The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (87 page)

And as Marx said personalities and events recur, the first time as tragedy the second as farce.

Revolution is only another matrix, dismembering the paternal inheritance in a Macte Jovis followed by fratricide. To eat is to be eaten for you too will be fathers dismembered and ammazzati.

Phooey. Rhetoric out of a lawsuit over property in Syracuse, a disembodied vox.

Revolution is not an institution.

We demand the abolishing of all idylls and a complete reorganisation of generating structures.

Truth is an outmoded institution.

Precisely. Words imply the absence of things just as desire implies the absence of its object.

Yes and discourse occurs only insofar as there is lack of sight, eyelessness is not a provisional state but a structure.

There is a flaw in the judas-eye.

Rubbish. Our object revolution is very much present, and desired.

It can’t be both that’s a polarity. In any case the punishment never falls on the euphoric term, only on the poor Yorick.

He’s dead.

Safe.

Words seeking to be true become false and inversely, words seeking to be false become true. We end up experiencing the feelings that we pretend, one can’t speak, or write, with impunity.

What set pieces of author dead dying and half dead are you dipping into like cannibalistic survivors comrade?

Look it up. Are not all idées reçues?

We demand the closing of all books and looks and the closing of this institution of learning the conspicuous consumption of texts with built-in obsolescence and a capitalist narrative economy now crashing into a middle-class crisis.

And who will close it, an arbitrary act of your fake authority?

Rules are made to be broken in an age that is earthquaking from evolving permanence to permanent revolution.

But from the point of view of the object exchanged the debit goes to the left.

You book-keeper, footman of the bourgeoisie. Close all the books I say. There have to be textual disturbances since you’ve all fallen back into the old ruts, regressed into archaic modalities that simply no longer exist and which can therefore no longer be imposed.

Hear hear.

Oh go fuck yourself.

Very good my friend it’s better than fucking your mother. Who do you think you are, bourgeois little boys dipped carefully into a bloody eye and swaddled in a castration complex to preserve the dirty little family secret that structures society each tale-bearer carrying his code in his mouth until he has eaten himself silly and soft and flabby? That way recuperation lies. We dip you you dip us in a permanent circulation of value-objects with always something added, ex nihilo, swelling out the portrait of the object instituted by itself as a value although its semes are false, with the moving signifier pointing to the falsehood but incapable of decoding it so that although long desired it is maintained in a pregnant plenitude the piercing of which, both liberating and catastrophic, will bring about the end of the goldicondeological discourse.

So that the fat magician lifts you up busting out of sequence to switch the lights to quell the audience he says dragging you out into the wings of a carnival all hierarchy dissolved although you scream not now not now see you later you-narrator the show must go on first we must change the subject find the missing prop the thirty-seventh veil the white white rabbit mannikin out of a black hatch consulting his watching consultant as he falls into a faint.

Meanwhile the timetable crashed into by the bouleversing bulldozers of society as subversion of the text has slipped into another, the talebearer has given birth to another tale-bearer, spokesman of a reality which merely seeks to appear true, separating the upper and the lower waters into sea and sky fornicating with earth in a death-battle with time for a trophy that drops into the sea and rises, feathered in foam, the signifier of signifiers beneath which the truth escapes for pigmaleons into its own depths, retaining its mystery, reflecting at the surface only the sky, despite the underwater plungers.

Iconostasis.

What do we do now, Jacques, the story of our loves has been interrupted again.

Coitus interruptus.

That’s not worthy of you.

No, I never like it. I gather there’s a pill now to structure the family which structures society.

The family has crumbled, together with Oedipus.

Unthroned.

O let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.

And kings’ daughters.

Undroned.

Transferred to the other place.

A stylus she can’t cramp.

The anti-hero anti-rescuing her from an anti-monster in an anti-romanzo.

It sounds very negative

and therefore singular

and therefore replaceable.

We could clean up the dirty little secret.

Or abolish it.

All deletions in the deep structure must be recoverable, that’s a law, written up there as you would say.

That way recuperation lies. For you are not my master except by a purely verbal gentlemen’s agreement I am yours.

A trace of hierarchy however has been retained despite demand in an institution where the old learn from the young and discussion frequently overflows the framework of this one point. Can a point have a framework? All purely verbal gentlemen should be eliminated. No, every fact of language must be first analysed as a global, social phenomenon. And what about mere linguistic ladies we demand an equal right to elimination. No, to analysis as global social phenomena. You don’t have the floor it’s Jeremy’s turn. Oh god is he still here? Well very briefly I simply want to say the problem isn’t where you think it is. Oh it must have gone out then it was here a moment ago that means we haven’t got a quorum, the problem must be present.

And if present then no longer desired since desire implies the absence of its object as words imply the absence of their referents. Since we are talking about the problem it must therefore be absent.

So what do you think, should we kill off Larissa?

She sure asks for it.

Naive speakers indeed!

In fact.

In fact of language, a global social phenomenon.

A balloon half grabbed let it go.

Explode it.

Both liberating and catastrophic.

Well Renata gave us the clue.

She stuffed it with clues and so did Ali why don’t they get together in a clueful grip?

Shall we Renata?

I’m not competing with Saroja of the khol-framed eyes.

Saroja of the oriental adagia has left this class.

Oh you’re eliminating her too?

She has eliminated herself into a cloud of unknowing.

Ah, like Stavro.

No not like him at all he’s a transparent blue lacuna which is quite different. More like Armel, if it weren’t for that illiberal and catastrophic chapter in which you reinvented him as an ideal husband, articulate and crueltobekind, in order to dialogue lunatically with yourself.

