The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

by Brooke-Rose, Christine

  Ah.

  Oh don’t start that A E I O U business again be articulate this is serious.

  Yes master.

  Of course her husband if true would have to be Armel

  But she’s only just met him and told him

  no that’s a coincidence. They do happen despite the critics.

  I don’t think so. You know my answer to all our problems, which has given me my surname

  not your surname your epithet

  if it is written above

  that’s striking below the belt

  if as I say it is written up there that we are to quarrel again, and make it up again, and have sexual problems

  textual

  textual problems that tie us up in knots like er Quipu, then it is also written that knots are meant to be either disentangled or cut.

  Jacques what would I do without you?

  That’s what I said at the inn. And before you opened the door into the narrative.

  Not only are they meant to be disentangled they are themselves meaningful. Decipherable.

  Oh decisively.

  Of course her surname is different. For you may not have noticed that she has acquired a surname from the book he was holding. That’s no problem in the twentieth century though. But it’s oddly close isn’t it? Toren, Santores, why, it’s part of it! And that’s why they write letters they’re separated-but-very-good-friends.

  Well didn’t you know that? It’s the only thing which is clear, the epistolary novel is always crystal clear people will explain themselves. But what about Armel?

  Yes, that doesn’t quite fit. Moreover her mental diagrams seem to be also a good deal more complex than his, though his emotional ones seem more complex than hers, which is perhaps the trouble, but poses another problem if she is inventing him, and even more so if he is inventing her. Still, we’ll come to that. As to the first name, well of course she could have changed whatever original name she gave to the man she was inventing, maybe it was Marco or Stavro, hence the confusion of brows hair and height at the beginning, and given him the name of the man from Porlock, I mean from Timbuctoo.

  I don’t follow.

  To get something out of the interruption if only an unusual name.

  You said women don’t want a name from a man in the twentieth century.

  Oh for fictional purposes yes.

  Ah. I mean, so nothing has changed then, in the twentieth century?

  That’s the whole point, you see, out of the zero where the author is situated, both excluded and included, the third person is generated, pure signifier of the subject’s experience. Later this third person acquires a proper name, figure of this paradox, one out of zero, name out of anonymity, visualisation of the fantasy into a signifier that can be looked at, seen. You should read Kristeva that’s what she says. Though we mustn’t forget that in the grammar of narrative the proper name coincides with the agent. In this way the construction of a character has to pass through a death, necessary to the structuring of the subject as subject of utterance, and for his insertion into the circuit of signifiers, I mean the narration. It is therefore the recipient, you Jacques, or anyone, the other, who transforms the subject into author, making him pass through this zero-stage, this negation, this exclusion which is the author. I am in fact dead, Jacques. Oh, he’s asleep. What a pity. Everything is becoming clear at last. God! No! Yes! Quick, pen and paper

  ARMEL SANTORES

  LARISSA TOREN

  Yes! It figures. So that’s why she said about Armel not finding his ME in her and she not finding her I. Why the names are anagrams. Except for ME in hers and I in his. Am I going mad? Help! I should have stuck to pronouns as in late twentieth century texts which refuse biographies since a name must have a civic status. In the pluperfect. Or a camouflashback pluperfect. That’s the rule. Written up there. In the grammar of narrative. Like attributes–states, properties and statuses. Iterative as opposed to actions. But any agent can enter into relationship with any predicate. The notions of subject and object correspond only to a place in the narrative proposition and not to a difference in nature hence no need to talk like Propp et al of hero villain lawbearer these are predicates. The agent is not the one who can accomplish this or that action but the one, who can become subject of a predicate. Hence only proper names, not substantives, though of course there can be duplication as when three brothers or robbers accomplish an identical action they are syntactically speaking one agent just as two lovers can be temporarily united in one proposition. So there have to be proper names after all, Jacques, Jacques why are you asleep?

  No, no master, I was listening.

  Jacques. I am going to break all the commandments.

  Oh good. When?

