Humpty Dumpty

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 3:59 PM
Subject: Re: Humpty Dumpty
>
> >
> > > 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?
>

No, the world is not a text. The world is chaotic energy in different forms.
But you and I can only speak about the world in the form of some text, ie
some kind of representation.

> Lit crit and Crit Theory are not what we do constantly in ordinary life,
> Otto. You drive a cab.

Well, doing that I'm constantly interpreting, for example road signs, stop
lights, the waving of a potential customer, the red light on top of the
police car stopping me for driving with too much speed. My brain is
constantly interpreting sign & signals. I'm aware that the reality is
something that cannot be understood in full. I interpret my desk as a stable
thing that will hurt me if I bang my head on it, but I know that in reality
there's much empty space between the atoms, electrons and quarks.

> I swing a hammer. What we do is work for a
> living. We are working class.

I don't believe in these class distinctions anymore. That's 19th century.
Hitler has been elected by all "classes" of Germans.

> We don't sit around interpreting a gun
> when it's pointed on our direction.
>

But it is a message that tells you better not to move quickly in order not
to be shot. Interpretation.

> 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.

Sorry, my cab is waiting for me. I'm going to finish the "Cryptonomicon"
tonight. Fine book.

Otto