GR translation: demolition man

[alice wellintown]

Not exactly. What Wood wants is ambiguity that causes readers to care
for characters. We see a little boy suffer and then he is cruel. We
then hope he will mend his ways. The author, without intrusion, has
made the reader as he has created his characters, made them care about
the boy and his life. When an author like Pynchon spins the reader
round and round in the funhouse of ambiguity, the reader is made
indifferent, cares little, if at all, for the characters, the worlds
they live in, the situations, but is fascinated by the mirrors, the
reflections of multiplicity, the ambiguity itself, the spin and
mirrors.

But this puts P in good company. Who cares for Romeo or Juliet? We
know from the start that they will die, will take their own lives,
that their stars are crossed. It is Shakespearre we go to see and
hear, and the acting of his plays, not the dramatis personae. Are we
concerned about Hamlet? We are not. It is a play we study, not quite
as a closet drama, but as a messy gothic monster full of more words
and ambiguity than any other play by the bard of Avon. It is full of
long speeches about Being, and Acting, and Madness; it is cutting room
floor film spliced together and grafted to an old Norse tale. Who
cares about Hamlet? A 30 years old actor who won't play his part as
King, a man who uses ambiguity to show off, to trick, to kill is not a
man I care about. I am indifferent to Hamlet. Shakespeare's ambiguity,
the play, the play within the play, the play with words, the ambiguity
is the thing that makes Bill Shakespeare the King.


> Does Wood makes this demand?  Really?
>
>>
>> And, anyway, if Wood assumes that language must be reduced to its
>> communication function, like the way one walks, or dresses to communicate,
>> and that a clear and unambiguous message is an expectation that readers
>> have when they open a work of fiction, he's an idiot.
>>
>