BOOKS
447
ican fiction. There is only one place left to go. "He will have to go
further into himself, away from all coherent rational spaces." The route
is signposted at regular intervals. "Diddy, inside himself. Which for
Diddy, doesn't necessarily mean being in his body. In his mind, then?"
There it is he wants to nestle, perchance to dream, perchance finally
to find the release of dreamless sleep. Readers of this late review will
not need much reminding of the narrative details of the novel- Diddy's
abandoning of a train to explore a dark tunnel where he thinks he kills
(or Didn't he?) a sinister workman on the tracks (who, I think, first
saw the light of day in
Anna Karenina);
his deteriorating relationship
with the blind girl Hester; the return to the tunnel to reenact his mur–
der and their lovemaking; and Diddy's final exploration of the cham–
bers of death to which the tunnel leads. In
The Benefactor
the nar–
rator says "I am crawling through the tunnel of myself," and
Death Kit
is just such another long dark crawl. Again, there is much talk of a
shell which Diddy dreams he throws from the train window. In the
dream he leaves the train to look for it. At first he cannot find it, then
he realizes that "It's because he's already inside it (now). The discarded
shell, no longer small, is as vast and capacious as the tunnel. Tunnel
and shell can substitute for each other, so Diddy can wander in either
as he sees fit." Shortly before the end he feels like a sea creature rising
"out of its shell" (I was reminded of Holmes's "Chambered Nautilus"),
and in those fantastic rooms full of dead bodies through which he
wanders, he sees "skulls like shells." Another phrase from
The Benefac–
tor
seems apt here: it describes a woman "alone in the crammed shell
of herself."
As
we watch Diddy crawling, or sinking, deeper and deeper
into the dome/tunnel/shell, venturing less and less into the world, de–
clining into lassitude, sickness and inertia, we may recall Miss Sontag's
praise for "Beckett's delicate dramas of the withdrawn consciousness–
pared down to essentials, cut off, often represented as physically im–
mobilized." ("Didi" is, of course, the nickname of Vladimir in
Waiting
for Codot).
Again from
The Benefactor:
"If
I cannot be outside my–
self, I will be inside." (Since she seems to have read everything written
this century, I wonder if Miss Sontag was influenced by Canetti's rather
nightmarish book
Auto da
Fe,
with its programmatic schematization–
"A Head without a World; Headless World; The World in the Head.")
From one point of view Miss Sontag's books are about how the
head gets rid of the world. Whether this is diagnosed as something
deplorable, or prescribed as something desirable, is left equivocal to
say the least. But the energies of disburdenment - or the fatigues of
relinquishment - are very evident in both her novels. The rather tire–
some narrator of
The Benefactor
speaks of achieving individuality
