I dressed as if for a polar expedition in as many clothes as I could find – woollen tights, a long needlecord pinafore dress, several reject men’s golfing sweaters that had been acquired in a St Andrews Woollen Mill sale, scarf, gloves, knitted hat, and, lastly, an old beaver coat, bought for ten shillings in the pawn shop at the West Port, a coat that still had a comforting old lady smell of camphor and violet cachous about it.
‘Ontological proof,’ Bob shouted mysteriously in his sleep – a concept he wouldn’t even know the meaning of if he was awake.
Terri grimaced and replaced her sunglasses and pulled on a black beret so that now she looked like a deranged governess engaged in guerrilla warfare. A Weathergirl.
‘Let’s do it,’ she said, and we slipped out into the shock of a morning that crackled with cold so that every time we spoke our breath came out in cold white clouds like the speech bubbles in the
Beano
. We trudged up Paton’s Lane and as we turned onto the Perth Road, the invisible, ever-watchful pair of eyes monitored our progress.
‘Maybe it’s the eye of God,’ Terri said. I was sure God, if he existed at all, which was highly unlikely, would have better things to do with his time than watch me.
‘Maybe he doesn’t,’ Terri said. ‘Maybe he’s like a really . . . trivial guy. Who knows?’ Who indeed.
‘
When words no longer strive for mimesis they become dislocated and disconnected. They illustrate
in themselves
the exhaustion of forms. Writers who eschew mimesis, looking for new ways of approaching the fiction construct, are disruptivist – challenging what Robbe-Grillet refers to as the “intelligibility of the world”.
’ Archie paused. ‘What do you think of that statement? Anyone?’ No-one answered. No-one ever had any idea what Archie was talking about.
Archie’s blimpish body strained to escape from his dark green polyester shirt, a shirt stained at the armpits with large damp triangles of sweat. He was also attired in brown trousers and a tan-coloured knitted tie that sported a different quality of stain – dried boiled egg-yolk, or custard.
He spun round in his tweedy, executive chair, so much more comfortable than the chairs assigned to his tutees – the little
faux
wood tables attached to our chairs seemed to be specifically designed to restrain us, like a cross between a baby’s high chair and an asylum straitjacket. The chairs were made from some artificial material – a hard grey plastic substance that the university seemed over fond of. It was only possible to be even remotely comfortable in these chairs for a maximum of ten minutes. An unfettered Archie, on the other hand, was free to birl and twirl around like a fairground ride on his Easy-glide castors.
‘
The act of writing itself comes to occupy the centre of the stage as the author is no longer concerned to invoke some
a priori
meaning or truth. Jacques Derrida reinforces the point . . .
’
Archie McCue was an argumentative Marxist who claimed to be the progeny of a Glaswegian shipbuilder, although, in fact, he had been brought up by his widowed mother who owned a sweetshop in Largs. This long-suffering woman was now ‘dottled’ according to Archie and had therefore recently been transported across the river to Newport-on-Tay and an old people’s home called The Anchorage with a ‘view of the water’.
‘
Valéry claims that literature is, and can be nothing else than, a kind of extension and application of certain properties of language . . .
’
Archie lived in a big house in Windsor Place with Philippa, his bossy English wife. I knew that because I was the most recent in a long line of McCue babysitters – Philippa and Archie, both nearing fifty now, had been breeding, at spaced-out intervals, since the end of the war. They had four grown-and-gone offspring – Crispin (‘Cambridge’), Orsino (‘Oxford’), Freya (‘year out in France’) and their eldest son, the mysterious Ferdinand (‘Saughton Prison, unfortunately’). Only one child, nine-year-old Maisie (‘a mistake’), was now left at home.
‘
. . . and in its multiplicity and plurality it cries out for a new hermeneutics . . .
’
We were a shrinking tutorial group. At the moment there were four of us – myself, Terri, Andrea and Olivia. Andrea was a grammar-school girl from the middle echelons of North Yorkshire society. Today, reeking of patchouli, she was wearing a flouncy, flowery dress, all buttons and bows and intricate bodice seaming, that looked as if it had been made for an amateur dramatic production of
Oklahoma!
Andrea had recently converted from the Church of Scotland to paganism and was studying to be a witch. To this end she had apprenticed herself to a warlock in Forfar. Few things were more worrying than the idea of Andrea with magic powers. Not that I have anything against witches,
per se
, of course – I am only too aware that my own mother is a wizardess of some kind – or wizardina, or wizardelle, for there appears to be no feminine form for the word. Perhaps I can just start making words up. Why not? How else do words come into being?
