How could a pain follow a pleasure if a thousand tiny pains or, rather, half-pains were not already dispersed in pleasure, which will then be united in conscious pain?

Gilles Deleuze

My fantasies
Have turned to madness
And all my goodness
Has turned to badness
My need to possess you
has consumed my soul
My life is trembling
I have no control

Animotion

The Litera(p)ture of Ontological Obsession

Here we are, delving deeper into the Mansion of Litera(p)ture, alcoves accelerating, its interior intermingling with the possible intrinsic dimensionality. So far we have checked out its enchanting Vestibule as well as Kitchen/Home Cinema full of dreamy desires. We shrug off the grogginess, the aftermath of potential overstimulation, for it’s no time for a break yet. The corridors are getting darker, they are almost pitch-black now. Where do they lead? Intuitively, we outstretch our arms, resembling tentative tentacles of a blind octopus, groping around for a remote determinant of direction or our whereabouts. Let’s hope we find a light switch fast and don’t crash into anything along the treacherous way. Or perhaps we should crash, after all?

Some novels are extremely approachable yet highly uncooperative. They welcome you with open arms only to dodge, duck, and finally flee from your reading embrace afterwards, snapping their vicious jaws of avoidance, simpering slyly. J. G. Ballard’s Crash is one of them. In the first half of the 70’s, when it first came out, its bizarre, perverse, electrifying charge must have been absolutely gnarly. I can see pulverized imaginations and overheated emotions of then readers left behind to rot in awe. But does the novel hold its own today? And, more importantly, what part of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture does it constitute?

The Slaughter of Infinities

A warm-up question: how come it’s so easy to discard countless factors of a given phenomenon just to deem it “graspable” by naming it? Why is it almost obligatory to hack through the halo of infinities radiating from any given thing in the world? An economy of thought? A safety mechanism preventing our brains from charring like a skin of an overdone pig on a roast? A necessity of being able to function in a hyperactive everyday environment? This slaughter of infinities always seemed to me as far too zealous. As if unintentional mindless eagerness, with which it has been perpetrated, took shape of a superfluous layer, as if addition meant subtracting not adding things together. Surprisingly, it is almost always the underlying reason for every obsession – we add by subtracting. For the sake of object of our infatuation, for which we are able to create unimaginable wonders, we loose touch with everything else. The constituents of our perceptions seem altered. The images are superimposed, the patterns of behavior – iterated, and, last but not least, our moral judgments – overlaid with doubtless self-assuredness, contradictory only to our previous assessments. We are literally someone else.

This is exactly the case with the protagonist and the antagonist of Crash – the obsessed duo of novel’s Great Attractors, if I may borrow the term from a more stellar domain. The former is James Ballard (I guess no disguises were used in the making of the narrator) – a producer of TV commercials – who miraculously survives a head-on collision, killing a man in the process. In spite of the fact that he has totaled his car, he gets out of it relatively unscathed – smashed kneecaps, a gargantuan bruise on the abdomen from impacting a steering wheel and a deep laceration on the scalp are the only injuries he sustains. On the other hand, the antagonist – Robert Vaughan, PhD. – an ex-computer scientist whose area of expertise comprised the implementation of computerized processes to administer all international traffic systems – is a walking map of car crash injuries. But it’s not his scarred body what fascinates the most – it’s who he has become: automobile accidents fetishist, to put it mildly. I don’t want to reveal too much plot. Let me just say, that Vaughan is totally consumed by his obsession to die in a car crash with a famous movie star Elizabeth Taylor. And Ballard becomes more and more obsessed with Vaughan…

