Some thoughts

"The patient has withdrawn from the persons in his environment and from the external world generally the libidinal cathexis which he has hitherto directed on to them. Thus all things have become indifferent and irrelevant to him, and have to be explained by means of a secondary rationalization as being 'miracled up, cursory contraptions.' The end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe; for his subjective world has come to an end since he has withdrawn his love from it. [...] And the paranoiac builds it up again, not more splendid, it is true, but at least so that he can once more live in it. He builds it up by the work of his delusions. The delusion-formation, which we take to be a pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction. Such a reconstruction after the catastrophe is more or less successful, but never wholly so; in Schreber's words, there has been a 'profound internal change' in the world. But the man has recaptured a relation, and often a very intense one, to the people and things in the world, although the relation may be a hostile one now, where formerly it was sympathetic and affectionate." (Freud 146-47)

Taken in a certain ordered chronology, Lanark can be read thus:

Thaw's childhood (book one) > Thaw's adolescence (book two) > Thaw's madness (book two) > Thaw's death (book two) > appearance of Lanark in the train car (book three)

"Did Thaw die tragically?" asks Lanark of the Oracle, who responds:

No. He botched his end. It set no example, not even a bad one. He was unacceptable to the infinite bright blankness, the clarity without edge which only selfishness fears. It flung him back into a second-class railway carriage, creating you;

and,

"The Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving," says the voice of the "author".

An aquaintance of mine once remarked: "I do think the book implies a cyclic rather than linear view of time: the Chapters which, according to the author, can be read in any order, and the arrival by train (of Thaw?) and the appearance of the mysterious Gloopy. a tragedy, but not - in my view - a terminal one..."

Which fits in with the D & G model of continual desiring-production -- a continual production (machine) and re/production (body without organs):

"[...] there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast -- the mouth). And because the first machine is in turn connected to another whose flow it interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction."

And Michael Hardt comments on this passage: "All the machines are capable of potentially infinite connections in all senses."

Which speaks both to the idea of the chapters being readable in any order (I need to track down a source on this claim) and also to D & G's particular use of Levi-Strauss's conception of bricolage/the bricoleur.

Edit (8:32 PM, 02.15.06): Above-mentioned aquaintance has given me the source reference: http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_gray.html

wherein I find the following:

AG: I felt no need to harmonize them. I yoked the bits together and expected the reader's interest to flow over all, as my imagination had done.