The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (73 page)

What on earth are you talking about?

Yes if you’re going to hold that kind of discourse please explain yourself.

This is not the place.

The bar functions like a shrug of scorn between signifier and signified for ever eluded and played out elsewhere, in some other class perhaps where revolution that has been long preparing out of archaic flaws in the dialectic of change raises antinomies of action that surpasses the subjective and renders it objective so that men realise retrospectively that they have accomplished more than they desired and worked at something infinitely beyond them, making a turntable of the timetable so that, twiddling along the transistor you dip in but not too deep (but why at this precise point?) where neither workers nor women let alone coloured people have gained anything by so-called emancipation and the double standard remains. Left wing intellectuals talk a lot about making the revolution like it was making love and about destroying capitalism and the consumer society but they don’t for all that refrain from enjoying consumer goods or borrowing vast sums at a high interest to buy luxury flats uptown and a country house in the bargain. As Marcuse said even the proletariat has been bribed so that we now have a new proletariat of second-rate citizens since any capitalist society must have a slave population, nor does one notice the intellectuals objecting to that. Or take women–leaving aside the bourgeoisie and their well-known mythologies one finds the very same intellectuals who talk of revolution and endorse black and women’s lib having as mistresses young teachers or graduate students who slave willingly, for example at compiling an index for their man’s thesis or next publication or typing it. But who ever heard of a man doing the index for a female graduate’s thesis or typing it? As for sexual liberty well, the double standard is rampant everywhere one is amazed. If the woman objects she is being hysterical and making a scene. But the man objects in much more fundamental and subtly unpleasant ways, disguising it as highmindedness of some sort. I know of one case not so far away in which a man who lives with a young teacher has installed another, from the same department of course, expecting them to live in love and peace with great talk of communal life and the new ideaology. Fine but when she says OK the same for me he won’t hear of it. Where’s the new ideology in that? It’s as old as sultans and no doubt cavemen. He even has them both working on his Index (laughter) and typing it. The more fool them.

Women in fact have gained all the responsibilities of men and none of their privileges, losing their own while men have lost something too, their sense of responsibility. And that at least was not the trouble in the days of the tyrant father. And even typical psychic castrates like Don Juan and Casanova at least were not hypocrites. In the Don Juan myth–the symbolic structure of which has long ago been analysed as that of castration, that of a man marked with the sign of incompleteness–the hero is at least magnificent to the end and it’s the others who are left bathetically moralising by the fire of hell, nor does he treat his women as nannies to solve his problems or as harem-slave-secretaries, though of course his repetitive pattern of continual conquest by means of wild promises is an attempt to solve them at another level, and doomed to failure. But if he’s a small winner he’s at least a great loser. That’s, that’s all. I–I meant to develop it a bit more but I didn’t have time.

Mmmm. That’s, very interesting. There are some good ideas there Doreen. The – er – levels of discourse are a bit mixed up though, aren’t they? What do you think, er, Eliza?

What I mean is, there are several voices in Doreen’s essay, and maybe some of them jarr a bit. Now which, do you think, and why?

Come along now, this is a free discussion. We’ll leave the facts aside for the moment, but what is it that gives a sort of wrong tone here, not, shall we say, very scholarly or objective?

Well she don’ pay no tension to the black people cep for the everlastin white lip-servus.

Right. But then she wasn’t supposed to deal with that was she? She mentioned it at the beginning as a parallel, like the workers, but this is on Women’s Lib. That’s not what I meant.

At all, that is not it at all. Who speaks? Isabel perhaps or Claire who teaches the Inscription of Protest. For the significance of any message is synonymous with its information within a system of probability as opposed to entropy and disorder. But information depends on its emitter so that a message however predictable such as condolence would increase its level of information to an extraordinary degree if it came from the president of the counsel of ministers of the USSR or the Emperor of China, information being related to improbability, which is why modern novels can be so disorientating despite the fact that through this chaotic freedom in the network of possibilities we fill the air with noises, twiddle along the timetable from left to right and back, from one disembodied voice to another on this or that wave-length listening in to this or that disc-jockey and always the same disc-horse, a yea-yea and a neigh inserted into the circuit of signifiers, each discourse penetrating the non-disjunctive functioning of another. And we do not find that concert disconcerting. The greater the noise the greater the redundancy has to be. Go forth and multiply the voices until you reach the undeicidable even in some psychoasthmatic amateur castrate who cannot therefore sing the part.

Ah. A self-evident defence-mechanism against threat of extermination. Why this flight into delirious discourse?

But now it is quite clear who speaks: the man from Porlock. He has been speaking for some time.

He comes, in fact, from Timbuctoo in Mali, half way between the Niger and Lake Faguibin longitude 03 West latitude 17 North. He is slight and mighty, mat brown and dazzling–a chance occurrence yet clearly also generated by anticipation at the flick of a timetable, so that makes everything all right despite the interruption–and the lines of his hands like the skin between the fingers are deadly greyish white because, he says when rudely asked by way of tacitactic diversion, he has been cleaning something with a strong detergent. He is cultrate and cultivated, ebullient and bullying, censorious and sensitive, tactless and tactile (tu me le paieras ce maudit portrait) from which several facts you will have gathered that he is a writer.

Do white writers then get black lines on their hands when they clean things up?

Of course, look.

That’s ink, too much.

Et pourquoi haïssez-vous les portraits?

C’est qu’ils ressemblent si peu, que, si par hasard on vient à rencontrer les originaux

Don’t tell me you belong to the critical school that ferrets around seeking Dorothea’s husband and the model for the Wife of Bath?

Who’s Bath? Do you mean Barthes?

The bell rings. The pen is put down in mid-sentence

which one?

