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ADAPTATION IN
THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE

Performances of
Authorial Presence
and Absence
The Author Dies Hard
Silvija Jestrovic
Adaptation in Theatre and Performance

Series Editors
Vicky Angelaki
Mid Sweden University
Sundsvall, Sweden

Kara Reilly
Department of Drama
University of Exeter
Exeter, UK
The series addresses the various ways in which adaptation boldly takes on
the contemporary context, working to rationalise it in dialogue with the
past and involving the audience in a shared discourse with narratives that
form part of our artistic and literary but also social and historical constitu-
tion. We approach this form of representation as a way of responding and
adapting to the conditions, challenges, aspirations and points of reference
at a particular historical moment, fostering a bond between theatre and
society.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14373
 Silvija Jestrovic

Performances
of Authorial Presence
and Absence
The Author Dies Hard
Silvija Jestrovic
Leamington Spa, UK

Adaptation in Theatre and Performance

ISBN 978-3-030-43289-8 ISBN 978-3-030-43290-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43290-4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: saul landell/mex, Getty Images

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgments

This book would not have been written without support and friendship
of many people. Most notably, my series editors Vicky Angelaki and Kara
Reilly, whose encouragement and enthusiasm made this book happen. I
am deeply grateful to the in-house editors at Palgrave, Eileen Srebernik
and Jack Heeney, and their team, for their great professionalism and for
their patience.
This book would not be what it is now without my language-fairies:
the superbly talented Mihaila Petričić, whose generous help on the first
chapter was indispensible; any my brilliant friend Joanne Mackay Bennett,
who has worked round the clock with me on this manuscript. I cannot
imagine ever writing a book without her on my side (and this is our third).
Veronika Ambros, once my mentor, always my mentor, answered any
questions about Structuralism and Russian Formalism I could possible
have in most precise detail and with most in-depth knowledge.
I am grateful to Tim Crouch and the Dead Centre for their amazing
and thought-provoking theatre; and to the photographers Adam Trigg
and Jose Miguel Jimenez, for allowing me to share their theatre
photography.
My colleagues in Theatre and Performance Studies at the Warwick
University have been supportive and generous as ever and I am grateful
for their gentle nudges too: Nadine Holdsworth, Andy Lavender, Nicolas
Whybrow, Tim White, Jim Davis, Yvette Hutchison, David Coates,

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Bobby Smith, Margaret Shewring. Special thanks have my book-writing-

buddies—Susan Haedicke, who took the time from writing her book to
read drafts of mine; and Milija Gluhović for reading drafts, finding things
I needed to read, and supplying me with bread from our neighbourhood
bakery.
One sunny summer’s day in Oxford, Domenico and Laura Pietropaolo
discussed Barthes with me over lunch at the rooftop terrace of the
Ashmolean Museum. On a rainy afternoon in Paris, Yana Meerzon and
I carried a debate on the responsibility of the author from one bistro
to the next. This was brainstorming The Author Dies Hard at its most
glamorous.
I would have never written this book if it hasn’t been for the cocoon
my family has been weaving all this time—they have been my room with a
view: I am grateful to my parents for their vitality and warmth, to Dragan
for the coffees, the conversations and the long car trips, and to my Ana—
for everything.
 Contents

1 The Paradox of the Author’s Death: An Introduction 1

Part I Birth(s)

2 Author as a Heteroglossic Figure 39

3 Embodiment and Textualization 57

4 Performing the Self 77

Part II Resurrections

5 Resurrection as Adaptation: (Re)Makes,

Deconstructions and the Gun 111

6 The Author Is Present 139

7 The Artist Is (Meaningfully) Absent 165

vii
viii CONTENTS

Part III Conclusion

8 Coda: In Other Deaths 199

Index 205
 List of Images

Image 5.1 Adler & Gibb—Denise Gough as Louise (Photo by

Johan Persson/ArenaPAL) 120
Image 5.2 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play (Photo by Adam
Trigg [Courtesy of www.naturaltheatre.photos]) 132
Image 5.3 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play (Photo by Jose
Miguel Jimenez) 133
Image 5.4 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play (Photo by Adam
Trigg [Courtesy of www.naturaltheatre.photos]) 135

ix
 CHAPTER 1

The Paradox of the Author’s Death:

An Introduction

In 1968, the year of the revolt in France and around the world, theorist
Roland Barthes famously proclaimed the ‘Death of the Author’, putting
to rest the notion of the author as the originator/God and placing the
reader centre stage. To be more precise, his essay was written a year earlier
and first appeared in English translation in an American journal. Anthol-
ogized only ten years later (in 1977 in Image-Music-Text and then in The
Rustle of Language in 1984), it had been photocopied and distributed
as samizdat on campuses all over the world, which only enhanced its
subversive appeal. The provocation of the death of the hegemonic autho-
rial figure, however, spoke to the revolutionary atmosphere of 1968.
Barthes and his circle, including Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques
Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, to mention a few, were considered to be at the
forefront of an intellectual revolution. Reviewing Barthes’s essay for The
Guardian book review, Andrew Gallix describes le nouvelle critique as
the ‘flavour of the month, much like its culinary counterpoint, nouvelle
cuisine, albeit more of a mouthful’:

Their works often became bestsellers in spite of their demanding and icon-
oclastic nature. […] The whole movement seemed as provocative, and
indeed exciting, as Brigitte Bardot in her slink, sex kitten heyday. Its
defining moment was the publication of the racy little number called The
Death of the Author. (Gallix 2010, n.p.)

