The Garden of Deictic Delights: A Shandean Meditation on Time and Writing

Writing to the moment, that impossible moment of the “now” that is not now. I say that I am writing now, but now I am reading that I am writing now, the “now” which I wrote then. To quite delightful effect in Tristram Shandy (1760), Laurence Sterne plays with the problem of endeixis, the designation that specifies without specificity, the “here” and “there,” the “now” and “then” that are both local and global, everywhere and nowhere.

I read Sterne’s Tristram Shandy then, but I write about it now. What can I say about it now, when what I thought about it occurred then? I would like to pursue the whole problem of endeixis as it manifests itself in Sterne’s work — Look at that, I have anthropomorphized an abstraction. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines “manifest” thusly: “Make evident to the eye or understanding; show plainly, reveal; display (a quality, condition, feeling etc.) by action or behavior; evince, be evidence of, prove, attest.” This is not the entire definition, but it is enough to serve my purpose. The verb is transitive, which means that there is a direct relationship between the subject governing the action and the object receiving it. However, when we insert the reflexive pronoun “itself” after the verb, we are indicating that the subject and object are identical, that the agent and patient are the same; the agent is the patient. — Here I have used “patient” in quite an antiquated sense. I don’t believe anybody in philosophy uses “patient” anymore in this sense. Even hospitals no longer have patients; they have “clients,” because hospital administrators believe “patient” too pejorative a designation, connoting too much passivity, supplication, helplessness. “Client,” on the other hand, connotes a greater sense of agency. Whereas a “patient” is sick and needy, a “client” is a discriminating consumer, awake to his own needs and in search of treatment, who knowingly enters into a compact with “health care providers.” The client is both agent and patient, or, as one who moves in philosophical circles would say, an agentive patient—not agentive enough to heal himself, but not patient enough to be in a position of utter submission to the health care providers. He is this and that, at the same time. — Endeixis.

The titular Tristram Shandy dedicates his work, an autobiography, to a patron he does not have. And judging by the words on the page, I notice that, as of 12 September 2007, he still does not have one. — “Still.” An interesting word, itself deictic. For instance, if someone were to inform another, much to his consternation, that “you still don’t have a date for the prom,” she would be indicating that the addressee is dwelling in a moment in which his dating prospects look quite dim.—Notice that in my little hypothetical situation, in which I attempt to illustrate a point I am in the process of making about endeixis, I use “she” as a pronoun for “someone,” which indicates that my someone is female. Now this may be inconsequential in the larger scheme of what I plan to argue about endeixis, but it does present delicious possibilities for my example, because it seems that we have quite an interesting narrative developing here (demonstrative, not deictic). To wit: “She said to him, ‘You still don’t have a date for the prom.’” Much like William Carlos Williams’s red wheel barrow, so much depends upon knowing who “she” is in this situation. Is it the addressee’s sister? His mother? A female friend who longs to be more than just friends? “Wishing he would ask her, she said, ‘You still don’t have a date for the prom…’” — The lack of resolution is unbearable! How will he respond? Verily, I feel a tremendous sense of obligation to continue this narrative; to refuse would be criminally provoking, even though I have quite lost sight of my reason for introducing this amorous young pair — oh yes, endeixis.

Still I have not launched into an analysis of Sterne’s masterful exploitation of the problem of endeixis. In speech, endeixis is always ephemeral. I say “now” in regard to a contingent, momentary aspect of the speech situation, the nowness to which my “now” belongs dying with the sound of my utterance. In writing, however, endeixis enjoys a permanence not found in speech. On 12 September 2007 I write, “Now, more than ever, this nation needs a hero.” Aside from the nauseating triteness of this statement, one also finds temporal indeterminacy in the making. Let us say I encounter this line thirty years from now, and, because I have been stricken with senility, I no longer recognize the writing as mine. Is this a statement relevant to the state of affairs in 2037? Is it my now, or my earlier self’s now, or the moment of “now’s” inscriptions now. Is now then or then now? Do you see what confusion my already senile older suffers in his attempt to sort out this dilemma? — You’ve of course noted that I speak of my older self of late 2037 in the present tense, as if he is already vexed and bedeviled by the problem of endeixis contained in my example. I am here (demonstrative, not deictic) engaging in a sort of prolepsis, a rhetorical figure in which a speaking or writing individual treats future events as having already occurred.

