The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (76 page)

You’re cruel.

Stop forcing me to choose. Try to understand.

I’m trying. But you’re destroying me, my image of myself I mean, as, reflected, by you, that’s what I can’t take, the way, you’re doing it. You know, all the things you said, what I was, to you, and now, it seems I’ve been, the castrating female, all along, and you’ve kept it, bottled up, instead of, talking to me, telling me, guiding me, on the contrary you’ve, pushed me, into that position, by always asking me, my advice, in everything, never taking, a decision.

You’re contradicting yourself too you know. You always stopped your infatuations dutifully, you complied with the rigid structure I imposed yet I pushed you into the man’s role. That’s your version. You just won’t see mine.

Well tell me then if I’m so stupid.

Perhaps I am trying to tell you something, and this was the only way. I love you Lara.

I don’t, believe it. You wouldn’t do this to me, and in this particular way, so crude.

Perhaps the only way I said.

You asked me a question. Yes, it’s awful. You’ve finally succeeded in making me feel jealousy, by first destroying me verbally, so that I have no resistance, I imagine the whole thing, the whole time, morbidly, bisexually, I am her and I am you. It’s horrible. And it. needn’t have happened that way if we’d had a more comprehensive structure, from the start, as I wanted.

But you never–oh I don’t want all these recriminations, it all goes back too far and there’d be no end. We’re in a crisis and we’re going round in neurotic circles. That’s the way it did happen, let’s stop talking about it. But I understand. What you’re going through. I felt your presence.

Oh go fuck yourself.

The fall was into language. Until the next time when you say you felt her presence she says I wasn’t there I was with someone else. But bumping into us all the time out of psychic inevitability she says or is she spying obsessionally? As if the enormous sprawl of city eating up the plain were not large enough to contain the three of us. Well if you will canoodle in public so she toots by with a friendly wave which upsets Veronica and makes you furious well what else could I do coming upon you like that I couldn’t back in that street everything I do is wrong recrimination or smiling by. Until she drives away into the night, twiddling along the car radio filling the air with disembodied noise that penetrates other noise like redundance busting the curve of entropy and always the same show, watching the dark magician as he juggles his logic into luminous coloured hoops dancing in the bluish rectangle that reflects the rear ahead.

Hmmm. That’s

I haven’t finished. And the hoops reiterate set circles of dialogue like why Armel I want to understand it’s so against your own well I am Italian no sorry I meant to cross that out Well I can’t explain. It’s a terrible force, a mystical force (that’s because we brought God into it you see). Something happens to me, it’s like drugs, or Zen, a kind of Nirvanah, from the sheer time of it, the duration. What do you mean? A sort of divine emptiness from sheer repetition, like ritual, well, you can’t go on for six hours can you?

Is that the end?

Yes.

Some guy. Go forth and multiply the multiplicator.

Ma, devo raccontare qualcosa.

What do you think?

 

Saroja?

I don’t know. The tone kind of drops. It sounds too personal. Would Larissa and Armel behave like that, or talk like that?

Well would they? What do you think, Myra?

She could be sort of two people. I mean highly intellectual women can drop to the level of women’s magazines when they’re upset look at Simone de Beauvoir. And that increases their agony they kind of watch themselves doing it. And Armel who’s been very poised so far, almost too much though I guess that was my fault sterotyping him into an old-fashioned casual cad well he could have a hidden violence men do you know which comes out, like hers, in a fury of vulgarity.

Sure, but somehow that’s not quite rendered here. Saroja raised two points which are really in contradiction, the tone, or what we may call the literality quality, and the realism or plausability. You’ve neatly explained the former by the latter but it doesn’t really resolve the problem, this being a text not an imitation of life. Michael?

I feel there’s an awful drop after Myra’s piece and Niel’s I mean there the castration theme we’ve been studying in Hawthorne remained on a poetic level as a symbolic structure whereas here it comes out as a private and crude matrimonial wrangle.

Yes well I said it’s a neurotic situation and the fall was into language.

Yes but what language? It was a nice phrase Salvatore but it doesn’t quite get you out of it as author. Yes Peter?

Well I think it’s crazy people just don’t talk like that any more I mean they don’t feel like that any more in an age of intersexuality they make love and that’s that. Marriage is only a human institution invented to protect property and it’s an outmoded institution.

Ali?

I agree about the non-literality and the modalities of thought and passion being archaic in fact the two usually go together. But I feel a bit sorry for the poor man who’s being trapped in his own very human condition by her ruthless yet selfish logic, for all her unconvincing sobs, a mere matter of inserting commas. You married Salvo?

Well, yes.

I didn’t know that Salvatore, though I might have guessed by now. Is your wife Italian?

No, English.

And that’s part of the trouble is it? Have you been married long?

Seven years.

That’s a lot for a student. You must have married very young.

Yes. I worked my way into college. I have a beautiful bambino.

