The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

by Brooke-Rose, Christine

is not like equates

  that at all but tall rarity

  with hair quite dark of

  and swept back grey over mind with

  splendid brow as stark unusual

  as Beethoven’s spirit and

  making the nose (turned up) the looks of a

  seem small between the burned up hero with a brow

  eyes and blurred as high as Beetho

  evasive ven’s a small nose an

  mouth evasive mouth

  it occurred in South and hair swept back

  Carolina dark but silver

  oh but over temples

  not muscular retaliating eyes

  indeed though and the

  masculine troubled

  and slim for identity

  grace and of the

  elegance narrator.

  (Portrait by Veronica) (Portrait by his reflection)*

  * Jacques, après avoir dit entre ses dents: “Tu me le paieras ce maudit portrait”, ajouta. – Vous avez été fou de cette femme-là?

  Le Maitre-Et pourquoi haïssez-vous les portraits?

  Jacques. –C’est qu’ils ressemblent si peu, que, si par hasard on vient à recontrer les originaux, on ne les reconnait pas. Racontez-moi les faits, rendez-moi fidèlement les propos, et je saurai à quel homme j’ai affaire.**

  (Portrait of the portrait by Jaques le Fataliste)

  **Tous les signifiés du portrait sont “vrais” … tous ces sèmes désignent la vérité, mais même mis tous ensemble, ils ne suffisent pas à la faire nommer (et cet echec est heureux…) Dans le système herméneutique, le signifié de connotation occupe une place particulière: il pointe mais ne dit pas; ce qu’il pointe…c’est la vérité, comme nom; il est à la fois la tentation de nommer et l’impuissance de nommer… Ainsi un doigt, de son mouvement désignateur et muet, accompagne toujours le texte classique: la vérité est de la sorte longuement désirée et contournée, maintenue dans une sorte de plénitude enceinte, dont la percée, à la fois libératoire et catastrophique, accomplira la fin même du discours; et le personnage, espace même de ces signifiés, n’est jamais que le passage de l’énigme dont Oedipe (dans son débat avec le Sphynx) a empreint tout le discours occidental.

  (Portrait of the portrait by Roland Barthes)

  Oh the moving finger points and having pointed itself out moves on, will not stay for an answer, tetrapod biped or tripod, two and a stick, a fang for an eye a foot in it for an unintentional phallusy but an intentional literality: gently dip but not too deep: you dip me I dip you I I sir you dip us. So that today we shall make a comparative analysis, taking these two famous classics, of the art of digression. Those of you who attend (or even analyse) General Assemblies and Faculty Meetings may well have concluded that it is not an art but a chaos. It is, however, a very subtly planned chaos, it has the odd, beautiful coherence of a neurosis. A pseudo-problem is raised, to which a false solution is found, thus creating (by design) another pseudo-problem. Neurosis has the cunning of stupidity, and stupidity is a dimension anyone can fall into, however intelligent, indeed, part of the intellect can rise suspended and watch, helpless and in pain, the misuse of its own projected trajectory struggling alone, as if cut off from itself, in a delirious discourse not its brother’s keeper.

  These things do matter despite psychic invisibilty or because of in a text like the world or the human body that merely engenders

  itself in

  to

  writing – for the foot men who say

  O in the mountain break fast tonguetables (thou shalt

  eat thy prisoner) for a feted calf

  so poor Midas and other goldicondeologists prisoners of

  well-planned desires for their own excrement obscurely alimenting them while nevertheless consuming them up regardless.

  So more

  or

  less

  literally

  It has all been dreamt up by the trait-or markster of the comment, the tale-bearer as eiron-monger hatching against his homo-logos a plot from fear of trans fer ring a handful of

  water for one thing nor wring its neck. Nor would he have four eyes neither in retrospeculation nor even in any kind of retrodiscourse as Armel might have and naturally does the moment they are uttered as possibilities epithets you mean no: sapphires or crysoprases staring tetracyclops from bare brow.

  Clearly Veronica is in

  love – true icon –

  who does not therefore exist

  as Larissa does

  (so?)

  ?

  Who

  has however an iconic nose

  and eyes like Isis or even maybe Ra

  Jacques. – O

  the day (or night)

  is green

  she plays upon a blue guitar

  she does not play things as they are

  hearing in the air messages un

  emitted unadmitted mean

  ingventing your desire with La belle si tu voulais (bis)

  Nous dormirions ensemble o-la (bis)

  and answering it unspoken with

  No vale la pena el llanto or l’amor è un

  altalena or love is just a four-letter word and

  more: love is a bore, a soap op

  era a telephone that doesn’t ring

  in many languages from Lucan to Lacan

  she fills the air as well with

  syntagmatic silence – from Phaedrus to Freud

  Homer to Husserl and Locke to the Li Ki

  effortlessly displacing notions with a diachronic chord.

  Jacques. – ee!

  Things as they are

  are changed upon the blue guitar

  namely

  It is more difficult for a phallus-man to enter the I of a woman than for the treasurer of signifiers to enter the paradiso terrestre.