Quite a neat trick, this prolepsis. Like endeixis, it is an attempt to domesticate time, to subordinate it to our purposes. “Now, more than ever, this nation needs a hero.” — an unintended universality in this sentiment. Maybe it is this unintended universality that manifests to us, that “make[s] evident to the eye or understanding; [that] show[s] plainly, reveal[s]; that display[s] (a quality, condition, feeling etc.) by action or behavior; that evince[s], [that is] evidence of, [that] prove[s], attest[s]” the fact that textual endeixis really does win, that it does manage to escape the ever-eroding flow of time. Thus we who cannot escape cannot help but be puzzled by such formulations. The flow of time carries these moments to me, and then carries them away. Texts, however, capture the ghosts of these moments, frozen as ciphers on a page. If you think about it — I mean really think about it — reading classics of the western canon is a little like necrophilia. We pore over the products of now-dead hands; we fuss and fret over the children of minds long since decayed. Artifacts, relics are these writings, carrying in them impressions of events forever beyond our ken. Yet Sterne’s words reach me beyond his mortality, over the horizon in which time falls into forever, reach through me and past me. His words capture and release me in search of another, future reader to capture and release. I am his reader now, and when his future reader is his reader now, I will then be his reader then. I wonder if Sterne in 1760 ever looked from the window of his home in York and imagined the mass of people who would be captivated by Tristram Shandy? Could he have imagined me, just one among the innumerable many? Could it possibly be that Sterne knew the hidden truth, the hermetic secret of textual endeixis — after all, Sterne’s main character was originally to be named "Trismegistus" — with which one may unite now with then, and in doing so find a sort of eternal life?

— Now for some more substantive discussion.

I suppose I am concerned with writing to the moment, with textual endeixis because, when written, deictic words inadvertently call attention to their textuality, to themselves as products of writing, and therefore represent a mode of communication that is deliberately not speech, not utterance as such, but speech's proxy. Unlike speech, in which one has much more opportunity to indulge each thought, impression, digression, and allusion, writing typically exchanges expansiveness for concision. It vies against time, pursuing its theme with a single-mindedness made necessary by the indefinite deferral of any possible response. In this way, Tristram Shandy reveals that it is written to an occasion, and therefore diachronic, i.e., contingent upon a prior historical causality which brings it forth. In form, however, it is synchronic, bringing together in one material body, namely, the book, a sequence of articulations that begin on the first page of the novel and end on the last.

Tristram Shandy, however, enjoys a peculiar relationship to time in that it is doubly diachronic. It is diachronic both in content, in which a sequential relationship of ideas becomes reanimated, as it were, with every reading, and in its materiality as discrete body moving through time and space—in this second respect there can be said to be many, many Tristram Shandys. The novel’s diachrony of content however, is limited, unable to incorporate any more temporality than what is already inscribed in it, whereas its diachrony of form is potentially infinite, provided the original text and its many copies remain intact and legible. The novel’s second-order diachrony, the diachrony of its formal synchrony, always has the potential of catching up to and going beyond its first-order diachrony, despite all of Sterne’s temporal tricks of writing to the moment and, at times, even beyond the moment. Sterne’s project is essentially conservative, or negentropic, and one finds evidence of this attempt at conservation in even the smallest narrative details: “Justinian, in the decline of the empire, had ordered his chancellor Tribonian to collect the Roman or civil laws all together into one code or digest, — lest through the rust of time, — and the fatality of all things committed to oral tradition, they should be lost to the world forever” (p. 150).

