Http://www.sinn&bedeutung.inc... Some sentences found in novels contain many quite strange terms: until now, we have never seen parading past such terms as rooms, gardens, I, Mama, magic lanterns, grandfather... in brief, the ordinary decoration of the worlds we frequent. But a Saint-Loup, a Swann, a Francoise! Ah! Yes, these must have unsettled our solitude enough to send our rooms, gardens, I, genealogies reeling and destabilize the credence afforded to our language. Ever so often do we find some professional whiners, splitting hairs, crying foul as per their vocation: the fix was in, and the checks drawn from the world of language have all bounced... But have the profits of Words, Words, Words Inc. taken a nosedive? Is bankruptcy in the cards for such a huge corporation? Perish the thought! Six billion shareholders, each and every little one promisingly crafty... A pyramid scheme, a planetary giga-Ponzi... And to think that we've thrown in the towel and left it all to posterity! In all, we are preparing ourselves as a hundred times before when our withdrawals have out paced our deposits, when we've speculated on credit as though dancing around an open grave. And nomenclators of the shadows, we pass through our lives drawing-up, compiling, consulting lists, indexes, directories, and dictionaries. For us to protect ourselves from the simian grotesque, or maybe out of feudal nostalgia and its mistaken yearning for each man to toil upon his own plot of land, we preserve the painful confusion of places and souls, all of which can be separately ensconced at the land registration bureau and that of civil society at city hall, in those two distinct registers we have become accustomed to enrolling our proper names. Each name, placed one under the other throughout the whole register, end up sliding off, becoming obsolete inscribed upon a stone. Wandering around a cemetery or leafing through the yearbook of lost subscribers: someone's proper name inevitably ends with a place name, and their body as an ephemeral statue. Your tomb: or how, by a concession an acre wears your name in perpetuity. An in what form of eternity does this perpetuity take? You leave of course, and another has entered in your place. Taking a census of Temps Perdu, we find everyone: fictional people, fictionalized real people, probably-real people of imprecise identity, anonymous entities that some feature individualizes. The mystery of the person... Is she to personage as a cord is to cordage, carne to carnage? Or maybe mess to message, rave to ravage, drive to drivel, vice to visage? Or even, tongue to tonnage, bare to barrage, and temper to temporary. A profoundly vast cemetery is this novel... Sowing tombs and headstones, mausolea and mass graves... And up to the columbarium identities are in flight... They stroll through the alleys, between the throbbing pines, between the tombs... An Adam, first man; an Eve, first woman, followed by 26 anonymous others (nine from the bedroom, three from the brothel, one coachman, one faker, one lover, an unstylish one, two lesbians), accompanied by thirteen girls (three cooks, one banker, one with blue eyes, one with gold eyes, one poor and dead, one poor-little), and then nineteen women (some Belgian, in grey, in pink or leaving a patisserie). Anna Karenina, Beatrice, Calypso, three Raphaels (Raffaello, the archangel, the filthiest man in town), Faust (the doctor, I presume), and four of their colleagues. A Peruvian, a Pétain, two pharmacists. Dike and Nike; Gogol, Goliath, Golo and Goya; Lea, Leda and Lear, Lazarus, Lot (his wife) and Luther (in celibacy); Mortsauf, Macbeth and MacDuff (a duchess of), Mallarme, mama and mother (ma); Virgil and a vicious thug. A Montesquieu, some Montesquiou, a Guizot, some Guise. Rock & Rolls-Royce; Olida (deli owner) and Oedipus; The Woman of Thebes (palmist), Love (dog) and Albertine Simonet (musician); Mill, Schlemihl and the brothers Karamzov; Leibniz, Landrou and Aunt Leonie. Barnum (Saint and Phineas Taylor), Darwin, Devil (the), Satan, Sappho, Salammbô, Spinoza, Sodoma (Il), Rosita and Doodica, Dieu and Decline (also known as), Dreyfus (in person and as affaire), Booz (dormant), Melba (preventing it), Galopin (the patisserie chef). One Ixion, nineteen X (among whom are the comtesse de, a Lord, a medical resident, a little), two Y, a Z; one individual (a shady character, a real rogue), two people (one blonde and one wearing short culottes), one reader (mine), some Innocents (massacre of). Why, you ask me oh distracted reader, such a late suspicion of this sudden incoherence, of this inconsistency in such a surface-level project, why not, if you beg my pardon, go to Francis I and Charles XV from the fourth sentence of the book, and even further on to Genevieve of Brabant and Golo, and even further yet? Undue discrimination? Invalid arbitrary clemency? You tell me oh dearest reader, that it is about filling the mausolea of fiction, giving final rest to wandering names. But your Francis I, your Louis XI, your Leibniz, your Luther already have