Well you seem to have crowded in a lot. But we won’t go into that. Shall we accept this instalment or let someone else have another go?

Let’s put it to the vote shall we. Those for. You can vote too Salvatore. Those against. Abstentions. Any refusals? A show of hands in the secret ballet of the I upon the sacred belly of democracy okay then I’m sorry Salvatore, who would like to take it up from where Julia left off? Renata. Right. Then Saroja. Fine.

For since we have slipped from proper names and textual idylls into the realm of impure fiction with biographies and
camouflash-backs
, things being given a local habitation in the hills under the sun stolen from Isherwood the ocean on the blue guitar the citrus fruits stolen (out of a letter from Marco or is it Stavro who misspells citrus with a y) as one might steal a dream a maxim or maybe a nose or brow to generate a text full of guinea-pigs who do not exist except in a theory of the sign that has no reference in reality then why not organs? Has La Gioconda a liver? Valéry asked. Well she looks as though she has unless it is the patina of time, reformulating the poetics of the Renaissance and deforming Aristotle as when we say we know the characters of Shakespeare Balzac Dickens Racine as characters of flesh and blood. They are our brothers. Yet the representation is always double read Rastier on this. Sometimes it is real and wordly sometimes mental, and in any case unequal: in some respects less than life since any structure presupposes a void where the liver should be for instance or excrement or a hole within a hole such as thyroid deficiency; and in others more than life, more than plenary, a surfeit that makes Silas Marner more real than all misers, Rastignac more real than all ambitious men, overtaking their time as eternal truths both universal and particular, both simple and complex, denying both historicity and the materiality of the text. Which is why on the one hand allegory causes difficulty in this humanist theory which rejects it as bad while, on the other, historical characters too must be avoided, they have too much dead weight to become eternal truths. But structure has its reasons that realism knows not. See that article on Gombrowicz in your bibliography.

And if these characters are men of flesh and blood they must therefore have a soul and the soul has passions. So that we must study the passions that enflame the soul of Cleopatra. This is a seventeenth century concept for the notion of passion has disappeared. And this passion must push to extremes, become transcendant, provide references in the before and after. But, note well, we do not in fact attribute a body to these characters, and this despite all the later vogue for detailed physical description. Hence the dis-illusion when we see them on stage or screen. It is better to fantasise them than to see them. This is Rastier’s view. You may not agree and we can discuss it. Thus, he says, the hero slips out of the text, establishing a specular relationship with the reader and away from the author in an eternal mechanism between the reader’s demand and the author’s gift of the character. The humanist theory has all the beautiful coherence of a psychosis: castration is at the basis of this enjoyment, Lancelot giving more pleasure to the ladies than any real imparfit brutal knight after the jousting without deoderant under his armour removed in a damp northern castle. He is a phallus detached from the totality of the text and walking about the world as hero. Yes Ali, on transcendance.

But who invents Larissa? A man, probably, suffering from anorexia in slow fluvial eruption, one flux catching up with the previous that continues nevertheless into his thirties forties or more somatic symptoms so that particles of food unbroken up by enzymes get lodged somewhere and toxic and he lives on a slop diet highly deficient in protein with the I subject to chemical
disintegration
in the dialectic of desire, these being mere iterative attributes which explain his passivity his depressions his outbursts of destructive violence his evasiveness and his inability to shut jars without opening them again to see if they are shut. And doors of cars, and doors. Hamlet has long ago been analysed, Don Juan has been analysed, Tristan Lancelot and Faustus who do not of course exist. For although it is arguable that any language which ascribes sensations and thoughts to persons will necessarily identify them as embodied persons the argument is itself a fiction. You can however reinvent them. Nor has he told–if he is telling–that Larissa is in the habit of having rotten organs removed all over the world, dropping an appendix in Sicily a kidney in Piscataway a gall-bladder in Gaul a thyroid gland in Thailand a womb totality in Utah leaving a chasm of pain and illness after sex and a hormone imbalance which subsumes the I as subject to chemical disintegration in the dialectic of desire, these being mere iterative attributes which explain her activity her depressions her outbursts of destructive violence her non-evasive articulateness her slamming of doors and wishing they were open with emphasis, envelope, O for the the wings of a dove.

Tea for two, euphemism, vive le roi, double you for quits.

For the alphabet the stars the zodiac and the gods are at least as old as the idyll of Armel and Larissa poem not couple which begins with swift-footed Hermes.

The golden gate to the paradiso terrestre the hills under the sun the ocean the vineyards and the c(y)trus fruits or is it the other place where invention grows out of letters following one another from left to right in childish characters that reflect a round pretty girl with soft round hair and unaccountable glasses. It’s marvellous Armel this sparking of ideas by air across a continent: ‘yours are the poems i do not write’. I love you already, intellectually I mean don’t get alarmed I love your work your words and find your name in them paradigmatically I’ll show you. My thesis is almost finished. Do you know our names are near anagrams? Looking forward yours ever Larissa.