Andrea said that she wanted to be a famous writer and accordingly had done an evening shorthand-and-typing course run by a man in Union Street who turned out to be more interested in his female students’ sweatered chests than he was in their Pitman short forms. So far, all Andrea had written were flimsy stories about a girl called Anthea who came from Northallerton and was studying English literature at university. Andrea’s most interesting story to date was about a strange sexual encounter her
alter ego
Anthea had with a teacher at secretarial college. I thought that
The Adventures of Anthea
would be a good title for an English pornographic film – the kind that involves a lot of window cleaners and innuendo but not much actual sex.
Anthea was always having poignant moments sparked off by mundane experiences – going to lectures, finding spiders, buying A4 narrow-ruled with margins. Personally I think that reading the details of other people’s domesticity is almost as tiresome as listening to them recount their dreams –
and then the fork-lift truck turned into a giant red squirrel that crushed my father’s head like a nut
– fascinating to the dreamer, but tiresome for the indifferent listener.
Archie himself, of course, was famously writing a novel – an experimental and epic tome that had now reached seven hundred pages. It was, reportedly (for no-one had actually seen it), an
Angst
-ridden, labyrinthine fiction about the metaphysical
Sturm und Drang
of the self called
The Expanding Prism of J
.
‘
. . . a technique which might be considered emblematic of the essential arbitrariness of all linguistic signifiers . . .
’
Olivia politely stifled a yawn. A fair, willowy girl, Olivia was a doctor’s daughter from Edinburgh, a St George’s girl and a clever, methodical student, the kind who write up their notes every night, underlining everything in three different-coloured inks. Olivia was clearly a student who belonged at St Andrews or Warwick, or even East Anglia, rather than Dundee but she’d had ‘some kind of a breakdown’ during her A-Levels and had ended up with Es instead of As.
For the last year, Olivia had been having an affair with a lecturer in the Politics department called Roger Lake (generally known as ‘Roger the Dodger’ naturally) who was always trying to be trendy and hang out with students. Roger had a wife called Sheila and a clutch of small, blond daughters (‘Just like Goebbels,’ Terri said), aged from almost nothing to nine years old.
Although sex between staff and students was rife at the university, it was nonetheless forbidden by the Dean who took ‘a dim view’ of it. Roger Lake worried constantly that he was going to be caught in a scandalous situation and insisted that he and Olivia behave in a cloak-and-dagger fashion, exiting buildings separately and ignoring each other in public (and sometimes in private, she reported). Having an affair with Roger Lake would have provided a good training for secret agents.
‘Good of you to join us,’ Archie said, and Kevin blushed and mumbled something indecipherable in his thick West Country accent, an accent which made everything he said sound either vaguely lewd or rather stupid. Like many of us at Dundee, in the so-called Arts and Social Sciences faculty, Kevin Riley had arrived, not through achieving good exam grades, but via the medium of the UCCA clearing-house, for, sadly, we were the students no-one else wanted.
Kevin was a plump, whey-faced boy, with a great frizz of bird’s nest hair, a kind of Englishboy’s Afro, and a pair of small penny rounders wedged on his nose. He had a rash of pimples on his chin which he’d misguidedly daubed with peachy-coloured Rimmel concealer. Kevin, shunned by the more robust members of his sex, had obviously spent a solitary childhood playing with Meccano and train sets, arranging and rearranging the postage stamps of the world and standing at the end of a draughty station platform with a flask and a small, ruled notebook.
These autistically boyish pursuits had now been replaced by writing – the true solipsistic disease. At some point in his drawn-out adolescence Kevin had created an alternative universe for himself – a lower-middle earth otherworld called Edrakonia, a fantastic kingdom from which the dragon queen Feurillia (who for some reason reminded me of Nora) had been exiled and the plot of which could probably be summed up in a sentence: (
And the Murk will fall on the land. And the Beast Griddlebart will roam the land and the dragons will flee.
)
Kevin crammed his big bumble-bee body into a chair, leftover flesh spilling out as he attempted to get comfortable. To cheer himself up, he took out a crumpled paper bag of lemon bon-bons and offered them round the class. Andrea recoiled in horror, she was one of those girls who wasn’t entirely convinced that food was necessary for survival – anything more robust than a strawberry yoghurt made her anxious.
The question, which had been hovering indecisively all this time, finally made up its mind and decided to ignore Kevin, for it had spotted the slim charms of Andrea, on whom it alighted like an unwanted insect.
‘Andrea?’ Archie asked encouragingly. ‘Derrida? [Not a rhyme you’ll find in many rhyming dictionaries.] Any thoughts?’