© The Author(s) 2020 1

S. Jestrovic, Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence,
Adaptation in Theatre and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43290-4_1
2 S. JESTROVIC

Nevertheless, with the proclamation of the death of the author, the author
was everywhere, even when it was difficult to separate individual voices
and gestures from the collective.
During the events of 1968 in France, a collective voice emerged
that began with committees formed to solve practical problems. Soon,
however, collectivity became a mode of cultural production, from the
anonymous authorship of the graffiti adorning the facades of Paris
to experimentation with collective creation in the theatre of Ariane
Mnouchkine and Jean Vilar. The occupation of the Odeon Theatre
marked the protesters’ antagonistic relationship with institutional and
bourgeois culture. The graffiti ‘Art is dead. Let us create our daily life’
sounded like an echo from both Barthes and Artaud. Like Barthes’s
proposition, of the death of the author the death of art was also provi-
sional. The other part of the inscription that called for ‘creating daily
life’ was really about a different way of making art: collective, embodied
in the everyday, with the barrier between creator and audience erased.
In Barthes’s radical proposition, the shifting of roles in the relationship
between the author and the reader (spectator, participant) is shaped along
similar lines—the reader is no longer a consumer of the work; he or
she is an active participant and, moreover, he or she is the focal point
into which the work streams. In other words, the reader completes the
meaning. Hence, the line between originator and recipient is blurred and
the meaning and shape of the work are determined through a commu-
nication process. As summarized in Alfred Willner’s assertion that the
‘division between those who create culture, in the artistic sense, and those
who consume it’ (Willner 1970, p. 33) has been rejected, the cultural
revolution of May 1968 played out—in the streets and within occupied
state institutions—a radical proposition similar to the one Barthes had
written about a year earlier when proclaiming the death of the author
and the rebirth of the reader. In both cases, the lines between passivity
and activity were blurred. Theatre director Jean-Louis Barrault and one of
the protagonists of the 1968 protests described the atmosphere in front of
the Odeon in Paris in its full collective theatricality: ‘The square outside
had become a regular fairground: a man with a monkey, a man with a
bear, guitarists, rubbernecks and more or less camouflaged ambulances.
Slogans all over the walls’ (Barrault 1974, p. 316). One of the leaders
of the revolt, the German student Daniel Cohn-Bendit, commented:
‘[…] the barricades were no longer simply a means of self-defence, they
became a symbol of individual liberty’ (Cohn-Bandit and Cohn-Bandit
 1 THE PARADOX OF THE AUTHOR’S DEATH: AN INTRODUCTION 3

1968, p. 63). The barricade became a space, a stage, where collective

improvisation in direct democracy could be performed.
That year, the Cannes Film Festival also turned into a stage for political
action when, instead of showing their films, authors of the French New
Wave—François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Lelouch, Roman
Polanski—stood in front of the blank projection screen of the small Jean
Cocteau theatre at the old Palais Croisette and called for the closure of
the festival in solidarity with the protesting students and workers. Truf-
faut, who coined the term auteur 1 cinema and foregrounded the role
of the director as the absolute author of the film—author with a capital
‘A’—was the most outspoken of the collective voices. He read the Ciné-
mathèque Defence Committee’s proclamation calling a press conference
to ask film-makers, artists, technicians, journalists and the festival jury to
stand against the continuation of the festival to protest police oppression,
the French government and the structures within the film industry. Direc-
tors Miloš Forman and Lelouch were the first to go onstage to announce
that they had withdrawn their films from the festival; others followed suit.
Truffaut’s words, captured in the documentary film footage of the day,
further electrified the atmosphere in the theatre: ‘The radio announces by
the hour that factories are occupied and closed, the trains have stopped
running and the metro and buses will be next. So to announce every hour
that the festival continues is just ridiculous’ (Cannes Film Festival, May
18, 1968).
As more people were gathering, the film-makers decided to occupy
the main theatre and it was there that Godard addressed ethical ques-
tions of art, political engagement and the auteur: ‘There isn’t one film
showing the problems going on today among workers and students. Not
one, whether by Forman, myself, Polanski, François. There are none, we
are behind the times’ (Cannes Film Festival, May 18, 1968). Godard’s
words called for the artist’s political and ethical responsibility and for crit-
ically engaged work that would speak to it. The auteurs of the French
New Wave had according to Godard, failed in making films that would
answer to the political demands of their time. Yet, to mitigate these fail-
ings, the auteurs appeared in person instead of their films to assert an
urgent political message that their creative outputs were too slow to artic-
ulate. These gestures of solidarity foregrounded the idea of the author as
a political and ethical figure. The director of the festival had no other
choice but to join the auteurs onstage and proclaim the Cannes Film
Festival closed. The spectators did not get to see the films, but they did
4 S. JESTROVIC

