If we try to decode the overall meaning logically, what we have is a puzzling equation: because the old man refuses to be alone but is "of the crowd" he is therefore "the type and the genius of deep crime" and representative of the "worst heart of the world." He thus seems to illustrate the assertion in the opening paragraph that men die "on account of the hideous mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed," "secrets which do not permit themselves to be told." The implication--central to the readings of the story which see it as a detective story without a detective--is that the narrator suspects the old man of being driven by a hideous mystery, an utterable secret.

In comparison to direct and instant perception as a source of absolute knowledge, inference is understood as the source of only indirect conventional knowledge, because inference is bound within the realm of the utterable and functions through the categories of names (Yum, 1987).

Their power is found in the breaking through of the classificatory opposition, which has been socially imposed in the dominant symbolic order 'between the sphere of what is politically utterable and everything that remains beyond discussion' (1991: 132).

(12) Here it is evident that for Bloch, the power of music as a utopian form rests in its nonverbal, nonrepresentational, abstract character and its consequent capacity to transcend the utterable. It does not merely prefigure a better world but invokes it:

It is known by a plethora of names, the more common and utterable ones being buah (fruit), igi' (seed) and leka (round object).

Caspar is free to make this claim because the restriction of what not to discuss--the fix, the sexuality of Bernie, Mink, and the Dane--is so pervasive that his claim, in conjunction with the attendant taboo, can delineate precisely what is utterable and what is not.

8 / For a more detailed history of women's editorial work in experimental/postmodern/avant-garde poetries, see Linda Russo's essay "The 'F' Word in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: an Account of Women-Edited Small Presses and Journals." Russo's essay chronicles women's editorial efforts in the twentieth century and illuminates, in particular, the role of women's editing in the production of innovative poetics: "Editing, as an act of insertion and assertion, makes visible affiliations and dialogues, and redefines the legitimate and the utterable, the individual and the community--all that occupies and constitutes fields of literary production."