Notes from Who Was That Man

Notes from Who Was that Man?

Epigram:

“Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city…

…city crowed pushing wrestling shouldering, against the tide face after face, breath of liquor, infidel skin, shouts, threats, greetings, smiles, eyes and breasts of love, breathless, clutches of lust, limbs, bodies, torrents, bursts, savage onslaughts, tears, entreaties, stranglings, suicidal, the sky, the houses, white faces from afar bearing down nearer nearer, almost touching, and glances unforgotten and meant to be unforgotten.

Preface

(in the form of an interview/solo performance)

“I don’t think anybody’s life changes as fast as a gay men’s when he moves to a big city.” Pg xix.

Coming to a city is similar to coming out, a gradual process without a clear-cut healthy/happy narrative.

“Coming to London (and that isn’t something you do just by stepping off the train, it takes years, believe me, it’s taken years), coming to London meant moving into a life that already existed—I started to talk to other people for the first time, to go to places that already had a style, a history, if you like. What I’ve done, I suppose, is to connect my life to other lives, even buildings and streets, that had an existence prior to mine. This is in itself remarkable, because for the longest time imaginable I experienced my gayness in complete isolation, just like any other gay child in a small town. And now, gradually, I’ve come to understand that I’m connected to other men’s lives, men living in London with me, or with other, dad Londoners. That’s the story.” Pg xx.

Erotic charge of the city
Slipping between past and present, collapsing what is and what was
Performance/genre
People/geography

Oscar Wilde obsession→ creates the map of London he knows (his queer London, not just he night life, path between museums and archives, etc.”

“Every boy is looking to find his way around, looking for someone, because you arrive knowing nothing. You fall in love with people you never talk to; that’s a common experience. Men you never really touch or understand can lead you into such a different part of the city. So I’ve “fallen in love” with men I could never actually meet. I’m not embarrassed to say it, to say that I’ve fallen in love with some of those men from the past.” Pg xxii.

“Our story is not yet finished.” Pg 23.

Three ways of telling a story.
1. Coming out story
2. Collective history of homosexuality
3. Combination of 1 and 2, the story of a “great” homosexual

Patron saint

“His words began to ghost my writing.” Pg 26.

“Clearly, as far as I’m concerned, the complete works are not complete.” Pg 27. Wildean-legacy works as revisions to the cannon.

When searching for texts, Bartlett pursued texts with “the dogged energy [he] usually reserves for cruising.” Pg 28.

“I become excited by the smallest hints; I scrutinized every gesture for significance.” Pg 28.

This work, his research, is an erotic experience.

“I hunted out the places where my explorations of London might still coincide with Oscar’s,” Pg 28.
Now Neil Bartlett adopts the ghostly role.
Is there something about this haunted language?

What about all of the trials that come before Oscar?

“I subject the story of my own life as a gay man to constant scrutiny; we all do. We have to because we’re making it up as we go along.” Pg 30.

Later in the book, Neil Bartlett critiques Oscar Wilde’s misogyny several times. Does this criticism from a fellow Oscar Wilde obsessor validate my love for him in some way?

Neil Bartlett utilizes camp as a reading/critical methodology (or strategy) when studying Wilde’s work. Pg 32.

Recognition, “the commonest of gay pleasures.” Pg 35.

“The works of Oscar Wilde, for instance, were written for us and us alone, and only we can truly understand them. We belong together, don’t you think?” Pg 36.

Sprinkles Wildean quotes and witticisms throughout/between paragraphs, interrupting, and often complicating his argument—how does one read queerness into something whose author expressly advises against it?

Chapter 2: Flowers

Among other things, offers close readings of Wilde’s works, particularly with regard to flowers, the green carnation worn by Salome, etc.

Not quite cross-gender identification—somehow link this to musicals/fandom, AMONI

On Salome, “Her anxious desire is suddenly that of an adolescent boy; she is the fourteen-year-old I Once was, the boy waiting for someone to take away the guilty of his desire by seducing him.” Pg 42 (the only way to yield temptation is to yield to it).

Interesting, performance, Salome becomes audience, not the other way around. Reverse identification.

“Desired community” Pg 48.

Direct address to audience/reader:

“Consider, also, how the apparently archaic system of attributes of “the homosexual” to which the princess alludes is till part of your own life.”—Clearly encouraging the reader’s engagement, interactive reading.

