COVFEFE: The Trumpian Syuzhet and Fabula
1.
Remember this: Despite the constant negative press covfefe
And the following, which appeared six hours later: Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’ ??? Enjoy!
What was to follow was a fusillade of snark and serious interpretative dissertation at an unfathomable scale. Everything from memes hashtagging “one more cup of covfefe before I go…” to articles justifying President Trump claiming that he was actually employing a Yiddish term which refers to a foolish rabbi assaulting mythological satanic butterflies. The chandelier of political lexicology plummeted to the floor.
In retaliation to the madness that was to ensue, the Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically for Engagement Act (COVFEFE) was introduced to hold the president and future presidents accountable for what’s been published on their personal media profiles. Despite these efforts to regulate and stymie the dissolution of political decorum, a greater threat had already been exposed. Covfefe was the hand that lifted pandora’s box.
Why wasn’t this all disregarded? With any other individual or in any other moment in time, would he have bothered with the parapraxis of this tweet? Was it really a mistake?
2.
Emmanuel Levinas, in his essay on post-structuralism titled Signification and Sense, once wrote:
“…language refers to the position of the listener and the speaker, that is, to the contingency of their story. To seize by inventory all the contexts of language and all possible positions of interlocutors is a senseless task. Every verbal signification lies at the confluence of countless semantic rivers. Experience, like language, no longer seems made of isolated elements lodged somehow in a Euclidean space… [Words] signify from the ‘world’ and from the position of one who is looking.”
We also must call into the question of authorship and dual-identity. Who is the author of the political identities we suffer to witness daily? Do these political characters author themselves? Is this their authentic self? Or, are they mere expressions, percolations if you will, of our thanatos, our death wish, our need to visualize the possibility of ruin?
Before we had words that were deployed to serve as placeholders for excuses, masks for nefarious actions: security, freedom, WMD, democracy, immigrants, terrorists, etc. These words were and are used, but they mean something different. They mean military campaigns, imperialism, and oppression.
It’s a joke, a dangerous joke. Words, less than a sentence, less than an entire phrase, have been enough to sell an entire public on dishonest, devastating political action. Now, reduced to nonsense.
3.
For two years, covfefe’s become somewhat a mantra — a way to ameliorate the frustration and despair one feels when engaging with the ludicrous nature of rhetorical devastation that is contemporary political discourse.
Politicians and the media satellites orbiting their moons have obfuscated, if not occluded clear rhetoric, semantic, and allegorical language. By this affect, there’s genuine fear that they’ve tainted the very sovereignty and potency of language and semiotics of language, the very source from which humanism hydrates.
After the incessant barrage of news articles, memes, blog posts, public hysteria, and tweets, covfefe was surrendered to the vacuous oblivion of personal belief and feeling — Trump’s effectively postmodernity’s illegitimate child. And this is just one example, albeit potentially the pinnacle of examples. The language he spews onto his allegorical canvass is not unlike Piero Manzoni’s in abstraction and content.
In a serious way, Trump, along with the media, represent the vacuum of language. They wonder through a hall of mirrors, and piped in the smoke, and the political theater’s become an impressionistic soiree of misdirection and latent narrative.
Discourse speaking, it appears we’ve all lost the plot.
Speaking of, I’m reminded about this:
In Russian Literature there is a method of writing that implements a dichotomy between the two elements of narrative form: the syuzhet (the plot) and the fabula (the story). In an essay about Nabokov’s short story Signs and Symbols, Alexander Dolinin writes:
“…The narrative… does not contain any direct or even indirect reference to an important, usually pivotal event (or a number of events) of the fabula and disguises this ellipsis. For example, instead of presenting such climatic events as death of the protagonist in “Lik,” a betrayal and murder out of jealousy in “That in Aleppo Once…” or supernatural intervention in “The Vane Sisters,” the plots of these short stories deliberately conceal them, superseding the textual “reality” with false or incomplete accounts of it. However, narration of this kind not only hides or masks the important event but also provides the reader with adequate means to deduce it and thereby construe the fabula in its entirety. Relevant information related to the omitted event (or events) is encrypted in the syuzhet as a kind of intra-textual riddle (often supported by intertextual references), and specifically marked clues to the pertinent code are implanted into the text.”
In Nabokov’s Signs and Symbols employs the pathology referential mania as a tool to decrypt the plot/literal words on the page. Referential mania is, in the narrator’s words, describing their son’s condition: “everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence.”
One of the story’s main purposes is to bungle the reader’s comprehension by devices employed in the syuzhet so that the fabula, the ‘real’ story latent within the text, creates the perfect conditions from which a reader can construe their own semiotic meaning. Essentially, the story makes the reader suffer from referential mania.
Fabula:
The absolute linguistic absurdity perpetuated by all parties involved in or circling the presidency have either intentionally or involuntarily developed their own semiotic codex. To understand the meaning behind what’s said and what’s meant no longer plays a remotely significant role in the political theater. In essence, politics has become the ultimate playground of the post-modern gaze. The unconscious, the abstract, the post-structural realm, where the artists and revolutionaries sought refuge during the fascist spells in history, is now under assault by these very entities. It’s the revolution of the patriarchs against the revolutionaries, and all the sudden the revolutionaries have had to resort to the cold realism left in the wake.
The syuzhet of the of modern politics is one in which any individual could assign a certain viewpoint or belief wherever they are compelled to do so. They generate their own meaning, converting it wholly, and tamper with any possible ontological, spiritual, or historical relation.
The fabula, on the other hand, is left up in the air. What is the real story behind the election of Donald Trump? Was he a populist? Was he a master of persuasion? Was it all rigged? Are we all pawns? Have we lost the one last refuge of individuality? Are there extraterrestrial miniature lizards pulling levers and operating in the cabinet of our brain box? Covfefe?
It is hard to imagine what will come next, because everything we understood about politics — which, in a general sense, is shockingly little — has been completely deconstructed by a new brand of political locution.
I’ve always blamed president Truman. What if it had been Wallace? I repeat to myself. It all started with Trinity. Give em’ hell Harry…Hell, he did.
The Tower of Babel has been rebuilt into a skyscraper on Wall Street. We are suffering more than ever the faults of our inability to communicate in a meaningful way. Language has been the tool to pull us apart, to make room for the gears of exploitation and manipulation. Our unconscious has been mechanized, commodified, and weaponized. The idiosyncratic, humanistic, transcendental, mono-mythic, and historical has been sequestered.
The syuzhet: covfefe
The fabula: We were never in control