  Jacques. – ah.

  Ah indeed. Larissa talks like that. The pathetic fallacy may be used to fill the hermeneutic gap. Or in the dialectic of desire, the subject is subverted and the object is from the start an object of central loss.

  Jacques. –Eh bien! monsieur, qu’avais-je besion du portrait que vous m’avez fait de cette femme?

  Ne saurais-je pas à present tout ce que vous en avez dit?

  Ecco! In any case the mistress of the moment should be changed, and no doubt will be in another moment though per haps she could meanwhile be called, Ruth, for mixed reasons of phonemic contiguity.

  Jacques. – eh?

  The Master. – work it out for yourself it’s not very deep.

  So that now we have at last returned to the subject of discourse, while still of the moment before being thru and hurt (oo!) but who is we to dip royally no collectively into an age-old narrative matrix before we gouge out the I in order carefully to gauge its liquid essence? The namers of things the silent obsessional re-emitters of words who will therefore have their mouths removed the spinners of texts that can engender only text such as the cold street juggling no hoops in no retrovizor and the sudden isolation of almost not wanting anything now standing in the wide street recumbent under great curved beams of pale light equispaced but staggered each to the other laterally, the quarter arches never meeting even on an imagined curve except quite distantly along the can yon of tall blocks all asleep all dreaming along the boulevard as they diminish in size quite distantly asleep whereas you standing out there in the cold street come along, did you hear? I bet you don’t know what I said I said you never tell me your dreams.

  I don’t have any to tell.

  Of course you do they’ve proved it.

  Who have?

  Every ninety minutes of the night why didn’t you know well fancy me teaching you something every one knows that, for a quarter of an hour you come up from deep level sleep and dream with electrodes no what are they called well yes electrodes I guess or something on the eyelids recording the movements up down and sideways called Rapid Eye Movements gee it’s just like television you just don’t remember honey and you ne
ed it like food and drink and sex too they’re called R.E.M.’s.

  Not every ninety minutes then.

  Oh yes you do they tried depriving them of their dreams waking them up you see when those rapid eye movements begin so then they compensated and dreamt twice as much and if they deprived them like that for fifteen days they got to the borders of schizophrenia.

  Were they allowed in?

  Er well I guess I just fill the air for you oh I said that earlier.

  Cut

  A diagram could

  No doubt be drawn

  You see

  Oh

  No.

  Mars and Venus copulating under the net, the third day with the sixth day, though it could also be Wodinsday with Moonsday or or Thorsday with Freyasday but never on a Sunday or anyone of these juxtaposed with any non-contiguous other from the point of view of any one teacher or student for that matter with varying performance in each system country continent classroom of each institution of learning.

  0900

  1100 Discourse Analysis I:

  Initiation to Semiotics (Miss Chatman) The Novel as

  Intentional Object (Dr Toren)

  1100

  1200 The Semiology of

  Cultural Images

  (Dr Medaware) Initiation to

  Transformational Grammar (Miss Arbor)

  1300

  1500 Language as Subversion

  of Society

  (Dr Underwood) The Inscription of

  Protest: Women’s Lib.

  (Ms. Littlebrown-Fitzjohn)

  1500

  1700 Discourse Analysis II:

  The Semiology of Mass

  Media (Dr. Medaware) Empiricism and

  Imperialism (Prof. Ngu-Rey)

  1700

  1900 The Inscription of

  Protest: Black Literature

  (Prof. Littlebrown) Initiation to Dialectical

  Materialism (Prof.

  Kreuzer)

  1900

  2100 Narrative as Object

  of Exchange (Prof. Kreuzer) The Generation of

  Narrative Complexes (Miss Webb)

  which

  must go on

  e se non è vero?

  Meanwhile

  quell the audience by changing the subjects which have to be reinvented continually or subverted in the dialectic of desire.

  Who speaks?

  Oliver Claire Hubert Olaf Gregory Chou Stanley Catherine the short plump demagogue and his lanky henchman or the pale young man carbuncular. They have been speaking a long time. I move that we move to item one on the agenda.

  You don’t have the floor it’s Jeremy’s turn then Catherine Maurice Bob then you Simon. Jeremy?

  Yes well very briefly I simply want to say that it seems to me quite evident that we must first decide on the viable modalities of action we should envisage before engaging in any kind of confrontation with the authorities on their decree of November 22. Firstly, on the one hand the chairs form bottom-shaped curves of white plastic and have liftable side-flaps that make a ledge for right-handed people only to write on point by point the finger at a pregnant plenitude like a pompous pilot that will not stay for an answering fear of piercing through to a catastrophic platitude full of the one that got away leaving a blue lacuna in the timetabled analysis of

  e se non è vero you will find rectoverso the schematized split image of the sign that watches, helpless and in great pain, the engendering of its own projected trajectory struggling along ad

  Or, on the other, to describe the proceedings in a letter to Larissa or perhaps the head of the head of the department, the short plump demagogue and his lanky henchman in smoked glasses who having carefully prepared the agenda for the manoeuvering of the meeting sit quietly clothed in democracy (but the emperor is naked!) as the tense young man carbuncular simply wants to say very briefly for at least fourteen more minutes while the middle-aged chairman of the hour exercises his fake authority with a motherless door-handle by way of gavel.

