Yet within this strictly selfish ethical matrix, he was able to display enough lineaments both of reason and bravery to satisfy those above him in rank and those below—till, from time to time, especially in the face of rank cowardice (which he always tried to construe—and usually succeeded—as rank stupidity) in others, he could convince himself there might be something to the whole idea. ‘Might’—for survival’s sake he never allowed it to go any further.
He survived.
But such survival was a lonely business. After six months, out of loneliness, he hired a scribe to help him with some of the newer writing methods that had recently come to the land and composed a long letter to the Vizerine: inelegant, rambling, uncomfortable with its own discourse, wisely it touched neither on his affection for her nor his debt to her, but rather turned about what he had learned, had seen, had felt: the oddly depressed atmosphere of the marketplace in the town they had passed through the day before; the hectic nature of the smuggling in that small port where, for two weeks now, they had been garrisoned; the anxious gossip of the soldiers and prostitutes about the proposed public building scheduled to replace a section of slumlike huts in a city to the north; the brazen look to the sky from a southern mountain path that he and his men had wandered on for two hours in the evening before stopping to camp.
At the High Court the Vizerine read his letter—several times, and with a fondness that, now all pretence at the erotic was gone, grew, rather than diminished, in directions it would have been hard for grosser souls to follow, much less appreciate. His letter contained this paragraph:
‘Rumors came down among the lieutenants last week that all the garrisons hereabout were to go south for the Garth in a month. I drank beer with the Major, diced him for his bone-handled knives and won. Two garrisons were to go to the Able-aini, in the swamps west of the Falthas—a thankless position, putting down small squabbles for ungrateful lords, he assured me, more dangerous and less interesting than the south. I gave him back his knives. He scratched his gray beard in which one or two rough, rusty hairs still twist, and gave me his promise of the swamp post, thinking me mad.’
The Vizerine read it, at dawn, standing by the barred windows (dripping with light rain as they had dripped on the morning of her last interview with Gorgik, half a year before), remembered him, looked back toward her desk where once a bronze astrolabe had lain among the parchments. A lamp flame wavered, threatened to go out, and steadied. She smiled.
Toward the end of Gorgik’s three years (the occasional, unmistakably royal messenger who would come to his tent to deliver Myrgot’s brief and very formal acknowledgements did not hurt his reputation among his troops), when his garrison was moving back and forth at bi-weekly intervals from the desert skirmishes near the Venarra Canyon to the comparatively calm hold of fabled Ellamon high in the Faltha range (where, like all tourists, Gorgik and his men went out to observe, from the white lime slopes, across the crags to the far corrals, the fabled, flying beasts that scarred the evening with their exercises), he discovered that some of his men had been smuggling purses of salt from the desert to the mountains. He made no great issue of it; but he called in the man whom he suspected to be second in charge of the smuggling operation and told him he wished a share—a modest share—of the profits. With that share, many miles to the south, he purchased three extra carts, and four extra oxen to pull them; and with a daring that astonished his men (for the empress’s customs inspectors were neither easy nor forgiving) on his last trek, a week before his discharge, he brought three whole cartfuls of contraband salt, which he got through by turning off the main road, whereupon they were shortly met by what was obviously a ragged, private guard at the edge of private lands.
‘Common soldiers may not trespass on the Hold of the Princess Elyne—!’
‘Conduct me to her Highness!’ Gorgik announced, holding his hand up to halt his men.
After dark, he returned to them (with a memory of high fires in the dank, roofless hall; and the happy princess with her heavy, jeweled robes and her hair greasy and her fingers thin and grubbier than his own, taking his hard, cracked hands in hers and saying: ‘Oh, but you see what I’ve come home to? A bunch of hereditary heathens who think I am a goddess, and cannot make proper conversation for five minutes! No, no, tell me again of the Vizerine’s last letter. I don’t care if you’ve told me twice before. Tell me again, for it’s been over a year since I’ve heard anything at all from Court. And I long for their company; I long for it. All my stay there taught me was to be dissatisfied with this ancient, moldy pile. No, sit there, on that bench, and I will sit beside you and have them bring us more bread and cider and meat. And you shall simply tell me again, friend Gorgik …’) with leave for his men and his carts to pass through her lands; and thus he avoided the inspectors.
A month after he left the army, some friendlier men of an intricately tattooed and scarred desert tribe gave him some exquisitely worked copper vases. Provincial burghers in the Argini bought them from him for a price five times what he recalled, from his youth in the port, such work was worth in civilized cities. From the mountain women of Ka’hesh (well below Ellamon) he purchased a load of the brown berry leaves that, when smoked, put one in a state more relaxed than beer—he was now almost a year beyond his release from the army—and transported it all the way to the Port of Sarness, where, in small quantities, he sold it to sailors on outgoing merchant ships. While he was there, a man whom he had paid to help him told him of a warehouse whose back window was loose in which were stored great numbers of … But we could fill pages; let us compress both time and the word.
