She sure asks for it.
Naive speakers indeed!
In fact.
In fact of language, a global social phenomenon.
A balloon half grabbed let it go.
Explode it.
Both liberating and catastrophic.
Well Renata gave us the clue.
She stuffed it with clues and so did Ali why don’t they get together in a clueful grip?
Shall we Renata?
I’m not competing with Saroja of the khol-framed eyes.
Saroja of the oriental adagia has left this class.
Oh you’re eliminating her too?
She has eliminated herself into a cloud of unknowing.
Ah, like Stavro.
No not like him at all he’s a transparent blue lacuna which is quite different. More like Armel, if it weren’t for that illiberal and catastrophic chapter in which you reinvented him as an ideal husband, articulate and crueltobekind, in order to dialogue lunatically with yourself.
What do you mean? That was real.
You hogged the paradismal dialogue my dear. Already Myra slipped him into the wrong rectangle as a black man last term at the flick of a sexual play and that had to be rectified. Tell me how did you spend you summer vacation?
Well, REALLY.
Textually speaking.
Sexually freaking so there.
Good good.
But Ali what do you have against the black people?
I am an Arab I have nothing at all against the black people Eliza.
BUT?
It didn’t fit, that’s all, The text must cohere. For Armel is not like that at all but tall and dislikes answering questions in black and white with a nominervating intelligence and an evasive mouth that wraps him up in the seductive parlour game of superstition disguised as mystery, which is an old illusion, but in which he nevertheless deep down believes.
That’s precisely why one has to reinvent him all the time. I mean that’s why Larissa had to.
The past tense doesn’t exist my love.
You’re going too fast I’m not your love yet
even now as we drive the discourse into the future merely glancing up at the retrovizor we watch the road ahead and sing like crazy touching each other’s thighs voglio far il gentil uomo for instance or la belle si tu voulais.
with the intuition of a naive speaker.
Shall we return to the subject of discourse?
Yes, what is it?
The text within the text.
Looks within books.
But Larissa? and our Larissa? Has she not carefully invented the person she has become, stereotyping her twenty-seven veils for a pontificating pirate who will not stay for an answer?
Till a motherless doorhandle crying order order pistol-shoots her into a swift earthquake that crumbles all the structures.
Well grammatically they’re the same agent you know, the doorhandle and the door, as when three brothers or robbers accomplish an identical action, only the modalities differing hence the confusion of brows at the start.
We’re going round in circles this isn’t a faculty meeting what shall we do, kill her off? Eliminate her to Lima or let her die in Rome?
Oh not Lima she wouldn’t have gone she obviously had no intention of going.
Let us not fall into the intentional fallacy.
But she must die in ROMA AMOR spelt backwards of course.
A heroine who literally dies of love.
Let us not fall into the affective fallacy.
No not of love she doesn’t love him she dies of the expanded timetable bulldozing into the remaining kidney hypertrophied you know to compensate for the removal of the other like dreams so it atrophies and
Oh yeah and I guess you want the intrusion of the bathetic fallacy to fill the gap with a deathoflittlenell scene Larissa attached to a kidney-machine that’s desperately trying to cleanse her blood of false semes as she talks to the ideal husband?
Or to the Other.
No the phallus-man should simply be fizzled out.
Well he is already.
Oh I don’t know it’s odd how one usually does bump into ex-lovers, you know, Albertine returned devoid of all but negative significance. Let’s have them meet though he would of course first fizzle himself out like she said, and that’s what would hurt, after all that pressure, that he’d be too cowardly even to honour her as a human being and tell her he’d switched off and met someone else, a student like she said who’d look exactly like his mother but a fresh fleshy young version and who’d hold him exactly where she wants.
How do you know what his mother looks like she’s extratextual.
Yes he’s a motherless doorhandle remember.
Oh well we could work her into the Calabrian sequence all Italians bring their women for the mamma to disapprove.
He’s not Italian he’s Albanian. Etruscan perhaps.
But an exile brought up in Italy with an Italian name.
Virgil was an Etruscan so was Julius Caesar.
Was it Calabria I thought we said France.
Yes and he would calmly bring her, the momma-sudent I mean, as his young bride to the semiotic castle the following summer, where she’d be recuperating Larissa I mean by invitation of the Count Professor whatshisname La Bocca from being at death’s door hanging by one thread about which he’d cared nothing having fizzled himself out the phallus-boyman I mean and we could have a hilarious comedy with the two women sneaking around the spiral staircases of the castle avoiding each other because he’d be too frightened to introduce them and La Bocca saying my dear lady he’s no gentleman coming here and Larissa bumping into him finally saying why are you behaving in this ridiculous manner. What ridiculous manner sheepish like and she’d say well all this cat and mouse game introduce me to your wife let’s behave like civilized human beings. Or maybe he could come up to her and say will you be my friend.
Oh my God Julia what mimesis are you working through nobody behaves like that.
And who cares if they do it’s a lost generation.
No well I agree it’s a bit too much but we should have the fall into language and the exploitation of the very clichés she feared.
Why? We’ve had plenty and rejected it.
But it somehow crept back into the text didn’t it? Everything exists even the discourse you do not choose.
Not the dimension of banality.
On the contrary, for that very reason will you let me finish for heaven’s sake it’s my turn
and the floor is flooring you
Oh shut up and they’d meet for a drink on the castle terrace and Larissa would say well tell me all how did you two meet closing the manuscript in which she’d been inventing the whole episode before she knew it would turn out that way that happens you know and the whole dialogue in advance and the girl would say well I’m studying comparadive lirrechure.
Why are you making her a Southern North American they met in Peru.
That’s true she’s a Latin mother type or maybe an Inca hook-nosed and fleshy round the jaws preparing several chins. Oh well anyway it would come out that she went to his class on I promessi sposi and they got all cosy over that and he was amazed she’d read it and she also knew The Knight in the Tigerskin translated of course through her course in Comparative Literature and he’d tell Larissa all about it how nobody reads that and how unique she is the mommagirlwife I mean we’d better give her a Spanish name Vittoria for instance forgetting that Larissa too
No thank you thou shalt not take my name in vain
Well anything it doesn’t matter they’re dropping out, going to Rhodesia to live the white man’s life and talking of how they’ll go on safaris and that, hunting the tiger
They don’t have tigers in Africa
They do
They don’t
And talking of drop-outs what about the Hungarian girl Marika we’ve forgotten her.
Oh well he’d already dropped her for Larissa she’s a loose end we can’t pick them all up. Or we could have her escaping to freedom under his pressure, he’d have started writing to her again after leaving Larissa in Rome and before meeting his wife, then again not telling her he’d married and she’d be writing desperate letters from a refugee camp in Austria and his new wife would be full of motherly understanding about his previous affairs including Larissa and say we must help her Marika I mean I have a friend in Sweden or something and he’d be so grateful.