enter into direct dialogue with their auteurs and joined in the collective
revolt. The auteur was no longer a hidden artistic force behind a film,
but an embodied presence. The film directors appeared in the flesh to talk
about politics, yet not to represent the films that they had withdrawn, but
the films they should have made (but failed to) in order to respond to the
political and social reality of the time. The auteur himself—as an engaged
intellectual—replaced the art.
The paradox is in the proclamation of the death of the author. On
the one hand, this became part of the revolutionary anti-hegemonic
tactics of 1968. On the other, the events of 1968 found their immediate
political and cultural articulation in the increased presence of artists, direc-
tors, performers, authors and auteurs who took centre stage as socially
engaged intellectuals of the revolt. The death of the author fed into the
cultural revolution of 1968, yet the author was more alive and present
than ever—be it Jean-Paul Sartre standing on a box outside the Renault
factory telling the workers about the student-worker-intellectual paradise
to come, the auteurs of the French New Wave closing the Cannes Film
Festival in solidarity with workers and students, the artists and writers
who took the stage of the eighteenth-century Odeon Theatre in Paris to
participate in debates, Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras leading
the takeover of the offices of the Writers’ Union and declaring that ‘the
practice of literature is indissolubly linked with the present revolutionary
process’ (in Holmes 1996, p. 198), or, indeed, the stars of le nouvelle
critique proclaiming the death of the author. In his apparent demise,
the author emerged as a performative figure at times serious in his/her
commitment, at other times playful and parodic, mocking the solem-
nity of authority (including their own). The performativity of the author,
which emerged in the annunciation of his death, opened the door to a
playfulness that matched both the theatricality and presence of authorial
voices in the streets, university lecture halls and theatres in the Paris of the
1968 revolt. The author, through his death and almost immediate resur-
rection, was not unlike the Groucho Marx figure of May 1968, conjured
in the famous slogan: ‘I’m a Marxist with Groucho tendencies’.2 This
figure, which combines the philosopher’s leftist thinking with the famous
comedian’s bushy eyebrows and moustache, has epitomized the playful,
theatrical rebellion against the symbolic violence of rigid hierarchical and
ideological structures. What emerges out of these revolutionary tenden-
cies in both political life and critical thinking—even if inadvertently—is
the proclamation of the author’s death as an essentially theatrical gesture.
 1 THE PARADOX OF THE AUTHOR’S DEATH: AN INTRODUCTION 5

Through this proclamation of demise, the godlike authorial figure is

deconstructed, but also almost immediately reassembled, sometimes as an
intertextual reference, sometimes as a ludic, performative figure—a Marx
with Groucho eyebrows.

Two Deaths of Roland Barthes

The death of Roland Barthes reads like a scene from an absurdist story in
the style of Daniel Harms: The famous theorist has lunch with the soon-to-
become president of France, François Mitterrand. It is February 25, 1980.
On his way home, crossing Rue des Écoles, a laundry van hits him. A month
later, the theorist dies of his injuries. In Laurent Binet’s novel The 7th Func-
tion of Language (2017), Barthes dies again in the same manner, however,
this time his death is not an accident, but a murder mystery. Like this
subchapter, Binet’s novel opens with Barthes’s death. While the circum-
stances surrounding it remain seemingly the same as previously described,
the texts are inevitably different: ‘Life is not a novel. Or at least you would
like to believe so. Roland Barthes walks up Rue de Bièvre’ (Binet 2017,
p. 3). In this chronotope—the final space/time stretch of Barthes’s walk
from Rue de Bièvre to Rue des Écoles towards the van that will hit him—
Binet imagines what might have been the theorist’s thoughts and anxieties
in that moment. These thoughts and anxieties, as Binet states, ‘are all well
known’: they include his dead mother, his inability to write a novel, and
his increasing ‘loss of appetite for boys’ (ibid., p. 4), but there is also an
excitement specific to the day on which the theorist’s death will become
imminent. The excitement, as we will learn later, had to do with Binet’s
plot device—the invention of the seventh function of language. Neverthe-
less, in the opening scene of the novel, Barthes, who is just about to suffer
his deadly injuries, is brought to life. The famous theorist, the author of
‘The Death of the Author,’ emerges as a performative figure, not only as
a textual entity in Binet’s novel, but as an intersection of text and embod-
iment. This two-dimensional Barthes that exists between the covers of the
book is created out of verbal imageries and Binet’s playful imagination,
but remains an embodiment of the author nonetheless. When the van
hits him, ‘his body makes the familiar, sickening, dull thudding sound of
flesh meeting metal, and it rolls over the tarmac like a rag doll’ (5). Even
though it is conjured through the text, the body of Barthes the author
becomes a mortal body; it bleeds, its bones break, it feels pain.
6 S. JESTROVIC

In the preface to his autobiography Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes,

the author writes:

The Text can recount nothing: it takes my body elsewhere, far from my
imaginary person, towards a kind of memoryless speech which is already
the speech of the People, of the non-subjective mass (or of the generalized
subject), even if I am still separated from it by my way of writing. (Barthes
1977a, p. 4)

