thoughts

[Paul Mackin]

On Fri, 28 Jan 2000 DudiousMax at aol.com wrote:


>                 This is a friendly note to the list.  It doesn't take on the 
> weight of a paper to be published.  I will field friendly debate and 
> questions.  I will not answer hostile attacks or character assassination.
>                  Charles Hollander      
> 

Not with any particular reference to Charles' post but I do think it's
important to keep in mind a general danger (not fatal I suppose)  of
trying too assiduously  to read subtext and underlying meaning into p-text.
Not only do the  'meanings' tend to end up sounding a bit trivial, but
once the first connection is made it may be impossible not to continue on 
making other connections. And these may lead to places we perhaps do 
not want to go. There's no easy stopping place so that isn't it almost
inevitable we will end up eventually with some kind of discourse on the
meaning of meaning? For example, to use Charles' example, we are not
willing to see the reference to the prestigious and expensive red bordeaux
as a mere burlesque of the not-exclusively-English habit of attaching
upscale glamour to rather lowly and mundane objects. We feel the need to
speculate that the name Rothchild is also meant to suggest the plight of
the Jews in Hitler's Europe. But why stop our active truth seeking minds
at this point. The totally obvious next question arises of why the
sophisticated and knowledgeable P would feel that foreshadowing the fate
of the Jews is appropriate or necessary at this point in a novel whose
obvious historic backdrop is World War II.  There can't be a person on the
face of the earth that doesn't know about this already. Consequently, who
then can resist the conclusion that what's important is not this
PARTICULAR meaning but rather some other meaning--something sly old P
wants to hit us with, and so forth and so on, and eventually nine times
out of ten the smart money says we will end up talking about "meaning" is
the abstract. Or the meaning of meaning as I've already said. In other
words in our search for meaning we have gotten exactly nowhere except a by
now stale litcrit discussion.

I know we all do this sort of thing. It's human nature. But golly it
ends up sounding for all the world like some kind of conspiracy theory.
Well, that's not inappropriate I guess in the case of the paranoia 
quest of Mr. P. But let's accept it for what it is. Heaven to goodness
there's plenty of subject matter for a good paper here. But IMHO it needs
to be seen rather obliquely--if that's the word.

			P.