None, apparently, for, chewing suggestively on the end of her Biro, Andrea hitched up her pioneer-woman skirt and slowly crossed her legs. Andrea had her life all plotted out – she was going to graduate, get married, buy nothing on hire purchase, rear children, have a successful career as a famous writer, retire and die. She seemed to have no inkling that life wasn’t as orderly as her pencil case and that everything is chance and at any moment any number of remarkable things can happen that are totally beyond our control, events that rip up our maps and re-polarize our compasses – the madwoman walking towards us, the train falling off the bridge, the boy on the bicycle.
Archie, still spellbound by the sight of Andrea’s knees – and heaven knows what else she was covertly flaunting – seemed to have momentarily lost his train of thought. We all waited for him to re-board. It was one of those tutorial groups where no-one really had an opinion about anything, except for Archie, who had an opinion about everything. We were all relieved when he started up again and absolved us from the trachle of having to think for ourselves –
‘
. . . made by several structuralist critics that it is only at the moment that the written word in literature ceases to refer to external “objective” data, that is, to referents in the “real” world, that it can begin to exist as language within the text . . .
’
Olivia chewed a strand of her long blond hair and looked thoughtful, although it seemed unlikely that she was thinking about anything Archie was saying. Kevin, who was in painful thrall to Olivia, stared aggressively at her feet, which were about the only part of her anatomy that he could look at without blushing. Olivia tended to dress like a down-at-heel medieval princess and today she was clad in a crushed velvet jacket over a secondhand satin nightdress and a pair of knee-high red leather boots that were a fetishist’s dream.
Olivia had once mildly voiced the opinion to Archie that it was wrong to dissect books as if they were cadavers because you could never put them back together in the same way. ‘Split the lark and so on,’ she murmured, but Archie grew contemptuous and said that the next person to quote Emily Dickinson in his tutorial would be taken out to the Geddes Quadrangle and publicly flogged. (‘Harsh but fair,’ was Andrea’s judgement.)
‘
What the new fiction reminds us,
’ Archie yakked on, ‘
is that signs need only refer to imaginary constructs – that perhaps that is all they do refer to, for perhaps it’s not the job of fiction to make sense of the world . . .
’
We were a hedonistic and self-absorbed group – vague, lop-sided people, not fleshed out with definite beliefs and opinions, for whom the greatest achievement was probably getting out of bed in the morning. We had lost one of our original members – The Boy With No Name, a frail, pallid youth from Wester Ross, so called by the rest of the group because no matter how hard we might (or might not) try, none of us could ever remember his name. Of course, he didn’t help matters much by habitually introducing himself by saying, ‘Hello, I’m nobody, who are you?’
I was sure his name was something fairly ordinary – a Peter or a Paul – but I could never come up with anything more certain. It was almost as if he was under some kind of strange, existential hex, as though somebody – a tenderfoot witch, for example – had been practising from
The Book of Spells
(‘a guid cantrip for disappearing’). What happened, I wondered, to someone who couldn’t be named? Did they lose their identity? Did they forget who they were?
At first it had been a mere glimmering around the edges, a certain lack of definition, but before long he was almost completely erased and was no more than a breath on the air. Very occasionally, there was a certain slant of light that revealed his ectoplasmic form, like half-cooked, poached egg-whites. Perhaps if we could remember his name we could conjure him back.
‘Maybe he just got pissed off and went home to Wester Ross?’ Andrea speculated when he finally disappeared.
The Boy With No Name had been constantly working on a laboriously hand-written, heavily corrected manuscript that proved to be a far-fetched tale of alien invasion, the plot of which revolved around the imposition on Earth dwellers by aliens from the planet Tara-Zanthia (or something similarly debutante-like) of an economy based on domestic cats and dogs. It was a simple fiscal equation – the more cats and dogs you possessed the wealthier you were. Pedigree breeds became a kind of
über
-currency and puppy farms grew to be the backbone of the black economy.
Much of this writing fever (for it is an illness) had been precipitated by the inauguration of a degree paper in creative writing the previous year. Archie had lobbied strongly for the paper, because he thought it would give the English department the avant-garde edge that it so obviously lacked. A great many students had enthusiastically signed up for the course, not because they were necessarily interested in writing, but because the creative writing paper didn’t involve an exam.
∗
Archie, still tutoring the class in those days before the advent of Martha Sewell, dismissed the Tara-Zanthian tale as ‘pathetic shite’ and, mortified, The Boy With No Name had fled the room. He had always had some difficulty occupying all three dimensions at once, but it was from that day onwards he began to fade.
