How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays (14 page)

As a result, you will approach your fax machine every morning and find it swamped with messages that have accumulated during the night. Naturally, you throw them away without having read them. But suppose someone close to you wants to inform you that you have inherited ten million dollars from an uncle in America, but on condition that you visit a notary before eight o'clock: if the well-meaning friend finds the line busy, you don't receive the information in time. If someone
has
to get in touch with you, then, he has to do so by mail. The fax is becoming the medium of trivial messages, just as the automobile has become the means of slow travel, for those who have time to waste and want to spend long hours in gridlocked traffic, listening to Mozart or Dire Straits.

Finally, the fax introduces a new element into the dynamics of nuisance. Until today, the bore, if he wanted to irritate you, paid (for the phone call, the postage stamp, the taxi to bring him to your doorbell). But now you contribute to the expense, because you're the one who buys the fax paper.

How can you react? I have already had letterhead printed with the warning "Unsolicited faxes are automatically destroyed," but I don't think that's enough. If you want my advice, I'd suggest keeping your fax disconnected. If someone has to send you something, he has to call you first and ask you to connect the machine. Of course, this can overload the telephone line. It would be best for the person who has to send a fax to write you first. Then you can answer, "Send your message via fax Monday at 5.05.27
P.M.,
Greenwich mean time, when I will connect the machine for precisely four minutes and thirty-six seconds."

1989

It is easy to take cheap shots at the owners of cellular phones. But before doing so, you should determine to which of the five following categories they belong.

First come the handicapped. Even if their handicap is not visible, they are obliged to keep in constant contact with their doctor or the 24-hour medical service. All praise, then, to the technology that has placed this beneficent instrument at their service. Second come those who, for serious professional reasons, are required to be on call in case of emergency (fire chiefs, general practitioners, organ-transplant specialists always awaiting a fresh corpse, or President Bush, because if he is ever unavailable, the world falls into the hands of Quayle). For them the portable phone is a harsh fact of life, endured, but hardly enjoyed. Third, adulterers. Finally, for the first time in their lives, they are able to receive messages from their secret lover without the risk that family members, secretaries, or malicious colleagues will intercept the call. It suffices that the number be known only to him and her (or to him and him, or to her and her: I can't think of any other possible combinations). All three categories listed above are entitled to our respect. Indeed, for the first two we are willing to be disturbed even while dining in a restaurant, or during a funeral; and adulterers are very discreet, as a rule.

Two other categories remain. These, in contrast, spell trouble (for us and for themselves as well). The first comprises those persons who are unable to go anywhere unless they have the possibility of chattering about frivolous matters with the friends and relations they have just left. It is hard to make them understand why they shouldn't do it. And finally, if they cannot resist the compulsion to interact, if they cannot enjoy their moments of solitude and become interested in what they themselves are doing at that moment, if they cannot avoid displaying their vacuity and, indeed, make it their trademark, their emblem, well, the problem must be left to the psychologist. They irk us, but we must understand their terrible inner emptiness, be grateful we are not as they are, and forgive them—without, however, gloating over our own superior natures, and thus yielding to the sins of spiritual pride and lack of charity. Recognize them as your suffering neighbor, and turn the other ear.

In the last category (which includes, on the bottom rung of the social ladder, the purchasers of fake portable phones) are those people who wish to show in public that they are greatly in demand, especially for complex business discussions. Their conversations, which we are obliged to overhear in airports, restaurants, or trains, always involve monetary transactions, missing shipments of metal sections, an unpaid bill for a crate of neckties, and other things that, the speaker believes, are very Rockefellerian.

Now, helping to perpetuate the system of class distinctions is an atrocious mechanism ensuring that, thanks to some atavistic proletarian defect, the nouveau riche, even when he earns enormous sums, won't know how to use a fish knife or will hang a plush monkey in the rear window of his Ferrari or put a San Gennaro on the dashboard of his private jet, or (when speaking his native Italian) use English words like "management." Therefore he will not be invited by the Duchesse de Guermantes (and he will rack his brain trying to figure out why not; after all, he has a yacht so long it could almost serve as a bridge across the English Channel).

