Christine Brooke-Rose - The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

But you’re not going to, coldly, use

Ma, devo raccontare qualcosa. I shall spell you into the sentence I write into the paragraph into which I insert you the sentence I write. But no, we’re going to Lima.

You’re mad. What about your job?

I’m here on a sabbatical you forget, starting September.

To be spent in a pastoral pastiche of marriage outside the walls? And he’s already a third person to you. You should dip into his own angle of vision not yours.

Oh don’t Booth me I do dip that’s the trouble but too deep I know it better than he does himself.

It will escape. You have no right to reify him into the voiceless object of an intellect that delimits him. A human being lives to the end on his lack of definition, he always has the last word.

Read Bakhtine! Of course he’ll have the last word which will be a cowardly silence. But Armel this is a conversation not a book, even if I talk like a book. How can I use the second person about him to you?

Of course, I am your second person singular why persecutest thou/me. But aren’t you composing a motet for a prepared Oedipiano with a falsetto sound? And what about the previous chapter?

I know, it’s a flop. As this one, and the next, redundant but necessary for qualcosa to continue. Narration is life and I am Scheherezade.

Incapable of a thousand and one nights. Or ten a day for a hundred days.

It will all get changed and transmuted,

How then does it get into the text?

cancelled even, for it does not exist, except in my own boundless need and fear that will alter the signifiers into a delirious discourse through swift-footed Hermes with terrible letters no doubt that we can skip as he will, for no recipient desires a message of enduring pain redundant and therefore without information content because not from the Emperor of China, all the less so if he has caused it so that I shall not transmit it many times and the unmany times I do I shall regret because I do not hope to turn again where the lack of imagination had itself to be imagined, unless I transmit it to you, but of course that’s useless since the recipient is the meaning of the message, even if he has an earful of sirensong or wax or crabs and can’t take any aspect of the truth gone wild.

Teach us to care, and not to care, teach us to sit still.

I do, or rather I did, a simple man’s simple love I can return simply for a while. But he won’t let me, he’s knocking at the other place both his and mine without even realizing it, so that what begins in banality has to go through the whole signifying chain from idyll to catastrophe until it can be returned to banality, beneath contempt, amusing maybe and harmless, a poison and a pharmakon that immunises. And he is the temporary pharmakos or scrapegloat, but only for a time.

And you say you love him? You treat him as an object and despise him thoroughly.

Of course. Both. There are degrees of love and scorn. As man with woman are you for the double standard?

But all this has nothing to do with him.

He’s aiming at someone else through me too though he doesn’t know it. This terrible love he calls it, and refuses to give it up.

But Lara that’s no reason

Well it’s just possible, you know, that I’m trying to prove with him, that your appalling accusations weren’t true, that I can love without, well, dismembering, though I’m taking the dreadful risk of proving that they are.

It’s you I’m thinking of, not him. You’ll lacerate yourself. He won’t, he’ll never even admit he was using you.

Oh I’ll come through. I always do you know. And so will he, certainly, you’re right of course, he’ll shrug it off with a swim and a fornication, or he’ll erect another huge romantic structure and never know what hit him.

How do you know he won’t? You’re playing dangerous games, both of you, incestuous games, but you should be wiser Lara, you know yourself too well, and the great lack, the hole you speak of so often, which even I couldn’t fill, never to be filled by anyone, least of all by an infantile phallus-man who calls his wife Maddy.

You beast.

I’m sorry. But I’m frightened for you.

Or jealous? Or outraged or what the heck. I’m frightened too Armel. His body is near but his discourse is far. He might be speaking out of some decadent Byzantine romance, the language of my twentieth year except that I never spoke it. It was fine as an idyll, in fact I turned a banal pick-up into an idyll because I couldn’t enjoy it otherwise, and that was all I wanted. But he’s more forceful than I thought, and has given it the twist of possession for ever, which normally I can’t stand but I’m so tired Armel, I want to give up, give in. And yet though he insists the age difference is nothing he can’t meet me even half way into his own future, naturally, so I have to do all the meeting, backwards, and not just the years of actual difference but way back, he’s a mere child for all he’s thirty. And of course that’s rejuvenating on the level of the idyll but on the other it’s like taking twenty steps back, into the void, where I never was. But his body is in me and I absorb his discourse through pores as if translated, magnified from far away. It’s about love. He himself doesn’t of course, recognise the other in me at all. His unknowing is my undoing for I need to be known, as my knowing will be his for he. doesn’t want my true or even untrue knowledge of himself no man does.

Hush. Every man does. But not so verbalised. Never let yourself be fully known, remember?

Oh it’s only to you Armel, a scrapped chapter.

Thank you.

With him I dialogue on his endless problems, or we sing like crazy in the car he does Leporello to perfection oddly enough, you’re right. For if I dialogue on other things I dialogue alone.

Well, see it through if you must. But don’t let him see you see through him.

Thank you Armel, for letting me talk. I do love you, you know. I’ll be back.

I hope so. My street though small is not so hard to find.

That’s a nice pentametre.

Well, let me know if, if you do want a divorce.

Could you, if you can bear it, do one thing for me, now I mean?

What is it?

I’d like you to meet him. Oh not as you. He knows I’m seeing you of course, god, the fuss he made, but he’s coming here tomorrow at eleven, we’re leaving the next day. Could you call, as a friend, casually, at about quarter past, under another name, Oscar for instance and we’ll have a drink together. And then you could ring me, or meet me outside. When are you leaving?

In three days. I don’t like it. In fact I think it stinks. But all right, Oscar it is.

Armel you’re marvellous. Is the poison really out?

In me yes, I think so. But is it in you?

Oh probably not, I’m rotten through and through you know, my name is Toren.

It isn’t it’s Santores. And I told you before, don’t run yourself down, people will always take you at your word, if only on that.

Yes but I have to run myself down to him, show him the worse he wants so insistantly to take with the better.

If that’s a perverse test of the knight by the lady he’ll fail it. I was hoping to spend these three days with you. Indeed I had hoped for the summer but you went off.

I know. I’m sorry. Do you mind very much?

I think I mind more this morbid threesome you’re asking of me. Why do you want it?

I don’t know. For strength to stop maybe, confirmation of a kind. You know how it is, the information-content of a particular unit is defined as a function of its probability, hence redundancy, necessary however.

That should make you redundant too, if you’re as predictable as he is and as you say you are.

Like u after q.