I’m getting pretty great at picking out foreshadowing. Regarding the final two lines of the last chapter, which I attempted to explicate before giving up and going to bed, the beginning of the next chapter goes in further depth (without coming to any more satisfying a conclusion than I did). Tough shit.
In short: urine = gunpowder. lightning = chamber pot. urine = Marcelle. gunpowder = Marcelle. chamber pot = Marcelle. lightning = Marcelle.
As if we didn’t have enough baseless associations to keep in mind while reading this, it’s now been revealed that Marcelle can’t get off without pissing herself. And so,
it is not astonishing that the bleakest and most leprous aspects of a dream are merely an urging in that direction, an obstinate waiting for total joy, like the vision of that glowing hole, the empty window, for example, at the very moment when Marcelle lay sprawling on the floor, endlessly inundating it.
And soon after, the narrator states that “we had abandoned the real world,” and that our personal hallucination now developed as boundlessly as perhaps the total nightmare of human society, for instance, with earth, sky, and atmosphere,” which concludes my brilliant and sensitive rejoinders to the last chapter regarding what makes me like it so well.
The narrator suggests, in a beautiful paragraph not worth repeating, that the end of his erection is likely death. We might have guessed. In the meantime, he and Simone are riding bikes home, sick and exhausted. He can’t get his eyes off her sex sticking to the seat, she’s masturbating while riding, and when she comes she crashes her bike. He thinks she’s dead, so he gives her the bloody works, and once she turns out to be alive he carries her home. To us he admits to loving her.
If you’re keeping track of things to pay attention to, you can now underline blood and death on that list, blood not having been seen since the teen orgy, death not having been seen since that girl was decapitated in chapter 1.
arts & fetters 