The very title of the book implies a duality, a separation, between the
writer and the subject of his writing, even if they, the writer and the
subject, originate from the same selfhood and share the same semi-
otic codes. Even though it is an autobiography, Barthes’s subjectivity
is split—the I is at the same time a not I (to echo Beckett). Barthes
foregrounds this point by often referring to himself in the third person.
The figure of Barthes, who appears in Binet’s novel, confirms some
of these points and even takes them a stretch further. Between the
covers of Binet’s book, Roland Barthes is no longer autobiographical,
but biographical material—hence, twice removed from his original or,
rather, extra-textual subjectivity. The voice that tells/writes the story is
already ‘non-subjective’, drawing from the notion of Roland Barthes as
‘the generalized subject’. Yet Barthes’s introduction to his autobiography
emphasizes the separation of text and body, whereby the textualized self
becomes inevitably disembodied. The text is all there is, ‘it can recount
nothing,’ let alone embody something. Nevertheless, the text, that of
Binet’s novel, is a starting point, as is the case with all literary works. It is
the sine qua non of Barthes’s existence as a fictional character. However,
the text is not all there is. I argue that, in Barthes’s transformation
from the author into the character of the novel, a performative dimen-
sion emerges. It spills over into the text to conjure images, to embody
and to make sensations of anxiety, excitement and pain palpable for the
reader/beholder. The author, who makes an appearance in the text even
if only to die a few pages later, is not only a semantic entity, not only
a linguistic construct, but also an embodied presence, even if language
is the only basis of his appearance. The intersection of text and embodi-
ment is a fleeting one, established in the communication process, in the
relationship between the work and the reader/beholder.
The relationship between text and embodiment is akin to the relation-
ship between theatricality and performativity. Theatricality points to the
 1 THE PARADOX OF THE AUTHOR’S DEATH: AN INTRODUCTION 7

artifice, artificiality, constructedness and, in a broader sense, to how the

material has been shaped, en-plotted, to the conventions of its making.
Applying it to Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes and Binet’s 7th Func-
tion of Language, it is the process, the strategies, the devices, the choices
through which the author turns into a textual entity, into a fictional
character and into a literary persona. Texts, however, don’t only conjure
images and bodies; they also witness, testify, incite, question and persuade.
They canonize and marginalize authors; they celebrate and ridicule them.
They are performative in an Austinian sense in the ways they affect reality
and create and shape imaginaries, including the figure of the author
as both the interlocutor, the initiator of a communication process, and
indeed as the character, the protagonist. The subjectivity of the author
might disappear at one end of the textual machine (de Man 1984; Derrida
1976), but the author re-emerges at the other end as a performative
figure. This performativity is what enables the intersection of text and
embodiment, creating a space within which to understand ‘the death of
the author’ as an interplay of presence and absence.
Binet’s novel is an intertextual coup de théâtre where the stars of
twentieth-century critical theory romp through Paris, Venice, Upstate
New York, Bologna and Naples in search of the ‘seventh function of
language’, of which Barthes was allegedly in possession while lunching
with Mitterrand. The case has landed on the table of Detective Bayard,
who in the course of his investigation encounters the likes of Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Umberto Eco, Judith Butler,
Roman Jakobson and others for the first time. To better navigate this
world, he seeks help from the figure of Simon, a postgraduate student at
Vincennes University. Aiding the investigation, Simon brings the detective
up to speed on relevant critical theories. While detective Bayard and the
young scholar Simon mediate the intertextuality of the novel and guide
the unsuspecting reader through the zany investigation that Barthes’s
death has set in motion, the nerdy academic indulges in the game of
recognition and difference as the factual gets intertwined with the fictional
and quotations from actual works of the aforementioned authors mix
with fiction. And how would the lay reader enjoy this satire if most of the
names in the novel are new to them? wonders the academic reader as she
meets Foucault in a gay sauna, eavesdrops on Kristeva’s dinner party and
spies on Butler having a threesome with Detective Bayard and Hélène
Cixous, while simultaneously lecturing the detective on performativity:
‘Now you feel my performative, don’t you?’ (Binet 2017, p. 284). As for
8 S. JESTROVIC

