The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,51
the Day Before. And its title makes my point. The genius of the novel’s narrative structure is having the protagonist located in the seventeenth century in order to mesmerize us with future possibilities. We are made to take desperate pleasure in learning what we already know to have taken place long ago. And this extraordinary novel is, as the author tells us, “a palimpsest of a rediscovered manuscript.” Through its construction and its reading we move forward into an already documented history. When the power and brilliance of many late-twentieth-century writers focus on our condition, they often find a rehearsal of the past to yield the most insightful examination of the present, and the images they leave with us are instructive.
Peter Høeg, whose first novel nailed us relentlessly in the present, turns, in The History of Danish Dreams, to a kind of time travel (associated with though not similar to Eco’s) in which regression becomes progression.
“If I persist,” Høeg writes at the end of this novel, “in writing the history of my family, then it is out of necessity. Those laws and regulations and systems and patterns that my family and every other family in Denmark have violated and conformed to and nudged and writhed under for two hundred years are now in fact in a state of foaming dissolution….Ahead lies the future, which I refuse to view as Carl Laurids did: down a gun barrel; or as Anna did: through a magnifying glass. I want to meet it face-to-face, and yet I am certain that if nothing is done, then there will be no future to face up to, since although most things in life are uncertain, the impending disaster and decline look like a safe bet. Which is why I feel like calling for help…and so I have called out to the past….
“Now and again the thought strikes me that perhaps I have never really seen other people’s expectations, that I have only ever seen my own, and the loneliest thought in the world is the thought that what we have glimpsed is nothing other than ourselves. But now it is too late to think like that and something must be done, and before we can do anything we will have to form a picture of the twentieth century.”
Forming a picture of the twentieth century then—not the twenty-first—is, in this novel, the future’s project.
William Gass, in a masterful work, The Tunnel, sustains a brilliant meditation on the recent past forever marked by Nazi Germany. In it his narrator/protagonist, having completed a “safe” morally ambivalent history of German fascism, a work titled Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, finds himself unable to write the book’s preface. The paralysis is so long and so inflexible, he turns to the exploration of his own past life and its complicitous relationship to the historical subject of his scholarship—“a fascism of the heart.” Gass ends the novel in heartbreaking images of loss. “Suppose,” he writes,
that instead of bringing forth flowers the bulb retreated to some former time just before it burgeoned, that pollen blew back into the breeze which bore it toward its pistil; suppose the tables were turned on death, it was bullied to begin things, and bear its children backward, so that the first breath didn’t swell the lung but stepped on it instead, as with a heavy foot upon a pedal; that there was…a rebellion in the ranks, and life picked the past to be in rather than another round of empty clicks called present time….I made…a try. I abandoned Poetry for History in my Youth.
What a journey, though, to crawl in earth first, then in filth swim; to pass through your own plumbing, meet the worms within. And realize it. That you were. Under all the world. When I was a kid I lied like a sewer system. I told my sometime chums I went there. To the realm of shades. And said I saw vast halls, the many chambers of endless caves, magic pools guarded by Merlins dressed in mole fur and cobweb, chests overflowing with doubtless dime-store-jewelry, rooms of doubloons, and, suddenly, through an opening jagged as a rip in rotten cloth, a new sun shining, meadows filled with healthy flowers, crayon-colored streams, oh, the acres of Edens inside ourselves….
Meanwhile carry on without complaining. No arm with armband raised on high. No more booming bands, no searchlit skies. Or shall I, like the rivers, rise? Ah. Well. Is rising wise? Revolver like the Führer near an