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Popular Culture Review
he writes, as if he is directing our attention toward one more piece of unfinished
business. This statement is followed by four more sentences, two hundred and
seventy-four words in all, which serve not only to simply introduce us to the drift
of Moody’s thoughts, ideas, desires, dreams, and dispatches, but also to indict us.
The force of the collective pronoun “our” is joined by sixteen uses of the pronoun
“we,” making us as complicit as Moody is in “the matter of our crimes,” which he
catalogues and lists; crimes which range from the “unspeakable . . . like robbery,
battery, rape;” to the mundane: “gifts never sent. . . the waiter we upbraided” (3).
In a large sense these crimes do nothing more than point out what the possibility
of living might look like. There is no finalizing gesture found in Moody’s
pronouncement; he simply states the obviousness of what we as living beings
must on some level share or do or think or feel.
He warns us early that if we are in “search of a tidy, well-organized life
in these pages, a life of kisses bestowed or of novels [he has] written,” we will be
in for a surprise. “My book and my life,” he tells us, “are written in fits, more like
epilepsy than like narrative. The process of this work is obsessive” (8). The
Black Veil, he tells us, is the “story of a particular search for the original image of
the veil in my life, the veil in the life of my family the original image of
facelessness, all this in account of a five-day driving trip to Maine to locate the
origin of the veil among Moody’s, this five-day search woven like a braid into an
account of my own difficulties” (8).12 The account “never settles for the orderly
where the disorderly and explosive can substitute, because obsession is not
orderly, it is protean, like consciousness” (8). Throughout the work other
voices—“disembodied quotations (some from Hawthorne, some from others) that
float like ghosts”—are intermixed with Moody’s descriptions and analysis (8).
These “voices” are signaled and set apart through the use of italicized type—there
are no other page or source references (though an extensive bibliography follows
at the end of the work). These different “voices” function also to influence and,
in a sense, “disrupt” the authority of a single voice, of Moody’s voice.
Early on one such “voice” begins a section this way: “Fathers appear to
us to love without condition if only we can interpret their complicated language.
Fathers move over expanses o f time, across abysses o f generations” (21, italics in
original). And it sets the stage for us to be introduced to Moody’s father, Hiram
Fredrick Moody, Jr. The father in Moody’s early memory is largely there as the
source of law, of punishment. He is the signifier of the elliptical term, “Wait until
your father gets home.” Until, that is, a divorce splits the household and the
reference loses meaning. Moody tells us that before his father chose a life in
business, in college he had been an English major and his field was American
literature. And so one evening when Rick Moody asked his father a question
about the epigraph by the poet John Donne in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell
Tolls, the father locates a copy and goes over the poem “line by line”: through,
“lines about being part of a herd, the rabble . . . [lines] about lineage too, or so I