a body without body... But this body, where is it? Doubtlessly disappeared in a puff of smoke, certainly decomposed into its component molecules. But what about all the dead we have plunged into a fictive state? Would you like me to figure out which belong to the Novel and which to History, a distinction I could not deign to ever make? Would you have a name which has ceased to name, name no one else? Do you want me to make the same silly mistake as the Church under which we have been submitted to monogamy and a ban on forgetting, if by some chance we fall into widowhood, the second, third, fourth, nth wedding anniversary, so as not to worry about having more than one spouse come the hour of the resurrection? Celestial polygamy of glorious bodies... Is this your secret wish? Louis XVI, Luther, Leibniz are dead for you already, solemn straw men within the annals of history whose agony gives you no reason to shiver. It is the nature of historic beings to be dead. To render death sensible for you, oh insensible reader, celibate Catholic of crime, I am obliged to novelize it for you. You are indifferent to the unknown body falling under my blows. But killing Francoise, and voila something burst in your imagination, something has suddenly broken in the innermost life held deep within your body, has bled and has gone opaque. But Golo? But Little Fadette? But Anna Karenina? But the Woman of Thebes? And those of Lot? And Mentor? And Hippolyte? And Mona Lisa? All these legendary people, immigrants to other novels, imported as contraband to museums and myths, these pieces brought back, autochthones naturalized into the work, why have they escaped the riddle of my assassinations? Jus solis. Since it would, without any doubt at all, bad to bury those who are not killed in their proper place, who are not smothered in the cradle, as they say; since Anna Karenina seized and undone from the thread of Temps Perdu survives plotting in her eponymous fiefdom; since Phaedra makes her way through multiple texts, canvasses, proliferating, ramifying, disseminating... You interject that the same Anna K. stuck, ghostly, within Temps Perdu, implies some pre-novel where the play of Françoise emerges too. It doesn't matter to me, dear reader. It doesn't matter since, for the purposes of my murder, she is so far away from her origin. A novel, it is said, is a mirror moving along a path. Imagine one of the woods that cities are so proud of preserving, encysted within their walls; a vestige of the past (or ultimate simulacrum) of non-human nature at which the city has nibbled then internalized, set with tree-lined paths, with clearings, with music kiosks, with little picturesque gazebos, propitiatory relics of its appetite. Imagine a lake found within these woods, one of those lakes beside which the families of last century would go on Sunday to have lunch on the grass, beside which students would sometimes amuse themselves by going for a row, around which old men would always stroll and remember their own lunches upon the grass, their own amorous meetings on the water. Two parallel canoes advance perpendicular to the shore, framing a landscape: a fragment of the bank with the sky reflected in the fluid surface of the water. Now imagine, seated in one of the canoes, a pair of legs dangling in the emptiness. And one scrutinizing this image, the sight of those feet, me. My victim will be the bird that passes into that liquid mirror by the shoreside path taken by the indolent passers-by. In my hand, a handful of gravel taken from the path. The passersby pass by at irregular intervals, and their reflections are arrayed in the mirror. I cast a little stone at the heart of each reflection as they pass, which breaking the surface, make waves in quick concentric circles, arousing the curiosity of the body which traverses the image. I chime out my stones, one after the other. The last pierces the silhouette of a man passing against the blue sky which sits at the bottom of the lake. The bird's dives into the profound azure depths and traces a trembling diagonal in its flight from one side of the frame to the other. I lift myself up, it was my turn to pass into the mirror's field to go take out "Swann." My reflection is reflected in him. You know the rest. It is believed that one must not kill; however, no world is perfect without the abyss. Like a black hole, all are attracted and engulfed by him, they orbit around him, Swann as an enormous wheel, fixed at the summit of a peak, and upon his spokes thousands of less massive entities are joined like mortises, and when one falls off, each little adjacent thing is precipitated with it in the resulting ruin. Swann, his love, his way, all that describes itself in his fall, and with which the now swarming innumerable virtual lives fomented in these dead sentences, the thousands of sentences within the entire tome of Temps Perdu, my treasured keepsakes of Combray's decimation, all it's ins and outs and all the rest. A body loses itself in death. Choose. Who cares? What, us worry? Not