Atdtda28: UnAmerican nights, 805

[Paul Nightingale]

The chapter’s concluding section summarises the action: the “[i]t” that
continues for a month is repetitive but elusive. Various actors recycle the
experience of the Event, either “imagining ever more extravagant disasters”
or “growing used to the curious pallor” (which in turn is no longer
“curious”, the Event evidently now passé). As “the phenomenon slowly
fade[s]” so do powers of recollection, and the novel’s title phrase occurs
in connection to habit and/or a range of time passing distractions, “orgasm,
hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night ...” etc.

>From the general to the particular. Go back to an earlier near
appearance--or repetition with difference--of the title on 450, following
Merle’s arrival in Audacity, Iowa: “... he noticed a small crowd shifting
and muttering and about to turn boisterous out in front of a flat roofed
clapboard building with multicolored gas lamps, already on before the
streetlighting, spelling out against the fading day the name of the local
moving-picture house”. In this passage the pleasures of narrative, the
“storyteller’s spell” and audience’s “happy stupor” (451) are set against
projection, ie “fooling the eye”. Members of the crowd offer a commentary on
the film’s action; and speech here is unattributed, emphasising the contrast
to the subsequent explanatory dialogue taking place between Merle and Fisk
(which is of course authored). At the start of Ch55, the Russians attempt to
understand the Event (780-782); at the start of Ch56, the Chums, with
Professor Vanderjuice, do likewise (793-794); so again the narrative has
produced a tension between experience and explanation.

The title phrase, as it appears at the end of Ch56, signifies the return of
something called normality; henceforth, and predictably, something called
‘night’ will be followed by something called ‘day’. Since the beginning of
Ch55, the Event has been inseparable from narratives of uncertainty and
incomprehension, given its apparent capacity to suspend time (eg Noellyn’s
“it can’t be this early still” on 804). Merle rescues Audacity’s film fans
from a suspended narrative: “Worst possible place it could’ve happened ...”
etc (450). His attention has been drawn to “multicoloured gas lamps ...
spelling out against the fading day ...” etc and therefore exploiting the
absence of daylight; whereas, post-Event, one has been able to “s[i]t
outdoors on public benches, reading calmly” (805). Cf. the fakery at the
heart of Truffaut’s La Nuit Americaine.