Milli mála - 01.01.2010, Page 207

What is the Queen1 doing?
She1 is washing her1 hands
no ambiguity here to mull over; these anaphors and deictics are
surely there in our text, so there is no reason not to show them. and
if we continue –
She1’s trying to wash the bloodn off
– we suddenly find we have a much wider range of reference, a
much more powerful index:
Who0 would have thought the old man2 to have so much
bloodn in him2?9
– a bunch, in fact, of indices which don’t simply point to Duncan
and Lady Macbeth, but much more strikingly to that vast backdrop
of canonical language that suddenly springs into focus. Even more
importantly, we find we are looking at the most intimate working
of the text, the threads of life which distinguish real language from
the other millions of pages of digital meaninglessness. We see in
fact that indexicality does not reside in either of the phonological
strings—she and her—which anchor it into the sentence, but in a
third movement, the event of their interaction, the event which cre-
ates meaning. Without this movement, there is no meaning: static
language does not exist. Over small stretches, within the sentence,
this movement will breed small meaning, tuning and polishing the
larger meanings. Between sentences, indexicality knits larger
meaning together; but full encompassing meaning is a function of
indexicality between texts, a global reference. and now our ques-
tion must be: What is the scope of this globality? How far afield
may we dare to look?
So far I’ve been talking for the most part in accepted metaphors,
as we have to do when we talk about, for instance, texts, for we
have nothing but metaphors to work with. The term text itself is a
metaphor, for it really means a woven cloth, a textile; and every-
PÉTur KnúTSSOn
207
9 Macbeth V.i.44.
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