Some Trick: Thirteen Stories

Famous Last Words

‘Structuralism is out of fashion anyway,’ says Brian, who likes to be a kind of thinking man’s Philistine. He slides a spoon into raspberry sorbet.

‘Post-structuralism is out of fashion,’ says Jane. They’re married, it isn’t really surprising.

‘Fashion is out of fashion,’ says X, in the tone of voice that makes you think ‘quipped’.

‘Fashion is out of structuralism,’ say I. It’s nice when they leave you the best line. X doesn’t like it, though. Didn’t see it coming.

‘I liked that pasta alla Gorgonzola,’ I say to Jane. ‘Is it really so easy? How do you do it?’

Cross looks round the table. I blush, as so often. It was an intellectual conversation. Jane doesn’t want to answer, she resents being dragged down to this level.

‘Oh, you improvise like mad,’ she says airily. ‘Gorgonzola and sheep’s yoghurt are the only essentials.’

This is not very helpful, but I don’t like to press her. Brian starts telling stories about Derrida: perfectly happy, it seems, to accept all the privileges of the author. Theories of authorial absence, says Brian, tend to leave out the curious circumstance that the author is always there to pick up his cheque.

X does not seem to resent this. X says as a matter of fact Derrida is a stickler about copyright.

I’ve finished my sorbet. I finish my coffee. I start thinking about the death of Voltaire.

X and I have a long way to walk home afterwards — X lives up the Abingdon Road, I live in Osney. It’s about midnight when we leave, and the Woodstock Road is deserted but well-lit: the road is pocked and blackened like a battered sheet of gold, the chestnut trees are brassy.

‘Brian is such a wanker,’ says X. ‘blaBLAblaBLAblaBLA — gossip gossip gossip.’

‘Lucky Brian,’ say I. I scoop up a handful of dust from a driveway and let it sift through my fingers on the wind. ‘The streets are paved with gold.’

X cheers up suddenly. ‘Still, I think I made a good impression. You can’t ignore politics.’

We cross Leckford Road.

‘I was thinking about the death of the author,’ I say. ‘People use “la mort de l’auteur” like “la mort de Dieu”. I mean, to describe the disintegration — no, the devaluation — the discrediting of a concept. It’s metaphysical. Nobody thinks God actually died: they think it was never alive in the first place. I think Barthes actually says somewhere “l’Auteur, lorsqu’on y croit!” Putting it that way is a paradox — how does a universal die, anyway?’

‘Dunno,’ says X. ‘Kind of obvious, innit?’ X sometimes likes to be a Philistine’s Philistine.

‘The life of the author in Barthes is a matter of being paid too much attention. Death would just be being ignored. No more Paris Review interviews — no more of those weird questions. “Do you write on the typewriter?” “Do you write to a schedule?” “When did you start to write?” “Does it come easily?” “Was it hard for you to write about oral sex?” Leon Edel — Leslie Marchand — André Maurois — Gordon Haight — will languish unread on the shelves.’

‘Kind of a Berkeleian non-existence,’ says X, going along with it. ‘There’s no one to think of the author but God, and God’s dead.’

‘But,’ I say, ‘that leaves you with the death of the author. There are what we could call, for the sake of argument, impostors — people who have deathbeds. There is a sense in which the death of the author is incompatible with “la mort de l’auteur”. Think of somebody like Voltaire. There’s something strangely fascinating about the way everyone tried to write his death.’

X holds up a finger, and says in a strong Cockney accent:

‘Your basic author,’ says X, ‘is transfixed by the eye of the dead God. What you’re talking about,’ says X, ‘is the night of the Living Dead.’

I think this is clever, but, allowing for the accent, it’s the kind of thing Brian might have said.

‘But it’s interesting,’ say I. ‘It’s a different slant on the question of sincerity. Not, “What did you really mean?” but “Would you still say it?” Recantation…’ I say it emphatically, it’s a word I expect to appeal to X.

‘Authority…’ X says thoughtfully.

‘Exactly. This idea of getting the one who said it first to take it back — or stick to it! More words from the same source. It’s this business of validation, or invalidation, coming from a particular direction — ’

‘Parsifal!’ says X. ‘Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug.’

‘Eh?’ (I can read German, but it never seems to sound the way it looks.)

‘The wound must be healed by the spear that made it.’

