p.s. I did intend to answer your remarks likening
literary pursuits to totalitarian states:
The shift of emphasis from
text to texture is an introduction to an integralidea/theme of the novel: the
mode of searching for absolute truth in text is not only simple-minded and
futile but can also be dangerous. When reading with the mindset that an
answer to the problems of the novel HAS to be found, we do not realize that,
in doing so, one employs the same manner of thinking used by those who go on
to make the most blatant and dangerous truth claims about the meanings of
text: Christian fundamentalists, extremist Muslims, Lenin, Hitler, et
cetera...
I don't admit the comparison.
Was
Toscaninni "dangerous" to anybody? He was a dictator, perhaps the last of the
great dictator/conductors. Shall we try him in the Hague? Cocteau in his film
Orphee can be seen in a "cameo" playing God. Should we have locked him
up? Attempting to solve a literary puzzle hardly makes one a religious or
political fanatic., and the World of Art (Mir Iskusstva) has never been a
democratic
state.