The Crawlspace with Translucent Walls

The most fascinating thing about obsession is its creative part. As both Ballard and Vaughan are spiraling down into the bloated world of perverse, the latter serving as a mentor to the former, the ceiling of their worldview gets lower and lower. The height of the first floor of their own baroque houses is being set. It consists solely of an overbearing crawlspace – stuffy, crummy and dusty, yet transfixing, absorbing and bewitching. With their minds altered and hell-bent on making their exploratory visions come true, they begin to add. Just as the not-so-innocent trinity of protagonists from The Dreamers reduced themselves to the minute and dark perceptions, their modus operandi being debauchery in their own triangular circle (now, that’s one resplendent imaginary competition to squaring the circle!), Ballard and Vaughan push the limits of darkness and minuteness even further. They shut themselves off so thoroughly form other infinities offered by the outside world, they are bound to engage in it on their own alternate terms. After all, the nature of things hates vacuum; its folds are – surprise, surprise! – infinite. Ballard and Vaughan’s excesses are sparking new infinities, but due to the fact they are born by obsession, their “geometry” is different. I don’t want to say flat, but it is the first adjective that comes to mind. For example, when Ballard’s wife Catherine ends up having sex on the backseat of Vaughan’s Lincoln Continental (the same generation in which Kennedy was shot) with its scarified owner, and Ballard is peeping them in the rear-view mirror, the latter’s sensations and perceptions of Vaughan’s scars in geometrical relation to the various instruments of the car interior, which allegedly create new possible designs of pleasure, don’t seem too convincing. Then again, I am not obsessed with car crashes, so what do I know, right? Lucky for me, the walls of their crawlspace are diaphanous, so at least I can sense what it may seem to mean.

So what’s with this murky idea of translucency of walls of their crawlspace, of their technosexually motorized obsession? It’s as simple as it gets. Obsession doesn’t give a shit about anything anymore. It’s as blatantly evident as two plus two equals four. It never resorts to any social masquerades, isn’t subjugated to some fanciful behavioral smokescreens. One wears it on one’s sleeve. However, the walls might be translucent, but are not permeable. You cannot (and almost always simply don’t want to) join this flat universe of extreme extravagance. Unless you fall for obsession of your own, whose premises are identical to those which founded the circle of infatuation you are, by then, bound to join. For obsessed individuals find each other unwillingly, almost miraculously, just like artists who leave a lasting impact on culture do. That’s all there is to it, really.

The Obsession of the Outside

Deleuze writes:

For Leibniz, to the contrary, monads exclude only universes that are incompossible with their world, and all those that exist express the same world without exclusion. As this world does not exist outside of the monads that express it, the latter are not in contact and have no horizontal relations among them, no intraworldly connections, but only an indirect harmonic contact to the extent they share the same expression: they express one another without harnessing each other.

But what about the “revenge” of incompossible worlds? Are obsessed individuals free to do whatever they will, all conveniently nestled within the realm of their flat infinities? Near the end of Crash, Ballard and Vaughan are very far from not harnessing each other. As if something outside of the monads is to have the last laugh. Now, that sentence is something which would make Leibniz tear his wig out. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t forget that Ballard and Vaughan, just as Isabelle, Théo and Matthew, are not monads anymore. They are demonadized modes of obsessive expression, wayward explorers of the frantic flat infinities of future technological desires. Their obsessions add so much, by subtracting all there has ever been, that their minute and dark perceptions project new configuration of separate reality. Their crawlspace breaks free from them and suddenly expands, self-sustained and imponderable, looming large, totally out of spatial control, incompossible with its postmonadic origin of convoluted obsessions. Nevertheless, thanks to its transparent walls, we, who aren’t obsessed (or whose own private infatuations lie elsewhere), may witness the tingling sensations Ballard and Vaughan are conjuring up before our very eyes. Their obsessive crawlspace is situated perfectly outside of us, yet we are able to remain within its apparition – the Crawlspace of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture.

Spanking in Tongues?

All thanks to Ballard’s (the author, not the protagonist this time) literary style. The narration consists of descriptive dryness, terse and virtually nonexistent dialogues and an overwhelming sensation of inexplicable, alienating, foreboding oddity. Everything seems singular in Crash, visually eviscerated, metaphysically separated. The impending drives of technosexuality are a jarring, jagged premonition of postmodern landscape. Traffic congestion, overpasses, hard shoulders, perimeter fences, flyovers, median strips are all too material to become truly substantial and, thus, unable to convey any meaning, to constitute palpable surroundings other than a gruesome dehumanized stage for horrific roll-over or fatal pile-up collisions. No wonder one of the most convenient books used as an interpreting tool on Crash is Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. However insightful Baudrillard’s work may be, I am going to skip it. One Frenchman at a time. Especially, when the one I have been quoting all along, heartily refers to individuals from other countries:

For with Leibniz the question surges forth in philosophy that will continue to haunt Whitehead and Bergson: not how to attain eternity, but in what conditions does the objective world allow for a subjective production of novelty, that is, of creation? The best of all worlds had no other meaning: it was neither the least abominable nor the least ugly, but the one whose All granted a production of novelty, a liberation of true quanta of “private”subjectivity (…).The best of all worlds is not the one that reproduces the eternal, but the one in which new creations are produced, the one endowed with a capacity for innovation or creativity.

