The concept of "presence-in-absence", "signifying absences", what have you

kind of an annoying qn, but simply put: what is the deal with this concept?

it seems to be a big thing.

what are is loci classicuses?

The lost wax metal casting process?

no, like, you miss an important thing from a novel, and that way it's more meaningful. think henry james did this a bit? virginia woolf? im all ears.

err i thot the point of this trick was that the thing-not-there is basically unmissable?

hemingway maybe?

iirc in 'the sun also rises' he's had his cock lopped off only he never says so?

so yeah.

err i thot the point of this trick was that the thing-not-there is basically unmissable?

yeah that too.

iirc in 'the sun also rises' he's had his cock lopped off only he never says so?

zakly what i was thinking about -- but i did not say

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_space

I prefer the concept of war

i sure didnt get that when i read that book at 16

Poor Hemingwang.

im not 100% sure i got it when i read it -- whether it was just the cock. some1 told me it was just his cock; his balls were intact, and thus he remained a man. he could have been fucking with me tho.

i too missed the presence-in-absence of the hemingway stand-in's wiener

I never got that Rael's wang was supposed to get cut off at some point in the story of "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" but I'm going to attribute that to a confusing narrative + being distracted by awesome music rather than "presence-in-absence."

Problem is that even when a book is structured like a puzzle it isn't really a puzzle to be solved.

There are readings of Wuthering Heights that argue that Heathcliff is black, hence the forbiddenness of his relationship with Cathy.

There are readings of Wuthering Heights that argue that Heathcliff is an orange cat, hence the forbiddenness of his relationship with Cathy.

ack!

"There are readings of Wuthering Heights that argue that Heathcliff is black, hence the forbiddenness of his relationship with Cathy."

it's true!

http://static.guim.co.uk/Guardian/stage/gallery/2008/oct/01/theatre.shakespeare/othellooliv-6482.jpg

you guys can boot me from this thread any time btw

cathy ack!er

I was thinking that in Stephen's deciphering of Hamlet in the "Scylla and Charybdis" chapter of Ulysses he argued that the central rule of a riddle is that you can't name the thing that is the answer, but a quick search makes me think I'm wrong and that discussion is from a different book, possibly a critical text talking about "the word known to all men" but maybe from something completely different.

fruit snack!

the big presence-in-absence of ulysses is that there is no character named ulysses--in fact he is a character from a famous epic poem

There are readings of Wuthering Heights that argue that Heathcliff is an orange cat, and Cathy is a middle-aged single office worker constantly panicking about dieting but they don't actually exist in the same universe, hence their relationship is forbidden.

Anyway I guess this is sometimes the point of yr signifying absence: if a text is structured in a riddle-like way, for it to function as a riddle it can't directly name the thing it's about.

the sinking of the odradek stadium kinda does this but not really

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipogram

Lipograms I think can use presence-in-absence but aren't always an example of this. Must read A Void some time.

Do not forget Ross Perot's crazy aunt who lives in the attic and is never spoken of. And the elephant in the room.

i heard a really good lecture about oulipo recently. really interesting, but definitely didn't make me want to read any of the actual stuff that came out of it.

Toni Morrison kind of does this (in reverse?) in "Paradise". The first line of the book is

"They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time."

thereafter she never actually mentions any of the women in the convent being white.

TONI MORRISON: Well, my point was to flag raise and then to erase it, and to have the reader believe--finally--after you know everything about these women, their interior lives, their past, their behavior, that the one piece of information you don't know, which is the race, may not, in fact, matter. And when you do know it, what do you know?

read locus solus scott

That 'word you cannot use in setting a riddle is its answer' turns up in 'The Garden of Forking Paths' by Borges.

That's what I was struggling to remember. Thanx.

hemingway's "hills like white elephants" is a canonical example of this.

On Henry James: is this different to the 'Figure in the Carpet' and 'The Aspern Papers' missing-middle trick? Like there it's 'there's a secret... there's a secret... there's a secret... there's a secret... NOT TELLING lol deep'; is this more pretending to hide or omit a secret while implicitly telling you?

hemingway should have called it the dick never rises tbh

A Farewell to Boners

Boners Like White Elephants

The Old Man and the No C on Ts

Leon Edel:

Another bit of imaginative projection upon James' life can be found in Ernest Hemingway's letters. This novelist, on learning that Brooks had written that James was "prevented by an accident from taking part in the Civil War," immediately incorporated this into his nearly finished novel, The Sun Also Rises. In Chapter 12, Jake Barnes refers to his World War I accident, and Gorton says, "That's the sort of thing that can't be spoken of. That's what you ought to work up into a mystery. Like Henry's bicycle." Barnes replies it wasn't a bicycle; "he was riding horseback." (In his memoirs, James spoke of having had a "horrid" but "obscure hurt." He had strained his back during a stable fire while serving as a volunteer fireman.) Hemingway had originally inserted James' name in the novel, but Scribner's editor, Maxwell Perkins, vetoed this. Hemingway insisted. They finally compromised on the "Henry" alone. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Brooks, "Why didn't you touch more on James' impotence (physical) and its influence?" The castration theme was picked up by R.P. Blackmur, Glenway Wescott, Lionel Trilling, and F.O. Matthiessen in their critical writings.

http://www.slate.com/id/3124/

the most striking example of the signifying absence in james' work that i can think of is the fact that the death of isobel archer's only child merits a single sentence in 'the portrait of a lady'

For Whom the Balls Toll

semiotics is sort of completely based on this concept

A long time ago, in another lifetime, when I was an undergraduate, I heard a lot of talk about the "slippage between the signifier and the sign."

