The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (78 page)

And if the king’s daughter, settling a pillow by her head or throwing off a shawl, and turning toward the window should say That is not it at all, that is not what I meant at all, you can simply disappear, opening a door into another door, working backwards in a wide circular pattern. Or backwards through the same sequences, which is simply regressive, and in a way cheating, since you have given many women a certain peculiar pleasure in frustrating their vulgar desire to know what happens inside you, and that pleasure should not be dropped too brutally, leaving them hungry for it. The two pleasures, the pleasure in your textual act and the curiosity, should be skilfully balanced which is the work of a six-hour nightly timetable.

 

Do you follow the principle? The principle being that you do not follow the principle you separate yourself from it though you remain goods friends leaving the door open onto other doors that lead to the other place as you drive away into the night watching the luminous coloured hoops dance in the bluish rectangle that reflects the rear before you.

Don’t look back Orpheus don’t look back.

 

Meanwhile.

Go forth and multiply the multiplicator.

See you later you-narrator.

But who invents Armel? A woman probably, binary to the bone, who sees herself entire and suffers from all the beautifully diagrammatic coherence of a psychosis when all that is signifiable in her is struck with latency as soon as raised to the function of signifier which initiates this raising by its original disappearance. Unless merely asthenia or cyclothymia, there can be no diagnosis since she too does not exist except as reinvestment itself perpetually reinvested letting S represent the subject of discourse and O the Other place and o the object of desire o
¹
o
²
o
ⁿ
.

On a point of information may we interrupt

Oh go away with your politics we want to work

No let them speak

Thank you my dear. But you brother you will soon be unable to work if the faculties continue on their present trend

We’re quite happy about it

What faculties, yours?

And who’s we, royal or collective? You little lot here? Caring only about accumulating credits like shopkeepers and acquiring your meaningless little degrees of presence and doctorates of debility to become lacqueys of the bourgeoisie?

Oh not that old playback. We’ll have to earn our livings won’t we like anyone else, whether we like this society or not, and if we want to change it we might as well understand how it functions.

Oh no my friend that way recuperation lies the bourgeois idyll is over you can’t perpetuate it for ever. The revolution is upon us which has been long preparing out of archaic flaws and

Si fa la revoluzione, all by itself.

What’s this guy talking about?

Make love not revolution.

Don’t worry sister we make both.

Is that your point of information? We’ve heard it before thankyou.

And you’ll hear it again with tearbombs on. Meanwhile there’s a General Assembly of staff and students at five in the Karl Marx Amphi to discuss more particular and relevant problems. The reorganisation of the university into a non-segmented and truly revolutionary institution devoted to establishing the truth.

How can an institution be revolutionary?

For it’s the protective segmentation that has enabled everyone, after an honest enough start, to fall back into all the old ruts, the hierarchisation of subjects, the dishing out of ready-made culture and all that shit. Apart from that there’s the related question of the syllabus-reform the students have been loudly demanding for so long.

Which students? You? Who’s you?

The vast majority as you well know.

The loud minority you mean. Everyone knows these General Assemblies are a farce, swayed by a few well versed in crowd rhetoric and ending in chaos, so that the real majority of serious students have ceased to go and the staff knows this and go on exactly as before.

You’ve hit it on the head my friend. If more people like you came to the meetings we might achieve something instead of this criminal apathy.

We’re not apathetic we’re diverting our energies into more useful channels.

Christ what is this class? Isn’t this the literature department? I thought so. Literature is the servant of the bourgeoisie.

Well maybe we are too literary to swallow your clichés.

What the hell is this reactionary culture you’re dishing out to these kids oh my sister?

If you really want to know, textuality as subversion of society.

Words words. Why this flight? Tell us how you go about it that’d be much more to the point.

This is not the place.

No it never is, is it? Hey you with the beard what you studying here come on comrade don’t be afraid I won’t eat you.

The symbolic structure of castration in The Mable Faun and other texts.

Christalmighty the marble faun! and you think it’s with the marble faun whatever shit that is that you’re going to succeed in subverting society? Oh brother.

Pooh! You’re only acting out. Brotherhood’s just another matrix, dismembering the paternal inheritance.

Well said Salvo.

Norman O. Brown you mean. Huh, we’ve read him too you know but he’s on our side, don’t you dismember him into yours.

No well I’ll tell you something out of my own country for believe it or not I care about these things as much as you do but you’re going about it the wrong way. Macte Jovis! we used to say in ancient Rome at a certain festival, kill Jupiter, kill the father, and we still shout ammazzalo! at soccer matches. Keep your violence for those my friend for you too will be fathers and dismembered and ammazzati.

Idiot. Sport is the opium of the people.

Yes Salvo that’s all rhetoric, and rhetoric as you should know was born in Syracuse out of a lawsuit over property, not in order to establish the truth but to persuade people of its verisimilitude.

Ali you’re nuts how can truth be established it’s not an institution?

You’re playing with words, Saroja of the beautiful eyes.

Well don’t you?

My! This is an interesting little nest of bourgeois ideology. Words words words as the saying goes and as the saying goes it went. Are you coming to the G.A. or not?

To hear more words? Why don’t you just blow the place up according to your own principles instead of going through that semblance of democracy that you call General Assemblies?

There follows a test for adjusting your stereophonic equipment. This is the left voice: boom body boom doom. This is the right voice: sham deed ah slam scram. If your equipment is correctly adjusted the sound should be exactly balanced in the centre:

Agitato
ma
non
troppo

    
The
bour-geois
i-dyll
is
o-o-o-ver

 

Meanwhile the timetable has slipped into the other place, the tale-bearers having on pain of death given birth to other tale-bearers, spokesmen of realities that merely seek to appear true, separating the signifier from the signified the manifest from the latent and the upper from the lower waters of the sky in coitus interruptus with earth as a death-battle with time for a trophy that drops bleeding into the sea to re-emerge, feathered in froth, the treasurer of signifiers behind which the molecules of water escape back into water that reenters into its own depths, retaining it mystery, reflecting at the surface only the sky.

Il court il court le furet

Which way did he go?

Down the hatch, safe

as a jack-in-the-box                     

Under the expert guidance of the lanky hencheminence grise in smoked glasses

 

The short plump pasha 
sultan the assembly dressed in democracy (but the emperor’s a naked imperialist!) hearer of deep structures below the performance of six hours as summarised in the minutes of the meeting of the permanent committee for the functioning of faculties May 24 at 1400 hours. Questions on the agenda: Statutes and internal organisation. Desegmentation and its consequences. Modification of the linguistics programme. Methods of Grading. Any Other Business.