Erasure

2

The center of the tree is the heartwood. It does little to feed the tree, but it is the structural support. The sapwood, which feeds everything, is weak and prone to fungi and insect damage. The two look the same. But you want the heartwood. You always want the heartwood.

I grabbed breakfast alone in the cozy hotel dining room and then walked down Connecticut Avenue to the Mayflower. It was a chilly, gray morning and that shaded my mood, but also I simply felt lost, failing to understand why I had made the trip at all. I of course didn’t care about the meeting and I had already seen enough of my family. There were more people than I expected to see at my session and I felt suddenly just a little nervous. There was really nothing at stake for me, or so I had convinced myself, in reading the paper I had written. Still, I was serious about it and knew that I would step on a few toes, though I was near as sure that it would take them a couple extra beats to actually become insulted.

The first paper read was a surprisingly easy-to-follow, albeit boring and inconsequential, discussion of Beckett and what he would have written had he lived longer and been met with a different kind of acceptance. Then it was my turn and I was greeted with a certain clearing of throats and not-quite-muttering, showing me, at least, that my reputation had, if not preceded me, then arrived with me. I read my paper:

F/V: PLACING THE EXPERIMENTAL NOVEL

F/V: a novel excerpt

(1) S/Z * The title perhaps answers any question before it is raised, making it in some sense an anti-title, but a title nonetheless, thus offering the suggestion of negation. So, is the title the name of a work or the name of a mere shadow of a work? In establishing its own subject, ostensibly Balzac’s Sarrasine, it raises the question of whether that text is indeed its subject. And of course it is not, as S/Z tells us, its subject is the elusive model of that thing which Sarrasine might be argued to be a representation. Like Barthes, let us designate as hermeneutic code (HER) “all the units whose function is to articulate in various ways a question, its response and the variety of chance events which can either formulate the question or delay its answer; or even, constitute an enigma and lead to its solution.” ** The S/Z refers no doubt to the unvoiced and voiced, but the enigma pales in consideration of the slash which separates them. The “/” at once combines the S and the Z into the title/anti-title and divides them, equally, but not so, as the S precedes the Z. The “/” is also that line which we have come to accept as the greasy and shifting mark, however dimensionless, between the signifier and the signified. The slashed whole connotes the cut text, the injured text or perhaps merely the fragmented text (which is either a lie of the writerly or a necessity of the readerly). The separated letters hold together as an indication of the containment of opposites and the necessity of their union in context, illustrating the impossibility of the individual consideration or the definitional bounding of the two, the “slash” or “/” being not only glue, but wedge. The “/” itself becomes a signifier and in each reference to the title it will be a sliding, conflicting element which behaves similarly to its function between S and Z, which is to say, any way it pleases or does not please. We shall indicate this element of the “/” as a signifier or seme or any tacit or voiced reference to its notion by using the abbreviation SEM, designating each time a concept (word) contains in it an implied “/,” e.g. sick (SEM. well) or sick (SEM. crazy).

(2) There are said to be certain buddhists whose ascetic practices enable then to see a whole landscape in a bean. * There are “certain” buddhists, even two might be enough, and we are not to read the majority of buddhists or common, usual buddhists. Is it the perjorative “certain” as in, “There are certain people in this room who are not welcome?” Or perhaps, “certain” means to say that those buddhists are assured, without doubt, steadfast in the beliefs. Before we enter the first sentence fully we are trapped by our first puzzle (HER. certainty). “Certain” is a word, the connotative import of which we cannot be certain. Unless, of course, given its possible meanings, we are to attend to only certain ones.

Pausing and backing up we have before the first sentence I. Evaluation. Is the “I” the Roman numeral one or is it the English pronoun I. “I” followed by a period (HER. period), connoting an extremely short sentence or, a mark of finality connoting the end of the self (SEM. self), thus casting away responsibility for the text to follow. And of evaluation, are we to attach this word to I which precedes it or to the text which follows? If the former, does it reiterate the shedding of culpability?

The “ascetic practices enable them” is curious as it seems to personify and give credit to the practices of the buddhists as if they exist in the world apart from their practitioners. It is because of these things we call practices that it is buddhists who are enabled and not catholics or muslims. Though the term practices is vague here, we might reasonably take it to mean “certain practices,” so practices (SEM. buddhists) becomes attached via the “/,” in that special way, to those whom it enables (SEM. practices) … to see a whole landscape in a bean. * What must it be to see a whole landscape anywhere, as our vision must stop somewhere, peripherally left and right, and away from us at the horizon. So, is the whole landscape always a fragment of a greater landscape? Or are we to understand that all landscapes exist as fragments and that those fragments are in themselves whole? A landscape can only be seen whole “in a bean” and therefore the trick which is enabled by the practices is really not so special at all. And why “in a bean” and not in a glass marble or within the footprint or in a close-up photograph of a face. The bean is present and therefore means something (even if it means nothing [SEM. Zen]) and we shall refer to units in this symbolic area with SYM. The bean of course implies the seed which it both is and contains, being what it is and that from which it comes. It is its own birth, complete and whole, from the ground, the land and so, is complete as a picture of itself, a landscape. This growth from the self while being the self is the ultimate action. We shall refer to such actions with ACT and we shall number each of the terms which constitute it as they appear (ACT. in a bean: (1) what is seen; (2) the seed of itself; (3) the idea of itself…). Finally, it is not the buddhist whom we should find interesting, but the bean.¹

