They insisted that she be rained to earn a living.

It's a library book, yet for three pages it is fouled by underlining in red ink.  Attempting to make sense of the marks, it at first seems to me that the underliner was pointing out typos.  Maybe he or she even had a kind of helpful purpose in mind: to tell future readers with red ink "look, this word isn't what it's supposed to be!"  The obvious typo is "processions" where "professions" should be.  Not just typos, but grammatical errors are underlined: "has" where "have" should be, for instance.  The oddest word underlined is "rained" in this sentence: "[they] insisted that she be rained to earn a living."  What word ought that to be?  This and the rest I can't make sense out of, exactly.  "On" in "whirling on her mind": should it properly be "in," or something?  This just seems like nitpicking.  And finally there's "pennant."I don't know what's wrong with it.  Is it spelled wrong?  The "pennant" in the next paragraph isn't underlined.  But then, by that page the underliner seems to have given up.  Too many errors to correct.  The book of course must be full of them.

It does leave me rather haunted.  What am I reading?  What else, unaided by red ink, is "wrong"?  But it's a mild haunting, as the underlined errors are not particularly grave, and don't much threaten the coherence of the novel's narrative.  "[they] insisted that she be rained to earn a living" does indeed sound like nonsense, but I move on.  It doesn't matter really; the sentence may as well say "[they] insisted that she earn a living."  It is interesting, though, to imagine how many other "rained"s we elide to read, whether they're words, phrases, sentences, themes, characters, or anything else that we ignore.

That sort of elision of unresolved words in order concatenate a coherent narrative, argument, or whatever is the semantic analogue of what depressives often become stuck on.  Unconvinced by the signified, someone depressed revisits the signifier over and over.    Or at least that's how Julia Kristeva has it.  ("Concatenate" is her phraseology in Black Sun).  When this position is taken up not regarding a forgettably nonsensical word in a novel, but regarding the most glaring failures of signifying apparatuses (death being the quintessential example and metaphor here), it raises some important questions.  What happens to the unsignifyable?  How can they be held onto and how can they be dropped?  Neither seems quite possible.  However felicitously signified, they remain not quite entirely captured.  However seamlessly elided, they continue to haunt.  However rigorously maintained as a pure void, this too is a symbol.  If not, what is there maintained?  And finally, this is not a special category; no signifier is strictly signifyable--thus the distinction.  Don't think about it too much.