Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 10:41:34 -0500
From: "George Y. Trail" <gtrail-AT-UH.EDU>
Subject: Re: PLC: Poetry, prose, and Troy as meaningful


Here's a post from a Bloom list that I thought the lettered among  us
might enjoy.
 
g 

You recall Nietzche's take on metaphors on his Secrets and Lies, right?  That
mobile army of metal that has lost its chainmail sheen in the jangle and
scuffle of our pockets.  Metaphors without their "sensuous power" I
believe is
N's phrase for it.

Pound entitles his work Guide to Kulture...his uncouth idiolect having
its way
with our ceremonious state.

Ezra and Eliot fight about metaphor in Dylan's "captain's tower."  Eliot
tropes the relationship in "Eeldrop and Appleplex."  Pound continues to blue
pencil the Wasteland and find shoes for our toey Irishman.

Joyce adds this P.S. to Pound:  "This is a very poetical epistle.  Do not
imagine that it is a subtly worded request for secondhand clothing.  It should
be read in the evening when the lakewater is lapping and very rhytmically."

Pound secures leather and lace.  Bundles it up in newspaper and twine.  Joyce
writes the following limerick in response:

A bard once in lakelapped Sermione
Lived in peace, eating locusts and honey,
  Till a son of a bitch
  Left him dry on the beach
Without clothes, boots, time, quiet or money

Pound replies later with his own "Ballade of the most gallant Mulligan"  and
speaks of going down to the Dublin Town "in that attire" without a frown or
lest ye drown.

Where I'm going with these boots that are made for walking is Bloom's
mastering trope, metalepsis.  That which he claims in Poetry and
Repression is
the "only trope reversing trope...produces the illusion of having fathered
one's own fathers."

As I see it, Bloom's position is a theological notion.  A much defined
Oepedial notion of repression and transumption.

What I see going on between Pound and Joyce is more playful.  Concept (need
shoes) / word (but don't take me seriously) / metaphor (ok, I won't, but here
are the shoes anyway...and a response to your limerick too.).

Perhaps my sense of the mastering trope is informed by Derrida's horsing
around with Nietzsche's umbrella.  Bloom is more Heideggerian.  More
fixable.  More Originary.

Anyway,

Geof

zatavu-AT-excite.com wrote:
> 
> Explain to me why I get treated this way, but Barron does not, when he's the
> one who started acting like an ass first.


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