The works

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Serres somesing strange

Reading Michel Serres has been a lot like trying to read an arrangement for an orchestra. The notes are all there, and I know what they all mean (that is, I know what a single note represents, much as I understand what a single word means), but it is near impossible trying to imagine them all coinciding at the same time being played by the respective instruments. Likewise, Serres draws up a variety of diagrams, often introducing the next one before I have fully grasped the previous, and he continually refers back to obscure references of fables I'm not familiar with. To top it off, he seems to write in a style that I would equate with a genius 10 year old who was dictating to a computer of his own invention. In other words, I feel that if I wrote like Serres, my essays would be thrown back at me.
However, Serres is well acquainted with the approved styles and organizations of writing, which makes me think, or hope, there is some method to the "madness" of his words. True, this was translated from French, and I've seen it written that his work has been regarded as untranslatable, but I don't feel that this has to do with the awkward and disjointed phrases that I'm perceiving. Many sentences do not have a subject or they do not have an independent clause. What is? His point I wonder.
It is his point that I’m after, not that of the book so much, not that of the ideas that have been printed. It is in him I’m interested in because he does not distance himself from the words. Why go after printed letters, when they just represent sound, which just represent words, which just express ideas, when I can go after the source? ‘I’ is a mainstay, ‘I’ is among the letters, standing tall and directing traffic, though if the goal were to expedite and ensure safety of understanding for the reader, it fails. ‘I’ throws a giant lasso around the pages, so large the reader doesn’t even notice it. A lasso to wrap around the words. “Mine” says the lasso. But the lasso is drawn by a pen, thrown by an ‘I’. Serres. One notices the odd language, the odd syntax. One can’t ignore it. Perhaps more effective than what the words actually mean, than by what examples he actually brings up, Serres expresses in the very way he writes how everything is a part of a parasite relationship. Though instead of a guest/host, he really plays on the reader/writer. The reader is dependant on the words of the writer to be a reader, but the words are an interruption, they don’t seem fruitful, they are essentially the visual representation of noise, of static. The writer can only be fulfilled while he has readers, so he uses his noise, he produces the letters, he captures readers in his lasso. While the reader reads, there is only one ‘I’. Serres.

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