  Well–tomorrow. First I must sleep. Undress me Jacques. I’m very very tired. Dead in fact.

  Yes master. Come, your redingote. There. Now let me unbutton the waistcoat. One, two, three, four

  oh make haste Jacques.

  Well there are a lot of buttons. There.

  That’s enough I’ll sleep like this I’m falling already

  But master, your jabot, your boots Oh Lord he’s off. See you later I-narrator. Here we go, left foot, yeeeeeeeank. Right foot, yeeeeeeeeank.

  Mmmmm. Sing me a lullaby Jacques.

  Anon anon sir. Ahem.

  Rock a narrator

  On a phrase-top

  When the verb blows

  The tree-structure will rock

  When the noun breaks

  The tree-structure will fall

  Down comes the noun-phrase narrator and all

  into an idyll

  and about time too

  the happiness sequence with lush screen music running in the woods along the rippling brook fresh green fresh no that’s for toothpaste or mentholated cigarettes or deodorant through a haze of heat and taking off at dawn racing down to the ocean first the swanky part then back along the highway to the slum stretch of shore at Las Ondas trash filthy then to the sordid motel where you make love till noon then off again along the freeway towards Malibu or maybe into the hills above the chaparral of a canyon or into the desert where the air is hot but soft on your skin and you make love again under a shadeless Joshua tree.

  But within every idyll there opens out another idyll as in a vast mouth that never names the secret chiasmus in the name of the farther place.

  Inside the mouth a camouflashback. Christmas time by an open fire in a fashionably beamed cottage. Six people, three men three women. Close-up on heroine sitting pale and dramatic her square face curtained into an oval by thick straight black hair parted in the middle almost meeting in well-trimmed curving points under the chin, underlining the distinct large mouth, touching on either side the edge of huge dark eyes themselves heavily framed in khol like those of Saroja Chaitwantee who however has a dark oriental beauty a quiet voice a modest manner and retains her mystery. The heroine is not like that at all but transparent deadly white and wears as the camera-eye travels down lovingly an elegant sea-green velvet trouser-suit close-fitting and low-cleavaged at the top three buttons undone to reveal pale lace under apple breasts when leaning forward to ask with childlike wonder in the huge dark eyes do you believe in the existence of God? In an elegant trouser-suit calling out in Shot 5 close-up of Armel pale and high browed a privation (at the superficial level) or a disjunction (at the fundamental level) as well as an attribution such as (a) Adam wants an apple (b) Adam wants to be good (at the superficial level) or a conjunction (at the fundamental level) so that God thus summoned as subject of discourse now exists (Shot 6). In an elegant trouser-suit.

  She is not like Larissa at all or Ruth or Saroja Chaitwantee. Shot 7 Larissa watches, bored, the imperceptible shrug of scorn functioning like the bar between signifier and signified for ever eluded played out elsewhere yet ineluctably played out right here in the beginning as a parting shot

  8. Close-up of Christopher Masters unmasterful long-haired but thin on top frail slight co
wed in a winged armchair and pulling at his earlobe. This shot to be cut in at various points in the sequence. Shot 9. Another man, the host, filling glasses, handsome, silver at the temples, a professor perhaps or a publisher. Shot 10. His wife archavid out of Who’s Afraid, watching Shot 11 et seq but seriously do you? I do. When I was a little girl with rapid eye movements (dialogue can be easily improvised out of seduction clichés and mystical maxims such as there is no fear in love in order to find your true Self the lower self must die which the recipient in the present instance is clearly meant to translate as O felix culpa in the presence of the divine I say O in the mountains which means O felix culpa etc). As they speak Armel uttering the maxims Shot 12 with a devouring yes-tell-me expression that lights his voice and eyes into what is your sign? No don’t tell me, Gemini Shot 13 but how did you know (R.E.M.’s) I guessed (Shot 14 continues with R.E.M.’s and illustration) from your gestures hands eyes ways of talking you’re very interested in art aren’t you? Why yes I work with art publishers I’ve always loved art even as a little girl (R.E.M.’s) so it must be true then. Can you interpret dreams too? I had such a strange dream last night I was in a huge tiled room on the edge of a small swimming pool and out of the pool there was an arm sticking out (rappel: shot 8) and I was trying to pull it out but it wouldn’t come. And suddenly it did and I become a sort of bird, flying around the room unable to get out. What does it mean Armel? Puzzlement all round the publisher’s wife archavid out of Who’s Afraid of Sigmund Freud. It’s a very poetic dream Veronica you have a poetic soul the arm is Excalibur and the bird the eternal spirit you see she sees and rapid eye moves.

