The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (88 page)

They don’t have tigers in Africa

They do

They don’t

And talking of drop-outs what about the Hungarian girl Marika we’ve forgotten her.

Oh well he’d already dropped her for Larissa she’s a loose end we can’t pick them all up. Or we could have her escaping to freedom under his pressure, he’d have started writing to her again after leaving Larissa in Rome and before meeting his wife, then again not telling her he’d married and she’d be writing desperate letters from a refugee camp in Austria and his new wife would be full of motherly understanding about his previous affairs including Larissa and say we must help her Marika I mean I have a friend in Sweden or something and he’d be so grateful.

Ugh, it stinks, it’s a lost generation, who cares.

You’re mad, all of you. You’re talking about all these people as if they really existed

Oh shut up Ali we’re having fun inventing

independent of our text the entire point of which is not to reformulate the poetics of the Renaissance through the rise of the novel of the middle class in layers, why look up your notes on the filling out of that mental space with wide-based aureoles of droning on about the passions that enflame the soul of Cleopatra’s nose or La Gioconda’s liverish mystery Larissa’s vicious organs which are all verbal organs and all removed reduced to a mouth most vicious of all that establishes a specular relationship with the reader’s vulgar desire to know what happens next in an eternal game of vinciperdi between his demand which cannot reach its end by justifiable means and the author’s gift of a running curriculum vitae as object of exchange, the truth as signifier being all the time non-specularisable except by a hidden representation of a representation.

Oh I don’t know Ali we don’t have to write to a proepigrammed course according to everything the teacher says.

No we don’t down with Oedipus he’s been deposed like they said there has been a complete reform of pregenital organisation and we don’t get swaddled in mythical complexes any more.

No? then why are you so anxious to pick up all the loose ends and wrap them around yourselves like winding sheets? and why those, there are plenty of others while you’re about it, floating about like the fringes of a sea-anemone what about Larissa strategically reemerging fully armed after a tacitactic defeat and a Trojan discourse war and reappearing disguised as Mentor on the lone sea-shore? You’ve forgotten that.

Well there must be some lost semes, vanishing away like gods into the other scene.

It has all the beautiful coherence of a psychosis with Don Juan a subject raised from an embedded sentence to a head-noun chopped, detached from the totality of the text and walking about the world of your fantasy as hero, giving more pleasure to you ladies than any asthmatic amateur who cannot sing the part without deodorant and throat-spray in a damp silling castle. But as you said yourselves or was it Armel, it’s only a semiotic castle.

What are you talking about Ali this is the text we are creating it verbally we are the text we do not exist either we are a pack of lies dreamt up by the unreliable narrator in love with the zeroist author in love with himself but absent in the nature of things, an etherised unauthorised other.

Yes, looking back to the now in the then emptied of now losing his paradise his loved utterance and decapitated, eaten up piecemeal like pieces of poet dead dying and half dead.

Well I think we should take a vote on it.

On what?

To kill or not to kill Larissa.

No that’s not a motionable motion I will reframe it we must vote on whether to be implicit or explicit and if the latter then vote on the positive or negative modalities.

Which, precisely, being which?

I vote we vote first on whether to vote those for those against abstinence refusal of representation with a show of hands in the secret ballet of the I where faculties never meet even on an imagined curve as illusion of a coherent structure diminishing in size

 

 

that every course should be represented in a re-presentation of every course on the decision-making committee though the demand cannot reach its end since there are only fifteen decision-makers and a hundred and fifty courses which would upset the balanced economy of the narrative whose arbitrariness (freedom) is not infinite.

There are however plenty more subjects to raise

after the passive transformation and before ex

traposition of Olaf Oliver Chou Stan Catherine

Hubert Claire or the pale young man carbuncu

lar all speaking for a long time not to mention

the students very malleable, though the element

of manipulation must not destroy the illusion

of floating faces maybe coinsiding to form a

mosaic or else an avallon of long blond hair

cropped nose cherub revolutionary falling over

the almond eyes or the red beard wrapped in a

sari mop with horn rimmed tresses and bright

mauve eyes made-up intelligence you dip into

and feel for till an arm pops up textcalibur

of a deep thought you seize to dip into brains

twisting the knife in the lacuna with a slow

deliberation rewriting derivations into termi

nal strings or what James called ficelles, but

full of knotty problems like Quipu, which

however are there to be resolved, by means of a

pseudo-solution, thus creating other prombles

as you switch on the overhead eyes to show

a tree of knowledge branching off into intermi

nable proairetic possibilities, and or not if

being the connectives dear lady look and yet

there is always a binary exclusion since the S

either is or is not starred through a flaw

in the eye-contacting the goldicondeology excali

brated youth in terminal strings that eat

up like worms the corpuscles of your chaotic

unlearning the poetry of the corpus crysis which

flutters out into the rectangular room with no

exit like a sort of bird for a flash an hour of

a six-hour timetable then nothing only degrees

of absence but we’ll come to that with inexorabi

lity since subjects are the space of travelling

semes the passage of a transformed decision

the attributes of a pentapod enigma in a nomi

native form borne by an unthroned king out of

a stone highergrif which has marked all our acci

dental discourse with a flawed judas-eye

gouged but gauged inessential despite the scar

the scare the scram the marks and the remarks

traceable only in the irrecoverable deletion

of a head noun on a piece of texture ex nihilo

In some languages however things recover them

selves. As when the student body turns into

the master markster of the comment for ever

marking every subject as object of discourse

into degrees of presence

                             desired and feared

                             unfeared and undesired

superimposing unlimited antisystems

unto sixteen times sixteen time sixteen
^_n

possible balanced relationships in

endless permutations

represented in a hidden representation

inside a representation alphabetically

marked in columns that support the

proepigrammed linguistic edifice

of marked and un-re-marked

sem(id)Iotic

irrecoverable

narrators

gone