Jack Holberg is a musical genius. Blind since shortly after his birth--he lost the use of his eyes thanks to the neglect of his parents, who allowed them to be infected by blowflies--he has become a famous pianist and composer. His works draw from classical sources as well as blues, rock-and-roll, barroom music, and like any good rock and roller, he has an entourage whose life is deeply entangled with his. Paul Vesper, the novel's narrator, leaves his middle-class engineering job to act as a kind of factotum to Holberg. He helps organize Holberg's flights of genius into compositions, but so does he cook dinner, run errands, and maintain the house where Holberg and his other hangers-on live in commune. But the line between admiration and resentment is quite thin, and Paul is tortured by his position:
Don't, listen, don't for one eyeball-searing second imagine this is going to be an analysis of the artist in angst. We're the ones--Bonnie, Faith, Vesper, Ilse, Hilda--who are the interesting cases, the fringe-dwellers in the suburbs of the great man's genius--any great man. Holberg is my cross and I'm nailed to him and you wonder why it is I don't wriggle off and walk away? The rips in the soft pads of my pander hands, perhaps. The rags of feet. I'm the mini-Jesus!
Holberg, it is true, can be quite cruel. As soon as Paul falls in love with Hilda, Holberg snatches her away from him, leaving him with his former lover (and Hilda's sister) Ilse. When Hilda is tortured by Holberg's infidelities, Holberg tosses her to Paul to mollify her in the bedroom. Holberg reveals to Ilse's husband that he, Holberg, is the true father of the man's child, leading the man to despair and suicide. People in Holberg's orbit have a way of getting hurt and dying, as if thrown into chaos by Holberg's own tempestuous moods and thrown against the rocks of his diffidence. And yet, like Paul, none of them can ever just get up and leave.
Blindness is a torture to Holberg, who is obsessed with his own inability to understand what people mean when they talk about colors. And yet blindness is the very thing that makes Holberg the musical genius he is, the thing that provides him with his compensatory talents. Then again it is blindness, too, Paul explains, that makes him cruel. Unable as he is to see the faces of the people around him, he cannot see the way they are tortured or distraught. Or perhaps being unable to see them affords a plausible deniability about such things: Paul, who knows Holberg better than anyone, begins to pick up that the composer's music is inscribed with secret messages that mock his entourage's despair and desperation. He seems not to notice, for example, that Hilda has taken to stumbling around the house with her eyes closed in order to understand him better, but his next opus imitates her broken, crashing gait. Paul, who knows Holberg better than anyone, can hear these things when no one else can.
Honestly, I sort of hated the prose style of The Acolyte. The snatches of Greek and Latin, the obscure vocabulary, the densely knotted sentences, they all seem so suffocating and pretentious. I could barely follow it at times. I wonder how much of this is an indication of Astley's style and how much is part of the voice of Paul, who is both suffocated and pretentious. I got pretty bad whiplash going from the repetitive plainness of Gerald Murnane to this prose, which is like being caught in a tangle of vines. Like Paul, at the end of The Acolyte I was rather happy just to get out.
No comments:
Post a Comment