Cathedral Connection

 

"She says, My job is to show you a door you can open." (20, The Keep.)  

Question 1:   Remembering what it felt like to read this book for the first time

What was it like to read this book?  Try and remember the different stages in your experience.  What did it feel like to be reading the beginning of the book, say, the first fifty pages?  Or, what was going on in your mind in the middle, when the complexity of the address of the story -- who’s writing it, and to whom, and who is reading it – began to dawn on you?  That complexity grows ever more complex as the story continues, doesn’t it?  Lastly, what was it like to reach that final image on the last page, the one of Holly closing her eyes and diving in?  The novel, for me, kept changing shape, so that at many points I wasn’t sure what I was dealing with.  Where are the edges of this thing? I kept asking myself.  Where's the outer limit, and where do I sit in relation to it?  Describe your experience of reading this book.

Question 2:  Terminal Zeus

Danny and his cousin, Howie, play a game together as kids they call “Terminal Zeus.”  It brings them – or it brings Danny, anyway – intense pleasure. 

He got so deep inside the game he forgot who he was, and when his folks said Time to go home the shock of being yanked away made Danny throw himself on the ground in front of them, begging for another half hour, please! another twenty minutes, ten, five, please, just one more minute, pleasepleaseplease?  Frantic not to have been ripped away from the world he and Howie had made.

--Jennifer Egan, The Keep, 2006. The Keep was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2006.  The edition we’re reading in the All Souls Book Group – and the one whose page numbers are cited throughout this document – is the Anchor Books edition, 2007.

It seems important that an engulfing game of make-believe, and one shared with someone else, a fellow make-believer, should be featured so early in the novel.  Why do you think it’s featured?  Why do you think Egan wants us to remember that intense childhood pleasure of making up a whole world, and with a friend?

Question 3:  Alto

What is alto?  It’s introduced on page 6.  It’s a relationship, of sorts.  “True alto worked two ways: you saw but also you could be seen, you knew and were known.  Two-way recognition” (6).  Could we think of this novel as the creation of a kind of alto, fragile though the creation may be?  And: Is that a good question? 

Also: It seems important that Danny and his friends have to make up a word for this relationship, that the possible candidates on offer in the English language don’t quite express the relationship they “crave” (6).  “But the English language came up short: perspective, vision, knowledge, wisdom: those words were all too heavy or too light” (6). 

Also – and here we are slip-sliding (without our boots!) down the eye-crossing, Möbius-strip head-bender that is this novel:  When we say that “Danny and his friends” made up a word – alto – haven’t we forgotten someone?  For it is Ray who made up the word, Raymond Michael Dobbs, the prisoner who was Holly’s student whose manuscript Holly is reading -- and which we are reading too.  But is that right?  When we say that it’s Ray who has written this story, have we accounted for the story all the way down to its source?  Of course not.  Maybe there is something about this novel that resists our expectation that we can see stories all the way down to their source.  Maybe Egan has come up with a novel-shape that is utterly aesthetically succinct yet also, in the end, incomprehensible, not see-around-able.  I don’t really know where this novel comes from, if that makes any sense.  And in a weird way I hope I never will.  I also don’t know what I’m proposing, here – so I need you to help me figure it out.  Thoughts?

Question 4:  Needing Connection

You may have noticed the recurrence of the word “need.”  On page 12 we hear that Danny needs the connection provided by his cell phone and by wireless Internet access, which is why he lugs a satellite dish all the way to Europe, “a drag to carry” and “an airport security nightmare.”  Without this connectedness Danny feels lost, and no amount of talk from Howard about people “needing” imagination (p. 48) more than connection will make him feel otherwise.

Did the novel make you think, as it did me, about what people need?  Holly: what does she need?  Ray?  Holly’s girls?  For instance, Meghan, Holly’s oldest, has her own sort of “keep” – the folding screen behind which she keeps a “collage of her life”: “pictures of her friends, straw wrappers woven into a braid,” etc.  What does Meghan need in keeping these things, in keeping this “keep” (231)?  How about Davis, Davis with his cardboard box “full of dust” (104)?  And Tom-Tom?  We tend to think of these characters as different from one another, even as opposed to one another – or, I tend to think of them that way.  Some of them, I decide, are good, some are bad; some are artists, some are not; some I can sympathize with, and some scare me so much I can barely begin to see them, never mind imagine who they might be inside.  But remember (I tell myself): like Ray, Tom-Tom is also a writer; and, like Tom-Tom, Ray is also a murderer. 

I’m sort of getting off question, but maybe that's what the novel does, too, and rather beautifully: begins as a question about our need for connection, and ends as a description of how we’re connected.  What do you think?

Lastly, what do you need?  Do you need to dive into that pool?  Did you discover you needed to make that dive only as you read this book?  Or am I not asking the right question? 

