Quotes |
Gail Scott |
From Eros The Bittersweet, by Anne Carson ". . . Whenever passion seems within reach, aidos falls like a veil. . . . This aidos is the archaic ethic of 'shamefastness'. . . . Ahprodite is the divinity in charge of the perversities of aidos within the novel. She is the chief designer and chief subverter of the story's changing triangles, both patron and enemy, inspiring with a passion strong enough to resist all the temptations that she herself proceeds to hurl against it. . . . Aphrodite's role in novels is an ambivalent, not to say paradoxical, one like the role of Eros in archaic poetry." Eros, p. 79-80 [Carson's Greeks lined up Eros versus 'shamefastness,' which I contemporaneously interpret not as 'chastity' but as 'cover-up'; class has entered discourse: shame is private and social (Scott)]
. . . What haunts
are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others
. . . [I like to think of
the phantom dressed up in a cloak studded with the latest consumer items,
on his way to the zoo. I like the play between contiguity and disjunction
implied by attempting to converse with the unspeakable. This makes strange
sentences that swing "both" ways, dialoguing with both the uncanny
and the social: a rhetorical edge is added to poetic thinking. (Scott)] . . .She loved me
like her own daughter. When I was two months old, she fed me cabbage soups
and once she managed to poison me by gorging herself on the pits from
the cherry preserves that were being made at our summer cottage. When
I grew up, she came to see me, always with presents; she remained standing
and spoke to me in the formal way; then, when everyone left, she sat down
to drink tea with me and used the familiar form . When I became an adult,
I began to understand her cheerful disposition: 'My mistress lives with
another woman; it's beyond me-just like nuns!' And she'd roar with laughter--.
. . She had a special smell, like her wooden trunk when she lifted the
lid: calico and apples. A tlted nose, knowing eyes. . . [This passage, though "authored" by Sklovsky, is actually by Elsa Triolet, Shklovsky's beloved at the time. He integrated her letters into his own fiction. I had intended to quote Shklovsky; whose manner of stringing together seemingly cut-up prose lines to effect narrative 'continuity' is exemplary. Not only shame, but also authorship, get partly buried here. (Scott)]
Performance requires
the person who is the actor (i.e. already a character) to be in character,
and this, in turn, cannot occur without performance. This produces not
a tautology ("performance requires performance") but a bifurcation-character
occurring as a performance in and of itself; or, as Osman says (in "The
Figural Cabinet"), "the taking place is double."
Not all halfbreed
mothers Not all halfbreed
mothers .. Not all halfbreed
mothers Not all halfbreed mothers drink red rose, blue ribbon, |