Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers Book IX – XIV, Chapter 140 – 238, p. 221 – 338


The beat goes on…



To avoid spoilers, please restrict your comments to page 1 - 338

Any thoughts on Book X, An Essay on Bail? Does this fit into the narrative or break the flow? On the one hand, it was interesting to get the facts, figures, and fallacies of the bail system, but on the other, it might have been better to add it as an appendix so as not to break the fictive experience...

Jim wrote: "Any thoughts on Book X, An Essay on Bail? Does this fit into the narrative or break the flow? On the one hand, it was interesting to get the facts, figures, and fallacies of the bail system, but o..."

Book 10:An Essay on Bail: The answer is yes & no– Domino's occupational hazard brings her into the clutches of law & through her case,Vollmann then elaborates on the loopholes in the system which leaves people going around in circles.
This part of the book almost feels like modern Dickensian- the sad lives of the prostitutes,the convoluted,labyrinthine justice system,to quote that line from Gaddis:"Justice? - You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law."
And the laws are skewed in favour of the rich & connected:
The epigraph says it all:"I tell you, that to every one who has more will be given; but to him who has not, even what he has will be taken away."
LUKE 19.26
The journalistic/research aspect of Vollmann's writing dominates as his writing here seems more facts than fiction:
"Leniency ought to be the watchword for an uncompleted crime, no matter what reason the ellipsis. Just as Dante’s hell contains circles of graduated misery, so should the bail system.(...) The bitter truth of Ron Albers’s Fine was that in law there was no truth. Sometimes I’ve wished that every crime could be addressed by a single statute, perfectly drafted.* So it used to be: An eye for an eye. But what if I put out my brother’s eye by mistake? What if I did it in wartime, or slyly paid Domino to do it? And so the dust of confusions and exceptions dulled the glitter of the ancient, perfect laws. In their place, we learned to fire multiple laws out of justice’s shotgun, hoping that if one pellet didn’t bring down the criminal, maybe the next one would."
The arbitrary & self-serving rules make a mockery of this grand statement:
"The principle of innocent until proven guilty."
Vollmann has made many excellent observations in book ten–
"Thus the first flaw of bail, its absolute arbitrariness. (As a smart young lawyer once told me: The criminal justice system is an ad hoc system. It’s not logical.) The second flaw is its relative arbitrariness."
And–
"It may be that too much discretion and too little are equivalent judicial evils. Perhaps gloomy disgust is the inevitable byproduct of any human attempt to quantify justice. Bail! How strange, bitter, and slippery it is!"
Even Dostoevsky directly addresses readers & then goes on a harangue & Vollmann is influenced both by him & Dickens too,I think.
But it really got depressing after a while & I was longing for a break.

Book 11,"Easier Than You MightEver Dream”
(continued)
Chapter 159, Domino is a character to watch out for- a feminist whore,she's one spirited woman & for all her tough demeanour,one feels for her:
"Domino knelt. She smiled somberly, thin-lipped and glowing-eyed, with all the grey freshly dyed out of her long blonde hair, and suddenly the Queen saw in her the same immense and speechless patience which she always marked in Beatrice; as if Domino were saying to her just then: My life is mine; I own it; I acknowledge it; I will live it out to the bitter end and do whatever I have to do to keep on being me, and if doing those things becomes sometimes bitter or hellish I will still be me at any cost; I’ll never disappear into Nirvana as Sunflower did . . . —Whereas Beatrice represented softly giving endurance, Domino possessed many plans which were square-angled like late afternoon shadows on Capp Street."
The contrast between her encounters with Beatrice,& the john in the hotel room,shows her fiery nature: all the abomination & sexual abuse has not been able to break her spirit:
"In a hotel room, the john slowly masturbated, then ejaculated onto her face. Domino went to the sink and washed herself off. Within five minutes she’d convinced herself that it hadn’t happened, and her exhilaration returned."
Domino got some catchy lines:
"What a bunch of lousy f****ing misogynists."
"Thanks for being such a gentleman."

