Let me be blunt. Chad Brunt’s recent ‘novel’ Dandruff on a Black Lacoste (Hypergram Press) is for the most part a trivial, plotless farrago of postmodernist conceits, conceits that extend beyond the text itself to the author’s own smart-arse jacket design and the astute buzz-marketing campaign—devised by Brussels-based boutique agency threedaybeard—that generated such unwarranted word of mouse in the first place. And yet despite the book’s blatant shortcomings, there is one passage that not only deserves to be amply quoted, but in fact gains from it: that in which anti-hero Adam Zurz, a deviant downshifter whose alphabet-encompassing initials are the pretext for much verbal pyrotechnics on the author’s part, is subjected to the demented patter of his boss, Charles Sayer.

‘Adam! Just a moment, if you will…’

I turned around to see a broadly smiling Charles Sayer, Interludo’s managing director, who had stolen up behind me in the corridor in the crêpe-soled tobacco suède brothel-creepers he invariably wears and that allow him to silently pad through life as if he were walking on a cushioned cloud.

‘Adam, I must tell you this because you’re bound to be the only person in the whole damn place who could possibly have the slightest interest in it, so just indulge me for a couple of minutes, will you?’

So saying, Sayer ushered me into the inner sanctum, passing on the way his secretary Olga, an efficient spinster whose leisure-time handiwork was visible in the form of a framed petit-point sampler hanging on the wall above the leather sofa. Presented to Sayer on his fiftieth birthday it bore the following credo woven in bold blue letters:

I SAY THAT IF THE EXECUTIVE CANNOT WRITE HIS OWN SPEECH,
LET HIM MAKE NONE. IF HE IS TONGUE-TIED IN PUBLIC,
IT IS BECAUSE HE IS TONGUE-TIED IN PRIVATE;
HE SIMPLY HAS NOTHING OF SIGNIFICANCE TO SAY.

‘Tell me, Adam,’ began Sayer in a near-whisper, as if he were solliciting highly sensitive information, ‘how many times do you think you can place the word had one after the other and still produce a meaningful utterance?’

Disinclined to rack my brains over the matter I replied, ‘I don’t know. Two?’, to which Sayer triumphantly replied that it could be repeated eleven times.

‘Consider this, Adam, and listen carefully because I find it fascinating. A schoolteacher—and this is the background to the example, because without the background the demonstration might not be obvious to you—a schoolteacher sets a grammatical exercise on the composite past tense for two students, we’ll call them Jack and Jill in order to emphasize their purely conventional status and let’s just imagine that all this happens while they’re being rehabilitated in the traumatology clinic after that hill-climbing and water-fetching fiasco. Now here’s the sentence itself—and I warn you, I’m not making it easy for you first time round: “Jack where Jill had had had had had had had had had had had the teacher’s approval.” Get it?’
‘No.’
‘Alright, the trick is that sometimes had is being used as what I’m going to call a conventional semantic element—either as an auxiliary or a past participle—and on other occasions it’s as if it’s being quoted as a word, the word had. For example, if I say “Once upon a time neologism was a neologism”—and just for your information Adam, that “once upon a time” was in fact around about the turn of the nineteenth century, which is food for thought in itself—you can see that the two uses of the word neologism there are fundamentally different. And again, if I say that tree has four letters, I’m not referring to the idea of a tree with its trunk, branches and leaves, but to the word tree—so that if it were written down you would expect it to be placed in quotation marks or in italics or whatever in order to remove the ambiguity, while if it is spoken—as indeed it just was—it is usually separated from the word preceding it by means of a pause or a kind of glottal stop and also normally assumes a distinct intonational inflexion. Follow me?’
‘More or less, yes.’
‘Good. Now I’m going to repeat the sentence about Jack and Jill and every time the word had refers in fact to the word had and not to the conventional semantic element had, at the risk of looking like an utter clown I’m going to make the “bull’s horn” quotation mark device with the middle and index fingers of each hand, OK?’
‘Yes.’
‘Alright, here we go: “Jack, where Jill had had had, had had had had. Had had had had the teacher’s approval.” Now do you get it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Extraordinary, isn’t it?…Now, how many times do you think you can repeat the word and and still make sense.’
‘Well you’ve just managed two, Charles, but judging from your last tour de force I would guess it’s considerably more than that. I don’t know, twenty-three?’
‘Five, I think, Adam and there’s no need to be facetious. Now, imagine that the proprietor of the Pig and Whistle public house contracts a signwriter to paint a sign for the establishment saying—logically enough—“Pig and Whistle,” and he tells the signwriter that before he starts on the actual sign he’d like to see a preparatory sketch. So the signwriter prepares a drawing for him and the pub owner is pleased but has just one minor criticism, namely that the signwriter—and once again I’m going to make the traditional “bull’s horn” quotation mark device, not only each time the word and refers to the word and and not to the grammatical conjunction and, but also each time the word pig refers not to the bristly omnivorous quadruped but to the word pig and each time the word whistle refers not to the clear shrill sound or the instrument for producing such a clear shrill sound but to the word whistle. Although of course you might say, Adam, that in referring to the Pig and Whistle public house one is not in any sense or at any stage referring to anything remotely bristly or shrill but merely utilizing a conventional label that depends upon the original, referential meaning of the words pig and whistle being somehow suspended or ignored or mentally shunted out of play. But anyway, let’s put all that on the back burner. As I was saying, the owner of the Pig and Whistle is pretty pleased with the preparatory sketch for his sign but has just one minor criticism, namely, that the signwriter hasn’t left enough space between—are you ready, Adam?—Pig and and and and and Whistle.’
‘Extraordinary.’
‘Isn’t it? But you know what really amazes me? That while we all know who said ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’—and that’s only three roses after all, small beer when it comes down to it—we haven’t the faintest idea who the genial poet of the eleven hads is.’
‘Or the prodigious bard of the five ands.’
‘Precisely.’