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What is the origin of this phrase?
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house of assignationnoun - a brothel. [Origin: 1825–35, Americanism] Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
© Random House, Inc. 2006.________________________________________________House of assignationAssignation \As`sig*na"tion\, n. [L. assignatio, fr. assignare: cf. F. assignation.] 1. The act of assigning or allotting; apportionment. "This order being taken in the senate, as touching the appointment and assignation of those provinces." --Holland. 2. An appointment of time and place for meeting or interview; -- used chiefly of love interviews, and now commonly in a bad sense. "While nymphs take treats, or assignations give." --Pope. 3. A making over by transfer of title; assignment. House of assignation, a house in which appointments for sexual intercourse are fulfilled. Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996 _____________________________________________________ Now tell Hydra, why, all of a sudden, have you become so interested in sex and stuff? 
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I hate to disappoint you, but I came across the phrase in Faulkner: Quote:
It was not anybody's room, and the faint scent of cheap cosmetics and the few feminine objects and the other evidences of crude and hopeless efforts to feminise it but added to its anonymity, giving it that dead and stereotyped transience of rooms in assignation houses.
—The Sound and the Fury
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Hell, Hydra, I'm not disappointed, in fact, I'm proud of you. It takes an exceptional mind to retain and then incorporate all the subtleties and clutter of Faulkner's writings. God knows that Faulkner didn't. Faulkner thought it enought to write like a professor. Now don't get mad, Hydro, just re-read the sentence above that you quoted from The Sound and the Fury, and then you'll get glad in the same shoes that you got mad it. (that's an old southern saying.)
Last edited by themilum; 01/16/2007 4:05 AM.
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I'm a Borges and Nabokov fanboy. They write with a tight, elliptic, almost mathematical style. The very antithesis of Faulkner. But I really enjoyed The Sound and The Fury a lot. It's kind of like putting a magic stethoscope to someone's head, and listening to their interior monologue. Same goes for Woolf. (Of course, those in the know know it's a popular misconception that Joyce wrote "stream of consciousness" novels. But that's another story).
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(Of course, those in the know know it's a popular misconception that Joyce wrote "stream of consciousness" novels. But that's another story).
I would disagree. There are instances of stream of consciousness in Ulysses.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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>I would disagree. There are instances of stream of consciousness in Ulysses.
Maybe. I only said that because some Joyce scholars will try and tell you there is a distinction made between the "interior monologue" and "stream-of-consciousness".
I'm still trying to get my head around it, but this is what it comes down to:
The later comes from the philosophy of William James where there is an emphasis on both preverbal thoughts and a continuous flow. For this reason, interior monologue is a more suitable term to describe Joyce's approach to representing thoughts in Ulysses because although he takes the reader in and out of his characters heads, he picks his moments carefully, and what his characters are thinking always has a carefully premeditated bearing on his truly, astonishingly, mind-bogglingly meticulous narrative schema.
Faulker and Woolf seem to take a more relaxed, scattershot, and free-associative/stream-of-consciousness approach.
Bloom, Stephen and Molly, for example, make associations, but there is not a single example of relaxed, unbridled "free-association" anywhere in the novel.
But, you know, tomayto-tomahto.
Last edited by Hydra; 01/17/2007 2:58 PM.
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But, you know, tomayto-tomahto.
Ah, I see. Faulkner-Woolf's was a kinder, gentler stream of consciousness.
[Edited to fix Virginia's husband's surname.]
Last edited by zmjezhd; 01/18/2007 1:41 PM.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Yep, I think that's about the long and short of it.
(You mean Virginia Woolf, right? Or did Tom Wolfe also write stream-of-consciousnessly?)
Edit: On second thought, I think a better way of putting it would be: Joyce's characters think speech while Faulkner's and (to a lesser extent) Woolf's characters just experience thought. In the Benjamin or Quentin Compson episodes of The Sound and the Fury, just to give one little example, there's a lot of grammatical mish-mash—an attempt to give to a web of words the texture of a mental state. I may be deceived, but the interior monologues of Joyce's characters, on the other hand, are grammatical, or at least no different from how they actually speak "out loud".
Last edited by Hydra; 01/18/2007 12:01 PM.
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