Barthes, not only does he die at least two deaths, but he is also a different
kind of figure depending on the reader, that is, the academic or the lay
reader. The former cannot help but indulge in the playful tautology of
the death of Barthes the author and the ‘Death of the Author’. Neither
can she fully shake the duality between, on the one hand, the writer of
A Lover’s Discourse, Camera Lucida, Writing Degree Zero—that is, the
name in parentheses following citations in essays that she reads and the
reference in her own works cited—and, on the other hand, the fictional
Barthes of Binet’s novel, whose death is at the heart of a murder inves-
tigation. For the layperson, however, Binet’s Barthes is less of a double
agent (author/character) than a fictional figure and a device that sets the
action in motion. The author, be it the one who writes or is written about,
disappears into the text; the duality between the real and the fictional is
an illusion. Hence, it is the lay reader rather than the nerdy one who
is indeed closer to Barthes’s theory, closer to being an ideal recipient.
The relationship between the reader and the text here also resembles
the contract of suspension of disbelief between the performance and the
audience in some forms of theatre. The spectator’s pleasure (at least in a
Stanislavskyian kind of theatre) comes from accepting the stage conven-
tion dictating that the sound of crickets coming from backstage should
be perceived as part of the environment of the onstage reality rather than
as the sound technicians’ and folio artist’s behind-the-scenes labour. We
enjoy the drama and passion of Carmen while keeping at bay the spoiler
question: Why are the characters singing their lines instead of speaking as
we normally do? This notion of a ‘textual machine’ (Burke 1992, p. 2),
where bodies, objects, documents, evidence, and the author himself disap-
pear and turn into fiction, is in a way an inversion of the suspension of
disbelief; it is a call for a suspension of belief that a certain authenticity
or authorial personhood could be found in the text he/she is writing
or has been written into. This approach resembles Brecht’s distancing
method of ‘not, but…’—not the author as a person, but the author as a
fictional character. Yet, the suspension of belief with regard to Barthes is
not entirely different from the suspension of disbelief in some forms of
theatrical performance, as it is a way into the text/performance and not
necessarily a distancing device. However, suspension of disbelief entails a
theatrical pleasure in indulging in stage fiction as if it were reality, while
in the world of Barthes’s theory, brought to extremes in Binet’s novel,
reality becomes fiction. If the main way to formulate the experience of
reality is through discourse, then the only way reality and subjectivity can
 1 THE PARADOX OF THE AUTHOR’S DEATH: AN INTRODUCTION 9

be textualized is indeed through the structuring devices of fiction. This,

however, does not make the reader’s, spectator’s, or semi-participant’s
task of completing the meaning any easier.
Binet presents us with the difficulty of this task from the very first lines
of his novel: ‘Life is not a novel. Or at least you would like to believe so’
(3). These two sentences are an intertextual reference, a quotation from
the aforementioned autobiography, Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes.
And who is the you? Who is the addressee in the second sentence? The
reader or the Barthes who is to get killed a few pages later? Towards
the end of the novel, the preamble ‘Life is not a novel’ is put into ques-
tion through a set of thoughts first attributed to the postgraduate student
turned co-investigator, Simon. They then blend into the voice of the
omnipresent narrator, possibly that of the novel’s author, Binet:

[…] Simon thinks: in the hypothesis where he is truly a character from a

novel […], what would he really risk? A novel is not a dream: you can die
in a novel. Then again, the central character is not normally killed. Except,
perhaps, at the end of the story.
But if it was the end of the story, how would he know? How would he
know what page of his life he is on? How can any of us know when we
have reached our last page?
And what if he wasn’t the central character? Doesn’t everyone believe
himself the hero of his own existence? (Binet 2017, pp. 309–310)

Hence, technically, within a text (any kind of text, including a perfor-

mance text) we can only speak about the death of the subject, of the
protagonist, of the character, and not of the author, as the author is
already dead; he dies with the first gesture of writing or embodying
he makes. However, as shown later, this is not such a simple equa-
tion. Matters of life and death—unfolding between embodiment and
textualization—are complicated. The quote above is not just a metaphor
or a parody of the life is a dream trope, but a provocation to the
reader/beholder.
If I , the reader/beholder, complete the meaning, who is at the other
end of the process? With whom am I confabulating, debating, quar-
relling, co-creating this idea that life is (not) a novel? With Binet, the
author of the novel, or with Barthes, the actual author of the opening
lines? Or, indeed, with Simon, the fictional character who questions these
lines a couple of hundred pages later? And who am I to trust, since
10 S. JESTROVIC

even the most seemingly consistent narrator is essentially unreliable and

even a very raw performance of self on some level is mediated? Still, the
reader’s/beholder’s/semi-participant’s freedom is not unlimited; rather
it occupies a small space between choice and conditioning, between
the individual, collective and contextual baggage that I bring into the
contract at one end and what they, who invite me to participate, have
offered from the other end.
In Binet’s critical theory-based thriller, the main quest, and the reason
for Barthes’s demise, is the alleged discovery of the seventh function of
language. The invention of the seventh function of language is based
on the linguistic theory of Russian Formalist scholar Roman Jakobson,
who indeed identified six functions of language. The quest for a piece
of writing that formulates the seventh function of language, at times
becoming a matter of life and death, is a plotting premise similar to
Umberto Eco’s presupposition that there is a lost part of Aristotle’s
Poetics that talks about comedy on which he based his scholarly thriller
The Name of the Rose. The seventh function of language is an intellec-
tual hypothesis of a similar kind, theoretically possible, but empirically
not achievable outside Binet’s novel. Moreover, both Eco and Jakobson,
to whom Binet has ascribed the invention of the seventh function of
language, appear in the novel.
Jakobson’s actual theory is centred around a communication model
that consists of the following: (1) the addresser (speaker, encoder, emitter,
poet, author, narrator, performer); (2) the addressee (decoder, hearer,
listener, viewer, reader, interpreter); (3) the code (system, langue); (4) the
message (the given discourse, text, artwork, performance); (5) the context
(referent); (6) the contact (a physical channel, a psychological and social
connection between the author, the speaker or the performer).3 Jakobson
identifies six functions of language that correspond to the six elements
of his communication model: (1) emotive (expressive); (2) conative
(appellative); (3) metalingual (metalinguistic, ‘glossing’); (4) referential
(cognitive, denotative, ideational); (5) phatic; (6) poetic (aesthetic). The
latter is related to the question of what makes a novel a novel, a play
a play, a work of art a work of art.4 To his fictional Jakobson, Binet
ascribes a secret seventh function of language, which could be described as
persuasive. It evolves along the lines of Austinian performatives, according
to which words are actions; they do things or make those involved in
the communication process do things. Words change physical reality. The
seventh function of language stretches this performative possibility even
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Title: The stroller

