Melville and MiddleWork

[MantaRay at aol.com]

Mittelwerk I love you but sometimes I cannot figure out what the fuck you are
talking about. I agree with whatever you said. 

MA/SCARY MAN:

>images of
> surface/depth/text all conjoined--and think about them tying
> TRP into old Melville's favorite image clusters--the inscribed
> surface (Ahab has a tablet set into his wooden leg; writes on it--
>  interesting image of the bady as text)-in my opinion this self-reflexive
trope is the key to the Melville-Pynchon axis.  The
>heiroglyphic and vatic image of the magic, inscribed or superimposed
character--
>it comes up over and over again in both TRP and Melville.
>
>Hey Manta--did you get into this into that paper you wrote on CONFIDENCE
MAN? Like

Why, yes I did, Johnny-boy. I also pulled a muscle writing that 20 page piece
of garbage. It was mainly about metafiction and identity transactioning in
both books, with the difference that CM was no longer interested with the
essential subject Moby-Dick was after. The body as text, in my weak write-up,
was tantamount to what Lentricchia calls the human desire to achieve the
"universal third-person;" the body as the first TV set. Not too
revolutionary, and I would rather have been writing on DeLillo or Pynchon,
but Melville, for being the drunk wife-beater he was, was a rather smart guy.


>the chalkboard the C. Man writes on throughout?

...yes, this as well as the fluid nature of the CM(s) himself/themselves.
Until I become more learned, I think the Confidence Man was one of the first
metafictional novels written. I see a Serious Connection between Smellville
and TRP, and I'm glad I took the class.

As far as metafiction goes, though, I'm having a hard time seeing Mason and
Dixon as an example of it. It seems pretty straightforward technically to
me...

MantaRay