614
TONY TANN ER
a black person is not enough: the point is that he sounds like no person
at all. Albert discovers that Millicent and Elijah "often employed the
identical favorite phrases, words, idioms." To the extent that Albert
accepts being absorbed into this surrogate family, he has to accept that
language, so that the narrator and the narrated come to share and
sustain a curious many layered discourse characterized by archaic
gentilities, abrupt formalities, exaggerated politeness, unexpected frag–
ments of the vernacular and colloquial, ritualized abuse, splenetic ir–
ritability, unprovoked imperiousness, obscuring pedantries - and sud–
den helpless cries of yearning, need, pain, and love.
If
Albert can say
"as you done promised me" in traditional darky dialect, he can also
shout out "Cunctator of cuntators," a positively Nabokovian lexical
obscurity (it means "delayer"). He is full of words but has no lan–
guage to call his own, employing instead the synthetic language of
those around him.
It
is one more paradox that Albert's linguistic con–
fusion, or inherited eclecticism, is also Purdy's stylistic triumph.
There is one further aspect to the existence of the weird, dissonant
speech of the book, a speech as deracinated as the speakers. One state–
ment from Millicent points directly to it. Thus she addresses the Bird
of Heaven: "But be glad, my angel, you can't talk. Your affliction is
your happiness. It's talking that has made man lower than the brutes
of creation, and is God's most calamitous mistake from which all other
mistakes stem. Had the beast ne\"er talked, this would be a fairer, green–
er place, and history, that parched synthetic middling bore of a nio"ht–
mare, which is eating away even at my brains, would never have been."
Her pessimism and exhaustion are her own, but it is a truism that
without speech there would be no culture, history, consciousness - or
books. Purdy himself uses words brilliantly, and it is only an apparent
paradox that one of the main feelings in his work is that talk is our
torment; tha t is, it torments us with the illusion of communication,
while obscuring or distorting what we ha\"e to say. It may also take
the place of emotion, or serve as a powerful tool in using people as
things to implement one's own schemes. How much better to be un–
consciously in nature, singing like a bird, instead of being trapped in
language and as Conrad put it, "out of life - utterly out of it"; or, if
we can't regress to a prelingual state, then to transcend language, en–
tering the heaven-haven of silence. These are not Purdy's specific con–
clusions but meditations provoked by the book. Looked at another way,
the book accepts that man, like a Beckett character, will go on mutter–
ing to the end, dreaming of a birdsong lost and a silence yet to be
reached. But then this book does so many things, finally resisting
demystification through its inexhaustible magic.
Tony Tanner