Book 12, The False Irene.
At one point,Tyler had wanted to exorcise Irene's memory but now when the Queen offers help:"You want me to take your pain away? I could make you drink something so you’d forget Irene forever. You wouldn’t wake up cryin’ no more. You want me to do that?", he declines,leading her to say:"You’re like some wolf that keeps lickin’ the razor-blade; he drinks his own blood an’ bleeds to death, ’cause he likes the taste." Like Strawberry,he is also a victim by choice.
In this section,Dan Smooth gets to play Tyler's shrink:"You know, if you wear your heart on your sleeve, other people can see it and spit on it."
He correctly puts his finger on Tyler's raw nerve ( my thoughts went exactly along the same lines!):"I think you never cared all that much for your sister-in-law. I think you only cared about losing her. It’s loss you’re in love with. That’s why you hang onto it. I’ll bet that before that Irene came along you were whining about someone else. Oh, I remember now. You grew up without a father, didn’t you? That explains it. Ain’t I clever? And now you want the Queen because you don’t believe it’ll work out with her. And if it does, maybe you’ll wreck it yourself just so you can mourn her. Aren’t I right, Henry? Just swallow hard and tell me I’m right. Aren’t you one of the most pitifully self-destructive, selfish bipeds that ever walked the streets? Well, aren’t you?" ( emphasis,mine).

When Tyler tells his age to Dan S,I was kind of surprised– I didn't expect him to be that old! He is forty-four, & still, has not been able to sort out his life! It felt kind of pathetic reading this:"he could telephone John this instant and beg for a ten thousand dollar loan. John would help him even now, for their mother’s sake. He could become something successful. If he relocated to Sacramento, he could take better care of his mother and also hook in with the Capitol politicians, hiring himself out to political action committees who wanted dirt on each other’s senators, or to “ethics” committees whose aim it was to prove some poor victim unethical. Or, better still, he could go to southeast Asia and return with a beautiful bride who resembled Irene. But then he’d have to support her. If only he knew what favor to ask the Queen! Smooth was right. He desired to be healed. What would heal him?"
Then comes his confession to the Queen:" I don’t know anything, not even who I am or what I want or whom I love. I, uh, I confess that up front."
Meaningless & lonely; is his life any better than the whores'?

The false Irene with her smell "like rotten sardines"," abscessed thigh",gaze "fixed almost like a corpse’s",made me almost think for a moment that the Queen had resurrected Irene but no,this gift is like another loyalty test that Tyler has to pass,at least that's what he thinks. I really don't know what to make of this 'gift'. Maybe Tyler's need to be needed prompted this sort of a female offering!?

I need some explanation of this passage- I think,there is some Biblical ref.perhaps to Jesus' serving of the lepers & other such miraculous,humanitarian episodes but Tyler is no Jesus!
"But what if some sacred vapor infused her(the false Irene's)ecstasies and depths? What if her endless struggle for junk and more junk were a meditation of perpetual equilibrium as valid as Buddha’s stillness on a lotus leaf? What if a brainless sea-sponge which spent its entire life weakly straining food from the currents actually experienced perfect fulfilment because its sensations were unmediated by consciousness? Was this what the Queen meant?
He refused to believe in the goodness of sickness. He longed to worship the false Irene as he had been told, but could not."
Later,in chapter 178,we read:"the Queen’s intuition about her proved entirely true, because at that moment, even if only for that moment, she ( i.e.the false Irene)was willingly and proudly embracing her own degradation, like a Christian on the cross. And perhaps what she intended for Tyler (although one can never be sure about anything concerning the Queen) was for him to take to himself the embodied shame of Irene’s self-distraction, loving somebody who would be bad for him. And yet how depressing, indeed repulsive these plans for another appear, when we spell them out like this! Tyler, of course, had humbly laid his life in the Queen’s hands; it was incumbent on her to do something with it."