“What I am claiming, though, is that some of my most basic ides about myself as a homosexual man were invented for me by other men, in another time, in another city.” Pg 49.

“Some anecdotes claim that he invented and popularized the flower, but it seems more likely that he stole that fashion from Paris, where, it is said, the flower was the insignia of homosexual men.” Pg 50.

In Salome, “The little green flower is not simply a decorative flourish, or a subtle hint of perversity. It is a sign. A promise. The two men understand each other’s intentions, and they share a desire. Salome offers the Syrian a little green flower, and then smiles at him (Look at me) and knows that he will do what she wants.” Pg 52.

“Although neither of the words homosexual or gay can neatly be applied to him, since this is the summer of 1891, the summer of Salome, this man has changed himself from a man with homosexual desires into a gay man.” Pg 53.

“Following a very specific set of signs, the lived in a city within a city, hidden and organized.” Pg 53.

“How is it that we load so much meaning into such delicate signs? Does any of this (1891094) mean anything to me now (1981-88)? But I remember that the signs can’t have been easy for Oscar either. They didn’t come naturally. Like me, he didn’t always live in London. He moved there in 1879, and then he too had to learn how to live there, here, had to learn the signs. So it’s the same story. Perhaps I’ll wear a green flower tonight.” Pg 57.
Wearing green carnations as counterpublic practice?

“Even as we discover the most obscure and outrageous fragments of our history, the more obvious and ordinary sources of information at last.” Pg 59.

Chapter 3: Faces

“I was never content with just words on a page, old books. What I always wanted to see was their faces. When I was a boy, I always wanted to k now what other men looked like, what men looked like, later we use each other.” Pg 61.
As in AMONI, he invokes the use of the mirror

“He was violently if occasionally misogynistic, since all the women of his texts are losers, at a loss when faced by virile men, sentimentally happy to submit, he is in love with the Ideal Woman, ignorant of her struggles but eager to wear her frocks.” Pg 61.

This section is both photo album and guessing game (guess who!)—like memory, a potential list of Who’s Who of Potential Victorian homosexuals.” Rather than captions, each picture features corresponding questions, asking questions that are simultaneously about the reader and the subject, inviting identification

This list contains “proven” homosexuals and men the author simply wishes were…

Chapter 4: Words

Quotes dictionary definitions of love, all of which are completely homosexual

“I have no place in these pages, although I wonder if the editor knew what he was doing when he quoted a citation from AE Houseman.” Pg 77. The irony of reappropriation.

Quotation from “My Secret Life”—“not because of anything I said, but because of the language that is used to say it.” Pg 79.

“I understand what this Soho queen of the 1870s is saying. This fragment of her voice, small as it is, tells me that there was a different world (how sweet it is among ourselves), a different experience of sex (of course being fucked is a pleasure), and best of all, a different language (I did not understand-the tables are turned for once—it is he who is baffled by our words.)” Pg 79.

“When we speak in our own language, we destroy the notion that talking about a gay experience is even worse than doing it” Pg 79.

“Even those whisperings have a history.” Pg 79.

“The need to talk among ourselves has made our language elaborate.” Pg 80.

“He is safe again. Dorian, like his creator, understands the real Importance of Speaking differently.” Pg 80.

“In Wilde’s exotic, allusive vocabulary, high literature aspires to the status of slang.” Pg 80s.

“And I remember that there are passages in Dorian Gray’s story that sound as though they should only be whispered, late at night, by one man to another.” Pg 81.

“Do you recognize any of these words there from your own lexicon of gossip, seduction, or obscenity? Perhaps you also use the words queen, trade, or drag. Does it follow that you would then be able to talk to, understand, even flirt with those men from ninety years ago, if on some extraordinary drugged evening we could all meet? It would be like costume night at the pub; such strangely different styles and voices, but no one a stranger. Since so much of our verbal finery is handed down, we would recognize some of the words and phrases. Would they still describe the same experiences? Would thee be enough for us all to talk to one another?” Pg 82.

“Teleny, published in 1893 and London’s first gay porn novel, is full of gay characters and incidents, and certainly included gay men among its authors. It seems to relate our story, in our language, because it seems that this text—hidden for so long and part of our dark, private world, speaking a pornographic language which seems hardly to have changed at all—this text speaks of how close to our history I am, of how we created our own lives and own desires even then.” Pg 83.

