I keep trying to see if there’s a connection between Johnny’s crazy stories and The Navidson narrative, but often the links are often easy to miss. Sometimes it’s just a single word or concept like “photograph” or “ghost.”
For example, in footnote on page 37, Truant talks about “the picture printed in the newspaper” of his father in a tractor-trailer accident. On the same page, the Navidson criticism discusses the photograph on Billy Reston’s wall from when he tried to outrun a falling high voltage wire and failed. Both photographs capture moments of extreme tragedy: death on one hand and paralysis on the other. Both images resonate strong emotional value despite being only 2D images of the events. What comparison is being made by juxtaposing these two photographs? There’s also the obvious link between photography and Navidson, the Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist. On page 22, the criticism explains that Navidson was devoted to photography because “it gave permanence to moments that were often so fleeting.” I see these connections, yet I can’t really explain why they were put there.
Another example is Truant’s footnote 164, which starts on page 128. Truant’s footnote was added to a line in the Navidson criticism about Jed’s knocking, which was described as drumbeats using the word “tattoos.” In his footnote, Truant also describes the difference between the tattoos he draws and the many scars he has on his body. In that same footnote, Truant also tells a story about when he met a ghost in his boarding school dining hall. When the Navidson criticism starts up again on page 134, it also mentions ghosts: “Perhaps here is a good a place as any to consider some of the ghosts haunting The Navidson Record.” By convention, footnotes are supposed to draw from the text, but it almost seems like Truant’s footnotes actually shape the text.
All of this raises the question: whose text is this? Since Truant supposedly compiled this text from the bits and fragments of material he found in Zampano’s apartment, he could have arranged this compilation in whatever way he wanted. I don’t know if I’d say this is Truant’s text, but he does have a lot of control over it.