File spoon-archives/bataille.archive/bataille_1999/bataille.9903, message 153


Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 14:08:17 -0400 (AST)
From: Stacey Maxine Armstrong <armstrsm-AT-is2.dal.ca>
Subject: Re: blue


how is it that a name can begin to to feel like a ground zero word?

I have been reading (that isnt the right word actually) some more articles
on satire and entrapment theory today which might be of interest in terms
of seduction and the ironic character of Johannes that Kirkegaard
*invents* in _the diary of a seducer_.

I dont know if I think K is a satirist or not. I think ironist might work
better.  In his exploration of the dialectical movement (?) between the
aesthetic and the ethical there is the same play of rhetoric that I see
happening in the works of Swift.  The machinations of the seducer or
writer are juxtaposed to a kind of doctrinal consistancy/constancy 
(perhaps the ethical ?) The seducer is a rhetorical jumping jack who
"exhorts, questions, begs, flatters, scorns, and consoles" the reader into
an emotional and aesthetic response that nears (if not reaches) a kind of
religious faith. 

The truly adept satirist is able to kindle the dullest reader into wit.
(laughter) Writing which flatters the reader by making them *feel* more
interesting and engaged...whether or not it actually *makes* the reader
more interesting is a matter of interpretation. As we might argue in the
case of Cordelia who remains pretty vacant to me.    

The keen thing about Swift for me is that his seduction does not end with
flattery which tends to become boring after awhile. The pleasure I derive
from reading him is turned inwards so that I become aware that I am the  
victim of my own pleasure because he makes me so aware of the moments in
which I desire meaning and significance only to rip them away. Satirists
(and perhaps ironists) do not only find pleasure in the play of words but
they are connoisseurs of entrapment.  (There is the underlying
suggestion at times that the satirist is a sadist) 

_the diary of a seducer_ is not a work of entrapment but Johannes does
entrap Cordelia.  Works of entrapment illict responses painful and/or
pleasurable by seeming way more intense than their perceived cause.  In a
sense content is kept to a minimum so that the reader becomes the subject
of the text.  The work will normally also cause contrary responses, both a
repulsion and an attraction. (In the case of Swift there is almost never a
middle term, the reader most be a sheep or a goat)  David Veith writes:
"literary entrapment does not differ essentially from entrapment in the
legal sense ("Abscam," "sting" operations) or the sexual sense. It offers,
not the poem as "well wrought urn" or "still unravish'd bride of
quietness," but the poem as whore." (that stings a little)

stacey



   

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