Diary entry? “All the time, I needed to find our own words, even if I spoke the same language as other men. I knew from experience that this speech would be me marred and decorated by resistance and confusion. We have very different things to express. This requires the invention of different mannerisms and inflections to alter the meaning of our city’s language. I listened to my peers, to the continuous gay chatter of the past hundred years, and I learnt how to do it.” Pg 84.

“Our first experience of talking as gay men (which is always different from talking of gay men) is the experience of lying.” Pg 84.

Inviting men from the past to be our witnesses—pg 86. Historical movement goes in multiple directions.

“The existing words can become inadequate, painful. And I love you still seems much harder to say than “I want you to fuck me.” Pg 86.

On Oscar Wilde and Bosie:

“(I could hardly continue reading the letters the night I read. I have no words for how I love you. I have no words for how I love you—in the same letter of July, 1894 as he wrote, I can’t live without you. That he should say that the man who spent his whole life talking, writing words, the man who everybody said could talk so brilliantly, that he of all men could be silent, at a loss for words.) I’ve tried calling him darling. I’ve described him as my lover, my boyfriend (but only in joke), my friend, mate, fuck, trick, man (that’s my man.) He is master, husband, wife, affair, love, himself, the other half the number one. Words fail me.”—somehow, by the end of the paragraph, NB is able to accept when words fail him. Pg. 87

Glosses British gay slang.

Chapter 5: Evidence

“We detect its presence in The Complete Works not so much by the encoded hints of what is lurking beneath the text as by a single obvious sin of its absence.” Pg 93.
Knowing Wilde’s sexuality and the absence of explicit queerness in each of texts encourages queer scavenging of his works.

Review of The Picture of Dorian Gray—“He suggested, cryptically, that it was intended to be read by outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys.” Pg 94.
This review of The Picture of Dorian Gray leads to the discovery of other queer lives.

“All that is permitted is a suggestion, an ominous possibility, a threat, something to be guessed at or detected. Homosexuality cannot be spoken.” Pg 95.

The amount of suicides related to these trials.

“These scrapbooks draw no conclusions, they only bear witness to the need to collect and keep and compare notes. They amass evidence, reminding us that it is never true that we are silent, or safe, or that our speech is safe from those who would silence or forget us. The scrapbook is the true form of our history, since it records what we remember, and embodies its omissions both how he remember and how we forget our lives. We are always held between ignorance and exposure.” Pg 99.
Eclectic archives, archives as queer

“My contemporary collection is as eclectic as its model. I simply moved from book to book following clues, reading anything and keeping everything. The wall was soon covered in paper. Looking to my history, I am generous. I am fascinated by everyone. I suppose I treat my past lives with indiscriminate respect because I want to know everyone’s story. This behavior is in marked contrast to that determined by our current tastes. Observing our contemporaries, we choose to know nothing of other people’s lives, to remember little of other people’s stories. This city is, after all, big enough and wide enough for us to live happily ignorant, we don’t want o know.” Pg 99.

Oscar Wilde as a man who “lived too many lives.”

“A diary lies if it gives too neat a pattern to its furious assembled histories, if it never surprises you with its events and choices. So why do we keep diaries? So we can look them up later and see what happened and then maybe say what it meant, and to whom.” Pg 101.

Fragments as witness-reciprocal relationship with the texts.

Wilde on Pater—“that book which had such a strange influence over my life.” Pg 101.

Timelines of queer literature and pornography in the 40 years preceding Wilde’s trial—much of which is journalism.

Relationship between Dorian Gray to the Cleveland Street Scandal—“The charges against Dorian are dangerously topical and almost specific. Pg 112.

Weaves Wilde’s works, and Wilde’s imagined reading of other works, amongst the quotations.

When Dorian Gray was published in magazine form, it had more explicitly homosexual content.

1891—“If we cannot alter your laws, we will go on breaking them.” (JA Symmonds) Pg 113.

The Star, 4 March 1882: “Mr. Oscar Wilde and a suite of young gentlemen, all wearing the vivid died carnation.” Pg 115.

