The Murder in the Museum of Man (28 page)
Read The Murder in the Museum of Man Online
Authors: Alfred Alcorn
Besides all that, who will take over as Recording Secretary? The one time I have been sick for more than a few days — I had my appendix out in 1969, the weekend of the first moon landing — the person they brought in made a complete mess of the records. It took me nearly a month to straighten everything out. And what about the history of the MOM I am determined to write? It will take thousands of hours just to research it properly. I am not about to waste my time doing one of those “official” histories that no one ever reads. The Museum of Man deserves better. I am, indeed, tempted to inform them of my feeling now, but then I did tell them I would think it over, and think it over I will.
The possibility, by the way, of Damon Drex making a spectacle of himself and the museum is very real. I received a transmission from his office in my e-mail this afternoon that left me dizzy. Not content, apparently, with claiming to prove that old saw about monkeys, time, and typewriters, he would now have us believe that one of his apes has climbed Parnassus. His assistant requests in a prefatory memorandum that I set a date for a press conference and send over to him a list of all “the print and electronic media” to be invited. The communication included, in addition to “a short lyric” purportedly written by that veritable beast Royd, the text of a press release and “an appreciation” by one Professor Reader of the English Department, all of which is to be part of a “press packet” to be distributed at a press conference. The final draft is to be printed on “Pan House” stationery, and I am to get back to them with suggestions or changes. Drex himself appended a note:
Dear Norman:
You will from papers see we have succeed on the other side of day light dreams. Royd that you meet at our jolly hour has made
poem. I know how enthusiasm you have for our program. Now together we tell world. It will be bannered day for Museum of Man and Chimpanzees (my little joker) and for us.
Well, I am going to can the whole thing. The press release claims “a major breakthrough in interspecific communication,” and “[t]he first recognizably literary production from a nonhuman source.” The quotation in the press release from a Fergus McFergus: “It’s obvious that these mere ‘animals’ have established a new level of writing, one that could well be emulated by the far more numerous ‘higher’ primates writing today. The simplicity and clarity of the syntax, the unadorned and powerful diction, the sparseness of sentiment, and the hypnotic cadences of the words impart to this short piece a nearly quadrupedal surefootedness.… We could do worse than to heed what might be called the sense of pongid urgency that this short work achieves with such convincing effect.”
The release goes on to say that Professor Jack D. Reader (I’ve never heard of him) has generously contributed “a more formal appreciation of the poem, placing its significance within the framework of contemporary literary theory.” (I know, kind reader, that you think I am making this up, but I am not. As incredible, as fantastic as it may seem, I have it right here on my video screen, as real as the cursor pulsing with a perfect beat.)
Ecco Simius:
Chimp Champ
by Hemmingroyd
Me chimp champ
You chimp chump
Chimp champ
Chomp chomp
Chimp chump
It gets worse. It gets awful. I tried twice to read what Professor Reader wrote, but I have to confess, I can scarcely make head or tail of it. (Why is so much that is written about writing unreadable?) At the same time I feel constrained to place Reader’s remarks in this journal as part of the record, not, frankly, that I can imagine anyone, even a historian, wanting to read it.
Paleonymics and Hierarchical Reversals
in the Pongid Realm
by Jack D. Reader
Though not the first pongid utterance of record, this short lyric constitutes the first record of a consciously “literary” expression by a species other than
Homo sapiens
. This fact alone, on its surface
(surface)
, foregrounds the necessity of reconsiderations of interpretive strategies now in place for more conventional textual artifacts. Hemmingroyd’s ostensible project posits in a closed structure a paradigmatic scheme of intraspecific relations very nearly Foucaultian in its effects. And while the formal program of the piece appears simple, perhaps even simplistic, a close analysis of the tensions and contradictions underlying the binary oppositions will disclose, in the matrix of a rudimentary language
(langue)
, the grit of words
(parole)
around which the empowered reader
(lecteur envoulant)
may accrete the layered pearls of his own miscomprehensions, setting the stage, so to speak, for a reversal of hierarchies. The missing copula, for instance, in the first two lines not only heightens the effects of recursive intonationality but foregrounds questions that are anything but stark. While the provided lack of any form of the verb “to be” in traditional analysis might be interpreted as an “apeing” of cigar store “Indian talk”
(parler de peau-rouge de magasin de tabac)
, raising the possibility that Hemmingroyd is employing a self-parodic mode not to parody Amerindian speech but to align himself with a marginalized group, thus politicizing this utterance with an economy little short of breathtaking. (As a member of
Pan troglodytes
, Hemmingroyd, by definition, is absolved of both the Europhallogocentrism that has marked
so much of the received canon and the anthropocentrism typical of literary production generally.)
However recondite, such an approach provides a mere sniff
(odeur)
of the interpretive plenitude to be gleaned from the cracks and crevices of this seemingly seamless text. Whatever its other possible sociopolitico stratagems, the forgone copula in the first line establishes for the reader of Indo-European copulated languages an ontological uncertainty that is repeated, affirmed, and deepened in the second line, where the introduction of the I-thou configuration escalates what can only be called the epistemological risk. At the same time, the problematics of the missing copulas is attenuated if not obviated by the use of the objective case in the predicate, the ambiguity of the
you
notwithstanding. Is, in short, this small but in no way trivial jump
(salter)
, this Nietzschean escape from grammar if not language, this objectification of the first person that fuses it with and transforms the nominal predicate nominative, even as the formal elements of speech remain graphically separate on the page
(page)
, rendering the nonexistent copula into the active voice, i.e., being as existence rather than as equation, a move to fuse and therefore eliminate the subject-object dichotomy? Or is it simply that the dropped copulas
(copules lachées)
represent a deliberate creation of places of indeterminacy
(Unbestimmt-heitsstellen
),
into which the aroused reader
(lecteur amoureux
)
is invited to supply his own copulation?
