The House of Doors 1

I've written frequently here - and once in the margins to The Library's Grain (see #112) - about how the Library functions and what it is meant to be or to be doing. As of now, its readership is woefully small, which is disappointing to me. More than one person has called it opaque - and I've chastised them for it. What obstructs one's reading is not the text, I've claimed, but a certain notion of how reading is supposed to function. I stand by that view, but I've come to accept that those "certain notions" are not open to instant and unaided revision. They require, like so many things require, aid. And so, in an effort to admit what (or who) the Library lacks, I offer here the first part of something like an introduction to that "text" in all its growing multifariousness.

The Library largely concerns seven days in the life of a single character named Stephen. As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and as a young man living in Philadelphia, Stephen's day-to-day is predictably open, structured by very few responsibilites and no emotional or physical center. Thus these seven days are not threaded together by any particular narrative or event. Their progression is built rather upon a gradual rising of intensity. Each of these seven days forms a chapter, starting with Monday, October 25, 2004 and ending with Halloween (at least, nomininally) - that is, Sunday, October 31. Each day is built upon a variety of distinct theoretical constructs and occurrences. Day 1, for example, and as mentioned in an earlier post, is conceived around the structure of a map. Day 2 occurs mostly in a library. And day 3 can be read as a meditation on love. None of these "themes" dictates by itself the unfolding of the day - Day 1, for instance, is also about the concept of periphery and Day 3 is immersed in issues of language and ethnicity - but any one of them offers a kind of hermenutic door or anchor for reading.

With each day comes an immensely large and shifting cast of characters, some of them appearing only once and others not even appearing at all (they are merely mentioned). Some have an important relation to certain days: Sarah to Day 3, for example, and Andy to Day 2. One of them appears almost every day, and that is Square, Stephen's best friend and the most eccentric figure in the book. Stephen himself is largely in search of a narrative (and in rebellion from the narratives he's been offered) and Square seems to have happily learned to do without narrative at all. The Days thus proceed (up until Day 6) with Stephen (and sometimes Square) moving in and out of the narratives around them, and the people and connections between people that make up those narratives. A relationship between one of the Adrians (there are two characters with this name) and his partner Blake (formerly named David), for instance, is in the proccess (or is it?) of dissolving. And one of Steven's students, Stefan - to take another example - is writing a paper on Shakespeare. Further in the background lie two important but little seen characters, one of whom has so far been called only JMR. A professor and advisor important to a number of the male characters (Stephen, Andy, Adam, Adrian 1, and John), JMR is (or is rumored to be) leaving the University - and the seven Days take place in the wake (or pre-wake) of his impending departure and the panic it produces. I will not (yet) identify the other "unseen" character here, but his or her identity is not difficult to intuit.

The Library, of couse, poses other problems. Who is the I who writes it and who sometimes takes a personal position within it? What is the relation between the early posts (originally written for a blog titled Verneinung) and those that make up the story proper? How does the Library relate to the novel it prefigures? Will that novel be similarly obscure or will its language be more accessible? How does the time of the present, which the author seems often to invoke, connect to the time of the seven Days? If much of what occurs and who appears is drawn from the author's "real" life, what is the relationship between what is real and what is written?

I can't answer all of these here, nor do I believe that doing so would be helpful or even possible. They are questions upon which the Library itself thinks - and the various answers to them imply various kinds of reading practices. Sometimes I think through them out loud here, often at the provocation of a friend or reader. I welcome and indeed entreat such provocations. I hope this introduction here will make them more common.