458
RICHARD HOWARD
of the
totentanz
around him have motto names: Jean-Jacques, Trissotin
and the
.ewig-weibliche
Frau Anders. They plotlessly collapse into each
other like telescope joints, as the narrator-hero keeps shortening his
sights on his subject-how to live a life of one's own, unconditioned by
work, art, social achievement or communal effort. At the end of his
recital, invoking all those other ironic, distancing effects of the old
prose convention-the catalogue, the enclave of letters, the quotations
from abandoned journals, the parody
en abyme-Hippolyte
manages to
exorcise even the dreams he has pursued so avidly, and neither he nor
we know whether the account he offers is that of his "real life" or his
oneiric biography. In fact, at the end, when Hippolyte drowns his book,
"enjoying the waning tribulations of subjectivity and the repose of a
privacy that is genuine," the author wittily allows us a sketch of the
negative possibility, in which the dreams are vivid life, the reality an
obscure phantasmagoria.
Of course the book would be even harder to read than it is if the
pain and effort of the Negative were omitted. And it is not so easy to
write about "love playing with itself," as Hegel calls it, that it can be
done-in a novel-without a wrench or even without occasional bad
faith. The narrator often forgets his admonition to himself ("I should
like to describe my life to you with the same evenness that one recounts
one's dreams") and actually
entertains.
Had he succeeded (failed to
entertain), the book would not exist at all, or at least we could not
read it, so we may be grateful for our unjustified diversion: like
Mallarme's poems, this novel is the imperfection of its method, not
its result.
Such a book is not a story (a story cannot exist without at least
the superstition of history), not even an allegory (for nothing here means
anything more than what it is): it is an image, a metaphor in the form
of a memoir. I suspect that the author required her fussy, arid tone
("For me, the very advent of myself suggested the problem of my own
dissolution") as she needed her international-style conventions, as ballast
for her revolutionary effort to produce an emblem of the possibility of
a life in the body unmediated by Culture: androgynous, messy, funny,
profound.
The Sun's Attendant
is a much more difficult book than its tidy chap–
ter legends, its neat diptych structure (Left Panel, Hinges, Right Panel)
would suggest, unless the very apparatus of order suggests difficulty in
fiction. The title, however, and the orderly procession around the ecliptic
(Summer Solstice, Aphelion, Autumn Equinox, Winter Solstice, Peri-
