The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (81 page)

Qui parle? Socrates is the one who speaks, unpaid for selling truth beauty and goodness wrapped up in dialectic as objects of exchange for a good argument, Plato his microphone, his reverential reference. In any case students don’t read. Soon all these innumerable voices will be as transitory as those of the transistor twiddled along from the transatlantic disc-jockey to the news in Serbo-Croat. For the record does not tolerate the re-presentation of a subject in its text, the I who says I not being the said I so that the recipient of the twenty-seven coloured veils is left frantically signalling into the wings of a love where nobody gets the message, like a pompous pirate who would not stay for a dancer through hoops and loops riding roughshod eye-hooded over unbeing for if mimesis exists non-being is. Look it up.

It follows therefore that if Larissa invents Armel inventing Larissa, Armel also invents Larissa inventing Armel. Thus there can be no communication between them and it is pointless or at least stylus-cramping to mime a dialogue of the deaf, an epistolary of the stolen I through purloined letters full of girded loins girdled with new leaves turned into fig-years of speech summarised in the minutes of their meetings where their mutual demand cannot reach its end let them call ulteriorly out of the anterior wilderness with mouthsful of locusts and white lies that eliminate Larissa right out of her own icon I-conned by his eyes until all that is signifiable in her is struck with latency as soon as raised to the function of the signifier which initiates this raising by its original disappearance, so that any discussion about whether to return to Armel (or to Larissa) as subject of discourse drifts into the undeicidable and she drives off again into the night watching the dancing hoops of taleological propositions split against one another inside the rectangle that reflects the rear a head, into which she enters as into a vehicle within a vehicle, twiddling along the transistor for other ideologies into which she enters as into a turntable broken into and broken up by a goldicondeology of golden youth for whom it is more difficult to enter the I of society than for the treasurer of signifiers to enter the paradiso terrestre as changed upon the blue guitar.

Evasiveness is the privilege of woman but woman has lost all her privileges by emancipation while gaining none of man’s, only his responsibilities. And when man reverses roles to steal both the irresponsibilities and the privileges of woman adding them to his own while leaving her only the responsibility for everything he has nothing to do but find another vehicle to get into, another hole an O an open vowel who will nevertheless become consonantal with his inarticulate seed and bring forth a concatenation of consequences with the non-privilege of non-evasiveness. All privilege must therefore be abolished and we demand a complete reorganisation of visceral organs. La demande however ne peut aboutir and the staff knows this and goes on exactly as previously falling back into the old ruts which must be analysed as global social phenomena. A long discussion then opens on a two-pointed prong:

Since, however, even a dead idyll is a mise-en-abîme and since every chasm opens into another chasm into which it is possible to fall as into a void, the intelligence nailed in pain as it sees through the acting out of its own lunatic trajectory, so every idyll dead alive or half dead opens out into another idyll, the idyll of Armel and Larissa, of Ali Nourennin and Saroja Chaitwantee Paolo and Francesca Lancelot and Guinevere Tristan and Iseult the potion and the holy grail the pen and the paper full of invariants such as the institution of learning rusticated into a bucolic carnival past-pralised by the presence of fixed motifs such as the equivocal use of exhorticultural terms for sexual ends and the display of vicious organs overflowing from the excess of hominivorous anguish. Larissa however has had most vicious organs removed, dropping a vessel here there and in the other place which explains her non-existence and consonantal compensation, piecemeal metonymised, parceled out, fragmented into synthetic synechdoche that organises a chiasmus in a forgotten name to create the rejection that she proinjects. Yours are the poems i do not write. In some languages things do themselves even when le ça ne se fait pas.

But if you come too close to any icon vero or non vero you will see only the texture and the knife-strokes not the goddess curtained in black hair with a small phallus-man where the phallus by the psychological sell should be, wrapped up in swaddling clothes bandages or winding sheets. If however you distance yourself from that particular myth you see merely an oval with a blob off-centre which owing to an archaic flaw in the intensity of the illusion splits into dancing hoops that rise and fall into one another as if juggled by an invisible magician or a black recumbent grave into which two men leap to double death by dripping dagger plunged through a crown of thorns a golden O of all the world a stage which is the other scene. Let the phallos perceive its aim. Within each texture is another texture within each myth another myth each signifier signifying another each problem a preamble to a promble.

