Arwin,
My Melitta reference was a shorthand way of saying that your approach to
literary art is mechanistic ("the human system"). Robert's explanation
improved your cultural _knowledge_, not your "cultural wisdom". You might be
making a little mistake because your native language is Dutch (so I assume) but
your English is so good I don't think that's it. Rather, it seems to me that in
all of what you have written, there is no admission of a difference between
these two modes of knowing. Your approach will take you to the former, not to
the latter.
A paradox: if the human mind were as simple to explain as you think it in
theory to be, the human mind would not have the intelligence to explain itself.
Your encyclopedia of allusions and contexts is not much different than much
mainstream philology. While such encyclopedias may be necessary for
understanding, they are not sufficient, and, in themselves, do not constitute
literary understanding. Let me give you one example of their meagerness (while
giving you another cupful of American culture).
In Faulkner's novel AS I LAY DYING, which is told from multiple points of
view, each of the characters delivering one or more monologues, Anse Bundren is
described as a lazy good-fer-nuthin', though there are hints that he may be
crippled or handicapped in some way, but these hints are undercut by the other
perspectives which see Anse as a malingerer. Anse is the husband of Addie
Bundren, who is dying. Dr. Peabody comes to tend to Addie. A big storm is
brewing. The Bundrens live atop a high bluff. Addie has had a son, Jewel, by
another man with whom she had an adulterous affair. She has three other sons,
of whom the youngest is Vardaman; he is still just a little boy. Peabody, a fat
man 70 years old, is narrating (the spelling reflects a "hillbilly" accent;
"hit" = "it"; "ketch" = "catch"; "kin" = "can".):
Anse is standing at the top of the bluff above the path.
"Where's the horse?" I say.
"Jewel's taken and gone," he says. "Cant nobody else ketch hit. You'll have
to walk up, I reckon."
"Me, walk up, weighing two hundred and twenty-five pounds?" I say. "Walk up
that durn wall?" He stands there beside a tree. Too bad the Lord made the
mistake of giving trees roots and giving the Anse Bundrens He makes feet and
legs. If He's just swapped them, there wouldn't ever be a worry about this
country being deforested someday. Or any other country. "What do you aim for me
to do?" I say. "Stay here and get blowed clean the county when that storm
breaks?" Even with the horse it would take me fifteen minutes to ride up across
the pasture to the top of the ridge and reach the house. The path looks like a
crooked limb blown blown against the bluff. Anse has not been in town in twelve
years. And how his mother ever got up there to bear him, he being his mother's
son.
"Vardaman's gittin the rope," he says.
After a while Vardaman appears with the plowline. He gives the end of it to
Anse and comes down the path, uncoiling it.
"You hold tight," I say. "I done already wrote this visit onto my books, so
I'm going to charge you just the same, whether I get there or not."
" I got hit," Anse says. "You kin come on up."
I'll be damned if I can see why I don't quit. A man seventy years old, weighing
two hundred and odd pounds, being hauled up and down a damn mountain on a rope.
I reckon it's because I must reach the fifty thousand dollar mark of dead
accounts on my books before I can quit. "What the hell does your wife mean," I
say, "taking sick on top of a durn mountain?"
"I'm right sorry," he says. He let the rope go, just dropped it, and he has
turned towards the house. There is a little daylight up here still, the color
of sulphur matches....
--
One of the main things that need explainin' in this passage is something that
is _missing_ from the passage. What might it be?
Tim Romano
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