IN-BETWEEN TEXTS—DEBASE & ERASE

In the beginning was repetition; for, in a sense, no gesture is original, or can be (Gerald’s Party, 269). And once the “origin” has begun by repeating itself, by redoubling itself, the double does not only add itself to the simple. It divides it and supplements it, generating this strange secondary phenomenon which repetition, the overt stylization of gesture, creates: namely those mysterious spaces in-between, says Gerald. There is immediately a double origin plus its repetition. In Pinocchio in Venice, a novel entirely built on intertextuality, hence repetition, triads everywhere multiply, trinities are forged anew: between the human being, the puppet, the piece of wood; God, man, the ass; Pinocchio, Alidoro, Melampetta; Il Dottore, La Volpe, Il Gatto; Pinocchio, the Fairy, Bluebell (provided, of course, these are two distinct “characters”); the professor, Plato, Aristotle, etc. As many shifting, shifty threesomes—there are also those “Three Kingdoms” the novel momentarily sets up again, along with the intermedial relations the novel establishes and investigates throughout between writing, painting, and the cinema; or, again, of the three interfering versions of a same “text” (Collodi’s, Disney’s, Coover’s) that might as yet be untold . . . —threesomes, then, in the middle of which Pinocchio always is, cooked in love and caught somewhere, lucky-pierre style, between his numerous, proliferating avatars, you, merely one of them . . .

Noticeably enough, underlying Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice is, of course, Carlo Collodi’s Adventures of Pinocchio. Yet, almost everything in Coover’s rewriting of it leads you to doubt that what has usually been referred to as “intertextuality” can still be apprehended on the by-now classic mode of the palimpsest that states that a text B (or hypertext, in its pre-computational understanding) is grafted onto an earlier text A (or hypotext) thus “underlying” it. But the very notion of the palimpsest, insofar as it denotes verticality (hypo- / hyper-), linearity, order, and unidirectionality (B A), cannot fail, it seems, to appear dubious when related to this outrageously intertextual novel whose carnivalesque dimension encourages you to question such notions as mask and disguise, being and appearance, surface and depth . . . All of which come to be reconfigured by the text.

Clearly, the book’s title already gives away its sources and, from the very start—problematic as it is—the palimpsestual mode on which the writing feeds is held in check: Pinocchio in Venice thus reads like the improbable cross between Collodi’s story and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (hence the novel’s parodic opening: On a winter evening of the year 19—), both mediated by the text that appears as some kind of third party or, in an all too literal sense, an inter-text, a textual buffer zone or interface facilitating dialogues, exchanges, recombinations, or remediations to coin a word, between its two predecessors, acting as it does as a copula of sorts to assist the quasi-incestual, self-gratifying inter-course between all . . . The genealogy of the texts—it was not she who had given me a place in the world, you see, but I who had called her into being, the professor lovingly reminds himself, to Melampetta’s amused surprise: “But this is a strange birth indeed [ . . . ]. A son pregnant with his own mother!” (66-7)—or their filiation, (chrono-)logically straightforward as it might appear at first glance, is however challenged by the aesthetic of Pinocchio in Venice as it keeps disseminating and intermingling their intrinsic elements: on the one hand, the characteristics of the fairy tale (humour, play, a sense of moral edification and, in the case of Collodi’s story, the suspense inherent in a serial publication, which Coover recreates in a deliberately artificial way at the end of each chapter); on the other, a modernist meditation on art, being and writing, split between the Apollonian and Dionysian poles that frame Mann’s narrative.

If, then, in its intertextual dimension Pinocchio in Venice were hiding or covering another text, it would probably not be the one you might have expected in the first place. At any rate, it appears quite illusory to expect any “first place” to “start with,” just as there might be no origin, no primal truth or identity behind the masks: for where to situate Pinocchio’s origin, whether as a character in the text—a piece of talking wood turned puppet turned boy turned professor finally (finally—?) turned decrepit misshapen little creature, neither man nor puppet (329) turned book . . . and, yes, somehow, now turned commentary, one, here, among others . . . —or as a literary myth? For beyond his innumerable rebirths and redeaths, Collodi’s Pinocchio may well be dragging with him most of western literature (and in the meantime, the professor is painstakingly lugging his not-so portable computer behind in the streets of Venice), from the Commedia dell’arte to Apuleius’ Golden Ass (itself partly a parodic text mentioned in the course of Pinocchio in Venice: like his nose, the puppet’s family tree keeps growing, sprouting new branches endlessly), along with, unavoidably, biblical reminiscences, Jonas’ chief among them. Coover’s text does not stop there and blithely (mis-)quotes, parodies, or simply refers, whether explicitly or implicitly, to Kant, Aristotle, Plato, Petrarch, Plutarch, Lévi-Strauss, Marx, Nietzche, Freud, Wagner, Duns Scotus, Ruskin, Walter Pater, Disney (of course . . . ), along with, among many others, Origen whose name alone suggests much about the problematic issue of a fleeting/absent origin. The novel’s intertextual framework—though, given the context, it may well be that Pinocchio in Venice itself, finding its place in-between all those past texts, now is the inter-text—is encyclopaedic, as suggested by Melampetta, the novel’s “philosophical watchdog” as a possible literal incarnation of cynic philosophy (portrait of the philosopher as a dog), who ends up quoting everyone from Alexander of Abonuteichus to the Zenos of Citium, Elea, and the Zattere [ . . . ] not forgetting in her citations Zosimos of Panopolis (243): from A to Z, almost every past writer could be granted a niche in the text.

The alphabetical ordering of Melampetta’s citations here suggests how arbitrary and grotesque the novel’s intertextuality is: no or little need for you, it seems, to trace back all those (pseudo) quotations through the text’s saturated surface for the potential light they could shed on your understanding of it, the insight they could give you into the text’s “profound meaning.” For as the quotes work or play through the text, any meaning that might have been attached to them is bound to appear secondhand, as a mere (barren) repetition or doubling of the text’s movement, its interest perhaps not so much in meaning as in play as such, in the spinning of the linguistic carousel it dizzyingly implements. All those quotations the text thrives on turn it into a literal “working paper” (and Mamma, the book the dignified American professor Pinenut, aka Pinocchio, flew all the way to Venice to complete before dying, will remain, you remember, a work-in-progress), a “working paper” that takes its cue from other texts it plays with as a child might, a pair of scissors in one hand, some paste in the other; for as a textual, generative practice, quoting might well appear as a joyful remembrance of a passion for the archaic cutand-paste gesture, a passion that, now more than ever perhaps, lingers on in your computational age . . .