Reading chapter187, I just don't know what to feel for Henry Tyler- he is such a loser! He was in the habit of breaking & entering his brother's place & going through Irene's personal things... He is in love with a dead woman & he can't let go. The fellow really needs help:"The place marker-ribbon was at Ephesians 5.14:
Therefore it is said:
Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead,
and Christ will give you light.
He felt a lump in his throat."

Jim wrote: "Any thoughts on Book X, An Essay on Bail? Does this fit into the narrative or break the flow? On the one hand, it was interesting to get the facts, figures, and fallacies of the bail system, but o..."

I think that the essay could have been left out of the story.

I think vollman was trying to make a case that the legal system isn't doing enough to rehab these woman, is corrupt and plain not built to help them.

I like when my social commentary is part of the main story, kind of like how swift wrote Gulliver's Travels. The commentary is there but hidden behind a fictionally story. I don't like when the author calls timeout so that he can issue his social statement.

Tyler is living out his life as was predicted earlier in the book:"But grant him this: In the end he (Cain)did at least wear his Mark with defiant pride, and set out most adventurously to take up housekeeping with Lilith’s daughters and other whores in the Land of Nod, which I’ve always assumed was the place that heroin addicts go to...". Dan Smooth repeats this idea in chapter197:"You’ll be happier when you let it all go and become homeless,(...) And, you know, I was just talking with the Queen about you, and she says that’s destined to happen."
So Tyler casts his lot with the Queen- after a spiritual union of sorts which was described in the most unspiritual,banal language,I'm left wondering what exactly happened in this week's reading!
Book 9-14,has mostly focussed on Domino's backstory,her rivalry with the Queen (& her future betrayal of the Queen which the latter has foreseen),& Henry's healing.
Vollmann's female characters always get to have more balls than her male ones & TRF is no exception-but the usual Vollmann dynamics don't seem to be working here-Tyler is pathetic but the Queen ain't magnificant enough to inspire a willing suspension of disbelief- her magical powers ( now you know the reason for a black character,how typical!) seem laughable because the text is not able to create that sense of awe & wonder- her hokey,Oprah Winfrey-esque folksy language & behaviour are not working for this reader,till now.
Maybe when we get her backstory,things might look up for this book- I was almost missing John & Brady!

Woah, The pedophilia is so graphic. Vollman really puts us the mind of the pedophile. Dan's coming to grips with the monster that he is is interesting.

Also i agree with Mala. Getting the Queen's backstory will probably make her more three dimensional to me.

Abt the Essay on Bail- let's hear it from the Man himself!
In the chapter Crabbed Cautions of a Bleeding-hearted Un -Deleter– and Potential Nobel Prize Winner from Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann reader,Larry McCaffery has shared Vollmann's detailed response to his long-time editor & supporter at Viking,Paul Slovak,regarding the need to cut the manuscript of TRF by approximately one-third. Vollmann cut almost a hundred pages,from the last section. Reg.Book X,this is what he has to say:
"I know how you feel about this,Paul,and spent days going back and forth on it.You're right that the reader won't miss this if it's not there,and it is long and it delays the story. However ... in my state of doubt,I went and reached for Moby-Dick . Just consider how much of this book is composed of digressions on cutting up whales. In The Royal Family there are three digression-chapters: this one,the short Geary Street chapter,and the description of rush hour in the financial district at the beginning of one of the John chapters. I think that all three are justified. This book is,among other things,a very pointed satire,and to keep those points sharpened these three grindstones are valuable. Domino and many of her colleagues are sleazy petty criminals and worse,to be sure,and yet they are victims also– and not necessarily(perhaps not at all) of their male customers,as it is so fashionable to assert these days,but certainly of the justice system which is rigged against them. What I learned about bail shocked me,and I want the thoughtful reader to be shocked,too,hopefully returning to the tale more willing to cut Domino some slack. And,as you'll see if you have time to read it,I did shorten and tighten this considerably."