Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal

Author:Gore Vidal [Vidal, Gore]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Unread
ISBN: 9781125979488
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 1968-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

25

Is it possible to describe anything accurately? That is the problem set us by the French New Novelists. The answer is, like so many answers to important questions, neither yes nor no. The treachery of words is notorious. I write that I “care for” Mary-Ann. But what does that mean? Nothing at all because I do not care for her at all times or at any time in all ways. To be precise (the task set us in the age of science), as I sit here at the card table in my room, wearing an old dressing gown of Myron’s, I can say that I like her eyes and voice but not her mouth (too small) or hands (too blunt). I could fill many pages of yes-no and still not bring the reader to any deep knowledge of what it is I feel at 7:10 P.M., March 12. It is impossible to sort out all one’s feelings at any given moment on any given subject, and so perhaps it is wise never to take on any subject other than one’s own protean but still manageable self.

What does Mary-Ann think of me? I could not begin to do more than guess nor, I suppose, could she answer this question even to herself: liking, hostility, attraction, revulsion, self-aggrandizement, self-sacrifice, all mingled together with no clear motif save the desire of each to exert power over the other. That is the one constant, to which all else is tributary.

Dr. Montag still challenges my theory from time to time. Once he spoke of the maternal instinct as something not involving power. But of course it does, in the most obvious way: the teat (or bottle) is the source of life to the baby, to be given or withheld at the mother’s pleasure. If there is any more fulfilling way of achieving total power over another human being, I have yet to hear of it. Of course most people successfully disguise their power drives, particularly from themselves. Yet the will to prevail is constant and unrelenting. Take that charming, seemingly unaggressive man who makes apparently idle jokes that cause others to laugh. In a sly way, he is exerting power quite as much as Hitler did: after all, his listeners were not laughing until he made them laugh. Thus it goes, at every level. My own uniqueness is simply the result of self-knowledge. I know what I want and I know what I am, a creation of my own will, now preparing for a breakthrough into an area where, until Myron’s death, I could enter only in dreams. Having already destroyed subjectively the masculine principle, I must now shatter it objectively in the person of Rusty, who has reappeared.

But who am I? What do I feel? Do I exist at all? That is the unanswerable question. At the moment I feel like the amnesiac in Spellbound, aware that something strange is about to happen. I am apprehensive; obscurely excited.

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