ATDTDA (5): Motive and eccentricity, 129-131 #2

[Paul Nightingale]

>From the opening description of the Hotel Borealis, and Hunter's attempt to
paint, cut to "the great fjord" and the glacier "that had never been named":
cf Padzhitnoff's "creature" (124). In this section, then, one form of
representation, artwork, is juxtaposed to another, naming; as with the
Inconvenience's "extra [crew] member" (125), "the true face" remains
elusive. Representation is treated as problematical throughout, but in this
second part of the novel the question is raised prominently: "the true face"
might even recall Hunter's portrait of Constance, "a three-quarters view
from behind, showing the face only just crescent" (127). Since the face is
unrecognisable, what the viewer recognises, isn't the model (the original)
but the convention that decrees 'this is a face': another "memory of a
memory" (84). One might add that "Mathematics and History proceed[ing] as
they would" (130) are also acts of naming.

If representation is treated as problematical, the relation between
signifier and signified is disrupted, the journey we make from one to the
other brought into doubt (with regard to maths, for example, the journey
from one side of an equation to another). In short, that particular journey
becomes one into the unknown. Hence the "hand-blown bottle, whose label ..."
(129) etc, a very detailed image: even the parrot's smile ("disdainful") can
be identified. The label has been "engraved and printed in an unfaded
spectrum of tropical colors": the passage of time, then, has had no effect.
Speakers are not identified as yet, but the bottle has been handed down from
father to son, so its provenance is marked: in narrative terms this is a
trajectory not unlike that of the "[t]ales ... from the first millennium"
(127), or even the Penhallow back-story (128).

One speaker asks another to "exercise caution" (130) and not drink to
excess; however, "[a]s expected, this advice was ignored". Consequently we
can say the future has not, here, in this modest instance, been predicted
accurately: advice doesn't 'equal' outcome, which is "notable for hysteria
and recrimination". The warning ("legend", 129) on the label requires
translation, of course, another form of A equals/is the equivalent of B; and
repetition (without the action implied) means "the phrase no longer [has]
any meaning" (130).

At the bottom of the page, one speaker is possibly (not explicitly)
identified, through the repetition of the father/son relation, as "young Mr
Fleetwood Vine"; the reintroduction here of Scarsdale Vibe is by means of
reference to him as an unreliable storyteller. The "tell" that sends this
information to his sons differentiates the "open sharing of deep business
confidences" from "important data ... being withheld" (131). The section
therefore ends by 'separating' father and son: Fleetwood must seek "further
enlightenment" independently. The fate of the salsa has been preparation.