The basic education of Gorgik had been laid. All that followed—the months he reentered a private service as a mercenary officer again, then as a gamekeeper to a provincial count, then as paid slave-overseer to the same count’s treecutters, then as bargeman on the river that ran through that count’s land, again as a smuggler in Vinelet, the port at the estuary of that river, then as a mercenary again, then as a private caravan guard—all of these merely developed motifs we have already sounded. Gorgik, at thirty-six, was tall and great-muscled, with rough, thinning hair and a face (with its great scar) that looked no more than half a dozen years older than it had at twenty-one, a man comfortable with horse and sword, at home with slaves, thieves, soldiers, prostitutes, merchants, counts, and princesses; a man who was—in his way and for his epoch—the optimum product of his civilization. The slave mine, the Court, the army, the great ports and mountain holds, desert, field, and forest: each of his civilization’s institutions had contributed to creating this scar-faced giant, who wore thick furs in cold weather and in the heat went naked (save for a layered disk of metal, with arcane etchings and cutouts upon it—an astrolabe—chained around his veined and heavy neck, whatever the month), an easy man in company yet able to hold his silence. Often, at dawn in the mountains or in evenings on the desert, he wondered what terribly important aspects there were to his civilization in excess of a proper ability, at the proper time, to tell the proper tale. But for the civilization in which he lived, this dark giant, soldier, and adventurer, with desires we’ve not yet named and dreams we’ve hardly mentioned, who could speak equally of and to barbarian tavern maids and High Court ladies, flogged slaves lost in the cities and provincial nobles at ease on their country estates, he was a civilized man.
—New York
October 1976
Appendix: Closures and Openings
It is easy to see why Pasolini’s arguments could have been so easily dismissed. He himself, only half jokingly, asked: ‘What horrible sins are crouching in my philosophy?’ and named the ‘monstrous’ juxtaposition of irrationalism and pragmatism, religion and action, and other ‘fascist’ aspects of our civilization … Let me suggest, however, that an unconventional, less literal or narrow reading of Pasolini’s pronouncements (for such they undoubtedly were), one that would accept his provocations and work on the contradictions of his ‘heretical empiricism,’ could b
e helpful in resisting, if not countering, the more subtle seduction of a logico-semiotic humanism
—TERESA DE LAURETIS
Alice Doesn’t—Feminism,Semiotics, Cinema
1. Compositional elegance would certainly have us place here K. Leslie Steiner’s translation of the c. 900 word Culhar’ Fragment (also known as the Missolonghi Codex), that most ancient of ancient texts on which the stories in this series are all, in part or in whole, based—as well, perhaps, as include select samples of her three hundred pages of commentary, which make the various essays in which those comments first appeared and finally the book in which, in 1977, those essays were collected a work of genius and her own. (It was in their separate journal appearances, between 1972 and 1976, that they first excited us to fiction.) Professor Steiner was willing. But anguished over—and afflicted with a sadly inflated notion of—Nevèrÿon’s commercial possibilities, her university publisher would not grant reprint rights for any affordable fee. Because the correspondence reached such heat, we have been advised for legal reason not even to mention the book’s title! I can only exhort readers to go, find, and lovingly peruse that wonder-filled volume. All I can offer in the stead of that absent text is these work-notes, marginal comments, and reminiscences.
2. I had every intention of making ‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals’ a farewell to my nearly ten-year sojourn in Nevèrÿon. The serial form, however, admits to certain speculations, elaborations, exfoliations. What origins, then, can we construct?
3. From the time I became aware that the Nevèrÿon tales would become a series—from the time I became aware of a certain dissatisfaction with the idea that a sequence of encounters with a set of socially central institutions was constitutive of the ‘civilized’ subject (‘The Tale of Gorgik’) and turned back to critique that notion with the idea that a sequence of far more subjective encounters with some far more marginal institutions could be equally constitutive (‘The Tale of Old Venn’)—I more or less thought of these stories as a Child’s Garden of Semiotics.
The five stories of volume one (Tales of Nevèrÿon) struggle through the classical notion of the sign (stoically divided into a signifier and signified), positted by the pre-Socratic Greeks and persistent up through Saussure and Pierce, and the conservative notion of social relations that this ‘classical’ sign stabilizes. Under such a program, semiotics becomes the study of the way in which signs are organized.
The sixth tale, the novel that fills most of the second volume (Neveryóna, or: The Tale of Signs and Cities), struggles toward a somewhat richer view of the sign, shattering it into sign consumption/transformation/production (or semiosis—more usually defined as ‘sign interpretation’), sign function, and sign vehicle—the schema that distinguishes Umberto Eco’s semiotics as he adumbrated it in Opera Aperta (Milano: Bompiani, 1962) and the early essays in The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), expressed it in A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), and (subsequently) critiqued it from a historical perspective in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). This is certainly the most impressive account of semiosis that allows sign systems to evolve, generate new signs, critique themselves, and generally to change. In such a view, semiotics becomes the study of the way in which signs are generated.
In the third and fourth volumes (Flight from Nevèrÿon, as well as in this, I hope, final book), the tales move away from semiotics to a more general semiology, as Roland Barthes described it in his ‘Inaugural Lecture’ for the Chair of Literary Semiology at the College de France, January 7, 1977: for Barthes, semiology was ‘the labor that collects the impurities of language, the wastes of linguistics, the immediate corruption of any message: nothing less than the desires, fears, expressions, intimidations, advances, blandishments, protests, excuses, aggressions, and melodies of which active language is made.’ This idea of semiology as the excess, the leftover, the supplement of linguistics brings us round to Jacques Derrida’s logic of the supplement, without which semiology and, indeed, poststructuralism in general would be hugely impoverished.
