[lit-ideas] Phatic answers to his readers
- From: "phatic" <phatic@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 00:10:16 +0200
PersonA, ch10:
Phatic answers to his reader
Phatic considered how it was possible that he could be the author of
a work where he figured as a character in a third person narrative.
"I would have to somehow be beside myself," he thought. Little did he
know that chapter 10 would spell the end of his illusion as his own
maker.
The novel had reached a bottom-point. That much was apparent from the
letters Phatic had received from his readers. While chapter eight,
which clearly constituted a projection of Phatic's recent
psychoanalysis, was passable (to some), chapter nine was a real
stinker.
"While I respect you without knowing you (as is my wont), you would
be well adviced to scrap that chapter," one reader wrote. "For one
hand, I don't need no phatic reminders of Lacan, and for another, it
has no relevance to the plot. And who is this Professor Kingfisher,
anyway. And what happened to Sinsemilla, Inta and Felix."
Phatic scratched my head (metadiegetically).
"Thank you, Phatic," I said.
"I felt it itching, too," he said, preempting my inquiry.
"Now you need to answer your 'fan mail'," I said with a gruesome,
"while I go about constructing some way out of the narrative mess you
left me in."
"Don't you schadenfreude me," Phatic said sadly.
"And don't alliterate, either," he harked haughtily as I hastened out
onto the streets of Bagdad.
I would have to be in Bagdad, since that's where Diderik Humble Jr
had left Phatic, and taken to the highway to Uqbar with Sinsemilla in
his tattered Trabant. It was on their way there that Sinsemilla had
encountered some Dean Corso-type character in a Red Romeo. Now we can
picture Diderik in a room of the Hotel Rio Grande du Sol, sealing the
envelope in which he has put his letter to Phatic. He is going down
the staircase to the lobby where Felix (from chapter four) is idling
away his time with a game of Hearts. Felix is eager, perhaps a bit
too eager, to post Diderik's letter.
"Are you telling me that Diderik didn't write the letter I so
carefully typed out in the previous chapter?" Phatic asked.
"Be quiet and go back to your assignment, nitwit," I rudely replied.
Later that evening Diderik, already on his second bottle of Gin, made
a confession to Felix, who was less than interested. Inta, meanwhile,
was preparing for her meeting with Mundt. She had read the note to
pieces. Now she was left with four scraps. One said "Who tol",
another "town ha", yet another "idnight", and the last "not me". She
tried to piece them together so that they would make meaning:
Who tol town ha idnight not me?
or
Who tol not me idnight town ha?
or
Who tol idnight town ha not me?
and why did the name Mundt reappear in her mind?
Then, at midnight, she found herself by the town hall, waiting for
Mundt. It had happened without further elaboration on her part. She
had a sip of the sweet water served by Felix at the reception, and
her body had acted on its own regard. Inta found it delightfully
relaxing and entertaining to observe her body get dressed, made-up,
and showered. As she walked past the hotel restaurant she saw a few
remaining Intra-Paracelcists drowning their midnight candles at both
ends and wondered why the head office hadn't recalled her, or at
least given her some notice as to when she should depart from Uqbar
(and the novel, she gathered, since she had never been to Uqbar
before the novel started).
It had been a short walk from the hotel. The town hall was an
astonishing piece of red brick functionalism, commemorating a lost
era of state socialist imperialism. She made a note of the remarkably
few memorials she had seen here to the later anarchist socialist
imperialism, but she put it down to her eyesight.
Anyway, as she closed in on the town hall, she had a call on her
mobile phone. It was the head office, informing her that she had been
elected, by acclaim and _in absentia_, to head the Intra-Paracelcist
International for the coming four year interim. "Why me?" she had
asked, but was met with mere silence.
"Not mere silence," the voice said.
"Listen," it said.
Inta listened to the solemn scraping of colorless noise from the
receiver, to the late leaves longing for their listless departure, to
the grass groaning, and to the owls hooting and tooting at her.
"To what?" she said.
There was yet no answer, but as the line went down, she thought that
she no longer needed the head office. For a brief moment she thought
her fate in her own hands.
Then she felt a sharp pain in her skull, and the owls, grass, leaves,
and the lovely town hall view disappeared.
***
Phatic laid down his pen (imaginary) and rolled another cigarette
(symbolic).
"If that doesn't shut up my critics, I know what will," he thought to
hisself.
He had metalepsed his way through chapter ten, "quite elegantly," as
he put another put at his office green.
He removed one of the pieces from the model of Uqbar he had
constructed in his 2nd floor office in Bagdad.
"Exit Inta," he said. "I'll send her here, and then Diderik can
squirm around in Uqbar."
What Phatic didn't know was that Mundt already had planned for this
eventuality. In a cable to the TRU Times, Managing Director Stimos
had declared all extra-diegetic interventions in corporate Eyeraki
business unlawful and in breach of the Come-to-Daddy Act, which
guaranteed Enduring and Absolute Class Advantage in face of Eternal
Peril. In terms of the Come-to-Daddy Act, the Least Privileged was at
fault by default for any disruptions to the Hole Trinity of Class
Divisions, but that is beside the point.
--
phatic@xxxxxxxxxx
http://phatic.blogspot.com
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