‘Ontological proof,’ Bob shouted mysteriously in his sleep — a concept he wouldn’t even know the meaning of if he was awake.
Terri grimaced and replaced her sunglasses and pulled on a black beret so that now she looked like a deranged governess engaged in guerrilla warfare. A Weathergirl.
‘Let’s do it,’ she said, and we slipped out into the shock of a morning that crackled with cold so that every time we spoke our breath came out in cold white clouds like the speech bubbles in the Beano. We trudged up Paton’s Lane and as we turned onto the Perth Road, the invisible, ever-watchful pair of eyes monitored our progress.
‘Maybe it’s the eye of God,’ Terri said. I was sure God, if he existed at all, which was highly unlikely, would have better things to do with his time than watch me.
‘Maybe he doesn’t,’ Terri said. ‘Maybe he’s like a really . . . trivial guy. Who knows?’ Who indeed.
The Art of Structuralist Criticism
‘BLAH, BLAH, BLAH,’ ARCHIE SAID. (OR SOMETHING LIKE that.) Ten minutes after eleven in Archie McCue’s room on the third floor of the extension to Robert Matthews’ soaring sixties’ Tower — the Queen’s Tower, although no queen was ever likely to live in it. The gloomy atmosphere was made gloomier by the absence of electricity. A candle, stuck in an empty Blue Nun bottle, burned at the window like a signal. The university was still managing to run its heating although no-one knew how — perhaps they were burning books, or (more likely) students. The room was hot and airless and I had to peel off my layers of reject golfing sweaters, one by one.
Archie was talking. Nothing will stop Archie talking, not even death probably, he will rumble on from the inside of his large coffin until the worms get fed up with the noise and eat his tongue —
‘When words no longer strive for mimesis they become dislocated and disconnected. They illustrate in themselves the exhaustion of forms. Writers who eschew mimesis, looking for new ways of approaching the fiction construct, are disruptivist — challenging what Robbe-Grillet refers to as the “intelligibility of the world”.’ Archie paused. ‘What do you think of that statement? Anyone?’ No-one answered. No-one ever had any idea what Archie was talking about.
Archie’s blimpish body strained to escape from his dark green polyester shirt, a shirt stained at the armpits with large damp triangles of sweat. He was also attired in brown trousers and a tan-coloured knitted tie that sported a different quality of stain — dried boiled egg-yolk, or custard.
He spun round in his tweedy, executive chair, so much more comfortable than the chairs assigned to his tutees — the little faux wood tables attached to our chairs seemed to be specifically designed to restrain us, like a cross between a baby’s high chair and an asylum straitjacket. The chairs were made from some artificial material — a hard grey plastic substance that the university seemed over fond of. It was only possible to be even remotely comfortable in these chairs for a maximum of ten minutes. An unfettered Archie, on the other hand, was free to birl and twirl around like a fairground ride on his Easy-glide castors.
‘The act of writing itself comes to occupy the centre of the stage as the author is no longer concerned to invoke some a priori meaning or truth. Jacques Derrida reinforces the point . . .’
Archie McCue was an argumentative Marxist who claimed to be the progeny of a Glaswegian shipbuilder, although, in fact, he had been brought up by his widowed mother who owned a sweetshop in Largs. This long-suffering woman was now ‘dottled’ according to Archie and had therefore recently been transported across the river to Newport-on-Tay and an old people’s home called The Anchorage with a ‘view of the water’.
‘Valéry claims that literature is, and can be nothing else than, a kind of extension and application of certain properties of language . . .’
Archie lived in a big house in Windsor Place with Philippa, his bossy English wife. I knew that because I was the most recent in a long line of McCue babysitters — Philippa and Archie, both nearing fifty now, had been breeding, at spaced-out intervals, since the end of the war. They had four grown-and-gone offspring — Crispin (‘Cambridge’), Orsino (‘Oxford’), Freya (‘year out in France’) and their eldest son, the mysterious Ferdinand (‘Saughton Prison, unfortunately’). Only one child, nine-year-old Maisie (‘a mistake’), was now left at home.
‘. . . and in its multiplicity and plurality it cries out for a new hermeneutics . . .’
We were a shrinking tutorial group. At the moment there were four of us — myself, Terri, Andrea and Olivia. Andrea was a grammar-school girl from the middle echelons of North Yorkshire society. Today, reeking of patchouli, she was wearing a flouncy, flowery dress, all buttons and bows and intricate bodice seaming, that looked as if it had been made for an amateur dramatic production of Oklahoma!
Andrea had recently converted from the Church of Scotland to paganism and was studying to be a witch. To this end she had apprenticed herself to a warlock in Forfar. Few things were more worrying than the idea of Andrea with magic powers. Not that I have anything against witches, per se, of course — I am only too aware that my own mother is a wizardess of some kind — or wizardina, or wizardelle, for there appears to be no feminine form for the word. Perhaps I can just start making words up. Why not? How else do words come into being?
Andrea said that she wanted to be a famous writer and accordingly had done an evening shorthand-and-typing course run by a man in Union Street who turned out to be more interested in his female students’ sweatered chests than he was in their Pitman short forms. So far, all Andrea had written were flimsy stories about a girl called Anthea who came from Northallerton and was studying English literature at university. Andrea’s most interesting story to date was about a strange sexual encounter her alter ego Anthea had with a teacher at secretarial college. I thought that The Adventures of Anthea would be a good title for an English pornographic film — the kind that involves a lot of window cleaners and innuendo but not much actual sex.
Anthea was always having poignant moments sparked off by mundane experiences — going to lectures, finding spiders, buying A4 narrow-ruled with margins. Personally I think that reading the details of other people’s domesticity is almost as tiresome as listening to them recount their dreams — and then the fork-lift truck turned into a giant red squirrel that crushed my father’s head like a nut — fascinating to the dreamer, but tiresome for the indifferent listener.
Archie himself, of course, was famously writing a novel — an experimental and epic tome that had now reached seven hundred pages. It was, reportedly (for no-one had actually seen it), an Angst — ridden, labyrinthine fiction about the metaphysical Sturm und Drang of the self called The Expanding Prism of J.
‘. . . a technique which might be considered emblematic of the essential arbitrariness of all linguistic signifiers . . .’
Olivia politely stifled a yawn. A fair, willowy girl, Olivia was a doctor’s daughter from Edinburgh, a St George’s girl and a clever, methodical student, the kind who write up their notes every night, underlining everything in three different-coloured inks. Olivia was clearly a student who belonged at St Andrews or Warwick, or even East Anglia, rather than Dundee but she’d had ‘some kind of a breakdown’ during her A-Levels and had ended up with Es instead of As.