Question 5:  Dust, Voices, and 9/11

Dust is present throughout the book, as are voices.  I put them together in the same question because the novel puts them together, in Davis’s box full of dust, which he calls his “radio."  Here is Davis describing the voices he believes his radio can transmit.

It’s the voices of the dead, Davis says.  He looks gentle, like the idea hurts him somehow.  He says: All that love, all that pain, all that stuff people feel – not just me and you, brother, but everyone, everyone who’s ever walked this beautiful green planet – how can all that disappear when somebody dies?  It can’t disappear, it’s too big.  Too strong, too. . .permanent.  So it moves to another frequency, where the human ear can’t pick it up (The Keep, 104).

The novel seems to propose the realm of the dead and disappeared – the realm of dust and voices – as an imaginative opportunity.  Indeed I think we could say that the place we go when we read The Keep is very like the place we go a great deal of our time, the place we go when we think about people, a liminal zone of "dust and voices" where the "real" people from our lives may possess less substance than the ones we happen to be thinking about, many of whom may have never said or done the things they're saying and doing when we think about them, and many of whom may have been dead for decades.  And there is something about being in that zone, in the framed and concentrated way offered by a work of imaginative literature, where we actually get to reflect on our habits as imagining beings -- well, what was the experience like for you?

Some thoughts about the novel and 9/11, the tenth year anniversary of which is taking place a week before our first meeting about The Keep.

I doubt I'm the only reader for whom repeated mention of dust and voices led to thoughts of 9/11.  Did others of you see The Keep as a response to 9/11?  

Following upon this proposal is a link to an article in last Friday’s online edition of the NYTimes about what people “kept” after 9/11.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/us/sept-11-reckoning/relics.html?src=rechp  

Question 6:  Imagining it was like seeing it, in a way. 

This possibility, that imagining things is like seeing them, animates nearly every page of The Keep.  Indeed right in sentence two we see a character seeing something that isn’t, in fact, real: “The castle was falling apart, but at 2 a.m. under a useless moon, Danny couldn’t see this.  What he saw looked as solid as hell: two round towers with an arch between them and across that arch was an iron gate that looked like it hadn’t moved in three hundred years or maybe ever.”  [My emphasis.]  Later in the novel, Danny will experience a “funny shiver” at the recognition that “imagining” something “was like seeing it, in a way.”

“The baroness smiled, that beautiful mouth coming apart in a way that must’ve knocked people out when she was young.  It gave Danny a funny shiver, because imagining it was like seeing it, in a way” (87).

Imagining it is like seeing it: did this proposal strike you as true?  Did it give you a “funny shiver”?  If it did, perhaps it’s because the book reads less as an exposition about that possibility than as an experience we pass through as we read.  An experience that changes us.  Perceptually we are inside of that possibility from first page to last.  How do you respond here?

Question 7:  Old and Young

You might decide, reading its first fifty pages or so, that The Keep is going to be about the young and only the young.  But then as you keep reading you find that’s not really true.  Old people become young in this novel and young people become old.  Polarities generally are collapsed, making that dualistic way of thinking we're unfortunately so (killingly) comfortable with – this versus that; you're this way and I'm the other; if you've got power then I have none; a dream has less substance and reality has more; the crazy inmates have killed people and the "normal" ones only stole; etc. -- make that way of thinking no longer the dominant one, or, at least, not the only one.  How do you respond, here?  Am I over-assessing, over-enthusing?  What have you to say to correct my estimation so that it’s truer to the literature? 

Question 8: Isn't it interesting?  As Ray is falling in love with Holly, he is writing a story she will read in which a young man, Danny, will couple romantically with a very old woman (who is the Baroness.) 

Question 9:  Did this book make you think about writing? 

It did me, in particular of writing a first draft.  How about you?

Question 10:  Haven’t you learned that the thing you want to forget the most is the one that’ll never leave you?  

And yet nearly every day we nearly completely snuff that awareness out.  Thoughts?  More specifically, thoughts about this truth as it’s given form by The Keep?  (This question is asked on page 221.)

Question 11:  Layers 

There are several images having to do with "layers," and they seem important.  The first I’m aware of comes on page 17, in the form of a “crust,” a crust of normalcy over the day that Danny left Howard alone in the cave.  “All the normal things that had happened to him since the cave made a crust over that day, and the crust got thicker and thicker until Danny almost forgot what was underneath” (17).  Crusts and/or layers come up again on page 74, as Danny is leaning over the pool at the castle to try and fish out his satellite dish, which has fallen in.  A “smell” rises from the pool, or, not just a smell, but a compound smell, a catalog of every smell that had ever made Danny sick: “every smell that had ever made Danny even a little bit sick gushed up into his face as he leaned over that pool, smells that at one time or another got him thinking just for a second (but he forgot it) that normal life was thin, it was flimsy: a flimsy thing stretched over another thing that was nothing like it, that was big and strange and dark.”  [Emphasis mine.]  And then we hear of layers again on page 217, after Danny has gotten everyone safely out of the cave.  A calm follows in which Danny perceives himself as the one who has the power.   It is now that Danny can ask Howard, and himself, what he is "doing here."  And, ever the Seller of Imagination, Howard knows just the answer to keep the magic coming.  “I don’t know buddy," he replies.  "You tell me.”  

