I read ten pages today instead of five, which is probably okay since I have catching up to do anyway. Today, we are back to the serendipity of theme. A lot of today's pages dealt with Marianne.
Francine is dying of intestinal cancer and Marianne, as before, refuses to leave her side. Marianne insists that she has cancer as well, but I suspect that her cancer is metaphorical. Dr. Brun doubts her self-diagnosis as well and suggests that Marianne has a nervous condition. In these pages, Marianne also threatens, apparently, to leave X and she goes so far as to leave the apartment building and get into the car, which she cannot drive. She also threatens suicide, locking herself in a bathroom. Interestingly, X does not take her seriously and continues his argument with her, implying that she is lazy (this is narrated and not quoted. X is still technically absent from this narrative). He finally must try to beat the door down and, when she comes out on her own, she has cut her wrists. The injury is not serious. On the last page of today's reading, she sits on the floor and sobs, refusing X's help in standing. The reason she gives for her anger is that he never calls her from work. This is clearly trivial, so she seems to be hiding the fact that she knows what is going on in X's other relationships, though she will not confront him.
Contrasting Marianne's character on these pages, we see Dagmar walking through the winter air in a well fitting dress. Dagmar seems constantly and effortlessly beautiful. So, considering Marianne's characterization as a fading, perhaps even dying woman, it is understandable that X would fall in love with her. Even if it is not honorable, it is forgivable. How can he be expected to resist falling in love with the vivacious Dagmar.
But then there's Helga. Whatever will happen with her is, even before it happens, unforgivable. On page 38, X appears in the garden below Helga's window. It is summer now and her window, depending on the angle from which one is looking at it, appear either black or bright white (a significant dichotomy). Helga finally sticks her head out the window and, seeing X, grins before thrusting her head back into the window and shutting it. Though her grinning seems coquettish and inviting, she is also taking detours to get into her apartment without X seeing her. So here, X seems a bit like Nabokov's Humbert Humbert. He takes Helga's nervous politeness as being purposefully alluring, as if she is playing a playful game with him. She may, in fact, be trying to escape him.
Synthesis:
By looking at the three women to whom X is connected, we get a complex look at X. X seems capable of romantic love with Dagmar, reluctant loyalty (though not faithfulness) to Marianne, and imperialistic brutality toward Helga.
Much of the way in which the reader will interpret X's character then may come from the order that these characters appear and the order that pieces of the narrative is revealed. The very first page of the novel, for me, contained the statute for rape. So from the very beginning, I knew X as a rapist. This characterization clouds all other views of X. Sure, he may wish to salvage his marriage, but he is salvaging it from his own horrific crimes. He may have a compelling romance with the easy to love Dagmar, but he is also a rapist.
Would this characterization change if the order of events had been different? If I knew of his failing marriage first, would I see his clearly exploitative (but not necessarily forced) affair with Helga as a desperate search for something he dies not get at home? If I knew of his love for Dagmar first, would I see his inappropriate dealings with Helga as the flaw of a man who is too easily enamored with pretty things? Or would the rape take over, even if it had come at the end? To what extent, then, is the softening or hardening of my feeling for X determined by the line of the story?
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