These Dreams of You

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A New World man hurtling into the heart of the Old World, Zan ran and ran in that moment of his undoing, guilt and failure so close behind that they weren’t at his back so much as on it. Ran to Berlin and, where the Wall used to be, tore from his damned guilty novel its pages and shred them, and sprinkled them on the Wall’s rubble as though that could absolve anything.

Now in the Paris hotel on the rue d’Alsace, Zan drifts, his dreams not quite dreams, somewhere between anxious dreams and figments of disorder. In the small cabin of his cross-Atlantic ocean liner, X plots his authorship of the Twentieth Century, having had the good stroke of fortune to stumble on its literature before anyone else could write it first. Not entirely unmoved by the ethics of the situation, he reasons nonetheless that in a sense writers always are plagiarizing something albeit unconsciously, things they’ve read or heard or seen that they re-manifest in some singular fashion that’s the only true measure of a writer’s originality. As a man literally ahead of his time, X understands that “originality” will be a quaint notion in the next century, with its evolution to a higher philosophy about hybrids and appropriation: I can’t be the first person this has happened to, he thinks, this going-back-in-time thing. Maybe all pioneers are out of time, bearers of the future to the past. I’m the first literary sampler, concludes X. I’m just sampling a whole novel, that’s all.

And after all, if I produce the novel first, who’s to say I’m not the author? If you get right down to it, how often have I felt I was onto something ten years before younger writers came along and got more attention for it? Who’s to say that in another time the Irish poseur didn’t himself get knocked on the head and wake up and steal the novel from someone else? In fact, who’s to say that in another past, the Irishman didn’t get knocked on the head and wake up and find my version of the novel that I’m copying now, dropped beside him? Maybe my version of time, thinks X, is the true prototype while the other is the clone.

To be sure, dilemmas present themselves. The first is that, thoughtlessly, the black teenage girl in Berlin who hid in the shadows while X was beaten neglected to deposit at his side, along with the one book, the rest of the century’s canon, which X hasn’t exactly committed to memory. Grimly realizing he’ll have to write his own versions, he brightens: Who’s to say I can’t write them as well or better? But something else nags at X; he’s not sure he can put his finger on it. . but if the same words are written by a different writer, then are they the same words? Is it still the same book? Or is the text transformed by the experience and persona behind it? And as X imagines writing his own versions of these novels, he begins leaving out passages of the book he copies now — it just goes on and on and on, he groans — because no one can possibly miss them; and then it isn’t such a far leap from cutting to editing to revising to recasting, enhancing, reimagining, improving.