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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)