A discussion of Chapters 5–7 of The Platform at the End of the Catalogue
Mr Blottisham arrived at the Senior Common Room carrying three books, a sheet of paper covered in diagrams, and a look of considerable satisfaction.
“I have discovered the principle,” he announced.
Professor Quillibrace glanced at the books. “Of the novel?”
“Of the universe described by the novel.”
Miss Stray put down her cup. “That was quick.”
“Not at all. I have been working on it since our last meeting. The universe is a collection of nested realities. Each contains a smaller version of itself, which contains a smaller version of itself, and so on. The narrator is trapped in this arrangement because he has mistaken one level for another.”
Quillibrace examined the diagram.
“You have drawn a series of boxes.”
“Precisely.”
“Have you considered that the boxes might simply be boxes?”
Blottisham sat down. “I see that our previous discussion has made no impression whatsoever.”
“On the contrary,” said Miss Stray. “I think we should begin with your boxes.”
1. A room inside a room
“In Chapter Five,” Miss Stray began, “the narrator encounters two Eleanors, both of whom claim to be Eleanor. Then there is the photograph containing a photograph of the same room, and the catalogue entries that refer to themselves. The museum's exhibits eventually disappear, leaving only their labels.”
“An obvious case of progressive abstraction,” Blottisham said. “The world sheds its accidental properties until only the essential categories remain.”
“Perhaps,” said Quillibrace. “But what happens to the distinction between the representation and the thing represented?”
Blottisham frowned.
“The photograph represents the room. The photograph within the photograph represents the photograph representing the room. And the catalogue represents the museum's contents, including, apparently, the catalogue itself.”
“Exactly,” said Miss Stray. “Each representation introduces another level, but the levels don't remain comfortably separate. The photograph contains the room, the room contains the photograph, and the photograph contains the room again.”
“A vicious circle,” said Blottisham.
“Or a structure in which the same relationship appears at different levels,” Quillibrace suggested. “The important point is not simply that one thing is inside another. It is that the relation between them recurs.”
He took Blottisham's diagram and turned it sideways.
“Your boxes all have different sizes. But suppose we asked what remains the same as we move from one to another?”
“The boxes,” Blottisham said.
“The arrangement,” Miss Stray corrected gently. “Perhaps the pattern matters more than the size of any particular box.”
Blottisham recovered his diagram.
“I shall redraw it.”
“Do,” said Quillibrace. “But I recommend leaving some space on the page for the possibility that the pattern is not complete.”
2. How small can a world become?
Miss Stray returned to the passage in which the narrator examines the catalogue's floor plans.
“What interested me was that the catalogue doesn't merely contain information about the museum. It contains representations of the museum that include the narrator himself. He is looking at a plan of a place in which he is already present.”
“Which means that he is simultaneously inside the world and outside it,” said Blottisham.
“Does it?” asked Quillibrace.
“Certainly. He is inside the museum, but outside it as the person looking at its representation.”
“Yet the person looking at the representation is also inside the museum. We have not escaped anything.”
Blottisham stared at the plan.
“I see what you mean.”
“Do you?” Miss Stray asked.
“I am beginning to.”
She smiled. “The story repeatedly offers us a view from which the narrator seems to be able to see the world as a whole. But the view itself belongs to that world. The catalogue is not an external vantage point from which he can survey everything. It is another object within the arrangement he is trying to understand.”
Quillibrace nodded. “This is one reason the story's repeated enclosures are so effective. A representation seems to promise distance and control. Yet the representation can itself become something that requires explanation.”
“And then we need another representation to explain that one,” said Miss Stray.
“And another to explain the next,” Quillibrace added.
Blottisham looked alarmed. “Surely there must be a final one?”
“Why?” asked Miss Stray.
“Because otherwise the process never ends.”
“Perhaps it doesn't,” said Quillibrace.
There was a silence.
“Then,” said Blottisham, “the author has failed to finish the book.”
Quillibrace took a sip of tea.
“An ingenious conclusion. Let us see whether it survives the evidence.”
3. The catalogue that contains the catalogue
“The catalogue is becoming rather important,” Miss Stray observed.
“It was important from the beginning,” Blottisham said. “It is an index of the world.”
“But it doesn't merely index things. Its entries refer to other entries, sometimes in ways that bring us back to where we started. Station leads to Museum, Museum to Library, Library to Catalogue, and Catalogue to Station.”
“A circular index,” said Blottisham. “Badly designed.”