What these people don't realize is that Rockefeller doesn't need a portable telephone; he has a spacious room full of secretaries so efficient that at the very worst, if his grandfather is dying, the chauffeur comes and whispers something in his ear. The man with power is the man who is not required to answer every call; on the contrary, he is always—as the saying goes—in a meeting. Even at the lowest managerial level, the two symbols of success are a key to the executive washroom and a secretary who asks, "Would you care to leave a message?"

So anyone who flaunts a portable phone as a symbol of power is, on the contrary, announcing to all and sundry his desperate, subaltern position, in which he is obliged to snap to attention, even when making love, if the CEO happens to telephone; he has to pursue creditors day and night to keep his head above water; and he is persecuted by the bank, even at his daughter's First Holy Communion, because of an overdraft. The fact that he uses, ostentatiously, his cellular phone is proof that he doesn't know these things, and it is the confirmation of his social banishment, beyond appeal.

1991

The literature on the Italian sestina by the anonymous "Autore della Civetta"
¹
now fills a not inconsiderable shelf, so anyone essaying a
Rezep-tionsgeschichte
of this brief but significant poem cannot fail, in taking on the mantle of its doxologist, to come up against a certain amount of touchy expertise.

Still, with all due respect to our illustrious predecessors and contemporaries, it may not be without some interest to repeat here the text that has inspired so many different interpretative readings, the nude simulacrum of the
jouissances
that are eluded there, writing and graphos, significant passage, imago, and perhaps phantom.
²

Let us first consider the text-ture of the definitive version that Segre,
³
with fastidious precision, established as long ago as 1970:

Amharabà ciccì coccò,
tre civette sul comò
che facevano l'amore
con la figlia del dottore.
Ma la mamma le chiamò...
Ambarabà ciccì coccò.

(
literal translation:
Ambarabà ciccì coccò
three snow owls on the chest of drawers
that were making love
with the daughter of the doctor.
But the mama called them...
Ambarabà ciccì coccò)

A certain number of versions of this sestina exist in other languages,
à savoir
the French version produced by the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle. It reads as follows:

Ambaraba cici coco,
trois chouettes qui font dodo
en baisant sur la commode
une fille très à la mode.
Mais maman cria aussitôt:
Ambaraba cici coco!

Note the loss of the informative "figlia del dottore" (literally "daughter of the doctor"), restored at the connotative level, however, through the reference to a girl of independent behavior.
⁴
Then there is an anonymous German version, not without some influence of Hugo Ball and perhaps, to a keen and sensitive ear, an authoritative hint of Christian Morgenstern.

Ambaraba Zi Zi Koko,
Drei Käuze auf dem Vertiko,
Die legten sich aufs Ohr
Mit der Tochter vom Doktor,
Doch da schrie die Mutter so.
Ambaraba Zi Zi Koko!

More interesting in its poetic achievement, though surely
extra moenia
as far as the laws of gender and the complex of extratextual references are concerned, is the translation that the distinguished novelist and scholar Erica Jong attributes to a mysterious Count Palmiro Vicarion.
⁵

There were three old Owls of Storrs
screwing a Girl on a big Chest of Drawers.
But the Maid was the Daughter
of a Doctor, and their Mother
cried: "Come back, lousy Owls of Storrs!"

Returning to the original, Italian text, we encounter immediately the problem that has so vexed critics: the matter of date. Although the alliteration in the first and last verses prompted Vossler, some time ago, to posit echoes of proto-Latin literature, in particular the
Carmen Fratrum Arvalium,
⁶
it is beyond doubt that the sestina cannot date from before the foundation of the University of Bologna, since the girl could then not be described as daughter of a "doctor."
⁷
It is true, however, as Stanley Fish revealed in his magisterial study
⁸
of the variants of the poem, that in an early manuscript the third verse does not read "che facevano l'amore" (who were making love) but rather "che facevano l'errore" (who were doing wrong), implying that, rather than making love, they were committing a sin. Thus the sense of love as
crimen
is in no way diminished; if anything, it is reinforced by the subtly moralistic allusion—and thus, as anyone can see, in replacing
errore
by
amore
only in the successive version, the anonymous Author achieved a remarkable paronomasia with the
chiamò
of the fifth verse, creating a metaplastic antithesis (rich in meta-semantic results at the level of actantial structures as well) between the anxious, protective love of the mother and the possessive and heedless love of the owls.

