Coherents Holes

COHERENT HOLES Cecil F. Quince

Afterword by Richard Sewall

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COHERENT HOLES

‘The lover as interpreter must construct his mistress so as to render her internally consistent’, Lucy said to the poplar tree.

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AFTERWORD COHERENT HOLES: A TOPOLOGY OF AMBIVALENCE

By virtue of its firstly assumed simplicity, Coherent Holes refuses itself to be the prey of careless reading. Thus it is able to display its boundless complex nature. Coherent Holes is a voyage, a unique experience of the intellect, which provides the reader with as much richness as he or she would be willing to take. The present analysis strives to disclose glimpses of this richness. Let us begin then with what is readily available at the entrance of this labyrinth of reading. Lucy’s statement allows us a view into the character’s private past and present. It would seem that her words are based on somehow sad or dissatisfied experiences in the field, and so they can even be voiced as a sort of protest. Similarly, we can view her statement as steaming from a pleasant and successful amorous experience, from which she has determined the ideal behavior a lover should adopt. By addressing her words to a poplar tree –an object incapable of producing a response, and also a strong phallic symbol– they become at the same time a passive and active statement, a mere expression of her private thoughts, and a public declaration intended to cause a certain effect. Lucy is talking to the phallic symbolism of the tree, and consequently to masculinity as a whole, and to masculine sexuality in particular; additionally, she gives a voice to her femininity, she speaks through and with her sexuality. This aspect is interlinked with several symbolic images in the work, apart from the sensual implications in Lucy’s statement itself. The counterpart to the phallic image is found in two interrelated elements. Lucy’s ‘internally consistent mistress’ gives a slight connotation with the image expressed in the title, which in turn coarsely refers to female genitalia. The use of this image undermines Quince’s own open feminist views, giving us a glimpse through his liberal carcass into a much deeper macho conservationalism, perhaps a lamentable surplus from his Latin American background. However, the openly use of the expression, specially as it is placed in the very title of the work, and because of the implicit tone of the whole work, has the measure to convince us that its function is not related to Quince’s personal views, but as a mocking device for what he wishes not to stand for –and as yet another element interrelated to the rest of the work to add to its complexity. Many of the images contained in Coherent Holes can be by themselves a transport for both serious and mocking expressions. The same may be said of the text as an entire piece. Nevertheless, there is no single correct analysis that will exhaust the hermeneutic possibilities of this peculiar and subtle piece of writing. From this it can be asserted that Coherent Holes’ intention is to transmit certainties through ambiguities. In fact, the whole text is mainly constituted by such an ambiguity, or the joint result of a group of ambiguities. The play of semantic potential in particular signs –moreover, we can argue that all terms 4 Copyright © Cecil F. Quince 2009 - All Right Reserved

Afterword allow themselves to be part in this game– can develop to a highly sexual and even obscene version of the work, although it articulates smoothly with other aspects of the inner workings of the text. This blurry face emerges as if uninvited, from the deeps a mischievous mind, to show us in its wake both the pure naïveté and the sinful appeal of human sexuality. It should be noted that such themes and images have haunted the author since the beginning of his coming-of-age years.1 The fact that this sexually explicit facet is not the main subject primarily available to the reader emulates the belief that, even though they are invariably merged, sexual desire and practice is in some way behind the purity of the emotion normally described as love. Coherent Holes attempts to demonstrate that sex and flesh are the very base, the deep beginnings, the blurry realm where sensations of love, happiness and compassion come to participate, and only in participating thus they become the emotions as we humanly experience them. This facet is as old as the reptilian instincts, and as such it can never be utterly ignored. In this respect we can add that the name of the character has not been chosen at random –in contrast to Quince’s common practice for the majority of his writings2. Lucy is a name that in the history of literature has been generally applied to a certain type of female character. This name denotes the ideas of boldness and beauty on its bearer. Lucy would be young, exquisitely soft and delicate, and at the same time courageous, self-centered and full of wanton. Going back to the comparison between the image in the title and Lucy’s views on the making of a consistent mistress, we can redraw the images into a different meaning, thus obtaining a fine discourse on none less than the act of reading itself. Generally, the coordinated force between the different text components and their intrinsic bond tend to render the work into a harmonious whole in the reader’s mind. In order to come to terms with the text, the reader has to choose what attitude to adopt before it, and make the parts complement each other towards this common cause. Nevertheless, –and here we come across the main feature of Coherent Holes– this work does not allow the reader to produce a total consistent meaning out of it or its elements. The image contained in the title clearly refers to the ‘holes’ in the text’s meaning, that is, to the ambiguities and irregularities that plague the reader’s attempt to ‘harmonize’ the text. To explore further this ‘sub-story’ on the act of reading, we should attend to the content of the ‘surface’ story. The comparison between lover and interpreter, so boldly expressed in the text, shows that the act of ‘constructing’ the mistress takes place inside the mind of the lover. The way in which he may regard her, and whatever conception he holds on the nature of their 1  See Frederic Mondain, ‘Sign Overload: Cecil Quince and the Concept of Sexuality’, in Stephen Williams (ed.), Struggles and Visions in Post-Modern Popular Culture (Brighton, 2006). 2  See Patricia Lambert, ‘Tzara’s Scissors: The Principle of Randomness in Quince’s Oeuvre’, Chapman 109 (Edinburgh, Apr 2008).

