“Mulivhill’s Memorial” continues the trend to which Willie Fitzgerald alluded in his great piece about “Torridge” from a few weeks ago, wherein Trevor pushes the envelope of how many character POVs can be employed in a story. Really, the technique he uses in “Mulivhill’s Memorial” is a kind of corporate mass consciousness, in which more than a dozen individual perspectives are trained on a single issue, for which the story is named.
Mulvihill, a mild-mannered ad designer at the tony firm Ygnis and Ygnis, is stricken down by a heart attack at the beginning of the story. His office mate, the Hungarian Wilkinski, discovers Mulvihill’s secret: in his off-hours, the man filmed and edited homemade pornography. Wilkinski turns Mulvihill’s films over to one of the firm’s bosses, the excellently named Ox-Banham, and Ox-Banham, in turn, begins discreetly screening them for the also excellently named Bloody Smithson, the boss of a client firm and the father of Ox-Banham’s former secretary Rowena, with whom Ox-Banham carried on an affair, and for whom he has secured a copyediting position. It duly transpires that Ox-Banham accidently screens an unlabeled film for Bloody Smithson that features Ox-Banham and Rowena screwing on his office floor, an act covertly filmed by Mulvihill. Enraged, Bloody Smithson pulls his company’s account, and Ygnis and Ygnis briefly teeters but survives.
Trevor’s mode of storytelling here is a relentless flitting from character to character, often in several successive paragraphs, sometimes in adjacent sentences. Witness here the marvelously profligate inclusion of virtually every possible perspective, including the momentary POV of the sleeping wife:
“‘It isn’t very nice,’ Wilkinski said again quietly, in the middle of one night. No one heard him, for though he addressed his wife she was dreaming at the time of something else.”
Again, this vast perspectival profligacy seems unified by the sense of office gossip and chatter, as it swirls around the question of Mulvihill’s death and legacy—the Mulvihill-shaped hole in the middle of the story. In a sense, this story is a mystery, an unraveling of an unremarkable man’s sordid private life. The narrative consciousness is a kind of singular detective-consciousness that probes into all of the characters that encircled Mulvihill during his life, and the effect produced is the chalk outline of a strange man only slightly better defined at the story’s end than outset. While this is perhaps not my favorite Trevor story in terms of character or the emotional effect produced, I hugely admire the technical chops on display here, as well as the ambition required to even attempt such a difficult mode of storytelling.
At first I was not convinced by the story’s ending, which I felt leaned too heavily on the tangential fun of Ox-Banham’s humiliation. But on a reread, I think I understand. For a moment, it seems that the Mulvihill will get his posthumous revenge on the firm and its higher-ups—that the office joke on Mulvihill’s memory will become Mulvihill’s joke on the firm. But the ship, as the story tells us, is righted, and Ygnis and Ygnis’s sheen of strenuous glamor glitters unabated. The story is, in a large sense, about an individual’s insignificance in the face of a business, in the face of Work. We can only know Mulvihill as his coworkers did, passingly and mainly through his workaday habits: the Friday night drink at the bar, the advertising posters blown up on his office walls. Even the disruption Mulvihill inadvertently creates is ultimately digested and reabsorbed into the ravenous gut of the Company.
The post The William Trevor Reader: “Mulivhill’s Memorial” appeared first on The Millions.
