I read Michel Serres's book The Parasite in '82. It is the basis for the PRETEXT list,
which is an extension of the print journal PRE/TEXT: A
Journal of Rhetorical Theory (began 1980) and of the
e-journal PRE/TEXT: Electra(Lite) (began 1997).
--victor j. vitanza
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From Michel Serres, The Parasite. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 15-16.
Satyrs' Meals_____Host/Guest
Everyone knows that satyrs have the tail and two legs of a goat. And being a goat, even half a goat, even the rear end, is really something. These dangerous beings live in forests, where they accompany Pan, the son of Hermes, the god of panic, the mother of all, the prince of fear and of wholes. Wild, they live in their lairs.Having followed the procession of Dionysos or having been on the lookout for nymphs, they go home, ragged, to eat a good dinner with their wives and children on the mossy rocks. They're seldom seen like that, solid citizens, the way La Fontaine shows them, a family picture, all around the dinner table. Satyrs too wind up thinking about eating. No rugs, no shelter, no Persian carpet-here we are back in the fields. Can fear come to corrupt a wild den?
It is raining; a passer-by comes in. Here is the interrupted meal once more. Stopped for only a moment, since the traveller is asked to join the diners. His host does not have to ask him twice. He accepts the invitation and sits down in front of his bowl. The host is the satyr, dining at home; he is the donor. He calls to the passer-by, saying to him, be our guest. The guest is the stranger, the interrupter, the one who receives the soup, agrees to the meal. The host, the guest: the same word; he gives and receives, offers and accepts, invites and is invited, master and passer-by. The traveller, the homebody, the fixed and the moveable, client and hostler, here and there-city and country, for example. He is the object as well, for in the exchange of the word we cannot see where the exchange of the thing is. An invariable term through the transfer of the gift. It might be dangerous not to decide who is the host and who is the guest, who gives and who receives, who is the parasite and who is the _table d'hote_, who has the gift and who has the loss, and where hostility begins within hospitality. Who hasn't trembled with fear in a shady hotel? Shady, obscure, badly lit. We like to know where we step. Again the same word, host and guest, active and passive, full of outrage and of generosity, of hatred and good-will. A word which hints at the inviter and the invited, the person warming himself by the fire and the one frozen from the cold rain, heat and cold.
The guest cools the soup and warms his hands; the host invites the traveller and sends him on his way, asks him in, asks him to sit down and eat and then asks him to leave, sends him away: don't sleep here, he says. The host, the guest, breathes twice, speaks twice, speaks with forked tongue, as it were. I don't know who the passer-by is or who the satyr is. Both are the host, the guest. And from one mouth they breathe and say yes and no. The traveller, moreover, interrupts the meal of his host; the satyr, moreover, interrupts the meal of his guest. Who cooled the soup, who spoke, but who didn't eat. The two rats here look alike. I would not be at all surprised if the passer-by's overcoat hid his tail and his goat's legs. Excluded even before he parasited the satyr.
But the excluded one, just a while ago, was making his way through the countryside; the passer-by goes out again in the rain that, as far as we know, never stops, beating incessantly on the roof of the host and guest. That noise too interrupted a process: a trip. And from this noise comes the story. Hosts and parasites are always in the process of passing by, being sent away, touring around, walking alone. They exchange places in a space soon to be defined.
There are some black spots in language. The field of the host is one such dark puddle. In the logic of exchange, or really instead of it, it manages to hide who the receiver is and who the sender is, which one wants war and which one wants peace and offers asylum. In the satyr's den, the host interrupts the guest and vice versa, and this is another black theorem. Or the non-zero sum of two things with opposite signs but the same value. We saw this shadow a short while back: we don't know what belongs to the system, what makes it up, and what is against the system, interrupting and endangering it. Whether the diagram of the rats is generative or corrupting.
--michel serres
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