Humpty Dumpty

[Terrance]

> 
> > Those P-listers 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. 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.

And "the wabe" is the grass-plot round a sundial, I
suppose?' said Alice, surprised at her own ingenuity. 

'Of course it is. It's called "wabe," you know, because it
goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it-----' 

'And a long way beyond it on each side,' Alice added. 

'Exactly so.



> 
> > 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.

You are not going to try to convince us that the world is a text? Are
you? 

Lit crit and Crit Theory are not what we do constantly in ordinary life,
Otto. You drive a cab. I swing a hammer. What we do is work for a
living. We are working class. We don't sit around interpreting a gun
when it's pointed on our direction. 

Camera? Gun? Penis? Sign? Symbol. Ah, fictional representations of the
death of the cabby and carpenter. Not to mention our Oysters, Euros and
Dead Presidents. 



> 
> >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

P is an American author. Wood says he is the inheritor of the Broken
Estate--Melville. You can think of the Estate as a mirror (not Joyce's
cracked looking glass) but a mirror of Emersonian individualism and
American Narcissism turned self-conscious and guilty of defining the
Other.