Renata Adler - Speedboat

“Apse.”

“Exactly. Fine. You will see at once that every choice in language is determined, on every plane, rhyme, meter, meaning, other planes, by a factor of synonymy. And one of contexture. If you do not see it, I refer you to your Jakobson and Halle.

“At first, we thought the distinction of no practical importance. Then, we found that, in cases of severe speech disorder, the absolute extremes turn out, in fact, to be, at one end, cases of pure synonymy, and at the other, pure cases of context. In disorders of synonymy, the same word is repeated, endlessly. Repetition. At the extreme of context, we have words rambling, with no apparent coherence. What we have come to call a word heap.”

“A word heap.”

“Yes.

“Now, if we turn from poetics to other fields — anthropology for instance — we find surprising applications. I draw your attention to the Haida, a tribe of Indians in the Northwest. The normal process of elimination seemed to them a sad thing; when they encountered droppings or dung in the fields or forests, they said a little prayer of condolence to the animal they thought it lost to. The first brave of the tribe, in the first times, was courting one of two sisters. The other sister was jealous and forlorn. On the path to the sisters’ home, this brave one day noticed a pile of excrement which, in the course of his many journeys, had grown nearly to his own size. He asked it, as it were, to pull itself together and marry the other sister. It did so. From the marriages of the two sisters, the tribe descends.”

“Really.”

“Now, what we have here might be considered a disorder of synonym in the name of context. Marriage, usually, is a matter of synonymy, equation. Husband, wife. Boy, girl. In some cases, brother, sister. But here we have a marriage of a person with an object with which that person is, as it were, only contextually associated. There are other considerations, of course. But wherever we look — poetics, psychology, anthropology, linguistics — the two ideas, synonymy and contexture, are among the key structures and processes of the mind.”

On the other hand, our local controversy is whether we ought to require the ability to read at an eighth-grade level before we let any university student in. I can’t understand how that is the question. Surely we are obligated to give them, at least, an eighth-grade education while they’re here and before we send them out. “I found the whole work disappointing,” Nina Valindez, a student in one of my own courses, here in the city, wrote, in her paper last term. “It was more theatrical than filmic. It did, however, remind me of many nineteenth-century novels such as Vanity Fair by Thakkry. And many of the better novels of Jane Austen.” Pat Gertz, one of my best students, wrote a paper on “The Sorted Love Affair in Fiction of the Forties.” The paper expressed all the views that a student of my generation might have held, of which affairs were and which were not to be considered “sorted.” And yet. And Shelley Muess. Ms. Muess, who had received a passing grade, left many agitated messages last term, after midnight, on my answering service. She warned that she would have to take our case to the Student Faculty Grievance Committee and enter a Denunciation/Demerit against my record with the Faculty Appraisal Board. I called her back. I asked what the trouble was. She said she had never received less than honors grades before. Since it had been a matter of some importance to me that I not actually flunk anybody in this intellectual swamp and rip-off I mentioned that the exam had only required each student to list the films shown in the course. Students were allowed to help one another with it, to take it home and turn it in the following week. Since Shelley Muess had missed most of the films, and misspelled the ones she got, a passing grade seemed to me not ungenerous. “Well,” Shelley said, hardly able to breathe with indignation, “I’m not an English major.” The chancellor of our branch of the university once asked me what I thought of the head of our division now. I said I thought he was a thug. “Ah,” she said, with a chiming laugh and a lilt, clapping her hands just once. “You wri ters! What a way you have with words.” For the most part, the students treat me with grave, gentle concern, as though I were something strange — a giraffe, say — among them, or an apprentice on a tightrope, or one of their own on a bad trip.

They were saying “Make peace, not war,” and so, the Commander of the Ohio State National Guard testified in the course of the Kent State trials, he threw a rock at them.

Dinner was over. Almost everybody had gone home. Jim and I were clearing the table. Benjamin, a tousled young journalist who was covering the negotiations at City Hall, was happily drinking up what remained in everybody’s butter dish. He did this without comment, as though it were the ordinary thing to do after a dinner that included melted butter. When he had finished, he drank what remained in three cups of coffee, and sat down on the sofa, with a perfect grin.

The girls were always running out of money, out of cash, precisely, to pay taxi drivers, train conductors, men who delivered pizzas after dark. They borrowed cash, normally, upon arrival. They borrowed passions — Wallace Stevens, Joseph Conrad, Mozart, hiking, the Bible — from each other, as girls of another generation borrowed clothes. At the great universities in those years, everyone who was not doing philosophy, in the mode that liked to think of itself as Ordinary Language, was in one of the other jargons, usually the social sciences. The philosophers at the great universities were, without exception, failed mathematicians. When they were not examining much of the vocabulary of civilized discourse to conclude that it, after all, lacked meaning, they muttered Gödel, Russell, Hilbert, liking to imply that they themselves had chosen philosophy over mathematics to give themselves a wider, though related intellectual field. With an intoxication they derived otherwise only from drinking a little sherry or from being in the presence of somebody English, they required and flunked their undergraduates, year after year, in a course called Symbolic Logic, much as the social scientists, who didn’t understand mathematics either, liked to flunk their students in a course called Statistics 101. Many students had been frightened by even the mention of algebra or numbers, ever since their first struggles with long division, and ever since someone first told them, most often wrongly as it turned out, that their skills were verbal skills. The predicament of these students enabled professors in all the departments that were a disgrace to the humanities in those years to claim for their work a strong mathematical base. The serious colleges for women were, by contrast, solid. They taught the same courses, without fuss and with a small sigh; they taught other foolish courses, notably in education, that way too. They reserved their serious efforts for the medievalists, the true scientists, linguists, other scholars, even the pre-law and pre-medical students, all of whom went out, degree in hand, into the world, and were asked, like their predecessors, whether they could type.

“Can you have dinner Thursday night?” Simon asked. Jim was in Atlanta. “It will be very late. Have a sandwich or something before. I’ll pick you up at seven. Don’t ask where we’re going. It will be a surprise.” The surprise was a five-hour performance of Parsifal . This implied a misunderstanding so profound that I kept looking at Simon from time to time to see whether he meant it as a shaggy-dog sort of joke. Mostly, he was asleep. Whenever he woke up, he was so evidently happy to be there, at that interminable spectacle in that vast auditorium with too few aisles. He would grin. I would grin. He would go back to sleep. The worst part, I think, comes near the end, when the hermit sings to Parsifal about how wonderful it is that Parsifal has brought the Spear, which will, after so many years, relieve the suffering of Amfortas, the Fisher King. The aria itself lasts many years. One is aware of Amfortas, waiting in pain, while this long-winded hermit and Parsifal exchange congratulations and amenities. Narrative conventions do make it quite impossible for them to bring the king the Spear, and then , when he is no longer in pain, sing on about their sympathy for him, in all those years, and their great gladness that a remedy is at hand. The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with. Yet there one is, with an emotional body English almost, wishing that pole-vaulter over his bar, wanting something to happen or not to happen, wishing somebody well. Amfortas was not even on stage. In fact, there was no Amfortas. Yet, more than I wished that I were elsewhere, more than I wished that the opera were over, I did wish that they would bring that king his Spear. When it was over, Simon, who is really a musician, woke up, cheered, applauded. He is also chief resident in surgery at a city hospital. When he isn’t on call, he studies voice. “Wasn’t it wonderful,” he said.