Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [248]
“You know the end I want and you’re not allowing it,” said Lanark grimly. “Since you and the readers are the absolute powers in this world you need only persuade them. My wishes don’t count.”
“That ought to be the case,” said the conjuror, “but unluckily the readers identify with your feelings, not with mine, and if you resent my end too much I am likely to be blamed instead of revered, as I should be. Hence this interview.
“And first I want us all to admit that a long life story cannot end happily. Yes, I know that William Blake sang on his deathbed, and that a president of the French Republic died of heart-failure while fornicating on the office sofa,10 and that in 1909 a dental patient in Wumbijee, New South Wales, was struck by lightning after receiving a dose of laughing gas.11 The God of the real world can be believed when such things happen, but no serious entertainer dare conjure them up in print. We can fool people in all kinds of elaborate ways, but our most important things must seem likely and the likeliest death is still to depart this earth in a ‘fiery-pain-chariot’ (as Carlyle put it), or to drift out in a stupefied daze if there’s a good doctor handy. But since the dismaying thing about death is loneliness, let us thrill the readers with a description of you ending in company. Let the ending be worldwide, for such a calamity is likely nowadays. Indeed, my main fear is that humanity will perish before it has a chance to enjoy my forecast of the event. It will be a metaphorical account, like Saint John’s, but nobody will doubt what’s happening. Attend!
“When you leave this room you will utterly fail to contact any helpful officials or committees. Tomorrow, when you speak to the assembly, you will be applauded but ignored. You will learn that most other regions are as bad or even worse than your own, but that does not make the leaders want to cooperate: moreover, the council itself is maintaining its existence with great difficulty. Monboddo can offer you nothing but a personal invitation to stay in
Provan. You refuse and return to Unthank, where the landscape is tilted at a peculiar angle, rioters are attacking the clock towers and much of the city is in flame. Members of the committee are being lynched, Sludden has fled, you stand with Rima on the height of the Necropolis watching flocks of mouths sweep the streets like the shadows of huge birds, devouring the population as they go. Suddenly there is an earthquake. Suddenly the sea floods the city, pouring down through the mouths into the corridors of council and institute and short-circuiting everything. (That sounds confusing; I haven’t worked out the details yet.) Anyway, your eyes finally close upon the sight of John Knox’s statue—symbol of the tyranny of the mind, symbol of that protracted male erection which can yield to death but not to tenderness—toppling with its column into the waves, which then roll on as they have rolled for … a very great period. How’s that for an ending?”
“Bloody rotten,” said Lanark. “I haven’t read as much as you have, I never had the time, but when I visited public libraries in my twenties half the sciencefiction stories had scenes like that in them, 12 usually at the end. These banal world destructions prove nothing but the impoverished minds of those who can think of nothing better.”
The conjuror’s mouth and eyes opened wide and his face grew red. He began speaking in a shrill whisper which swelled to a bellow: “I am not writing science fiction! Science-fiction stories have no real people in them, and all my characters are real, real, real people! I may astound my public by a dazzling deployment of dramatic metaphors designed to compress and accelerate the action, but that is not science, it is magic! Magic! As for my ending’s being banal, wait till you’re inside it. I warn you, my whole imagination has a carefully reined-back catastrophist