And if present then no longer desired since desire implies the absence of its object as words imply the absence of their referents. Since we are talking about the problem it must therefore be absent.
Slipped through the rectangle of time
into a rectangular stanza into which you
enter saying once upon a time
there lived a credibility obitu-
ary black framed portrait as
an absent value-object of desire:
hence all the semic portraitures
that in the wabe did gyre.
So what do you think, should we kill off Larissa?
She sure asks for it.
Naive speakers indeed!
In fact.
In fact of language, a global social phenomenon.
A balloon half grabbed let it go.
Explode it.
Both liberating and catastrophic.
Well Renata gave us the clue.
She stuffed it with clues and so did Ali why don’t they get together in a clueful grip?
Shall we Renata?
I’m not competing with Saroja of the khol-framed eyes.
Saroja of the oriental adagia has left this class.
Oh you’re eliminating her too?
She has eliminated herself into a cloud of unknowing.
Ah, like Stavro.
No not like him at all he’s a transparent blue lacuna which is quite different. More like Armel, if it weren’t for that illiberal and catastrophic chapter in which you reinvented him as an ideal husband, articulate and crueltobekind, in order to dialogue lunatically with yourself.
What do you mean? That was real.
You hogged the paradismal dialogue my dear. Already Myra slipped him into the wrong rectangle as a black man last term at the flick of a sexual play and that had to be rectified. Tell me how did you spend you summer vacation?
Well, REALLY.
Textually speaking.
Sexually freaking so there.
Good good.
But Ali what do you have against the black people?
I am an Arab I have nothing at all against the black people Eliza.
BUT?
It didn’t fit, that’s all, The text must cohere. For Armel is not like that at all but tall and dislikes answering questions in black and white with a nominervating intelligence and an evasive mouth that wraps him up in the seductive parlour game of superstition disguised as mystery, which is an old illusion, but in which he nevertheless deep down believes.
That’s precisely why one has to reinvent him all the time. I mean that’s why Larissa had to.
The past tense doesn’t exist my love.
You’re going too fast I’m not your love yet
even now as we drive the discourse into the future merely glancing up at the retrovizor we watch the road ahead and sing like crazy touching each other’s thighs voglio far il gentil uomo for instance or la belle si tu voulais.
with the intuition of a naive speaker.
Shall we return to the subject of discourse?
Yes, what is it?
The text within the text.
Looks within books.
But Larissa? and our Larissa? Has she not carefully invented the person she has become, stereotyping her twenty-seven veils for a pontificating pirate who will not stay for an answer?
Till a motherless doorhandle crying order order pistol-shoots her into a swift earthquake that crumbles all the structures.
Well grammatically they’re the same agent you know, the doorhandle and the door, as when three brothers or robbers accomplish an identical action, only the modalities differing hence the confusion of brows at the start.
We’re going round in circles this isn’t a faculty meeting what shall we do, kill her off? Eliminate her to Lima or let her die in Rome?
Oh not Lima she wouldn’t have gone she obviously had no intention of going.
Let us not fall into the intentional fallacy.
But she must die in ROMA AMOR spelt backwards of course.
A heroine who literally dies of love.
Let us not fall into the affective fallacy.
No not of love she doesn’t love him she dies of the expanded timetable bulldozing into the remaining kidney hypertrophied you know to compensate for the removal of the other like dreams so it atrophies and
Oh yeah and I guess you want the intrusion of the bathetic fallacy to fill the gap with a deathoflittlenell scene Larissa attached to a kidney-machine that’s desperately trying to cleanse her blood of false semes as she talks to the ideal husband?
Or to the Other.
No the phallus-man should simply be fizzled out.
Well he is already.
Oh I don’t know it’s odd how one usually does bump into ex-lovers, you know, Albertine returned devoid of all but negative significance. Let’s have them meet though he would of course first fizzle himself out like she said, and that’s what would hurt, after all that pressure, that he’d be too cowardly even to honour her as a human being and tell her he’d switched off and met someone else, a student like she said who’d look exactly like his mother but a fresh fleshy young version and who’d hold him exactly where she wants.
How do you know what his mother looks like she’s extratextual.
Yes he’s a motherless doorhandle remember.
Oh well we could work her into the Calabrian sequence all Italians bring their women for the mamma to disapprove.
