The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (80 page)

The knight in the tiger-skin. Or how the tiger got his just-so stories to motivate his burning quest in the forest of the night.

And if we must have this chaotic freedom in the choice of discourses let us at least try and integrate it through psychic structures we understand. A timetable is not a turntable.

What on earth are you talking about?

Yes if you’re going to hold that kind of disc-hoarse please explain yourself.

This is not the place.

The shrug of scorn functions like the bar between signifier and signified for ever eluded and played out elsewhere in other rectangles of time with a reformed syllabus by demand from the ever-youthful body of an old society for ever replenished from generation to generation, the object of exchange being a subject of controversy so that subjects have to be continually reinvented and always the same show

 

We have however retained a trace of hierarchy despite student demand in that you have to go through the trivium before proceeding to the quadrivium. The hours between completa and laudes may be spent in heterotextuality. There has been a complete reform in genital organisation.

For if it is true that there must be no specialisation, that, for example, no city could exist unless we were all flute-players, do you suppose that the sons of the best flute-players would necessarily be superior to the sons of bad flute-players? Similarly any man brought up among civilised men will know more of justice law morality than a man brought up in a society that has no education no tribunals or laws nor any constraints whatever. These are adagia, which even Protagoras thought were useful because memorable, as did Uang Iu p‘uh. Had Uang Iu p‘uh read the Protagoras? And are not all idées reçues? And what about Marx on the division of labour had he read the Protagoras? And why did Plato spill and spread the
medicine-poison
that introjects the body with its exteriority and make the memory fail into memorability? How for that matter did Socrates running to his friend report verbatim the entire dialogue with Protagoras in which midway he interrupts the discourse with a point of order that since Protagoras is speaking to a man without memory he must not speak so lengthily which point of order becomes an episode of some seventeen pages themselves leading to an explication de texte on a poem by Simonides before returning to the subject of discourse? Wrought irony within the orbit of an ire on eye that kills the letter it devours in a patricide extasy of O in the mountains with waxen or stone tablets broken in anger at the sight of a goldicondeology? Nor does the text tell how Dante ever got back to weave his comedy after being nailed to the upper cirle of light as a geometrician trying to measure it just like Gulliver and his watch until was struck by lightning his spirit and high fantasy. O luce eterna che sola in te sidi and love that spins the sun and stars out of the Consolations of Philosophy II.m.viii the text within the text nobody reads, the show within the show.

Unless it is, all the time, Oscar.

The unmarked term, scaring, scarring you with his zero, forming you to his pygmalion desire that realises retrospectively that it has worked at something infinitely beyond itself since the diagonal contradictory of the dialectical reply to I want to take you over must necessarily be I want to overtake you whatever the deep structure. How long O Freud how long?

And yet the unmarked term has long disappeared as object of exchange raised to the n
^th
power but marked with zeroist authorship dressed in democracy clothed in cartesianism (but the emperor’s a naked empiricist!), conjured away like a brain in a flask after the parting shot. Just as Veronica has vanished as object of any jealous anguish despite the letters of her name whereby she keeps her Ivory coast and see for yourself and capital V for Victory, the Ic however losing to the me he keeping L for gnome or Larissa. The text does not give her maiden-name only Masters which inaptly belongs to Christopher who like Veronica has been thrown piecemeal out of its timetable by the church as narrative matrix of outmoded myths on the incredulous grounds that they did not exist except as etymological formations (etymo: true, real). This could be known as the etymological fallacy. But fallacies have a way of being true for a while, true as the mistress-piece of the moment who then disappears from the texture of self-love as a scar vanishes, a trace, a negative on a piece of cloth. Paradise Lost, Maud Gonne, Albertine Disparue, a sort of bird.

For although every discourse presupposes a blind spot it never the less implies the absence of things as desire implies the absence of its object. This works all the way through from alpha to omega and from the phonic level to narrative structure or myth. Maybe it’s the grammar of the universe. Programmed and epigrammed. Although you go beyond it as you went beyond Oscar. O for the wings of a dove.

O for a beaker

Queue for a quipu.

Which poses problems or even prombles to which false solutions are found thus creating other blompers. But every promble is not only meant to be disentangled it is itself meaningful provided it is written up there. Nevertheless the arbitrariness of narrative is not infinite since the narrator chooses the middle of his kernel sentence in function of its end which justifies the means with a felix culpa thus preserving the balance of power and preventing the economy of the narrative from crashing into a world crisis. V = F. V for la revolution = F for vescence.