“Set free in a luxurious and erotic pseudo-archaeological fantasy, the Victorian homosexual can still only imagine his obscure object of desire as an artwork, or a corpse.” Pg 119.

“The artist”—a forum for Victorian homosexual theories and practice.

An opera featuring a Wildean Dandy named Cyril Vane premiered in 1893.

Two months prior to his fall, “Scandals used to lend charm, or at least interest to a man—now they crush him.” Pg 124.

“Once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties, he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don’t like that. It makes men so very attractive.” Pg 124.

“What this accumulation of details means, most simply, is that the gay culture of London was there. It was organized in a variety of forms, spoke both private and public languages, inhabited both private and public spaces, was both terrified and courageous.” Pg 128.

What is it about translation? Code witching? English/French? Heterosexual/homosexual? Bosie translated Salome….the exotics of translation? Pg 128.

“The discovery of homosexuality in 1895 was a contrived spectacle.” Pg 128.

“The fiction of our invisibility remains influential. Most people, ourselves, included, think we are invisible, both in the contemporary life of the city (as in, I don’t think I know any gay people, only you, or…are there ay gay pubs near here?) and in the history of the city. Even after I moved here in 1981, I moved right into a busy and complex gay scene, anything outside my immediate experience remained invisible.” Pg 128.

“When I find traces of his life, and of other lives, I’m not sure how to react, whether to celebrate, or turn away and look out the window;, like he did, angry, angry that all these stories have been forgotten. This “evidence” raises important questions about my own attitude to our own history. Do we view it with dismay, since it is a record of sorrow, or powerlessness, of lives wrecked? Or is it possible to read these texts, written as they were by journalists, policemen, and court clerks, with delight, as precious traces of dangerous, pleasurable, complicated gay lives?’ Pg 129.
Adore or become? Perform him?

When speaking of Fanny and Stella—“The scale of their activities can be judged by the splendour of their wardrobe.” Pg 132. Relate to Velvet Goldmine?

“They adropted a public style, a style which made public their sexual identity.”

Rather than recognizing the association between drag and homosexuality, courts denied the existence of homosexuality altogether.

“You cannot legislate against a language simply by imprisoning two people who speak that language. Better to deny the existence of the language altogether.” Pg 141.

Link to Velvet Goldmine—the tactic of using the journalistic “scandal” or expose to boost the mass circulation of newspaper was invented in this period.” Pg 143.

“Wilde was not intolerable because he was a homosexual. He was intolerable because he was a public man who was a homosexual.” Pg 148.

“If his example to us was not of how a man can be swiftly and violently silenced, but of how his work can endure, not as evidence of disaster, but as witness, seducer, guide?” Pg 148.

Extremities—invisible or hypervisible

Homosexuality portrayed as something that had “suddenly, shockingly appeared in the form of Oscar Wilde.” Pg 140.

The articulation of desire, not the existence of threat desire, is what is contested.

“The definition of pornography is that we know exactly what the text is going to mean even before we open the book.” Pg 155.

“By playing priest, they make you confess.” Pg 162.

The end of chapter 5…interesting…

Chapter 6: Forgery

Inspired invention

Changed name to Sebastian Melmouth (“call me Sebastian”)

“We are all fakes, all inventions. We are making this up as we go along.”

Chapter 7: Possessions:

“Whenever I imagine him posed, it is not naked or against a bare wall. It is not with other people (other men) but characteristically, as a single man in a room, in an interior. It is not just himself he composes and arranges. In the room of each of my lovers or friends, there is a singular collection of possessions.” Pg 173.

“And each of Wilde’s heroes is a collector, a connoisseur.”—is he collecting us? Pg 173.

“But he does not care what he collects. It is the activity of collecting itself that he enjoys. He will lead me from room to room, each one full.” Pg 174.

“Can a list ever actually give us the pleasures it describes and promises, or can it only ever seek to choke the hunger that gapes beneath it by amassing a junkshop of unconvincing details. All its verbal luxuries actually achieve is to remind us that this is not enough. Living in a city, you are always looking in shop windows, looking in magazines, bring invited to want. Always you want more.” Pg 175.

“The text mimics the movements of Wilde’s prose; the activity of the listing itself is erotic.” Pg 177.