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Afterword relationship, are to be systemized into a smooth tight-knitted concept. In order to successfully interpret his mistress, the lover must produce a fixed impression of her, which is beyond questioning. He may adopt this pose as interpreter so that his role of lover could be improved momentarily, if at all –we shall see in the next two paragraphs the nature of this ‘momentarily’–, in both the physical and emotional fields, for the benefits of the mistress. Similarly, the reader must produce a consistent concept out of what he is reading. He must fill in the text’s gaps, and resolve any conflicting aspects, so that reading can become an untroubled experience, a commodity ready to be effortlessly consumed. The liaison between text and reader is easily consummated thus. Alas, as it is often the case with lovers and mistresses, such untroubled liaison is not always possible. As we have previously seen, Coherent Holes is mainly constituted by a set of ambiguities, which poses several difficulties that prevent the reader of absorbing the text at once. What the text does not explicitly say turns out to be its most expressive voice, and this voice’s subtle hermeneutic richness makes this work a hard specimen to be ‘rendered internally consistent’ in the reader’s mind. This goes against what Lucy seems to state about a lover’s behavior, thus adding to the conflictive, or rather ironic, nature of the work, and consequently to the burden it holds upon the reader. Coherent Holes seems to undermine the very principle of a harmonious construction on which the work itself relies. Let us look further into this particular conflict between the outer and inner narratives. Lucy’s statement proposes a utopian lover, someone who understands his mistress to the point of expelling all doubts that may surround her. This understanding comes at a very high cost, for a fixed system devoid of uncertainty is bound to eventually loose its appeal. In his early essay ‘On Grooming Worms and Lovers’3 Cecil Quince argues that the experience of love is a constant re-discovery (and consequently a re-measurement) of the loved one, and for this to happen one has to allow room for this new measures. A lover who, when assessing his or her beloved and their relationship, fails to add a hint of hesitation and doubt, will block the flow of re-discovery, growing gradually dissatisfied with the beloved. Therefore, according to this view, Lucy’s ideal lover is unviable: he will abandon his mistress sooner or later, tired of her never-changing features. In a similar fashion, a reader who does not allow room for irregularities of meaning will impose a blockage to the re-discovering of alternate reactions to the text. This may facilitate the reader to come into terms with the work; however, it irrevocably reduces the complexity of the work, reducing as well the amount of enjoyment to be possibly obtained from such a rich composition. In the aforementioned essay Quince stresses that a blockage in the flow of re-discovery may not be a matter of concern for everyone. There are in fact certain types of people who will produce a consistent view on their lovers, and never allow it to change. This is a mechanism 3  C. Quince, ‘On Grooming Worms and Lovers’, in The Daily Thoughts of a Hedgehog Obsessed with Keeping That Potato Far From the Plunging Zone (Strasbourg, 1997), pp. 141-58. This volume also contains ‘We Are Tired of Tradition’, a study of several Latin-American writers that have made of ambiguity a necessary element in their works.

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Afterword obviously governed by the fear of leaving the “comfort zone”, the desire to keep everything as it is at the present, the fear of change. Such refusal of change will eventually bring the consistent view the lover has produced of their beloved, into conflict with the real beloved, the actual person bound to historical and social change. On a broader scale, in which we can include the relationship between reader and text, the lover has an anti-historical approach to a historical dependent subject. By refusing to allow for differences and irregularities of meaning, the lover/ reader suspends the subject of analysis outside time and history, and isolates it of reality in order to maintain its consistency; therefore the illusory character of such consistent views. The fact that Lucy’s statement calls for this kind of temporal suspension makes it an unsatisfactory statement, a view hardly applicable to Quince4. It is not by chance that this deceitful statement is the first thing the reader comes upon. Quince presents it entangled in between the elements that compose the final work, where its prominence arouses the frictions and contradictions so inherent to the text’s character. Only when viewed in depth, Coherent Holes reveals the true intentions and beliefs it wishes to expound: how meaning is as relative to the reader’s intervention as it is to the author’s; and not only it is relative but it can not be hold still into a harmonious construction. If it ever does, it would only be an incomplete and defective meaning fixed momentarily in the reader’s mind. In other words, Coherent Holes explores the impermanence of its own meaning, and thus of meaning in general. In this respect, it is a portray of human experience itself, illustrating its inexhaustible potential for variations, and it stands as such by a net of diverse indistinct elements. The text remains ambiguously between several mutually conflicting positions, eliciting from the reader a kind of consent while seeking simultaneously to undermine it. Try as we might to follow the thread accordingly, while withholding our attention to all constitutive details we meet, it is our fate to become entangled in the maze of meaning. This is by all means a superb aesthetic experience, a voyage masterly guided by the genius of Quince. RICHARD SEWALL

4  It seems hardly applicable indeed if we take into account Quince’s views as presented in several of his nonfiction publications, of which I would stress: The Daily Thoughts…, (1997); The Death of the Artist, or A Plea on the Role of the Contemporary Audience, (Amsterdam, 2001), an attack on intentionalism in the field of fine arts, and where Quince sets forth his theories of ambivalent-imbedded meaning and how this ambivalence could be exploited; The Yellow Thread That Unites the Red Drawer with the Blue Chandelier, (Edinburgh, 2005), brings together a faint Hegelian notion of progressive history tainted by Marxism with the paradigms of postmodern thought, pouring the results in practical form into our everyday life.

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Copyright © Cecil F. Quince 2009 Copyright of the Afterword © Richard Sewall 2009 All rights reserved.

Copyright © Cecil F. Quince 2009 - All Right Reserved