PISANUS FRAXI
29
ploying a familiar maneuver of the unconscious, need not feel "re–
sponsible" for it.
Ashbee's mania for quotation
is
not, however, exhausted by
these devices. He will stick in a few lines wherever a small blank
space occurs, and he
is
happy to manufacture the opportunity to
quote at length and liberty: Volume II, the
Centuria,
for example,
opens with no less than six full pages of epigraphs. The functions of
such a practice are not difficult to interpret. To use the words of
other men instead of one's own is to attempt to arrogate their strength
or authority; it is furthermore a primitive device of concealment, the
words and ideas of others acting as a protective cover for one's own
(children are inveterate quoters).
In
addition, a text which uses
quoted material tends, in proportion to the thickness and frequency
with which the quotations are sown, to become progressively less read–
able. Ashbee's own work, with its perpetual flood of quotations, with
quotations interspersed with further quotations in several languages
(his habit was always to quote in the original and never to translate),
and with every page dotted with hiccoughing references and hiero–
glyphic citations, indicates that his own impulses in the direction of
unreadability were quite strong. And we can understand this too as
in part a defensive countermeasure: in a book which
is
written with
the impulse to communicate "everything"-both in the way of
knowledge and of sexuality-the counter-tendency to communicate
nothing can be expected (just as children, again, who are on the
point of communicating or who have just communicated some piece
of sexual information to an adult will often spontaneously break into
nonsense language). The difference between the impulse to "tell all"
and the impulse to tell nothing is in such matters always difficult to
maintain.
Another distinctive element in Ashbee's practice is the intensity
of his insistence on precision. He makes a point of emphasizing that
throughout his work "all extracts given are transcribed with every
fault and peculiarity, whether of spelling or punctuation; this should
be borne in mind, so that errors which belong to the original may
not be attributed to me or my printer." His justification of this ab–
solute literalness is essentially cryptologicaI. Error itself may be a
source of knowledge, "for by a peculiarity of diction, a special man–
ner of punctuation, the omission or improper use of an accent, an
