Late Response

[LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU]

A couple of thoughts prompted by Vaska's post of 10/27.  Sorry for the
tardiness; it's been a busy week and I'm still slogging through the backed
up e-mail (the bulk of which is from this list!):

Vaska sez:
"I              
am old enough to have been caught, in my education,
exactly at the cusp between modernist critical theories a la I.A. Richards
and structuralist/poststructuralist re-inforcements of modernism (e.g.
Barthes' death of the author thing you alluded to in a previous posting).
Even as a callow undergraduate in an old-fashioned British university
program, I thought the gentlemen (and the few ladies among them) did protest
too much.  Eliot's (and Joyce's) "impersonality" theory can cover up a
multitude of sins; has anyone been following the recent brouhaha in England
over a new book on Eliot's anti-Semitism?  It seems to have been torpedoed
by a concerted series of critical establishment actions -- though I don't
believe that it'll stay sunk for very long."

I'
m not so sure about Barthes, but Foucault's description of the "author-function"
in society seemed more wide-ranging, a naming of a particular *role* that
"authors" play in society, regardless of the personality of the people
involved.  Perhaps another way of saying, why are we reading *this* author
and not *that*?, which strikes me as having Pynchonian resonances.

The Eliot book is by Anthony Julius, T.S. ELIOT, ANTI-SEMITISM AND LITERARY
FORM, and is now available in quality paper in the U.S.  I haven't read it
but from the reviews it might seem to overstate its case, but some of the
more derogatory reviewers overstate their cases even further, methinks.

Vaska's surprise at the persistence of Jungian thought is notable.  Jung,
for all the academic fervor pro and con that addresses Papa Freud, keeps
hanging on.  Some of it lies in the luck of his followers.  Northrop Frye,
more a formalist than a true Jungian, kept some of the flame alive for
a while.  Part of the upsurge in Jung is undoubtedly due to the flurry of
favor that Joseph Campbell found before his death (speaking of anti-semites!),
especially in his tv interviews on Public TV with Bill Moyers.  But there is
something about Jungianism that is highly appealing--like other "
"grand narratives" (Marx, Freud, etc.) it is deliciously explanatory while
preserving the mystical and unmeasurable that Marx and Freud so badly want
to measure in their different ways.

Yes, all of this, dear readers, is relevant to TRP, playing off of Eliot as
a literary stepfather from "The Small Rains" on and using Jung (sometimes
contra Jung) as he uses everything in the sweet grabbag of western (and
some eastern) culture in GR.

But Vaska also mentioned Leni.  Let us look closely at Leni's own initial
anti-semitism, her projections about Rachel, one of the radical cell to 
which she belongs, and then see how *she* is "Judaized."

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)