Hence, possibly, Pinocchio’s reminiscence: the Piazza below appeared to him as an open book, a book he’d read a thousand times before, or perhaps a thousand books he’d read before compressed to one, its text dizzyingly complex yet awesomely simple, readable at a glance, yet somehow illegible, and it recalled to him his first terrifying encounter, when still a puppet, with his abbiccì, which (the Fairy said) promised him the world and more but gave him (under “N” of course, and this was the page he’d come to once again) niente. Nothing. (195-6) A puppet’s memory; the letters of the alphabet, and consequently the words they incessantly (re- / de-) compose, are unstably labile—

“Too many words in the world already. Like taking water to the sea.”

“Enough words, maybe,” acknowledges the old scholar with a sigh, “but we still haven’t put them together right. That, Alidoro, is our sacred mission.”

“Bah!” barks Alidoro. “I shit on sacred missions!” And he squats down right where he is in front of a barbershop to make his point. (105)

—which is something Pinocchio may progressively become aware of, but that only Alidoro, in his canine/cynical aptitude to suit his actions to his words, can fully recognize. All it takes is some cutting here, some pasting there, and the polymorphous text metamorphoses, carrying its meaningfulness still further away, beyond the words, beyond the quotes, the only “meaning” now in its dizzyingly complex moves, among the permanent recasting of the letters that set it in motion; in the end, you may have been reading the same story all your life, impossible as it might be, and you know that you are not done yet, not even close: again and again, you revisit the same old pages on the same old primer, and incorrigible as you are, you will lose your way once more, under “N,” of course, where the alphabet, split open, draws a blank to recommence: come what may—the maid, in Spanking the Maid, knows much about this . . . —the text will not be written “once and for all,” and instead elevates its multiple variations to the Nth degree, lingering over the blanks in its past, blanks to probe into and read into again; for who knows what you might find there, some silent outcasts from the Bible, maybe, now allowed to speak or think for themselves (“The Brother” or “J’s Marriage” in Pricksongs & Descants), or the contents of a lively, if terrifying, dream dreamt for a hundred years (Briar Rose) . . .

“Before” and “after” may then be nothing but inventions, mere illusions. Instead, what the text somehow instantiates, is a pending. The distinctions between copy and model, repetition and origin, hypertext and hypotext, variation and theme, all collapse: what you are now facing is a simulacrum, the playing of a variation upon an absent theme, a variation itself in variation, which keeps redoubling itself on the (redoubled) model of pricksongs & descants, thus dividing itself indefinitely: variation(s)^N. Neither melodic line can be said to be original then; nor can one be said to be the repetition of the other: both play themselves simultaneously, in perfect reciprocity or generosity. Of course, Pinocchio in Venice in part can read like a parodic sequel to Collodi’s Adventures of Pinocchio. But the perspective can easily be altered and, seen from another angle, it is Collodi’s text that already parodies Pinocchio in Venice. This, at least, is what the novel bids you to consider in its anarchic dimension, in its breakdown of all boundaries and hierarchies, in its challenge to linearity: no more “before” and “after,” but an “outside” and “inside” instead—hence Pinocchio’s Entrance in and Exit from the text—“front” and “back,” “obverse” and “reverse” which, in their reversibility, tend towards indistinction, as suggested by the professor’s misadventures through the text, mirroring and inverting the adventures of Collodi’s puppet, turning them back to front even as Coover’s Professor Pinenut goes through the same ordeals again, and more or less in the same order. The two texts—three if you take Death in Venice into account, four if you include Disney’s version, etc.—thus intermesh or intertwine, inter-write and inter-read in their inter-course, like two segments of a unique circular course which goes above from left to write and below from right to left, but which is one sole movement in its two phases, a spiraling movement that drives the text both forward and backward simultaneously, as further suggested by its systematic use of flashbacks.

What in fine is contested by such textual intertwining is the existence of a logic to the text(s)’s unfolding, of an order in the way sentences are linked: back to front, left to right, top to bottom, past to present; the right order Pinocchio is looking for, which orients the syntax, making it find its origin in a subject, this fleeting I that the illustrious scholar has sacrificed his whole career in trying to define, forging the concept of I-ness. Because Pinocchio in Venice is being exported into a preexisting network of past texts, from the inside out rather than summoning them in, spelling itself out, as it were (Pinocchio, you recall, is himself conspicuously lacking in interiority . . . ), and thus becomes the inter-text of Collodi’s and Mann’s stories (among all others) rather than the other way around, Coover, you feel, invalidates the difference between quoted and quoting, parodied and parodying texts. The texts, in their newly-defined inter-textual relations, now share one plane of existence, abolish differences in favor of one and only text, always the same, yet always differing as, in its essential openness, in its perpetual incompletion, in its permanent resumption, it never comes to be written, never is settled or immobilized “once and for all” but, endlessly rewriting itself, is forever and simultaneously re-[/]de-mobilized. No matter his arduous travels across two continents and as many centuries (13), Pinocchio will never enjoy the satisfaction of a Gustav Aschenbach—of whom he is an inversion—of having both his life and work reach the ultimate period to which they have been straining all those years and which would elevate them into a complete, unified whole, an unsurpassable work of art having served an absolute, indisputable meaning and purpose (14). This probably is where the line, at least a line, is usually drawn between modernism and postmodernism—as far, that is, as such movements or moments exist and can be generalized—the postmodernist aesthetic often denouncing the illusion of a (transcendent) whole in favor of discordant parts. Just before Pinocchio in Venice closes, Pinocchio avers that his last wish would be to be turned back into the old puppet he used to be, despite the fairy’s protest: If that stupid puppet lives on, all that will have been in vain! Your own beautiful life, the one I gave you, will have been meaningless! (327) On the verge of dying and disappearing “once and for all,” Pinocchio once more outlives himself, then, in the form of a book to be again rewritten and reread . . . “We’ll make a book out of you!” decides the fairy, and his life, his work, will thus find and meet no proper end; the book closes on its own shadow, a shadow that again perpetuates it as the third party you hold between your hands, as a deferral within the now of writing—She leans toward the little man’s head now as though to suck at the orifices there (yes, he can feel it go, feel it all emptying out) . . .—as the distance between the book and the book to be—Somewhere, out on the surface, distant now as his forgotten life . . .—as this other hand between yours, no longer second, that has now become the inter-text. And . . . is she doing something with his nose? Ah . . . ! Yes . . . ! Good . . .

