The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (72 page)

Salvatore Tancredi

Roll on the vacation.
Meanwhile in Philadelphia.

The present tense does not exist Armel, even as I write and your eyes move into the future from left to right (on their two legs
like Gulliver on his ladder contraption in Brobdingnag) let alone airmailtime, I’m going to lose a verb there just as you lost a person but never mind (read Hegel on Becoming) that’s today’s style, no time for belles lettres persanes or otherwise, I mean it’s so much easier to ringturn up isn’t it. Though no doubt you’re doing that, the epistolary novel I mean as per your essay on Time in same which I read, though you still seem to remain in the old dispensation as if Clarissa and Pamela and Mme de Merteuil et al really existed and really wrote (boy in that perspective I wish Pamela could have been dealt with by Valmont–instead of being mere projections with which the reader identifies, the characters ultimately stepping right out of the text–read Rastier on this, most interesting. I ought to have closed that bracket ages ago why not here). No but seriously it’s a classic example (the ep.nov.) of the fact that characters also narrate, which has been obvious since Homer but which trad lit critters keep ignoring. Why this flight into platitude? Structural analysis is already out of date, let alone all that stuff about scene and summary point of view and the narrator explicit implicit privileged unprivileged reliable unreliable etc., true of course but quite simply non-pertinent, impertinent in fact since point of view
is
discourse and what matters is→ are the innumerable and ever escaping levels of Utterance by the I who is not the I who says I (if he does) but you know all that we discussed it. Which is why we have to reinvent it continually, rehandling the signifiers in constant reinvestment. Read Irigaray. And of course we have no surface narrative you and I, Armel, only the deep structures of competence, the show within the show, played out elsewhere, the text within the text which generates another text and so on ad neurotic infinitum.

Why ask what went wrong? If it did that is not an askable question (nor for that matter if it didn’t, for opposite reasons). In any case you know part of the answer, at the surface (poetry being surface structure if it is anything, resonant to infinity and for that reason with its deep structure irrecoverable, and those who try to reduce it to deep structure are mere grammarians and drive me bonkers): ‘He said “willingly for the tale is short / it was i think yourself delivered into both my hands / herself to always keep” / “always?” the young man sitting in Dick Mid’s Place asked / “always” Death said.’ But you can make up answers such as you didn’t find your ME in me or you kept it nor did I find my I in you but kept it. Why speak of it however? Write your text and reinvent me in the present tense, which is a convention like any other tense. I shall then be different (and language consists of difference!) but from what unmarked term of your binary conception is harder to determine than in mere linguistics. Whoever you invented invented you too. That surely is the trouble, we do not exist. But by all means let’s go on pretending we do, going forth and multiplying the letters (Fort/da). I
^I
enjoy your
ⁿ
letters though not your cliché about leaving doors open or was it not slamming them, OK in a letter written during a faculty meeting (very amusing) but avoid in text please.

Larissa my loathing. Who’s she when she’s at home.

There has occurred however, the darkening of the man at the flick of a dialogue slipped out of a timetable turned smoky grey and even Black Literature to dim the glare of floodlights from behind, although the glare is preferable to the sudden isolation of almost not seeing Armel who is not like that at all but tall and deathly pale with an evasive mouth as described by Veronica and the Other and a brow as high as a sacred belly in the name of the farther the sun and the love that bypasses understanding swinging left out of it beaming ahead transformed into two small red eyes in a huddled shape outlined by forward glare and away into no narrator at all but a lacuna through which it is possible to fall into delirious discourse that does not belong to anyone least of all to any sidelight substitute whose only role is to utter by chance or by neurotic cunning the words of passion for ever unbelieved as deep structures every niente minutes or so but opening up a vast network of possibilities in which we can then construct our sequence of functions.

Are adagia functions?

Never let yourself be fully known.

Give not your soul unto a woman.

Contrariwise or unwise: There is no fear in love.

Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.

And by banal association when waking by anyone who has sworn eternal love and thinking in the cold light of the small hours that grip the hole of truth as it generates nothing but *sentences let not the day weave the other’s fantasy into your own so fully recognised, pick up your fantasy and go.

Fill the air from left to right with elements of narrative grammar which does not exist save in mythology which however covers a multitude of scenes.

And when entering into the name of a father as into a secret chiasmus remember that the law-bearer breaks all the commandments in wrath and then brings down new Thoth tablets which may or may not be exact replicas of those in the other scene.

(This in a parenthetic phrase is called the Parent Sinthetic Phallusy)

Those which? Those for. Those against. Abstinence is good for you. Refusal of the goddess by Eurilochus, you know, Canto 39 look it up, I can’t explain without sounding like one playing the role of femme fatale but it has its basic truth, he ended up with crabs in his ears, eaten by crabs I mean at the bottom of the ocean for fear of being eaten or merely perhaps changed.

