23.

Zoom out. Eli Mandel might claim that the corpus constitutes the minimal element of writing — what he calls the “life sentence,” in which the whole canon of a single writer becomes the main unit for authorial discourse: i.e., “a life of words or a life in words.” ³⁷ Every work written by a poet gets absorbed into such an opus, all “to serve the sentence” (from which no poet gets out on parole). I might note that not even parole (à la Ferdinand de Saussure) allows us to escape langue altogether, for only the full stop of death ends such a sentence. The demise of the author, complete with any “last word,” leaves behind a body of work, a corpus, memorialized under a name, both unique and proper, identifying the standard currency of exchange among the living, who must construct for themselves the grandiose tradition of literature out of these indeed large, albeit prime, units of writing.