The Monster at the End of This Essay
the things in the world, the things that are done in the world—there is the end of
the world. At the moment of naming the start of the book, there is the end of the
book. And the monster is at both ends. All books bemoan this. All language is a
lament. Every sentence is a eulogy, every paragraph an obituary. All texts, the
site of our collective grieving, are graveyards cluttered with the solemn marking
stones of words.
We turn, again, to Derrida and to Rembrandt. In his eulogy for Sarah
Kofman, Derrida recalls Kofman writing about Rembrandt’s The Anatomy
Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp (1632). Derrida inscribes these words:
It is a lesson, she says. . .. Sarah interprets in this painting the
strange historical relationship between the book and the body,
between the book and the proper or lived body of the mortal,
to be sure. . . . We can there follow the narrative of an
historical fascination with the book when it comes to occupy
the place of the dead, of the body-cadaver. Actually, I prefer
the English word corpse here because it incorporates at once
the body [!e corps], the corpus and the cadaver. . .
If, then, the book is the placeholder for the corpse, filled with words like little
decaying organs, and if language itself is a body that mourns, constructed of
letters like little epitaphs, and if the subject of the book is always already an
object, always already on the way toward death, then it is the wise book that
accepts this fact and admits its own decay.
In the corpus of Grover we find such volumes as When Grover Moved
to Sesame Street and Grover Travels All Over, but it is The Monster at the End
of This Book that truly stands out as a tomb among the tomes. The book is not
only about the confrontation with death, but is complicit in its own destruction.
To read the book is to demolish it. If we think of The Monster at the End of This
Book as the book of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, then it is the book itself that is the thing
on the examination table, dissected, splayed open, autopsied. Just as the process
of living is what kills the body, so too does the act of reading destroy the book.
Each of the pages of this book has drawings of the previous pages in tatters. On
page seventeen, for instance, we see in the left m argin of the text drawings of
the edges of previous pages with ragged ropes, broken boards, and crumbled
bricks sandwiched in between. Grover embraces a hermeneutical reading of
what he is up to, we might say, laying out the past for us on each future page.
And if it is a past marked by inevitable, inexorable annihilation, then to read the
book is to destroy it and to move closer to destroying Grover.
One must ask at this point the child’s question: why? Why, in fact, do
we continue to turn the pages, torturing lovable furry old Grover, ruining the
book we are apparently enjoying, and bringing all of us closer to the monster
and thus our doom? After all, Grover has told us that continuing to turn pages
will harm us all. The title of the book itself, in fact, tells us that once we get to
the end, we are in big trouble. Why, then, do we continue to turn the pages of a