“Possibly,” said Quillibrace. “But consider the alternative. What if the catalogue is not a map that leads us out of the world, but a device that reveals how the places in the world are related?”
Miss Stray turned a page.
“The narrator tries to use it to locate Platform 0. Eleanor suggests that he cannot find it because he is looking in the wrong place. Yet the difficulty may not be geographical at all. Each attempt to locate the platform seems to involve another part of the same system.”
“So the catalogue is a map of the maze,” Blottisham said.
“Perhaps. But a map of a maze normally gives us some perspective on the maze. This catalogue seems to be caught up in the very relations it records.”
Quillibrace tapped the table.
“Notice the difference between a list of places and a system of references. A list can be incomplete, and we may add the missing item. But a system in which every item refers to another item raises a different question: what counts as an item in the first place? And what counts as the place to which it refers?”
Blottisham looked down at his notes.
“I have an index in my forthcoming book.”
“Does it refer to itself?” Miss Stray asked.
“Certainly not.”
“Perhaps you should check.”
He made a note.
4. When the archive remembers you
“Chapter Seven,” said Quillibrace, “seems to take this problem out of the museum and into the world of ordinary records.”
The narrator visits a public library to investigate the station's history. He finds photographs, archival documents, a record of Eleanor Vale's employment at the museum, and a folder entitled Visitors Who Have Not Yet Arrived. His own name appears in it, accompanied by tomorrow's date.
“The archive is no longer merely a source of evidence,” Miss Stray said. “It contains a record of the person who has come to consult it.”
“Which is an administrative error,” Blottisham replied. “The record should have been entered after the visit.”
“Unless the visit is already part of the record,” said Quillibrace.
“That would be an even more serious administrative error.”
“Possibly. But the narrator's difficulty is not simply that the archive contains incorrect information. The information appears to anticipate the event that would make it correct.”
Miss Stray considered the page.
“I wonder whether the distinction between past and future is becoming less secure because the records are no longer confined to recording what has happened. They participate in a sequence in which the act of consulting them becomes one of the things recorded.”
“Like the notebook in Chapter Four,” Quillibrace said.
“Yes, but now the pattern extends beyond the narrator's own possessions. The public archive has become involved. The strangeness is no longer confined to a private encounter with an inexplicable book.”
Blottisham looked uneasy.
“Are you suggesting that public institutions might become unreliable?”
“Not quite,” said Miss Stray. “I'm asking what happens when a record becomes part of the circumstances it is supposed to document.”
Quillibrace leaned back.
“A useful question well beyond this particular story, I think.”
Blottisham looked at his notebook, then at the books he had brought.
“I shall have to revise my filing system.”
5. The page that waits to be written
“There is another detail,” Miss Stray said. “The narrator discovers an archive volume whose pages describe his current visit. The final page is blank. Then, as he reads, it develops the sentence: ‘The visitor now closes the book.’”
“Another example of self-reference,” said Blottisham, pleased to recognise familiar territory.
“Yes,” she replied. “But there is something else. The page doesn't merely describe an event that has already occurred. It seems to wait for the event, and then the sentence appears.”
Quillibrace nodded.
“We should distinguish several things here. A record may describe an event. It may predict an event. It may cause someone to act in a way that brings the prediction about. Or it may appear to do something stranger still. The story invites us to consider these possibilities without giving us a reliable means of separating them.”
“Then we cannot know whether the record is describing or producing the event,” Blottisham said.
“We cannot know from this evidence alone,” Quillibrace replied. “That is not the same as knowing nothing.”
Miss Stray closed the book.
“The archive makes the narrator's visit part of the archive's own history. But it also makes us wonder whether the archive could be complete without including its own act of completion.”
Blottisham brightened.
“Ah! The solution is obvious. The archive must contain a record of the record that contains the record.”
Quillibrace looked at him for a moment.
“And where would you put it?”
“In the archive.”
“Which would then require another record.”
Blottisham opened his mouth, closed it, and examined his diagram.
“I shall need a larger sheet of paper.”
6. Does the story have an outside?
Miss Stray turned back to the final scene of Chapter Seven.
“The narrator leaves the library, which has become the museum. Eleanor is waiting at the desk. The catalogue's index directs him from Archive to Library.”
“The same places again,” said Blottisham. “A return to the beginning.”
“Not quite,” said Quillibrace. “The narrator now knows something he did not know at the beginning. He no longer asks where the library is, because he already knows.”
