Joss and Sally

"And then, so true is it that one thing leads to another and that you can try a good man just so high, he suddenly found that she was in his arms. After that, he hardly knew what he was doing. Chibnall, however, could have told him. Chibnall, with his intimate knowledge of the Nosegay Novelette series, would have recognized the procedure immediately. He was clasping Sally to his bosom and showering burning kisses on her upturned face." -- P.G. Wodehouse, in Quick Service

Chibnall, in this scene, is a butler, and he loves novelettes; his fiancee, Miss Pym, is a barmaid who loves detective stories. The beginning of the passage that I have quoted is distinctively Wodehouse (the twinned bits of cant in the first sentence; the subtle ordering of the scene in calling what's happening "the procedure"). The very end is an example of something that pops up in Wodehouse a lot, distinctively his by distinctively not belonging to him: just as later, with a lot of gangster talk, he will weave in bits of Miss Pym's detective stories, we are getting a little undigested prose from one of the Nosegay Novelettes. We have already figured out, probably by the second sentence, what the he is doing to the her; and it is a fun and funny little reward when the romance novel's language arrives so exactly. Joss (the he) is kissing Sally (the her): that's the plot, and all of the fun in the sentence is the running from the Wodehouse to the Nosegay register.

"You need kissing badly. That's what's wrong with you. You should be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how" -- Rhett Butler
"For 'kissed', substitute the word you're thinking of." -- Roger Ebert

Wodehouse can move with ease between these two registers because politeness and lust had teamed up, over a few hundred years, to make sure that writing about kissing was often carried out in a fairly regimented way. The kisses are often hot, or accompanied by hot tears, and are often showered or otherwise discretely dispensed. My favorite part of the passage from Wodehouse is that they are all falling on Sally Fairmile's upturned face. Upturned face is the best, the most clearly romance-literary chunk of the passage. It perfectly and asexually reminds us about these two bodies, angled toward each other, Joss showering burning kisses on Sally, in the most rewarding position that they can be, in chaste Wodehouse or in chaste Nosegay novelettes.

"Moreover, the kiss, one particular contact of this kind, between the mucous membrane of the lips of the two people concerned, is held in high sexual esteem among many nations (including the most highly civilized ones) in spite of the fact that the parts of the body involved do not form part of the sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract." -- Sigmund Freud, from "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality"

Shortly after the procedure described above, Joss and Sally are interrupted by Sally's fiance, Lord Holbeton, who says, "I say!" (Wodehouse describes this as not quite the thing that Othello would've said). Shortly after that, Joss begins applying mascara to his face, as a mustache, and writing on the mirror of the room (his employer's) with lipstick. I don't know why he does this; it's not quite gone into. However, it coming right on the heels of the kissing put me in mind of the marvelous above sentence, from Freud, his fascinating bewilderment at the act of kissing, which seems just as ungovernable, as unliterary and unchaste and just plain unusual, as the mascara mustache or the lipstick writing. Freud gets a bad knock, I think, for being obsessed with sex, or with attributing too much to various sex drives or such. Instead, I think that what Freud insists upon is the deep weirdness of every single in the world. Everything is filtered through sex drives for Freud because sex drives are weird, and so is everything else: form, digestive tracts, kisses.

Yes. Isn't It Nice to Think So?

I'm reading a (ahem) rather scholarly book about Nabokov's fake scholium on a fake poem Pale Fire, which is called Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. It is by the apparently very well regarded (and why shouldn't he be?) Brian Boyd, and apparently it caused something of a scandal when it was unleashed upon the world, as in it, Boyd renounces his position as a leader of the Shadeans (people who think that John Shade, the fake person who in the novel Pale Fire is credited with writing the poem, actually invented Charles Kinbote, the fake person who writes a misguided commentary about the poem) and returns to the position that KInbote and Shade each wrote the sections that the text says they wrote. Everything is what it is and not another thing. However, Boyd goes onto say that both Kinbote and Shade are influenced by the ghost of Hazel Shade, and that, post-his-own-mortem, Shade joins his daughter in suggesting things to Kinbote that make the most compelling parts of his commentary compelling. Boyd does a lot of work to tease out hidden connections: Kinbote's grandfather's mistress, Iris Acht, is one of Hazel's avatars because her name is an eye-part, and because Hazel's name is a color that refers almost exclusively to that eye-part.

Frankly, I don't have any idea what to make of any of this. It is difficult enough to talk about Pale Fire to anyone who hasn't read it (really: try explaining it to your mother and see if you make it past "999 line poem in heroic couplets), and it's difficult enough to talk to anyone who has read it without just enjoying yourself in the comic and tragic luxuriances of its prose. I honestly can't figure out how the idea that dead Hazel has, like Sibyl Vane, started communicating through Nabokov's words unbeknownst to anybody would affect the way I feel about the novel. It's a weird lack of involvement after reading nearly three hundred pages about a novel I love. I've written on here before about the quondam king of Zembla, namely to write about how, while watching Mad Men one night, I realized that I don't know what he looks like. Knowing me, I probably came to the conclusion that it was best to just keep him vague. Is it good to keep oneself in the dark (shaded) about whether or not a prominent character in a book is, as a ghost, dictating the thematic of the book?

