Hi everyone,
I hope you are managing to stay dry and safe. As you may know by now, classes have been canceled for Tuesday at Macaulay. That’s disappointing because I was especially eager to discuss this work, having so enjoyed your posts. So let’s try to spend time during the day to reply to each other and add other posts on it. And look at Anastassia’s Pet Care link in case you missed it.
Best, Lee
In Rick Moody’s “Albertine Notes,” he uses a variety of literary tropes to create a story where the reader becomes just as lost as those taking Albertine. (Did anyone else notice that? I thought it was a beautiful syntactic move.)
When I began to read this novella, I was struck by the oddity of the title – the name/word “Albertine” isn’t one heard very often. I tried searching for meaning, and I found a few interesting references (through Wikipedia) that seem connected, at least, to the ideas of power, rule, and sex and prostitution:
Albertine Sarrazin, a French female prostitute, and the Statuto Albertino, a law passed by King Charles that gave the King absolute power over the ruled, and the military forces. (There was also this song which I found semi-relevant, with the violent imagery and lyrics about faith.)
These may only be coincidences, but I was struck by the relation to the Statuto Albertino – it reminded me of the belief that fundamentalist Christians may have about God, that God is absolute and controls everything – that every event, thus, is happening as part of God’s will. It also reminded me of Cortez in the novella, who seems to be the ruling dealer of New York City and also who uses the military.
What is interesting about “The Albertine Notes” is the way that time works kairiotically but in a backwards and forwards way at the same time, I feel. There is the constant attempt to reach back to a past that has been obliterated, much like the past that the “born-again” relinquish. Except in Kevin’s world, the past holds a holiness – and, layering on top of that, a conscious person who is sober can look back onto the past and know the future that succeeds it. While on Albertine, the user feels the past event and only that moment, singularly. Realistically, in a present, out-of-time moment that is almost a way of subverting time, not unlike those who adopt a fundamentalist mindset. This is interesting (and super complicated) because it inserts the apocalyptic event into the middle of the timeframe, with everything being measured in reference to that event. However, the future still holds a relative waiting-out for something else to occur, though in this (“Godless”?) apocalypse what that event exactly will be is unsure.
The Albertine Notes often left me as confused as the Book of Revelation did. The lack of chronological time and the explanations of events as if the reader has been a part of the prior events had me re-reading passages to see if there was something I had missed, especially in the beginning. Like my classmates have said, this novella is a definite example of kairotic time. Continue reading
Religion is the opiate of the masses.
– Karl Marx
I love how Rick Moody’s Albertine Notes mentions in passing the bombing of half of a large portion of the city and the corruption of its water supply, weighing them against one another, but instead focus’ primarily on the dangers of mass drug use and the impact of that on the city. Continue reading
The first thing that I noticed when I started reading “The Albertine Notes” was that time was measured kairotically. Time is not measured, but marked by events:
The use of kairotic time is justified by the fact that people want to hold on to their memories after an apocalyptic event. By using Albertine, they are able to hold on to memories and by doing so their perception of time becomes altered from chronologic to kairotic. Kevin knows the concept of chronological time (p. 158), but it seems that he no longer understands it. He cannot tell whether two days or two weeks have passed. Because no significant event had happened to mark the time, time has just simply passed without any kind of measurement.
When reading Rick Moody’s novella, The Albertine Notes, I was confused initially midway through when Kevin started taking Albertine. Yet after a while, I realized the story was non-linear and that it functioned on kariotic time, as time was never discussed when Kevin was under the influence of drugs. Another thing that I realized was that at the end of the story, he seemed strung out on drugs, yet these are his notes. How did he himself muster the effort to write everything he wrote? After all, at the beginning of the story, he is writing in the past tense as if everything had already happened already. I kept wondering how this novella could be interpreted, and in the end I settled that The Albertine Notes uses the post-apocalyptic setting with the fundamentalist ideology of kariotic time.
The character Cortez was an interesting addition because his role constantly seemed to shift. Throughout Kevin’s point of view, Cortez was a character that owns a cartel, to a man who committed his first murder through a memory, and to someone who wanted to bomb Manhattan. It was quite confusing to actually follow along with what was being said throughout the story. Another thing was the shifting perceptions of who his mom was. He was confused with the image of Cassandra as his mom. He even had memories of her being a chief chemist for the Cortez syndicate, informer for the Resistance, just a young woman, and of her as an older Chinese Woman. The memories of Cassandra were introduced as may or may not; meaning that Kevin was high and was going through different points of events through kariotic time. After all, when he was locked inside a supply closet in order getting high on Albertine, the reader was told the amount of time that he was on the drug.
Nevertheless, I found The Albertine Notes, to be confusing to follow at times when Kevin was slipping in and out of different memories. I think this was set by design by the author who wanted to display kariotic time, as anything kariotic can only be displayed in a nonlinear sense. Then again it could be like that just because Kevin was under the influence of Albertine making the confusion over memories as was one of the dilemmas that I was faced while I was reading the novella.