Ballard (again, the author, not the protagonist), by sheer coincidence, hits the bullseye with narration. However, its novelty doesn’t lie within itself. Crash doesn’t strut with a gait of bombastic form. There are no narrative loops, nor double or triple twist endings. The characters are groomed with conventional literary utensils of moderation and plot utilitarianism (excluding their obsession, that is). The novelty lies outside Crash. In sensations which the book ignites within the reader. Naturally, not in every reader, just as not everyone is prone to obsession. But those of you who are, brace yourselves, should you choose to hitch a ride with Ballard and Vaughan. The expressways meandering through the Crawlspace of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture – robust and vast, twisted and irresistible, infatuating and fateful – await! Just don’t forget to fasten your seatbelts.

Amonne Purity

You were the baby of the class you know
You were so young and so uncertain
Suffer little children
Oh what a poor soul

Erasure

Hey now, hey now
Don’t dream, it’s over.

Crowded House

The Litera(p)ture of Ontological Desire

Or should I have written The Holy Innocents (1988) Redux, perhaps? For when Gilbert Adair’s agent was approached by Jeremy Thomas – a British movie producer of such memorable flicks like Oscar-ridden The Last Emperor, totally whacky Naked Lunch, or Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence – one of only six movies in which David Bowie starred as a male lead – and acknowledged that Bernardo Bertolucci himself was not only whetting his appetite for the movie adaptation of the novel, but also wished Adair wrote a screenplay, the British author immediately gave in, tempted by the occasion to rewrite and re-entitle or – as he himself put it – “overwrite” The Holy Innocents with which he had grown strangely dissatisfied. That’s pretty much how The Dreamers came to life.

The above lightweight “forewordy” anecdote straight from the cinema world was a bit telltale, as you will see for yourselves in a minute or two. But now, let’s face the slight inconvenience with continuity… Each and every time, a flawless attention to detail is needed to deject the possibility of stirring up the atmosphere of the scene, the vibe of the plot, the general ambience of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture. Ah, yesss… The Baroque House buffed up, unfolded, the premises (here, the double meaning in full bloom) of its geometry based upon smoldering glances of the Silver Screen starlets… We leave its enchanting foreground of Frothy Vestibule and, with our hearts pounding wildly, as if a hummingbird on coke desired to outflutter its ever-eager wings, enter another room. What is it?

The Kitchen-sink (Ir)realism

The common knowledge says most accidents occur at home. Leaving the statistics for more justified and rational circumstances, what room seems to be the most dangerous, then? Garage? Nah. Not everyone likes tinkering with their cars, motorcycles, lawnmowers, etc. until the wee hours of the morning. Besides, not everybody even has one. Bathroom? Sounds pretty tempting. Mop the floor and you’ll end up having splendidly unassuming, leg-breaking, concussion-inducing trap (yellow Slippery When Wet signs are good for public places and names for Bon Jovi LP’s). Blow dry your hair while having a bath and chances are you’ll turn into a piece of toast. But still, my best bet is kitchen. You hang out in there a lot, not only during dinner time, but also casually, without any particular reason, popping in for a sandwich, for a sip of milk, for a few grapes from a fruit tray, and so on. It is a store for various potentially harmful utensils (knives, cleavers, graters, potato peelers, can openers, meat forks and tenderizers, ice picks [Sharon, calm down and keep your legs crossed!], pizza cutters, rolling pins, seafood shears, etc.), appliances (pressure cookers, meat and coffee grinders, blenders, microwaves, deep fryers) as well as hazardous elements of the interior “landscape” (scalding hot oil, boiling water, preheated ovens, baking pans with apple pies inside them, cooling down on windowsills). A dangerous place, indeed. Just like desire could be…