However, assuming, as you might have, that the novel’s take on intertextuality serves an overall aesthetic based on recycling, as hinted in turn by the fairy and Pinocchio himself—I’m afraid there’s nothing left to do but send you to the pulping mills to help ease the world paper shortage (329) / paper is no longer a debased surrogate for the stone tablets of old upon which one hammered out imperishable truths, but rather a ceaseless flow, fluttering through the printer like time itself, a medium for truth’s restless fluidity, as flesh is for the spirit, and endlessly recyclable. (31)—would probably be one more mistake. For what the novel’s inter-textuality also challenges somehow, beyond the conventionally reassuring linearity that moves you from past to present into the text and global literature, is the concomitant existence of, or belief in, some literary “propriety.”

For behind “recycling,” you fear that there might still be, ascribed to writing, a certain utilitarian function or purpose, a sense of rationalization (in an economic sense), along with some ecological modesty when faced with litter and waste, filth and scatology, all of which being usually deemed improper to your “proper” literary consumption . . . Yes indeed, you too like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, you hope can supply a kind of “sense” of what is going on. This sense, you know, is not to be obtained by reading between the lines themselves (for “properly” speaking there is nothing there, in those white spaces—niente) but by reading the lines themselves—looking at them, and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, yes, of having “completed” them . . . Apparent insignificance, the interference of pointless details, dross for some, dreck for others, even excrement, were you still one to believe in the etymology of words: all somehow get to be “recycled” in the course of your reading, to be alchemically transmuted into proper meaning; only then will you have completed the cycle of the text’s sentences and thus, you will have legitimated, justified, rationalized your reading activity, which in turn will give you the expected assurance that you have not read in vain or for nothing; no, no time wasted, everything digested: you will leave nothing behind, no residue . . .

Ah, but snow, you see, may be recovering the Venetian campos, the Serenissima already betrays the romantic idea that desperately clings to it (like shit to a shovel, is it?); for in this city of masks, the reddening sky that every evening hangs over the churches and palaces in loving embrace, and that fascinates tourists so much, might be but a consequence of the polluted air that escapes from Marghera’s petrochemical complexes; Aschenbach, you remember, dies of walking the streets of an infested city in pursuit of Tadzio . . .

And so is the text of Pinocchio in Venice: contaminated, polluted, saturated with quotations and references that overwhelm it; well, constipated too, yes, like Pinocchio himself after having set foot in Venice . . . Yet if a quotation is an exchange of sorts in the economic sense of the word (for quoting implies the circulation of an object which supposedly has some value), the many quotations that arbitrarily “play” through Coover’s text, precisely because there are too many of them, end up emptied of all possible “value.” It is the whole hermeneutic approach to intertextuality and to the text that here loses its efficacy. The halved alphabet produces niente, nothing (195-6), as Pinocchio realizes at his own, yes, expense . . . Nevertheless, exchange as such keeps taking place although, paradoxically, it has now become intransitive: all sorts of (mis)quotations and allusions keep circulating through the text, freewheeling, as it were, in what rather appears to be a parody of classic intertextuality, or parody parodied. For perhaps, as far as writing is concerned, perversion is to be understood economically, as it disturbs the very structure of discursive exchanges, alongside literary ownership and/or propriety. You could even imagine a form of stagflation that would mainly pertain to contemporary writing: it would be the coexistence of the “author”’s redundancy and an (inter-)textual inflation; it would thus consist—and this is what Coover often indulges in, especially in his rewritings of fairy tales in Pricksongs & Descants, Briar Rose, Stepmother, and A Child Again, or in his unwearied sabotaging of previous plots in A Night at the Movies or The Public Burning which alone demystifies the very notion of literary propriety—in taking over or resurrecting past works and literary characters, yet this would not and could not amount to theft or plagiarization any longer. You even feel that such (inter-)textual inflation in Coover’s work has reached a degree that condemns the characters to wander from text to text, mere variational avatars of each other and, as such, no one’s property, mere ideas, hatched whole and hapless, here to enact old rituals of resistance and rot. (The Universal Baseball Association, 230)

Pinocchio in Venice is incidentally not indifferent to the economic issue that it somehow addresses frontally, even if playfully; for Venice is depicted as a new global village controlled by Eugenio whose plan is to turn the city away from its romantic image, into a rival of Osaka, Manchester, and New Jersey (203). The description of the station through which Pinocchio arrives in his native city—though Collodi’s story, you remember, is set somewhere in Tuscany; by “translating” it to Venice, Pinocchio in Venice asserts its slippery, translational aesthetic—already betrays this globalized vision: The Stazione Santa Lucia [ . . . ] is that tender spot where the ubiquitous technotronic circuit of the World Metropolis physically impinges upon the last outpost of the self-enclosed Renaissance Urbs, as a face might impinge upon a nose, a kind of itchy boundary between everywhere and somewhere, between simultaneity and history, process and stasis, geometry and optics, extension and unity, velocity and object, between product and art. (20) A metonymy of the city and a metaphor of the text, the station appears as a boundary, that is as a line that both holds apart and together, and, further, as a “technotronic circuit” or interface that facilitates transits and exchanges from one world, one medium, one text, to another: One is ejected, the narrator continues, through its glass doors as through the famous looking-glass into a vast empty but strangely vibrant space that recalls the definition of paradox envisioned by Nixon in The Public Burning, i.e., the dissolution of the natural limits of language, the conscious invention of a space, a spooky artificial no-man’s land, between logical alternatives (The Public Burning, 136).

Obviously, once you find yourself on the other side of the looking glass, everything becomes possible again: you set foot in a world in which meaning and purpose are replaced by or translated into pure nonsense, in which language alone matters; words can now be freely handled, fondly fondled, as sense yields to sensuality. Words mate and breed new words, new worlds of words, and the writer’s part in all this may simply be to assist them in some form of artistic maieutics . . . For one of the peculiarities of a novel like The Public Burning for instance is that it is made up of thousands and thousands of tiny fragments that had to be painstakingly stitched, cut and pasted, coupled together in a reduplication of what Uncle Sam does on a smaller scale, sprinkling his discourse with portmanteau words (manifest dust-in-yer-eye, the Merrycunt Revilusion . . . ) whose several conflicting, dissonant meanings, packed up into new words, grotesquely and ferociously betray the ideals sponsored by the nation to get rid of the Rosenbergs, thus doing away with so-called notions of (historical) sense and purpose.

