The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (74 page)

You see. I’m in the majority then.

The majority doesn’t make the truth.

A reactionary into the bargain.

Don’t be silly. You think you know me from quickly leafing through a book.

I have read it all from cover to cover. And taken notes.

The majority also prefers platitudes. And I’m sick and tired of this one about language as an escape from reality. Language is all we have to apprehend reality, if we must use that term. And I notice that when people talk of reality they usually mean sex, with them.

Now Larissa Toren author, that is naughty, you are jumping to conclusions, I was referring uniquely to the communication you had with your Moroccan friend. But here you are putting delicious ideas into my innocent head.

And if they don’t mean sex they mean communication. As if communication wasn’t language.

Yes yes my dear but what language? I brought these other books to show you: here is a best-seller and sometimes you write like it. Sometimes however you write like this one, here, which is, look, I took all these notes.

All discourse is the return of a discourse by the Other, without whom I am not, but to whom I am more attached than to myself, I say I but I mean everyone, all of us, nor can I proceed to the identification of that I except through the medium of language.

There you go again.

Why do you suppose patients talk, and write? Why did the silent movies have captions? Why does teaching continue through books and dialogues and not simply by means of gestures and diagrams and experiments in glass bottles?

Well they do seem to use more and more diagrams but that’s precisely

Why for that matter did you come up to talk if it wasn’t to use language about language?

To go beyond your book.

to undermine it with other language, and that’s fine, you have every right, everyone has a right to subvert any text with any other but now

and to hold your hand

well and so you have. And now truly I must put you out and get on with my work.

You are escaping again. All right you are the host I must submit. You know there is an ancient Peruvian subsitute for writing by knotting threads. It is called Quipu.

Sauve qui peut then.

Ah Larissa Toren author come give me a kiss.

No.

Larissakissammmmmmmmmmmmmm.

That’s enough. Now please be a good boy and go.

And when can I see you again? Will you come and have a kous-kous with me?

Bang–bang?

Excuse me?

I’m sorry but I don’t like kous-kous.

You don’t like kous-kous!

Well it’s too greasy for me I don’t digest it.

I’ll have something else for you then. What do you like? When will you come?

Next winter.

You are mad. I shall not be here next winter.

Too bad.

I mean now please Larissa Toren author surely you have to eat sometimes?

I’m sorry. In any case I’m expecting my husband any day, tonight perhaps.

You have a husband! Ah well, now I understand everything.

Good. You might have found that out from my neighbour. Goodbye. Thanks for calling.

Which could be called society as a subversion of the text, if it were not itself textual.

You see even the hands were unnecessary in the portrait.

Jacques my friend you must help me. Certain problems have arisen.

Yes master?

Well, first,

Oh no master, not that firstly fourthly on the one hand small a small b stuff I can’t take it in. All right at faculty meetings but not when I have to participate.

Okay scrub it then one equals zero.

Please master what is the problem?

I’m just telling you. To begin with, I mean, sorry scrub that. Thanks to the man from Timbuctoo it is clear that Larissa is producing a text. But which text? It looks mightily as if she were producing this one and not, as previously appeared, Armel, or Armel disguised as narrator or the narrator I disguised as Armel. That’s not very clear.

No it isn’t.

Of course she may be producing a different text.

She may indeed, master.

That’s not very clear either.

Perhaps not.

But you see what follows from that?

Not quite yet master.

It means that the narrator I transformed into Larissa am no longer your master but your mistress.

Master! I find that most offensive. I know that we quarrelled at the inn, but I made you agree afterwards that all our quarrels were due to our not accepting the fact that although you were pleased to call yourself and I was pleased to call you the master, I am in fact yours. And when you asked me where I had learnt such things I replied in the great book, which seemed to settle the matter. But no great book could justify, in our long relationship (which I may remind you includes the story of my loves, much interrupted but otherwise normal and healthy) no great book as I say could justify the imputation you have just made. I beg leave therefore, although it breaks my heart, to part company once and for all with one who

Jacques, Jacques, stop that. I didn’t mean it literally.

Literally is I hope precisely how you did mean it master.

Jacques! You are a genius. Of course it was literal. A question of textuality.

There you go again.

Heterotextuality of course.

Eh?

It was a manner of speaking.

And a very strange manner if I may say so.

Well let’s forget it there are more important problems than my change of, I mean thirdly, no I mean, to get back to the subject of discourse, this woman Larissa has not only usurped my place as narrator, which apart from putting our relationship in danger

you said to forget it

I placed it in a parenthesis–poses other problems. On the one hand, I mean for one thing her mental diagrams may be a good deal more complex than mine, but that’s my problem, and on the other she has also acquired a sudden husband as a last minute escape.

He could be a polite lie.

Yes but he could be vero, no?

A husband is always, from a woman’s point of view, ben trovato.

You are speaking like an eighteenth century man-servant.

Yes I am. And you are an eighteenth century gentilhomme.

But in the late twentieth century, Jacques, women have been liberated, as you heard, and it is therefore only a man’s archaic viewpoint that his name and person are the greatest boons he can confer upon a woman.

Ah.

Oh don’t start that A E I O U business again be articulate this is serious.

Yes master.

Of course her husband if true would have to be Armel

But she’s only just met him and told him

no that’s a coincidence. They do happen despite the critics.

I don’t think so. You know my answer to all our problems, which has given me my surname

not your surname your epithet

if it is written above

that’s striking below the belt

if as I say it is written up there that we are to quarrel again, and make it up again, and have sexual problems

textual

textual problems that tie us up in knots like er Quipu, then it is also written that knots are meant to be either disentangled or cut.

