Surprise and Ambiguity

 

The chord between two scales

and the stripper's pants are both Ambiguities –

the changelings that bring Surprise, the deceivers that delay gratification, the Tricksters.

Teasing is fundamental. It is the call to that most basic of human hardwired archetypes – the tortuous path of the Quest.

It is the fundamental thing the Treasure does to the Hero.

And its importance lies not so much in the obtaining of the Treasure,

but what we experience along the way,

and how we react to

the Ambiguities.

 

And of course, it works both ways.

Every work of art, and every seduction has two sides.

The provider of the artwork, (or the seducer) is delaying satisfaction

while they unroll their hidden agenda, and attain their

Treasure too.

 

I think of the countless bookshops that fascinated and then mugged me,

relieving me of far more money than I ever intended to part with.

The work of art is the sugar coated viral shell,

and inside, the invading idea

or  meme.

 

Roland Barthes

 

Roland Barthes was  an influential French philosopher and semiotician

 from the later 20thC. He wrote many illuminating and entertaining articles on popular culture,

and a number of classic books. In his famous work ‘S/Z’  he examined

Balzac’s novel Sarrasine and showed how it was constructed, and why it was so effective.

 

The story is about a ‘castrato’ – a male singer whose boyish voice was preserved

by early castration – common in centuries gone by – not so common now!

The story maintains the secret of the castrato to near

 the end by introducing a series of Secrets,

and then delaying their revelation by a series of subterfuges

(snares, equivocations, partial answers, etc)

which Barthes reveals, line by line:

 

“Oh! What a beautiful painting!” she went on,

getting up and going to stand before a painting in a magnificent frame.

We stood for a moment in contemplation of this marvel,

which seemed to have been painted by some supernatural brush.

The picture was of Adonis lying on a lion’s skin.

[a new enigma, the fifth, is thematized here – who is this Adonis?]

 

The lamp hanging from the ceiling of the room in an alabaster globe

 illuminated this canvas with a soft glow which enabled us all to make out all the beauties of the painting.

“Does such a perfect creature exist?” she asked me,

[formulating the new enigma – does the model for the painting exist?]

 

after having, with a soft smile of contentment,

examined the exquisite grace of the contours, the pose, the color, the hair;

 in short, the entire picture.

“He is too beautiful for a man,” she added, after an examination such as she might have made of some rival.

[An equivocation: truth plus snare – saying that the Adonis is not a man

is part truth (he is a castrato), and in hinting he might really be a woman, a snare –

not true, sending the reader off on the wrong path]

……

“It’s a portrait,” I replied, “the product of the talent of Vien.

But that great painter never saw the original and maybe you’d admire it less

 if you knew that this daub was copied from the statue of a woman.”

[As Barthes explains – ‘The picture was copied from a statue true, but this statue

was copied from a false woman; in other words the statement is true

with regard only to the statue and false with regard to the woman…. Equivocation]

 

“But who is it?”

I hesitated.

“I want to know,” she added impetuously.

[Enigma 5 formulated again, with rising tension]

“I believe,” I replied, “that this Adonis is a. . .  relative of Mme de Lanty.”

[suspended answer,  and then a new enigma – who is Mme de Lanty?]

 

But Barthes does not leave it there.

He continues to delve into the nature of the equivocation. The mysterious subject of the story

is repeatedly referred to as apart from the others, between life and death,

supernatural, an excluded creature - but his sexual

status is hidden from us:

 

“Equivocation (often) consists in discerning genus (I am an excluded creature)

and silencing species (I am a castrato): one says the whole for the part, a synecdoche…”

 

 

In ‘S/Z’ , roland Barthes analyses

the way a Secret or enigma is maintained through a discourse,

by the use of what he refers to as

the hermeneutic code:

 

“just as rhyme… structures the poem

according to the expectation and desire for recurrence,

so the hermeneutic terms structure the enigma according to the expectation

and desire for its solution… the problem is to maintain

the enigma in the initial void of its answer;

whereas the sentences quicken the story’s “unfolding”

and cannot help but move the story along, the hermeneutic code

performs an opposite action: it must set up delays (obstacles, stoppages, deviations)

in the flow of the discourse… between question and answer there is a whole dilatory area

whose emblem might be named “reticence,”

 the rhetorical figure which interrupts the sentence, suspends it, turns it aside…

Whence, in the hermeneutic code, in comparison to these extreme forms (question and answer),

the abundance of dilatory morphemes:

the snare (a kind of deliberate evasion of the truth).

The equivocation (a mixture of truth and snare which frequently, while focussing on the enigma, helps to thicken it),

the partial answer (which only exacerbates the expectation of the truth),

the suspended answer  (an aphasic stoppage of the disclosure),

and jamming (acknowledgement of insolubility). "

 

[Barthes might have added here the introduction of a new enigma –

nesting a new enigma in the existing one is a most productive way to delay resolution of the secret.]

 

"The variety of these terms (their inventive range) attests to the considerable labor

the discourse must accomplish if it hopes to arrest the enigma, to keep it open.

Expectation thus becomes the basic condition for truth:

truth, these narratives tell us, is what is at the end of expectation.

This design brings narrative very close to the rite of initiation

(a long path marked with pitfalls, obscurities, stops, suddenly comes out into the light):

 it implies a return to order, for expectation is a disorder…” 

(Roland Barthes, ‘S/Z’, Blackwell 1990)

 

 

So one way to misdirect the spectator

 is by referring to species ‘a’ by naming its genus,

and giving the clue to the reader that the species being referred to is actually species ‘b’,

‘a’ and ‘b’ both being species in this genus.