  So that is what went wrong, plunging into the dimension of banality. But no. Shot 26 Larissa purses an oddly prim mouth and shrugs, separating signified from signifier as God the lower from the upper waters or Freud the latent from the manifest, and within earshotful of sirensong a shot, a mere assassination or tearing off of orphic limbs as declencher of world conflict that has been long preparing out of archaic flaws in the dialectic of change, raising antinomies by action that surpasses the subjective idea, is the parting shot, rendering it objective, here on the ocean edge by the fireside, in an elegant trouser-suit sea-green with deep cleavage revealing apple-breasts laced in foam emerging like a trace in the memory and beckoning, naked, sprayed with the froth of stars and the existence of God as a seduction gambit in words Fiat Deus and there was love, each creating the other as Chronos created the phallus-girl cut from Uranos approaching the earth’s open legs and tossed into the sea so that man realises retrospectively that he has accomplished more than he desired and worked at something infinitely beyond him like love out of revenge for the death of love.

  Man advances staggering through regressions. Says Larissa (Shot 42).

  The other eyes reflect nothing, and when the shoulders move back to the correct position in the armchair the image vanishes. In any case God as signifier is non-specularisable and cannot see himself signified except by a hidden representation of a representation. You should read Lacan.

  This is Larissa’s parting shot in the battle of books versus God as conversation gambits hiding the representation of another battle from which she withdraws into tacitactic defeat, back into the back of her creator’s mind where she talks to her publisher, waiting strategically to re-emerge one day, fully armed, after a Trojan disc-horse war, content merely to send Hermes the swift-footed to Calypso’s island or to appear disguised as Mentor on the lone sea-shore.

  Neil Alder

  Meanwhile.

  Her creator works on the idyll.

  Which is always a mise-an-abîme even though it occurs on the crests of amorous euphoria

  slipping into another timetable through an open mouth full of stars art history and the existence of God in her open convertible (Larissa having insisted on not sharing the car with the ghost of an icon) and away in oleander on hills, the great St Gabriel range behind them overlooking the downward terraces trucked out in layers for low-roofed dead suburban villas and the bridge to the clapboard shacks and Mexican white houses of cracked stucco under a forest of aerials and beyond that the metropolitan sprawl that is eating up the plain, the ranch-lands, the orange-groves, spreading north and south in a death-crawl from which it is dying of the greed that made it and beyond that the bay out of which she came and the distant cliffs of Palos Verdes. Away above the chaparral of a canyon and into the desert where the air is hot but gentle on your skin, hungering between the accolades of breasts and hipbones each pointing to a mouth that grips the senses and old idyllic sentences such as your eyes are a bucolic entertainment your voice that of a shepherdess singing in green pastures your scent of musk and fruit your thighs those of the Syracuse Venus under eyes devouring the inverted accolade that points down again into one word zero.

