Ancient History (novel)
Ancient History: A Paraphase is Joseph McElroy's third novel, published in 1971. It presents itself as a hastily written essay/memoir/confession. The character Dom is sometimes described as a fictionalized Norman Mailer. The title "Ancient History" refers to classical Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Persian history, which Cy, the narrator, is something of an amateur expert in. It was the name for the course Cy took at Poly Prep. But it also the narrator's frequent dismissive phrase regarding his own obsessive retelling of trivial details from his own personal past. The word "paraphase", used in  the subtitle and a few times in the text, is Cy's neologism, never actually defined. In March 2014, Dzanc Books published a paperback edition, with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem. Plot summary. The setting is one evening, circa 1970. Cy had intended to talk to the famous social scientist/writer/activist Dom (or Don, Cy isn't sure) who lives in the same Manhattan building as Cy. But upon arriving on Dom's floor of the building, he finds the police are removing Dom's body, reportedly a suicide. Cy enters the apartment, locks the door but leaves the  chain off, and proceeds to commit in writing, with Dom's own paper and pen, all the things Cy had intended to say to Dom, and then some. The resulting manuscript is the sole content of the novel. Cy tells the rambling story of his own life, his friendships since childhood with Al (on vacations in the country) and with Bob (his neighbor in Brooklyn Heights), his marriage to Ev and their daughter Emma, her ex-husband Doug, later a suicide which Cy feels partly responsible for, his stepson Ted. He makes a major issue of the fact that Al  and Bob have never met by his own connivance, but are about to. He confesses to stealing Dom's mail. He also writes a great deal about Dom's life and theories, and expresses concern that Dom's suicide might be Cy's fault. Halfway through, the narrative breaks off mid-sentence. As we learn in the resumption of Cy's writing, Dom's son-in-law and a police officer entered the apartment and looked around. Cy was hidden behind a curtain, but he had left the just-written manuscript on Dom's desk. The officer wasn't sure  if he should treat the apartment as a crime scene: he was suspicious of the son-in-law's removal of Cy's manuscript, but let it go. When the two leave, Cy sees that his writing was taken. Cy then resumes his writing, even more frantic. What is "paraphase"? McElroy has given the following explanation: Cy's first use of the word occurs on page 139: The "phrases" here refer to Cy's actual writing compared and contrasted with the reality they are describing, three phrases to Cy's personal "ancient history", and two phrases regarding Cy's current  situation (although the "thirty word" count seems to be off by one). A reader of Beckett's novels, Cy has adopted a Malone-like style, including comments on his own handwriting. Not all readers have noticed the unusual spelling. For example, "The New York Times" review by Lehmann-Haupt gives the subtitle as "Paraphase", and similarly misspells the word in the above quotation from the novel. Themes and style. The novel is highly repetitious (one analysis calls it "a verbal excess"), with Cy amplifying the various back stories, in ways which emphasize, and sometimes are, the themes. Cy himself is  a reader of Samuel Beckett's novels. Because Cy has too much memory (Cy wishes he "could be Forgetorix the First, and leave behind ... a mass of Past"), Cy is forced into florid repetitiveness. The "connect-the-dot" puzzles that Al's father did are echoed in the characters with names barely more than A, B, C, D, E, F, etc., and which the reader is forced to "connect". Cy has a taste for "para-" as a prefix, including several uses of the subtitle neologism "paraphase". Cy muses that Dom's "site", now that he is occupying it, has become  a "para-site". "Parabola" is used frequently. It first appears attached to two diagrams from Ted's geometry lessons, one of a parabola showing the curve as the locus of points equidistant from a focus and a directrix, the other as a cross-section of a cone. Later uses, along with "equidistant" and "directrix", are vague and metaphorical. Cy has a theory concerning what he calls the "Vectoral Muscle", located in the brain near the pons Varolii. It is a gift that usually only children might have, allowing them to see the geometric relations between everything. But it can go  wrong, leading to "Vectoral Dystrophy". Reception. In the two reviews from the NYT cited below, note that the first review has the incorrect "Paraphrase" in the subtitle, while the second review has the correct "Paraphase".