Subject: Re: Bananastanley Fish
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Sun Feb 20 2000 - 05:02:15 EST
'... But when I give them quizzes about the footnotes and
A[e]neas and Dido and asyndeton and chiasmus, lighbulbs
come on ... foreheads begin to glow, recognition cracks into
cheeks, knowing smiles creep onto faces ...'
That's me, Matt, around 1945: no chiasmus lost, no asyndeton
unpunished, no chance lost to reward Henry McLeod Webster
with the right answer, the 'knowing' answer that most teachers
long, indeed need, to hear from their favourite pupils.
Yet I couldn't give one shit about Hamlet. (Or Mercutio
or Brutus - or even Malvolio whom I played that Christmas
with what, as you can well imagine, was uncanny realism.)
It was only five or six years later when Olivier's film came
to Dublin that I found myself going for the twelfth time
to sit in the plush seats of the Metropole cinema & feel
the goosepimples spreading over my back once again,
just as they had when I first heard that killer, pansy voice
whispering: 'Oh that this too too solid flesh ...'
What was it? My own Werther-like depression at the time?
A repressed homosexual identification with Olivier?
Walton's music? The black & white photography?
Eileen Hurley's embodyment of my dream mother?
Jean Simmon's heart breaking face? Simply the isolated
luxury of the front row of the Metropole circle?
It sure can't have been Larry's ludicrous bottle-blond hairdo.
Whatever it was, it had very little connection that I could
ever see with that earlier intellectual detective game that
I'd once greatly enjoyed - but simply in the way any proficient
games player might.
The piece from Stanley Fish - insofar as I understand it
(I no longer possess an 18 year old brain) - seems to belong
with the whole movement, as it strikes me, to democratise
literature: to elevate the reader to more or less the same
level as the writer. 'We're all in this together ... you too can
play your part in the whole venture ... your role in
''Holden - his struggle'' is as central as that of JD Salinger ...
without you, none of this exists ... you're a fully paid up
member of the Glass family like the rest of us ... ' & so on.
I can understand how good it must make you all feel.
And, of course, when it comes to Jim's comment:
'... The author is important because he is the first reader,
not because he is the origin ...', words fail me altogether.
In conclusion, let me at least try bravely to congratulate
you on your elevation to the bishopric. Yet I had such
hopes for you.
Still, the heart lifts at the prospect of reading Cardinal Hochman's
felicitations. They should be something.
Scottie B.
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