SL Red Herring salad

[Matthew Cissell]

Red Herring in the SL introduction? This is bananas. First, maybe some of the 
confusion can be cleared up by addressing the apparently troublesome word 
"story". In english this word has less to do with some strict genre format (eg, 
sonnet, short story, novel) than with the idea of a narrative of some sort. 
Let's look at some of the language games it is involved in: to tell a story, 
make up a story, to write a story, what's your story,etc. So it seems clear that 
TP can call it a story. But that really isn't the problem, is it?
    "Tom must be kidding", think about it. an author who rarely addresses the 
public decides to take the piss out of his readers? Hey, i guess that stuff 
about his interest in the Beats was also a red herring. (Perhaps Jed was being 
ironic?) C'mon. Do you really find it so hard to accept? Didn't Joyce burn 
Stephen Hero? Can't a writer look back on something with less than total 
contentment? I think this is more about somebody's reading than it is about TP & 
the veracity and accuracy of his SL intro. 

    Me? I'm with Mark. It is to be taken straight. If you don't want to that's 
your business; a good part of literary theory stems from just that. The author 
said What? Everyone knows that understanding literature is too important to take 
an author's word for the gospel truth, we must interpret what he says as well as 
what he writes.
        As Freud once allegedly said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." 
There's a lot of good information in the SL introduction. Maybe, just maybe, 
when he wrote the introduction he felt exactly what he wrote. I guess that for 
some that is too simple for such a complex writer.

Simplicissimus