The Dreamers takes place in Paris in a turbulent spring of 1968. Ahhh, the late 60’s – the last epoch of human naivety, its last caprice of innocence. The innocence of a belief that the status quo of existential habits and the rules of the game called Civilization are correctable, ready to alter on a whim. That the new ensuing set of meta-practices and post-values implemented in place of the old ones – trashed and heaped up mercilessly at the junkyard of obsolete customs and overwrought thoughts – would suffice. That the Jungian collective unconsciousness will not fall victim to the brute, boorish, myopic impotence of the revolution. That the unus mundus – one world – hypothesis and other “uncharted territories” of reality are going to stand still or lie dormant while that highfalutin hullabaloo hurls around and wreaks havoc in the name of not that well thought out progress, without any consequences. That the revolutionaries themselves are courageous and prodigious enough not to become cowardly prodigal sons of unforeseen twists of fate, and persistent enough not to get pranked by the good old chaos. For it takes infinite strength of will to bear in mind (let alone handling it in reality!) the raving intricacies of contingency, the embodiment of haphazard turn of events lying ahead as a consequence of each and every conceivable, radical deed. One false move – hell, one right move, too! – and all goes down the drain, to which the instigators, perpetrators, agent provocateurs would react with boohoohoo faces of a brainwashed clockwork Alex. But all of the above is rather an irrelevant, second-rate dimension, like a texture of the tiles on the kitchen floor. The real desire of The Dreamers lies somewhere else – among the trio of protagonists. What happens between them is the ontological constituent of the Mansion’s Kitchen.

Isabelle, Théo and Matthew. The first two are 17-year-old nonidentical twins, a progeny of an exceptionally rare breed of artist – a materialistically successful poet. The third one – a student from San Diego, one year older than the siblings, rather namby-pamby, definitely bashful and psychologically timorous – is of a bourgeoisie or, in terms of the wild wild West, middle class origin. All three of them are movie buffs of the kind which not only flabbergast people with their extensive knowledge of cinema, but also ignite fierce pangs of jealousy among other movie maniacs (all right, all right, I admit I inferred that conclusion from my own envy – I consider myself “movie buff light”…). The amateur gang of celluloid fetishists frequent the most famous of all film archives in the world – Cinémathèque Française – where other cinephiles roam as wild horses did back in the day. After the spontaneous reenactment of one of the most memorable scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s movie Band of Outsiders – speed-visiting Louvre – our fidgety trio, under unexpectedly favorable conditions (the poet dad and subservient mom need to take refuge in their summer house outside Paris, for he has to put finishing touches to his latest work, undisturbed by the clinking clanking collection of caliginous distractions the capital of France provides bountifully), obfuscate itself to form a half-incestuous ménage à trois.

The Dark Decor of Desire

Deleuze writes:

Now we can return to perception. All monads express the whole world darkly, even if not in the same order. Each one encloses in itself the infinity of minute perceptions. They cannot be distinguished by weakness or strength. What distinguishes them is their zone of clear, remarkable, or privileged expression. Ultimately, “totally naked monads” (lacking this zone of light) might be conceived. They would live in darkness or near-darkness, in the vertigo and giddiness of minute and dark perceptions. No differential mechanism of reciprocal determination would come to select a few of these tiny perceptions in order to extract a clear perception. They would have nothing remarkable about them.

How kind and thoughtful of Gilles – helping me out like that! For our very naughty trio descends into or, rather, strips itself down exactly to the dimension of “minute and dark perceptions”. The teenagers “(de)monadize” themselves by virtue of fancy game Isabelle names Home Movies. The rules are pretty simple: each of the profligate participants reenacts – without fixed turns, while going about their daily routine – a movie scene spurred by tiny associations, petite recollections, negligible gestures they once observed on the silver screen and, out of the blue, recalled. If a challenged player, handpicked by the “actor” to guess the movie the reenacted scene comes from, fails to do so, he or she forfeits. It is precisely the nature of said forfeits that illustrates another trait of the Kitchen, ever more randy, lewd and debauched with every game of Home Movies going on – the metamorphosis into a Home Cinema with a bar in the back.

For nobody has claimed The Mansion of Litera(p)ture is insusceptible to shape shifting. Just as our Vestibule (via Vian’s Froth on the Daydream) revolved around enchantment and the silver screen smoldering glances (what a premonition, by the way!), as an underlying metaphysical rule on how should we try to imagine the geometry of the Mansion, here, in the Kitchen/Home Cinema, the rules are different. The sensations, “minute and dark perceptions”, now taken not as a monadic seeming-in-the-world, “trembling” of “concentration, accumulation, coincidence of a certain number of converging preindividual singularities”, but as metaphysical, nonhuman “bricks” with which our Mansion has been constructed, begin to oscillate, attract each other, dance and breed yet another wants and cravings for new rules to push the (r?)evolution of the Mansion further.

