Re: For those discussing Lit Crit...
john v. omlor (omlor@packet.net)
Fri, 10 Jul 1998 15:39:02 -0500
Will,
You should definitely listen to your niece. The show can be a lot of
laughs (in a strange, silly way, I think even Franz would have laughed at
the stupidity of Kenny's ridiculous demises, btw -- they say he laughed all
the time and couldn't finish reading *Metamorphosis* out loud because he
would always break up). In any case, Kenny as K. is the topic for a whole
other session of papers! Instead of never-quite understanding, he can
never quite be understood... We could so easily work in the line about
the actors and "false writing" that Buddy talks about and cites at the
opening of *Seymour.* Yes! We could undertake "an interrogation into the
even more profoundly undecidable status of the non-concept 'false' when the
actors happen to be little cartoon kids." Piece of cake.
Thanks for the welcome. I do know David Lodge's little book (but I also
know some of the people explicitly being made fun of personally and so it's
not a fair read for me really). I liked Smiley's *Moo* as a lark in a
similar vein -- though no one does it quite like Nabokov did; *Pale Fire*
is a riot along these lines.
In any case, the early tip off to the joke in my faux-paper, in addition to
the Kenny as Christ thing, was the ridiculous fake and not so fake circle
motifs in the criticism cited -- though Jung and Campbell really are
circle-nuts (I resisted the tempting "circle-jerks" there, you noticed),
Derrida's "Circumfession" is of course about something entirely
non-circular, entirely other, he would say; as is the Delueze (though he
*does* take off on the repetition thing in that book), and Foucault takes
the circles (spirals, actually) out of Nietzsche's genealogy . Also, the
mock-Hegelian excess of the rhetoric about historical climax and the
too-precious construction of "spec(tac)ular" were just little dabs for
flavor (and now I'm sounding like my own joke again, so I'll stop).
Well, I'm off to jazz in the rain, "quickly and slowly" as our friend says.
Enjoy your days and nights -- the next semester is already looming.
Yours,
--John