Who is not like that at all but tall and dark with hair drawn tightly back and an iconic nose no glasses but eyes dark-framed and painted all around like those of Isis or maybe even Ra. These things do matter in a text like love and three beautiful illegitimate children by a man she refused to marry why do they always want marriage why marriage? In the immortal words of Louise de Valmorin nobody marries nowadays, only a few priests are thinking about it. Well I am a prêtre manqué Larissa. Manqué or marqué? In this day and age when we know that the object is from the start an object of central loss. He was called Oscar. Interesting isn’t it. He scarred me with his zero oh that’s not worthy of you Lara my love I know I fill the air with minimal narrative units from left to right or vice versa. He was not Odysseus the voyager through flux but Eurilochus. Eurilochus? Oh yes you know, Canto 39 I can’t explain without sounding like a femme fatale you’ll have to look it up but it has its basic truth. He ended up as a crab or something no at the bottom of the ocean eaten up by crabs which comes to the same thing for we can’t eat each other without becoming each other can we. Let the phallos perceive its aim. I love your head Armel you have the most beautiful head. Like Beethoven. In fact I think I love your head more than anything, and all that’s in it. O Salome do you want it on a platter then?

He was the unmarked term I mean Oscar was you’ve done linguistics haven’t you no well you must every poet must it’s wildly poetic, the binary polarity in any field phonic or semic but in fact much more complex one can do an elementary diagram of contraries and contradictories look white versus black or white versus non-white. But that’s logic it’s as old as Socrates it comes in the Protagoras. Oh does it? How wise you are Armel you must teach me. But linguistics is logic of course it seeks the fundamental patterns of thought below the surface structures. Take sexual relationships for instance, prescribed versus forbidden, say incest, horizontally, here, prescribed versus non-prescribed, diagonally, so, such as in our culture female adultery, then the other diagonal forbidden versus non-forbidden such as male adultery you see the double standard is useful even in semiotics the vertical relationships being implicit. And you can superimpose any other system the economic for example here, profitable, non-profitable, harmful, non-harmful you see female adultery coincides with non-profitable and male adultery with non-harmful so that on any one axis sixteen differently balanced or unbalanced relationships are possible and if you superimpose yet another system say individual, desired non-desired feared non-feared there must be sixteen times sixteen I haven’t worked it out. Or take a simpler system traffic lights for instance, green versus red or green versus non-green, that’s amber. The amber operates on both axes I suppose but with a different meaning non-green or non-red. Except at night when it functions on its own flashing on and off without taboo, and all you need is care and courtesy. It works all the way from semes to narrative structure or myth. Maybe it’s the grammar of the universe or do I mean universal grammar. Though I’m also beginning to suspect structuralism. Maybe I’m going beyond it as I went beyond Oscar. It has its limitations yes he marked me with his zero, which is also the other.

But it needs adjusting.

Like a bluish rectangle into which you enter as into a room saying once upon a spacetime Larissa is a little girl. There is a photograph of a soft round pretty-plain creature in glasses ill-fitting cardigan over a blouse and string of pearls and soft round hair with two small children and a baby as if their maid and you dip your eyes into hers within it to feel for the potential beauty and bring it out in amazement. It has to be first imagined to be true yet not by you by Oscar perhaps the unmarked term who nevertheless conjures her as Ra, teaches her to dress to slim to wear contact lenses paint her eyes read learn live but not to love. Unless she has carefully reinvented herself for you or some other. A dompna soisebuda composed of femme-reine, femme-enfant femme fatale, grey eminence Cleopatra’s nose Musset’s Muse a bit of Heloise old and new the charming scatterbrain Georges Sand Mme de Merteuil George Eliot Antigone Elizabeth Barrett Browning Elinour of Aquitaine Mrs. Pankhurst Circe Julia Kristeva Joan Baez Penelope Virginia Woolf Helen of Troy la princesse lointaine Scheherezade Pallas Athene la belle indifférente the man with the blue guitar

The dance of the twenty-seven veils

 

The airy fiery
thickening to slow but articulate fluvial eruption one flux catching up on another that continues nevertheless until some swift earthquake for a flash for an hour crumbles all the structures if any either way the narrator could step in and say some years later or meanwhile but that is rather clumsy leaving the recipient-emitter-actant-place frantically signalling into the wings where no one gets the message. No of course I am not a structuralist I never have been I merely played with it besides one has to pass through it to understand modern linguistics. Generative grammar’s the thing it’s the grammar of the universe and it’s wildly poetic why they have rules called it-deletion and psych-movement
subject-raising
and object-raising and head-noun-chopping can you imagine the object of central loss being raised read Hegel on Aufhebung it becomes wildly funny. Though the object is not obligatory of course but like a request stop according to supply and demand however inexhaustible in a consumer society and in any case ever escaping like the signified. Some subjects are intransitivised and walk about the world like stray phalloi detached from the totality of the text.