even one wrinkle upon the surface of this ocean of the living? A body disappeared. But the resource there is so abundant, the others have already presented themselves before your very eyes, an infinitude of lives, in waves, unfurled, such a wave of bodies which ebbs and flows. Sovereign dictatorship of death, mystified under the democracy of life. Isn't there one eye, one single eye to register the fall, the trace, the concentric ripple of the sinking body, the ripple which propagates itself, self-interferes, reverberates, breaks, reflects back and mingles with itself and finally peters out? A real being, perceived by your senses, remains opaque to you. A weight of death your imagination cannot lift. The novelist's ingenuity has been to replace these parts, impenetrable to your soul, with an equal quantity of immaterial parts. Such a miraculous mirage... Within the machine that is your emotions, imagery is the only essential element. From that comes the distance, the novels, the descriptions, all the little movies projected within your darkest heart of hearts, exciting only your pity and tears. Do you really believe that I, a litterateur, make nothing different than the clever novelist who rattles the body hidden under the gold and crimson chasuble of a saintly maid, under the elegant tuxedo of a snobby amateur painter in love with the woman in pink, under the glorious imaginary of personhood? It's in this way that you consummate the crime... There's not enough Julie, Bovary, E.T., and Lady Di there for the appeasement of your glacial yet sickly sweet sympathy... That's literature. So I go past your pity, and past your indignation too, towards the dismantlement, the butchery of this Proustian cathedral which you have not the stomach to fully digest, gargoyles, crypt, lead seals and all. You content yourself with dipping your little toe, your fingerbowl, your baptismal glass into the pearlescent sheen of the entryway... Would that you would be so weighed down, so filled to the brim with my murders that your images, such pitiable mirages, of this opaque thing, this body, which your feeble soul could never even know how to assimilate, that you would manage to push through, to migrate, to the other side of this dark bloc. Would that render it visible to you? I have said: rooms, gardens, I, mama, magic lanterns, grandfather... All that ordinary decoration of the worlds we frequent. And the reader became so incensed by that, so frustrated at the spiciest, most classic, most instructive of murders... Would I have to keep myself from abandoning all pretence of slaying grand-uncles, grandfathers, grand-aunts, papa, mama? Dear reader. Seriously? Is "mama" only a name? Could not the same be said of a chapter that began with: Today "mama" died, or maybe yesterday or of another which also announced: I have killed "papa" at an intersection? That could not be said. "Lies!" you would cry, and with good reason. Why pretend to have as much respect for those invisible lines that connect members of a family by the circulation of the same blood as a Greek tragedy? The dead don't interfere with the living anymore. And the living have long ago forgotten to fulfill the wishes of the dead. Since they have died, we no longer desecrate the Gods, but the work which you have substituted for them and which you purport to no longer, let alone ever, have faith in; those are whose rituals you (and what a waste of time they are!) religiously observe once again. Those works are destined, just as all the others, to the mechanical reproduction of dead memories. Are you liable to reminiscence, childhood memories, Laostics, thrushes, periwinkles? The night remembers, in my absence, as I leave turning away from my computer, programmed to read in a high-pitched voice my novel of predilection such that, with each murder I commit, it is decomposed. Indefatigable electronic parrot... It suffices to run a little piece of software to automatically synthesize each word, to choose one from among various artificial voices and diverse set of languages which industrious linguists have rendered as rules of phonetics, prosody, etc. And all night, the digital speech machine works, obedient, blind, with programmed instructions encoded on its hard drive, grinding sentences, shelling phonemes; articulating, synthesizing, threading, composing the digital sounds that a Digital-Analog Converter spits out in spasmodic jets through the audio cones of a speaker. But the most poignant, you see, is the discord that I have made as the rule for these recitations: I never select from among the range of modelled languages available those with which Temps Perdu have been written but always barbarize this text through the mispronunciation of a disembodied, metallic voice. With the accent of a cowboy, a muezzin, a toreador, or a Cardinal rat, the tender syllables of the French language are mechanically shredded and hammered until dawn. I like to think, while I scan the streets in pursuit of my victims or my dreams that at some point during the night an