Jonah Burke

A couple weeks ago, I tried to read Louis Menand’s review of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel. I got as far as this passage:

Getting broken is in the nature of being an egg. The novel gives the concept some low-key metaphysical play—original sin is an obvious analogy—but, apart from this and a death-and-resurrection motif involving a saxophonist in a surf-rock band, “Inherent Vice” does not appear to be a Pynchonian palimpsest of semi-obscure allusions.

At this point, I concluded what I usually do when I read Menand: I am not as smart as Menand. Not only do I fail to understand the beautiful, complex molecules that are his thoughts; I don’t even get the atoms. What, cried my feeble brain, is a palimpsest?

Luckily, my dad, who also has not won the Pulitzer Prize, was standing close by. He told me that, although he had seen the word here and there, he didn’t know what it meant either. We looked it up, mused about it for a minute, and continued on our way, content with our new grain of knowledge and confident that palimpsest would not soon again cross our paths.

How wrong we were. Today, on the train, immersed in Andre Gide’s The Immoralist and feeling pretty good about reading something French, I once again collided with that hyper-aspirated interloper. In the midst of a scene in which the protagonist is discovering, within his dry, erudite self, a sensitive and passionate person–there it lurked:

And I would compare myself to a palimpsest; I shared the thrill of the scholar who beneath more recent script discovers, on the same paper, an infinitely more precious ancient text.

Before, reading Menand, I hadn’t recognized the word at all. And now, face to face again with that frustrating jumble of obstruents, I had only a vague memory of the definition. I could glean something from the context, but, having been bested by palimpsest twice in two weeks, I wanted a full measure of understanding. I resolved that, once I navigated the soppy floor of Canal St. station and arrived at my office, I would postpone work and consult the Internet.

My favorite source, the simple and reliable Merriam-Webster web site, reminded me of my prior trip to the dictionary. A palimpsest, according to m-w.com, is a “writing material used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased.” It also quotes Margaret Atwood using the word as metaphor, meaning something with “diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface.”

Gide, of course, uses the word in its literal sense, and–doh!–practically defines it for the reader. Menand, on the other hand, employs it like Atwood, asserting that “Inherent Vice” does not, like some of Pynchon’s other work, require the reader to peel back an apparently simple surface to get at the book’s real point.

What’s so interesting about palimpsest, though, is not its meaning but its sound. What an exemplar of pulmonic egress! It sounds more like the French rejoinder to the Zeppelin or something that Voltaire would sit on than a humble scrap of papyrus. How did this word come about?

The always helpful Online Etymology Dictionary presents an unusually simple lineage. In fact, the word comes not from the French (shows my lack of word instinct) but the Greek palimpsestos, meaning “scraped again.” Palim, points out the OED, derives from the root palin, meaning “again,” as in palindrome.

I always wonder why I remember certain things and forget others. Esoteric words like obstruent stick in my brain while palimpsest, epigone, and untold others slip away. Or are they still there, under the surface?