‘Yes. And I think there’s something very striking about the candidates for deathbed conversions: intensely rational, articulate, revolutionary people — Voltaire and Hume. As if no one could be sure of their own arguments unless they could get Voltaire or Hume to repeat them. All these deathbed confessions of Voltaire — it’s hard to say what’s more interesting, the multiple last statements or the endless arguments about them. Which was genuine? Why did he refuse the sacrament? I’ve got this book at home, La religion de Voltaire, that gets incredibly anxious about it.’

‘Sounds interesting,’ says X.

‘Oh, it is. Pomeau thinks the confessions are tongue in cheek — he goes through them word by word. Which of course simply shows the futility of the exercise — the very problems of sincerity, of interpretative validity, which were to be settled at last without possibility of revision, are all to be settled again for the “final words”.’

‘I wouldn’t mind having a look at that,’ says X.

‘I’ll have to show it to you some time,’ say I.

‘It’s not that late,’ says X. ‘I can come by your place.’

‘Oh,’ say I. ‘Oh, OK.’

My place is very small. I have use of the kitchen, and a room on the second floor with a narrow view of the canal and swans. X and I sit at the kitchen table, surrounded by books about deaths of authors. I have Noyes’ biography of Voltaire, and Pomeau, both with extensive discussions of the death of Voltaire. Noyes also includes a description of a visit to Voltaire by Boswell. Besides these I have the volume of Boswell’s journals which includes his interview with the dying Hume. I say that I think I once read something somewhere about the death of Foucault, but I can’t remember where.

‘The thing that interests me,’ I say. ‘One of the things that interest me is the way there is this emphasis on inserting the body of the writer into the scene, as if making a connection between this physical presence and the derniers mots will somehow make these specially valid. Look at Noyes.’ I pick up the book.

‘“We must obviously not picture him here with the ‘eternal grin’ of Mr Lytton Strachey, but with the blood-stained rag at his lips, and eyes that had been looking into the face of Death. Those eyes are turned for a moment, with the curious wonder which is a sick man’s only way of reproach, upon a secretary who is trying to defeat a purpose definitely decided upon before this illness occurred.”

‘The blood-stained rag,’ I say, ‘says this is real and true. The document is genuine. Its statements may be attached to Voltaire.’

X is flipping through Pomeau.

I start rehearsing facts and dates. On February 26, 1778 Voltaire took confession and signed a statement: ‘Je meurs dans la Religion Catholique où je suis né, espérant de la miséricorde divine, qu’elle daignera pardonner toutes mes fautes, et que si j’avais jamais scandalisé l’Eglise, j’en demande pardon à Dieu et à elle.’ He refused to take the Sacrament because he was spitting up blood and might ‘spit up something else’ (the exact words are disputed). On February 28 he issued the following statement: ‘Je meurs en adorant Dieu, en aimant mes amis, en ne haïssant mes ennemis, et en détestant la superstition.’ At the time of his death, he was attended by the curé of Saint-Sulpice, La Harpe, and Prince Bariatinsky. The curé asked whether he recognised the divinity of Jesus Christ. Voltaire replied, ‘Laissez-moi mourir en paix.’

X has found Pomeau’s analysis of the confession. ‘Wouldn’t take the sacrament — says he dies in the church, not a member of it — second statement the real Voltaire — Whew! “Il était mort en théiste, non en chrétien.”’

‘Whereas Noyes,’ say I, ‘says Voltaire’s early religious training gave him a strong sense of the sanctity of the host.’

X puts a hand on my knee.

‘Boswell sounded Voltaire out on immortality,’ I say. ‘Boswell wore his flowered velvet at the interview. Noyes smiles up his sleeve at this: if the bloody rag is the mark of intellectual commitment, the flowered velvet is that of silly Scottish dilettantism. Boswell asks whether immortality is not a noble idea. Voltaire agrees, but thinks it more desirable than likely. “Potius optandum quam probandum” — isn’t that a great line? On Voltaire’s authority, Boswell goes to see Voltaire’s doctor for confirmation that Voltaire had never been afraid of death.’

I look for this in Noyes, and read: ‘“Had he any horror of it?” “No! The more seriously ill he is, the better Deist he becomes…” “Ah, well,” says Boswell, “I can say all that, then, on the best authority. M. de Voltaire bade me ask you whether he feared death, as ministers of religion had affirmed.”’

X and I are smiling. We are both charmed by the flowered velvet. X’s hand moves up my thigh. I have noticed this tendency to reductionism in X before. The text is infinitely variegated, the subtext always the same. I tried once to resist this by accusing X of believing in final causes — that for the sake of which the rest is there — but it didn’t work. X said I took everything personally. X takes nothing personally: X discussed the deconstruction of teleology and put a hand on my knee.

What is a subtext? You may think of it as a movement in the circumambient language, whose presence you divine by distortions and ripples in the text; what lies between the lines is as invisible, as plain to the eye as the breeze which stirs the leaves of the copper beech in the quadrangle, the high wind that toppled trees in Hyde Park. And we know that the disruption is not in one direction only: the text is a kind of windbreak.

One walks quicker with the wind at one’s back. I feel the subtext pushing us forward, and I am rather afraid it will outstrip the text altogether, before I have got to Boswell and Hume, so that — although I could say a good deal more about the ‘solemn and singular conversation’ — I hasten to open Boswell in Extremes, 1776–78, and bring to X’s attention Boswell’s recollections of the day when he was too late for church, and went to see David Hume who was a-dying.

‘“I found him alone, in a reclining posture in his drawing-room. He was lean, ghastly, and quite of an earthy appearance. He was dressed in a suit of grey cloth with white metal buttons, and a kind of scratch wig. He was quite different from the plump figure which he used to present.”

‘You see what I mean,’ I say, ‘ — the physical presence, with its marks of imminent dissolution, guarantees the seriousness of the speaker — at the same time that it threatens permanent absence of the speaker. This, it says, is your last chance to find out what he really thought.’

‘Yeh,’ says X. ‘Basically it’s your capitalist perspective on meaning as property: authorial presence can be bequeathed to some textual children — others may be disinherited. Boswell’s hoping for a bit of melodrama — a deathbed scene where the Treatise and Enquiry are cut out of the will.’ X squeezes my thigh.

I read rapidly:

‘“I had a strong curiosity to be satisfied if he persisted in disbelieving in a future state even when he had death before his eyes. I was persuaded from what he now said, and from his manner of saying it, that he did persist. I asked him if it was not possible that there might be a future state. He answered it was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn.”’

‘Straight out of the Enquiry,’ says X. ‘If Hume had had a Pomeau he’d have been cheering. Il était mort en athéiste non en théiste.’

‘The bulk of my estate,’ say I, ‘I leave to my beloved son, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.’

‘Boswell writes Hume very well, doesn’t he,’ says X. X puts an arm round my shoulders and looks down at the book in my lap.

We read together:

‘“Well,” said I, “Mr Hume, I hope to triumph over you when I meet you in a future state; and remember you are not to pretend that you was joking with all this infidelity.” “No, no,” said he. “But I shall have been so long there before you come that it will be nothing new.” In this style of good humour and levity did I conduct the conversation. Perhaps it was wrong on so awful a subject. But as nobody was present, I thought it could have no bad effect. I however felt a degree of horror, mixed with a sort of wild, strange, hurrying recollection of my excellent mother’s pious instructions, of Dr Johnson’s noble lessons, and of my religious sentiments and affections through the course of my life. I was like a man in sudden danger eagerly seeking his defensive arms; and I could not but be assailed by momentary doubts while I had actually before me a man of such strong abilities and extensive inquiry dying in the persuasion of being annihilated. But I maintained my faith.’

‘Oh ho!’ says X. ‘La mort de l’auteur c’est la naissance du lecteur. Happy birthday Bozzy.’

‘The author really is like God,’ say I. ‘Dead? Not dead? Opinion is divided. The Barthesian texts, meanwhile, are like the witty, iconoclastic works of Hume and Voltaire. You remember, in “La mort de l’auteur”? Refusing to assign a single sense to a text releases activity which is “contre-théologique, proprement révolutionnaire, car refuser d’arrêter le sens, c’est finalement refuser Dieu et ses hypostases, la raison, la science, la loi.” Boswell would have gone to the deathbed of Barthes.’

‘The author can’t die yet,’ says X. ‘S’il n’y avait pas d’auteur, il aurait fallu l’inventer — capitalism requires the existence of someone to pick up the cheque.’

‘I know what Barthes would have said to Boswell,’ say I. ‘On n’a donc rien écrit?’ I am proud of the ‘on’, and wait for applause. Then it occurs to me that this is cheating. I have wilfully revived the author, or rather ‘l’auteur’, constructing ‘characteristic’ remarks to be uttered by the collector of royalties in extremis. I could have said this at dinner. X will have something to say about it.

‘Oh, you!’ says X. X kisses me. ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ says X.

