Atdtda33: Purportedly doing business, 934-935

[Paul Nightingale]

In the previous section the narrative shifted in favour of
the three female characters and their projected feminist alternative to the
malestream. This section begins with the three males playing “Anarchists’
Golf”, which, translated, might be a “[b]it like snooker” (935), ie choose any
hole/pocket. The discussion of ‘business’ (“Ratty ... trying to explain”), moreover,
might take place on a ‘normal’ golf course. We are in the Anarchist spa, but
this version of golf is “a craze currently sweeping the civilised world” (934).
Any golf course might be considered a map of sorts, one that
imposes meaning on the terrain in question, as well as dictating the way one
proceeds. Ratty introduces the map, then names the hole he’ ll “try for”; his
question (“You don’t mind the stroll, do you?”) is answered by Reef’s question
concerning the map, a question that might just as easily apply to the scorecard.
The map they discuss is supposed to represent the Belgian Congo, just as they
are supposed to be playing golf. One land mass stands in for another. Reef
thinks of South Texas, just as, arriving in Yz-Les-Bains on 931, he thought of
“a mining camp early in the history of a silver strike”. Here on 935, the map as
an artefact is absent, present only in Ratty’s account of it, just as the map
itself would only stand in for the land map it (“[p]urportedly”) represents.
And whom does the land belong to? Cf Frank’s “history of
exile and migration” (928) at the end of the previous chapter.