Introduction

342
Sonja Lehmann
5.4.2. Everything Is Collage
Even though Divisadero’s title suggests a division, the novel’s halves are nevertheless
intricately connected through a string of recurring motifs. Parts of one storyline
constantly turn up in one another: the blue table of Anna’s boyfriend reappears
in Lucien’s house in France (D 30; 70; 93; 239); the flags Anna gives to
Coop are suddenly present when he is almost beaten to death by the poker players
as well as when he and Claire meet his former friends (D 132; 161); Stendhal’s The
Red and the Black is used as a chapter heading for Coop’s story in Tahoe (D 39),
additionally mentioned in the narrative strand that follows Anna’s life in France
(D 77), while Claire and Coop accidentally meet again after years of not having
seen one another in a club called “The Stendhal” (D 106). There are many more
of these examples, which finely sew together the different parts of Divisadero. The
lives of Anna, Claire and Coop are thus not as absent from the second half of the
book as it seemed at first.
This leaves the question of why this is done. In any case, it reflects the motto
that “everything is collage” which is twice mentioned by Anna during the narration
of her youth (D 16-17). It also evokes her similar quotation that “everything is
biographical” (D 16) and her occupation with “piec[ing] together the landscapes
[Segura] had written about” (D 144). With all this emphasis on piecing together
and collages, mixed with the inevitable reference to French literature – Stendhal –
and the notion that everything is also biographical it is not far-fetched to conclude
that maybe Anna is the one who does the piecing.
Further close parallels between the events in Anna’s youth and the life of
Segura strengthen this perception additionally. Segura is characterized as someone
who “lived mostly an imaginary life” and preferred the company of fictional characters
in troubled times (D 173). At one point he finds a journal by his wife that
leads to his realization that he did not know her at all (D 223) just like Anna begins
to understand that she did not know her sister at all after having read her
diary (D 138-9). Additionally, a number of scholarly remarks in the parts that are
not narrated in first person by Anna could indicate that she, being a scholar, narrated
these parts as well, including the life of Segura. What narrator would otherwise
mention that they “have recently been reading, in a monograph a haunting
thing” (D 142) or reflect on “Sanskrit poetics” (D 152)?
Together with her conviction that “[t]he third-person voice protects us” and
that “sometimes we enter art to hide within it” (D 142), the probability that all
storylines are narrated by Anna is further strengthened. Her admission that “we
live with those retrievals from childhood […] making up a single monologue” (D
136) finally seems to sum up and explain the strange structure of this novel. Anna
would hence be seen as the novel’s narrator who invents or at least strongly influ-