The irony is that the narrator has not fully comprehended yet that he is living an unreality, that he is actually narrating the nightmare. Though I knew I was not living an unreality per se-like those born out of a simple dream and ending up in a nightmare, which we can only escape from when we wake up sweaty, trembling, and confused. I trailed my hand over them as if to confirm the reality I was living in. In a book-lined office, he attempts to stabilize himself through the textual “reality” of printed matter:
Early on, the narrator, already feeling uncertain about why he has moved halfway across the world, arrives at a university’s Portuguese department. Throughout Lord, Noll dramatizes abject consciousness in turmoil. We get the sense in Lord that consciousness is always under radical duress, that a state of being might collapse at any time or give way to some other, unknown state of being. The man who arranges for the narrator to come to London is himself a shifting cipher in Lord, transforming into different entities-at least in the narrator’s (often paranoid) view. That first-person voice is “a Brazilian who wrote books that were mostly well received by critics but not the public.” The Brazilian novelist travels to cold winter London on an unspecified “mission.” Indeed, the mission remains unspecified to both reader and narrator alike, although it does seem to involve an English university.
Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that in Lord, Noll gives us a consciousness dissolving and reconstituting itself, a first-person voice shifting from one reality to the next with absurdly picaresque energy. Madness is perhaps not the correct term, although it does point towards Lord’s gothic and abject modes. João Gilberto Noll’s short novel Lord is an abject and surreal tale of madness.
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