ATDTDA (9): Something else is out there, 255-259

[Paul Nightingale]

This section deals with a specific event, the collapse of the Campanile; it
also manages to include sweeping references to European and world history
from the late-C18th onwards. The fall of the Bastille (255) and the
Napoleonic Wars (257); relations between Venice/Italy and Austria (255);
relations between Russia and Japan (258-259); Britain in South Africa and
the Far East (259). Implicit throughout is bourgeois nationalism, as
distinct from the working-class unionism that characterised the Colorado
sections (any question of anarchism notwithstanding). Bastille Day (255) is
just another public holiday (cf. the writing of July Fourth, 81-82); and the
cafes have, in the age of tourism, lost their rival political allegiances.

Randolph says the tower has "stood for a thousand years" (257). Just as its
collapse was predicted by Renata (253), so this event in turn functions as
prediction. By the end of the section, "civic plans had been set in motion
to rebuild the Campanile ..., as if the dilapidations of time and entropy
could be reversed" (259): that is to say, denied.

Also denied is responsibility: neither airship crew is willing/able, to
claim a role in the tower's collapse. Padzhitnoff says "[g]eography is
irrelevant" (258), reminding us of what Professor Svegli said of the
Sfinciuno Itinerary (248-249); although he does, however, seem to think
otherwise when complaining ("St Cosmo, are you insane?") of the Chums'
involvement with the Black Dragon Society (258). The narrative, therefore,
switches back and forth, from microcosmic to macrocosmic levels, as is
customary in Chum-related sections. This is related to the way the scene is
established at the outset: at first the reader is positioned with the flyers
looking down on "[p]edestrians below" (255), although the subsequent
paragraph ("[s]een from the ground ..." etc) has realigned the reader. In
neither case is the subject in a position of authority. The novel has
employed this spatial metaphor since the opening page; here, there is a
denial of perspective, and all one has is an impression that undermines the
authority of an objective vision. The airships are said to be "more
conjectural than literal": cf. the reference in the opening chapter to "the
realm of folklore, superstition, or perhaps, if one does not mind stretching
the definition, the religious" (5).

One might consider here the writing of the lasagnoni ("blurry as bats at
twilight ..." etc, 256), which perhaps alludes to the way a contemporary
painter might represent the scene; and also reminds us of the photograph
that Renfrew showed Lew in Cambridge (240). Photographed, the lasagnoni are
"often scarcely visible as more than sepia gestures" (256) because the image
has been captured, so to speak, by accident.

Which sends us to Walter Benjamin: ". the most precise technology can give
its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have
for us. No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed
his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a
picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which
reality has so to speak seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot
where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so
eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. For it is another
nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye: other in the sense that a
space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the
unconscious. Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some
idea what is involved in the act of walking, if only in general terms, we
have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a
person steps out. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and
enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first
discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the
instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis." ("A Small History of
Photography", in One-Way Street and Other Writings, NLB, 1979, 243.)