In an age of digital manipulation and of novels for the computer, this old cut-and-paste routine has taken up a new dimension: a coinage like “hypertextuality” has by now acquired another signification that points to new literary trends proclaiming the end of books altogether. Pinocchio in Venice, in this respect—to say nothing of Stepmother or A Child Again whose colorful layouts and material aspect may embody the heyday, perhaps all but forgotten, of the very idea of book—is bound to appear almost obsolete with its clearly-delineated and balanced parts, each divided into eight chapters of approximate equal length except for the third and last ones, made up respectively of four and one chapter(s) only. If compared with the quasi-entropic saturation of Gerald’s Party or the predetermined growing momentum of John’s Wife, for instance, both novels doing away, along with Ghost Town or Noir, with chapters altogether (and so does The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, substituting “reels” instead), the contrast is all the more vivid. Yet behind the mask of, or, rather, along with its novelistic consensual linearity, Pinocchio in Venice, much like any other text by Coover, already impinges on some form of (computer) hypertextuality: the image of the labyrinth, perhaps inherited from Borges, often hailed as an influential precursor of hypertextuality, pervades the entire novel which, despite its linear progress, ends up moving in circles (Pinocchio: “I say, we seem to be going in circles! We’ve been on this bridge before!” He wonders now if this is only the second time . . . ), following the circular pattern set by each chapter. Most chapters indeed dramatically start in medias res and end abruptly, keeping you in (artificial) suspense until the following one, roughly built along the same lines, backpedals in order to fill in the gaps left conspicuously open in the story. To the linear narrative thrust is thus superimposed a retrospective countermove whose function in the narrative is to “bridge” its various moments or peripeties, before slowly circling back again to its point of departure, until a new peripety occurs. The trompe-l’œil linearity of the sequential chapters is thus inseparable from the helix-like motion of their narration, which gives the novel a quasi-hypertextual volume (. . . “Venice is not like other cities,” the porter explains soberly, easing the trolley down off the bridge. “To reach some places we must cross some bridges twice.” [26]), a volume enhanced throughout by the discrete repetitions of phrases or metaphors, though never presented as such: [ . . . ] as though pursued by assassins in coal sacks (13) / the night came down on him like a coal sack (220), the “coal sack” comparison being itself taken from Collodi; like a bell clapper on a wedding day (60) / I was up there for hours, blowing about like a bell-less clapper (71), etc. The recurring apparition of textual fragments from chapter to chapter could suggest that the text is but loosely hierarchized or vectorized, if at all, as though it were caught on diverse loops of its own that compelled it to morph almost topologically as it relentlessly keeps (mis)quoting itself, adding to and subtracting from itself constantly.

Like the very geography of Venice, the text’s architexture is thus unstable and shifting all the time. As you read through it, at the same time as Pinocchio walks the labyrinthine streets of Venice—like Lucky Pierre, too, wandering the snowy streets of Cinecity which, though familiar, yet at the same time [appear] utterly new, as if being reinvented by his walking through them as if he must walk through them that they might be reinvented. (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, 192)—you somehow reinvent and/or reconfigure its structure, uncovering new routes through the text, connecting or bridging diverse narrative threads that may have been left pending. Yet this maze-like quality of the text, as is often the case in Coover’s work, is not only spatial, but also eminently temporal, for as the text keeps folding back upon itself, constantly un-/re-writing itself as it were, it is prevented from ever rigidifying into its own past existence or experience: the character’s each new (mis)adventure is but a variation or replay of all others, their permanent re-actualization or, in a temporal sense, re-presentation. For even though the text opens and closes with Pinocchio’s “entrance” and “exit,” the temporal dimension of the narrative, mostly written in the present tense, is also concomitantly stressed both by the novel’s opening line (On a winter evening of the year 19–) and “Mamma,” the title of the last part of the book that points to an ironical regression in time.

Once back in Venice, Pinocchio rediscovers his “roots”: his own past resurfaces and, with it, everything that he took so much trouble repressing his whole life/lives as a human. Nothing is left aside, everything is reshuffled in some form or another. Boundaries collapse, starting with those separating Collodi’s from Coover’s texts (thus condemning these possessive forms to superfluity): the image of the labyrinth is again a parodic one, for in the absence of any clear textual boundaries—Pinocchio in Venice is thus somehow molded on the topography of Venice itself, this uncertain space, both yet neither land and/or sea—nothing can be said to work (from) inside (labor intus), everything, and the writing itself, now being turned inside out, as it were, pushed still further out, absolutely outer, a bit like this Madonna of the Organs sporting and flaunting her insides on her outside . . . Spatial and temporal landmarks blur just as frontiers fade between everywhere and somewhere, between simultaneity and history . . . The repetition exports and deports everything it repeats onto a unique textual, superficial interface deprived of any depth or interiority.

It is no wonder, then, that Pinocchio, who is slowly turning back into the piece of wood he used to be, fails to maintain a private, interior space all his own, his thoughts being more and more often spoken out loud without his being aware of it. Dispossessed of everything he owned, he also comes to be stripped, bark and all, of his every thought and his language, household word that he has become (68), one more boundary collapsing between the private (household) and the public (word); nothing will be spared, and even his “posthumous” work will be stolen from him before completion: all boundaries having vanished, replaced by an only “outside” independent of any inside, of a sole interface whose obverse and reverse are indistinguishable, nothing can remain properly his own.

Even the name of the illustrious professor—His work! His reputation! His very life! (256)—has been sullied by his former enemies. Pinocchio himself, in his (inter-)textual dimension, may be such a stain, smudge, or blot in the text, as exemplified by the novel’s propensity toward the scatological, already filigreed in some of the text’s opening euphemisms: an aging emeritus professor from an American university [ . . . ] eases himself and his encumbrances down from his carriage / He has arrived [ . . . ] through what foreigners [ . . . ] think of as the city’s back door (13). Were there still any doubts lingering on in your mind as to the underlying scatological aspect of such lines, they are shortly swept aside by less ambiguous terms in the second chapter, when the station through which Pinocchio sets foot in Venice is compared to a gleaming syringe, connected to the industrial mainland by its long trailing railway lines and inserted into the rear end of Venice’s Grand Canal, into which it pumps steady infusions of fresh provender and daily draws off the waste. Incidentally, the narrator eloquently adds: perhaps it is constipation, that hazard of long journeys, that has provoked this metaphor, or just something in the air (20) . . .