What do you mean? That was real.

You hogged the paradismal dialogue my dear. Already Myra slipped him into the wrong rectangle as a black man last term at the flick of a sexual play and that had to be rectified. Tell me how did you spend you summer vacation?

Well, REALLY.

Textually speaking.

Sexually freaking so there.

Good good.

But Ali what do you have against the black people?

I am an Arab I have nothing at all against the black people Eliza.

BUT?

It didn’t fit, that’s all, The text must cohere. For Armel is not like that at all but tall and dislikes answering questions in black and white with a nominervating intelligence and an evasive mouth that wraps him up in the seductive parlour game of superstition disguised as mystery, which is an old illusion, but in which he nevertheless deep down believes.

That’s precisely why one has to reinvent him all the time. I mean that’s why Larissa had to.

The past tense doesn’t exist my love.

You’re going too fast I’m not your love yet

even now as we drive the discourse into the future merely glancing up at the retrovizor we watch the road ahead and sing like crazy touching each other’s thighs voglio far il gentil uomo for instance or la belle si tu voulais.

with the intuition of a naive speaker.

Shall we return to the subject of discourse?

Yes, what is it?

The text within the text.

Looks within books.

But Larissa? and our Larissa? Has she not carefully invented the person she has become, stereotyping her twenty-seven veils for a pontificating pirate who will not stay for an answer?

Till a motherless doorhandle crying order order pistol-shoots her into a swift earthquake that crumbles all the structures.

Well grammatically they’re the same agent you know, the doorhandle and the door, as when three brothers or robbers accomplish an identical action, only the modalities differing hence the confusion of brows at the start.

We’re going round in circles this isn’t a faculty meeting what shall we do, kill her off? Eliminate her to Lima or let her die in Rome?

Oh not Lima she wouldn’t have gone she obviously had no intention of going.

Let us not fall into the intentional fallacy.

But she must die in ROMA AMOR spelt backwards of course.

A heroine who literally dies of love.

Let us not fall into the affective fallacy.

No not of love she doesn’t love him she dies of the expanded timetable bulldozing into the remaining kidney hypertrophied you know to compensate for the removal of the other like dreams so it atrophies and

Oh yeah and I guess you want the intrusion of the bathetic fallacy to fill the gap with a deathoflittlenell scene Larissa attached to a kidney-machine that’s desperately trying to cleanse her blood of false semes as she talks to the ideal husband?

Or to the Other.

No the phallus-man should simply be fizzled out.

Well he is already.

Oh I don’t know it’s odd how one usually does bump into ex-lovers, you know, Albertine returned devoid of all but negative significance. Let’s have them meet though he would of course first fizzle himself out like she said, and that’s what would hurt, after all that pressure, that he’d be too cowardly even to honour her as a human being and tell her he’d switched off and met someone else, a student like she said who’d look exactly like his mother but a fresh fleshy young version and who’d hold him exactly where she wants.

How do you know what his mother looks like she’s extratextual.

Yes he’s a motherless doorhandle remember.

Oh well we could work her into the Calabrian sequence all Italians bring their women for the mamma to disapprove.

He’s not Italian he’s Albanian. Etruscan perhaps.

But an exile brought up in Italy with an Italian name.

Virgil was an Etruscan so was Julius Caesar.

Was it Calabria I thought we said France.

Yes and he would calmly bring her, the momma-sudent I mean, as his young bride to the semiotic castle the following summer, where she’d be recuperating Larissa I mean by invitation of the Count Professor whatshisname La Bocca from being at death’s door hanging by one thread about which he’d cared nothing having fizzled himself out the phallus-boyman I mean and we could have a hilarious comedy with the two women sneaking around the spiral staircases of the castle avoiding each other because he’d be too frightened to introduce them and La Bocca saying my dear lady he’s no gentleman coming here and Larissa bumping into him finally saying why are you behaving in this ridiculous manner. What ridiculous manner sheepish like and she’d say well all this cat and mouse game introduce me to your wife let’s behave like civilized human beings. Or maybe he could come up to her and say will you be my friend.

Oh my God Julia what mimesis are you working through nobody behaves like that.

And who cares if they do it’s a lost generation.

No well I agree it’s a bit too much but we should have the fall into language and the exploitation of the very clichés she feared.

Why? We’ve had plenty and rejected it.

But it somehow crept back into the text didn’t it? Everything exists even the discourse you do not choose.

Not the dimension of banality.

On the contrary, for that very reason will you let me finish for heaven’s sake it’s my turn

and the floor is flooring you

Oh shut up and they’d meet for a drink on the castle terrace and Larissa would say well tell me all how did you two meet closing the manuscript in which she’d been inventing the whole episode before she knew it would turn out that way that happens you know and the whole dialogue in advance and the girl would say well I’m studying comparadive lirrechure.

Why are you making her a Southern North American they met in Peru.

That’s true she’s a Latin mother type or maybe an Inca hook-nosed and fleshy round the jaws preparing several chins. Oh well anyway it would come out that she went to his class on
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promessi
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and they got all cosy over that and he was amazed she’d read it and she also knew The Knight in the Tigerskin translated of course through her course in Comparative Literature and he’d tell Larissa all about it how nobody reads that and how unique she is the mommagirlwife I mean we’d better give her a Spanish name Vittoria for instance forgetting that Larissa too

No thank you thou shalt not take my name in vain

Well anything it doesn’t matter they’re dropping out, going to Rhodesia to live the white man’s life and talking of how they’ll go on safaris and that, hunting the tiger