douglas fowler

[Terrance]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> Coming from the one guy who has ...
> 
> --- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> >
> > Harold Bloom once said, we can't read them all.


My Dear Mrs Hawthorne

I have hunted up the finest Bath I could find, gilt-edged and stamped,
whereon to inscribe my humble acknowledgement of your highly flattering
letter of the 29th Dec: -- It really amazed me that you should find any
satisfaction in that book. It is true that some men have said they were
pleased with it, but you are the only woman -- for as a general thing,
women have small taste for the sea. But, then, since you, with your
spiritualizing nature, see more things than other people, and by the
same process, refine all you see, so that they are not the same things
that other people see, but things which while you think you but humbly
discover them, you do in fact create them for yourself -- Therefore,
upon the whole, I do not so much marvel at your expressions concerning
Moby Dick.

		--Melville, Letter to Sophia

"Books are top be called for, and supplied, on the
  assumption that the process of reading is not a half sleep,
  but in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle;
  that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on
  the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the
  poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text
  furnishes the hints, the clue, the start or framework." 
                                                  --Walt Whitman,
Democratic Vistas

Create them for yourself? 

The strong misreading comes first; there  must be a profound
act of reading that is a kind of falling in love with a
literary work. That reading is likely to be idiosyncratic,
and it is almost certain to be ambivalent, though the
ambivalence may be veiled. 

			--Bloom 

In his early novels Melville encouraged his readers to be partners or
interlocaters. Readers were to be partners in communication. Reading,
Melville understood, is an act of creation not unlike writing. In fact,
reading is a sharing in and a  completion of, the complex dynamics of
the creative process. So, by the time we get to Moby-Dick, the narrator
Ishamel steps to the side and says, I am an unfinished man, unfinished
project,  I leave to posterity the labor of putting the capstones on.
But by Confidence-Man this symbiotic partnership between the text and
the reader is squashed like an ampersand in a printer's vice. In C-M
Melville gives the reader only what George Harrison got from John and
Paul--thanks for the pepperoni ("subtile significanes"). The reader
can't communicate, can't participate in the conversation, can't be a
partner in the creative process because mind is overwhelmed while the
words collapse under the weight of too many nested subordinations. The
reader is caught in the reader trap, in the cul-de-sac of language, in
the confounded and confused kute Konnections and contradictions. And
just when the reader is completely confounded and ready as were many a
P-lister when reading GR to toss the book across the room,  three
characters step forward as a chorus, disrupt the drama and begin to
admit or at least suspect (which is worse and better really because it's
paranoid suspicion) they too are confused, confounded, as they begin
asking about another character and if he is possibly an agent of the
Pope. Triangles and triangulations. Victims? Are the readers, as McHale
would have it I suppose, victims of the author's postmodern
deconditioning? Or is suspicion (paranoia) in Melville, like positive
paranoia in Pynchon, a religious thing and therefore blessed. Yes,
that's it. 
Blessed because knowledge of the "truth" of things comes only by
paranoia (suspicion) or revelation. 


Hoppy Easter for those on that calendar.