These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Zan wants to kill X. In his sleep, he seethes at the character with every passing word, growing more furious: This is why you’re a failure! he screams at him silently in the dark of the rue d’Alsace hotel. You have a chance to be the greatest novelist of all time, author of the literature of the century, and you rewrite it.

With John’s revision of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Zan tells the university seminar in London a week and a half ago, though it seems longer now, “the novelization of history replaces history itself.” John’s version of the narrative means to preclude all others. It means to banish from history those who are deaf to its music and to declare all other sins trivial compared to the sin of deafness. John’s is the narrative as sustained hallucination, totalitarian in the manner of all great art. With paper and the printing press, the act of creation becomes an intimate one, the act of reading a private one, at which point storytelling is liberated from avoiding the forbidden in order to pursue it. The transformed imagination transforms the conscience. From John’s novel there can only be one place to go, the Book of Revelation, “which isn’t a novel at all,” Zan tells the lecture hall, “but a rave.”

Zan can’t kill X. If he kills X, the rest of Zan’s novel vanishes into the future. But as the ocean liner continues its way to New York, in the early morning hours a mysterious and unseen stranger bearing a strong resemblance to Zan himself breaks into X’s cabin and beats him senselessly.