PISANUS FRAXI, PORNOGRAPHER ROYAL
(Continued from Page
32)
consists of a letter written in a seventeenth-century German so il–
literate as to be virtually indecipherable. The writer of this letter is
a woman, and as far as can be made out she is hysterically lamenting
the fact that her husband-at any rate some man-has a penis so
enormous that coitus with
him
is impossible. The center of the page
is neatly decorated with a perfectly drawn circle whose diameter is
two and a half inches or six and a half centimeters, whichever side
of the ruler you prefer to read. Although Ashbee is willing to admit
that "medical science has made vast progress" since Schurig's time
and that many of "his
theori~s
and notions have consequently been
long since exploded," he continues to insist that "his vast erudition
cannot be too much admired, nor can the value be underrated of
the numberless pertinent
facts
which he has amassed, and for which
he invariably gives his authorities."
It
is Ashbee who emphasizes the
word "facts," and this leads us to suggest once more that we are
dealing with a subject in which the idea of fact regularly ceases to have
a signifiable meaning. In this context fact almost invariably comes
to mean that somebody wrote, said, or dreamt it; this regressive sense
of reality is, I should suggest, a principal requirement for any pro–
longed involvement with this subject. It is, furthermore, a sense of
reality quite compatible with the process of forgetting from one book
to the next what one has read.
A final resemblance which Ashbee implicitly draws between him–
self and Schurig has to do with style. Schurig wrote in what Ashbee
describes as "the macaronic style frequently used by the learned Ger–
mans of the time," an irregular mixture of Latin and German, which
bears certain similarities to the macaronic verse from which the term
is derived. Ashbee finds this style to have "real charm," and defends it
against modem detraction by assimilating it to the style of
The Anatomy
of
Melancholy.
Ashbee's habit of interpersing his prose with quotations
in a number of languages may be regarded as a latter-day equivalent
of Schurig's macaroni.
As for Ashbee's own English prose, that is something else again.
At certain moments of stress, as we have seen, its logic tends to break
