PARTISAN REVIEW
613
Albert Peggs. His final declaration, "1 am Elijah Thrush," is a crucial
act of renomination and at the same time his final self-annihilating act
of obedience to white impositions. In the alchemy of the book, is black
transformed into gold? Or, more sinisterly, is black forcibly turned into
white?
It
could be that Albert, having been emptied out, is by the end
filled up with Elijah Thrush - the host turned into the parasite. But
perhaps he does it for love.
Millicent admits that "we were not the right people" to "bring
Albert out," but she insists that he had to come out sometime. Again,
nea r the end, Elijah insists that "we've boarded the wrong ship." Just
so Fenton Riddleway, in 63:
Dream Palace,
says with sudden panic: "Do
you think we're really
in
the right house maybe?" Wrong house, wrong
ship, wrong parents - to many of Purdy's bereft and wandering figures,
such apprehensions are only aspects of a larger terror, that of having
fallen into the wrong world, which, however, is the only world there is.
H there is an intermittent feeling that this is the wrong world, it is not
suprising that we should be able to detect the recurrence of a distinct
ontological anxiety or uncertainty - particularly in Albert who has
no place in this world and thus no self.
But in addition to being about the problems of relationships, Amer–
ica, the family, identity, perhaps most importantly the book is about
language. Purdy's work is full of all kinds of narrators, writers, fabrica–
tors, cofabulists, memoirists, all in different ways either trying to en–
snare the reality of another person's life in words, or compelled to
undertake the listening and writing task , or actually attempting to
e\'oke some reality to fill in the dark pits of their ignorance. As often
as not, the reality these people are after eludes their words and yanishes
into the unreachable silence of absence or death. To be born is to be
inserted into a particular discourse, \\'hich to a large extent will deter–
mine the values, modes of perception, formulations of reality, by which
and in which we liye. And quite as often as feeling that they are in
the wrong house, Purdy's central figures feel tha t they are in the
wrong language. Thus Albert, a reluctant memoirist, finds tha t the
words poured into him radically chang'e his consciousness (some of his
lapses from consciousness may be attributed to a surfeit of the wrong
words ). As he realizes from the start, once he has met Elijah Thrush
he starts "falling into his ... language"; and here is a more important
statement: "More than anything else ... the money. the humiliation,
the hate of this great house where I was a paid memoirist, it was the
language spoken which was now becoming mine that made me go out
of my head," There are different forIlls of ens!;1\'ement, and bla ck
Albert has been taken over, his mind both narcotized and manacled,
by a n alien language. To say that as a narrator he hardly sounds like