— I know I promised a more substantive discussion that what I've hitherto pursued. But, in the course of writing what I have just completed, I came to realize that my promise was based on a false and biased assumption: namely, my promise implied a commitment to abandon the Shandean form my discussion had heretofore assumed, which in turn implies that Shandean discourse is inimical to substantive analysis. You will be glad to know that I have come to see the light. This is not to say, however, that I have lost sight of my purpose for introducing the above quote from Tristram Shandy. No, I was taught very early in my university career that — and this principle is something I exhort my young freshman charges to abide, though in this they prove refractory—one does not introduce an illustration from the text under discussion unless he intends to contextualize it sufficiently into his argument for the edification of his reader. Suffice it to say that the above quote demonstrates the negentropic or centripetal force invested in writing. Justinian’s code fixes, or brings into synchrony, the series of significations that constitute Roman law. The law, now a corporate whole — of course I am speaking of Justinian and Tribonian’s now, not my now or Sterne’s now — moves through time, its elements suspended in its system and thereby saved from the oblivion of time. Speech turned writing is the silence that is not. Reading is often a silent activity — although there are certainly times that one reads aloud. Try reading this aloud, and when I ask you that, I mean trying reading “try reading this aloud” aloud. — Nevertheless, reading is often performed in silence. Yet in reading you are addressed. You are reading what I have written, but, chances are, you are silent, and not because I wear a silly grin, which, since I am not with you, is something you could not detect anyway. And, you will be pleased to know that I have been quite silent the whole time I have written these words — nary a peep out of me, only the sound of my fingers punching the keys of my computer. You and I are in fact communing in complete but nonetheless voluble silence. Very monkish, wouldn’t you agree? In observance of this silence, I shall break off —

—Here —

— Now.

Ignorance as Critical Practice

Below is the transcript of a discussion I had two years ago with my friend Rob about the Sisyphean task of teaching university freshmen how to engage in academic discourse. He and I are both of the conviction that the rhetoric of such writing can only be approached once one has acquired appropriate habits of mind, such as a healthy skepticism toward received knowledge and the critical awareness that this skepticism engenders. While among many, critical thinking and writing are highly valuable skills, the sad fact is that it for a vast many more, these skills are simply recherché, like the talents of the blacksmith or wheelwright, which find a market only in the incredibly small domain of touristy pioneer village mock-ups. Perceived as the relic of an era in which people had little else at their disposal to beguile their leisure, critical writing becomes as obsolete as the dusty Commodore VIC-20 in your parents attic. Thus confronted with having to deal with the rigors and demands of a mode of writing that to them has no perceivable connection to the cash nexus, the typical freshman reacts with impatience and hostility, itching to move on to the more practical concern of enhancing his future earning power, which, though he may not have the foggiest idea how this is acquired, to his mind certainly does not involve English 101.

Now an editor of a major magazine and himself a blogger of the first order (read his blog at http://marginal-utility.blogspot.com), Rob had been for several years a freshman composition instructor like me. We both speak from several years of experience, and though I regret the cynical tone of our exchange, I maintain that, given the ever-worsening state of affairs in higher learning, cynicism is inevitable.

* * *

Rob: How's your academic life going? Still wading through internecine bullshit?

UJ: I am exhausted, but mostly from teaching freshman composition. My students are impervious to anything remotely intellectual. In fact, they are extremely suspicious of anything that even smacks of intellectualism.

Rob: Just like Americans. I keep explaining in cover letters why I had to stop teaching, and I end up saying things like that. That probably doesn't raise my hireability threshold.

UJ: And they are overly willing to submit to my authority when choosing topics, not because they respect me, but because they're trying to get me to micromanage their essays at every stage.

Rob: —Very tempting, because it provides the illusion of accomplishment when you fashion the product for them. You can pretend the product and not the producer is important, but then you are in the same position as the factory manager. I used to want to write all 25 essays for my students, which seemed to me a more efficient process. I lost sight completely the whole goal of teaching: thinking rather than achieving a tangible end.

UJ: Yeah, my sharper dialectics put me in an enviable position, because I could exploit them at every turn, but I'm ethically obliged to restrain myself from the very thing that would conduce to my financial success in the corporate world: i.e., exploiting the effort of others.

Rob: Ethics, haven't you abandoned them by now? Hasn't the recent election [of Nov. 2002] convinced you there is no good fight left to fight?

UJ: Yeah, but my reasoning is that my ethical conduct prevents ethics from disappearing altogether. I've become rather antinomian as I've aged.