You will eventually catch a whiff of the same idea in Noir: The city as bellyache. The urban nightmare as an expression of the vile bleak life of the inner organs. The sinister rumblings of the gut. [ . . . ] It’s all about digestion. Or indigestion. (Noir, 42) Which Pinocchio in Venice renders all too literally and realistically; the city’s by-streets, bridges, and canals thus constitute as many bowels emptying out on the little campos, and Pinocchio is likened several times to an excrement: “Who was it,” thundered a deep ogrish voice from overhead [ . . . ], “laid this turd at my doorway?” (133) This, you feel, cannot but throw a new, ironical light on Pinocchio’s arrival, as though the metaphorical syringe had had but the reverse effect, pumping more waste than was already there . . . It seems, then, that the writing does not so much try to polish the page in order to reclaim its former whiteness and purity, as it somehow aims at debasing it, sullying it even more; snow may be falling in Venice, the maid, you remember, may be armed with all her cleaning paraphernalia in Spanking the Maid, and Gerald’s wife might well spend most of the party in her kitchen, cooking and scouring everything clean. Yet it seems that the texts’ dynamics rather consist in debasing the image of Art and Literature conceived of as “fine arts and letters”—farts and lechers (63), as Melampetta has it, whose name already is a pun, you are told, on the Italian melampeto, a “black fart” (60), recalling in turn the name of Don Pedo in “Shootout at Gentry’s Junction” from A Night at the Movies—an idealistic vision Pinocchio, in all his would-be grandeur or “highness,” is eager to believe in all too staunchly and almost comes to embody, paraded as he is through the streets of Venice in his ambiguous litter chair . . . The “proper” meanings of words are thus rejected or de-jected, rather, as though the language has lost its referents and is only good for the noise it makes. (51) The words the professor desperately clings to, those carrying meaning and having purpose, let him down too easily—Over his head, he sees now, there is something written. It seems to say “JESU.” [ . . . ] Not “JESU” but “JUVE.” (46)—betraying his ingrained faith in language by not pointing, in this Venetian maze, to any direct access route to his (fake) hotel whose door, whose dark door, he nonetheless thinks he has found again, the same door, undoubtedly, that the Fairy taught him to recognize when he was but a puppet still, in her little Parable of the Two Houses: “Let me tell you a story [ . . . ] about the pretty little white house and the nasty little brown house—do you see them there?” He rubbed his eyes and running nose against her stocking tops and peered blearily down her long white thighs. Yes, there was the dense blue forest, there the valley, and there (he drew closer) the little house, just hidden away, more pink than white really, and gleaming like alabaster. But the other—? “A little lower . . . ” She pushed on his head, sinking him deeper between the thighs, until he saw it: dark and primitive, more like a cave than a house, a dank and airless place ringed about by indigo weeds, dreary as a tomb. (116) This dark and primitive door that he seems to have found his way back to at last will however remain closed to the pressing urges of the bewildered traveler, lost in the city’s entrails: There’s the bridge, there’s the narrow underpass! The joints of his knees are locked up, frozen solid, he has to totter ahead stiff-legged, rocking from side to side, his eyes watering, his nose running but, yes, through here and turn right—and there it is! The long fondamenta, now a ghostly white and daintily pricked out with cat tracks, the stately palazzo rising through the eddies of swirling snow, the blackened doorway! (46) As though the better to highlight the scatological overtones of the scene (as conveyed by terms like fondamenta and blackened doorway for instance), the narrator further indulges in its parodic mise-en-abyme: Pinocchio, feeling swallowed up as one sucks up an oyster and waiting to be digested (44) as he runs through the bowels of Venice, is trying to escape the murderous creature above him, while [h]is insides seem to be exploding and collapsing at the same time. He must squat somewhere, and quick. (47) Yet not quick enough . . .

“All the style’s gone out of your parties, Ger [ . . . ], there’s too much shit and blood.” (Gerald’s Party, 168) (But why is it that you elide from the quote the contents of the parentheses, as though you wanted—do you?—to eliminate what “dreck” might interfere with the consensual, continuous flow of reading. Sequences but no causes, contiguities but no connections, remember? Juxtaposition matters. Try again.) All the style’s gone out of your parties, Ger (“That’s not a very generous view of art,” Iris remarked, peering over her spectacles), there’s too much shit and blood.” (Gerald’s Party, 168) Naomi in Gerald’s Party will share Pinocchio’s incontinent lot, and Gerald will come to her rescue, helping her clean the mess in a scene that echoes Melampetta and Alidoro’s subtle art of oralsons and lickanies performed on a grateful, yet bespattered, professor. The same excremental logic pervades a story like Aesop’s Forest and can be seen as a strategy, both political and aesthetic, to overcome “exhaustion” and “blockage” of sorts, somehow epitomized by a compulsion to cite and repeat, ultimately to be transformed effectively—digested first, then dejected, that is—to ensure survival in a sublimed form of subjectivity. Of course, this theory is not yours but your voracious appetite and functional digestion of it alone somehow testify to its attractiveness. Yet when the king dies in Aesop’s forest, his whole world and the underlying hierarchy it rested upon die with him: the forest extinguishes itself around him. (A Child Again, 276) Nothing can be individualized any more, neither subjectivized nor subjected, all boundaries and covenants dissolved with this ontological transgression—which, as such then, no longer is a transgression: Aesop’s dubious biography, you are reminded, may well be but a mere fictional construct already . . . —after which creator and creatures share the same world: He’d always thought of that distance between them as ontological and absolute, but now—he stirs uncomfortably. He’s rarely come this deep before. The fox seems to have let one, his own commentary on the truth no doubt. (264)

