“For after the uh demo,” Marjory says defiantly, resenting his evasion, his duplicity.
The old man looks as happy as Ray’s ever seen him, like a veteran examining a war wound that hurts excruciatingly. Doris Nourse is clearly wishing the whole scene would turn into a television commercial. “I wouldn’t say no, Ray,” says Tom Nourse. “A cool glass would go down very nicely today. Try and get a good head on it.” As a charger of glasses, Ray Finlay is notoriously inept.
“Do you think it’s wise?” Mrs. Nourse asks nervously. “You’re not going to get hurt, are you, dear?”
“Of course she’s not,” Ray says, pouring a glass that’s seven-eighths froth. “Probably,” says Marjory simultaneously. “Nonsense,” Ray tells them. “It’ll be thoroughly organized. After all, the marchers do represent the most educated, responsible and capable—”
“Humph,” snorts Nourse, regarding the botched beer.
“If the bloody cops don’t run riot,” Marjory says, “and beat up all the pregnant women.”
Doris Nourse blanches, and her fingers twitch the teaspoon. Ray feels an irritated impulse to pat her hand. It’s all right, dear, Marjory may be thoroughly and scandalously debauched but she’s not pregnant. Can’t say that, though. That’s not the name of the charade. Our daughter may be Wild and Eccentric, but thank the Lord she has her Virtue still.
In truth he’s appalled, as always. Ray is easily shocked by other people being shocked by things that don’t shock him. Still, if that’s the way they want it there’s no gain in ramming the obvious down their throats. And maybe getting Marjory’s allowance cut off. He has no ambition to become perforce her sole support and comfort. Not that it’s likely. He recalls one time she went home for the weekend and left her pills lying around. “I see the doctor has given you something to regularize your periods,” her mother had told her. “That’s right, Mum.” Ray feels an odd rush of affection.
It can’t be sustained, though. Nourse is saying drearily, “Now I’ve got an open mind about things and I like to see both sides of every question,” always the dichotomy, the mentally crippling binarization, every major and minor issue has two and only two sides, “but if you’re actually suggesting that the Police Force, a splendid body of men with the rare exception, the very rare rotten apple, Detective Inspector Hubbard is one of my oldest friends, that they’re wrong to protect the community from rioting over-educated little upstarts with too much money in their pockets…”
“Over-educated?” Of course Marjory is on her feet, actually out of her chair and yelling. “Too much god-damned thinking, is that what’s wrong with us?”
“…manipulated by the Reds…” Nourse is saying, but Marjory plainly means to refute his assertions point by point.
“Too much money, for Christ’s sake? It’s your complacent mindless little clerks who get the money, baby!” His true love’s hold on democratic principles, Ray observes, goes all to pieces under stress. Her hands grip the edge of the table while her father sits back now, relaxed, puffing his pipe. “Rioting?” she cries shrilly. “Oh the callous bastards, they’re out there beating up those poor leather-jacketed club-swinging pregnant policemen. And bombing their hospitals.” She exhausts breath and impetus, and walks shakily across the small room to Ray’s perch on the garbage can.
“Marjory!” her mother objects in a shocked whisper. “What kind of language is that?”
“Oh, fuck off,” Marj mutters. But she masks it by swilling down the last of Ray’s beer.
TWO: a purchase on invention
For what we can no longer accept is precisely this Joycean faith in the transcribability of things. It is because reality cannot be recorded that realism is dead. All writing, all composition, is construction…There is no mimesis, only poiesis.
::Robert Scholes, “The fictional criticism of the future”
A DOG’S WIFE
…seven
Spot rose to his feet at the wedding reception, lurching more than somewhat, and replied to the toast. The cantors smiled, and the mullahs did the same, and the officiating Cardinal applauded, with all his conclave of nuns and monks and a brace of castrati if I’m not in error.
“Acknowledgments,” cried my husband, who had been inhaling the herb. “We wish to thank the musicians. All that sawing and smiting, bowing and puffing and groaning, and why? Why, only to sooth the gusts into gaiety. Here we go. Lift those ankles and prance.
