Thursday, December 13, 2012

Hmm …

… Krugman, Krauthammer and Their Implied Authors - Bloomberg. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

This strikes me as among the dumbest literary commentaries I have ever read. Consider this:

As horrible company, Booth invokes Peter Benchley’s “Jaws,” which begins by preparing readers for a violent encounter between a woman who has recently “thrashed” with her boyfriend in “urgent ardor on the cold sand” and the “big fish,” the shark, moving “silently through the night water,” with eyes that are “sightless in the back” and “a small, primitive brain.”
No one, while reading a novel, thinks of himself as keeping company with the novel's author. With the novel's narrator maybe, if there is one, or the various characters. (Even if the novel is autobiographical, most readers are savvy enough to know that the protagonist is a fictional rendering, not a non-fictional one. We keep company with Philip Carey, not Somerset Maugham, in Of Human Bondage.)
As for columnists, of course they adopt a voice, a persona. That's why you can parody them, because they employ a tone that you can, if you wish, caricature.
You don't think of the author while reading. You think of what the author is telling you. If he tells it well, you get caught up in it.

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