A Clue to the Exit: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

he told the headmaster that he’d been testing the effects of more blood flowing to the brain Monsieur Jourdan had privately predicted that Jean-Paul would become a great savant. By the age of eleven, he was eating a plate of Roquefort before going to bed, in the hope of adding to the splendour of his dreams. He had a torch and notebook under his pillow and a chewed ballpoint tied to a string around his wrist. Jolting out of his rank and troubled sleep he would transcribe his dream images before they slipped beneath the horizon of consciousness. As he grew older, he plunged into philosophy and psychoanalysis and emerged from the usual succession of hautes French schools as an advocate of Lacan and the other giant intellos of his youth.
    Meeting Crystal had returned him to experiment and disobedience. The loss of self engendered by the psychedelic voyage she had taken him on in Utah’s Canyonlands had been pivotal to his development. It destroyed his faith in the priority of linguistic structures. Of course generative grammar had a hard-wired, impersonal chic, it was the matrix for making sense, but it was neither what he experienced in consciousness nor did it seem to him the ground of being.
    The egalitarian chaos of his psychedelic experience highlighted the roles of empathy and analogy. At first he tried to contain this chaos: surely there were choices behind these analogies, desires behind the choices, psychological structures behind the desires, and, underlying the psychology, the stainless steel of generative grammar. This analysis made him feel false, made him feel he was resisting an insight rather than having one. It was untrue to the quality of his experience, to the plasticity of his choices, the molten emergence and reabsorption of images. As he allowed the old order to be dismembered, a new erotic order arose in which there was an unceasing intercourse between sensation and conception, the mental blossoming of every sensation and the embodiment of every idea.
    He concluded that only the tyranny of talk had made thought seem like an internal conversation. He was now reluctantly drawn into a pre-linguistic realm where sensations gave rise to images and images to empathy and empathy to analogy, with words attaching themselves quite late in the process, if at all, like advertising executives promising to promote a product. The images sometimes naively took them on. And even those late-coming words could turn into sensations as easily as any other idea. If he said ‘ colombe’ , for instance, he had a spherical sensation, like a marble rolling quietly round the groove on the rim of a solitaire board. The English word ‘crazy’, on the other hand, ripped through him like shrapnel.
    I must suspend the writing of On the Train for a moment in order to go to Monte Carlo and throw away half my remaining capital in the Salles des Jeux. I expect to be able to accelerate my production once I’ve reduced my income to a more uncomfortable level. It was rather a business getting hold of all that cash but I now have it in a small suitcase. I have to admit that I find the whole situation rather enthralling.

 
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    Gambling is wonderful. It breaks my heart that I’ve taken so long to discover it. On the other hand, ripeness is all, and there could be no more perfect moment to become addicted to this exhilarating new vice. It’s all very well to cultivate pure Being, but in order to become a well-rounded person one must also cultivate pure Chance.
    I had never been to the casino in Monte Carlo before. The passport formalities warned me that I was entering another country, with its own dialect, its own currency of lustrous plastic counters and, above all, its own sense of time, sealed off from natural light and measured in spins and deals. If time is money, I was entering an eternity where all its other aspects were carefully falsified. I was at the heart of the delusion which I could only escape by penetrating more