“The magicians, yes, the tumblers, whipping their endless purple, crimson, golden scarves in the spanking musical air. Fowls from eggs, great tails lofting under high crystal, green feathers, hard green, soft green. Sawn in half. Bulky bolted brass-and-leather boxes, proved empty moments earlier. Sheer magic. Good work, team.
“Some people find the libretto obscure. Not us. We’re polyglot. And grateful for the poet’s drawn face and crabbed manner and song, song.
“Who? The lighting people, sure. Beams like harsh metal poles furring, fogging where they splash into astonishing scales of peals of tinkles of gongings of lightning blue, satin pinks, reds, purples, and all the whites, and the rest.
“There’s food on every table, here and there in silver porcelain wooden platters slipping from plates into bowls of dip and sauces laid on the tables and marble waiting surfaces: birds, slabs of crusty meat oozing juice the moon curves of mandarins, oranges, grapefruit, the gold and purple of passionfruit, slimy on the tongue but cut by tart, and tarts all slithery in berries and apricots, pale peaches with sugar crusting, melting cliffs of egg white meringue. So here’s one for the chef, the cooks and helpers, the serving staff. Good eating, no doubt, no question there.”
The microphone made spattering noises from this point on, for Spot was salivating with delirious stoned intensity, laughing his fool head off and biting from moment to moment at his own flanks.
“Company. The guests. eh? Doing your bit, swarming about, chattering and nattering, bellyaching just enough that we know you’re taking the business seriously and yielding no quarter out of sentiment for Randy and Fiona and the lovely lass herself.”
Bruce Garbage, the punk crooner whom Randy had flown in from San Antonio, tried valiantly to wrest away command of the public address system but was clearly in terror of having his leather Savile Row suit nipped. Balked, he brought up all his fingers and swung them down in the gesture which at the close of 1981 was to be featured on the cover of Time, and his ensemble seized up their instruments once more and heaved us all into a bruising bout of interactive slam dancing.
1979: things fall apart
A scratch afflicts Joseph’s throat. He has been talking at the hike Nitting Circle about the theorists Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault for nearly an hour now, much of the time shouting to convey his scrambled thoughts above the incessant kibitzing and Nit-Picking of his close friend and associate Brian Wagner. He eases the irritation with a glass of light, or lite, ale, and snaps with some viciousness at Wagner, “Fucking piss off, Brian.” At once, squeezing his eyes tight against his own aggression, he rushes on, “It’s curious that around the time Marcuse revealed the rather startling notions of oppressive tolerance and ‘repressive desublimation,’ we notice that Foucault was besotted with the idea—Foucault makes this absolutely abominable claim. No, I won’t tell you about that—” Instead, he picks up and displays The History of Sexuality, Vol I.
“Go on, Joe. He said what?”
Joseph sighs, rummages again. “Okay, he’s discussing Nietzsche. The Frogs all love the Krauts. No wonder they—All right, he says this: ‘Man, in his finitude, is inseparable from infinity. The death of God is accomplished through the death of man.’ I mean, give me a break.”
Wagner has a cigarette out and alight, to everyone’s distaste. “He writes badly, yeah.”
“It’s not just that he writes badly, it’s, it’s almost impossible to believe…Here’s a piece he wrote about Bataille: ‘The discovery of sexuality, the discovery of that firmament of indefinite unreality—’”
/>
‘What!’
“Hang on. ‘—the discovery of those systematic forms of prohibition that we now know imprison it, the discovery of the universal nature of transgression in which it is both object and instrument—indicates in a sufficiently forceful way the impossibility of attributing the millenary language of dialectics to the major experience that sexuality forms for us.’ I trust that’s perfectly clear.”
A rustle of uneasy laughter.
“See, the heightened and prophetic quality of Foucault’s writing from the beginning gets more and more mannered. And his fans love him for it. It’s so poetic. It’s so transgressive.”
