This post covers this week's reading of Chapter 3.4 - Chapter 4.5.Thomas!
Will, one kind hermit crab, like Binx, another kind of hermit crab, seem to both be seeking a shell, a material reality suitable to protect tender abdomens yet comfortable for them and their actions. Hermit crabs can also modify the interiors of the shells they inhabit to some extent, but picking the wrong shell is detrimental for them. Both Will and Binx are seeking a shell, a material reality, or home for the subjective existence. But where Binx's subjective existence had a certain substance about it – he had thought about it and tried to recognize it for what it was – Will's is ephemeral. He's a shape-shifter who can interact with and mimic virtually any intersubjective way of posturing and coversing. He seems doomed to float ghost-like through his own actions and interactions with little or no self-awareness, "rowboating," as Percy puts it with regard to Forney's driving.
Glad you brought up again the issue about comparing this book with The Moviegoer. Binx is much more aware than is Will. If he were a hermit crab, I think Binx would have a better of surviving than our sentient engineer. Binx isn't as lost--he's on a Search--Will doesn't really know where he's going, it seems to me. Binx is rather like the narrator of The Last Gentleman, presenting Will as an example of the sort of alienated people that Binx (and later Dr. More) comments on.
1. The different ways of being involved in making a home with the Vaughts – compared to the fairly clear alternatives of Binx, Kate, and Aunt Emily – seem not only more numerous but also much more conflicted. The quest is on, but the plausibility of a grail, holy or not, at the end of it seems remote?
2. And then there is Sutter, a supposedly good diagnostician, looming on the horizon, but he apparently does not have a lot of success with his diagnoses, as good as they might be. The one noted here:
"Jamie told him Sutter drove an Edsel to remind him of the debacle of theFord Motor Company and to commemorate the last victory of the Americanpeople over marketing research and opinion polls. …"
is on the mark and the irony resounding, but where is the value for us in it.
"The engineer wasn't sure he liked this. It had the sound of a quixotic typewho admires his own gestures."
3. And, then there is this notion of using one's "radar" rather than seeing. Being in France at the moment, and not knowing French, I think I have some idea of what Percy meant by this. It seems to involve sensing things non- or pre-linguistically from a distance whether actually interacting with what is seen or not. But it also seems to involve sensing different kinds of things, kinds of things that can only be expressed indirectly if at all, about others and their interactions.
I've always been put off by this novel and never got very far in reading it. The utterly incompetent detective, funny as he may be, can rarely keep me interested until the end when he will miraculously solve the crime. But, now that I'm actually forced to keep on reading and trying to unravel it as best I can, it's getting more interesting, and I'm wondering just how Percy is going to pull all this together at the end.
Thanks,
Tom Gollier----------------------------------
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