Perhaps, but the dichotomy persists in what remains a structure of opposing valences, mitigated, it is true, by a play of monosyllabic graphemes that, whatever their signification, change meaning with single vowel variations. The question for the scrutinizing language theorist locates itself in this instance in the relations between the binaries
chimp
and
champ, chimp
and
chump
and the double binaries
chimp champ
and
chimp chump
. In this first instance, does
chimp
modify
champ
, or is
chimp
substantive while
champ
remains adjectival, i.e., supplemental? Or does the reverse pertain? Or does it make any difference? In any case, a
larger issue establishes itself regarding the double bind of the double binaries noted above. It is possible, in an algebraic move, to factor out the
chimp
from both sides of the equation (leaving aside for the moment the issue of the active verbs that link subject and object), privileging the question: what distinguishes
champ
from
chump?
(Some language theorists will object to this line of inquiry as a valorization of the obvious. A more productive approach, they will contend, would be to examine the oppositions
chimp
and
chomp
, however problematic the former’s status as a substantive. They will ask, how do you tell the chimp from the chomp? For a discussion of this issue in general terms, see A. J. Denny’s analysis of the de Man dance/dancer conundrum.
Viz
. “Effects of a Vitiated Stream of Protons on a Fabricative Arcanum”
(Wordlings and Other Orphans
, Boston: Orange Press, 1985). A conventional interpretive strategy would devolve on the role played by the compound (perhaps even squared) verb
chomp chomp. Chomp
, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, is an Americanism or dialect for
champ
, a resonance that further links subject and verb, particularly as the word as verb belongs “to a primary
chamb
, app. [ears] closely connected or identical with JAM
(jamb)
, and
jamble
, to squeeze with violence, crush.” Leaving aside the possibilities of “enjambment” or the communicatory “jamming,” the ostensible object of Hemmingroyd’s project consists then of a constative speech act followed by a performative, assuming an elliptical
will
, resulting in an apparent hierarchy of a dominant champ over a chomped chump.
A more resourceful reading, a more radical hermeneutics, however, reveals other, different, deferred possibilities. The typographical spareness of the work (despite the inferable allusions to jam making, enjambment, and jamming), provides, in what might be a deliberate irony, an interpretive toehold: words,
per se
, are not words but traces of words, traces of traces of words, a veritable ichnology of meaning, conglomerates of paleophemes, fossil phemes mineralized over time from the precipitates of many meanings. It is possible to decode, therefore, with paleophemic
instrumentality, a range of alternative significations. When the overlay of the
ch
is dissolved from the work, the resulting schema, ‘Me imp amp/You imp ump/Imp amp/Omp omp/Imp ump,’ while retaining the thrust of its declarative force, reveals an underlying text open to a diversity of interpretive modalities.
Imp
in this construction can be taken as its primary definition, “child,” or its secondary, “demon.” Similarly,
amp
, short for
ampere
(after André-Marie Ampère, 1775-1836, French mathematician and physicist), is a measure of electrical force and stands for power
(pouvoir)
. This construction gains credence when it is recalled that in Saussurean ([dino]Saussurean?) theory, words can only mean in their relation to difference with other words. Thus is
amp
amplified as “power” when contrasted with
ump
, short for
umpire
, the personage wearing the Egyptianate chin ornament who squats with shield and shin guards behind the catcher in American baseball adjudicating balls and strikes. “Power” thus confronts “right,” or, more likely, “demon power” does something (does something) to “child right,” and even at the paleophemic level the tension of the binary oppositions holds.
Omp
may appear at first glance more problematic. Further reduced to om, it takes on a decided Zen/Ginsbergian coloration. Ora, however, despite its suggestive power, forgoes the transitive force required in this context. At some risk to consistency, the
h
of the dropped
ch
could be reintroduced at the terminus of the paleopheme, producing
omph
. In this move, “imp amp omph omph imp ump,” suggesting, again in the Ginsbergian context, a transcendental fellation of right by power. A more fruitful appreciation retains the origin pheme and anagramizes it to
pom
, resulting in
pom pom
, the tasselated hand object shaken by short-skirted cheerleaders at American football games. To pom pom, in short, is to cheer, to encourage, to affirm. And while the possibilities abound and the ambiguities are profound, a more radical reversal of hierarchies is difficult to imagine beyond the infinite regression entailed in all such analysis, and the resulting euphoric ap(e)oria makes all the
différence
in the world.
Well, there you have it. I am nearly tempted to help them arrange a press conference and see what happens. The worst they could do is make a laughingstock out of the museum. No, the worst they could do is be taken seriously. And the way the world’s going they probably would. I can imagine Damon Drex surrounded by his charges on the cover of
Time
. “The New Voices,” the headline would say. And who are we to judge?
In another rather interesting development, Malachy Morin has been cleared of murder charges related to Dean Fessing. He’s still being held in the death of Elsa Pringle, however, despite a good deal of legal maneuvering and public posturing on the part of Ariel Dearth. Amazing how much airtime and newsprint that man manages to garner for himself. He had the presumption to ask me for a deposition attesting to the “sound moral character” of Malachy Morin. I sent him a note saying that I could not, in good conscience, make such a statement.
Enough. I am closing up for the night. I am going to wend my way over to the Club and order myself a large whiskey. Although, as Kevin says, quoting some Irishman, there is no such thing as a large whiskey.
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