“The more provocative question would be, according to quantum indeterminacy, does New York City actually exist? At least, if you take the hypothesis of theoretical physics to its logical conclusion… NYC [is] as an illusion purveyed by a malevolent scientist.” – Albertine Notes, page 200
The strangest thing about Rick Moody’s Albertine Notes is not its horror, physics or plot. Nor is it even the utter plausibility (almost to the point of likelihood?) of his Manhattan-doomsday scenario. No, what lends the novella its gripping power is its matter-of-fact, journalistic ease: the apocalypse, cast as an undercard headline in a soft-core porn mag. As I read the Notes, I was struck also by its similarity to a certain other book of notes – Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Underground, to which Moody is certainly paying homage. Like the classic underground man, our canary-hero reports quite naturally the greatest excesses of opinion and event, and leads his reader to question whether it’s the world or the man that has gone mad. One of them, or both, has fissured beyond repair.
And that’s what Albertine represents: that horrendous, reflexive forgetting. Just as in The Road, the death of the world that was can hardly merit a page of description. For those who lived through it, the pain is manifest in everything about their broken lives. Reflection upon its source is impossible– as Lee mentions early on, people seem to just drop dead when they are taken back to the Day under Albertine bitch queen’s dirty-dropper influence. Instead, as time continues to warp in on itself in a more and more convoluted fashion, survivors take refuge in the memory of things gone by, though even there autumn and its decay always closes in. The Albertine Notes questions the idea of destruction not because of, say, the inherent goodness of society and human hearts, but because – if and when it comes – no one will be sure what happened.
So the task, as it always has, boils down to something very simple: bearing witness to the chaos, and holding it together enough so that you might feel its sorrow and thence make it human (so often they go hand-in-hand). That’s why Lee is “collectible… like a power-hitting shortstop;” he wonders, he feels, and he manages to write it down. He ponders conspiracy or lack thereof, governments and cartels and labial narrative space. He dives into the past to try and save Addict Number One, and gets entangled in a future where he both failed and succeeded. He is a product of New York City, as we are, and lives with chaos as a bedfellow. Somehow, even sans time as we have constructed it, true human virtue is as clear as ever: it is the courage to bring order to chaos; to face your death, and the death of your world, with the strength of an immortal and the knowledge of a god.
I think the title of your post is very important. He becomes an important witness because he is a journalist, a writer, and he can keep a record of history. After becoming an addict, he can no longer be that witness. The written history becomes the only thing that the people can grasp onto because they can’t go on relying on their own memories and their perception of the present because it is constantly changing. The written word becomes the only tangible thought that can be trusted.