A Portrait of the Author (in the image of his son)

Having been away from this blog for a week or two, I've had time to reflect upon its current direction, which - Jeehyun notwithstanding - I've decided I don't care for. With each new entry the posts have increasingly approximated the stucture of the confessional. Lugubrious, straightforward, and mimetic in a way I neither practice nor trust in my day-to-day, their apparent authenticity should be treated with a good deal of suspicision. By myself, that is; you, the reader, are free to do as you choose.

But, with that in mind, I decided earlier today that this blog's return should be marked by some kind of intellectually or materially obscure meditation. Say, for instance, on the limitations and potential of what I named with Jeehyun this afternoon "heterotextual desire." That, I promise you, was the plan. But an hour or two ago, as I lay shoeless and shirtless in the sun at Rittenhouse Square, I read this in Vicki Mahaffey's - who is named Valerie in the novel - Reauthorizing Joyce: "Stephen, like Telemachus, begins his odyssey by looking for a substitute father who can tell him about his real father." An answer - or at least a coherent description - of everything I've been doing (at least, discursively) since this month began.

Which begs, I suppose, the question: Is that what my Stephen, unbeknownst to himself, is doing for those 7 days in 2004 that make up my novel? If so, there has been only one hint - a phrase from King Lear where Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, calls Gloucester (who is present but does not recognize his son), "the foul fiend Flibbertigibitt." That phrase is, I proclaim here, the one and only reference to Stephen's father that will appear in the novel. Which is not to say that those 7 days aren't filled, the way a tomb is filled with traps, with other forms of fathers.

The structure, in simplified terms, is threefold. Square has a father, Corey has none. And Stephen has a father in-between: a duplicitous father. This name, this concept, this structure in itself, is not (though I have previously called it such) a moral judgment. It belongs originally to aesthetics. And it is for me now the opening of a question where there has previously been the most unyielding (because invisible) of impasses.

My father is, like my Stephen's father, a duplicitous father. One who owns and disowns simultaneously, who insists by way of rejection upon a lineage, and who rewrites his history and his devotion with an ink invisible to all but him. I have resisted any kind of acknowledgement of my father (in thoughts if not necessarily in deeds) for every moment of my life since he left. I say that with no exaggeration, no melodrama, no confessional apology. But here, at least right now, I venture to say something else: I am of my father. And am of him in every claim and denial of me he makes.