So that the darkening has occurred at the flick of a word or two although Armel is not like that at all but tall and deathly pale with back swept hair over a nominervating intelligence. These things do matter in a text like the human body politic or not, nor does he omnicomment the beginnings of narrative in a radical university which has been dreamt up by the unreliable narrator of the moment who however will be tactfully dropped without scene or motivation. For it is easy enough to find a substitute text such as for instance Greimas on attribution such as a) Adam wants an apple b) Adam wants to be good.

“The introduction, into the superficial grammar, of wanting as a modality, permits the construction of modal utterances with two actants: the subject and the object. The axis of desire uniting them then authorises a semantic interpretation of them as virtual performer subject and an object instituted as a value …

Such an attribution–or acquisition, by the subject, of the object–seems to occur as a reflected action: the performer subject attributes to himself, as subject of the descriptive utterance, a value-object. Thus the reflected attribution is only a particular case of a much more general structure of attribution, well known in linguistics as the diagram of communication or, more generally still, the structure of exchange, represented in its canonic form as an utterance with three actants–the emitter, the recipient and the object of communication. Thus the Narrative Utterance

NU = F: transfer (E→o→R)

The use of a very general formula has the advantage of allowing us to distinguish clearly between two different syntactic levels: a) the level of the syntactic operator of the statement, translated in a superficial grammar as the subject performer of the attribution (in fact a metasubject and the cause of the accomplished transfers) and b) the level on which the transfers themselves operate. The terms emitter and recipient in fact merely camouflage the distinction.

The second level (descriptive and non-operational) can then be given an anthropomorphised topological representation: the actants are conceived not as operators but as places where the value-objects can be brought and from which they can be withdrawn [so Paul was right about recipients].

The transfer can then be interpreted at the same time as a privation (at the superficial level) or as a disjunction (at the fundamental level) or as an attribution (at the superficial level) or as a conjunction (at the fundamental level), thus representing the circulation of value-objects topologically as an identification of the deictic transfers with the terms of a taxinomic model … that is, each isotopic space (the place where the performances occur) consists of two deixes that are conjunctive but equivalent, at the fundamental level, to the contradictory terms:

(by kind permission of the author)

 

So far however there are no actant-places except the Other Scene and the Institution of Learning where the old learn from the young and the young learn nothing until suddenly one day they too are old. And even that has just been closed down by an arbitrary act of Authority after serious textual disturbances due to the obscurity of excessive generalisation.

Some universities have large square rooms for faculty meetings with bottom-shaped chairs and liftable side-flaps for left-minded people not to write on a point of information, some have boardroom tables. In some you lecture on a raised dais in an amphibiantheatre to a sea of floating faces rising in waves upward and away, in some you sit ensconced in an armchair protected all around by walls of books, in others you sit on a table among the students but so as to be above them nevertheless and casually chat. In some you peripat along in ancient sunshine (known also as the peripatetic fallacy), in others you walk up to one who sits by the roadside pretending to be receiving wisdom and say you old fool, come out of it, get up and do something useful, you sit on the one and only wooden Chair between St Julien le Pauvre and Notre Dame or is it Ali Nourennin and Saroja Chaitwantee with the students on sacks of straw under a leaden sky. Now and then the mosaic of bent heads breaks and the boulevards which were originally promenades constructed out of demolished bulwarks are bouleversed back into bulwarks again. Other times the bulldozers are content to crash into the timetable. In some actant-places you have chalk and sponge and blackboard to inscribe and scrub your diagrams, in others a roll of parchment from which you dictate figures of rhetoric or else an organ of flash buttons facing glass cubicles full of earphoned heads or an overhead projector and a spirit-loaded pen which you dip into your mind coming at this moment upon nothing at all in the sudden isolation of losing I-contact with everyone except set pieces of masterpieces dying or half dead. There are degrees of presence just as there are degrees of redundancy to save the message from entropy which is the negative measure of the significance of the message. These are familiar rules, made to be broken in an age of transition between evolving permanence and permanent revolution moving right to left from the point of view of the object exchanged.

Order order. You don’t have the floor it’s Larissa’s turn.

I am astounded. I think it is quite aberrant, not to mention confusing, for first year students to be plunged into Generative Grammar in one class and Black Protest or Women’s Lib in another. For one thing the Women’s Lib lot don’t understand a thing about deep structures and are crashing around with destructive naivety but that’s a parenthesis Larissa that’s not fair. I can’t have you will you let me finish please. You are turning this place into a carnival. Well I have no objection it’s a mode of perception as Bakhtine has shown, but you should then be aware that carnival has its own structure at every level all taboos suspended all hierarchy reversed and certain very specific ineluctible processes I forebear to mention. There is too, the question of duration. If you know what you’re doing, fine, go ahead. But I doubt it. And if we must have this chaotic freedom in the choice of courses let us at least integrate it through psychic structures that we understand. A text is a text is a text.