Rob: With social politics generally irrelevant, I guess a personal politics is worth preserving. I wish there were a way to escape the culture's tendency to make us squander our energies mounting small-scale ethical battles with ourselves. Faith is all there is, I guess, to see a meaning in the personal war; we can't ever have enough perspective to see what it might mean—the same with classroom efforts.

UJ: What profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his soul in the bargain? Or something like that.

Robert: Who said that? Dick Cheney?

UJ: Ken Lay. . . . I have found that the recommended rhetoric for essay end comments to students has either stifled me utterly, or has forced me into totally ridiculous phraseology: e.g., rampant use of passive voice, anthropomorphizing the essay, etc.

Rob: It's a surreally euphemistic form of writing.

UJ: My grading practice and mind have been colonized by simpering relativist nabobs!

Rob: Maybe you should do the "grading conference" where you can rub their nose in the essay: "What did you do here? Come on, come on, tell me! What were you thinking! Why did you write that! What made you choose that word, hmm?" Then you can make apparent the social conditioning, encoding, and brainwashing inherent in the writing process. . . .

UJ:—Which are reinforced by my comments.

Rob: . . .Your true role as monological disciplinarian comes to the fore. You could say, "If you don't speak the hegemony, and thus think the hegemony, how can you enjoy your hollow life within it?"

UJ: The feigned disinterest of the rhetoric of marginalia is totally bizarre; it disconnects any sort of agency between the student who writes and the document s/he writes. The document just becomes this miraculated text, finding its way into the world without any sense of it[s] being created. I think that this is a subtle form of the convictions underwriting many of the tenets of pomo victim politics. The paper just is.

Rob: Holding the student accountable for it seems like some kind of rape on the student's dignity. When in fact the mollycoddling presumes the dignity of an independent sentient being who already doesn't exist. Best to teach them how to write cover letters, the only document that they will feel truly invested in.

UJ: Exactly. And they are so ready to read personal affronts into these comments, which I've labored to make as oblique and insipid as possible.

Rob: I tried to circumvent that by being as impersonal in the classroom as possible, to be remote, and as though I didn't know any of them. But in our narcissistic society no one feels empowered to produce anything difficult unless they feel that it is personally demanded. Everything has to be personal or else they don't care.

UJ: Why is evaluating quality of thought forbidden? Am I always already some sort of fraud?

Rob: They are used to everything seeming like ads, as though directed solely at them, and their life become the baseline for what is meaningful. They are used to everything in their lives apparently pandering to them. . . .

UJ: —Ah!

Rob: . . . All discourse seems to single them out as special, but our classroom discourse doesn't, so they tune it out, behave as though it can't be significant—it belongs to the denatured discourse that their essay belongs to, produced by and for no one.

UJ: They are defiantly and professedly complacent, and thus make themselves spectators of their own lives. But they are duped into thinking that this passivity has allowed them to penetrate what they see as the obfuscative tendency of academic discourse, and thus made them hipper, savvier.

Rob: That is so true; ignorance passes as a kind of criticism, a critical practice. . . .

Quid Es Veritas?

Is there anyone more postmodern than he who utterly rejects postmodernity?

Rejection is never negation; rejection is negation thwarted. Even the Amish, who reject modernity, cannot negate modernity, or its sequel, postmodernity. The cautionary day-glo triangles that adorn the Amish’s buggies betray an implicit awareness on their part that, for the rest of the world, it is no longer the nineteenth century. If anything, these orange triangles stand as emblems of the Amish’s defiance of the dialectical progression of history, as ensigns around which they arrange their insular society in order to keep at bay the encroachment of modernity. The Amish way of life is history brought to a halt by an act of sheer collective will. All time is one for the Amish, as it is for St. Augustine’s God. But are the Amish aware of the dialectical nature of their own identity? Isn’t Amish-ness only possible in a modern or postmodern age?

Two Sundays ago I had an encounter with Catholicism's own version of the Amish, namely, Catholics who continue to celebrate the Tridentine Mass despite the reforms of Vatican II. I have long been fascinated with the Tridentine Mass. For some time I had wondered about the enduring appeal of the pre-reform Mass. Thus I had been planning to attend one of these services, offered every Sunday at 5 PM at Holy Family Church here in Tucson, but, plagued by some vague apprehension, I continually quailed at the last moment.

