The character of Molloy is by far the most interesting individual we’ve encountered in the class so far. The aspect of this character which I find most compelling is his notion of being “bounded”. He describes at one point in the text how he believes himself to be relegated to one vast “region” (88) which he can never escape. This feeling of being bound manifests itself spatially in Molloy’s fascination with the canals that crisscross the town as well as by his obsession with the town which he claims as his own (though he cannot remember its name). I think this feeling also manifests itself temporally in that he seems to be unable to distinguish between differing periods of his life or even of the day – in this sense, he is in some sense timeless. Finally, this “boundedness” manifests itself physically in Molloy’s inability to be mobile due to his stiff leg(s), which explains in part his love for his bicycle.
All of this goes to say that Molloy feels as if he is bounded by something, be it an external force or simply inner turmoil. What this has to do with Moran or the rest of the novel, I’m not at all sure.
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ReplyDeleteThis idea of boundaries and territorialization seems applicable to the second portion of the novel as well: the control that Moran exerts over his son, the tension between Moran and his son over the stamp collection (an issue of control/boundaries/possession), and Moran's own subjection to the higher authority of Youdi. My interest, however, lies in how we, as readers, apply these ideas of "boundaries" to the novel itself. Namely, are we tempted to read the two narratives (Molloy and Moran's) as individual/separate pieces? Or, rather, are we more inclined (I think we are) to cross the narrative and structural boundaries of the two sections in order to make interpretations about Molloy/Moran's identities (as possibly the same person)? What compels us to cross these boundaries, and if we do so, are we disrupting a structural integrity of the novel?
ReplyDeleteIn response to Anna, it's possible that, like The Golden Notebook, this novel actually invites its structural integrity to crumble. As Vincent wrote about in another post, a central theme here is negation and contradiction - that is, the destruction of that which was once real.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the issue of structural integrity presupposes that the novel has it. A traditional plot never even gets built, and Molloy's mind and body are unstable. It's possible this is the first book we've encountered that has no structure, if we define "structure" as a narrative direction.
Can we speak of a novel without structure? "Narrative direction" is one way to define structure, but it feels a bit limiting to me. I guess I'm always asking versions of the same question: can an art form contest or abandon form altogether?
ReplyDeleteProbably not. Our ideas of what formlessness is are probably track pretty well onto how humans perceive randomness, which is notoriously bad (http://www.jstor.org/stable/58853). I'm not sure the human mind works any other way but through organization, analogy, and metaphor.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things I found interesting was that Molloy reveals that he is, in a sense, bound from the very beginning. He has been confined to the room in which his mother once lived and he spends his days there, binding hi to that one place. And yet, through his writings, he becomes, to the reader (or me at least), unbound. He talks about all the places he went too, how he taveled to the town which may or may not have been his own, how he traveled through the forest, in which he is unbound. The fact that he continually messes up events and orders in his memory serves to leave him further unbound, as, mentally, he is no longer bound to any specific time period apart from the present.
ReplyDeleteVG--I suspect that is right. Let me turn the question around: why do we (and I'm using this "we" on the basis of the texts we've been reading, so that could be a spurious generalization) seek to contest or problematize form? Why even question it?
ReplyDeleteThat's a nice point Bennett. He does regain his mobility through narration, but it grinds almost to extinction. So what does it mean that he is actually immobile during the act of narration? That something has come to a complete stop?
ReplyDeleteDS--I don't know, but this seems to be a consistent drive of art, not merely modern/postmodern. Maybe this is because form carries meaning. There are plenty of ways to paraphrase this, e.g. Marshall McLuhan:"The medium is the message." Another paraphrasing might be, form is the most completely naturalized and, for that reason, most effective transmitter of ideology. Malloy's form, for instance, undermines many of the unstated sociopolical/cultural assumptions of the novel that we would today gloss as ideology, for instance, the stable isomorphism between characters and persons, story and narration, diegesis and nondiegesis.