The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

by Brooke-Rose, Christine

  a for orses) every fact of language must be analysed as a global social phenomenon

  b for mutton) all dismemberment and fragmentation must be avoided between different linguistic exercises

  c for yourself) so must any segmentation between disciplines taught within the department (linguistics, literature, social sciences).

  d for lution) the creation of a subcommittee to study the modalities of a possible actualising of the desegmentation of sections (unanimously approved)

  A long discussion then opened on two points:

  A. Integration of a horizontal co-ordination into the syllabus (principle adopted: experiment limited to three groups)

  B. The number of groups thus desegmented to be actualised in September:

  Brillig proposes the creation of four groups.

  Tove is in favour of a solution which does not fix a priori the number of groups which, in his opinion, must depend on the number of teachers prepared to undertake the experiment. Gimble is for the principle of integrating into the timetable the hour of horizontal co-ordination in the framework of only two groups.

  Larissa Toren is opposed to all horizontal coordination which, according to her, would degenerate into useless chatter.

  It is more difficult for a revolutionary trajectory to enter into the I of society than for the treasurer of signifers to enter into the paradiso terrestre.

  For as soon as a solution is found in the E for lution of a project there will be a display of visceral organs overflowing the framework of this one point from excess of amorphous anguish in the horizontal coordination of segments.

  This however is a Renaissance concept for the notion of passion has disappeared, having become merely a motet for prepared professor, altering his sonority.

  E se non è vero, if it has all been dreamt up by the markster of the moment you can always drop into a lacuna, entering a busy beehive through a little hole where you execute a secret ballet with a show of legs and a quiver of wings for a swarm of honeyvorous impulses that palp oscult measure and imitate the message sucking the performer dry with no memory of the fact that the message has been transmitted from generation to generation of an increasing vastness that nevertheless dwindles to a fat queen bhi, quivering now and again in apathy from fear of being

  unthroned

  undroned?

  whose stylus she must cramp

  (he is the poet who dies by his pen)

  For you are not qualcosa to be narrated by yourself or some other who talks like a book and wants to be read like an algebraic grammar of narrative where the punishment in final position never falls on the euphoric term, always on the dysphoric. Who ever invented you is the absently unreliable or unreliably absent narrator or you in love with him who is in love with the implied author who is in love with himself, so that he is absent in the nature of things, gazing into the pool as the I who wins but loses to the me in an eternal game of vinciperdi or through doors opening on doors, the eternal presence and absence of signifiers that characterizes the practice of language. You are a speaking head on a platter, narrating yourself to an earful of crabs at the bottom of the ocean or shouting in the wilderness with a mouthful of locusts and wild honeybees and blind as well maybe, since eyelessness is not a provisional state but a structure, a blind spot in your own youdipeon discourse and discourse only occurs insofar as there is lack of (in) sight. The fall was into language. Thus even the provisional other is only a verbal icon who carries the image of your head on a piece of texture, a handkerchief for tears a sheet for sweat semen and death, while waiting for the suspended narrative out of your head which will emit the word. Che vuoi? You always get your way in the end, even if it is not the way of your original demand which has accomplished more than you desired and worked at something infinitely beyond you, advancing as you are, staggering through regressions. Votre demande is not an askable question. Veuillez appeler ultérieurement. Freud Freud why persecutest thou/me.

  For it is pure fiction and impure fantasy that Armel writes long letters to Larissa or will go on as if. That was a terminal string of symbols or what James calls a ficelle. But there is a flaw in the intensity of the illusion, for which you playing tale-bearer have to pay with your head even though some other tale-bearer created the flaw, leaning a little to the right out of vanity. In the correct position the flaw vanishes and there is no reflection except a distant icon of Larissa who is the articulate markster of the moment, rehandling the signifiers of what went wrong, redrawing mutual portraits in words that nail the word on the head then wishing she hadn’t since the past tense is merely a convention even as she moves into another portrait which he reads from left to right like Gulliver on his contraption with his eye on legs let alone airmail time losing a person there just as he lost a verb or viceversa no one dreamer’s characters ever coinciding in exactly the same quarter of an our though sometimes overlapping in endless statistical improbabilities of reinvestment, filling the air with silent hierogrips that explode into an earful of stabs, tuning along a transistor of synchronised diachronic chords at night for lack of dreams and always the same show, into which you enter as into a room saying once upon a time Larissa is a little girl.

  Why however did you crop her hair then grow it again and dye it black and give her three illegitimate children and an iconic nose? For you did not give her three children beautiful illegitimate or authorwise nor did any other either before or after the hole it is possible to fall through as into a delirious discourse, since any structure like Larissa presupposes a void, a gouging! out of the I in order carefully to gauge its liquid essence, although the text can well supply the subtle dyes and the cosmetic surgery to round the Gothic arches where the heroine is fair and the femme fatale dark back into Romanesque, the two faculties never meeting except on an imagined curve or at a distance by optical illusion. For although the arbitrariness of narrative is not infinite there is a certain freedom of choice as to which of the two dark ladies of the sequence should become fair at the flick of a dyeing word or which, for that matter is really a man or even God in an elegant trouser-suit.

