(urth) Thecla's "Identity"

[DAVID STOCKHOFF]

Well, this does go a long way to answering your question about Wolfe's relative invisibility. We can't blame people for not specializing in what they don't understand, and most lit-crits are not, by definition, engineers, mechanics, scientists, detective novelists, writers of potboilers. They have their own abstract methods, and while they try to make those methods concrete, they also make them inflexible and blind. 


I always liked New Criticism because I could get my mind around a "perfect" but "perfectly flawed" structure, where function transcends form. But the French guys always lost me at some point.




>________________________________
> From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
>To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net> 
>Sent: Friday, April 5, 2013 9:42 AM
>Subject: Re: (urth) Thecla's "Identity"
> 
>
>What's funnier about it to me are almost 200 page books devoted to "Naming Beckett's Unnameable" and examinations of all these philosophical principles and articles about "meaning and significance" that mention hermeneutics and deconstruction and discourse and Derrida's pharmakos and they always stutter around the idea that our narrator is ultimately "unnameable" in actuality instead of merely in society, and fail to see the pun in his other identites, The Worm and Mahood (ma(n)hood, as I like to read i - he doesn't hear too well, since sounds vibrate through the body he is attached tot).  Our object simply romanticizes his origin because he has no understanding of his actual function.  
> 
>In my mind it isn't particularly hard to see either - isn't it these guys jobs to read books and interpret them?  How can't they see that metaphor, and that it is society's morals that make it unnameable instead of some existentially unsolvable puzzle?  
> 
>This is why to me the great mass of literary criticism obscures rather than illuminates.   If you are bored read some of those articles on the work for a good laugh.
> 
>
>
>--- On Fri, 4/5/13, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>>From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
>>Subject: Re: (urth) Thecla's "Identity"
>>To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
>>Date: Friday, April 5, 2013, 5:24 AM
>>
>>
>>Wow. Excellent example.
>>
>>Really very reminiscent of 5H---we don't know for sure how much the internal narrators have made up, just like the penis and its "limbs," in trying to be human.
>>
>>On 4/4/2013 11:20 PM, Marc Aramini wrote:
>>> kett's unnameable.  Our narrator is a one eyed immovable weeping vomiting mess randomly swathed in darkness and light, and hundreds of papers you find deal with all kinds of gobbledegook about self knowledge and perception in the outside world and transforming the subjective "I" when really our narrator is just a penis that has anthropomorphized itself and made up a story about once having limbs. Beckett was enraged when explicit mention of a penis was removed from the work because, I am sure,  it was the dominant metaphor behind it.  Yet none of these intellectuals and scholars ever mention that the narrator is a penis.  Do they just not notice?  Is it beckett's
 joke on the world?
>>
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