Reading for Plot

In the beginning of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake, Philip Marlowe flirts with a receptionist:

She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens.

She's a nothing character, a no one, she's gone in half a page never to return. But that's all I remember from the book. I couldn't even say for sure that there was a lady in a lake, if the title didn't remind me.

In this snippet, we see the whole novel en abyme: a universe that means you no particular harm, but that will harm you nonetheless.

At least I think that's what's going on. I can't remember anything else about the novel.

I have a terrible memory for plot. I can be in the middle of reading a novel and not remember what's happening. I generally have a sense that there's some guy or some lady and they're doing stuff. Or not.

This is not to say that I don't read for plot. I do--it just doesn't do me any good.

What I remember from novels are moments. Sometimes, like with the Chandler, they are moments that seem emblematic of what's going on in the book. From Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night, I remember the chess set that Lord Peter gives to Harriet Vane. The chess set seems a metaphor for their courtship--calculating, bloodless. But Harriet accepts the gift, falls in love with it. And when an intruder breaks the pieces, we sense that we are now in the realm of the irrevocable. There's no going back. And sure enough, by the end of the book, Harriet finally agrees to marry Lord Peter, and their relationship finally moves beyond the cautious strategizing of a chess game.

But as far as what the mystery in Gaudy Night is? I have no idea.

Sometimes, however, what I remember doesn't have anything much to do with the novel as a whole. For example, all I ever remember about Jude the Obscure is that he sent off for books on Latin and was crushed to discover that there wasn't a secret code to deciphering the texts, and that learning another language was hard work for which there is no shortcut. I didn't even remember the big traumatic moment until I was discussing with a friend yesterday (the realization that I couldn't remember the most memorable part of the novel is what prompted this post).

There are in our existence, Wordsworth reminds us somewhat pompously, spots of time that with distinct pre-eminence retain a rennovating virtue. Our understanding of the past gets organized around these moments--they become the template by which we (re)construct the narrative of our history.

What we remember is important, but it's also important to remember that it's not the whole story. An historical imagination demands that we force ourselves to remember not just Jude Frawley's Latin textbooks, but that other thing that happened [I don't want to spoil the book for anyone]. It also demands that we figure out just how Marlowe chatting up the office girl fits in with everything else that happens.

We're not very good at this as a nation. Better, perhaps, than I am with novels, but still not very good. Look how easy it was to convince people that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were connected. People remembered the Gulf War and 9/11 and constructed a narrative around these two things.

Just not, you know, the right narrative.

If we only remember a few salient moments, we run the risk of letting our history get scripted for us. And we can see where that leads.

I am thinking now of all that's being written about Gerald Ford. From the right, he's being praised for his calm leadership and decency. From the left, he's being vilified as the man who took office without being elected and who pardoned the criminal who put him there. Neither of these is an accurate portrait.

He was a man who stepped into an impossible situation and handled it badly, but not as badly as most people would have done. I think that the real lesson from the Ford presidency is that years of ideologically motivated miltarism and government corruption (sound familiar?) can't be solved by even a decent guy. Vietnam and Watergate couldn't be undone in half a term--and certainly not by a man who was beholden to his predecessors.

I think there's a lesson in the Ford administration that we'll want to remember a couple of years from now.

Historical understanding involves more than just organizing a narrative out of what we happen to remember or what happens to suit us. Shame on everyone for falsifying the past to make a point--the stakes are a lot greater than what I happen to remember about old Jude.