Language in its classical model begins as the grunt spilling out alongside gesture, the excess of indication, the supplement to ostension, the verbal signifier denoting reference. But eventually the grunt, the excess, the supplement recomplicates into meaning, a system so rich it reverses the hierarchy at precisely the point the grunt becomes a spillage, an excess, a supplement to emotion, need, desire (i.e., becomes itself a gesture indicating something otherwise unseeable, that is: at the first infant’s cry). In its recomplication it becomes a system able to create and to control meaning on its own, developing in the process its own spillage, excess, supplement—writing—which begins to recomplicate all over again, again upsetting the power hierarchy, contouring it not to its former value but toward a new one. Through its richnesses, meaning has become power …
4. In the traditional paraliterary story/novel series, each new tale critiques the tale (or tales) before it. Is it belaboring the obvious to point out that, in the Nevèrÿon series, earlier tales (e.g., ‘The Tale of Old Venn’ and Neveryóna) dramatically critique later ones (e.g., ‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals’) as well …?
I had every intention of making ‘The Game of Time and Pain’ a farewell to my sojourn in Nevèrÿon … But why must all assertions such as this end, from now on, with a pause?
5. The Nevèrÿon series takes place at the edge of the shadow of the late French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, from the slaves who have vacated the collars in the first pages of the first tale (gone to what manumissions, executions, or other collars, the child Gorgik never knows, though the rest of his life can be looked at as an attempt to find out) to the series of vanished authorities and their empty citadels, such as Lord Aldamir and his castle: the Dead father, the Absent father, the Name of the Law.
At the same time, I have tried to keep a sharp vigil against the muddling results of an essentialist sexuality. As the late Michel Foucault warned us so pointedly in a lecture at Stanford a few years back: ‘We must get rid of the Freudian schema … the schema of the interiorization of the law through the medium of sex.’ Deeply I feel that in our current social system, almost all claims of such an interiorization are, today, signs of potential terrorism, wherever they are made, even by groups as seemingly diverse as orthodox and radical psychiatry or the Moral Majority or feminist critics against pornography.
The material power of the present father is the material power of any coercive aggressive individual, male or female, armed or unarmed. But it is only the power to coerce in excess of immediate bodily force—the power of the ‘absent father’—that constitutes authority in our patriarchal culture as a day-to-day social reality. And it is our habitual insistence on reading all such absent-but-functioning authority as male (even when, as in the case of the ‘absent father,’ gender is, indeed, materially absent) and at work, usually, on a feminine ground of ‘the natural’ (e.g., where ‘the natural’ is a fragment of effective social functioning that is seen as somehow ‘normal’ [instead of tediously learned and internalized], ‘a-historical’ [instead of insistently socially constituted], or a product of ‘the better side of human nature’ [instead of the intersection of a series of repressions], and thus essentially feminine [instead of masculine, as it would be cognized were it seen as a product of these now bracketed modes]) that stabilizes the socio-economic realities of patriarchal society. Social power-relations, from the way embarking passengers wait at a subway-car door for the former passengers to leave the train, to the way a prisoner receives a sentence of incarceration or death from a judge, are very much a language. They involve understood meanings, always more or less accepted, always more or less challenged, always in excess of bodily coercion—in excess of striking body and rebounding body, i.e. of classical mechanics—that contour appropriate or inappropriate behavior. But as long as power, whether it goes with or against the law, is name
d male, the law itself will be male—even if justice is a woman blinded by men, with both her hands occupied maintaining a passive and impossibly difficult balancing act.
As language comes from all that is in excess of gesture (unto containing gesture), so social power/authority comes from all that is in excess of mechanical coercion (unto containing mechanical coercion).
The unconscious is structured, declared Lacan so famously in Ecrits, as a language.
Well, so is social power/authority.
Indeed, the totality of social power/authority as it is interiorized for better or for worse by each individual may just be the structure of the unconscious.
Do I believe, then, Michael Ryan’s assertion with which I opened the third volume, i.e., that the impossibility of individuating meanings at the level of the word, which Derrida has so powerfully demonstrated (or at the level of the sentence, which Quine has demonstrated with equal power, though with less fanfare; or at the level of any operationally rich, axiomatic system, which was Gödel’s originary contribution—Derrida took the term ‘undecidability’ from Gödel), is a material force?
Frankly, I don’t know.
But I think the possibility must be seriously considered by anyone interested in either language or power, not to mention their frighteningly elusive, always allusive, and often illusive relations.
6. Lacan, and at this point Lacan’s commentators even more so, have led us back to a careful reconsideration of Freud’s texts with a focus on language. (Our focus? Freud’s? The text’s? Often it is as intriguingly undecidable as the terminal prepositional phrase’s antecedent in the previous sentence.) These rereadings have been scrupulously clarifying, profoundly exciting.