Unless it is all the time, Oscar. The naked emperor of I-scream. Or the young man carbuncular whose concubines stereotype his index with names and numbers that he may reach his doctorate of indoctrination deliveried in ideology from top to toe a footman of the bourgeoisie.

There are plenty of subjects to play with Oliver Claire Hubert Olaf Chou Gregory Stanley Catherine reformulating the poetics of the Renaissance in the poetry of the cry the representation always double and in any case unequal, in some respects less than life in others more than plenary Oscar for example more empirical and imperial than any empirical imperialist his lanky henchman more wenching and lanky in smoked glasses than any other guinea-pigs as eternal truths both universal and particular, each an emitter recipient and of course a place d1
1 d2
2 with sixteen possible types of unbalanced relationships the double standard being inescapable even in semiotics. Not to mention the students. Students however according to the lanky wenchman dressed in democracy and smoked glasses are very malleable. The element of manipulation however should not be too visible for it destroys the fictive illusion by making the recipient over-aware of a technique at work.

Meanwhile Saroja Chaitwantee has at last fallen in love with Ali Nourennin just as he has grown a little weary of empty adagia wrapped in oriental mystery and hovers back to Hegel Heidegger Husserl. He also removes his watch, no one dreamer’s Kama Sutra fantasy coinciding in exactly the same quarter of an idyll.

Which needs adjusting.

Who speaks? What new narrator lover or mistress uttering there is no fear in love give not your soul etc except at night when the amber operates on both axes without taboo and all you need is care and courtesy (the notion of passion having disappeared), wondering however how to get through from the now which remains in the then to the then emptied of now. Simply by adding the heartlessness of then to then? But that is rather clumsy, metonymising the metaphor, projecting the horizontal axis of death onto the vertical axis of life and in a way cheating since you have given many a man a certain peculiar pleasure in frustrating their vulgar desire to know what happens inside you and that pleasure should not be dropped in mid-erection, leaving him hungry for it unless merely anorexic asthenic or cyclothymic, there can be no diagnosis since he too does not exist except as reinvestment itself perpetually reinventing S into O the Other Place and o the object of desire o
¹
o
²
o
ⁿ
.

They reflect nothing, for the narrator has disappeared into a pool of lethal self-love with Echo echoing on, though that is only a manner of speaking and the manner of speaking says in the beginning was the parting shot. Never let anyone see you see through them. Never let yourself be fully known.

Take these down as rules, preferable to thinking about the object of exchange in a double standard of the narrator’s omniscience that dips into many minds with varying degrees of presence of mind coming upon, at this point, the pistol, a mere instrument, whose only role is to utter by chance or by neurotic cunning the words of passion for ever unbelieved as surface structures every ninety minutes or so but opening up a vast mouthful of possible presences, an amateur Don Juan perhaps or Donatello of The Marble Faun why not? Oedipiano, piano.

The moving finger writes and having writ scrubs out the diagram. Tous les signifiés du portrait sont faux but even altogether cannot succeed in naming the falsehood, although they point to it in a hermeneutic gap chock full of the parenthetic fallacy whereby the falsehood is long desired but evaded by way of the evasive mouth and its paradismal trick of articulation.

It is the pain, it is the pain endures (I may the beaute of it not sosteyn) and pain, which takes a minimal fraction of a second thought to say, has to be lived through, and you could cover pages and maybe you do, rehandling the signifiers into acceptability and even amusement so that at last it vanishes like delight, a pricked balloon, a bubble not a festering boil. For no recipient desires a message of pain emitted from another, neither if he is in it nor if he is out of it, all the less so if has caused it. So you do not transmit the message, many times, and the unmany times you do you regret it since it falls on an earful of sirensong or wax or crabs. Only ebullience can be shared, grabbed, and is, for there is always someone who needs to reinvest in it.

Marco for instance.

Or is it Stavro?

At last we

 

 

The moving finger with its dumb designation maintains the truth (of the falsehood) in a pregnant plenitude the piercing of which (with the punishing finger in final position), both liberating and catastrophic, must bring about the end of the discourse, and the character (finger or pistol) is never more than a passage of the enigma with which you dip us all in the eternal debate with the sphinx that has stamped the whole of occidental paradismatics. Therefore the truth (about the falsehood) must be evaded at all cost of life until the death of the discourse.