"This hot, dependent orator": shifting narrative stance and the collision of speaker and reader in 'Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1996 by Jonathan Ausubel

But Notes has barely begun. After propounding the sauvage lion, elephant, and bear, the pedant continues to mock the ephebe:

You lie

In silence upon your bed. You clutch the corner Of the pillow in your hand. You writhe and press A bitter utterance from your writhing, dumb,

Yet voluble dumb violence. You look Across the roofs as sigil and as ward And in your centre mark them and are cowed. . . (I.v)

The enjambment of "You lie" suggests the double-edged meaning of the passage: the ephebe is at once a fool exposed by the pedant and a man trapped in a room of his own, in a way of thinking,(4) to be educated out of ignorance. Paradoxically, the way out of ignorance is the way in: "You must become an ignorant man again" (I.i) because "Ignorance is one of the sources of poetry" (OP 173). As the pedant realizes he cannot educate the ephebe into ignorance, his severity lessens, a shift in tone noted by both Rajeev S. Patke (125) and Schwarz, who observes that Notes moves from the imperative to a "common ground" (186). By the end of "It Must Be Abstract," the pedant's commands to the ephebe have softened and his mocking questions ("May there be an ennui of the first idea? / What else, prodigious scholar, should there be?" [I.ii]) abated: the. ephebe is instructed simply "to make" of the man "In that old coat, those sagging pantaloons," "to confect / The final elegance, not to console / Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound" (I.x). Here is one lesson the student-reader cannot copy from the board and later regurgitate, a lesson in which the ephebe's suggestions are as potent as the pedant's pronouncements.

The pedant's position is untenable; since his relation to the ephebe is highly constructed, it cannot participate in the supreme fiction, which must be discovered, not built. Statements to this effect abound in Notes, most clearly with the introduction of characters such as the Chaplinesque man, Canon Aspirin, MacCullough, the President, and General Du Puy. Once the Canon has chosen "amassing harmony" (III.vi), the narrator chides him for imposing order:

to impose is not To discover. To discover an order as of A season, to discover summer and know it,

To discover winter and know it well, to find, Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, Out of nothing to have come on major weather. . . (III.vii)

In this light, we can see why many of the characters of Notes are unsatisfactory. As Canon Aspirin imposes order, so the MacCullough is imposed: "Can we compose a castle-fortress-home, / Even with the help of Viollet-le-Duc, / And set the MacCullough there as major man?" (I.viii) Clearly, the MacCullough will not serve since he is mythologized, "an expedient" toward the supreme fiction, with an insipid "Incipit." Despite his demotion from the MacCullough to MacCullough, MacCullough can only imitate, evidencing the shortcoming of the student who regurgitates: "He might take habit . . . Of greater aptitude and apprehension" from the book he reads or from the ocean by which he lounges. It is notable that the whole MacCullough passage is framed hypothetically, alive in possibility only: the MacCullough is a "crystal hypothesis"; the "double in the word" remains "latent":