The Baroque solution is the following: we shall multiply principles – we can always slip a new one out from under our cuffs – and in this way we will change their use. We will not have to ask what available object corresponds to a given luminous principle, but what hidden principle responds to whatever object is given, that is to say, to this or that “perplexing case.” Principles as such will be put to a reflective use. A case being given, we shall invent its principle. It is a transformation from Law to universal Jurisprudence.

The letters which seduce with their nauseating nocuous nocturnes of wet dreams. The sentences like femmes fatales, irresistibly tempting, yet tempestuous and pesky – the unhinged sources of unending temptation and trepidation. Paragraphs resembling whores in skimpy thongs giving throbbing throngs of incessant excitement, leaving you senseless or “senseful”, depending on whether you gave or received. Chapters, a double-crossing, conniving chaperones, Marquises de Merteuils of intrigues, cold-hearted malevolent succubi of emotional scumbaggery, donned in an elaborate and eloquent elegance of linguistic exuberance. Look! The lights have just dimmed down! The séance is about to begin. What is it going to be? A movie Travis Bickle took Betsy to watch on their date? Whose hand is going to land on your knee and slowly creep upwards in a spidery, sliding manner, in a vein the Engineer chased Kristy in The Hellraiser?…

Cooling off a bit, no wonder Isabelle, Théo and Matthew – our ever less innocent, or shall we simply say “nocent”, cherubs of bawdy, lascivious activities – were bound to fall for the metamorphosis of the Mansion’s Kitchen. They now serve a double purpose as multipliers of new rules – the bawdy brood of “minute and dark perceptions” – as well as – on the other hand, eliding their monadic qualities, quantities and convergent singularities – metaphysical “architects”, who erect the rapturous, luscious edifice of Home Cinema. Unfortunately, this spectacular feat occurs WITHIN the enclosed reality of Isabelle and Théo’s parents roomy apartment. The minute our exmonadic rule makers and raunchy terraformers step outside their finite alternative world, they clash with more spacious, more capricious and more unforgiving revolutionary reality. They are willing to comply, they try to conform (Oh, Sweetest Irony! Why are you not my one and only love!?). Alas, in the end, with their jaws (r/de?)evolved into mere mechanical valves of pleasure, they bite more than they could chew. With their (In)nocence lost, the dream is over…

Yet, our séance continues. The Mansion hollers ontological piquancy and purrs literary terms of endearment, with a sultry murmur. They nestle into our earlobes. There are corridors to stride, other rooms to explore. We get up from the chaise lounge of the in-house Silver Screen. We come over to the bar in the back and pour ourselves a shot of whiskey, to gather up. Where would the exit of Home Cinema lead us to? Just you wait and see…

Amonne Purity

First, a couple of explanatory sentences. Every now and then comes a time when one simply knows the end is near. The curtain falls. But before it does, there need to be something left behind. It is an obligation which rejects any doubt as to the necessity of its happening. The last chef d’oeuvre, the swan song – no, wait! – the swan opera. The following text is the first “installment” or – if we follow the trail commenced by the crucial term above – the “overture” of my farewell. So buckle up or sprawl on your couch, if you like. The ugly duckling has finally metamorphosed. And it sings…

Angel made in heaven
All I want is your love
Gimme some of the action, reaction

Erasure

The Litera(p)ture of Ontological Enchantment

In 1988, my favorite philosopher of late – Gilles Deleuze – published one of the most intellectually enthralling books I have ever read: The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. This brilliant lecture not only on notions of Baroque traits and characteristics as an epoch in general, not only on marvelous audacity and holistic tenacity of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s thought, but also a splendid example of Deleuze’s own interpreting prowess, with a prominent allegory of the Baroque House at the forefront – an ample approximation of how human being functions as a Monad – the key concept of Leibniz’s philosophy. This and many more scintillating profundities left me in a state of titillating rapture. I, being a bookworm par excellence, smitten by explosiveness of ruminations, with which The Fold… filled me to the brim, suddenly felt the inexplicable surge in infatuation towards literature, which was even more intense than my usual outbursts of tenderness towards it. So strong was the said affinity it resembled almost some kind of premonition. I just knew something was in store for me. All I had to do was keep my eyes open. So I kept them open. And then it hit me like a stray, flamboyant meteorite, propelled by Deleuze’s high-octane book and my ongoing rapture. The litera(p)ture…