  Secondly I don’t agree with Charles that for nine and a half minutes the tense young man has said nothing very carbuncular under firstly his facial muscles moving up and down towards a thirdly we seem to forget that in a radical university destruction precedes construction as the morning forms a large rectangular hole within a larger rectangular hole full of bottom-shaped curves in white plastic with liftable flaps for right-winged people to write on a point of information let him finish for heaven’s sake permit the disaffected elements to exercise such an inordinate influence in relation to their numbers. Not to mention extreme youth as they sit in the plastic shapes filling out the space with wide-based aureoles of self-importance basted in revolutionary spirit unless merely the intoxication of illusory power such extreme youth never had before this newly created institution of learning Language as Subversion of Society or the Inscription of Protest the Poetry of the Cry in a faculty that multiplies its base by youth zeal and inexperience so much easier for the short plump magician to handle. He is my dear Lara a typical demagogue but looks like Hemingway. In a sense they are all ready-made caricatures here, nothing to invent. Except the show within the show, the portrait within the portrait. But why bother since they create your psychic invisibility and don’t want to know your true or untrue knowledge of themselves unless we form a subcommission to examine the problem, thus finding a false solution to a pseudo-problem and so engendering another pseudo-problem thirdly, as to the problem of desegmentation I have noticed that they’re very fond of the word problem here I’ve just heard it four times and wish they could say blomper or promble just for variety because surely we are all agreed that the department should not be segmented piecemeal into more and more and smaller and smaller subsections that have no contact with the larger whole.

  Catherine?

  I haven’t finished. Fourthly.

  On a point of order, desegmentation comes under Item 3 on the Agenda.

  Fourthly and lastly, as a matter of fact, Lara my love, you know me well enough to guess that I was foolish enough to make that smug remark to one of the young teachers here, called Oliver, an amiable dandy and anarchist to boot who picks up female students rather too often and overtly for competence—professional I mean not linguistic (and no doubt his performance in class and elsewhere leaves nothing to be desired ((e se non è vero è ben trovato yes? no))) (sorry, the parenthetic fallacy is filling the hermeneutic gap) I said to him in a moment of exasperation after a meeting, they’re all ready-made caricatures here, and he got up from the floor where he was placing large blue rectangles on an outsize timetable and pointed to his most current girl-friend, a pale prim student with long black hair a mauve mouth and teeth like death saying what do you mean? I’m not, she’s not. My Larissa what went wrong? I miss you despite. You say the object is from the start an object of central loss yet surely our peripheral gains reached and almost filled that empty centre fifthly. And in your narrative grammar are not some subjects wholly intransitivised, walking through the action with indirect objects only or none? (yours are the poems i do not write). Talking of which (students as objects) I never of course on a point of order that’s not fair you said fourthly and lastly have affairs with students it’s not fair, too easy, banal, and apart from that and psychic invisibility one can’t work with them after they will go on as if (I know I’m doing it to you but we were a poem not a couple). It’s bad enough even when one doesn’t work with them. Even now I have a girl who’s fabulous in bed but mythologises me in her dreams and tells them at great length and talks about the indifference of man and how I don’t really want her like the fat magician she dreams of. Okay so I don’t. I once saw a poster somewhere which said Abstinence is Good for you. In Wales, must have been. But the show must go on.

  Until they vote on whether to take a vote those for those against abstinence refusal of vote repeat performance to pass the motion before moving on to item two on the agenda. You’ll have to back into it. Leaning a little to the right
to meet briefly the second pair of eyes, tarnished but useful despite psychic invisibility or because of a mere rectoversion of eyes juggled by the performing self left behind the time laid out in rectangles called The Semiology of Cultural Images maybe or merely Creative Writing into which you enter on Jove or Mars or Mercuryday saying we shall now consider the question of the narrator’s presence in his narrative.

  Those for. Those against. Abstention. Refusal of Vote.

  And repeat performance before passing on to item three on the agenda (desegmentation) as juggled by the manoeuvering magician clothed in invisible democracy while the stooge chairman of the several hours knocks his motherless door-handle shouting order order in the poetry of the cry that this is an utterly delirious discourse until the short plump magician whisks away his main prop his invisible silk squares holds up his ego busting out of tight sequence and quells the audience, producing out of a hat a white white point of information or is it a clear summary of an essentially simple problem some people have misunderstood, so that in all honesty one must be frank for twelve and a half minutes we must call things by their right names unless perhaps we must see things as they are. And changed upon the blue guitar. And to sum up very briefly I simply want to say that we must first decide on the viable modalities of action to be envisaged in the struggle before I can go to the authorities and persuade—for that is the operative word, we must not seem to be adopting a threatening attitude (boo!)–and persuade them to accede to our demands.