Topical Guide 770
Mark Dorset
Contradiction: Deliberate
Author as God or Magician or Puppeteer
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 58:
The fire might, in another moment, have gotten out of control; the audience might have run, screaming, for the exits, trampling one another in their panic; Ariane’s entire house and the warehouse around it might have burned to the ground; Terrence might have died as he intended, drugged and indignant; and Ariane might have died in unspeakable agony, unwilling and unprepared—if it hadn’t been for quick-thinking Duncan Rollo of the Zoning Board. He dashed onstage wielding one of the fire extinguishers that he had insisted be installed at intervals around the auditorium, covered them both with foam, and led Terrence away, to the applause of the crowd.
Let me remind you of something Peter wrote in the Preface to What a Piece of Work I Am:
I WENT AWAY to college, stayed away for graduate school, and then returned to teach molluscan biology, local history, folk etymology, and recreational mathematics at Babbington High. When I returned, Ariane was still in town, at the same place, down by the docks, but I didn’t see much of her. I just never seemed to have the time. Then one night her house burned down and Ariane was killed.
Again, I blamed myself. If I had been there—who knows. Perhaps the fire never would have started. Perhaps I could have put it out. Or perhaps we would have died together. When I start a thought with if, I tend to get lost in a maze of possibilities, and soon I’m furious with headstrong fate for having, in haste to get from then to then, chosen a single route, and a wrong one at that, an unacceptable one, when so many others would have served, such as the one that I have described in the pages that follow, in which a fire extinguisher is provided at the critical moment, allowing her to telephone me one night, a few years after the fire extinguisher saved her.
And let me remind you of one of the epigraphs to What a Piece of Work I Am:
Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”
See also:
Author as God or Magician or Puppeteer TG 17, TG 94, TG 117
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