jurnal.eidotomic

This is only a personal, subjective comment of mine on the book I am reading at present in the collective presence of other books I have also been reading since I started this one in particular. Even though I’ll mention nothing about the other books I’m, too, reading, I should mention this special book that intrigued me and made me mull over the essence of God and ponder the kind of divinity that he is and where he may be coming from because I’d pretty much like to set the right tone for my comment and to stress, once again, that what follows is merely my understanding of the very thing I’ll soon be commenting on.

This book is entitled A Fraction Of The Whole, and it was penned by Australian writer Steve Toltz. My goal here is not to say a word about the book’s story line, or about its characters, or about the narrative mastery of he who’s penned it down. All this can be known fairly easily by simply opening the book and starting reading it page by page. Quite on the contrary, I won’t even concentrate on the book’s literary themes, hidden agenda or, for that matter, ulterior messages of whatever sorts. In brief, I’m here just not interested in what this Australian book has to say, nor am I equally interested in whom it may say it to. As the book’s title rightly anticipates, or insinuates, or simply coincidentally points out, I’m not even interested in its entirety, but exclusively in its fragmentariness: of all the wonderful things to be picked up along the reading way, the only one I’ve garnered for these lines is just a fraction of the mock-diary written by the second most important narrator in the novel, and read (and also mechanically re-written as a copy-paste addition to his own narration) by the first most important narrator in the novel. This narrative fraction that I have selected for what is to come in the following lines has its narrative core, and its story that its narrator is actually telling, but I won’t say a word about all this, nor am I going to burden your memory with such details that make no sense until they have been read out of the novel itself.

Actually, all I have to do in order to set the stage for my very personal and subjective comment is to give God’s own history my equally personal and subjective outline of it. For this, I need, above all, to dichotomize God. My splitting of God is not entirely original, but it may end up so, at least partially, if I consider giving each fraction into which I’m halving God its own sense, probably different from the one already in use by the world’s all God-splitters. The first half of God, or the first category under which God might fall, is the one I would like to call the God of beyond, as I think it best describes the traditional kind of God that this book of which singular fraction I’ll presently be commenting on is really not about. This God of beyond would then be the God theology has always strived to impose on its practitioners, and the God that philosophy has never stopped from demolishing by all sorts of arguments aimed at proving his existence. It’s the God of perfection whose person is nothing but the pure essence we are, too, supposed to be made out of. It’s that kind of God that resides beyond our actually sensing him, and who dwells beyond our faith in him, even though the sensorial beyond of God may be different from God’s fides type of beyond. This is the kind of God I’m discarding for the duration of these lines. The second half of God, or the second category under which God is likely to fall, is the one I would like to call the God of within, albeit with a slight change in the meaning of within. Clearly, this is not the God of tradition, nor is he by any means the kind of God that might be best described as being perfect mainly because his person is nothing but the pure essence we’re supposed to be made out of, too. Instead, this is exactly the God that the book I’m currently reading speaks about, and refers to, and even moulds in the splitting image of the second most important narrator of the novel later to be transferred onto the image of the first most important narrator of the novel. If this God of within is not traditional, he must then be modern, to be in due opposition to God of beyond. At closer inspection, though, he proves to be nothing of the sort because his nature is mood-centred rather than time-based. This God has nothing to do with time in general. He has nevertheless everything to do with the passing of time that the narrator who created him had invented him from. This special time is, I should say, whimsical. The God of within is, if born out of a whim, provisional. He is the Prop God, or the God of all props. He is temporary, and his time is whimsical. Above all, his existence does no longer consist of pure essence; quite conversely, it rather consists only of props. This God is of within, but not in the most used meaning of it, which would naturally imply inwardness and interiority. By all gods, this God has nothing covert about him, and can only hide himself from his believers in the unlikeliest of places. The sense of this God’s withinness is that of within reach; that of extreme tangibility. This God is so near his believers that they don’t know they’ve just touched him, and spoken to him, even when they are doing it – and they do it on a daily basis. Actually, this God is quite ungodly, and the only reason I’m still calling him by this name is because he likes to call himself by it.

As my only business is with God of within, I shall no longer keep God of beyond waiting. He may go beyond wherever he may have come from, and stay there, at least for the remaining lines of this comment of mine. God of within, on the other hand, as he’s always at hand for his believers, must now stick with the commentator. His provisional time has finally come to exercise himself as God of beyond. I think I must’ve forgotten to mention that of these two Gods, only one of them is trying to pretend he is the other one. Whereas God of beyond has no inclination to pretend he is some other God than he really is, God of within does the pretending all the time (well, most of the time, which is actually all his provisional time) by impersonating none other than God of beyond. Thus, God of within, for all his extraordinarily palpable presence in the world, turns out to be just an absent mock-God of beyond. God of within is truly a sad funny God to watch how he’s playing at God of beyond even though he is only God of within:

Where are you, Lord?

[The believer asks not knowing that God of beyond was being personified by God of within, who was made unto the image of the second most important narrator of the novel, who was in fact the man by whom the believer had got pregnant…]

In the bathroom.

[God of within simply answers probably not knowing or simply not caring how absurd and equally radical he was when feigning God of beyond]

But this is only the peak of the conversation between God and the faithful that my whole comment is based upon. The peak of this conversation is merely a fraction of all the conversational frenzy taking place between God and the faithful. It is simply a fractional peak that proves the unlikelihood of the situation.

As if to take in the full impact of knowing God’s unlikely position relative to her, the pregnant believer asks him the same question, to which she gets a similarly sinister answer:

Where are you, Lord?

In the bathroom!

Earlier, when these conversations started out of the same whim that God of within had been invented from, God of beyond, impersonated by God of within, played by the second most important narrator in the novel, hadn’t yet peaked as he was still God of beyond:

Dieu! Vous êtes ici? Pouves-vous m’entendre?

[The soon-to-be-mother believer asks in French, not knowing that God of within, whom she’d taken for God of beyond, only speaks English]

English, my child.

[God of within corrected her not knowing, or probably not caring, that God of beyond, the God he was playing at, was supposed to speak all the languages in the world]

Despite its appearing to be so within the realm of possibility, the scattered lengths of this conversation between God and his gravid believer are in fact well beyond any realm of possibility however far into the verisimilitude they may indeed be. This particular conversation, either at its lengthiest or at its shortest, which is making here no difference whatsoever, defies both the very touchable of the situation, and the very untouchable of it. After all, these highly improbable entretiens that are confabulatorily carried out between God and the faithful, when at their fakest, may only take place simply to stress the fact that they will never take place either within or beyond any realm of the verisimilar possibility.

This is what my comment on this book drew its inspiration from: a mere momentary fraction of the whole permanent dialogue between divinity and humanity caricatured into, and, if you will, ontologically downgraded to the equally tragic and comic miniatures of both the divine and the human.