This is no news to Wagner. “He has a linguistic problem, really. They all do.”
Joseph waves at a wisp of smoke and sighs. “Bullshit. It’s deliberate evasion of declarative, um, clarity, chosen for reasons that are probably impeccable. He’s made a linguistic decision to have his words work in an unusual way. He wants to show actions and ideas interpenetrating with a degree of force inexpressible in ordinary French, let alone English. It just happens to…give me the screaming willies.”
“I think he’d like us to feel it could only be expressed—”
RAY FINLAY (first words masked by Wagner’s, above):
…in the log-jam of trying to work out—
JOSEPH:
Hang on. Ray, once you’re onto his paradigm it shouldn’t cause any problems per se. It’s poetic locution made toward a cognitive end.
RAY:
Oh, I’d agree. To get the intended effect, you’d have to read straight through without thinking and—
BRIAN WAGNER:
How many treatises are you prepared to read through without thinking, Ray?
RAY:
Well, obviously you can go wrong. I’ve been reading Jacques Lacan in translation and—
JOSEPH:
Christ, he’s even more obscure than Foucault.
KENNY:
This is the radical French psychiatrist, right?
JOSEPH:
Yep. Ray, I get the impression that Lacan has taken Freud in directions that Laing might have—Sorry, we’re getting a bit—
RAY:
How much of it is the sheer difficulty of translating these poetic statements from one language to another?
JOSEPH:
Exactly! One commentator mentions Foucault’s discussion of, um, the ‘solar hollow’ which he says is ‘the space of Roussel’s language, the void from which he speaks’.”
KENNY:
But Bertrand Russell was English, right, not French? So he—
JOSEPH:
Raymond Roussel, the notorious surrealist. Okay, so this could of course be one playful loon piled on top of another, but what if the term Foucault actually used was ‘solar plexus’? This wouldn’t advance the world’s knowledge a great deal, but it would be less, you know…random…than ‘solar hollow.’
RAY:
That’s exactly where I was headed with Lacan, Joe. I was in a study group of psychiatrists the other day—
VOICE:
Ah, they’ve caught up with you, eh?
ANOTHER VOICE:
But he escaped. Quite mad, but a master of disguise.
[Laughter]
RAY:
—poring over a page of Lacan. He mentioned ‘the fractured terms of language’s solar specter,’ or something like that, and the assembled psychiatrists all fell to babbling, trying to parse this mysterious truth of the unutterable unconscious and its prophet.
MARJORY:
I suppose you set them straight. Even though you speak and read no French.
RAY:
Correct. A specter, eh? Was this the Derridean trace image of the phallocratic sovereign subject, they asked each other. Could the marxist Lacan actually have believed in ghosts and spirits? On and on it went. After a while, I suggested that maybe Lacan was simply drawing an analogy. White light is broken into its constituents by a prism. So too with language. But nobody in the room knew if ‘spectrum’ is or can be the same word as ‘specter’ in French, or if the pun would be sustainable, and anyway my interpretation was deemed intolerably reductive and scientistic…
MARJORY:
‘Spectrum’ does translate into ‘specter.’
RAY:
Amazing what a training in computer science does for one’s powers of extrapolation. Anyway, my point is that even if Lacan actually was making sense, underneath the poetic tosh, you’d never find much evidence of it in his earnest and laughable English-speaking interpreters, let alone his followers.
JOSEPH:
This level of evasion and fancy footwork is now a signature of all the poststructuralists, but the question is: is our own irritation and laziness as readers a product of Marcuse’s repressive desublimation? Or is the opaque writing itself evidence of textual laziness?
RAY:
Pretty energetic laziness.
JOSEPH:
Exactly. Exactly.
BRIAN: Big deal. What becomes of a thinker who grows so enamored of his linguistic ability that he turns into a fool when he tries to present his subject matter?