Of the owls or, possibly, of the girl: for, as Hobbes and Hobbes
⁹
have observed, it is not clear whom the mother is calling. It should be obvious that the mother is concerned for her daughter, but in that case—as Allen
¹⁰
so perceptively notes—why should she call the owls and not her daughter, unless all family ties, as well as the sexual characteristics of the dramatis personae, are a good deal less obvious than they would appear at a hasty first reading?
¹¹

In any case, and to return to the problem of date, the poem does not seem to be earlier than the eleventh century A.D., and perhaps it is somewhat later if, as Le Goff suggests, "the chest of drawers appears in the practice and philosophy of interior furnishing with the decline of the feudal economy and with the rise of a peasant class of small landowners, not yet completely free, but in any case liberated from the living conditions of actual serfs. It is toward the seventeenth century, finally, that in the Ardennes there arose the custom of making love on the chest of drawers rather than on straw, not least because the chest of drawers was usually surmounted by a mirror."
¹²
The virtually primal scene of the owls' love-making, as Marie Bonaparte
¹³
has pointed out, can of course take place only in a peasant ambience. This observation is an elementary one, as it would be difficult to explain such a concentration of owls in an urban context.

Having thus arrived at an approximate dating of the sestina, we can examine its strophic and metric structures.

As is obvious at first sight, the poem's opening verse (repeated at the end) consists of two four-syllable units, accented on the first and fourth syllables and on the second and fourth, respectively. This introduces four chiastically arranged lines of catalectic and acatalectic trochaic dimeter; the six verses obey an
a b c c b a
rhyme scheme. A difficult and "splendid achievement," as Scholes
¹⁴
observes, when you consider that in an earlier version (of uncertain provenance) the second verse read "tre civette sulla casset-tiera" (three owls on the cupboard), with obvious loss of metric and accentual vigor.

In any case, an impressive structural analysis of the sestina can be found in
Les Chouettes,
the masterly study by Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss. The authors take special pains to underline how the first three verses present subhuman entities (the owls and the chest of drawers), while the next three present human beings; and similarly how the second and fourth verses feature subjects while the third and fifth feature actions. This prodigious semantic symmetry is reinforced, with splendid parallelism, by an extraordinary play of phonological oppositions. In the first half of the first (and last) verse the alliteration proceeds via an oral bilabial, lax, grave, voiced, stop, diffuse, whereas in the second half there is an opposition between two pairs of voiceless orsals, in which the first alliterative pair consists of palatalized, strident, compact, diffuse, acute affricates and the second of velar, grave, compact, guttural, tense stops.

This double pseudo-alliteration is paronomastically recalled in the second verse (civette versus comò), whereas the appearance of the mother represents an elaborate play on the quintuple recurrence of the grave labial nasal
(m).

At the lexical level, "the owls named in the title of the poem are called by name only once in the text"; further, the labiodental grave constrictive voice fricative (v) of "civette" never recurs in the course of the sestina except in the guise of the labiodental unvoiced grave constrictive fricative (/). Thus the presence of the owls, alluded to but never again openly declared, represents in the sestina a
hap ax
"that shines like a solitaire." Summoned up also by the anaphoric
che
(third verse)/le (fifth verse), the owls still dominate the poem. The birds of Minerva, they are unquestionably a travesty of the "savants austères" and, at the same time, as participants in love-making, of Baudelaire's "amoureux fervents": hence the identification of the beloved maiden with a cat, "orgeuil de la maison" since she is exposed on the chest of drawers and "comme eux'sédentaire ... amie de la science [the doctor] et de la volupté [love]." The analysis of Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss does not involve (nor could it have, during that unfortunate period of pa-leostructuralist severity) the dialectic of desire, which made its triumphant appearance in the critical history of this poem through the justly famous'Séminaire XXXV of Jacques Lacan.
¹⁵