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5. ‘‘Stones for Thought’’
- Fordham University Press
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5. ‘‘Stones for Thought’’ such an experience of time requires the specification of location : for a grave to be understood as a grave, rather than mere ground, it must be marked; and for a graveyard to be recognized as such its own limits must be demarcated. The indication of a ‘‘here’’ not to be confused with ‘‘there’’ is what makes the apprehension of time on earth, the historical, possible. As discussed in the Introduction, in filming a simple enactment of just such deictic precision within the extensive verbal testimony and silent footage of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann achieves, with cinematic means, a recorded and thus repeatable demonstration of that fact. Contrary to those prescribed by the mason ’s speech, to be considered next, acts of deixis made apprehensible by the medium of documentary film-making need not be accompanied by the articulation of an enduring theoretical principle because the very fact of their enactment and recording define them and their viewing as already historical, after the fact. The documentary film commemorates—renders both immediately visible and historically past—the reality of a certain present, whether staged, discovered, or uncovered, for the future. Deixis represented with purely discursive means is, by contrast, merely an idea, and so must instead depart from a laying down of general principles in the first place. Specific indication of place is the first rule of all building laid down by the ‘‘mason’’ (VI:299) at the laying of the foundation or groundstone of the pleasure-building. Taking place on Charlotte’s birthday and intended to provide additional diversion for the living, the ceremonial laying of the groundstone appears in many ways to stand the principle of erecting a gravestone on its head. The unbridgeable difference between the two architectural acts would be the difference 114 ‘‘stones for thought’’ ‡ 115 between life and death, yet the narrator indicates there is a familiar if ‘‘imperfect’’ way of translating between them. For the mason’s discourse , related, like all else in the narrative, in prose, is stated to have been originally delivered in verse: ‘‘A cleanly attired mason, holding a trowel in one hand and a hammer in the other, gave a graceful speech in rhyme which we can only imperfectly reproduce in prose’’ (VI:299). The only poetry to which the novel refers, even as it ‘‘imperfectly reproduces’’ it in its own prosaic, representational mode, is verse explicating the general foundations of building at a ceremony in which a particular foundation is about to be laid.63 Building in itself, the narrative appears to suggest, is a form whose irreproducible purpose lies quite apart from the unavoidably prosaic uses to which it is routinely —here, novelistically—put. For, even in the world of prose discourse and prosaic purposes in which they come to us translated, the mason’s words indicate there is nothing routine about the work he undertakes. In order for there to be building, he pronounces, there must first be an unprecedented act of reference, a founding definition of place: ‘‘Three things,’’ he began, ‘‘are to be taken into account when building a building: that it stand on the right spot, that it be well grounded, and that it be carried out completely. The first of these is properly the matter of he who builds; for just as in the town only the prince and the commonweal can determine where [something] should be built, so in the country it is the privilege of the land owner to say: here should my dwelling stand and no place else.’’ (VI:299–300) With the ‘‘privilege’’ of property come the joint privileges of definition and deixis: the landowner says ‘‘here’’ and a specific location in space is identified, in distinction from all others, by an illocutionary act. And, like the ‘‘privilege’’ of property, of regarding pieces 63. The report that the mason’s speech was given in verse the narrative itself can only reproduce in prose seems a less strange or self-limiting inclusion in the context of the novel’s fiction in view of an early observation by Goethe. In a posthumously published essay on architecture, ‘‘Baukunst’’ (written 1795), Goethe equates the general failure to recognize architecture as ‘‘an art for itself,’’ based in ‘‘intellectual principles,’’ with an implicit inability to appre- [35.175.212.5] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:18 GMT) 116 ‡ built time of space on earth as one’s own, the act of indicating the single proper...