automated memory babbles or caws a cackling parody of Temps, lost and decomposed. And I dream while walking, yes, I dream of achieving this decomposition which has long occupied and intrigued me. A possibility, almost a temptation, appears to me. I play roulette with language, you see. But games of chance are in their calculation, and anyone who plays with out calculation, at random, are fools. I play roulette, and it is increasingly clear that chance -- that vapour of probability that our desires condense into an idol; capricious or benevolent -- chance favours my first throws. Improbability is in its further pursuit. The character of balance is a stake placed on the mat: even or odd, red or black. The ball has rolled three times and three times fulfilled my expectations. There is no martingale to this game and no working backward. I will inevitably lose some day. As for my initial carelessness, in the blow made against Madame de Saint-Loup whom I allowed to escape, we say that the chips thrown down on the mat, and the profits, have gone to tip the invisible croupier of my Russian Roulette. No working backward? I might have been given, once in the first round of this completed decomposition, to go back, and on the job or on the mat, put the work back together. So, with the venerable legal principle which wishes that one's past acquittal (or conviction) of some offence may not be submitted to a new judicial test, I divide and cut not risking anew the life, by acting as party to the process, of all those persons who have escaped, by their discordance or by my error, to the proceedings, as with all those sentences through which they are weaved up to the final cesura, to no new confrontation of such mortal sort with myself, young but not capricious Paraca that I am... I envisage a perfect loophole. Making such use of my principles of parsimony, my juridical prudence, my subtle semantic distinctions, my onto-theological scruples, I take myself to have dreamed up a novel so emaciated to be skin and bones, at which to gnaw to the marrow... Yes, I'll keep going, I'll make an attempt on the narrator. Wasn't he so thoughtless to take on (I didn't make this up, it's there) the little name, Marcel? Vertiginous perspective... A world finally disengaged, disengaged from the illusion of human presence. What will remain his when he is no longer a person, no longer a personality? No longer a subject... Not even an I... Just, maybe an eye...The absolute impersonal. Listen. Midnight soon. And the ray of day which crept under the door has disappeared. This house is cut by a curved line which is none other than the limit of one of those glass ovals held in place within the widow frame which glistens between the wings of a lantern. Outside, things will seem to resemble it as well, figured at silent attention untroubled by the light of the moon, which overtakes and pushes back against that thing in front of it which it reflects, more dense and concrete than itself, having made its passage simultaneously thinner and larger like a folded plane upon which it is developed. That which can move, the foliage of a chestnut tree, moves. But its shivers are meticulous, total, executed just so in the smallest nuances and utmost gentleness, not pushing against the rest, not melting into the crowd, remaining within their circumscribed boundaries. It could be none other than this way, not in days such as these... Imagine that world. Depopulated by some cataclysm, pestilence, disease, apocalypse... Dead forever? It's possible... But would they not remain buried underground, within the depths of a cavernous tomb, within a concrete bunker, an air-conditioned temple, a trace, a sign or a simulacrum? Untiring nuclear piles feeding, for all time, a forest of computers. Nevertheless, no one passes anymore between these old silicon pillars once dedicated to the transmission of information and meaning, and with nothing to do since the catastrophe which had blown up, disintegrating the old spiderweb of W.W.W. Inc. In a corner crouches a machine, the last Turing machine, engrossed in the routine it will auto-exec. indefinitely. All the network nodes, except it, all the addresses, all the servers, all the routers, and all the terminals in the world are disconnected or melted away, the memories scrambled, evaporated in a tsunami of electromagnetic radiation. So, with the synthetic voice of Marylin Monroe which will come too late, like Madame de Staël discovering an affinity for German, a voice of Marlene Monroe, the machine incantates its eternal return. In the night without dawn, it pants in frantic curliness the last packet received, the dead letter of language: Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten Daß ich so traurig bin Ein Märchen ans alten Zeiten Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten Daß ich so traurig bin Ein Märchen ans alten Zeiten Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt Ein Märchen ans alten Zeiten Daß ich so traurig bin Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn