Dump This Book While You Still Can! by Marcel Bénabou

Author:Marcel Bénabou [Bénabou, Marcel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780803261860
Google: wvTVh3-1nIgC
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2000-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

7

S

o I had to get moving again. Moving forward, of course. The question was how, and where to go. I had just been through my text, from front to back, several times, and in every direction, without succeeding in grasping it.

Then I had a new idea, which was, actually, quite simple.

To move forward, to finally make the barriers yield, I clearly had to move backwards, once again, all the way to the beginning. To go back to the primordial element, the words. But since words, like air or water, present a certain resistance to anyone trying to pass through them, I must not hesitate, in order to break this resistance, to break the words themselves. No longer try to seduce them or attract their condescending sympathy by my repeated, clumsy errors. On the contrary, I had to scrutinize them to the point of destroying them. Strike them, if necessary. With great pickaxe blows. In order to make the seams of gold appear. And if that was not enough, then still more refined modes of torture (to which I would be forced, despite my reluctance, to resort) would end up making them confess their secret truths.

Therefore I went back to the words on this page, taking them one by one.

First, as if they were the pearls of a necklace that one rolls gently between one’s fingers, I examined them. Then I started dividing them into syllables. In the hope that from these resonant debris, if I could grip them tightly enough, would ultimately emerge illuminating glosses.

I was convinced that my quest would become more serious, because this time it was going to take its models right from mythology: like Isis gathering up the scattered fragments of her brother-husband, I too would reassemble, syllable by syllable, the elements of a dissimulated corpus.

In doing so, I also remembered certain procedures cherished by the poets of ancient India and Rome. They sought to reproduce, to suggest, tirelessly, the sonorities of a single name: that of the divinity or hero whom they wished to honor. It even happened sometimes that the word that was the subject, the key, of a whole text did not appear overtly even once. Could that be the case here?

But all my efforts yielded only very unstable results that immediately evanesced, without having illuminated me at all.

Then I resolved to attack the syllables themselves. And I did so at first with a kind of cold fury. As if there had suddenly awakened in me, arising from some very distant place, a desire to destroy, a spirit of revolt against the violence of rules and their arbitrariness. Each syllable was thus promptly denuded, reduced to the simple letters that composed it. I spelled these letters one by one, erased them, brought them back again, constantly watching for the moment when I could move from the simple typographic sign to the message. Other people, who had not hesitated to adorn their slender songs with anagrams, had succeeded in reading an allegory of the

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