Guess. The eye is put to the judas-eye

you mean the trait-or master of the moment I mean the markster of the comment who dreams things up?

and there he is, curiously foreshortened by the lens, carrying five books, including one of yours foolishly loaned on a pressing request

do you mean one of yours or one of mine?

I didn’t know you’d written any I mean one of yours I speak in the second person

which means one of yours why don’t you say so

I do if you will allow me to proceed

proceed

The moment of hesitation passes, the door opens

on its own?

in some languages things do themselves

aha! l’amor si fa?

that is not what I meant at all may I for Chrissake bring this person in who is as I have said, a man.

Well if you put it that way get on with it, there can be no breaking in before the breaking of the lock no wonder you call him the man from Porlock.

There are times, Jacques, when the recipient should be shot right out of the message he makes so much noise.

Ah but where would the message be without him that’s why redundancy was invented come to think of it it’s easier for the emitter to disappear if things do themselves.

So far there is neither emitter nor recipient within the message, only without, thanks to you.

All right silence pax proceed hands across the sea

Hello.

I want to talk to you.

Fine beginning I must say

I wither him with a look.

I’m writing.

I know.

I’m seeing no-one, I don’t answer the door.

The door hasn’t said anything, and you have answered.

Well because I knew you knew I was here and I didn’t want to offend you.

She who explains herself is lost. May I come in?

She?

Yes, you gave me an idea.

Ah.

Well, yes of course, what er can I do for you? Would you like a drink? Have a cigarette. Or some coffee or

No no sit down. Give me your hand.

Why?

I want to talk to you

Can’t you talk without touching? What about?

Well of course about your book which I have touched handled read look I have taken all these notes.

But I only gave it to you a couple of hours ago you can’t have read it.

Ah the vanity of authors. I am an author.

So I hear, and very successful.

Oh that, I don’t care. Give me your hand.

Look, I only met you this morning

You mean there is a timetable in white society for hand-holding?

Well yes. I didn’t even properly catch your name.

Armel.

What?

Armel.

Oh.

And yours?

It’s on the book and on my door.

Ah but it might be a pseudonym. Larissa. That’s nice. Larissa Toren. It almost sounds African.

Please, I’m in the middle of a sentence

which one?

I’ve already forgotten it thanks to you. Tell me what you want to say.

A great deal. It will take a long time. Come and have a kous-kous with me.

I’m sorry I’ve already eaten and I’m working.

Not now you are not.

Please say it now then.

Why this flight?

What flight?

That’s what I asked myself all the time while reading your book look I have made notes. The publisher says it’s very funny. He’s mad.

That’s not part of the book don’t you know what a blurb is? The publisher says that to sell it and you’re quite right, he fails. It has nothing to do with the text.

Ah. In my countries publishers tell the truth.

I didn’t know you had publishers there aren’t you published in America?

We don’t, that’s why they don’t have to lie.

Hmm. So you don’t think it funny?

Ah that hurt did I? Of course it’s not funny you are weeping all the time it is one long cry of anguish.

Oh?

This woman for instance she says page 143, no, it’s somewhere else, well never mind what I mean is there are moments when you touch on the very essence of things and then brrt! you escape, you run away into language. You are merely amusing yourself and I want to know why.

You mean that when I touch on the essence of things, in that text, it’s not by means of language? What is it then?

There you go again, playing with words. Why this flight?

Into logic? Look, this is ridiculous, charming but ridiculous. Aren’t you playing with words too, doesn’t everyone?

Not me. Give me your hand.

No. So. I’m weeping all the time and yet I’m merely amusing myself. But isn’t the only thing to do with a long cry of anguish to amuse oneself? In my country we never separate the two. I take it as a compliment. But you seem to utter these phrases as reproaches.

No, no, please do not take offence. Ah writers are so sensitive, I know, I am sensitive and now you are treating me as a person of no sensibility.

Oh come, we’re both above exchanging hurt sensibilities.

That’s better. Come, give me your hand.

No. Why do your hands have white lines?

Don’t yours? Show me.

No.

Yes they have. See?

They’re not white, they’re beige, same as the hands, a bit darker if anything. Whereas yours

I have been cleaning something with a strong detergent. This is my natural colour, here, look.

What do you do when you write?

I use language, yes, I admit. But directly.

That’s an old illusion. But I didn’t mean that, I meant, do you cut yourself off?

Cut myself! Oh you mean, oh yes, completely, I rip out the telephone and see no one.

Well then can’t you understand

But I want to understand that’s why I came. Here you give me this book

because you happened to be at my neighbour’s whom I happened to see on the stairs and who happened to ask me in and happened to introduce me to you and happened to insist that you should read one of my books

that’s a lot of happening it must mean something

on the contrary it’s a string of chance improbabilities. A terminal string.

and I happened to come up and want to discuss it with you so that you will perhaps happen not to take this flight any more

which is likely to have the opposite effect. Listen, you’re very nice but I wrote this book ages ago it’s dead and gone for me. I know everything that’s wrong with any book I write by the time it comes out. I am now in the middle of another and to hear anything at all, for or against, about an earlier one is simply imp–non-pertinent, irrelevant I mean. But the interruption isn’t, it could block me for days.

Ah, you see, you do care.

As you care about success.

That’s a completely different level.

It isn’t what you say it’s the fact of interruption. A friend from Morocco turned up the other day

my country is near Morocco. There is only the whole of Algeria in between.

and I couldn’t not see him. It was delightful. It took two hours. I lost three days.

Because that was real. It takes a lot of trouble and concentration to construct your escapist edifice.

Look, er, Armel, you’re very perceptive, but you’re not the only one to say these things you know, I’ve heard them before, many times.