Author: Margaret St. Clair

Illustrator: Leo Morey

Release date: July 9, 2022 [eBook #68484]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Standard Magazines, Inc, 1947

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

STROLLER ***
THE STROLLER
 By MARGARET ST. CLAIR

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1947.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
All sorts of things come in on a space freighter. Even in the old days
grocers were always finding twenty-foot pythons curled cozily inside
bunches of bananas from South America; and what sort of undesired
stowaways do you suppose you get when you have a cargo of
tongarus from south Venus, agatized Fyella corymbs from the district
around Aphrodition, hand-painted lumigraphs on goor fiber made in
Marsport prefecture, and golden rhnx jewelry from the canal
centers?
George Saunders, supercargo of the S.S. Trito, gave his wife a warm
kiss on the cheek.
"For Pete's sake," he hissed into her ear, "act like you're glad to see
me, can't you? The Old Man's watching us."
Marta Saunders hesitated a moment and then threw her plump body
into her husband's arms.
"Oooh, Georgie!" she squealed. "You sweet old thing! It's so
wonderful to see you again!"
"That's enough," George rumbled warningly. He was swaying a little
from the impact. "Don't want to overdo it. Let's get out of here."
They started over to the parking area of the spaceport, where their
'copter was.
"What's the matter?" Marta demanded as soon as they were out of
earshot of the ship. "What do you care what the captain thinks about
us?"
"Listen, Marta, the old fool's been riding me ever since we left
Aphrodition. Says I'm the most incompetent supercargo he's ever
had. Just before we docked today, he said he thought he'd take it up
with the union. If he does, you know what'll happen. Pynx said the
last time that if he got one more complaint about me he'd take the
case to the executive board. I'd lose my license, sure."
"Oh." Marta seemed unwillingly impressed. She got an atomizer out
of her handcase and began spraying quick-drying cosmi-lac over the
skin of her face and neck. "But what happened?" she asked an
instant later when the cosmetic had set. "Why's he so down on you?"
For a moment the fine-etched lines of irritation and petulance faded
from George Saunders' face, to be replaced by an expression of
honest perplexity.
"Marta, I—wait, here's the 'copter. I'll tell you about it after we get in.
And for the love of heaven, don't drop any pop bottles out of the
window the way you did the last time I was in port. Having the air
police after us would be the last straw, as far as my nerves are
concerned."
He slid into the driver's seat. Marta got two bottles of pop out of the
refrigerator, shoved straws into their necks, pulled a shelf out of the
paneling to hold one bottle at a convenient level under George's
nose, and began drinking out of the other herself.
"Well?" she asked after a couple of swallows.
George drank from his bottle before replying.
"It's the darnedest thing. I remember beginning to load number two
and three holds at Aphrodition, and I remember telling the longshore
leaderman to have the hatch covers put on again when the holds
were filled, but there're six or eight hours in there during the loading I
don't remember a single thing about. They're totally gone.
"Well, the way the ship handled at the take-off from Aphrodition, the
Old Man thought there must be something wrong, and when we
were out in space he went in for a look. Wow! I can see, sort of, why
he's sore. Those holds look like somebody'd stirred the things in 'em
up with a big stick. About a third of the cargo's ruined. The tongarus
have leaked all over those blasted lumigraphs, and—Well, the
insurance company is going to raise blue murder, and the owners
won't like it one little bit."
George licked his thin lips.
"What I want to know," he burst out, "is what happened to me? I
must have told the longshoremen to load the holds like that, but—
When we were two days out of Venus, I asked Sparks (he's had a
pre-medical course, and he's saving up the tuition for medical
school) to look me over. He gave me all the tests, dozens of them,
and finally told me there wasn't a thing wrong with me mentally or
physically except that I needed more rest. Rest, bushwah! I've been
sleeping ten hours a night, and I wake up tireder than when I went to
bed."
Marta studied him.
"You do look sort of tired," she observed. "Maybe you need some
vitor-ray treatments."
George ignored this comment.
"Of course, the Old Man's not such a bad guy," he said. "He never
said anything about that time I missed the ship at Marsport."
"You mean that time you were so drunk on soma? One of the times."
George gave an irritated shrug.
"Never mind that," he snapped. "I mentioned it because I asked him
to have dinner with us on Thursday, the day before we sail, and I
want you to have a real old-fashioned home-cooked meal for him.
Maybe I can soften him up. Have something nice for him. None of
this complete meal stuff out of the freezer—have something good.
Out of cans."
"You mean like my canned crab and mushroom casserole?"
"Um-hum. Have that. And what's that dessert you make with the
canned peaches and the soma? pêche flambée, or something. He
might like that."