Danny turned his face to the sun.  It was a weak morning sun, but still so bright.  He said: I don’t know.  I thought I knew, but there was another layer (217).

Why layers?  What is this image saying to you?

Question 12:  And is Howard really only a salesman? 

That's what I implied in my last question, and without meaning to.  I wonder if it isn't Egan's intention that we see Howard only as Danny can see him.  What does Howard want in inviting Danny to Europe?  Could he really have forgiven Danny?  Is such forgiveness possible?  As we ask these questions, let's try and stay in Danny's perspective.  Doing so will keep us closer to the novel.

Question 13: Traffic

I was struck by the traffic sounds in the last section – that all Holly can hear in the distance beyond her house is traffic.  How about you? 

Question 14:  Snow

So amazing, so perfect to this story, that snow suddenly begins to fall in the last paragraphs of the novel, just as Holly is about to dive into the pool.  Did you think so?  Why, or why not?

Question 15:  Verve in the Storytelling

One of the things I love about Jennifer Egan's writing is her pleasure, or seeming pleasure, anyway, in telling stories.  This is a writer who seems to have found her power and is reveling in it.  And Egan's pleasure seems continuous with Ray's pleasure in writing his manuscript.  Or maybe the word pleasure is too "pleasant" a word for Egan's sensibility.  Maybe "gusto" would be better.  Gusto!  It's fun to say.  Or, I'm going to be like Jennifer Egan: gustogustogusto!  Do you sense this gusto too?  Where, in the novel, do you sense it?

Question 16:  What do people go to fiction for?  And why do they write it?  And, while we're at it, why do they go on vacation?

What silly questions!  But did the novel make you think, as it did me, that Egan is unusually interested in why it is that people read fiction?  Throughout the three Egan novels I read this summer I sensed a writer thinking on my behalf, as though she were in a relationship of responsibility with me, even a relationship of "alto" with me.  It's a kind of intelligence I'm describing, an intelligence seasoned over long consideration as to what is involved in living through the current historical moment, and how fiction might answer dilemmas engendered by that moment.  Moral dilemmas, spiritual, even perceptual.  This intelligence resides underneath the narrative as a kind of wellspring; or, above the narrative, like the eye of a god.  In this regard -- and it is actually a regard I'm talking about, an authorial regard -- the novelist Egan most reminds me of is George Eliot.  This is a fuzzy proposal I'm making, and it would require a Ph.D. to support.  So I'll leave it for your consideration.

I will say that the moment this "intelligence" first revealed itself to me in The Keep was when, at the end of Chapter One, Holly tells her students what her job is as their writing teacher.  So here's Ray writing that moment:

"She says, My job is to show you a door you can open.  And she taps the top of her head.  It leads you wherever you want to go, she says.  That's what I'm here to do. . ." (20).  

On its own, the offering -- to have been shown a door you can open -- is gold.  But then when you remember that it's actually Ray who's opening the door, for himself, through his writing; and, in doing so, opening it for Holly, who is reading him writing; neither of these two broken human beings at any point growing implausibly stronger than what, being human beings, they are capable of -- well, what do you think?

Question 17:  Love those kids.

Children, also, and care we give (or don't give) in raising them, seems a preoccupation in all three of the Egan novels I read this summer: The Keep, A Visit from the Goon Squad, and Look at Me.  You may remember, near the end of The Keep, the moment when Holly asks Ray why he committed the murder he's in prison for.  His answer, basically, is: "It's just something I did."  And Holly says she doesn't like thinking things can happen that way.  Ray's reply to her, which is given its own paragraph, is: Love those kids (188).

Do you sense this concern for children in The Keep, that we take care in raising them?  Do you sense it elsewhere in the fiction of Jennifer Egan? 

Question 18:  Freedom

Lastly, let’s remember that exchange between Ray and Holly when they say goodbye.  For me, it’s at this moment that the novel expands beyond what could have ended as a really good love story to something a great deal more affecting.  

'Holly,' he said, and when I looked up he was smiling again.  He’s happy, I thought. I’ve never seen him happy before.  'Don’t you get it?' he said.  'You’re free' (254).

What is the freedom Ray is talking about?  Bigger question: What is the freedom offered by this novel?  As she dives into the pool, Holly takes that freedom.  I would like to take that freedom as well.  How about you?

Looking forward to seeing you Monday,

Emilie