Earlier, when I said that everything is what it is and not another thing, I thought I was quoting Bishop Berkeley, the idealist British philosopher. Wrong! It turns out that I was quoting a different bishop, Bishop Joseph Butler. I now know exactly two things about Bishop Butler, which is one, that he said that, and two, that he shares his name with a musician from the Lovin' Spoonful. And while I'm onto them: I was positive that one) there was some kind of major connection (like, shared members) between the Lovin' Spoonful and Herman's Hermits, and two) that at least one, and possibly both, of these bands featured one of the four guys who would go on to be Crosby Stills Nash and Young. I don't have any fucking idea why, as of fifteen minutes ago, I thought all of that. It will be very difficult to get around to not thinking it. But now I know it's wrong.

Do you remember that move Socrates was always doing? Socrates had this move where he'd ask forty questions, and eventually someone would say that a bold man is better than a just man, but that justice was better than boldness, and then Socrates would say, "Oh, no, Hippomarchus or whomever, we've gotten ourselves into a scrape!" and then Hippomarchus or whomever would make hesitant noises, and probably go home. That's Socrates for you: the bulldog of the law of the excluded middle. I always feel bad for all of those Hippomarchus and whomsever. Excluding the middle is alright for gadflies and saints but seems like a terrible place to eat. Tomorrow I am going to consider the evidence about Hazel Shade and not change how I feel about Pale Fire. Also, if I think about the Lovin' Spoonful, I will also think about Herman's Hermits and about at least Graham Nash. I'll believe in anything. Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe.

With Me, It's All or Nothing

I'm reading a book by Brian Rotman called Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, and one of the things he talks about is the Greco-Christian opposition to the idea of nothing: it was a scandalous idea, a terrifying idea, an idea that attacked everything that made sense, it was intolerable. And that's just what it was to the Greeks. To the Christians, it was even worse, because it seemed situated, in every important scale, across the table completely from the Godhead, which was a plenum: a site of fullness. Zero and nothingness, especially to, say, Saint Augustine, are the ultimate privation, the most complete sense of difference from God, whose majesty lies entirely in His completedness: hence Augustine's conception of the God before time, outside of time, et cetera.

Naturally, those of us who have to wake up in the morning don't exist in any plenums, or even near any. Do you all remember the episode of Futurama called The Why of Fry? No? Well, in that episode, a bunch of sentient cerebrums (cerebra?) called the Brainspawn decide that they are damned close to an epistemological plenum -- that they, as a race of sentient brains, have come to know everything -- and that they ought to destroy the universe in order to close the set of potentially knowable things, so that they will not have to come to know anything else. The knowable but unknown foreclosed, fullness achieved. Luckily -- luckily! -- the plan of the Brainspawn is foiled by Futurama's protagonist, delivery boy Philip J. Fry, in a series of events that you should all familiarize yourselves with by watching this and every other episode of Futurama. But the plan of the Brainspawn is an interesting, if high-concept, rejoinder to the horror vacuii that Augustine responded to with his exaltation of the plenum. It's one thing to think of the fullness of God as something a spiritual analogue to pre-Oedipal life in Freud, or to any other condition of pristineness (each pray'r accepted and each wish resign'd), but the thing about the fullness is that the fullness is DONE.

The quotidian ballast to this high thought balloon came about in my life today when, bored at work, I made a list of books that I will soon be able to X off of my list of Books Bought and Unread, among them Brian Rotman's Signifying Nothing. There's a way in which the entities that make up that list could be fulfilled, obviously, which is that I could actually finish reading all of those damn books and eventually my library would be a wall of accomplishments (such as they are) rather than aspirations (ditto). It is more likely that the constitution of my Books Bought and Unread will never really achieve a plenum, that they will be less like the Labors of Heracles (check, check, check) and more like the people of the Earth, interred and replenished as need and desire strike. The list -- refillable until the Big Crunch or not -- is itself a weird space where it's unclear to me what sides fullness and nothingness take. Finishing each book, moving it off of my current truncated bookshelf and onto the now three (progress!) piles of Books Read, next to the fan and behind my box of sweaters -- should that represent an increase in fullness (Now my Read Books are fuller) or in the nothing (the list, after all, is getting smaller)?

There's an allure to the middle state of incompleteness, the participation in a going concern. It's like people who don't want to have watched every episode of a television show they like, because then there's nothing left to watch. I did a similar thing, or at least committed to a similar thing, when I was sixteen and fell in love with Slaughterhouse-Five, and vowed that I would never read the entire Vonnegut oeuvre, lest there be no oeuvre left. But I fucked up, and had read all of the available Vonnegut before I was twenty. So it goes. Of course, the books I might read is crucially different from the books that Kurt Vonnegut wrote, in that one is practically inexhaustible and the other one I exhausted. But the feeling, the sliding from incompleteness to fullness to nothing, is there when I watch the list contract and expand. Make a list, feel the presence of the plenum, and then, even faintly, nothing.