Jacques what would I do without you?

That’s what I said at the inn. And before you opened the door into the narrative.

Not only are they meant to be disentangled they are themselves meaningful. Decipherable.

Oh decisively.

Of course her surname is different. For you may not have noticed that she has acquired a surname from the book he was holding. That’s no problem in the twentieth century though. But it’s oddly close isn’t it? Toren, Santores, why, it’s part of it! And that’s why they write letters they’re separated-but-very-good-friends.

Well didn’t you know that? It’s the only thing which is clear, the epistolary novel is always crystal clear people will explain themselves. But what about Armel?

Yes, that doesn’t quite fit. Moreover her mental diagrams seem to be also a good deal more complex than his, though his emotional ones seem more complex than hers, which is perhaps the trouble, but poses another problem if she is inventing him, and even more so if he is inventing her. Still, we’ll come to that. As to the first name, well of course she could have changed whatever original name she gave to the man she was inventing, maybe it was Marco or Stavro, hence the confusion of brows hair and height at the beginning, and given him the name of the man from Porlock, I mean from Timbuctoo.

I don’t follow.

To get something out of the interruption if only an unusual name.

You said women don’t want a name from a man in the twentieth century.

Oh for fictional purposes yes.

Ah. I mean, so nothing has changed then, in the twentieth century?

That’s the whole point, you see, out of the zero where the author is situated, both excluded and included, the third person is generated, pure signifier of the subject’s experience. Later this third person acquires a proper name, figure of this paradox, one out of zero, name out of anonymity, visualisation of the fantasy into a signifier that can be looked at, seen. You should read Kristeva that’s what she says. Though we mustn’t forget that in the grammar of narrative the proper name coincides with the agent. In this way the construction of a character has to pass through a death, necessary to the structuring of the subject as subject of utterance, and for his insertion into the circuit of signifiers, I mean the narration. It is therefore the recipient, you Jacques, or anyone, the other, who transforms the subject into author, making him pass through this zero-stage, this negation, this exclusion which is the author. I am in fact dead, Jacques. Oh, he’s asleep. What a pity. Everything is becoming clear at last. God! No! Yes! Quick, pen and paper

ARMEL SANTORES

LARISSA TOREN

Yes! It figures. So that’s why she said about Armel not finding his ME in her and she not finding her I. Why the names are anagrams. Except for ME in hers and I in his. Am I going mad? Help! I should have stuck to pronouns as in late twentieth century texts which refuse biographies since a name must have a civic status. In the pluperfect. Or a camouflashback pluperfect. That’s the rule. Written up there. In the grammar of narrative. Like attributes–states, properties and statuses. Iterative as opposed to actions. But any agent can enter into relationship with any predicate. The notions of subject and object correspond only to a place in the narrative proposition and not to a difference in nature hence no need to talk like Propp et al of hero villain lawbearer these are predicates. The agent is not the one who can accomplish this or that action but the one, who can become subject of a predicate. Hence only proper names, not substantives, though of course there can be duplication as when three brothers or robbers accomplish an identical action they are syntactically speaking one agent just as two lovers can be temporarily united in one proposition. So there have to be proper names after all, Jacques, Jacques why are you asleep?

No, no master, I was listening.

Jacques. I am going to break all the commandments.

Oh good. When?

Well–tomorrow. First I must sleep. Undress me Jacques. I’m very very tired. Dead in fact.

Yes master. Come, your redingote. There. Now let me unbutton the waistcoat. One, two, three, four

oh make haste Jacques.

Well there are a lot of buttons. There.

That’s enough I’ll sleep like this I’m falling already

But master, your jabot, your boots Oh Lord he’s off. See you later I-narrator. Here we go, left foot, yeeeeeeeank. Right foot, yeeeeeeeeank.

Mmmmm. Sing me a lullaby Jacques.

Anon anon sir. Ahem.

into an idyll

and about time too

the happiness sequence with lush screen music running in the woods along the rippling brook fresh green fresh no that’s for toothpaste or mentholated cigarettes or deodorant through a haze of heat and taking off at dawn racing down to the ocean first the swanky part then back along the highway to the slum stretch of shore at Las Ondas trash filthy then to the sordid motel where you make love till noon then off again along the freeway towards Malibu or maybe into the hills above the chaparral of a canyon or into the desert where the air is hot but soft on your skin and you make love again under a shadeless Joshua tree.

But within every idyll there opens out another idyll as in a vast mouth that never names the secret chiasmus in the name of the farther place.

Inside the mouth a camouflashback. Christmas time by an open fire in a fashionably beamed cottage. Six people, three men three women. Close-up on heroine sitting pale and dramatic her square face curtained into an oval by thick straight black hair parted in the middle almost meeting in well-trimmed curving points under the chin, underlining the distinct large mouth, touching on either side the edge of huge dark eyes themselves heavily framed in khol like those of Saroja Chaitwantee who however has a dark oriental beauty a quiet voice a modest manner and retains her mystery. The heroine is not like that at all but transparent deadly white and wears as the camera-eye travels down lovingly an elegant sea-green velvet trouser-suit close-fitting and low-cleavaged at the top three buttons undone to reveal pale lace under apple breasts when leaning forward to ask with childlike wonder in the huge dark eyes do you believe in the existence of God? In an elegant trouser-suit calling out in Shot 5 close-up of Armel pale and high browed a privation (at the superficial level) or a disjunction (at the fundamental level) as well as an attribution such as (a) Adam wants an apple (b) Adam wants to be good (at the superficial level) or a conjunction (at the fundamental level) so that God thus summoned as subject of discourse now exists (Shot 6). In an elegant trouser-suit.