, and whatever other admiring adjectives you fancy, it can win a ‘fiction prize’, be talked about on TV, become a movie, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the running of the programme, so long as it can be satisfactorily filtered and neutralised, so long as it passes through without making any real trouble
in and with language
.

In the case of a work written in English the prospect is especially acute, for this language (‘international English’ or ‘Anglo-American’) is the imposing medium of freedom, as well as of inequality, hegemony and exploitation across the world. This language makes, on millions of people, insidious demands. It is oppressive and domineering, as well as a means of help towards a ‘better life’ – a fuller education, more rewarding job,
widening of horizons, etc. Anglo-American is the language in which democracy, international law and human rights continue to be extended, while also remaining the
lingua franca
of imperialist exploitation and global capital. No language today is more poisoned and treacherous.

But, for the English novel, this is also its chance. The novel has to make trouble
in and with language
. It must meddle. The novelist has to aspire to a writing that figures and insists on strangeness, on what cannot be appropriated or turned over to the language police. The novel has to resist and, as far as it can, interfere with the smoothly neutralising, nulling flow of the programme. It must strive for English to appear in its most pristine form, as what it always was: a foreign language. It would thus urge a new experience of that language, inviting readers to feel for themselves the strangeness of this ‘English’ which, after all, belongs to no one. Meddling and strangeness, however, should not be confused with calculation and coldness. The novel must also be a work of love. Which means speed. It means moving, in Shakespeare’s words, ‘with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love’.

The novel can seem such an old-fashioned thing. Its pull on our attention is in many respects weak in comparison with the easy entertainments of TV, film, computer games, phones and other teletechnology. More than poems or short stories, the future of the novel seems bound up with that of the book. The book remains an object of affection, but in an increasingly rarefied, circumscribed way. And the book, we tend to think, is a slow thing, even if we also attribute to it (for example on a train journey) the ability to
kill time
.

In truth the novel is a key to the experience and value of speed, and to a critical understanding of those forms of teletechnology in comparison with which it can seem such a tortoise.

Take telephones. Especially in their mobile form, they speed up life and communication, intensify anticipation and knowledge, inject new complexity into postponement and decisions. This presents formidable challenges to ‘the novel today’. If you want to write a novel you really have to be engaged (no pun intended). A certain era of literature appears to be over. This was announced, in characteristically playful, downbeat fashion, by the American poet Frank O’Hara when he suggested in a little text called ‘Personism’, dating from August 1959, that there was no need for him to write a poem; instead he could simply telephone the person he wanted to address. It is not that telephone calls (or, more recently, emails or text messages) replace poems. Telephones don’t deplete pleasure, they complicate and can also of course enrich it. More subtly, they interrupt and interfere with the way we desire and think about poetry. And what goes for poetry here also goes for the novel, for any novel worthy of the name is poetic.

Writers have long had a thing about telephones. Mark Twain, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and James Joyce, for example, were all fascinated by the strange voice-at-a-distance that a ‘
telephone
’ literally is. But O’Hara’s Personism represents something new, going to the heart of what we suppose a poem might be or do. His discovery is that the telephone has been installed, there is a poetry of telephony, and no one can really write poems any more without finding themselves – and the value or purpose of their writing – on the line. O’Hara’s telephone is an updated version of E. M. Forster’s suggestive idea, in
Aspects of the Novel
, that writing a novel is like writing a letter.

How should a novel deal with the reality of telephones and of other, newer modes of telecommunication? To ignore or avoid reference to this reality is obviously one option; but this can inevitably come to look like disavowal or dishonesty. The future of literature is inextricably linked up with these forms
of teletechnology, in the most ‘wireless’ ways conceivable. The novel has to work at new velocities, with new rhythms. It has to break up, interrupt, slow down and reroute unexpectedly. There is little point in supposing that new forms of telecommunication are going to be novel-friendly, or vice versa. The novel has to resist and twist, accommodate and diverge. After all, nothing in a work of fiction dates more quickly than the latest gizmo. A novel wants to be a joy forever, or, let’s say, a joy-fever, a fever that resists treatment, that stays with you awhile and can come back, at once chronic and fitful.

