69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess by Stewart Home

Author:Stewart Home [Home, Stewart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

I DON’T remember when I woke up, how many cups of coffee I drank at breakfast or whether Alan and I made love before we rose. However, I do know that Alan drove me out to the university and waited for me in the canteen while I had a tutorial. At first my professor was angry with me for skipping classes but through an astute use of the conversations I’d had with Alan about literature, I managed to convince him that I hadn’t been wasting my time. I imagined the professor laying a hand on my leg and running it up under my skirt. Daydreams of this type helped pass the time, although my tutor was actually far too staid to even consider being unfaithful to his wife. Eventually I escaped from my professor’s office and Alan drove me to the Donside Tesco superstore. With Dudley seated mutely between us, we had a fry-up in the café. We trailed around the store and Alan grabbed a bag of donuts.

Having disposed of my tutorial as a topic of conversation in the car, our verbal exchanges in Tesco were devoted to other subjects. I suggested that we should visit all the supermarkets in Aberdeen and treat these excursions in much the same way as our trips to stone circles. Alan insisted that it would be difficult to have sex in those stores that lacked customer toilets. I told him that he was missing my point, which was poetic, he had to imagine himself living 3000 years from now and pretend he was visiting ruins. My companion complained this was an impossibility since the logistics of supermarket construction meant the buildings would not survive for this length of time. Such an over-literal response was uncalled for and I eventually persuaded Alan that after leaving Tesco we should travel on to Norco in Kittybrewster. In the meantime, as we queued to pay for the donuts, we talked of books.

Alan insisted that if I was to continue reading the contemporary literature he was rapidly discarding, I should give The Biography of Thomas Lang: A Novel by Jonathan Buckley some serious consideration. This text, Alan added slyly, cried out to be described as a work of literature. Taking the form of a series of letters, the novel demonstrated – in a manner not entirely dissimilar to some of the essays in Derrida’s Writing and Difference or certain works by Wyndham Lewis such as Enemy of the Stars – that in order to approach truth, one must simultaneously appear to veer away from it. It should go without saying that language is a tricky thing and that honesty has always hidden itself in lies. Alan praised Buckley for abandoning 19th-century notions of literary depth and said that like many famous modernists and post-modernists, this author’s prose was the return at a higher level of pre-modern forms.

Buckley’s book is only a novel if one accepts the contradiction of giving this title to a prose work whose central subject eludes it, and not only because the Thomas Lang of the title is dead.

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