Taking a simultaneous ride on the Ferris wheel of pondering and the roller coaster of excitation, I began mulling over the imaginary endeavor – to take Deleuzian allegory and “redecorate” it with the newly coined term as a heavenly guideline. The problem was I didn’t have any “materials”. Nevertheless, being a firm believer in serendipity, I wasn’t to be left at the mercy of chance. I quickly recalled I had had spectacular (mis)adventures with Nabokov’s Pale Fire which I happened to mention back in the day on one occasion, which have recently been somehow rejuvenated by yet another novel. Both of them, on a completely compossible plain or, rather, fold of perception, escorted me to a path, which in turn led me to the right confluence, allowing me to pick up the best novels along the way and compose my grandest literary ornament so far. The first of the books in question – the “overture” of my farewell opera – is Boris Vian’s 1947 novel Froth on the Daydream.

Entering the Baroque House

I have never shunned from my irrational fascination for metaphysics. The surreal depth of thought it offers, when favorable mental conditions meet appropriate stimuli of questions, always bedazzles, befuddles and bamboozles me thoroughly. Because of it, oftentimes I am hot under the collar, have ants in my pants. I exude overeagerness to ask further questions, to speculate boldly and without an ounce of hesitation, and extend my chain of thoughts via the wild new variety of unpredictable associations. However, the best, the icing-on-a-cake type of sensation I get out of metaphysics is during those rare moments when I see something completely unexpected somewhere where there was no telling in doing so whatsoever. When all the ensuing jumble of jubilation makes me jump out of my bed, for I always read in horizontal position. That was the case with The Fold… It cast a spell on me. It teleported me before the Baroque House itself. I stood in front of it, among the shrubs sheared with pious pruning passion of Edward Scissorhands. I regarded the edifice of the House. Its first floor wide, spacious, with several windows up front, some of them claustrophobically tiny, others gargantuan in size. The second floor, strangely soaring, skyscraper-ish, windowless. It resembled a body of an old overgrown smock mill without the sails. I was enchanted. Breaking off from the mesmerizing stupor, though only slightly, I set my eyes on the main door. The double rectangle of old oak wood pulsed and breathed. Videodrome style. It summoned me. And I stepped inside…

The best and most vivid representation of this rather anthropomorphic yet, on the other hand, simple entrance to the Baroque House of Litera(p)ture is Froth on the Daydream. Vian’s best known work is the finest example of what does it mean for a novel to confirm that something exists without neither material nor spiritual proof (let alone diligently discarding necessity to justify a “taking-it-for-granted” mode of existence). The book doesn’t have to do anything. It just is. Its qualities are pure. The story the Frenchman subjects us to (here, without the nasty connotation the “subject someone to” expression entails by default) is even purer, yet it makes us wander among thoughts and wonder on the fringes of imagination. The Lewis Carroll-ish language conjures up the Wonderland-like world with remarkable ease and without much ado (eels living in sewers being caught using pineapples, ice rink commuters stretching out due to velocities attained on ice, pianocktail concocting fancy cocktails out of fine tunes and even finer spirits, junctiquitarian forced to overbid due to customer’s munificence when bargaining, snow-moles with marmalade furs and noisy dispositions snooping around, rozza-erasers being pulled on rozzers, etc.) – as well as paints hearty, honest, oftentimes absurd exchanges between characters. But this is only the beginning.

There is this oldie with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak entitled Strangers When We Meet which tells a story of a love affair between two married neighbors. And… that’s it. There’s nothing more. The movie consists only of the said fornication. Of course, there are some additional events within the story which lead to its melodramatic end, some qualities (like wooden acting on Novak’s part) constituting the “meat” of the movie, however they somehow disappear, as if gobbled up by the wholeness and simplicity of the main idea – the love affair in itself. In the same vein, Froth on the Daydream is the story of falling in love and nothing else (notwithstanding the fact, that, in truth, there is more to it than meets the eye). This paradox of having and not having anything else is the main latch on the entrance door to the enchantment. It is, in turn, the first of the openings to our redecorated Baroque House.