There is a text which I could insert at this point which begins ‘I’m not in the mood,’ but the reader who has had occasion to consult it will know that, though open to many variations, there is one form which is, as Voltaire would say, potius optandum quam probandum, and that is the one which runs ‘I’m not in the mood,’ ‘Oh, OK.’ My own experience has shown this to be a text particularly susceptible to discursive and recursive operations, one which circles back on itself through several iterations and recapitulations, one which ends pretty invariably in ‘Oh, OK,’ but only about half the time as the contribution of my co-scripteur. I think for a moment about giving the thing a whirl, but finally settle on the curtailed version which leaves out ‘I’m not in the mood’ and goes directly to ‘Oh, OK.’ X and I go upstairs.

X and I sit on the bed. The subtext is suddenly too much with us, and it is clear it will soon push us into what is not spoken. X begins to move oddly: a hand traverses space but makes no gesture. X’s movements, my movements must become the thing meant; X cannot approach this. The words have slipped away, the distance between signifier and signified is no doubt not very great — but the threshold of silence is daunting. X begins to talk about construction and deconstruction of gender, and succeeds again in ‘placing a hand on my knee.’ ‘What is woman?’ says X. ‘Is this the mark of woman?’ X puts a hand on my breast, cannily pursuing sous-texte sous prétexte.

X talks about clothes, which gesture at the difference they conceal. Or don’t. X begins to undress. Each signifier, says X, signifies a further signifier. Each difference is meant and meaning. Difference gestures beyond itself. I begin to undress. X is talking very fast while unfastening all fastenings: buttons fly from holes, zips unzip, clothes fly from skin to the floor. My clothes fall to my feet. And X, who has been taking this road very fast, goes into a skid on the slippage of meaning and smashes up against silence. It is as if we have accidentally removed, with our clothes, all signs of desire and desirability, as if we have sloughed off tits cunt prick with bra skirt trousers and find ourselves, stripped of language, indifferent featherless bipeds, trying to put it all back — but we are to each other as pale and lumpish and uninteresting as Cranach’s Adam and Eve. We catch each other’s eyes, after all we always understand each other.

‘Blue, not-blue,’ say I.

X shows a flicker of interest at the Edenic language: his cock lifts its head.

‘Blue and not-blue,’ he replies. He thinks a moment. He holds up crossed fingers. ‘Bleu,’ he says grinning. He pulls me over onto the bed, and starts kissing my breast.

We plunge at last into silence. No. Silenced, beneath X, my text goes sous-texte and presents the question: is it then the physical which makes sense of my story? Is it here that you find the array of possible meanings contracted — does this compel you to take things a certain way? Must X be a man? It seems inescapable to me.

It is as if I am lying on the bottom of a lake looking up through clear water at the sky: I see ripples across the surface at the meeting of water and air. I wonder how this looks to X. X sees, perhaps, a single body of water across which Hume, the scratch wig, that pleasing notion immortality skim and skitter like watermen. I close my eyes. I see a vast slate-coloured ocean with an immense and wrinkled skin.

I think of one of the fragments d’un discours amoureux. ‘This cannot go on.’ I think: ‘This could go on all night.’

I open my eyes. X rolls over on his back. He begins to sing softly:

‘Well it ainno use ta sit an wonder hwhy babe, iffen you dont know by now. An it ainno use ta sit an wonder hwhy babe. It’ll never do somehow.’ X likes songs that hug the vernacular. He dwells on whatever is most untranslatable to pen and paper, whatever written language can only hint at, what written language must be distorted even to acknowledge: hoarseness — nasality — drawing out of syllables — chromatic scales through the diphthongs. X does not, of course, admit that anything could be irredeemably unwritable, his position is that all these marks of the spoken are repeatable and therefore written. But X cannot sing and state his position at the same time. Singing, X indulges in illicit joys — he will restate the position after the song.

‘Well it ainno use in turnin on yer light babe. The light i — never knowed. An it ainno use in turnin on yer light babe. i’m on the dark side of the road.’ X catches my eye. ‘Well i wish there was sumpn you would — do er say — Ta tryen make me change m’minden stay — We never did teuu much talkin anyway — But don think twice its all right.’

