Edward Aubyn - Lost for Words

‘Of course he won’t,’ said Auntie, clicking her tongue. ‘Whoever made the mistake in the first place, there’s no question of my little book being a finalist for the world’s most famous fiction prize. It’s really too ridiculous. I wish I hadn’t been put on any list at all.’

‘There, there,’ said Sonny. ‘You’ll drive yourself mad by thinking about that letter.’

Auntie suddenly withdrew her attention. With her back straight, her hands folded in her lap and her gaze resting on a midpoint in the carpet, she seemed to have taken refuge in the heights of an invincible aloofness. Sonny grew nervous, feeling that he had gone too far with his patronizing reassurance.

After a few minutes, the painful silence was alleviated and amplified by the rattle of pots, jugs and plates, and the clink of heavy silver on a table wheeled in by the waiter to whose solicitous enquiries Sonny gave sullen and abrupt replies.

‘Over there, over there … not that chair … don’t bother, we’ll help ourselves.’

When Didier eventually arrived, only ten minutes before the Inkwell broadcast, Auntie had still not surrendered to Sonny’s offer of tea, and only gave a cold, vague greeting to his friend.

Sonny threw himself on Didier and started to describe Auntie’s book in the most flattering terms, hoping to melt her resistance with an overheard eulogy.

‘Of course, we’re hoping to see The Palace Cookbook move from the Long List to the Short List in just a few minutes,’ Sonny concluded, his hypocrisy made sincere by his panic-stricken desire to win Auntie back.

‘Oh, honestly,’ said Auntie, ‘it’s just a few recipes and some family portraits. There’s been some sort of mistake…’

‘Evidently,’ said Didier, before Auntie could complete her self-deprecation, ‘the intention of the author is not the measure of the text. We are not living in the nineteenth century! We are not going to sit here, even in the Arnold Bennett Suite, pretending that Roland Barthes never wrote The Death of the Author .’

‘Perhaps we could take up that interesting point,’ said Sonny, ‘after the broadcast.’ He leant over to switch on the radio.

‘Oh, please,’ said Auntie, restraining his hand, ‘I really don’t see the point.’

‘Shhh,’ said Sonny, ‘we’ll miss the beginning.’

‘Frankly, I’d rather miss the whole thing,’ said Auntie. ‘You’re just doing this to torment me.’

‘Auntie! How could you say such a thing?’

‘Oh, very well…’ said Auntie.

By the time Sonny was allowed to switch on the radio, Malcolm was already nearing the end of his introductory remarks.

‘As to the selection process, all I can say is that if we had been asked to draw up a list of the six worst books we’d read this year, our task would have been a great deal easier — believe me, there was no shortage of candidates for that prize! But, of course, what we were in fact asked to do was to make a list of the six best books of the year, and that is, without doubt, a far stiffer challenge. Rather than attempt to describe the critical framework of our decisions, or the forces that we have tried to hold in balance, I shall simply read out the Short List. The press are free to criticize our decisions, but there should be no doubt that they were made by a team of thoroughly responsible, highly intelligent and passionate readers.

The Frozen Torrent by Sam Black

The Enigma Conundrum by Tim Wentworth

All the World’s a Stage by Hermione Fade

wot u starin at by Hugh Macdonald

The Palace Cookbook by…’

Auntie’s name was drowned out by a cry of astonishment emanating from the author herself.

‘ Bravo ,’ said Didier, ‘ et bravo pour Sam. ’

‘Congratulations,’ said Sonny, extorting a smile from his drooping features.

‘And last but not least,’ Malcolm concluded, ‘ The Greasy Pole by Alistair Mackintosh.’

Sonny switched off the radio.

‘I really don’t understand,’ said Auntie, clicking her tongue again, ‘especially after that offensive letter from Mr Elton.’

‘Evidently,’ said Didier, ‘we are in the presence of the text-as-textile, as the fabric -ation that weaves a dissimulating veil over its apparent subject, expressing the excess of figurative language over any assigned meaning or, more generally, the excessive force of the signifier over any signified that tries to contain it. A recipe from the Palace Cookbook is also a recipe from the Anarchist Cookbook ! Precisely because language explodes with meanings that subvert our logocentric reading of the text, including the text we call “Reality”.’

‘There you go, Auntie,’ said Sonny, as if he’d understood every word of Didier’s impenetrable excitement, ‘Didier has put it all in perspective for you.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Auntie, a little stiffly. She sighed and allowed her shoulders to relax; she liberated her hands from her lap, and seemed to be taking in the tonic of the good news.

‘Thank you, Monsieur Leroux,’ she went on, smiling graciously at Didier, ‘thank you for explaining that to us.’

‘ De rien ,’ said Didier.

Sam sat at his desk, his middle finger dented by the pressure of the pen he was pressing against the almost blank page. A small ink stain had spread around the pen’s eager nib. Above it, scrawled diagonally across the right-hand corner, was a list of words that failed to form a sentence but represented a kind of warm-up for the nauseating responsibility of writing one: ‘not, neither, nor, nothing, less, without, and above all, no’.

This little doodle of negativity, like a cough before a speech, prepared Sam for the obligation of writing despite having nothing to say; indeed, the obligation to write only when he had nothing to say, since only then could a new insight emerge. Should he start with a declaration, or a description, a dialogue, or a comparison?

Declarations would buckle under the weight of their undeserved positivity and end their sentences as denials.

The only description worth having was a description of the gaze that produced the description in the first place.

Dialogue was just characters discussing the plot, but there were no characters, and there was no plot. Why not throw open some quotation marks and bring them both into being, by saying something, by saying anything at all?

The dent deepened, the stain spread.

Comparisons didn’t bear thinking about. The ceaseless traffic of correspondences between one resemblance and another — eagle nebulae, star fruit, frog suits, foxgloves, rapier wit — generated a craving for The Thing Itself, but everybody knew, or else should know, that The Thing Itself was just another comparison, once it had been fished out of the ocean of silence by a linguistic net in which every word existed in relation to all other words. Even if it was decked in the mayoral chains of a Proper Name, a word depended on its position in a sentence as well as its history. Paris could famously turn up in Texas, and Boston could stay quietly in Lincolnshire; Byzantium and Constantinople were buried under the busy streets of Istanbul, while Leningrad was St Petersburg for the second time. ‘A table’ was a table, not the table, this table or that table; it depended on the words before and after it, just as the object it pointed to depended on its entirely metaphorical legs. The object was assembled into an illusory autonomy from bits of wood, glue and metal, while the word for it was assembled into an illusory stability out of grammatical and semantic relationships. Nothing was whole or complete. The universe was expanding as it decayed, and the language that described it, turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns, gentrifying slang, coining neologisms, importing foreign words, and dumping obsolete ones, was doing its best to keep up.