Sempler

   One sentence, one name, one body: in each case I have presented so far, this
rule has consistently applied. How does one proceed from here when sentences
come to us encased in other sentences, when people see their identities
multiplied, and when many of them find themselves lodging together in the same
sentence?

   A novel? A Cruise ship, jumbo jet, unending metro car... Certain places are
reserved especially for sentences which are pregnant or amputated by a verb.
First class seats where the most opulent sentences stretch their extremities at
their leisure of their neighbours alongside the overcrowded tourist class where
three people negotiate a narrow compartment, and so many passersby travel under
multiple passports...

   Consider, for example, in the following section of our version of ~In the
Shadow~:

   "This was doubtlessly in observing the dejection into which I plunged myself
during each day of the year approaching vacation, as each announced itself to
me, that I must not see Gilberte, until one day, to distract me, my mother told
me, "If you still have such a great desire to watch Berma, I believe that your
father might permit your going there: your grandmother will take you."" 

   Are we in the matter of one or two sentences? And how can we, according to
our rule, chase after two sets of prey, Gilberte and Berma? Finally, Gilberte
Swann, as any reader could not possibly ignore, is the name of Madame de
Saint-Loup when she was a young girl, who we missed so lamentably: is she, for
us according to the rule, the same or another prey? 

   Such confusion!

   Can one only treat this as one sentence, one woman, one law?

   Even after twenty-five centuries of civilization, incredible treasures of
speculation (and even more so when one adds the exertions of imagination, the
labour of reflection that the least idea, even false ones, have cost human
genius...), the libraries, these black holes of language, which implode and
crumble under the weight of their own mass, its still same old, same old...

   Women complicate everything by the inconsistency of their legal status. If
they still have the decency to outlive their spouses... What a waltz of
etiquette! A Madame Verdurin, born Sidonie des Baux, in seconds becomes the
Dutchess de Duras only to finish off as the Princess de Guermantes... We are not
in India; widows are not subjected to suttees in this novel. 

   Aristocrats are not the same as women, changing their name as though changing
their shirt. Just look at Palamede de Guermantes slogging away in the muddle of
familial titles: at will Baron de Charlus, Prince des Laumes, Duke de Brabant,
Prince d'Agrigente, des Dunes, d'Oleron, and de Viareggio. 

   And that's just a shortlist...

   Like in the theatre where one takes on a role, as Berma does in Phedre,
fictional individuals and others take on proper names, first names, surnames,
usurp privileges, distinctions, espouse patronyms, titles, lands. They're all
enough to make rigid logicians, austere republicans, enraged Catholics,
disgruntled feminists, vain nobles, little dukes, and simple readers sick...

   Chameleons! Has-beens! Parvenus! Kids! Mediocrities beyond calculation! When
will the reign of a single, individual identity, a rigid regime of
individuality, be established?

   In my case, I who never dreams of these revolutions -- or restorations -- ,
who is neither legitimist, nor feminist, nor Hinduist, nor memorialist, I
vigorously arrange the fictional disguises through which I decimate the world.
Of what importance is personal identity, in fiction as much as in the world,
only insofar as it is a theory of identification, as in Time, successively and
simultaneously, singular insofar as multiple, if under all this multiplicity
runs an invisible chain...

   This chain is the thread spun, fiber by fiber, from the distaff of narrative,
to the spinning wheel of memory via a russet blond little girl who makes her
appearance behind a hawthorn hedge, the name "Gilberte" given like a talisman
which will enable her eventual re-identification, making her a person, and
before which she will be only an uncertain image, contingent (since how could we
retrieve and remember one moment long ago by candle light or behind a boxwood
hedge?), the daughter of Odette and Swann, the friend of Bregotte, the little
companion at tea parties on the Champs-Elysees, she, who didn't successfully
pour her tea, the object of my desires, the heir of 80 million, the unknown one
in the woods, the window of Saint-Loup...

   This chain, dear reader, is that which will emerge intermittently through the
surface of the page, passing through the weave of events, through the mad
embroidery of motifs running through the very tissue of the novel; this warp
thread is unwound from your neurons and is that which you call a person.

   And for me, nocturnal Penelope devoted to my craft of unweaving? I am the
exemplary sempler who at a point in the text where it comes to the surface and
fastens itself to a name, lifts the warp thread to cut it, and thus thins out
Temps.