So that we must devise viable modalities of action to be envisaged before engaging in the struggle the struggle for what? For abolishing all institutions of learning a conspicious consumption of knowledge

In the months of thirty-one days the symposium shall according to the desire of the majority either continue into hene kai nea or cease on the ninth day of the third decade thus affording two days of rest, hene kai nea and noumenia, the punishment in terminal position never falling on the euphoric term, always on the dysphoric. In the last decade the days are counted backwards. The timetable structures nobody wants with its built in obsolescence so why are you here or what will you put in its place? Oh not that question again brother you’re ruddy tape-recorders so are you.

Danger men at playback, raising antimoneys by reaction that surpasses the subjective idea, rendering it objective for as Marx said personalities and events reappear, on the first occasion as tragedy on the second as farce. Albertine returning bereft of significance Paradise Regained a bore Maud Gonne and good riddance.

There has however been a complete reform of congenital organisation as we move staggering through regressions to the other calendar.

 

society but destroys the family which structures society, each tale-bearer pressured into his story in order that the hero’s quest may proceed. But as we saw the motivation may well be reversed, the timetable structuring the family but destroying society which structures the family, each tale-bearer carrying his coda in his mouth until he has eaten himself silly and soft and flabby, fit only for the undertaker who overtakes and takes over, the movement by which the family is constituted being also that by which it is dissolved, the womb the tomb a rectangle of time a city of rectangles along which the eye walks up and down like Gulliver on his contraption a moving finger mannikin that having writ with a spirit-loaded pen scrubs out the hieroglyphs and starts again.

Some trace of hierarchy however has been retained in that you have to proceed from the conspicuous consumption of the civic virtues in the morning to the built-in obsolescence of the private passions at night, resting every decade. The hours between the symposium and rosy-fingered dawn may be spent in the winedark sea of infratextuality for there has been a complete reorganisation of flute-playing phallusies. And if you peer through the flawed hymen eye-lens of a judas-eye in the timetable you will see the high men of learning curiously foreshortened into highwaymen who point a pistol at your brain after the introduction of the parting-shot, proepigrammed within earshot of the primal scene which does not take place in the institution of learning for that is not the place but the placenta thrown out with the mannikin leaving danger men at replay, and if you lose the thread of the texture you lose your head your paradise your utterance your pygmalion-skinned hero creature that slips out of your grasp and becomes a line in its own rewrite rule going forth to multiply the multiplicator of books and looks within books like a function of narrative

For mimesis inevitably produces a double of the thing, the double being nothing a non-being which nevertheless is added to the thing, and therefore not totally devoid of value although, however resembling, never absolutely true. C Plato for yourself. And when by way of additional supplement the thing is as evasive as a sophist in perpetual flight behind binary digressions of the dianoia beyond the discourse, diegesis needs a digraph, the right hand resting on the liftable flap to write down a point of information, the left hand ignota treeing off unsupported by a head-noun and falling into the void that is presupposed even by a tree-structure. Thus you will have two hands, two pens, two penises to generate a double text into a corpus crysis.

And if the master-marksman does not give us a little margin full of marks to add up we shall edge ourselves over the edge. These things do matter in a text like the human body or society as object of exchanging books and looks in the book of nature which is written up there or the book that imitates the soul or the soul of the book which is the unvoiced logos. And having edged ourselves out of the text we shall nevertheless be outlawed from the city because of the text that kills the head that brought it forth and is therefore fast exteriorised by the head before it generates itself into a patricide, safer outside.

But Sordello? And my Sordello? There are but the twenty-seven Larissas, and each is marked with zero, liminivorous but eliminated by the letter she does not write since the epistolary novel is dead and it is so much easier to turn up The Collected Telephone
Conversations
of Larissa Toren Armel Santores Veronica Masters even though your demand cannot reach its destination and you are requested to call ulteriorly.

For the more thoroughly we understand deep structures the more man is reduced to a cybernetic sigh to cypher into psychic invisibility a statistic two-dimensionally static on a page, diagramming his dysphoric dianoia, encoding his codal dreams, unless the motivation can be reversed so that the line of twenty-seven and a half black mannikins occurs in order to generate the lion-skinned hero helpless in his quest and displaying visceral organs overflowing from excess of amourous anguish. The heroine after all must not be found too soon since familiarity breeds contempt as the family breeds death. This seems not to apply to the hero apparent who is allowed to dis-chant his chances and enchantments from tale to tale ten a day for a hundred days owing to the double standard or taleological fallacy of felix culpa that the end be balanced by the meanness and the woman is always the end, the matter upon which you write your narcissistic love the virgin page you soil in which you sow your seed when the Pleiades go down to rest, the clay on which you scar the zero marks of masterhood by definition doomed to fail in that it masterhoods the eyes from the iotaboo. A good hero is hard to find.

Thus the original escapes between the signifiers of a discourse which is not your discourse but a trompe l’oeuil. Tu m’as trompé l’oeuil. Sauve quipu.