The Litera(p)turous interior

The unfolding of love in Froth on the Daydream composes the vestibule of our inflected lathery den. It is reciprocated, the love, free from the deathly torments of its murky, gloomy, unrequited opposite. Wholeheartedness, honesty, exultation, elation, delight – these are the words that come to mind when we recall the suave and chic fondling of reality procured by Colin and Chick – our two main male characters. The willingness, eagerness, the sheer hankering for love exhibited by the former, and the ongoing double limerence of the latter toward Lisa – his girlfriend – and Jean Pulse Hearte’s (sic! [if I may throw in a multi-faceted pun – almost noseating 😉 ) literary and philosophical output – are not only as straight as an arrow, but also surprisingly tender. Suddenly, we are beginning to pine for something similar for us to happen. Colin’s conjugation of the verb “to wish” at the beginning of the chapter X seems almost like a prayer or a chant, which is only one vowel and consonant away from our crucial verb “to enchant”… Not too many pages later do we realize we have already fallen under the spell of the novel, lithely, along a new fold…

Long story short, the characters are purely positive. Even when they do questionable or outright malevolent deeds, they are momentarily and miraculously excused. Vian achieved something truly remarkable – he created dramatis personae lacking in qualitative spectrum yet being able to shine bright with integrity exempt from the one-dimensional naivety and symbolism of fable heroes and heroines. Colin, Chick, Chloe, Nicolas, Lisa and Isis neither fumble with nor fume at themselves, neither forbid themselves, nor resort to pretentious altercations within confines of their psyche, yet they are solidified, far from paper-thin, trite literary machinations a certified bungler would pen. They invoke one charming association – a soft focus photography. The colors of sensations Froth on the Daydream invokes are pastel-like, bland, almost bleached, yet their atmosphere is dreamy, slightly shifted, as if expectant. Why is it so?

The geometry within the Mansion of Litera(p)ture

The end (taken literally here) justifies the means. Thus, I am going to quote Deleuze verbatim in order to show you the “point of departure” of my redecoration of the Baroque House:

Yet the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity. First, the Baroque differentiates its folds in two ways, by moving along two infinities, as if infinity were composed of two stages or floors: the pleats of matter, and the folds in the soul. Below, matter is amassed according to a first type of fold, and then organized according to a second type, to the extent its part constitutes organs that are “differently folded and more or less developed.'” Above, the soul sings of the glory of God inasmuch as it follows its own folds, but without succeeding in entirely developing them, since “this communication stretches out indefinitely”.

All we need to do is shift the allegory, push and shove it into something more… seductive. The Baroque House ceases to be the allegory of monadic human being. With all of its intricacies and generalizations, nuances and totalities, fluxes and influxes, flexibility and rigidity, redundancies and quintessences, modes of repetitiveness and one-time ingenuity, etc., ad infinitum, the Baroque House turns into a Mansion of Litera(p)ture. Our senses do not unfurl to infinities, swirling and swinging along right to the top room of the soul floor, do not occupy the interior of the first floor. Their motion of riding the wave, trailing along the ever-infinite folds, is overtaken by the geometry of literary intensity.

A cavalcade of immediate questions comes tumbling down on us. What does this new geometry look like? What is it based on? Does it have preferable shapes? What kind of topology of the ontology of letters is permissible here, on the premises? Is it dual? Does the Mansion retain two storys? Why is it based on intensity? Imagine a flicker in the eye casting a smoldering glance, just like the one in the Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s painting The Love Letter, or the other, half-coyly half-blatantly peering from behind a slit in a wavy blonde curtain of a peekaboo hair of Hollywood’s Golden Age star Veronica Lake. Imagine the alluring light of its sparks, the immediacy of shadows permeating your retinas, flirting with an opacity of their possible reciprocation, and their raucous triumph, thundering silently somewhere else, where prepositions give birth to the next generation of word allocations – a grand yet straightforward spaces of sentences to be, to denote, to invoke, to delineate, to subvert, to encrypt, to celebrate, to joke, to multiply, etc. Imagine the geometry of longing for the plausible beginnings of whatever you wished them to begin, as enchanted as Colin was when he danced with Chloe for the first time, as enchanted as I was “enliteraptured” while reading Froth on the Daydream, as enchanted as I wish you truly were at least once in a lifetime. I know you can sense what it all looks like, but are unable to describe it using mere hackneyed words of old. Lucky for us, the true enchantment hates descriptions and loves turning into mutual desire. It craves, covets, yearns to do so with every fiber, every fold of its post-infinity. So keep your eyes open. The Vestibule, the Overture ends here, but the desire that follows is nearer than you think…

Amonne Purity