   That she who has the name Saint-Loup reappears under that of Gilberte is
advantageous for me. This new denomination is, for me, a renewed licence to
perform my sempling action: an occasion to retry the test of murder, a
supplementary opportunity to perforate the work. By the off chance I manage to
pass the test, the whole chain is seized by the articulation of one of the knots
or names which present themselves at one point or another within the text.

   This was the same case for she who was known under the two names "Odette" and
"Mme Swann" who I tried hard to pinch and lift on two successive occasions, at
the exits of two different brothels. But "Odette" on the first day, the
eighty-second body offered for my inspection, as with the second "Mme Swann",
the forty-sixth, each slipped away in kind. I don't have any luck with women...
Patience, we will haunt the brothels until a "Miss Sacripat" and another "Mme de
Forcheville" succumb to our assiduities. The devil take it if we do not finish
off, once again, with the upper hand.

   
   Something else for a change.

   In the shadowy room, the lights have been turned off. A film is about to
start. Seated in the fifteenth row, we have designed as our gunsight, as our
gravitational attractor, two armchairs of red velour immediately in front of us.
The cohesion of the pair, of the trio, of the aggregate is the condition of
success for murders which are not only serial, but plural. We return ourselves
to the fascination of the mobile images projected upon the white screen to
captivate and fix our prey, since we certainly do not know, even though we
contain multitudes, the exact moment a victim will hurry by.

   But the idiosyncrasies of the spectators! This affectation of thoughtfulness
-- or reticence to enter our proximity -- which makes them divert so as not to
butcher the view of those spectators in the rear; these procrastinations of
myopes which thrice retakes them and changes their seat for a better focal
distance from the screen; these sanitary cordons which only endeavour to
establish on either side of them, under intimidation, reluctantly, the abusive
occupation of adjacent seats by hats, coats, umbrellas, bags, and newspapers
which they conspire to maintain vacant, constituting a personal no man's land...

   My fatal seats are slow to fill up.

   Finally, a subject appeared. The wrong subject, undeniably masculine, out
there where I waited for a "Gilberte" or a "Berma." And then guided through the
darkness by a ray of light obstinately pointing from the usherette's flashlight
toward the floor, another body mounted the aisle and rushed into the fourteenth
row. In the great glare of a rising sun (I know it's a bit cliché) it appeared
that this body happened to be a woman. 

   And voila, unaware of what made it happen, a stranger arose to meet a
stranger (maybe they know each other), the go through their polite niceties,
sketching the path of a hesitation waltz, and instead of seating in the
designated place, the stranger occupies the seat yielded by a stranger, such
gallantry, making it hers.

   "Gilberte" and "Berma;" a man and a woman. But who is who? They have
exchanged places. At what moment does the interlocking of body and name take
place? Do we maintain that chronology determines the order of identification so
that the first arrival cannot claim to be "Gilberte," mentioned first in the
reference sentence -- and in this case failing to be so since he is not of the
correct gender -- , and the second arrival, therefore, necessarily must be
"Berma?" Do we maintain that from chronology, we cannot deduce, but by physical
location, the sentence-like right to left order of armchairs which determines
the assignation of body to its name? Certainly, it's the coincidence of two
places and two bodies that validates the coordination of novel sentence and
world aggregate. But how do you work out this changing of places, this musical
chairs by which "Gilberte" is successively occupied by an unknown man and an
unknown woman? 

   The incertitude doesn't detain me from murder at all, what's the difference?
By the way, there's a sense of urgency: the screech of tires, the striking of a
scare chord in unison, the crashing crumple of metal, falling barrels and
various bits of scrap metal. Unbelievable calibres, inexhaustible magazines of
bullets are not simply content with piercing the man you direct it to bring down
but explodes his guts at 20 paces. I plunge my hand into the pocket of my
overcoat and disengage the safety of my P .38; I estimate, based on the portion
of the cranium which goes above the headrest of the armchair in front of me, the
approximate height of the stranger's heart; I aim my firearm. Bodies tumble off
the footbridge, ringing out as they flatten upon the metal, gongs, timpani, a
grapeshot apotheosis... I pull the trigger, one time, two times, I rise, I
escape into the fuliginous night, the explosions, the deflagrations, shake the
ground under my feet, pulverise the stores on screen and give off huge plumes of
black smoke which obscures the celestial radiance perched up there, at the top
of the cavern, behind the backs of the spectators. 

   I come to kill a woman though I don't know if she is Gilberte or Berma.

   It's not a huge deal.