Satin Island

by Tom McCarthy

my hero finally alights, far up some river, on a tribe so fucking strange he can’t make head or tail of them. This exasperates him too: incomprehensible is no better than banal—it’s just its flip-side. But maybe, just maybe, he reasons, somewhere in between these two extremes—in between understanding so completely that an object’s robbed of its allure (on the one hand) and (on the other one) not understanding anything at all—there might be some “ambiguous instances” in which the balance is just right. These instances, he tells us, would be godsends; they’d provide us with the very reasons, or excuses, for our own existence. But wouldn’t these instances, too (he asks), be cons? Who’s the real dupe of the confusion sown by observations which are carried just far enough to reach the borderline of the intelligible, only to be stopped short there? It’s as though he, Lévi-Strauss himself, were now playing the role of the phony, hand-chancing, pen-wielding