“Think of the sequence of rooms through which your seductions have taken you, the living rooms, the bedrooms, and how their contents have impressed you, how they have been as sensual and as significant for you as their owners themselves.” Pg 178.
Link to Ann—fetishization of objects

“Our pleasures have no lie of their own. They exist to reaffirm the life of their owner.”

Consumption.

“If on a dark night I whispered in your ear the most predictably Wilde of sexual fantasies, if I could show you a shining shop-window full of luxuries; if I could lead you through a silent museum galleried with overwhelming gorgeousness, then your whispered reply to my question would be of course, yes, that is what I really want.” Pg 183.
What do I make of these sections?

“The intoxication of possession, the importance of repeatedly possessing things, is a characteristic pleasure of life in the city.” Pg 183.

Novel: A Rebours

“Now that the reveler (the lover) is stone-cold sober, the vine leaves, the champagne, and the moonstones must be catalogued as all-too-accurate signs of life he has led in this, his chosen city.” Pg 186.

“The strangest thing is that it’s so hard to tell if its true or not. My father always said, if you’re not sure if it’s the real thing, then it isn’t. In ten years time I suppose I’ll be with someone else, or on my own, or I’ll have left the city, and I’ll look back and wonder how I could have believed that what I felt was real. I’ve felt so much for so many men. I look into his eyes and wonder if this is it. That’s why I’m starting to keep this diary, I suppose I just want to write down what is happening, against the time when it isn’t happening, any more and I want to remember how and why I did all this.” Pg 189.

Series of diary entries, some comprising only of TIOBE quotes

Lord Darlington in LWF: “From the moment I met you, I loved you, loved you blindingly, adoringly, madly.” Pg 190.

“But I can’t forget that there was more than one man he sent such letters to. I wonder, would the words become true if I dared to use them myself.” Pg 190.

The repetitious cycle, Wilde of William Shakespeare, us of Wilde

“Shakespeare is to Wilde what Wilde has been to later cultures; the homosexual, our archetype.” Pg 193.

Close reading of “The Portrait of Mr. W. H. “mixing academic and erotic passions” Pg 19203.

Robbie Ross-Wilde’s lover, pre-Bosie. Robbie as a character in AMONI. Link?

“Between them, they spun a whole fantasy of homosexual culture.” Pg 193.

Moves on to close reading of Dorian Gray.

Diary. “Every love affair begins with the certain knowledge that there has never been anything like this before…We dream about men before we ever meet them.” Pg 196—queer temporality, desiring men from the future and the past.

“I knew all the time that like Erskine, like Wilde, I was scrutinizing an imagined historical London to see if it would reveal the face and the ancestry of my own lover. When I sat there with the books, at midnight, I knew what I wanted from them.”

“Wilde’s quote about literary ancestors from TPODG. Requited on Pg 198.

“So I re-read The Complete Works, looking for my ancestors. To a young man alone in a library, all of Wilde’s texts can begin to conspire, to imagine rather than record his life.” Pg 198.

“His crimes seem to have had an important effect on his art.” Pg 198.

“The idea that one man’s experience may be the repetition of another’s.” Pg 199-simultaneously unique→experiencing isolation but knowingly repetitive.

On Maurice—“I bought my copy in 1977. It was the first book I ever bought because I’d heart (at school) that it was by a homosexual.” Pg 201.

“Originality is not a virtue in our culture; the most beautiful and successful men model themselves on other men. I never believe Wilde, not for a minute.” Pg 201.

“Originality is not a virtue in our culture; the most beautiful and successful men model themselves on other men. I never believe Wilde, not for a minute.” Pg 201.

Wilde’s plagaerism—“If the words are so systematically re-used, the value of this currency must lie somewhere apart from ‘originality.” Pg 202.

“Wilde’s repition—“The glittering phrases, which seem an utterance to be true because they are both spontaneous and unique, are reproduced, shifted form mouth to mouth and from text to text.” Pg 203.

On Wilde’s courtroom defense—“If this, the truest of all his speeches, is a quotation, or worse, a quotation from his own work, then what answer can we hope to have to our question the only question we ever want to ask of history, the first question we must ask ourselves, is this true?” Pg 204.

“We grow up invisible and alone, but then we characteristically move from complete isolation into what feels like a complete culture in a very short space of time.” Pg 205.