Before I continue my narrative, I should perhaps better explain my interest in the Tridentine Mass. Generally, I celebrate my postmodernity and the theoretical discourse associated with it. I relish the latter’s explanatory power, and I feel fortunate to have been thrown into history at a moment when the complete demystification of the world, and humanity's relationship to it, at last seems possible. But, as I have grown older, and as I have crammed my head with ever more abstruse theory, I have discovered that my enlightenment exacts a price in the form of an ever-lurking nihilism that at times threatens to overwhelm me. According to the claims of many contemporary theorists, certainty is altogether impossible. Yet, despite this knowledge, I still find myself standing on the shifting sands of postmodernity looking ruefully upon the seemingly effortless religious conviction of such figures as John Henry Newman, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy (Catholics all), who not only managed to weather the epistemological gale of modernity, but who also managed to diagnose with a certain serene sprezzatura all of modernity’s various malaises. For these individuals, Catholicism remained something more than rank superstition. I suppose I am dissatisfied with what I take to be the cold comfort of modern secularism. Thus I contemplated exploring the Catholicism of my pre-Vatican II brethren, anticipating one of two possible outcomes: either I would rediscover the spiritual plenitude of the faith in which I had been raised--a plenitude that I had never before recognized, or I would at least derive some aesthetic pleasure for the solemn pageantry of the mass, that I would, like Philip Carey”s friend Hayward in W. Somerset Maugham’s *Of Human Bondage,* be able to luxuriate in the sartorial splendor of “the gold and silk that clothes the priests of Rome.”

Sadly, my experience attending the Tridentine Mass proved anything but consoling. It was, in a word, terrifying.

Though I had arrived ten minutes before the mass began, I entered the church while a recitation of the rosary (a pre-mass tradition of the former Catholic era) was still in progress. I quickly found a pew at the rear of the church, moving with the furtiveness of someone who perceives his entrance a disruption. Almost immediately, I felt like an intruder on my own faith.

As I surveyed the parishioners, many of whom knelt over the backs of the pews in front of them with rosaries wrapped firmly in piously folded hands, I fully expected my head to be one of the only ones not gray or white. I was, however, surprised to find many parishioners who appeared to be around my own age, some with as many as four children (O, thou fecund faithful!). As the service began, many of these parents harshly whispered their progeny’s eyes forward, or crisply swatted the fidgets from them. All of the trappings of the old faith were in full display: the women's doily-like head coverings, the spiritual shepherd with his back to the flock, muttering almost inaudible Latin prayers, the kisses planted on the foot of the life-sized crucified Christ. On the whole, the Tridentine Mass was alien enough for me not to know when to sit, stand or kneel, which, as any Catholic will tell you, is quite remarkable, because most of us have internalized this liturgical choreography so thoroughly that it has become second nature to us. (Return and lapsed Catholic to mass after a hiatus and she will fall in step with the others like she has never been away.) The celebrant’s homily was a soaring discourse on that perennial curriculum of perdition, namely, abortion, contraception, and homosexuality. His invective provoked in me fugitive, heretical thoughts. I resented his thesis, but I resented even more the dogmatic absolutes with which he adorned it.

There I was, a secularized apostate among the faithful remnant for whom 1962 never happened: among those who still move to the staid pulse and rhythm of the liturgical calendar: among conservative Catholics, who are in many respects indistinguishable from mega-church-going evangelical Christians. Like the evangelical, the conservative Catholic goes in for cheap political ostentation: American flags set in car windows, bumper stickers proclaiming the driver’s abhorrence of Roe v. Wade or uncritical support of the present administration, and so on. Thus I realized the reason why Mel Gibson’s *The Passion of the Christ,* which I understand is steeped in singularly Catholic theology, full of iconography and lore that the evangelicals’ forebears would have derided as “Papistickal claptrap”--could achieve such pan-Christian appeal. It was because the making of this film was more a political act than a devotional one. It gave both conservative Catholics and evangelicals an excuse to drop the cudgels of a centuries-old antagonism and rally around the pet project of a well-heeled schismatic madman. The film became an emblem of insularity and the absolute rejection of the liberalizing tendency of the last hundred years. The film is a fasces in the pure etymological sense—an axe carried before both the conservative Catholic and evangelical Christian with the purpose of smashing the coupling between them and the train of history. Amish, evangelicals, and conservative Catholics all live as if the twentieth century never happened.

