“All acts are acts of aggression, we know that,” the professor said. “The point is to give them other properties.”
The wallflower sat reading in the Paris restaurant. There used to be so many categories of wallflower: the anxious, smiling, tense ones who leaned forward, trying; the important, busy, apparently elsewhere preoccupied ones, who were nonetheless waiting, waiting in the carpeted offices of their inattention, to be found. There were wallflowers who clustered noisily together, and others who worked a territory, resolute and alone. And then, there were wallflowers who had recognized for years that the thing was hopeless, who had found in that information a kind of calm. They no longer tried, with a bright and desperate effort, to sustain a conversation with somebody’s brother, somebody’s usher, somebody’s roommate, somebody’s roommate’s usher’s brother, or, worst of all, with that male wallflower who ought — by God who ought — to be an ally, who could, in dignity and the common interest, join forces to make it through an evening, but who, after all, had higher aspirations, and neither the sense nor the courtesy to conceal it, who, in short, scorned the partner fate and the placement had dealt him, worst of all. The category of wallflower who had given up on all this was very quiet, not indifferent, only quiet. And she always brought a book.
The wallflower, then, was reading in her neighborhood Paris restaurant. The regular customers sat at their accustomed tables. It was nine-thirty on a busy night. She had finished her meal and ordered coffee. The light in the restaurant was pleasant. She read on. A tall, blond, shaggy man had been coming to the restaurant almost every evening of the autumn. He always sat at a small table near hers and ordered a single cup of coffee. He sat, with that single cup of coffee, most nights from nine until the restaurant closed. He was there, as usual, this evening. Her coffee did not come. She read. Her awareness of the shaggy man was, as it was of the restaurant in general, peripheral. In addition to his coffee, he had ordered brandy. He seemed altogether somehow less poor. Suddenly, though quietly, he offered her a cigarette. She upset her wineglass. “Ça vous scandalise?” he said.
“She feels she doesn’t want to anchor the hat.”
“I’m not talking about now. Now is different.”
“Whatever it is they want from him is not what is there.”
The freshmen, who had been at the top of their classes through high school, got C’s on their first college midterms, and felt the world tilt. Within months, they had caught on to serious study, had learned to set forth information, with that last, original fillip of the expert mind. In default of the fillip, when invention failed them, they used the fail-safe method for undergraduate work at any solid institution: take two utterly unrelated things or matters and show that they are, if not in fact identical, actually related in the most profound and subtle sense. A paper of this sort would demonstrate, not only the highest tradition of the scholar, but also the signature of the alert undergraduate, her mark. For lectures, the intense, off-the-beat academic flirtation: the animated face, the gaze at the instructor, the lowered eyes when that look was returned; the secret smile at anything that could remotely be construed as felicitous or comic; the hastily scribbled work in notebooks, not when points were being made in order or by number, but at some demonstrably arbitrary moment, when the instructor had not realized that his lecture had reached such a highly interesting point. The crude strategies of the years preceding college, the raised hand, the eager question, were despised, and rightly. “Tell Thorne to shut up,” on a scrap with a fragment of a doodle, was passed, in complete consensus, all the way across the room to Bronx Science graduate Thorne. Having refined her display of rapt attention to changes rung on silence, Thorne went on to marry a tycoon and run a clinic for unmanageably disturbed children. The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.
“So for these purposes, digitalis, adamantine, apple orchard, gonorrhea, labyrinthine, motherfucker, flights of fancy, Duffy’s Tavern, Halley’s Comet, birthday present, xenophobic are all synonyms,” the great professor said. “Synonyms, in terms of meter, that is.”
“I see.”
“And words that rhyme,” he said, “are synonyms, in terms of rhyme, with all the words they rhyme with. Cat, gnat, flat. Fang, sang, sprang, you see.”
“Yes.”
“So that in the study of poetics, we have. Rhyme synonyms. And meter synonyms. I leave aside pure synonyms of meaning. There are not really very many. And there are other factors, of course.”
“Of course.”
“In tests of free word association, we find that some people respond in ways that reflect what we might call the cast of mind of synonyms. You might say trap. They say snare. You say dog. They say cat. More or less equivalences, don’t you see.
“Other people have what we call the turn of mind of context. You say trap. They say door. You say cat. They say hairs. Contextual associations. Can you give me another rhyme synonym for flat, Miss Miller?”
“Sprat.”
“Yes. And another meter synonym for apple orchard, Mr. Elkin?”
“Vigilante.”
“And a free word association, in the line of synonyms, to church, Miss Wheelock?”
“Temple.”
“And a context response to church, Mr. Cook?”
“Apse.”
“Exactly. Fine. You will see at once that every choice in language is determined, on every plane, rhyme, meter, meaning, other planes, by a factor of synonymy. And one of contexture. If you do not see it, I refer you to your Jakobson and Halle.
“At first, we thought the distinction of no practical importance. Then, we found that, in cases of severe speech disorder, the absolute extremes turn out, in fact, to be, at one end, cases of pure synonymy, and at the other, pure cases of context. In disorders of synonymy, the same word is repeated, endlessly. Repetition. At the extreme of context, we have words rambling, with no apparent coherence. What we have come to call a word heap.”
“A word heap.”
“Yes.
“Now, if we turn from poetics to other fields — anthropology for instance — we find surprising applications. I draw your attention to the Haida, a tribe of Indians in the Northwest. The normal process of elimination seemed to them a sad thing; when they encountered droppings or dung in the fields or forests, they said a little prayer of condolence to the animal they thought it lost to. The first brave of the tribe, in the first times, was courting one of two sisters. The other sister was jealous and forlorn. On the path to the sisters’ home, this brave one day noticed a pile of excrement which, in the course of his many journeys, had grown nearly to his own size. He asked it, as it were, to pull itself together and marry the other sister. It did so. From the marriages of the two sisters, the tribe descends.”
“Really.”
“Now, what we have here might be considered a disorder of synonym in the name of context. Marriage, usually, is a matter of synonymy, equation. Husband, wife. Boy, girl. In some cases, brother, sister. But here we have a marriage of a person with an object with which that person is, as it were, only contextually associated. There are other considerations, of course. But wherever we look — poetics, psychology, anthropology, linguistics — the two ideas, synonymy and contexture, are among the key structures and processes of the mind.”