The scatological dimension, whether in Aesop’s Forest or Pinocchio in Venice, highlights the dissolution of all limits and boundaries, as though, blatantly disregarding the usual taboos imposed by political correctness, Coover’s carnivalesque texts ended, rather than upended, all forms of hierarchy between “high” and “low.” For once the line holding them apart has been erased, it is no longer possible to distinguish between high and low, pure and debased, or text and inter-text as the latter is now made ex-plicit or has been ex-posed when, according to a former logic, it should have been masked or covered: Not all here in Aesop’s troubled forest are pleased, of course, to have their miserable excrement read so explicitly. It makes many of them feel vulnerable and exposed, especially at a time when all the comforting old covenants are dissolving, and no one knows for certain who they are anymore, or who they’re supposed to fuck or eat. Can one not even take a homely shit without worrying about the consequences, they ask, are there no limits? But of course that’s just the point, there are no limits any longer, that’s the message of the old king’s desperate condition, this pointy-headed freak’s intrusion here, his frantic bare-ass bob through these dark brambly thickets at the core. (A Child Again, 260-1) As in John’s Wife, in the accelerating course of which reality and fiction are being progressively and intricately interwoven (which brings about puzzling interferences between Ellsworth’s novel-in-progress and what may be happening in some characters’ lives; the overall plot thus seems critically reduplicated or mirrored on a different scale or narrative level, as suggested by echoes between Trevor and the Stalker, Gordon and the Artist, or “John’s wife” and the Model . . . ), the lion in Aesop’s Forest—He feels then as though he’s falling [ . . . ], hanging on as the light dies and the earth spins (275-6)—Aesop—he hurled himself, cackling derisively, off the cliff, flapping his stunted little arms as though the fool thought he might fall up instead of down (273)—and his fabled tortoise—The tortoise, tumbling through the air, wags his arms frantically. (265)—all merge into one, or, rather, appear as three variants of a unique “character” whose identity, individuality, not to say originality, are blurred and challenged: sameness is already otherness, and conversely.

The attractive attempt at renegotiating a radical subjectivity capable of resisting the totalitarian assaults of late capitalism is thus itself already tilted towards some form of authoritative control that the texts playfully debunk in their aesthetics. The constant challenge to a mythical origin and no less mystifying originality, along with the renewed interrogations Coover’s work is pervaded with about the very “identity” of the fictional character (from Pinocchio and his parodic concept of I-ness to Gerald, in Gerald’s Party, who undergoes the frontal assaults of an aggressive dialogism that transpires in the chaotic syntax of his text, along with what texts like The Public Burning or Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? do to the concept of historical character, or a story like “You Must Remember This” in its pornographic rendering of a scene taken from Casablanca), all suggest that such notions eventually are mere fictional constructs and that trying to pin them down into a set form, provisional though it might be, is at best illusory: for in such a maze of probable improbability, the hero can be sure of nothing except his own inconsolable desires and his mad faith, as firm as it is burlesque, in the prevalence of secret passages. There is always, somewhere, another door. (A Night at the Movies, 33) Another door which, somewhere, always opens onto another “identity”—being a phantom, in that case, no doubt helps—onto another film, another text, already in variation again, to the N^th power: no matter what, when the cinematic, that is the kinetic stylistics of absence prevails, as in A Night at the Movies (33), one always circles back, and you along, to the letter N, self and text alike, after all, perhaps but pages forever blank that willingly and generously consent to yet another variation.

An “I” by any other pronoun would probably still refer to the same subject . . . Or would it? What truth there is in “I is an other” may be less astonishing, perhaps, to the intuition of the poet than obvious to the gaze of the psychoanalyst. Yet who, if not the poet, will question the objective status of this “I” too often confused with the subject? This anomaly should be manifested in its particular effects on every level of language, and first and foremost in the grammatical subject of the first person, in the “I love” that hypostasizes the tendency of a subject who denies it. For, as Lennox in John’s Wife reflects, [i]n the expression “I love you,” neither subject nor object could be identified or proven to exist, only the verb was beyond dispute, the only indispensable verb in the language perhaps, centering all others. (370-1) But when this comes to be forgotten, notably by Pinocchio whose hypostatic tendency manifests itself all too clearly in his famous I-ness, the most general structure of human knowledge resurfaces: that which constitutes the ego and its objects with attributes of permanence, identity, and substantiality, in short, with entities or “things” that are very different from the Gestalten that experience enables us to isolate in an ever-shifting field . . . But can you blame him, who had to fight hard, puppet that he was, to be able finally to forget all those logical difficulties encountered in a statement like “I’m a man,” which at most can mean no more than, “I’m like he whom I recognize to be a man, and so recognize myself as being such”?

Yet as far as recognition goes—as far, that is, as mis-cognition, no doubt—it always dawns on Pinocchio a little too late, leaving you the little time necessary to register the irony and see that past mistakes will repeat, that change, for him, is impossible and that, do what he will, he cannot “go with the grain” . . . It is only too late that he at last recognizes his former enemies, La Volpe and Il Gatto, who welcome him in Venice. Unlike Collodi’s reader, Pinocchio fails to see or miscognizes that their disguise already betrays their true colors, which the narrator hastens to stress in an ironical comment: There is an awkward moment then with the tourist bureau clerk looking pale and abashed (of course, this is the expression fixed upon her mask, but the professor supposes this to be a true instance of art reflecting the reality beneath the surface) (17). The masks, here as elsewhere in Pinocchio in Venice, hide nothing much, and the one who is blind in this recognition that is mis-cognition and vice versa, is Pinocchio himself rather than the Fox somehow; by seeing too clearly, Pinocchio ends up utterly blinded. The narrator’s irony (of course) focuses on the conjunction “but” which does not introduce any opposition so much as the truth of the artifice that hides nothing any more, least of all any subjectivity which, alienated though it might be, would yet progressively become aware of itself; what Pinocchio in fine recognizes here might be nothing but the imminence of his own end and the extent of his foolishness—this thought is not an idle one, not a self-pitying one, but a simple recognition of his failing powers, his overwhelming debilities (17). At any rate, if there is a conclusion to be drawn from this initial misadventure cueing all his subsequent mis-cognitions, it may be that when the wick of light, albeit belatedly again, dawns to force on him the recognition of his former friend turned donkey—What—?! Lampwick? Is it you—?! (86)—Pinocchio, despite himself, has finally overcome all logical difficulties to be able to state, at long last, not the expected “I’m a man,” but “I’m an ass,” which at most can mean no more than, “I’m like he whom I recognize to be an ass, and so recognize myself as being such.”