Archie, scooting around the room in his chair like the glass on a Ouija board, came to a sudden stop in front of Kevin. He looked at him vaguely as if he thought he recognized him from somewhere and then asked him an impenetrable question about Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Kevin squirmed in his chair but still couldn’t take his eyes off Olivia’s seven-league boots. He had begun to sweat in the clammy atmosphere and the concealer on his chin had taken on a strange consistency so that it looked as if his skin was melting.
Kevin was saved from Gramsci by Professor Cousins, who wandered into the room at that moment. He caught sight of Archie and seemed confused.
‘Looking for something?’ Archie asked, rather impolitely, and under his breath muttered, ‘like your brain perhaps?’ Professor Cousins appeared to be even more puzzled. ‘I don’t know how I ended up here,’ he laughed. ‘I was looking for the toilet.’
‘You found it,’ Terri murmured, without apparently opening her mouth, or even waking up.
Professor Cousins was English – an affable, rather eccentric person who had recently taken his first tottering steps into dotage. Sometimes Professor Cousins was lucid, sometimes he wasn’t, and, as with anyone in the department, it wasn’t always easy to distinguish between the two states. The university’s strict laws of tenure dictated that he had to be dead at least three months before he could be removed from behind his desk. The crown may still have been perched precariously on the incumbent cranium of Professor Cousins, but the various faculty members were already deep in the throes of a momentous power struggle over the imminent possession of it. The sixties’ breeze-block walls echoed with machination and intrigue, plot and counterplot, as pretenders and contenders jostled for position.
Unnatural selection had already taken care of the main challenger for the post. The members of the English department were a notoriously accident-prone lot and the favourite – a statesmanlike Canadian called Christopher Pike – had eliminated himself by mysteriously falling down a flight of stairs in the Tower. Now that he was strung up in complex traction on the men’s orthopaedic ward of the DRI, the English department had witnessed a sharp escalation in hostilities between Archie and his two main rivals – Dr Dick and Maggie Mackenzie.
‘Well,’ Professor Cousins said, scratching his nose and hitching up his spectacles, ‘well, well.’ His almost bald head was covered in age spots; only a pale fringe of hair remained, like a friar’s tonsure or a ghostly atoll. He reminded me of an old animal – a sagging carthorse or an arthritic Great Dane, and I had an impulse to reach out and stroke his bald freckled pate and search in my pocket for an apple or a dog biscuit.
Suddenly, spying the empty chair next to me, he teetered over and sat down, squeezing his bag of bones behind the little wooden table from where he smiled benignly at us, raising his hand in a papal kind of gesture. ‘Do go on,’ he said amiably to Archie. ‘I’ll be out of the way here.’
Archie, after visibly struggling over how to deal with this bewildering behaviour, finally seemed to decide to simply ignore it and set off again. ‘
By asserting itself
as a piece of fiction,
the non-mimetic novel is in a position to negate both Sontag’s vision of an aesthetics of silence and John Barth’s prescription for formal regeneration.
What do you think? Someone?’
‘Well, it’s got me flummoxed, Archie,’ Professor Cousins laughed. Archie glared at him. Professor Cousins was an old-fashioned Shakespearean by trade and somewhat baffled by Archie’s approach to literature. As we all were.
The new question was batted silently around the room, a room that was growing increasingly hot and airless. We all found different ways of distracting ourselves – I looked out of the third-floor window as if I’d just seen something interesting (which I had actually, but I’ll come to that later) while Kevin stared at Olivia’s feet and made little goldfish moues of distress with his fat blown-rose mouth and Olivia herself inspected her fingernails, one by one, very carefully. At first I thought Andrea was incanting a spell to ward off Archie but then I realized she was quietly humming a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, which probably had much the same effect. Terri, meanwhile, as enigmatic as an egg, maintained an eerie silence, apparently occupying some mental space denied to the rest of us.
The door opened and Shug strolled into the room, carrying a purple velvet shoulder-bag embroidered with tiny mirrors and eclectically dressed in a pair of jeans which were composed almost entirely of patches, a black and white Palestinian shawl round his neck and an Afghan coat. Shug – who was our vertical neighbour in Paton’s Lane – claimed to have bought this coat, which was considerably superior to the dirty, matted fleeces possessed by most students, in the ‘Amir Kabir’ in downtown Tehran.
Shug, lithe and lanky amongst a stunted population, liked to think he was the epitome of cool. He was one of the few native Dundonians at a university awash with English drop-outs. The first time I encountered Shug he was walking along the Nethergate, with Bob bob bobbing along beside him, holding a haddock in his hand like a lollipop – ‘Arbroath Smokie,’ he explained in his own kippered voice. I thought he was talking about some kind of hashish – although many people, of course, consider it to be a kind of red herring.