| Girl, you'll be a woman soon |
[22 Jul 2008|08:26pm] |
"I woke up laughing and terrified both, because I thought that the thirty-year old man I am today was aping and ridiculing the callow juvenile I once was, while he in turn was aping me and, by the same token, each of us was aping himself."
So says Witold Gombrowicz, not one page into Ferdydurke, neatly capturing the problem of the I. We are multivalent creatures, here, lumping ourselves through the dark wood, sprouting I-stalks.
It's tricky for the writer: voice-splitting, the grafting of the root. "I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson;" one Borges confesses, "he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me."
The internet I - iterations, interactions - approximates the artist's conundrum (how democratic). iMac, iTunes, iLike: the iI. Clever man.
In translation: into English, the I elongates, grows phallic, a tower whose top may reach unto heaven and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered (neat excision of the semicolon, texttweak, perpetrated by the current I, drunk with typographic power). The Anglosaxon I was capitalized c. 1250, while I began to be capitalized c. 1983, each of us emerging, extending, naméd.
The I is both the most reliable narrator (Descartes loaded up according to de grocery list unobserved and unobservable by the Other) and the least reliable (inaccuracy of reporting, failure of omniscience, paranoia, relativity). And that's assuming a stable I (monolith) - but I'm saying there're more M's to modify It (morph/mutate). As Horacio Castellanos Moya's narrative in Senselessness streams on, his Me acquires hangers-on, the broken syntax of the indigenous I's he copyedits weaving into his own. Long sentences meander around him, rush down gullies, propel his paranoid flight, and at the end: the voice of another: sentences like gunfire: "Everybody's fucked. Be grateful you left," and he's validated. Condensed. Sometimes one takes on the I of another to suit himself. R. Kelly emerges from closet after closet, tailoring the narrative as he goes. R. u Kelly? or is you another I, fumbling with the shoe-rack in a labyrinth of closets, one behind the other?
Perhaps one reason we give the memoirist such a hard time is that he threatens our crumbling monuments with his unreliability.
Similarly, there is no I train. If it were late, or running on the wrong track, it could cause a citywide existential crisis.
I've got I's only for you, you say, wrymouthed. The I becomes the I that is in you, lain bare like a spine.
The last laugh? There is no Ferdydurke.
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