George set the 'copter down neatly on the roof of their apartment
house.
"Remember," he said, "I've got to make a good impression on him.
Flatter him as much as you can, but use your head about it. And if
you get any kind of a chance to tell him about how reliable I usually
am, do it."
The days moved on toward Thursday. George continued to complain
of fatigue, and on Tuesday night Marta woke up shrieking with a
vague and horrible nightmare, but it was attributed to indigestion;
after a dose of antiacid, she went back to sleep. On Wednesday she
had her hallucination.
She was putting a bunch of old digests and tabloids away in the
closet in the living room when she came across the jacket George
had used four or five years ago when he went grotch hunting.
"George!" she called. "Oh, George! Can I throw your old gray jacket
away? It's full of moth holes."
"What are you yelling at me for?" George asked irritably from behind
her. He had been sitting in his study, which was only about five feet
distant from the closet, drinking soma. "I'm right here."
Marta came out of the closet and stared at him. One hand went to
her heart. The pallor of her heavy, sagging face showed through her
thick face lacquer as a muddy gray.
"Wha—I saw you go into the kitchen!" she said. "You were wearing
your brown suit. I was looking right at you, and you walked the length
of the living room and went into the kitchen and closed the door
behind you. That's why I yelled at you. You were wearing your brown
suit. You've got the blue one on now. You were wearing your brown
suit!"
"Shut up!" George said passionately. "Are you trying to drive me
crazy? I've been sitting right here all the time. What do you mean,
you saw me walk into the kitchen? You couldn't have. I've been
sitting right here all the time."
"But I saw you! You were wearing your brown suit."
"You imagined it!" her husband shrieked at her. "It's your imagination.
You shut up. What are you trying to do, get me so nervous the Old
Man will think I'm ready for the loony bin? You imagined it!"
Marta looked at him. She had to lick her lips twice before she could
answer.
"Yes. Yes, of course. That must be it. I imagined it."
George spent the rest of the day drinking soma and holding his
hands up before his eyes to see if they had stopped shaking. Marta
got a five-suit deck of cards out of the closet and played solitaire.
None of her games came out, but she was too distraught to realize
that she had left two of the cards inside their box.

Surprisingly, both George and Marta slept well. They awakened far
more cheerful than they had been the night before. Even their pre-
breakfast snapping at each other lacked its usual note of bitter
sincerity. When Marta left the apartment and started out to do her
shopping, she was humming under her breath.
The canned crab was easy enough to locate, but she had to go to
three stores before she could find the peaches and the mushrooms.
She ran them to earth at last in a little grocery on a side street. Just
as she was leaving it, her eye caught the flash of a red label on a low
shelf near the door and she triumphantly dug out two cans of tomato
soup.
"See what I got!" she said, showing her prize to George when she
got back home. "I guess I'm lucky or something. It's awfully hard to
find."
"Gosh!" George shut off the video to give her his full attention.
"That's wonderful. I happen to know the Old Man's crazy about it. His
mother used to have it all the time. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it
makes him change his mind completely about going to the union.
Marta, you're a smart girl."
Marta spent the rest of the day at the beauty shop, getting her hair
re-garnished with galoons and her face set. She wanted to make the
best possible impression on the captain. Around five-thirty she
began getting dinner—it doesn't take long to open cans—and an
hour or so later the Old Man (his name was Kauss) was chiming at
the door.
Kauss was definitely stiff at first. He greeted Saunders with resentful
formality and gave Marta the merest flash of a smile before his face
grew hard again. When the fragrant steam from the tureen of tomato
soup Marta was bringing in blew toward him, he relaxed somewhat,
and the salad of canned string beans, onions, lettuce and
mayonnaise softened him still more. By the time he had finished two
big helpings of Marta's crab casserole, it began to look like the job
was saved. He offered George a cigar and began telling him a long
story about what the little Martian hostess at the Silver Weetarete
had said to him.
Marta went out in the kitchen to fix the pêche flambée. She cut
sponge cake into neat rounds, spread disks of hard-frozen banana
ice cream over them, and crowned the structure on each dessert
plate with half of an enormous canned clingstone peach. From a
bottle she poured soma carefully over each of the peaches, set a bit
of paper to burning by pressing it against the element in the atomic
range, and then used the paper to ignite the soma on the peaches.
"George!" she called in the direction of the dining apse. "Oh, George,
honey, help me with the plates!"
She heard him come in. She turned at his step, ready to pick up the
plates, one in each hand, and give them to him.
He was wearing his brown suit.
But—he was wearing the green one today, wasn't he, because it was
the best suit he had and he wanted to impress the captain. His green
—his green—
George's face slipped down toward the fourth button on his coat. It
wavered, solidified, flowed back into place, and then slopped down
over his lapels once more. Suddenly it solidified into a sort of
tentacle. It came falteringly toward Marta, half-blind, but purposive.
Marta tried to scream. Her throat was too constricted by terror to let
out more than a mere thread of sound, but it had carrying power.
George and Kauss, out in the dining apse, heard it.
They came running in. Kauss was quick-witted. He picked up one of
the plates with the soma burning on it and hurled it straight at the
thing that was wearing George's clothes.
There was an explosion, so loud that the plexiglass in the windows
bulged outward for a moment, and then a bright, instant column of
flame. Then nothing. George's brown suit lay collapsed and empty
on the floor.
 There was an explosion so loud the plexiglass windows bulged
outward for a moment.

