314
PARTISAN REVIEW
rison found as she was writing the novel that it was the first volume
of a trilogy, so we can look forward to further variations on the use of
an ending.
One reason complete happiness isn't possible , these novels
unite in showing us, is that knowledge can be acquired but not lost.
That truth is what people thirst for doesn't mean the drink is a pleas–
ant one . In
The Voyeur,
Dodo cannot unlearn what he has painstak–
ingly pieced together : the all but certain knowledge that his wife is
having an affair with his own father . In
Cigarettes,
answers to many
enigmas are teased out by the reader as well as the characters ; the
truth is like the seminal portrait of Elizabeth , which is cherished,
stolen, forged, destroyed, bought, sold, restored - but about which
we chiefly learn that it doesn't resemble her. Nor is Elizabeth herself
ever physically described. As we're finally getting to know her, late
in the novel, she is felled by a stroke and transformed - as by a fur–
ther artistic abstraction - from a radiantly generous presence to a
speechless, wheelchair-ridden invalid .
In
The Golden Droplet ,
Idris knows that the innocence of the
oasis, where "we have nothing but we lack nothing," can never be
restored. He can't say why he leaves but knows he must; the novel is
an elaborate allegory of the progress from East to West, reality to
image - or is it signified to signifier? Pursuing a blonde French–
woman in a Landrover who has taken his photograph and thereby
spirited away his soul, the handsome boy himself becomes a fantasy
of the East for the image-makers (photographers , advertisers, film–
makers, a dollmaker, a sculptor) he encounters . Like the personage
in Wallace Stevens's dreamlike poem "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,"
Idris keeps finding himself "more truly and more strange" even as he
also keeps losing himself in each successive recreation of reality.
There is no final truth; certainly there is no return to the Tabelbala
oasis. When Idris finally rediscovers his golden droplet, which was
stolen from him by a whore in Marseille, the amulet is in a jeweler's
window on the Place Vendome, and Idris, on the sidewalk, wields a
pneumatic drill that shatters the plate glass of the window - hardly
an idyllic reunion .
It's in
Beloved,
the most ambitious in scope of these novels, that
the acquisition of truth about the past is the most problematic . Sethe
and Paul D . can free themselves from the ineffable brutalities of
their shared and separate pasts, as slaves and fugitives , only by tell–
ing and retelling each other what has happened in the past eighteen
years. Yet the telling reenacts the horror of slavery, a horror which
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