The Blotted Line

Friends, Bartholomew; Bartholomew, Friends.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Bartholomew is a plant. On closer inspection, he appears to be some variety of ivy. I’m not certain. You see the nursery at Ikea can be likened to a Dickensian orphanage. You hear that swelling chorus? “Food, glorious food!” That’s right, I’m thinking Oliver. You know that scene in chapter two (which also contains the famous, “please sir, I want some more” scene) where Oliver is forced to stand in front of the faceless board? This is how I imagine Bartholomew:

“Boy,” said the gentleman in the high chair, “listen to me. You know you’re an orphan, I suppose?”
“What’s that, sir?” inquired poor Bartholomew.
“The boy is a fool- I thought he was,” said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.
“Hush!” said the gentleman who had spoken first. “You know you’ve got no father or mother, and that you were brought up by the parish, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Bartholomew, weeping bitterly.
“What are you crying for?” inquired the gentleman in the white waistcoat. And to be sure it was very extraordinary. What could the boy be crying for?

Orphans are orphans and plants are plants. Everyone gets the same functional plastic orphanage pot and rote watering each morning by a bored teenager named “Dan”. I’m not blaming Dan, I sure he’s just as powerless against the Board as Bartholomew, but at least he gets a name.

Poor Bartholomew.

I purchased Bartholomew for $2.00 (including his ceramic pot) and brought him home. He now resides, as you can see, on the shelf by my window, amongst my early modern drama. [i] Now he rises to fame as the protagonist in the newest feature in my non-material archive, Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew. You’ll watch Bartholomew as he grows taller, eventually leaving the safety of the drama shelf and extending up to early modern poetry and prose and, if all goes to plan, the early modern and post-structuralist criticism.

This outrageous anthropomorphising approaches sheer lunacy, but it’s an idea I’ve been mulling over for a few weeks now, ever since I read the following passage in lit. theory redux:

The proper name (nom propre) does not designate an individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multiplicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operation of depersonalization, that he or she acquires his or her true proper name. The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity. (37)

This excerpt is from Deleuze and Guattari’s “1914: One or Several Wolves?”. The idea of the article is that just as the individual is both a single body and multiple (each with autonomous bacteria, organs, cells, and plasticites), the individual also belongs to a communal body that is several layers of communities existing within larger communities. Names are the things which indicate the communities in which the individual exists at any given moment. Our seminar examined the concept of nicknames: nicknames (like proper names) are generally not self-titled, but are names which others in our community give us to designate what we we mean to that community. For D&G, the nickname is a form of love: it indicates our selection by another.

Thinking back through my own nicknames, I can see what they mean: my brothers have individual names for me by which they have referred to me for for as long as I can remember, the origins of which have been forgotten, and which are entirely meaningless (and thus not used by) any one beyond my immediate family: they designate my belonging to my familial community [ii]

Nicknames are fascinating precisely because (as Dickinson pointed out) they begin to construct an “archaeology” of the person: you can identify from what “era” old friends and acquaintances come simply by what name form they use to address the named person. For example, in high school, a friend and I were writing notes to each other in our “world issues” class (probably the most boring class I ever took, and that includes civics). As my friend was sitting in the desk ahead of me, he had to turn around to write on the paper which was on my desk, and, a consequence of writing upside-down, misplaced the last two letters of my name. When I laughed, he very calmly added an “e” to the end, and said

“Ernie J” That’s your name now.

Bizarrely, it stuck throughout the rest of high school. You can always tell my friends from that era from nothing more than the use of that name. Interestingly, this is a name that, like all other nicknames I’ve possessed, I have had little control over, and which even the people who designated and used the name seemed to have little input in its creation: it is, like original atomic structures, or the chromosomes which constitute the body itself, a “random assemblage” (D&G, 34) of letters that, because we were bored, because the event seemed humourous to us, we repeated, and through repetition, continued to give the assemblage meaning.

Of course, names are often hurtful, and don’t seem to designate love at all. They do, however, continue to establish the individual’s relationship with the community. One must think, if however briefly and subconsciously, of that name and the body it designates, in order to utter it. Which means the body is not effaced. The easiest way to destroy a body is to remove its proper name, to group it among a homogenous “other” and to order its destruction from afar: an enclosed office, pen on paper.

I can’t have a particular relationship with a passenger pigeon.* It’s already dead. I do know, however, the blue jay who screams two feet outside my window each morning: his name is Jeremy[iii].

I’m not suggesting that in naming and anthropomorphising we can ever understand the other: this would be an entirely irresponsible suggestion. We are already in a relationship with our environment[iv], however, and naming perhaps reminds us of this fact, and serves as a beginning for a more responsible relationship with at least our local environments. So I name Bartholomew, and include him in my writing, and, with any luck, this will remind me to offer him water occasionally[v]. I name him Bartholomew and yet continue to be ignorant of what kind of plant he is, exactly. Perhaps I will never know and this species name will be a part of a community (say, a biological community) to which Bartholomew belongs separate from me. This is a name he will keep to himself.

End Notes

[i] This is a fitting location for him, since Bartholomew is named after the irresponsible Bartholomew Cokes in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. I like to imagine my plant would be a bit more irresponsible than myself. Perhaps I am projecting though. (By the way, it’s pronounced the British way: “Bart-ol-mew”)

[ii] I still get cards and letters addressed to “Erin-Merrin” and “little freak” — the last of which is only non-offensive when used by my brother Craig.

[iii] After Jeremiah, prophet of doom. Blue jays are ridiculously loud and obnoxious.

[iv] Environments too, are “random assemblages” of individuals born to that locale.

[v] In the past I have tended to neglect this act, and as a result, most of my plants have died.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. “1914: One or Several Wolves?” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: U of Minneapolis P, 1987. 26-38.

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/olivertwist/

9 April 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

passenger pigeon. n. See Barthes, Roland.