Pinocchio’s multiple metamorphoses—among which is the Apuleian Transformation of the Beast registered in his bibliography—clearly undermine his sense of identity; the dreamlike logic of a chapter like “The Movie of Life,” retracing the Passion of Pinocchio (83) and thus taking parodic advantage of the Christ-like aspect of Collodi’s puppet as often analyzed by Italian “Pinocchiologists,” successively casts him as the donkey, Christ, and the wooden cross, in a reversal of the Incarnation (the flesh made wood again . . . ). The very movement of the chapter recalls the story “Lap Dissolves” in A Night at the Movies, a literary attempt at remediating the cinematic dissolve, which (among other things) generates a crisis in the referentiality of language, especially as it suspends both the cataphoric and anaphoric processes. Of course, opening a text without specifying anything about the characters—She clings to the edge of the cliff . . . He struggles against his bonds . . . (A Night at the Movies, 79)—using mere pronouns instead, is a familiar in medias res device: the identities of the characters are comfortably set in a preexisting referential world whose coordinates you progressively discover as the story unfolds. However, in the case of “Lap Dissolves,” the reference to some complete, stable world before and outside the reading is invalidated by the slippery, forward momentum of the text immediately transporting you into another referential world different from the presupposed initial one: Her hand disappears, then reappears, snatching desperately for a fresh purchase. He staggers to his knees, his feet, plunges ahead, the ropes slipping away like a discarded newspaper as he hails the approaching bus. She lets go, takes the empty seat. (79) The personal pronouns remain inexorably empty of any proper referents, and you are left in the lurch without knowing—while hoping for some synchronization at last—where to look for them, whether before or after their appearance in the text; what you are left with are mere blank pronouns going through several scenes, several films, several genres; mere pre-constructed roles without any actors to embody them.

The story closes on an almost self-parodic mise-en-abyme of the whole process it has just staged: a teenage girl recounts the dream she had the night before and what applied to third person pronouns again applies to the first person and the “subject” usually confused with it. “Wow, speaking of sheets, I had the weirdest dream last night [ . . . ]. I was in this crazy city where everything kept changing into something else all the time. [ . . . ] Well, it occurred to me suddenly that if everything else was changing I must be changing, too. I looked in a mirror and saw I could flatten my nose or pull it out to a point, push my chin up to my forehead, stretch my cheeks out like wings. Still, I felt like there was something that wasn’t changing, I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly, but it was something down inside, something I could only call me. In fact, there had to be this something, I thought, or nothing else made sense. But what was it? Who was down there? I was curious, so I asked the woman I was with to tell me what she thought of when she thought of me. I told her it couldn’t be something physical, my scars or my cock or the shit-streaks in my underwear, it had to be something you couldn’t touch or see. And what she said was, ‘Well, I think of you as a straight-shooter, Sheriff, but one who can’t stop lustin’ after the goddamn ineffable.’” (84-6) And on goes the endless dream, as the story stops in mid-conversation a few lines down and eerily seems to morph into Ghost Town (is that just my bowels movin’ or is this saloon goin’ somewhere?!) . . . Yet where would you pinpoint the disjunction that took place, the moment when the “I” sloughs off and changes its “subject,” if not in the blank spaces of the page that somehow substitute for the mirror the character looks in? Those blanks, that is, those empty spaces, located nowhere except in the conjunction itself (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, 394), which montage the words together, shape and animate the text’s syntax. Turned into a movie screen, the “mirror” does not, cannot any longer, reflect any stable subjective identity, for in a way, the dialectical move the mirror supposedly creates is reversed: the empty “I” projects, hence defines, the othered image, and not the other way around: I looked in a mirror and saw I could flatten my nose or pull it out to a point, push my chin up to my forehead, stretch my cheeks out like wings . . . The mirror is incidentally no longer enough and literally translates into “the woman,” and what truth there might still be in the “I is an other” is here somehow redoubled, as though parodically othered in its turn. The text’s very movement, then, does not so much reverse as it radically does away with any form of dialectics, for no “image” is ever reflected back to the “subject.” The process does not split between projection first, reflection then, but rather unstoppably flees: beyond the mirror, or through the looking glass, the image blurs and shifts again (one who can’t stop lustin’ after the goddamn ineffable). Whatever there is now to see or watch there, it deflates the theoretical permanence of this “I”—even you, as you read on, get to be reinvented somehow, or reshaped, as each new shift in the story tips your balance as it alters your expectations—this so-called first person whose precedence is merely hypothetical; just another fiction, somehow, to be reinvented again and again: for, after all, THIS WORLD IS BUT CANVAS TO OUR IMAGINATIONS, is it not? An empty canvas, yes, a vacant screen onto which are projected all these fantasies belonging to no one in particular, not even you, to no definite “subject” whose identity, alienated though it often is, would be permanently fixed, once the mirror stage is successfully passed.

Witness Lucky Pierre, the actor, the character, both at the same time, yet neither—the charactor, always split between both, always on screen, yet always elsewhere too, since the screen spreads now everywhere in the streets of Cinecity, and beyond, were there one . . . Whether raised by Pinocchio or Lucky Pierre—variations of one another much like most of Coover’s characters—the question, displaced from text to text, remains the same unanswerable one: what is it he remembers? His own life or the film of it, the legends? This life of his: it has been like a kind of dream—but who was the dreamer? He cannot think. His brain is frozen. (Pinocchio in Venice, 45) Something went wrong. Who knows what? Just life, probably, if what he’s had could be called one. More like a dream. A kind of flickery nothing that’s all there is. The sort of thing he was chasing in the street. But if a dream, who’s the dreamer, who the dreamt? It’s a question he has often asked himself in other ways, such as Where’s the projector, Where’s the screen? (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, 361) Sometimes the fadeouts lead to dreams. That is to say, more movies. But whose? If he’s the dreamt one, as they like to say, who’s the dreamer? Such thoughts, which have often entertained him, make his poor doomed head ache, so he pushes them aside and focuses instead on the blank screen— (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, 391) As the texts, seen as variations on one another, keep reflecting themselves, extending beyond their own textual boundaries, the mirror, you see, reflects nothing anymore; the screen remains forever blank, and so does the page, despite the flickers that dance upon them both: if this flickery nothing that’s all there is refers, you feel, both to the movie running on the screen (the flicks), and the pages of the book(s) you flick through, you are made aware that the totality (all there is) is as nothing (a flickery nothing), while in the sentence’s reversibility, this positive nothingness, this generous absence, precisely offers you all there is and could not give you more.

