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.This shift then gains in amplitude and intensity as the passage continues.We observe, in particular, that the incorrect syntax that spreads like a contagion through this passage is produced by the reciprocal activity of ellipses and metaphors—both the presence of prosaic words made poetic and their suppression via ellipses—as though both techniques were interchangeable or, as it were, in “perfect equilibrium” with each other.The possibility of achieving poetic effects by violating normal syntax is beautifully expressed in Text 19, in which Soares speaks of “The magic power of words in isolation or joined together on the basis of sound, with inner reverberations and divergent meanings even as they converge, the splendour of phrases inserted between the meanings of other phrases, the virulence of vestiges, the hope of the woods, and the absolute peacefulness of the ponds on the farms of my childhood ruses” (25; my emphasis).This evocation of words that are isolated from each other—or connected to each other in ways that dispense with conventional syntax—may remind us of an intriguing remark that Roland Barthes makes about haiku in The Preparation of a Novel.The fragments of a haiku, Barthes says, are “present to one another yet they’re not connected; a mode of co-presence that’s very difficult to conceptualize: to conceive of a co-presence without it being metonymical, antithetical, causal, etc.; a consecution without logic yet without signifying the destruction of logic: a neutral connection—such would be the surface of a collection of haiku (33; my emphasis).The “neutral connections” that can be equally achieved either by isolating words or by joining them together—thus producing what Soares called, in another context, “Siamese twins that aren’t attached” (20)—may be noticed in the ambiguous effect that he achieves through his use of ellipses.At times, he will use them (especially in the medial position) in a perfectly prosaic way in order to mark a pause for which a simple period may have sufficed: “I did my best to lose all attachment to life.In time I even shed my desire for glory” (217); “To begin with somebody else’s creation, working only on improving it.Perhaps that is how the Iliad was written.” (250); “No, others don’t exist.It’s for me that this heavy-winged sunset lingers, its colour hard and hazy” (268); “The voice of brooks that you interpret, pure explicator.The voice of trees whose rustling means what we say it means.Ah, my unknown love, this is all just us and our fantasies, all ash, trickling down the bars of our cell!” (277).An equally prosaic effect is created in the several places where Soares has left a blank space in places where he couldn’t decide on the appropriate word.At such moments, our recognizing the author’s hesitation does not provoke even the slightest emergence of the poetic: “His religion was far from the common people and the ” (53); “My hazy but constant sensibility and my long but conscious dream which together form my privilege of a life in the shadows” (165); “Ah, what transcendental sensuousness when at night” (197); “who’s to say that sickness wasn’t preferable or more logical or more than health” (216); “this is the substance from which I carve the imaginary statue of my existence” (216); “The creators of metaphysical systems and of psychological explanations are still in the primary stages of suffering.What is systematizing and explaining but and construction?” (341).Poetic effects do emerge within this prosaic surface, however, when Soares uses initial and terminal ellipses to enclose a fragment, in such away as to create a reciprocity between completion and incompletion.This strategy produces a “greater completeness” in which the ellipses, while signifying that a piece is missing, also create an aesthetically satisfying experience of closure.Examples include:“.the sacred instinct of having no theories.” (218)“ [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]