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Popular Culture Review
book of which we are explicitly told not to turn the pages? It is ‘‘the imperative
of the book format,” argues Steve Ingeman, “that demands that we get to the end
and overrides anything that the book might contain as content.”^ What drives a
book is the force of the book. It is a force that is at work on Grover and on the
reader.
From his home in Cairo, and later in Paris, Edmond Jabes reflected on
the status of his own Jewish identity as it stnictured a relation to writing and to
the book. Arguing, in The Book of Questions, that “you are the one who writes
and the one who is written,” Jabes proposes that the stranger has a privileged
role in the structure of a book, and that the very act of writing both creates who
one is and changes that Self into something Other. “I am. I become. I write,”
writes Jabes. And in an earlier poem: “1 am searching for a man 1 do not know,
who has never been more myself than since I have been looking for him.”^ This
is, as well, the claim of a man in search of a monster, a man who creates that
monster through the very act of searching.
Let us, then, consider a second possibility for understanding this text.
Let us say that The Monster at the End of This Book is an existentialist
account of what it means to encounter ourselves in a world where we are
radically free and yet desperately anguished because we are free. Sartrean
existentialism—the kind Grover would most clearly be modeling under this
reading—takes as its starting point that there is no God. Think of the difference,
Sartre would say, between a knife and a human being. The knife maker has an
idea of how he or she wants the knife to appear and what that knife will be used
for, what its telos will be. The essence of the knife precedes the existence of the
knife. First the designer has a plan (the essence), then the knife is constructed
(the existence). But if there is no God who made humanity, then there is no
creator to have had a plan in mind for us, no telos to impart to us, no blueprint to
follow, no essence for humankind. We simply are. And we only become
something-in-particular by doing things.
This, according to Sartre, gives rise to feelings of abandonment, for
there is, at least at first glance, nothing that makes us special: God is not there to
have created us; God is not there to love us; Jesus doesn’t want me for a
sunbeam. Yet, for Sartre, we are special—special precisely because we can
choose and thus become whatever we want. Which is not to say that there are no
restrictions whatsoever on the ethical demands that are attached to our choices,
for when we choose, we choose for all of humanity. The values we espouse by
choosing them become the values that we affirm in general as worth choosing.
Consequently, what we make ourselves into is precisely what we are trying to
make everyone else into. We thus have a responsibility that goes along with
every act of choosing that is overwhelming and anxiety-producing. Sartre
writes:
What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence?
We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself,
surges
up
in the
world—and
defines
himself