RAY:
Take the other point of view, that Foucault and Lacan are always striving for effects they feel can’t be gained with ordinary language, except with an enormous amount of—
BRIAN:
Come on, look at the medium they’ve chosen to work in. Psychoanalysis, the most pretentious and bogus…
JOSEPH:
I’m not convinced it is. They take fairly considerable pains to stress that the linguistic space—the connotative space—available to the 20th century critical theorist is in fact considerably different from that available to the classic empiricist. Marcuse’s revival of the dialectic—
BRIAN:
Academic wanking. They play these elaborate games with their followers. It’s a big world out there.
[A confusion of voices]
JOSEPH:
Well, sure, it bothers me, too, when Foucault tosses off this sort of merry aside: ‘If mental pathology has always been and remains a source of psychological experience, it is not because illness reveals hidden structures, not because man here more easily recognizes the face of his truth, but on the contrary because he discovers here the dark side of this truth and the absolute fact of its contradiction. Illness is the psychological truth of health, to the very extent that it is its human contradiction.’ He adds that psychology ‘will be saved only by a return to hell’.”
BRIAN:
Joe, for fuck’s sake, do you actually have the gall to sit there and tell us we should be interested in the intentions of a writer capable of that sort of obfuscation?
JOSEPH: There’s no obfuscation within that—
RAY: He’s trying to be—
JOSEPH:—Trying to be precise—
RAY:—trying for clarity.
JOSEPH:—pin it down, multiple codes—
RAY: You try and read Finnegans Wake and—
BRIAN: But Ray, he—Why can’t you—
JOSEPH: He’s explicating a transparent binary contrast of the world—
RAY:Yeah.
JOSEPH:
—or apparently transparent, but he immediately, I mean the thing that comes through is the degree to which what one had stupidly thought to be fairly straightforward is multiply complex, layered with an extraordinary number of overlapping—
BRIAN:
Bullshit! What ‘contradiction’? Is a broken leg the ‘dark side’ or ‘infernal contradiction’ of a straight one? This is as bad as that Nazi fruitcake Heidegger.
MARIO PONTE:
Is he asserting that these oppositions express the theorist’s analysis, or is he trying to peel the surfaces back and expose the theorist’s own psyche? Because ninety per cent of what anybody experiences is what he’s obliged by culture to experience.
JOSEPH:
Foucault’s experimenting in a critical laboratory not many people in the English-speaking wor
ld are yet acquainted with: semiotics, deconstructionist—
RAY:
The Structuralists.
JOSEPH:
The poststructuralists. Derrida, Kristeva, that lot. He starts from a proposition that Roland Barthes put forward in a book called “S slash Z”—
BRIAN:
Speculative Zonk.
JOSEPH:
Hmm. Semi-Zymurgyic. Barthes draws the distinction between the writerly text and the readerly text. The writerly text in some sense has a privileged position, aesthetically, over the readerly text. The readerly text is that which we—as far as I can make out; it’s very obscure to me, and I would hope that Madame Finlay would help out on this—the readerly text is the classic text, the text which gives itself up to us in all its plenitude, and soothes our minds and massages our sensibilities and tell us all the things we want to know.
The writerly text is the creative interface between the words and the person either writing or reading (as I understand it); we readers don’t ‘read’ the writerly text, we write the fucking thing. And the intention of the author more or less disappears, because we have no—we ought to have no interest…You can argue that there’s no way of reclaiming the intention of the writer. although a lot of people tried to, in the New Criticism…I suppose…or do I mean…?
MARJORY FINLAY:
The Intentional Fallacy, but you’ve got it arse-about.
JOSEPH: The Intentionalist Fallacy was repudiated, then, by the New Critics.
MARIO PONTE (musingly):
Where did Gore Vidal discuss that?
BRIAN WAGNER:
Borges said it too, beautiful—
MARIO PONTE:
I read it in something this afternoon somewhere—
JOSEPH:
There’s obviously a sense in which it must be true, a sense reflected in Marxist terms like praxis, where the reader engages with the text, creates the text—
RAY:
This is—
JOSEPH:
Quipu Page 8