‘When people ask me why I live in London, I say, I’ve made a life for myself. But I haven’t invented a life, I have moved, made a place for myself in a life that already existed. It’s quite true. I am other people.” Pg 205.

“Our very sense of identity is constructed around the idea of a unique self, and around the act of “finding yourself,” making a practical distinction between our (gay) selves and the (oppressive) society which produced us. We are original.” Pg 206.

“I didn’t’ so much “come out” as “go in,” since at the very moment at which we come out, we declare our difference form the world, we immerse ourselves in a highly stylized, pressured, conventional society; gay society.” Pg 206.

“I have found that it is when we are most like each other when we enter an economy based on the exchange of shared signs, that we have found our greatest strength. True individualists, our enthusiasms are vulgar, our passions commonplace, our venues familiar, our tastes predictable and our faces recognizable.” Pg 207.

“When you are old, who will ghost your memoirs?” Pg 209.

“At the very moment at which, historically, we ban to exist, he created a biography of a homosexual man in which fake and true are quite indistinguishable.” Pg 209.

“Perhaps I like the idea that we’re being watched. I like the idea that he should see us, see how we boys now live in his city.” Pg 209.

Chapter 9—Letters to Oscar

“I suppose it’s gestures like that, public and unremarkable, that you could never enjoy.” Pg 211.

Chapter 10

“We are about to escape. The world is about to change.” Pg 215.

“Even after a night spent in his arms, morning comes. He has to get up and go to work. Even after the darkest sex (darkness of love, darkness of ordinary but well-executed lust.” Pg 215.

“The bland and the awful are harmoniously co-existent.” Pg 216.

“History can be a dark night too. It can move us. From its gallery of ‘characters we choose those heroes who exert the greatest of erotic or intellectual attraction—Saint Oscar, or the hardest, most anonymous boy.” Pg 216.

“…making love after dark just like we do, their lives unbelievably courageous because their lives were like ours, supposed to be impossible.” Pg 217.

“If we were all ever to meet, surely it would be a wonderful party.” Pg 217.

“London is not always recognizable as London.” Pg 217.

“You have always told me you were a homosexual. I have always introduced you to everyone as a homosexual. You look like a homosexual. You are the most homosexual-looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd you saying you want to change.” Pg 218.

Gay cultural apocalypse—Pg 220

Wilde/San Francisco/AIDS Pg 221

“For many of us “born” late, the lack of a past, of history, is not felt as a lack. Too eager for the future to look back. I used to think I had no need for a history, no need to look for Wilde’s London for information, for inspiration.” Pg 221—both fact and fantasy.

“I’ve begun to notice other parts of the city, and I realize that he men who live there are no more or less historic, part of history than Oscar Wilde. They are expert in the complications of their own culture. They reassure me that we are not the first to have to fight for our lives.” Pg 221.

“The one duty we owe history is to re-write it.” Oscar Wilde, qtd. Pg 223.

“If you don’t’ know the stories, then how can you cherish your own life, hold it precious.” Pg 223.

“What does he look like, this man you’re dreaming of, this man you want to be.” Pg 224—vampirism, ID/Desire

Mirror imagery—on Dorian Gray. “It comes alive again as I now scrutinize it, read into it and from it, make it give up new meanings as I attempt to use it as a mirror, a dictionary of anatomy of my own, still nameless sin.” Pg 224.

Class and drag Pg. 226

On gay Victorians. “They reduced the rules and models of culture to a fantasy in order to make it malleable to their own commands. They read between the liens of history, stole its best liens for their own use. Thy were magpies, thieves, bricoleus for whom the past could be reassembled, given new and wicked meanings.” Pg 227.

“We now have public languages in which to rewrite ourselves.” Pg 227.

“One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.” Oscar Wilde, page 229, link to VG

Reconstructing history and geography

Danger of rewriting history

“We are offered a very particular and potent freedom of the city. Sometimes it feels like vertigo. Don’t be scared. We do it all the time.” Pg 230.

Erotic encounters in the city as a young boy-1983

Italics interruption, Pg 234.

“What kind of city is this? Sometimes I sit in my room, after a man has left of I’m walking to meet a friend, or I’m waiting to get on a bus to come and see you, and I wonder, if just once, if just once we tell each other what our lives have been like, what would happen?” Pg 235.

“DG-esque ending—where does that leave us?