(3) Precisely what the first analysts of narrative were attempting: to see all the world’s stories. * Precisely is terribly imprecise, as the “first analysts” were not trying to see a landscape in a bean, but rather define the necessary and sufficient conditions for calling a story a story. So, “precisely” is ironic, quietly claiming that the subject text is above the pedestrian efforts of the “first analysts” (SEM. precision). What is implied by reference to the likeness in mission of the buddhists and the first analysts is that the buddhists are not in fact among the first analysts. Those bean-gazing, fat boys have no need for the establishment of narrative model because the model is already contained in the bean. Precisely — the buddhists do not look to the bean for a representative landscape, but for the landscape therein contained. Theirs is not to extract the essential quality which makes that thing what it is, but to see it completely, in which case attention to particular features might well destroy the achievement we have been told we should admire. Is our first analyst to be Aristotle and his concern with praxis and proairesis? Or shall we wonder about the prehistorics who must weigh the telling of two descriptions of events and decide which is true and which is fabrication, the assumption here being that telling the truth requires only remembering, while offering a fabrication requires a picture of what a telling of the truth might sound like. But maybe we are simply to choose the Russian formalists and leave it at that (SYM. analysts). And they are attempting (ACT. attempting) to undercover this model, the obvious implication being that they have failed. One never says of a man who has struck the motherlode, “He is attempting to find gold.” (SEM. attempt) … to see all the world’s stories * Embedded here is already the conclusion that there is this universal story (REF. story). The naming has done either the damage or the work and cannot be undone. The naming has created the thing itself and to then go look for that which makes it that thing is to fail to acknowledge that in the first place its existence must be verified; having been named not constituting the same as really being (REF. unicorn).

(4) … (and there have been ever so many) within a single structure: we shall, they thought, extract from each tale its model, then out of these models we shall make a great narrative structure, which we shall reapply (for verification) to any one narrative … * As if there have been stones of which it has been said, “Is this story?” and really meaning it, instead of meaning what a lousy story it in fact is. At best, the effort seems a response to the commercial picture of the publisher saying to the writer, “You call this a story?” But this digression takes the whole of the notion (though a fragment of the text) and falls outside the spirit of the analysis. so many (HER. many SEM. many) ** seems ironic, even contentious, seeming to laud the productivity of the makers of stories, yet offering the comment parenthetically, thus compartmentalizing the writers of stories without ever mentioning them. they thought (SEM, thought HER they REF. they) ** an obvious announcement of the failure to complete their mission. The rest tells us what they expect from the beans into which they stare, but “they thought” renders their beans blank. And so we come to dismantling of the endeavor as the endeavor of the text at hand, Sarrasine, not being chosen as a model at all, but accepted as one treated in a way which in turn is a model for the treatment of other texts, as is this text. A reiteration of the obvious is never wasted on the oblivious.

When I was done, there was a tentative smattering of applause and then a nerve-dulling silence while people tried to figure if they were offended and why. As I stepped back toward my seat a ball of keys flew past my head and hit the flocked wallpaper. I looked into the audience to find Davis Gimbel, the editor of a journal called Frigid Noir.

Gimbel shook his fist in the air and shouted, “You bastard!”

I could tell immediately that he hadn’t understood a word of what I had read; his reaction seemed inappropriate and extreme. But he was eager to appear as though comprehension had come quickly to him.

Linda Mallory was in the audience and we shared a look. She indicated with a nod that she thought my paper was all right and offered a single, quiet, continued applause. I picked up Gimbel’s keys and tossed them back to him.

“You will no doubt need these,” I said. These words too were taken as an insult and Gimbel, a man who fancied himself a kind of Hemingway, moved toward me as if to fight. He was restrained quickly by his entourage, a changing but constant stable of four young, aspiring writers who would evaporate and be replaced by the next crop.

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Gimbel,” I said. I could already tell that the session was going to be the talk of the meeting, that it was going to take on a life of its own and become the kind of thing these talentless puds thrived on. “Which part bothered you most?”

“You, you mimetic hack,” Gimbel spat at me.

“A mimetic hack,” I repeated his words. “Okay.” I glanced at the door and saw people already bolting for the outside, where they would offer their versions of the fight and say, “I was sitting right next to Gimbel when it all started” or “I couldn’t believe it when Ellison hurled the keys right back at him.” Anyway, I left the room, everyone giving me a wide berth, out of fear or reverence, I could not tell.

1. A pause here, as within the subject text, to make clear what has in fact already been offered, that being the five major codes under which all the textual signifiers can be categorized. They are, in no order of importance, but of appearance: The hermeneutic code comprises terms which imply, suggest, embody, contain, protract, disclose and/or solve enigma. Semes exist without connection to character, place or thing, and are listed to achieve some semblance of thematic congregation: We are instructed to allow them “the instability of dispersion, characteristic of motes of dust, flickers of meaning.” (In other words, free associative mumbo jumbo is not a bad way to install or jumpstart meaning or, more to the point, interest.) As well, there is to be no structuring of the symbolic grouping, but generous allowance for multivalence and reversibility. The opposite might well be the meaning of the text, since every positive carries with it some understanding of its negation. Actions (terms of the proairetic code) are merely listed, as any sequence of the terms is “never more than the result of an artifice of reading,” the reading accumulating a list of generic titles for those things done (sitting, dying, exploding, nodding off), such titles embodying sequences, the sequence existing because it is named, revealing itself in and by the very process of naming, the title is not the product of logical deduction or induction, and empirical only in the sense that the title is established for some reason (logic aside). Finally, and rather easily defined, the cultural codes are references to a system of knowledge or type of knowledge (medical, literary, historical …), indicating the body of knowledge without expression of the resident culture (REF. culture).