Dear All,
I’m not
qualified to offer an opinion on Professor Boyd’s premises but it seems
to me that his article is interesting and useful in that it resists and
counters the dominant exclusivity of Theory. For the same reason I
enjoyed Dr
Alexander’s review. I agree with V.V. Bibikhin who wrote that “the
main controversy in human history is about indeterminable things, and
in order
to preserve them we must step over the threshold of silence, despite
the risk
of delusion and self-delusion” (LANGUAGE OF PHILOSOPHY [2002]. P. 34).
In reply to
Charles’s post about VN’s elitism. One British intellectual
suggested that the calculatedly “difficult” idiom of 20thC
English literary modernism was an anti-egalitarian conspiracy to keep
the
common reader out. Lovely Joyce and lovely Beckett, both
arch-Europeans, are
elitist; VN is democratic and even populist in comparison to them. To
be more accurate,
VN draws on both European elitism and American populism at will, and
combines
them to produce the necessary artistic result. His main, artistic
criteria are,
I’d suggest, lifted clear of nationality or geographical affiliation.
It’s
we who need him to be Russian, European, or American. The thing is he
was all
of those, and more. So we shouldn’t be surprised to hear one day that
he
was the archetypal Transatlantic writer.
And I should say
that
theory itself is “doing,” at any rate it can be sublimely creative.
SK