Time Must Have a Stop

Americai HEVWW Dempsey continuedfrom previous page ¦ Good Soldier (1915) rather less than exemplary by comparison." At one point a character places a book on a shelf "between Ulysses and Edgar Allan Poe," which, as a description of the novel, gives something of the flavor of this allusive, challenging, and, at times, rather gothic work. Markson uses a panoply of literary techniques to describe forms of loss and the abysmal meaninglessness of existence from which the expatriate characters seem to suffer: there are passages in italics ; stream of consciousness, flashbacks, speeches cut off before being completed; Biblical and poetic prose; allusions and quotations from a huge range of literature, philosophy, and culture, both Eastern and Western; as well as motifs drawn from Mexican myth, along with a sympathetic naturalism in the depiction of the lives of the Mexican villagers. Going Down, then, is excessive in every way, like the Mexico it depicts— the heat, the poverty, the death cults, and the main characters' unconventional sexual relations. The deeply-troubled Steve Chance and the psychologically-fragile Fern, for example, see themselves in a whole range of literary and artistic characters, and the proliferation of references and allusions are their attempts to paper over the suspicion that the world appears to have no intrinsic meaning, that either reality itself is a solipsistic fantasy or that human beings are unknowingly playing parts in some larger fiction. This is one of the many ways in which to read the novel's gnomic first line, "Accept the illusion," which, apart from its metafictional dimension , draws upon ideas about the illusionary nature of the phenomenal world found in Mexican and South American religions, and the whole question of fiction's relationship to the world as we know it. So, this is serious fiction with a capital "S," and, as a consequence, the prose is a little arch and portentous at times. Light "attains" characters' faces, while hills are "achieved" and any number of sentences begin with "and" — almost always a bad sign. At one point, in a kind of cunnilingual game of Twister, Fern "goes down" on Lee (yes, the pun is there in the title), and for at least one of the three-ina -bed sex scenes, the less worldly reader may need pen, paper, and protractors to work out what exactly is going on. But these are signs of ambition, of overreaching , and are quickly forgotten when there is so much achievement elsewhere. Though we find out "who did it" and why, the larger motivations of the two main characters, Fern and Steve Chance, remain profoundly mystifying, and this goes some way to explaining why this ineffably strange and compelling novel retains its power thirty-five years after its first publication. The novel is deeply marked by a sense of literary belatedness, a self-consciousness about those who have gone before, who are dealt with here through homage, pastiche, and parody. Going Down is both an original work of art and also a work produced from within a symbolic and allusive modernist aesthetic. In his literary restlessness and ambition, Markson has taken this kind of writing as far as he can; what would lie ahead in this direction is the dead end of Finnegans Wake ( 1 939). The novels Markson will go on to produce will get him out from under his influences —without forgetting them. The contingency and fragility of posterity becomes something of a theme in the later fiction. In the final lines of this marvelous novel, Steve Chance's poetry ends up as toilet paper. Going Down's reissue begins to allay that particular worry. Peter Dempsey teaches American literature at the University ofSunderland, UK. Time Must Have a Stop Doug Nufer Dies: A Sentence Vanessa Place Introduction by Susan McCabe Les Figues http://www.lesfigues.com 142 pages, paper; $13.00 Dies: A Sentence is a novel that takes place in the moment of a fifty-thousand-word sentence narrated by a mortally wounded man. While life is, after all, a death sentence, the last words of this World War I soldier whose legs have been blasted away constitute a life sentence: as long as it goes on, he lives. Our...