You then start dreaming on your own that such blankness and vacancy might still epitomize the freshening of possibility, the potentiality of a generous space where everything can still take place again, where every story can be told again, and where, because the screen-page, surrendering its substance to the insubstantial image gliding over it, only reflects back the harsh floating light of your projected fantasies, of the phantoms of your imagination, of the spectral animation of your desire (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, 331), the film-text remains to come, awaiting to press down on your patient, submitting eyes. And again you dream that, precisely because this mirror, mirror on the wall will not disclose any of its secrets—you remember that the old Queen is dead now and that before entering her in her tomb, the Dwarfs, patched and bandaged, came rolling down the mountain singing a lament for the death of the unconscious (A Child Again, 62)—the invention of a conscience, of a subject, of a soul, might still be worked out; is it not the dream, one of them, dreamed by the master in Spanking the Maid? Hoping, like others, for some sort of “epiphany of the subject,” for the descent of some spirit or other, of some breath (anima), he turns to that broad part preferred by him and Mother Nature for the invention of souls (Spanking the Maid, 96), but only receives in return little explosions of wind . . . The enduring whiteness of the maid’s fundament may be here to remind him and you that as far as writing is concerned, everything is founded on a repetition of sorts, building upon its own concomitant erasure; the body is without memory: Sometimes, especially late in the day like this, watching the weals emerge from the blank page of her soul’s ingress like secret writing, he finds himself searching it for something, he doesn’t know what exactly, a message of sorts, the revelation of a mystery in the spreading flush, in the pout and quiver of her cheeks, the repressed stutter of the little explosions of wind, the—whush-SMACK!—dew-bejeweled hieroglyphs of crosshatched stripes. But no, the futility of his labors, that’s all there is to read there. (86-7)

Ah, yes, a kind of stuttering nothing that’s all there is . . . The blank page here remains a two-way mirror that reflects the master’s fantasies back at him; no flash of mystery, the notion is simply flushed down the text. Nothing, no revelatory meaning. Like the master in Spanking the Maid, like Nixon in The Public Burning, the Kid in Ghost Town, or Phil M. Noir in Noir, Pinocchio has also been through this, both anticipating and parodying your own futile attempts as he too expects “a message of sorts” to enlighten him: He’s a sucker for words, he’ll read anything, afraid of missing something if he doesn’t. Might be a message, a final message (all my life, he thinks, I’ve been waiting for a message). (Pinocchio in Venice, 46) But the only, if any, “message” to be found might merely consist in its own mirrored, stylized repetition at the other end of the novel: If there is something to be read, he cannot but, fearful of missing a message, the message, read it. (308) Whatever “message” there might be may simply be there somewhere, inscribed in the gap, this mysterious space, that separates the repetition from what it repeats, in the blanks of the text, or the absence of the inter-text: absence, not only in that Venice is itself a ghost town of sorts—the Venetian lagoon (laguna) already betraying the absence or “lack” (lacuna) it is built upon—but also in the forgetful absences Pinocchio suffers throughout.

What is perhaps taking shape here is a redefinition of intertextuality in terms radically opposed to the “memory of literature” that the notion is usually linked with. Undoubtedly, the text (Pinocchio in Venice) writes and reads with the memory of what it was or used to be (Adventures of Pinocchio); diverse means are carried out to repeat, quote, rewrite its previous version, progressively brought to the surface as the text’s privileged intertext. As such, as is often thought, literature is able to constitute itself into a virtual sum or “library” through which it imaginarily moves. Yet this view is inseparable from some hermeneutics as it leads one to retrace the intertext in order to see and understand what the text proceeds from, that is, to seize its meaningful origin. However, the more you reflect upon it—or, rather, the more the text reflects upon you . . . —you “sense” that the inter-textual practice of a novel like Pinocchio in Venice revokes all hermeneutic possibility, stressing the very futility of all such labors. Coover’s text or, better, inter-text, specifically proceeds from nothing—as Pinocchio in Venice reads backwards somehow, it parodically enacts this impossible quest for a slippery origin embodied in its main character, motherless and twice-fathered by Mastro Cherry and Gepetto—the “palimpsest,” thus no longer one, recovers and hides nothing anymore: past and present, in their (inter-)textuality, cancel one another out, intertwine and erase themselves mutually: debased and erased, the page remains obscenely blank; all you are faced with in the end is the text’s flitting movement from page to page, a movement that condemns intertextuality to appear rather as a mere “intertextuality effect,” redoubling all its artificiality in the many truncated, parodic or wholly invented (mis)quotations that circulate through the text.

While thus staging an aggressive form of inter-textuality and hence displacing the focus from the “cited” text (the intertext as conventionally regarded and backed up by hermeneutic approaches) onto the “citing” text (the inter-text, the text that wilfully and playfully posits itself between all others, thus doing away with such initial distinctions as “cited” and “citing”), Coover may be inviting you to envision a poetics of oblivion instead: for such seems to be Pinocchio’s resolve ultimately, preferring to abandon and forget himself to the Fairy’s delightful favors as she “blows” new life into the former puppet, even though and especially because this means that Pinocchio’s illustrious, twice-Nobelized career has to be erased from collective memory: yes, he can feel it go, feel it all emptying out as, [s]omewhere, out on the surface, distant now as his forgotten life, fingers dance like children at play and soft lips kiss the ancient hurts away. (329-30) Forget, then, and surrender to an old popular song; “Lèzi, scrivi” (328)—read and write, rewrite all the time in a unique reading move, a rereading that moves all the time, to keep playing with the texts, keeping them at play, in play. Newness is irrelevant, now-ness is not. Leave nothing behind—this whole book, you know, may be but a contradiction in terms—that cannot be erased or reset. The precious, albeit cumbersome, computer Pinocchio cannot let out of his sight, may be condemning the white page to obsolescence; yet as Cora has it in The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, having in mind a different surface altogether, [s]urface is only surface and infinitely restorable. (274) And even more so, perhaps, when it extends to the pure surface of an inter-textual interface on which flit, without ever coming to rest, the unburied treasures of literature, of lit-erasure, against the motion and force of which the stored prosthetic memory of a computer, as though to make up for the professor’s absences, can do strictly nothing.

Tip into oblivion; fade to white . . .