"It was wearing your suit, George," Marta said hysterically. She was
leaning back against the wall, looking faint and sick. "George, it was
wearing your suit. Oh, what was it, what was it, anyway?"
Kauss was looking at the debris on the floor. A peculiar expression,
half satisfaction, half private insight, hovered around the corners of
his lips.
"It was a Mocker, I think," he answered.
"A Mocker? What—?"
"Um-hum. You still find a few of them in the wilder parts of Venus.
They're parasitic—ah—entities, that feed on the life force, as well as
the flesh, of human beings. No doubt this one came aboard the ship
at Aphrodition, in that consignment of Fyella corymbs. They're
invisible most of the time, so of course we didn't suspect it."
"But how did it get here?" George demanded. "Why did it pick on
Marta as a victim?"
"Well, you see the usual way a Mocker works is to select someone
as a host, as a sort of base of operations, and then range out from
him whenever it wants to eat. For some reason, whenever it leaves
its host, it takes on his features and body and dresses itself in his
clothes. That's what happened here. One of the first signs that a
Mocker is taking hold is a spell of amnesia, and of course that's what
happened to you, Saunders, when we were taking on cargo at
Aphrodition, though I didn't realize it at the time.
"A Mocker doesn't usually kill its host directly, but it does draw on his
life force to keep itself going, and he usually complains of feeling
worn out and tired."
Kauss halted. Marta looked down at her husband's brown suit and
the ice cream slowly melting across it.
"Please, George, pick up that stuff before it ruins your suit
completely," she said automatically. And then, to Kauss, "But what
happened when you threw the plate at it? What happened? Oh, I
was so scared!"
"Yes, the Mockers are terrifying." Kauss agreed. He seemed to
square his broad shoulders. "However, at bottom they are
unintelligent—look at the stupidity of this one in attacking you when
your husband and I were in the next room—and they are really not
especially dangerous provided you know the defense against them.
"You see, their body structure, while based on the same elements as
our own, involves large quantities of free hydrogen between the body
cells. Hydrogen ignites in ordinary air with explosive force—the end
product's water—and when I threw that burning stuff at the creature,
the hydrogen in its tissues exploded. It blew up. There's probably a
good deal more water vapor in the air in this room than there was
before I got rid of the thing."
Kauss cleared his throat.
"There's another life form," he said with a faintly professional air,
"allied to the Mocker, but with important differences, which is far
more dangerous. That's the Stroller."
"The Stroller?" Marta asked. George had put his arm around her;
they were not an affectionate couple, but the moment seemed to call
for tender demonstration. "Why do they call it that?"
"No one knows, exactly. It seems to come from the creature's own
name for itself, for its fondness for taking long, long, walks."
Kauss turned the cigar in his mouth. He poked at the suit lying on the
floor with the toe of his shoe.
"What does it do?" Marta queried. "Why is it so terribly dangerous?"
"The Stroller doesn't hunt a host, like the Mocker," Kauss replied.
"Early in life it takes over the identity of some human being, and it
remains indistinguishable from a human being to any usual test. It's
so dangerous because there's absolutely no defense against it. No
free hydrogen in its tissues. It's indestructible."
"My!" Marta said. "Goodness!"
"It feeds, like the Mocker, on both the flesh and the life force of
human beings. Fortunately"—Kauss smiled—"it's very, very rare.
There are probably only a few Strollers in the entire solar system,
and they reproduce only at widely separated intervals."
Once more Kauss halted and poked absently at the clothing on the
floor with the toe of his boot.
"There's a peculiarity about their feeding habits," he said. "They'll go
for years without feeling any desire to eat their special food, and then
something will happen which makes them—greedy, and after that
they can't be stopped before they feed."
"Goodness!" Marta said again. She hid a nervous yawn behind her
hand. "George, get me a chair, will you? I'd like to sit down." To
Kauss, she said. "How did you find out all these things? You must
have made quite a study of the subject. Why, I've read several books
about Venus, and I listen to all the casts on the video about it, but I
never heard either of these creatures mentioned before. It seems to
be a sort of hobby of yours."
George pushed a kitchen chair out for her; she sat down with a sigh
of relief.
"Not a hobby," Kauss corrected gently.
His face began to waver and flow as the Mocker's had done. Then it
snapped back into place.
He licked his lips very delicately.
"You see, I'm a Stroller myself. And, somehow, I'm feeling that I'd like
to eat."
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
STROLLER ***

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