VLVL(5) At the Movies and on the Tube

[Dave Monroe]

>From Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose
(New York: Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich, 1984) ...

   "The postmodern reply to the modern consists of
recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be
destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence,
must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I
think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who
loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say
to her, 'I love you madly,' because he knows that she
knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these
words have already been written by Barbara Cartland.
Still, there is a solution. He can say, 'As Barbara
Cartland would put it, I love you madly....' At this
point, having avoided false innocence, having said
clearly that it is no longer possible to speak
innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he
wants to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he
loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman
goes along with this, she will have received a
declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two
speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted
the challenge of the past, of the already said, which
cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with
pleasure play the game of irony ... But both will have
succeeded, once again, in speaking of love." (pp.
67-8)

http://www.bartleby.com/66/14/18414.html

http://www.culik.com/weatherr/Pomo/Home.html

--- Michael Joseph <mjoseph at rci.rutgers.edu> wrote:
> 
> But this kind of quoting, which decenters the notion
> of a privileged set of cultural constructions
> inherently possessing greater authenticity or
> immediacy, is exactly how John Barth says writers
> *should* express their "inner feelings," the only
> means available to them in a postmodernist age.

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