heh, Scottie, I love your posts. I'm very sorry in all the debate I failed
to express proper appreciation, but I'd like to correct that now.
This facet of the discussion is really interesting to me because it opens
the discussion out a bit.
First, please note I am talking exclusively about literary texts. I'm not
talking about, say, interpersonal communication. As a result, while I
don't think I can know with any degree of certainty exactly what Salinger
meant to communicate in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," I feel I can know
pretty surely what my wife means when she tells me she loves me with a nice
big hug and a radiant smile, or when she says "I love you..." through
gritted teeth :).
The difference between these two forms of communication is, of course, the
presence of the speaker/author. Presence. That thing we try to
reconstruct through historical and biographical research, but never really
can very well.
The more you listen to me, at this point, the less postmodernist I begin to
sound.
Jim
Scottie Bowman wrote:
> Poor Jim. Never to know. Never, never, NEVER
> really to KNOW what's going on in the minds of
> those bastards.
>
> Does she love me? She says she does but maybe
> I misheard. Maybe she said loathe. Maybe she didn't
> say anything. Maybe it's a hallucination. Maybe
> she's not there at all. Maybe it's only me here alone
> in an empty, whistling universe of my own imagining.
> Maybe Berkeley was right all along. And, anyway,
> what does she mean by love? What do I mean by love?
> Is love a valid concept? What did Hazlitt say about love?
> What did Nietzsche? Or Heidegger. Now there's a man.
> Or was he a man? What evidence do I have he was
> a man at all. Maybe he was actually Hitler in a pair
> of lederhosen. I once saw a picture of Adolf in Alpen
> gear. Or did I? Maybe I only imagined it........
>
> Alanzopine 5 mgm tds - increasing, if necessary to 10 mgm
> in four days.
>
> Scottie B.
>
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Received on Fri Oct 25 14:42:32 2002
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