Humpty Dumpty

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 2:11 PM
Subject: re: Humpty Dumpty


> Those P-lister yet unfamiliar with the text or world  of lit-crit and
> crit-theory might be feeling a bit like Alice passing through the
> looking glass. Once through it, how can language reflect reality? But
> the mirror is still there. It's Plato's mirror and it's turning away
> from nature, away from Hamlet, away from Joyce's crack squatting over a
> hole wiped with a journalist's jargon and in a postmodernist's hand the
> mirror is held up to reading itself.
>
> Wabe
>
> Take a look at the word "Wabe", a word hitherto without meaning in the
> text, generates a surpassingly vivid image which simultaneously expands
> its physical size and solidity of interpretation as as to intrude into
> Alice's and the reader's perception of reality. A word has produced a
> concept rather than the other way about.
>

Some German in the poem. "Wabe" is honeycomb and "outgrabe" sounds a bit
like the German wird for to dig out, to exhume: ausgraben.

> Something metaphorical about Alice. The language constructs our world,
> rather than reflecting it.
>

Seems as it is indeed this way round.

> Lit-crit and Crit-theory have nothing on Alice. For so much of what they
> do and do poorly, mostly because they can't, as Molly Bloom implores,
> "Tell [us] in plain words" is translated from the French misreadings of
> Greek philosophy.

But Lit-crit and Crit-theory are only other words for what we are doing
constantly in "ordinary" life. Living and acting in the world requires an
ongoing process of interpretation. The world we see are only pictures in our
brain percepted through our senses.

>French and those that pretend to translate it's
> critical ideas to English are both too self-centered and self-absorbed
> to force Anglos to become self-consciously aware that meaning is not
> passive and universal but produced through the language and
> contextualization of literary texts.  We should do well to remember that
> Alice was English and that
> Americans are far too narcissistic to step through a looking glass and
> far too practical to fall in French Rabbit hole.
>
>
> http://sundials.org/about/humpty.htm
>

I don't understand what the difference between French and Americans has to
do with it. Pynchon is very aware of this and far from being narcissistic.

Otto