  Tout se passe comme si we were brother and sister Armel and always had been. The very movement by which the family is constituted is that by which it is dissolved, for to educate children is to destroy the family. The family is the tomb, which must be guarded, and the woman who guards the family also guards the tomb to prevent the dead from being eaten by nature or by the cannibalistic violence of the survivors’ unconscious desires. The woman is night, sensibility, divinity, the man is light, reason, humanity, that is to say, the city, or politics, which excludes the woman. The war between government and the family is the war between man and woman, which is eternal. To struggle against the family, government drags it into other wars and violates it, preventing total ensconcement into the natural but reminding it that it is subject to death. The husband and wife relationship is immediate, non-mediated, and specular, sensed through a natural unrepressed desire which however because it is natural, is lost, the initial piety eventually unreflected. The relationship of parents and children is mediating but the piety there is transitive and unequal. Only in the brother and sister relationship is there no desire and hence no repression, hence no war, but an unnatural peace, a recognition that does not have to pass through conflict. The brother and sister relationship goes further than the husband and wife relationship which is ensconced in nature, not only on account of desire and pleasure, but also on account of the negativity attached to singularity. And singularity is in effect replaceability. The brother however cannot be replaced.

  A brother irreplaceable? O brother she has been reading Hegel again, unempirical Hegel who had been reading Antigone, daughter and half-sister to Oedipus, daughter and grand-daughter of Jocasta, dipping into the elementary structures of kinship as a cannibalistic survivor dips into pieces of master/mistress dying or half dead as a thieving magpie dips into this or that human brain for a silvery phrase, uncovering her tracks however by pr
eserving the brain in a flask, after the parting shot, but conjuring it away into a political mystery, a mere struggle with Creon.

  But is it true or merely well found, ill founded and dragged in by the long ashblond hair normally flattened down on either side of the waxen brow sharp green eyes iconic nose of a fantastically turbaned de la Tour lady demanding the hidden ace from the cheater at cards? (Tu me le paieras, du reste, tous les signifiés du portrait sont faux). Does not Larissa always give her sources and Armel none? Whoever speaks is hiding behind a discourse that is not theirs, from which the subjects vanish, the one giving no references the other too many, thus having the mouth removed. But if we give too many references what shall we teach the students we must keep something back. Yes well I must say I find it utterly aberrant that this question of bibliographical lists should create such an outburst of indignation are you all so unsure of yourselves or what? In any case students don’t read.

  So that the curved beams of their brightness never now meet even on an imagined line between them except quite distantly by optical illusion, staggered along the canyons of chronology, no one student’s reading even coinciding in exactly the same rectangle of time though sometimes overlapping in endless statistical probabilities of texts within texts, so that we read about Virgil showing Dante Paolo and Francesca reading about Lancelot and Guinevere or more, about Bakhtine talking about Rachmaninov musicalising Virgil showing Dante Paolo and Francesca reading about Lancelot and Guinevere, who must have read about Tristan and Iseult who drank the potion which is the same word as poison which is what Thamus called the gift of writing offered by the great god Thoth as told by Socrates to Phaedrus as related by Plato who had related a discourse of Lysius which generated a discourse on beauty the soul the gods the delirium of love rhetoric the true the plausible and other kindred topics read by practically everyone since in some form direct or indirect.

  This structure is generated by recursivity rules which in English tend to be to the right, as in French, whereas Japanese favours recursivity to the left. In theory the recursivity rule can be applied infinitely but there is a limit imposed by the human memory of both recipient and emitter, a limit which demonstrates the difference between grammaticality and acceptability. In either case however, it is the text that generates the passion acceptable in the text, and beauty is merely a referential code sending us back to beauty as statue painting or goddess. There are codes within codes, tales within tales, codas within codas, the porte-parole carrying his coda in his mouth until the caliph lui coupe la parole. In some languages the word is carried, given, taken, cut. In English it is given only as surface performative, then sometimes stood by as in Chinese or more often broken, as when we guarantee frontiers or get engaged and break it off. We do not give the word but the floor, we introduce the speaker, hand him the microphone or other U for misms in the secret ballet of the I who vanishes behind the I who says I, giving no references or too many.

  It seems however that Saroja Chaitwantee despite her a+ can write but not narrate, generating her narrative complex by means of laws and maxims, addressing herself or the Other for you with adagia which can nevertheless function as functions if their negativity, attached to singularity and therefore replaceable, is replaced with lecture notes from some other rectangle of time unless stolen from or otherwise transmitted by Ali Nourennin. Of course. There have been looks exchanged so why not books? Books within books, looks within looks, looks within books, books within looks. Another idyll then, or semidylliotics within semiotic idylls. So that when waking by a man who has sworn eternal love and thinking in the grey light of the small hours that grip the hole of truth which cannot be established what are you doing here by this intense beardless young Marx who doesn’t wash his neck or his long fuzzy hair, let not the day weave again his Kama Sutra fantasy into your own quite other, pick up your fantasy and go. Never let a man see you see through him, call his bluff and accept he will soon get cold feet. Fill the air with quotations, twiddling along the row of books and looks, listening in to classes of men and men of class struggles or caste wars that are the war between man and woman, day and night, the city and the tomb, for no man is an island he is full of noises, chattering through his silence with his fingertip ballet of the I and his dropped nailpairings.

  But has Larissa a narrative complex? Is she a narrative complex? Or an actant-place with a brother-complex? Reinvesting dead Eteocles of the lion-skin in every man, her husband Haimon then in fact his homologue?

  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 nth 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