The End of the Nineteenth Century(unpublished)
The study
of place and character that began in An American Memory continues with
The End of the Nineteenth Century. Set again in West Tree, Minnesota,
the events in the story sometimes precede those in Larsen’s first
novel, although at the same time the whole book extends a considerable
time beyond the ending-point of An American Memory, going, in fact, into
the future. In this climactic third in the tetralogy of novels, what Malcolm
Reiner sets out to do is create what will constitute, essentially, his
own intellectual autobiography, putting himself in the ancient tradition
of self-explorations from St. Augustine onwards.
For Malcolm, however, the story of his life must necessarily be a chronicle
of loss, an accumulation of increasing absences rather than the chronicle
of achievement, growth, stability, or wisdom that might make up a more
conventional history or biography. For Malcolm, the nineteenth century’s
end—including the disappearance of his own progenitors—wasn’t
a prelude to a greater age to follow, but the signpost toward a lesser:
it wasn’t an introduction to higher achievement, but the beginning
of a long diminishment that would, in the end, bring about not only the
end of history itself but the disappearance of everything.
So it is that when Malcolm begins learning what his own place and role
are to be within space and time—within history—he begins learning
also that within the span of his own lifetime, those same things are going
to disappear forever. His journey into such knowledge may sound abstruse,
but the means of his achieving it are simple, homely, often funny, sometimes
purely beautiful. Sitting in the upstairs bathroom of the house of his
great-aunts Marie and Lutie, he will become aware of "vertical"
and then "horizontal" thinking, of the inter-relatedness of
all things, and, not least, of death as the end of life ("I Learn
that I Am to Be a Student of the Mysteries of Space and Time").
As World War II is being fought on the other side of the world, Malcolm
learns more about the nature of space and time by seeing a blimp floating
overhead, by watching goldfish hovering in a pool, going on a car ride one
summer evening, or simply by hearing a distant train whistle in the middle
of the night. As he grows older, he "sees" into the past through
the "windows" afforded him in different parts of West Tree,
in his grandmother’s house, and on the old farm that his family
moves to in 1947. There, Malcolm lives through his "years of perfect
seeing," and there, in the front yard one summer morning in 1950,
he stumbles on the epiphanic moment that combines past, present, and future
and that more than any other experience will reveal, project, and determine
the outcome of his entire intellectual and artistic life—the moment
when he comes upon his father, entirely naked, sitting in a white wooden
lawn chair, smoking a cigarette, and looking out over the fields.