“So the repetition has changed him,” Miss Stray said. “The places recur, but the narrator's relation to them has changed.”
Quillibrace considered this.
“That may be the most important distinction we have encountered today. A pattern can recur without the situation being identical. We may return to the same place, encounter the same object, or read the same sentence, but we do so from a different position in the sequence.”
Blottisham looked disappointed.
“I thought we were discussing a closed system.”
“We are discussing a story,” said Quillibrace. “Whether its world is closed is another question.”
“But every route seems to lead back into it!”
“Then perhaps we should ask what we mean by outside.”
Blottisham looked at the door.
“The corridor?”
“A physical corridor, certainly. But what would make it an outside in the relevant sense?”
Blottisham followed Quillibrace's gaze.
“I had not expected the question to become architectural.”
Miss Stray smiled. “The story makes it difficult to distinguish a place that lies outside the arrangement from a place that merely provides another part of it. The narrator leaves the library, but finds the museum. He returns to the catalogue, but the catalogue sends him elsewhere. Each apparent exit becomes another entrance.”
“And yet,” said Quillibrace, “we should not assume that every possible route has been exhausted simply because the narrator has not found one.”
7. The reader enters the room
Quillibrace gathered his notes, but Miss Stray had not finished.
“I've been thinking about our own position as readers. We encounter a catalogue that contains the narrator, an archive that records his visit, and a page that describes the act of closing the book. We can stand back and observe these devices. But we are also following the sequence of events, turning pages, remembering earlier chapters, and revising our expectations.”
“Surely the reader is outside the story,” said Blottisham.
“Of course,” he added quickly. “The reader is sitting in a chair, perhaps beside a fire, with a cup of tea.”
“Some readers may be,” Miss Stray replied. “But I mean something else. The story depends on the reader remembering what happened earlier, recognising repetitions, and comparing different versions of an event. The pattern we discover is not contained in any single scene. It emerges as we relate one scene to another.”
Quillibrace nodded.
“And those relations may change as we continue reading. Something that seemed incidental in Chapter One may become significant in Chapter Seven. We return to the earlier scene with a different understanding, though the words on the page have not changed.”
“So the reader participates in the pattern,” Miss Stray said. “Not by causing the fictional events to occur, but by bringing their relations into view.”
Blottisham considered this carefully.
“Then the story contains the reader?”
“Not literally,” Quillibrace replied. “But it can incorporate the reader's activity into the experience of reading it. We begin to notice that the same kinds of relations which unsettle the narrator also organise our own attempts to understand what is happening.”
Blottisham looked from one to the other.
“I believe I understand.”
“Excellent,” said Quillibrace.
“The author has trapped us in the book.”
“No,” said Miss Stray. “I think that may be rather too strong.”
Blottisham picked up his notebook.
“I shall retain it as a provisional conclusion.”
8. What the book has not told us
For a few moments, none of them spoke.
Then Quillibrace said, “Let us take stock. We have noticed representations that contain representations of themselves, patterns that recur at different levels, catalogues whose references lead back into the systems they describe, and records that appear to include the events of their own consultation.”
“Fractality,” said Blottisham.
“Self-reference,” said Miss Stray.
“Recursion,” added Quillibrace.
Blottisham looked pleased. “We have names for everything.”
“We have names for some of the things we have noticed,” Quillibrace corrected. “That is not quite the same achievement.”
Miss Stray looked again at the novel.
“And we still don't know whether the narrator's world is a dream, a trap, an elaborate construction, or something that cannot be described in those terms. Nor do we know whether the catalogue governs the world, reflects it, or merely gives the narrator a way of encountering its patterns.”
“Then what have we gained?” Blottisham asked.
“Questions,” she said. “Better questions, perhaps.”
Quillibrace rose.
“And a reason to return to the story. The next chapters may change the significance of what we have noticed here.”
Blottisham gathered his books and diagram.
“I shall prepare a comprehensive account of recursive reality.”
“Will it include the reader?” Miss Stray asked.
“Certainly.”
“And the account itself?”
Blottisham paused.
“I shall have to think about that.”
After he had left, Miss Stray picked up the novel. She opened it at the beginning of Chapter Five, where the narrator had encountered the two Eleanors.
She read the passage again.
Then she turned back to Chapter Three, to the sentence about a part containing another whole.
She wondered whether she had understood it differently the first time.
She was not sure.
But she was sure that she wanted to read on.