Reading The Loop by Jacques Roubaud, part 2
It occurred to me that since The Loop is written in a very particular way, a way that allows for multiple ways of reading, I should attempt to map my progress through the book.
First, a short description: There is the main narrative. There are also both "interpolations" and "bifurcations." The main text is often, not interrupted exactly, but forced to move aside for a marker which points to either an interpolation or a bifurcation. The reader may choose to follow the marker's lead or not. Sometimes the interpolation is itself interpolated. Every section is numbered. The book's main theme is memory. A secondary theme is its own form (which is, in many ways, also the form memory takes).
Because I follow all the markers down the rabbit hole and back out, today, I started reading §2, which was interpolated by I§52, which was interpolated by I§53, which was itself interpolated by I§54-57. When I finished I§57, I went back and finished I§53, then went back and finished I§52, then went back and finished §2.
-or-
Because I follow all the markers down the rabbit hole and back out, today, I read the following pages in the following order: 15, 16, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 204, 205, 202, 203, 16, 17, 18, 19.
-and-
Because I follow all the markers down the rabbit hole and back out, I have three bookmarks in The Loop.
This book is not dissimilar to (from?) Julio Cortázar's novel Hopscotch.
This book is nothing like Julio Cortázar's novel Hopscotch.
I have already mentioned (yesterday) Julio Cortázar's novel Hopscotch, and its main character Horacio Oliveira, of whom I was again today reminded when I read,
If I actually interrogate my memories, I can't see at all how any line of thought is in any way capable of exiting the moment, the present tense, in which it took place. Every sequence of deductions made represents a line of thought, and is always, always thought in the present: precisely because it is, essentially, identically repeatable at any given moment. One cannot ever truly think through an old line of thought.
I have, on numerous occasions, attempted to recall the sequence of thoughts (from when I was seven) between when the fellowship hall floor collapsed into the basement and we were able to exit the ruined building. I cannot recreate any sort of detailed order, but I do remember two individual thoughts: confusion and amusement at reading a felt banner which bore the title of a hymn, "Christ is Made the Sure Foundation"; and confusion at seeing a woman's foot covered in blood and thinking all the foot's skin must have been removed somehow.
I would describe both of those images as being burned into my memory like photographs (though less so the banner, because I saw it again nearly 20 years later, after my great-grandmother's funeral, during the post-funeral luncheon, which was held in the rebuilt fellowship hall—and so my original memory of the banner is contaminated by the second (and also very likely vice-versa)), and of photography, Roubaud writes,
Photography has profoundly changed the perception of childhood memories (of all memories, but especially of childhood memories: Childhood and photography now have an almost consubstantial link—"All photographs," as someone once wrote, "are childhood photographs." I would add: and all childhood memories are seen as photographs (or, in even more contemporary terms, as "video images" [which I read, incidentally, as "video games])). Through it, they have proliferated in the world, like an "album of times long past." But it has also given them a model, to which all memory images henceforth attempt to conform: and this model, so immobile, so "idle," so unique and so fixed, is mistaken and false.
Here is a photograph I took today of some graffiti on a cigarette machine:
