(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).