. Spinning .

Made myself take some time out from trying to justify (or rather, discover the obvious) the spending of $100k against a house the fiduciary claims to want to buy for $264k today to do some reading.  What a delightful point in the story to come into at this time.

If I get out of this pocket, said the Good Fairy in a thin voice, I will do damage.  I have stood as much a I will stand for one day.  (p. 176)

This is the story within a story within a story.  What the narrator of O’Brien’s book is having his character’s character write.  A Pooka, a Fairy, a couple of cowboys, all speaking together and yet with several conversations going on at once.  But it’s not just the layers of time that separate this novel, but the time element and the variety of characters all combine to make it an exciting time. 

I find myself going back to the  beginning of the book to assure myself that O’Brien wrote this in 1951.  The style of writing of the main or primary story is similar to what I would consider to be 19th century in its formality and language, as well as the described dress and habits of the characters.  Now we go into the narrator’s character of Trellis the author, and from there into this fairy tale-like group of Pooka and the Good Fairy.

I can’t help but wonder at times if O’Brien was on drugs during this writing, the ideas are so out of the norm and creative.  Not pot surely, since he’d have spent a month alone pondering the title and never gotten this masterpiece written.  Truly intriguing, and particularly at this point of the tale, enchanting.

In this epitomy of metafiction, we’re bound to get lost if we wander too far away for too long.  O’Brien makes sure that we don’t:

Trellis’s dominion over his characters, I explained, is impaired by his addiction to sleep.  There is a moral in that.

(…) He is a great man that never gets out of bed, he said.  He spends the days and nights reading books and occasionally he writes one.  He makes his characters live with him in his house.  Nobody knows whether they are there at all or whether it is all imagination.  A great man.  (p. 139)

(…) Very unexpected things happened, I said.  They fall in love and the villain Furriskey, purified by the love of a noble woman, hatched a plot for putting sleeping-draughts in Trellis’s porter by slipping a few bob to the grocer’s curate.  This meant that Trellis was nearly always asleep and awoke only at predeterminable hours, when everything would be temporarily in order.  (p. 141)

Hah!  We tend to indeed live with our characters surrounding us as we write, and yet the thought never before had occurred to me just how they might turn the tables and gain the upperhand.  I’m personally very free with my characters and allow them to go where they might; might this be dangerous?

O’Brien’s ideas and perceptive insight into narrative are so complex, and yet so deceptively simple as to be genius.  He reminds us now and then of who is who and in what plane of structure so that we can note the connections and accept them; after all, the author himself (the one created by O’Brien) is telling them to us in a fairly detailed fashion.  Shall we doubt the author’s author?

There may be an underlying "moral" to this situation as the character states.  Does sleep in fact create a looseness or flexibility so different than our waking state of control?  Or is he perhaps referring to the mind at sleep being so much more dramatic, more free-flowing with ideas that dreams are of what literature should be composed?