The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (68 page)

Omni scient qui mal y pensent.

Ooooh.

My! That’s a terrible pun.

Not when you think about it. I can do more.

So I noticed in your work.

Nominipotent O miniomnipresent narrator with his interdiscoplenary comment hominivorous or deivo rous consuming his patrimoney.

(                )

Omni rident!

Well now

Excuse me correcting you Salvatore but it should be omnes. Rident omnes.

Well now

Okay okay Herr Professor Ali Nourennin we all know you’re a great scholar and I’m only a wog putting in Italian endings. Besides your puns bust the grammar too.

Well now

But you weren’t punning Salvo. The pun is free, anarchic, a powerful instrument to explode the civilization of the sign and all its stable, reassuring definitions, to open up its static, monstrous logic of expectation into a different dialectic with the reader.

Oh come off it Al.

I think we’d better get back to the subject of discourse.

Why, wasn’t all that stuff you spouted from the same book as the stuff I’m spouting?

Sure. I gave you the bibliography. You’re the only one who seems

Well then

Tell me since we’re on this, were you working with Francesca? There seems to be a remarkable similarity in your attempts at explosion.

Sure why not? We’re all in this together aren’t we? There’s no more private property in writing, the author is dead, the spokesman, the porte-parole, the tale-bearer, off with his head.

Fine. But wouldn’t it have been better to have first given the reader

No. Ideas, and ideas are always words, come out of a mouthful of air, jostling each other, bursting like atoms, or hoops if you prefer, set theory gone wild, and the text slowly forms itself, like a shower of gold in Danae’s lap. But even a raindrop has molecular form, and in the puddle it makes a shape.

Why that’s beautiful Ali, you should work it into the text.

Thank you Saroja of the Oriental eyes, you are a girl after my own heart.

In my country a girl is a woman at my age.

Is that an invitation my love?

Come my friends, this is getting out of hand, extra-textual shall we say, or extra-classical.

Why sir, it’s infectious.

Sure it’s infectious. But what about the clarity of the message?

You read what you want into it.

I see. And what do you read?

It’s not for me to say, I wrote it.

But the reader is the writer and the writer the reader.

According to his positioning in time and space. You remember what you said about the picture? It’s the same. If you come very close you’ll see only the texture and the brush-strokes. If you distance yourself a little you’ll see the madonna and child. Distance yourself further and you’ll see the balance of colours and lines, until when you go very far there’ll be merely an oval with a blob off-centre. So with Hamlet you said, or Frye said, if you distance yourself very far you see an open grave, a woman’s descent into it and a battle of two men leaping in after her. Then I did it with Macbeth and saw a dripping dagger leading to a circular O around the head and another balance of power struggle to a double death. But the process is infinite I think, within each text there is another text, within each myth another myth. The reader has to be prepared for the undeicidable.

Oh, Ali!

Hmmm. That’s interesting, Ali. Opera aperta in fact?

Opera a parte!

No, Salvatore.

I still think the reader should be helped a bit.

No, but he can be prepared, like I said, he’s the instrument, you know, it’s a motet for a prepared piano.

Ha! Sul piano umano?

Oh, Salvo!

Piano, piano.

Well, to get back to the narrator. Take Pride and Prejudice, which we have been analyzing. What point of view does Jane Austen take? Barbara.

The point of view of a Victorian old maid.

Are you being ironical or have I not made myself clear? And perhaps a little diachronic precision wouldn’t be out of place here. Queen Victoria came to the (scrub) throne in

Jane Austen wrote during the Napoleonic Wars, which as you should know from at least the 1812 Overture occurred somewhat earlier. Though admittedly this is hard to tell from the text since the author is not in the least concerned with war. Right, well, to continue

Surely she should have been concerned with war and what about the Revolution don’t you think all literature should be engagée?

Oh shut up Jean-Marie your French revolution achieved nothing it was a bourgeois revolution.

Surely you should be concerned with dipping into their minds (gently dip but not too deep) according to varying degrees of omniscience and coming at this point perhaps upon dramatic irony

For often the narrator passes from one floating 

 

 

Take Homer for instance through to the civilization of the sign with its dualistic binary structure and its vertical hierarchy which coincides roughly though not by chance with the Renaissance we’ll come to that and the rise of the novel of the middle class in layers to the unomniscient unprivileged unreliable narrator in the explosion of the sign at a time still laid out in rectangles into which you enter as into a room filled with nineteen maybe characters into which you enter for that space twelve times a term after which repeat performance with thirty two floating faces of another generation who create anew your psychic invisibility with unrapid eye movements tampering the Message between Emitter and Recipient so that
that do not want to know your true or untrue knowledge of themselves behind the marked portrait you compose in grades of presence/absence competence/performance that makes up the student role they play to the teacher role you play for that space twelve times a term not to mention a few faces overlapping such as those of Ali Nourennin and Saroja Chaitwantee so that you can compose in either case a double portrait.

 

Ali Nourennin however tends to get
ß
+ or
a
– in Creative Writing whereas Saroja Chaitwantee gets
a
in both Creative Writing and The Beginnings of Narrative as well as in Black Literature which triplicates the portrait so that you get to know each year after three or four weeks which face is which, calling them by their names second names first and first names later looking at the correct referent the proper name gradually possessing the long blond hair the short cropped khaki the almond Indian eyes outlined in heavy khol the cherub revolutionary the pale girl’s spotty skin the pudgy nose the dark trees thickly falling over the left shoulder silken in sari the fuzzy mop the red beard the horn-rimmed glasses the bright mauve eye make-up the intelligence wrapped in potentiality that you gently dip into and feel for, caressing it with sentences cocooning it with the convolutions of your brain to bring it out in signifying strings foetally modelled on yours and feeding on the corpuscles of your life’s unlearning until they flutter out and about the rectangular room for a flash for an hour then nothing, settling on this or that blond or black head or the dark beauty of Saroja Chaitwantee. But we’ll come to that.

which she generates out of maxims in the imperative, addressing herself or the Other with adagia like never let yourself be fully known. A fool utters all his mind. When an unsuitable young man proposes and proposes call his bluff and accept, he will soon get cold feet. Yes is for young men. Never let a man see you see through him. Or if by such misassociations when waking by anyone who has sworn eternal love, and thinking in the grey light of the small hours that grip the hole of truth what are you doing here with this sweet empty substitute, let not the day weave again his fantasy into your own so fully recognised, pick up your fantasy and go. Fill the air with quotations, twiddling along the transistor of your isolation, for no man is an island and the isle is full of noises.