You recall the beginning: ‘In the middle of the night the phone rings, over and over, but I don’t hear it.’ The reader hears about what the narrator doesn’t hear. It is the novel calling. The novel is a kind of weird telephone exchange. Reality literature would be writing that acknowledges this weirdness and goes somewhere that was not foreseeable, either for the author or for the reader. And at the same time it makes the word ‘weird’ vibrate with all the resonances of prophecy, fate and clairvoyance we meet with in
Macbeth
’s witches, the never-faraway weird sisters. Telephones exist in novels long before Alexander Graham Bell and others came along. Wherever you have a narrative or narrator telling you what a character is thinking or feeling, wherever you have someone reportedly thinking to themselves (like Alice in Lewis Carroll), wherever you have a narrator who is not the same as the author, wherever you have a story in which you hear about things which haven’t happened yet or which are happening to someone else without their knowledge, you can pick up a sense of the strange telephone network.

When do you get the call?

These things happen from time to time.

You might suppose that reality literature is the first literary genre to be explicitly derived from TV. The phrase ‘reality TV’
dates back, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, to an article published in
Newsweek
in March 1978. Reality TV is of course a fiction. Like everything else on TV that appears to reach us in a natural or unmediated form, whether it is a ‘wildlife documentary’ or the ‘world news’, it is constructed, programmed and ethnocentric.
Reality literature
invites us, on the contrary, to be wary of such constructions and
narrow-mindedness.
It seeks to question and complicate, to dislocate and interfere. Is it a literary reality or a literature
of
reality? ‘Reality literature’ lives on this duplicity. It is not a genre but something more ghostly and fleeting. Its vivacity is spectral: it knows that the dead speak and that without the completely unexpected openings generated out of mourning there would be no future. It is something that happens, perhaps, when the novel is operating at top speed, gone before you can say.

You might suppose that reality literature entails a new attention to realism, even a new kind of realism. Again, you would be right. Yet the force and focus here is not only realism, but what makes it possible. It is the wayward telephone network. There is a literary telephony or, better perhaps, a literary telepathy, that has to do with the singular nature of magical thinking in literature. To read a novel is to enter a world of magical thinking. (This doesn’t mean you’re mad or ‘believe in superstition’ or have to surrender your reason at the door: like love itself, the doorway is magical.) Realism, in this respect, is not so much about credible characters, places, experiences and events, about furniture and food, sadness and street-corners, and so many other narrative details, all or some of which are taken to be suggestive of what is called ‘the real world’ or ‘real life’. Rather, realism is, first of all, what is secured through telepathy and clairvoyance. Reading the thoughts of others, receiving fateful intimations or weird knowledge of the future, hearing what others are feeling: that is what you find yourself doing when you read a novel.

(In a final parenthetical pouch, let me just add: what is at issue here is something ultimately foreign to religion, animism or superstition. The novel would be a space of quilted thinking.
Quilt
’s a queer word, to be sure. It is perhaps the true afterword here, the title-term that came some time after the writing was done, seeming to raise itself up out of the text. It is a matter of reckoning with all its meanings, associations and sounds (
quilt, quill, will, kill, ill, kilt, wilt, quit, it
), with all it covers and uncovers, as well as its distance from a world of simple surfaces and depths, concealment or revelation. What may seem so ordinary quickly becomes odd. You might think of something that you get under, something soft and comfortable, but dictionaries start off curiously abstract. Thus the primary definition in
Chambers
, for example, proceeds: ‘quilt
[kwilt] noun
: a bedcover consisting of padding between two outer layers of cloth stitched through all three layers into compartments or channels; any material or piece of material so treated…’ Another way of talking about novels is perhaps evoked: instead of ‘narrative perspective’, ‘first person narration’, ‘indirect discourse’, ‘point of view’, ‘focalisation’ and so on, there would be layers and pockets of voices, feelings, thoughts. ‘Quilt’ is also a verb, of course, meaning: to swallow. The principal sense here, however, is as another name – apparently dating from the eighteenth century – for a manta ray.)