A little while later I read about something called objet petit a in these books
http://server40136.uk2net.com/~wpower/images/product_images/9780860915928.jpg
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/026274015X.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Recently I enjoyed a novel which seemed to be about a disappearing and reappearing absent presence, M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart.

xp - just don't expect me to remember the plot of Riddles of the Sphinx.

Or that of The Lady Or The Tiger.

do we think there's a relationship between the issue of presence/absence in derrida and lacan, and the use of ellipsis in hemingway and james?

i've read a thing that seems to connect them and im not sure if im convinced/if i get it.

Wait a few decades, maybe you'll get it then, or you won't care anymore.

re. derrida/lacan: i don't think language ever made the claims they attribute to it. given that both write deliberately badly, fail to make rational arguments, etc, and their acolytes likewise, there is limit time to devote. im not closing my ears, hence this thread. but im more interested in the "older" literary use of absence.

it wouldnt be hard to make the connection, especially not if the thing thats missing is a big ol ding dong, but you dont NEED it by any means

ah, guess i mean, is there a direct connection in some way. or: why did ppl like henry james start to employ this innaresting technique?

(the case i have in mind really is woolf, who i know less about, but who seems to have done this?)

sex in the spoils if poynton is a pretty big lacuna, in fact in almost all of James iirc

anyways this is basically a riff on the old literary technique that what is implied is oftentimes more interesting than what was shown/said

classics student in me wants to claim that this is as old as the greeks at least but im too stoned to think of any examples

there was absenkalous, god of absence for example

always warring with his brother presencles

all the off stage stuff in tragedy, the whole notion of what is "obscene"? xxp

sometimes they would be 'in' each other if you know what I mean

maybe there is a difference between presence-in-absence as a phenomenon & p-i-a as a literary technique or something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDFGa0juCM
(xp)

mansfield park and slavery may be a good example? like, the one time the slave trade is mentioned it's followed by a "dead silence".

read locus solus scott
Roussel was too early for Oulipo, no? I believe he was what they called an "anticipatory plagiarist."

(Whole Heathcliff/Cathy/Sir Larry thing upthread is comedy gold, btw)

another jamesian example, maybe - in the aspern papers, the narrator is told that the papers exist...and have been destroyed...but he never actually sees them for himself - and i think william james described his brother's writing as a 'hall of mirrors', where events and characters are 'reflected' through other people's recollections, impressions

it has been nearly twenty years since i marinated myself in this kind of theory, but my memory is that 'structured absence' etc could also apply to audiences who are there-and-not-there as spectators/subjects/objects of representation and whatnot

damn i gotta read some henry james.

mansfield park and slavery may be a good example? like, the one time the slave trade is mentioned it's followed by a "dead silence".

― joe, Thursday, December 17, 2009 1:28 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah. i did this at school, i suppose as well understatement shades into this sort of thing. when they made a movie of 'mansfield park' they added back in all the slavery etc. fail?

I can't remember which famous writer is was who said you should figure out what your novel is really about and then never mention that thing.

a lot of these modernist or almost-modern examples of absence signify the same thing, don't they? FEAR. like in lovecraft, i.e. "what is it? well i can't tell you what it is, because my imagination has failed me it would be too scary!!"

mayne 20th-c french philosophy can often be deliberately poetic and contradictory, which puts it v much at odds with other traditions but saying that derrida and lacan wrote "deliberately badly" is stretching it

Srsly does this relate to the tradition of absent TV characters?

I'm still confusing myself over how all this fits together - like Aspern/Figure in the Carpet H. James looks like an inheritor of that 'oh shit what if there's nothing in the middle' Victorian nervousness - Browning ('Childe Roland' maybe, 'Fears and Scruples'), later Dickens (Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mr Merdle); and that's like the postponement/unreachable bits of Kafka (so this Borges essay); but that's not quite the unspoken/repressed theme thing that's going on elsewhere in this thread.

in his paris review interview, borges says something to the effect that "everything in kafka can be found in the short stories of henry james at a much higher level"

by the way i think the "hauntology" series that freaky trigger's doing about a different james - m.r. james - is particularly apropos here:

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2009/12/hauntography-oh-whistle-and-ill-come-to-you-my-lad/

http://sportskate.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/fedex-logo.jpeg

I think Gérard Genette's Narrative Discourse is your only man for this kind of stuff.

Literature-wise, the example I always heard is that in Proust's writing there are missing prepositions which serve as a way of talking about homosexuality, at a time, mind you, when it wasn't to easy to explicitly write about such things. Granted I've never read Proust, let alone have read him in French where syntactical particularities are in place...

I've always been thinking about this alot with respect to visual art. Rachel Whiteread casting negative space, for instance, is a good place to look, or conversely I saw a monument for Nazi book burnings that consisted of empty book cases - its the sort of idea of putting emptiness on the shelves.

best modern iteration of this concept imo

http://tvplex.go.com/touchstone/homeimprovement/wilson/images/TimWilson.jpg

no mention of snuffleupagus eh

i figured, more than the dick, the big thing never mentioned in the sun also rises is world war i

"The Beast In The Jungle" is another story where James does this.

John Marcher, the protagonist, is reacquainted with May Bartram, a woman he knew ten years earlier, who remembers his odd secret: Marcher is seized with the belief that his life is to be defined by some catastrophic or spectacular event, lying in wait for him like a "beast in the jungle."

obviously it doesn't happen. or, rather, it does happen by not happening. a slow event.

he also does it in "In the Cage", to an extent, but the themes there are a little different.

Godot