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Related Analysis


Who Is Telling This, and To Whom?


With regard to Rags' writing the story of the Invisibles in 2.20, I kept thinking of a line that appears in 1.24 as Malcolm/Mr. six is sealing the rupture in the abcess that appears in the House of Fun. Throughout that part of the book there is narrative describing the means by which he seals the rupture by sacrificing his malcolm identity; that narrative ends with the following on page 16: "All of it comes to an end. ... which leaves, apart from who he's going to be, now that Brian Malcolm's dead, only one question. who is telling this, and to whom?"

So then I went back to that issue and page, because I only had a vague memory of the line, and there is Rags examining the picture that's the key to time travel. In the annotations to 2.20, others have made the connection between takashi's assertion that language is the binding agent that makes possible the manipulation of time and Rags writing a novel called "The Invisibles" and believing that she can make it real simply by writing it. The obvious implication, to me, of the episode I described in 1.24 is that Rags may have been the narrator of that particular episode, as part of her effort to write a novel of the Invisibles and in doing it make them real. Of course, that still leaves unanswered the question to whom she was telling the story. and it raises, but offers few clues to answering, the question whether everything we've read has been Rags' story, or if her story is only a fragment of the whole, a story within the story....

On the subject of language as the binding agent that makes possible the manipulation of time, consider the following: On 1.14.1, the butterfly that is Fanny's guide during his initiation tells him that time is like a bubble but is to a bubble what a bubble is to a circle drawn on the ground. On 1.15.15, as part of her initiation, Fanny learns "the secret common language of shamans--that language whose words do not describe things but are things." Finally, on 1.15.16, Fanny learns of Barbelith, opening hir unused eye, and of the magic mirror stuff within hir "that comes from outside." s/he begins to see many things at once, including "the killer with his guns." In the bottom right panel of that page, we see an apparent bubble made of magic mirror, and the narrator says that fanny begins to see all time at once. "The lightest breath across its surface is sufficient to alter the fragile structure of time and space. And so, against the wishes of the other, she blows gently... and the membrane shivers."

So, s/he learns a language that, in light of recent revelations, probably partly allows her, under the right circumstances, to summon magic mirror and manipulate time. And then we're essentially told that she does just that. What follows in 1.15 is the fight between KM and Brodie that ends with Fanny alive but KM shot ...

The questions that arise for me are multiple: did Fanny manipulate time to save hirself, and the price was risking KM's life? Did s/he place KM in that danger for a specific, as-yet-unrevealed purpose? Did s/he simply get it a little wrong since the manipulation of time and space is likely a tricky business? Was KM meant to die immediately from that shot, and Fanny actually saved him (the implication of which might be that all the talk of KM dying was right in the sense that he was going to die, but Fanny and Jack saved him)? Is it just part of rags' narration, the point of which is also yet-unknown?

Sky Woodruff [flysky@uclink4.berkeley.edu]

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