Episode III: “It’d be a great place to live if you were dead”

A gallery with the first 12 chapters, 76 pages of Darconville’s Cat

Hello and welcome to Thursdays with Theroux, an ongoing series spotlighting a piece of Alexander Theroux's work in weekly installments, with novels spread out over several months, stories and essays given several weeks.

The plan is to eventually cover everything Theroux has written that is reasonably accessible. I'll be compiling lists that cover the availability of specific texts and expected cost. Thankfully, most of his work is readily available (with a few exceptions) or will be soon.

Each week's post will feature a recap of the reading, highlighting themes and some of the allusions, trivia, arcane words (of course), and anything else that jumps out, along with discussion prompts to get things going, but it'll really be a free-for-all. All questions, comments, and impressions are fair game.

This week’s reading was a dark but beautiful journey.

#Chapter III: Quinsyburg, Va.

The Epigraph from Sir Thomas Brown sets the tone for this short chapter: “Death hath not only particular stars in Heaven, but malevolent Places on Earth, which single out our Infirmities and strike at our weaker Parts.” Geography has become a threat. Death, like a serpent, lies in wait in “malevolent Places on Earth.” Regions, localities may be poisonous. They target our weaknesses.

The fictional town of Quinsyburg “sits in the exact center of” Virginia. A negative tone pervades all descriptions of the region: “one feels more in the depth of imagination, the kind of anxiety, a foreboding, of a guilt within not traceable to a fact without…flat tobacco country where the absence of perspective seems as if offered in awful proof of what suddenly crouching in a perfect and primitive isolation, becomes a town…a terrible letdown…the capital city of all failure wrongheadedness , and provinciality.”

We get a reference to Queen Elizabeth I, the “virgin” queen and namesake of Virginia, and rumors of her secret relationships with numerous prominent political figures, stressing the contradictions between private behavior and public persona. This also calls back to Sir Thomas Wyatt and his alleged affair with Elizabeth’s mother Anne Boleyn. Wyatt’s great-grandson served as governor of Virginia Colony.

The second person narration of this chapter begins with an impersonal tone, simply guiding “you” across a map of the area to pinpoint our setting, but shifts to projecting the sense of desolation and disappointment onto the reader.

#Chapter IV: He Enters the House of Rimmon

The chapter title alludes to 2 Kings 5:18, and the concept of paying lip service, as in a non-believer entering the temple of Rimmon (Baal) and engaging in the expected behavior.

The epigraph is a quote from Anticlea of Ithaca to her son Odysseus during his visit to the Underworld in Book 11 of The Odyssey. She informs him of the state of his home and Penelope and Telemachus. Underworlds and guides appear a few pages later in references to Dante and Beatrice in The Divine Comedy.

Miss Thelma Trappe, a Quinsy teacher forced into retirement, takes Darconville on a tour of the city, laying out racial and class divisions. She’s from New Hampshire originally, and a description of “her Pyewacket head” refers to a Native American tribe from the New Hampshire region and the familiar spirit of an alleged witch in 17th Century England. The references to alleged improprieties of women are stacking up.

Thelma frequently references “Mrs. Battle’s Opinion’s on Whist,” an essay by Charles Lamb, as she fills Darconville in on specifics about different areas of the town and various historical details.

The town “hadn’t changed much since the long-gone days of the Civil War” and “There was an odor of decay there, of custom, of brittle endurance, a sort of banality, with yet something sinister, waiting below.” References to the town’s racist past and present saturate this chapter, from obliquely in “dreams in black and white — preferably the latter” to directly in the “no-longer-used slave quarters.” A statue of a Confederate soldier honoring “those who died—so read the inscription—'in a just and holy cause.’” Near the end of the section, we find out about “the black ghetto.”

Thelma is almost run over by a green pickup truck with a gunrack in the window. She talks about her brother, whose wife left him for another man, became and alcoholic, and committed suicide at age 20.

During a stop for tea at the Seldom Inn, the townspeople are very negatively described as “remarkably alike all, with faces like the trolls on German beer mugs, the curious result, perhaps of poultry-like inbreeding, a hedgecreeping lower-class breed of joltheads and jusqu’ aubouts…slackjawed and malplasmic to a one.” The prose of these insulting passages is stunning and witty, doubly so considering the negativity they convey and the depravity building throughout the chapter — “It seemed an orgy of kin, with everybody anybody’s cousin — in contrast to otherwise romanticized conceptions of “the doo-dah South of the Camptown Races, good bourbon, and the smell of honeysuckle in old shambling yards wither at dusk one heard the sound of risible Negroes pocking out ‘Dixie’ on hand-hewn banjos.”

Quinsyburg was a town of “zelators and zelatrices…racists Elks (B!P!O.E.) and their shovelmouthed wives” where “a writer in staying too long would go mad,” Thelma says, warning of the high suicide rate.

The town is steeped in religion, but it’s an exploitative form of evangelicalism to which “the illiterate faex populi had swarmed only to be bilked, beggared, and buccaneered right on the spot,” a population “maintained in the hollowness of their churchianity.” It’s a strain of “civic religion” focused on resisting outside ideas and pressure.

This is seen most notably in the town’s refusal to integrate schools, instead shutting them down and instead opening “a private white academy…to maintain racial purity.” This was a common practice across the South and still exists in towns with high African-American populations but low school diversity.

The “black ghetto” was “a pauperization—the direct result of racism in Quinsyburg—that kept the blacks, because poor, servile.” Black families who tried to fix up their houses found their rents increased; upward mobility was systemically disallowed. The only “upside” is that black residents could depend on their lifestyles never changing.

We then get a very emotional section when the Thelma and Darconville see black women mourning at a church over the death of a black boy, who was killed by a pickup truck in a hit-and-run at the spot where Thelma was nearly run over. Thelma’s mother was killed in a hit-and-run, the experience surrounded with shame, insecurities, and trauma Thelma still feels, and “Darconville could say nothing: so overcome with pity, he could find no words adequate to consolation.” Awash in grief, Thelma kisses Alaric on the neck and walks off alone.

The racism in this chapter opens up the gallows reference in Chapter 1 to the possibility of a history of public lynchings.

#Chapter V: Were There Reason to Believe That in Quinsyburg Visionaries, Fabulists, Hilarodists, and Hermeneuts Would Suffer the Dooms, Chastisements, and Black Draughts of a Depression They Otherwise Didn’t Deserve and Deteriorate Utterly?

“Amply.”

I took this one word chapter to mean that people with some form of aspiration or special in storytelling in one form or another were to expect destruction. The environment is not inviting to narrative.

The long chapter title reminds me of several short story titles I’ve seen in David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers collections.

#Discussion Questions

Here are a few prompts to generate discussion, but feel free to post any reactions/questions.

1. Did you find any of the descriptions jarring?
2. How did you find the balance between playfulness and darker points?
3. How do the racial concerns depicted reflect issues that have dominated news headlines for the past several years?
4. What benefit does the role of the outsider confer upon Darconville?
5. Have you caught the rhythm of Theroux’s prose?
6. How are you handling the allusions and references? Do you look all of them up in the moment and check for intertexuality? Do you read past some of them? Do you make a list to look up later?

Next week, Nov. 18: Chapters 6-8.