X likes songs that gesture at inarticulacy. He is drawn to the poignancy of a world in which the unspoken is two-thirds of the iceberg. He is drawn to lovers who take things for granted. There are lovers, says the song, who do not include in their writing of la situation amoureuse the texts which play around the theme ‘I’m not in the mood’ — that must pare down discourse quite considerably. I myself am strangely drawn to a form of closure which leaves things so largely unsaid. X and I face a very long and wearisome collaboration on the end of the affair. Having written so much it seems we must continue: language squeezes an author like an orange. X and I are not in a position to walk away; we can part but not leave. Face to face some things are impossible to say. It’ll never do somehow.

I think of telling X that we think too much alike. I imagine writing down a song and handing it to X in a note:

I am in the common room looking through the paper. x is reading a book in a dark blue cloth binding. I stand by x’s shoulder, the TLS in my hand, and look down at the page. In a frame which consists of the angle of x’s neck and shoulder, x’s right forearm, x’s left knee, I read:

The frame is very simple: x’s checked flannel shirt, with an open neck and short sleeve, has a Wittgensteinian innocence. The dark blue trousers are just trousers. The arm is long and bony. I am looking at the score of the music of the spheres. I gaze at this silent material for some time. The harmonies I see represented remain perfectly inaudible to me, but I see from the repose and concentration of x that x can hear them.

I have mastered subjects and failed to love them. I have looked at the sun and not been blinded; I have dimmed the sun. I will be a lover of the moon.

I lie on a bed with x. It is covered with a spread of purple chenille. The room is filled with humble objects lent dignity by the light of the moon: an electric kettle which does not switch off automatically; a mug with a picture of Miss Piggy; a box of Brooke PG Tips, a jar of coffee powder; a packet of My Mum’s digestives; a skimpy blue and red striped towel thrown over a chair; a shiny orange anorak.

On the desk are a pad of graph paper, four or five medium point blue Bic biros, two or three stubby pencils, a calculator. Ranged along the back against the wall are books: Diophantine Inequalities, I read on a spine. Bauer Trees of Sporadic Groups. Amenable Banach Algebras. Singular Perturbation Theory. I suppose that these books map out truth, or at any rate truths. I believe that mathematical truths are eternal, or rather timeless; but it is comforting rather than not to have so many of these truths allied to names and dates. I have not forgotten that the Cauchy-Bunyakovsky inequality was discovered by Cauchy in 1821! x has thrown a few library books on a chair by the door: Volterra Integrodifferential Equations in Banach Spaces and Applications. The Penrose Transform. Classical Fourier Transforms, Automorphic Forms, Shimura Varieties, and L-functions. These names commemorate persons who heard, wrote down snatches of the piece. I am happy for them. At the same time it is sheer accident that one rather than another happened to do so — x sometimes tells me stories of simultaneous discovery. x can’t see why these delight me. Sometimes I ask x ‘Who was Banach?’ ‘What about Shimura?’ ‘Just who was Penrose, anyway?’ just for the pleasure of hearing x’s confessions of ignorance, or professions of knowledge — the answer, when x has one, is always of the form ‘A was someone who discovered that B.’

X, who had views on everything, would not have stood for it. What was his line? ‘The truth is that counting has proved to pay.’ ‘It can’t be said of the series of natural numbers that it is true, but: that it is usable, and, above all, it is used.’ This sounds familiar — I’m sure I remember X quoting it — but whether pro or con I can’t recall. Certainly mathematics were not to have the privilege of referential semantics, but the ins and outs of the arguments for levelling escape me now. I look at the face of x, calmly intent upon a book: the light must come from somewhere.

x sometimes has a book propped open against a knee. I look over x’s shoulder at Probability Approximations via the Poisson Clumping Heuristic; my eyes wander restfully across a page of Greek letters and brackets. x holds, sometimes, a small spiral pad, one of the blue Bic biros, from time to time x scrawls a note, pursues a line of thought in strings of symbols which modulate down the page. x’s wrist lies along the edge of the pad. I see the articulation of the joint, thin delicate bones jut out beneath thin pale freckled skin; x’s large knuckles clamp round the pen, bitten fingers press into the palm. How close they look! I am seeing the moon through a telescope. It is not the smooth flat surface you imagine, seeing that disc suspended in the sky; but there is a kind of wonder in seeing the rocky cratered plain which nevertheless disperses light — in seeing how, even at closer range, the line between black and brilliant white is absolute.

I put my arm around x. x’s forehead is very high and pale, the skin stretched tight over the sleek pure curve of the skull. I lay my forehead against it and close my eyes. I do not strain my ears to pierce the silence; I know that within that bone and blood, a few centimetres away, plays the music of the spheres.