Popular Culture Review
to convince the reader to stop turning pages, to end the narrative flow and avoid
the inevitable conclusion. When reason and pleading fail to stop the progression
of the story, he attempts to force the pages together—with rope, wooden boards,
and bricks—to keep them from being turned; and still the reader, God-like in the
desire and the will to see this to the end, forces the pages open one by one until
the conclusion: a conclusion that finds only Grover himself at the end of the
book, Grover the monster, Grover the beginning and end of the narrative, alone
with his fear, his embarrassment, and his relief.
Let us consider the possibility that this is a modernist allegory. As a
metaphorical parable for our confrontation with death, the title of the book
makes it clear that the finale—our collective shared finale—is set. There is no
question, no question mark, no possibility of a different outcome. This fear of
non-being marks our existence: if we refrain from turning the next page can we
stop the monstrous end from coming? Plead and beg and fight as we might, our
own death awaits us at the end. Reading allegorically each of Grover’s attempts
to stop the flow, then, we can see the whole of human history bemoaning our
mortality. Grover moves from tying rope to nailing boards to laying bricks. Like
the Three Little Pigs who make their homes of progressively more trustworthy
materials—at least so it seems—Grover attempts to avoid the Big Bad Monster
who eventually comes to blow us all down.
He turns to rope. As far back as 17,000 BCE, humans were making
rope. It is a natural material, a stringing together of the fibers of date palms, flax,
grass, papyrus, hemp, and animal hair. Such strings and vines and lines exist
already in nature; rope is just a matter of putting them all together, twisting them
into something that makes sense to us and is useful to us. And so are all the
struggles of life and death, of an animate wilderness pulsing with life and with
meaning. The spirits of animals and plants all around us, their stories and their
presence intertwined with ours like loose strands of a grander story as we see
ourselves in relation to them, our being in relation to their being. The pantheists
look to the world, see the forces of nature at work, and put them together,
twisting them into a picture that makes sense and is useful. Weaving together the
fibers of the natural world, a worldview emerges. We will avoid our demise by
making sense of it all, by using nature to bind us together, by pulling together
disparate bits of life and death into a grand scheme that reconciles nonexistence
with existence. In the Incan language a quipu is a knot as well as a collection of
ropes and strings with bundled knots of various kinds. The Incans tied these
knots in rope in intricate patterns used to store information and convey
knowledge. Knots and ideas were tied and untied, leaving a bundle of rope that
spoke a language meant to be felt as well as seen, whole stories passing over
ones fingers in what anthropologist Gary Urton calls a “three-dimensional
binary code.”^ Recorded in twisted strands of natural fibers were their desperate
desires to speak to animal spirits, to their ancestors, to prepare to spend eternity
with the Sun rather than in the damp ground alone. But the force of history—and
Spanish conquest—ends the project. The stories make sense and give us