For Keeler's class this semester we've been reading Tom McCarthy's Remainder. I make mention of this because I know about half the Shakespeare class is in Keeler's as well, and I cannot stress enough to the rest of the class the need to read this author.
A witty writer who--though broady avoids any denotation of a lable-- adresses through a new form of perhaps "post-modernism" the issue of the "stage". McCarthy is quickly becoming one of my new favorite authors who--due to my recent injury-- I hope to read al of his works by the end of this semseter, starting with C.
The injury i've endured seems to be a great intersection of life, and literature from which i can branch out. to start I'll have to apologize for any misspelled words or slow posting. This obtrusive cast has forced me to re-learn how to type, to sleep, eat, really everthing. One really misses their water until their well runs dry. The character in Remainder has far, far more extensive damage and rehabilitation to go through, but he too deals with this re-learning, and recognizing the infinitly extensive compontents to every action that at some point we learned or inherited.
I think of this in terms of lanugage: not only our massive cosmos of novels, phrases, words, and lettering, but of our connections through communitaction, and through interaction. The anxiety of influence shows us our own impotence (or perhaps fear of) to these grand master works put out before us. But these are not entities to abhor, to be hanuted by, these are our muses. Not as english majors specifically but as humans, as particpants in human connections.
This is essentaily at the core of Bloom's book, I could qoute extensivly from him to support my argument but I won't. This is for several reasons, one: frankly I'm a bit tired of Bloom, I find he's really hit and miss in his Invention of the Human, obviously it is all excellent but I quickly tire of his exsessive drooling over Fallstaff. The second reason: it sort of debases my argument for the time being, in that yes a lot of his ideas are being channalled through me as we speak, but there are infinite other's who I owe homage to equally, both knowlingly and unknowingly.
For example, I owe much of my vocabulary to Shakespeare himself, words like submerge, assasination, lonely--all his, yet I won't cite him. That is not to say I should not be aware, That i should not be appricitative, instead that I am fully (not really) aware that this ether of language and literature is living, birthing, and consuming entity. But I digress.
Back to McCarthy and Remainder whose story line divulges into these obsessive re-creations of events, places, and characters, we see the concept of the stage developing, or rather we see it un-earthed. His work becomes absurdist, but we can perhaps catch a pale gilmpse of reflection in our own lives. Whether we aknowledge that our own language, our every day diaologe come from a nebulous of lines, stage ques, and previously uttered converstions, or whether our recognition of our lives' stage comes from the examination of our everyday rituals.
Why do we wake with the sun, eat cereal, have a baby, die and decompose? What have we understood about each of these events, each of thier infinite componats, the transparancy of their history, their mythology?
after these mimic motions what remains?
(*pealse note "Mimic" a shakespearane word and "mimic motion" a segment of Stevens)
As usual I get going, veer far off topic, and run out of time, not before throughouly confusing and confoudning myself and dropping segments, scattering them to the breeze upon millions of diffrent topics that I'd like to discuss.
So conisder this just a pre-amble to alot of other things i'd like to talk about.
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