IVIV20: Gateway to the past, 351-352

[Michael Bailey]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> As Ch20's first paragraph ends the narrative segues into a discussion of
> "what Sauncho's colleagues in marine insurance liked to call inherent vice"
> (351). Temptation, indeed: that the novel's title is being explained finally
> is easily swallowed.
>

well, at least it gives a body pause, seeing the title in the text...

> However, before taking the bait, we might consider the context and
> acknowledge the failure of interpretation

hearkening back to Susan Sontag's essay "Against Interpretation"
(which it's quite possible you're alluding to here, anyway)
which might be apropos here - "instead of a hermeneutics, we
need an erotics of art"

That book was on my parents' bookshelf back in the day, but
I never cracked it.  However, the Wikipedia summary indicates
that it may be a statement of something I've been groping at myself:
rather than trying to piece together how a story points to something
else, instead trying to have reasonable, edifying and enjoyable reactions
to the story itself...

although, using Doc's attention to the blown-up pictures as a case in point,
it's fairly easy to generalize about the nature of attention itself -
forest/trees, map/territory, type of thing

This passage made me think of page 42, where
Doc's said he'd like a warehouse to keep all the photos he'd like
 to take, "one for every minute"

so Hope - responding to what may seem to her like
an inherent instability in Doc revealed by that desire -
asks him if he's seeing a therapist,
and in one of the non-sequiturs that abound, he mentions that
he's seeing a deputy DA...

and instead of clarifying her original question, she responds to
his non-sequitur answer with relationship advice: "Even if you
don't know what you've got...act sometimes like you do.  She'll
appreciate that, and even you'll be better for it."

which sort of blends the hermeneutics and the erotics nicely



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