He’s not Italian he’s Albanian. Etruscan perhaps.
But an exile brought up in Italy with an Italian name.
Virgil was an Etruscan so was Julius Caesar.
Was it Calabria I thought we said France.
Yes and he would calmly bring her, the momma-sudent I mean, as his young bride to the semiotic castle the following summer, where she’d be recuperating Larissa I mean by invitation of the Count Professor whatshisname La Bocca from being at death’s door hanging by one thread about which he’d cared nothing having fizzled himself out the phallus-boyman I mean and we could have a hilarious comedy with the two women sneaking around the spiral staircases of the castle avoiding each other because he’d be too frightened to introduce them and La Bocca saying my dear lady he’s no gentleman coming here and Larissa bumping into him finally saying why are you behaving in this ridiculous manner. What ridiculous manner sheepish like and she’d say well all this cat and mouse game introduce me to your wife let’s behave like civilized human beings. Or maybe he could come up to her and say will you be my friend.
Oh my God Julia what mimesis are you working through nobody behaves like that.
And who cares if they do it’s a lost generation.
No well I agree it’s a bit too much but we should have the fall into language and the exploitation of the very clichés she feared.
Why? We’ve had plenty and rejected it.
But it somehow crept back into the text didn’t it? Everything exists even the discourse you do not choose.
Not the dimension of banality.
On the contrary, for that very reason will you let me finish for heaven’s sake it’s my turn
and the floor is flooring you
Oh shut up and they’d meet for a drink on the castle terrace and Larissa would say well tell me all how did you two meet closing the manuscript in which she’d been inventing the whole episode before she knew it would turn out that way that happens you know and the whole dialogue in advance and the girl would say well I’m studying comparadive lirrechure.
Why are you making her a Southern North American they met in Peru.
That’s true she’s a Latin mother type or maybe an Inca hook-nosed and fleshy round the jaws preparing several chins. Oh well anyway it would come out that she went to his class on I promessi sposi and they got all cosy over that and he was amazed she’d read it and she also knew The Knight in the Tigerskin translated of course through her course in Comparative Literature and he’d tell Larissa all about it how nobody reads that and h
ow unique she is the mommagirlwife I mean we’d better give her a Spanish name Vittoria for instance forgetting that Larissa too
No thank you thou shalt not take my name in vain
Well anything it doesn’t matter they’re dropping out, going to Rhodesia to live the white man’s life and talking of how they’ll go on safaris and that, hunting the tiger
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 sixteenn
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-marke
d
sem(id)Iotic
irrecoverable
narrators
gone
Adam ϑ
Albee, Edward ϑ
Alder, Neil γ–
Amanda x
Andersen, Hans C. γ
Andromeda ß
Anna, Donna x
Antigone ϑ+
Aphrodite, alias Venus ß+
Aquarius γ–
Aquitaine, Elinour of x
Arbor, Helen ϑ–
Aretino l’ x
Aries, alias Mars a
Aristotle ϑ–
Arthur, King x
Athene, Pallas ß+
Austen, Jane x
Austin, J. L. ß–
Author, implied ϑ–
Author, Other ϑ–
Bacon, Francis ϑ+
Baez, Joan a–
Bakhtine, Michal ß–
Balzac, H. de ϑ–
Barthes, Roland ß+
Bataille, George a+
Bath, Wife of x
Beauvoir, S. de x
Beckett, Samuel ß
Beethoven, L. van ß–
belle indifférente x
black magician a–
Boethius x
Boole, Charles γ+
Book, the x
Booth, Wayne C. ϑ
Born, Bertrans de x
Bouhours, P., S. J. x
boy-mouth a
Brémond, Claude ϑ+
Brillig, Bob ϑ–
Brooke, Dorothea x
Browne, N. O. x
Browning. E. B. a
Burns, Robert x
Byron, Lord x
Cage, John a–
Capricorn γ–
Carroll, Lewis a
Casanova J-J. ß–
castle, semiotic x
Centaurus x
Chairman (of hour) ϑ–
Chaitwantee, Saroja γ+
Chatman, Catherine ϑ–
Charib, Vittoria ϑ
Charles ϑ–
charming scatterbrain x
Chaucer, Geoffrey x
Chomsky, Noam γ
Christ, Jesus γ+
The Brooke-Rose Omnibus Page 65
