dreamofmourning

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I'LL TELL YOU.

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"These men know too well what will happen because they were there." real lines from real texts

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shattered, voluble, fragmented, desperate, dramatic, futile

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weepy henry hid the day

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Marie Howe

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oddly im thinking about the turn of the screw and a little life in relation today wrt the imagined power of disclosure to restore order/comprehensibility to a life story (a fantasy which is dismantled by yanagihara, and deliberately not by james) ("all those answers i had wanted about who and why he was, and now those answers only torment"), or the fantasy that a life story simply being comprehensive would make it comprehensible, ie that it's only the existence of missing gaps of unaccounted time, not what those gaps contain, that prevent understanding

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similar to a post i've made about a little life, but the idea that the narrator simply knowing this other character's entire life, being able to fill in the missing gaps and possess a complete chronology of him, would somehow in and of itself magically make him comprehensible (and describable) within that span, is clearly tied to a biographical mode, and it's kind of incredible to me how much power this has in these types of novels, and i think accounts for a lot of the strange temporal aspects of them — because biographies must be written retrospectively

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"I hoped that we wouldn't stop there, that the old desire to confront our entire relationship and re-examine it, to elucidate and have full consciousness of it, would be realized."

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i wanted to post this because the second sentence has always had a very memorable resonance to me, a la "how long and complicated lila's suffering had been" and in each of those cases it's the narrator both 1. attempting to recreate the other's point of view ("must have seemed so close") but also 2. imagining points in a chronology that the narrator wasn't there to directly witness. so it's both attempting to reconstruct a missing point of view and this magical fantasy of chronological completeness that i was posting about before. the fantasy being that the missing point of view is only missing because there's gaps in the chronology, because that's easier than grappling with the total opacity of this other person

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difficult as in "hard to understand", difficult as in "hard to deal with"