It appears that I will have to revise my original assertion that rejection is thwarted negation, because rejection in postmodern age is, for all intents and purposes, equivalent to negation. Postmodernity’s peculiar brand of skepticism allows for the rejection of postmodernity itself. In other words, the consummate postmodern gesture is the rejection-negation of postmodernity by willfully comporting oneself to a reified and eternalized ideology. Thus, if someone were to ask, “Show me those individuals completely at home in postmodernity,” I would say to him, “Look at the Amish, look at the evangelical, look at the conservative Catholic, and there you will find those you seek.”

The Degree-Zero Morality of *Less Than Zero*

I happened to catch *Less Than Zero,* a film based on Bret Easton Ellis's novella of the same name, on Bravo late this afternoon. It wasn't the first time I'd seen it, but I hadn't seen it in so long that it was as if I was watching it for the first time.

I recall that the film--featuring such eighties bratpackers as the eternally pubescent Andrew McCarthy, a particularly unctious and reptilian James Spader, and, in an eerily prescient casting choice, the soon-to-be recidivist substance abuser Robert Downey, Jr. as the troubled, substance abusing Julian--struck me at the time of its release as being an important, unblinking exploration of the plight of the spectacularly wealthy, whose main problem seems to be their spectacular wealth. Watching it now, in 2004, I cannot help but think that the film's singular attraction rests in a certain lurid relish in seeing the beautiful folk of Beverly Hills plummet from high atop the ramparts of the house that Reaganomics built, and endure a series of picturesque humilations as they descend. In other words, we seek in the film the frisson of fabulous devastation.

Which brings me to my point: as cinematic tragedy, *Less Than Zero* fails utterly, because it constucts a world in which morality is almost entirely absent. The film eschews this ponderous convention altogether and opts instead for the pseudo-effects of spectacle. This choice on the filmaker's part, however, becomes deleterious to the film, reducing it to a series of gestures, poses, and set pieces of such calculated slickness that the net effect upon the viewer is one of estrangement. She sees constructed before her a demimonde of such moral vacuity as to be nearly unrecognizable. Ignoring for a moment the film's commercial enticements--the now laughably garish late-eighties couture and the various other items of conspicuous consumption--one is left with an intensely derivative film full of cliché dialogue, stock poor-little-rich-girl-and-guy types, and contrived situations. Thus, instead of eliciting our sympathy, Julian's fall from his plush aerie high above L.A. to the decidedly unglamorous back rooms in which he fellates strangers takes on all the dumb inevitability of a hurricane. We feel as if we are watching something monstruous and misbegotten that must surely collapse and suffocate on its own bulk--which, if we are totally honest with ourselves, is often our attitude when witnessing the extravagances of the filthy rich.

Hence the strategem of *Less Than Zero*: it begs the audience to supply it with the moral context it cannot itself provide. To borrow the language of of neo-Aristotelian literary critic Wayne Booth, *Less Than Zero* constructs an ideal viewer who is such a well-conditioned creature of popular culture that she will reflexively endow the film with the gravitas it itself foresakes in its pursuit of spectacle. All she must do is respond to cues: a suggestive glance, insouciant mugging, the figure of a dishevelled Julian pensively smoking on the beach. However, should this ideal viewer never materialize, or, if present, prove refractory, then the film falls on the sword of its own irrelevance. *Less Than Zero* value, then, ultimately remains historical. It remains a curious relic of a strange and sinister decade--a decade that managed to be both puritanical and decadent, consisting of strange juxtapositions (The PMRC and DIY video porn, "Morning in America" and McMartin Preschool). A decade that, despite its being characterized by gross economic injustice and insane foreign policy ("Mutually Assured Destruction"), has become quite an object of nostalgia for the under-thirty set. It will perhaps be these individuals who restore *Less Than Zero* to its glossily vacuous glory.