Subject: Re: " and debate 'Louise' "
From: Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 24 2000 - 13:46:44 EST
Bruce revived a thougt of Louise's:
> "Like Nabokov's `waxwing slain through the false azure of the window pane' -
> slamming into the window in our world but passing imperceptibly into the
> next in spirit - Buddy is the one who hit the window, while Seymour is the
> one who kept going."
I had thought to let sleeping threads slumber but, being the
fractious, contentious sort, it would be nothing short of a shirk
now. It is as if I had taken an alternate route home, for the sake of
prolonging a Rilkean conversation, alongside an old battlefield of
last week, only to notice there a few lingering injured, before
presumed dead but now struggling dangerously close to
consciousness--soon to be followed, first by determination, then
locomotion, and eventually full rehabilitation. Best to finish them
off, I think, with bootheel, with spade, with candlestick, while they
are still only groaning. Or, if you please, Eddie Rickenbacker-like,
before they learn to fly.
Certainly, Buddy didn't pass through any windows. But it's the larger
Hamlet metaphor that's mismatched. Casting Buddy as "to be" and
Seymour as "not to be" is useful, I think, but only from Buddy's
perspective. From Seymour's perspective, there is no such question.
The words are in his lexicon, but no grammatical sense obtains in the
statement, "not to be." Seymour's question isn't a binary one, a
choice between two opposites. If anything, as suggested by "Bfish"
and the Glass chronicles, his question isn't a question at all, but a
metaphor. Seymour is full of tropes, but not syntax. It makes sense
if you think of language, from an Eastern standpoint, as a warped and
imperfect tool for representing some kind of spiritual *in*differance
(to trope and trump the list's favorite neologism): Buddy--"Buddy" as
a figure--is a narrative, built on binaries, deferred presences, and
all the rest of that western stuff, while "Seymour" is a presence
communicated not by difference or deferrance, but by likeness and by a
simulated presence, as in metaphor. His narrative isn't a narrative
so much as a series of continuous metaphors: bananafish, bicycles,
cigars, short mute uncles, etc. The "Seymour" figure performs
metaphor; Hamlet, the Buddy figure, etc., perform difference.
Put that in your desiring machine and smoke it, Gilles!
-- Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu - * Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message * UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
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