Ambivalence

1986/1987

¶ A boy stands at the crossroads, considers his limited
options. In one direction, whose topography looks ardu-
ous but dully familiar, lie the determinations expected
of him: to face the realities of learning and working and
making his way in the world—which is to say, acquiesc-
ing to the world, its conventions dressed as opportunities
and responsibilities. Duty, his father likes to say about
everything from homework to mass-going to getting
yourself a secure job to obeying the commands of an
exhausted, scared and sarcastic father. Is that all? Are
there no larger duties, such as his father might once have
felt? On the other side, in B’s mind, there is the flight
from facts at hand, which he has been pursuing now for
years, mostly alone. One day at school he approached two
of his friends and asked what they were talking about.
What’s it to you, Dillon? All you care about is what’s in the ‘hit
parade’. It is not exactly true: a lot of the music he loves
will never make it into the charts. He cares also about the
magazines in which he reads about new music; certain
music critics there, whose pronouncements he carries
around in his heart like prayers; the writers and books he
first came across in the pages of those same magazines, or
in the lyrics and interviews of David Bowie, with whom
he used to be obsessed. (Primal scene of this fixation: he
is about twelve years old, and a boy behind him in class
prods him in the back and points to a large Bowie badge
on his jumper. Is that a man or a woman? He simply cannot
say. Exactly, it’s David Bowie.) To say hecares means he can-
not, when he is not longing for love, stop thinking about
these subjects from one end of the day to the other.
He cares, but what does he know? He has grown up, as
they say, in a house full of books. Aside from a year or so in
his early teens when, under the influence of boys at school,
he bluntly refused to pick up anything more demanding
than ‘novels’ spun off from the TV series Grange Hill, he
has never stopped reading. At seven or eight he loved
Enid Blyton’s Five Find-Outers and Secret Seven series,
which turned him into a child detective, equipped with
notebook and binoculars, pushing through bushes at the
end of the garden, in search of clues to unknown crimes.
A little later, the prep-school adventures of the reckless
Jennings and his myopic friend Darbishire—here (unlike
the Blyton books) the author, Anthony Buckeridge, was
irrelevant. There were the west-of-Ireland novels—The
Lost Island and The Island of Horses—of Eilís Dillon, who
came from Galway like his grandfather, and whom he
thought must be distantly related (no evidence). When
he was ten or eleven he read The Scarlet Pimpernel by
Baroness Orczy; afterwards he copied out in red ink a line
drawing of the little red flower from which the hero took
his nom de guerre, then stuck this picture on a tiny golden
badge he’d got from a bubblegum machine—secret insig-
nia, never worn in public. Dickens, Defoe, Stevenson: he
read these at his father’s suggestion, but around the age
of twelve his literary imagination collided with his taste
in television, and he was gripped by science fiction and
fantasy. On the day of his Confirmation, offered the rare
treat of a trip to the cinema, he insisted, because he had
read the novel by Arthur C. Clarke, that the whole family
sit mystified through a revived screening of 2001: A Space
Odyssey. Less dizzying, less portentous: the adventures of
a grifter and thief in Harry Harrison’s wry pulpy novels.
In the five years since, he has gone from The Stainless
Steel Rat to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. From
The Sands of Mars to Subculture: The Meaning of Style.
In the realm of ideas, he knows the barest facts about
existentialism, gleaned from a Pelican paperback in the
mahogany bookcase his father has had built into a cor-
ner of the infrequently used dining room. He has read
quite random pages by Ernest Jones on psychoanalysis,
and some passages from Freud himself. Somewhat mis-
understood: concepts of self-fashioning and situation, the
second of which he has confused with something else,
called Situationism. He has not read his father’s slim blue
copy of The Communist Manifesto, but he has read ‘The
Soul of Man Under Socialism’ by Oscar Wilde and a lot
of his maxims on art and life. He believes, consequently,
in style as its own kind of revolution. He knows a little
about semiotics, enough to believe that the science of
signs, with its attention to the surface of things, shares
something with his own commitment to style. But his
reading in this field has taught him to think about desire
and pleasure—he knows the French word jouissance,
but not its ordinary usage—as a kind of dissolution and
surrender, so far solitary, so far discovered mainly in the
texture of, and the talk around, music and books and
movies he loves. (…)