  Peter Brandt

  And I shall teach you another alphabet with which it is impossible to write anything except love and laughter ‘Ay for ‘orses Beef or Mutton See for yourself. Devolution Evolution Effervesce into peals of mirth. It works all the way from alpha to omega into which you plunge with a spirit-loaded pen floating up every nineteen minutes or so for slowed down eye-movements under electroded lids and a shared Elf of gnome Emphasis Envelope O for the Wings of a Dove. O for a beaker full of the warm south tasting of Flora and the country green. Not Flora, me. Yes, you, V for le roi E for lution R for eedom is a noble thing O for the wings N for lope I for Novello C for yourself A for ‘orses. And I shall spell you in the stars A for Andromeda R for what there’s no R. Let’s say R for Aries. Why R for the Ram! M for Mercury E for I don’t know oh yes Earth we’re a planet anyway. You’re mixing stars and planets galaxies and constellations who cares L for Leo and Love. V for Venus and Vega E for Earth R for the Ram O for Orion N for er nebula I for what, I for Icarus a falling star? C for Centaurus Coma Capricorn Cygnus goodness what a lot of C’s why don’t astronomers distribute the stars better and finally A for Aquarius. I shall spell you into the sentence I speak into the paragraph into which I insert my you the sentence I speak. Thus you spell her to your image out of the stars and when the Pleiades come down to rest sow thou thy seed the I subsumed in the dialectic of desire yet growing big with adoration for a hero must have adoration out of which you form her to your image of an iotaboo like the existence of goddesses naked under elegant trouser-suit sea-green and laced with foam cut by time out of sky in coitus interruptus with earth’s sacred belly and dropped into the ocean as a phallus-girl no one fantasy coinciding in exactly the same curve of time never quite meeting other curves along the canyoned thorax like a bladed rib kept back or withdrawn once long ago into a creature made to man’s desire but somewhere along the sequence slipped out of his optical illusion to become a person in her own right wrong. Was it awful?

  Yes. Was it nice?

  O for the bathetic phallusy of words that fear to explode into the other place at a mere touch since in every idyll there opens out another idyll, lost, as a vast mouth opens, never naming the secret chiasmus the signifying substance which once upon a spacetime is accidented as the idyll of Armel and Larissa poem not couple.

  Hmmm. That’s interesting Julia, you’ve used the given elements very well and introduced new ones. Where did you learn that alphabet?

  Oh in London, as a child. It’s an old thing, my mother taught it me. You can tell it’s English and old on account of A for ’orses and Ivor Novello. I couldn’t think of a more modern Ivor except Ivor Winters and that seemed a bit too specialised.

  Well considering you quote Hesiod via Pound and we’ve used almost everything from Phaedrus to Freud you shouldn’t worry. After all it’s our text, isn’t it, for us only. I see what you mean though. How about ivory coast?

  Gee yes, that’s much better, with the sea symbolism and all.

  I see you change the referent of the you at the end. Do I take it she’s imagining the whole thing?

  Could be, or passing from one to the other it doesn’t really matter. He’s gone off
for a weekend you see and I wanted the shock of ordinary language in a conjugal state of tension at the end.

  I see. Well, what do the others think? Shall we discuss how to proceed or do we have more to say on Julia’s piece?

  Well actually I worked with Salvatore, not with him I mean but we divided the sequence and I told him where I’d leave off and he’s gone on from there.

  Fine. Well Salvatore we’re all agog.

  Ahem. Julia’s going to read Larissa as I’ve done the beginning all in dialogue and it’ll be clearer. Okay Julie?

  You know these weekends are always awful. There’s the ridiculous aspect, you trotting off with your little suitcase or like this time shouting for your clean pajamas which I’d put in the machine with the others by mistake then of course going off without (laughter, smirk from Salvatore) and returning asking was it awful. But there’s also the degradation.

  Oh don’t start

  But I want to understand. Why? You’ve always insisted on a rigid structure, no invasions from outside, we were a poem not a couple, no criss-crossing social foursomes with wife-exchange and the usual hypocrisies.

  Well I’ve CHANGED.

  Don’t shout. Yes you have. But into what?

  I don’t know. I’m in a crisis help me instead of going for me.

  Oh it’s not the thing in itself that’s banal enough it’s the contradiction, the principle being that you don’t follow the principle

  Shut up you bitch you castrating bitch.

  So that’s where we’ve got to.

  I can’t stand this pressure, from both sides, all this drama why the hell can’t women accept their respective positions the mistress wants to be a wife and the wife a mistress oh don’t start crying again for God’s sake.