Quipu by Damien Broderick Page A

deliberate evasion of declarative, um, clarity, chosen for reasons that are probably impeccable. He’s made a linguistic decision to have his words work in an unusual way. He wants to show actions and ideas interpenetrating with a degree of force inexpressible in ordinary French, let alone English. It just happens to…give me the screaming willies.”
    “I think he’d like us to feel it could only be expressed—”
    RAY FINLAY (first words masked by Wagner’s, above):
    …in the log-jam of trying to work out—
    JOSEPH:
    Hang on. Ray, once you’re onto his paradigm it shouldn’t cause any problems per se . It’s poetic locution made toward a cognitive end.
    RAY:
    Oh, I’d agree. To get the intended effect, you’d have to read straight through without thinking and—
    BRIAN WAGNER:
    How many treatises are you prepared to read through without thinking, Ray?
    RAY:
    Well, obviously you can go wrong. I’ve been reading Jacques Lacan in translation and—
    JOSEPH:
    Christ, he’s even more obscure than Foucault.
    KENNY:
    This is the radical French psychiatrist, right?
    JOSEPH:
    Yep. Ray, I get the impression that Lacan has taken Freud in directions that Laing might have—Sorry, we’re getting a bit—
    RAY:
    How much of it is the sheer difficulty of translating these poetic statements from one language to another?
    JOSEPH:
    Exactly! One commentator mentions Foucault’s discussion of, um, the ‘solar hollow’ which he says is ‘the space of Roussel’s language, the void from which he speaks’.”
    KENNY:
    But Bertrand Russell was English, right, not French? So he—
    JOSEPH:
    Raymond Roussel, the notorious surrealist. Okay, so this could of course be one playful loon piled on top of another, but what if the term Foucault actually used was ‘solar plexus’? This wouldn’t advance the world’s knowledge a great deal, but it would be less, you know…random…than ‘solar hollow.’
    RAY:
    That’s exactly where I was headed with Lacan, Joe. I was in a study group of psychiatrists the other day—
    VOICE:
    Ah, they’ve caught up with you, eh?
    ANOTHER VOICE:
    But he escaped. Quite mad, but a master of disguise.
    [Laughter]
    RAY:
    —poring over a page of Lacan. He mentioned ‘the fractured terms of language’s solar specter,’ or something like that, and the assembled psychiatrists all fell to babbling, trying to parse this mysterious truth of the unutterable unconscious and its prophet.
    MARJORY:
    I suppose you set them straight. Even though you speak and read no French.
    RAY:
    Correct. A specter , eh? Was this the Derridean trace image of the phallocratic sovereign subject, they asked each other. Could the marxist Lacan actually have believed in ghosts and spirits? On and on it went. After a while, I suggested that maybe Lacan was simply drawing an analogy. White light is broken into its constituents by a prism. So too with language. But nobody in the room knew if ‘spectrum’ is or can be the same word as ‘specter’ in French, or if the pun would be sustainable, and anyway my interpretation was deemed intolerably reductive and scientistic…
    MARJORY:
    ‘Spectrum’ does translate into ‘specter.’
    RAY:
    Amazing what a training in computer science does for one’s powers of extrapolation. Anyway, my point is that even if Lacan actually was making sense, underneath the poetic tosh, you’d never find much evidence of it in his earnest and laughable English-speaking interpreters, let alone his followers.
    JOSEPH:
    This level of evasion and fancy footwork is now a signature of all the poststructuralists, but the question is: is our own irritation and laziness as readers a product of Marcuse’s repressive desublimation? Or is the opaque writing itself evidence of textual laziness?
    RAY:
    Pretty energetic laziness.
    JOSEPH:
    Exactly. Exactly.
    BRIAN: Big deal. What becomes of a thinker who grows so enamored of his linguistic ability that he turns into a fool when he tries to present his subject