 becomes left. So mirror is a useful way to think about these notions of mimicry and modification. You'll see that this is a lecture brought to you by the letter M. Perhaps above all mirrors reflect and the aim of this lecture is a chance to reflect perhaps on some aspects of the course of the whole, on the history of the novel, on modernity perhaps, perhaps also post-modernity, but mirrors as well as reflecting they also, as I just mentioned, distort. They may appear to be true copies, but in fact to a greater or a lesser degree they always introduce difference and divergence. In the very act of what we might call mimesis, the Greek for copying, for reproduction, they split the object on which we're reflecting. There's the object in the mirror, it's doubled immediately. Two or more mirrors placed opposite each other can multiply the object many times, such as in the Dysodium, I think last time a maze of mirrors, for instance, a mirror maze, in which until ultimately we can never quite be sure which is the copy and which is the original. This is also a theme of course that bore his hammers at over and over again. But perhaps even more fundamentally still, even as a mirror seems to provide a way to reflect on and examine things in detail and depth, in fact they're nothing but surface. So I'm interested also in that. I'm interested in difference in repetition, but also in the notion of surface and depth. So a mirror seems to open out to another world, to what's behind it. So a world quite like ours, but not exactly like ours. But of course this depth is in, in many senses, an illusion. The mirror is an agent that aids us optically, but it also deceives us optically. Revealing in some ways a flaw in our vision, the way that we too easily take what is the other side of the mirror for reality. We're too easily fooled by mirrors. In the end after all there is no other side to the mirror. In another sense all we have however are mirror images, more or less imperfect attempts to reflect and reproduce the world around us. And that's what we've been examining I think of the last almost year, nine months or so. Looking at these various more or less imperfect attempts to reflect and reproduce the world around us, from Genesis to the present. And this, this image by the way, is René Magritte as it says and the translation, the title translator translates as not to be reproduced. It's sort of command or warning I suppose. And it also is a play with the notion of the imperfect copy of the mirror. Here we have a mirror in which what we see is exactly, what we see the other side of the mirror is exactly what we see. This side of the mirror, but that undoes the whole nation notion of mirroring. We expect to see something else. We expect to see the guy's face, the other side of the head there. All we see is the same thing that we see in front of the mirror in this particular image. The image, this is a mirror which gives us no further information except that it tells us, it warns us about the illusions of reproduction and mymesis and copying. So this is our guide through the looking glass. This is where we'll be going. As I say, a lecture brought to you by the letter M, multiples, mutation, minutiae, muteness and monsters. This is an image that I showed you last time I think from Lewis Carroll through the looking glass. I'll give you a couple of quotations from Lewis Carroll through the looking glass also as we go through. I had thought of a lot more M's. M is a very fertile letter it turns out. I had thought about sections on memory, mimicry, montage, manipulation, modification, monuments, modernity, madness and of course mirrors themselves. I think there's a lot to talk about in this text and I feel that at least of the text that I've been lecturing on, this is the one in which it's most evident that in the lecture in two hours we can only scratch the surface. But I like that metaphor too because if we're scratching the surface, at least we see that there is a surface. When a mirror is too clean, too unscratched, that's when the illusion starts. That's when we can mistake what's behind it for what's in front of it. Once we start dirty scratching, marking the surface of the mirror itself, then we're reminded that there's a surface which is mediating, which is distorting our vision. I'm going to start with a video. I did a little bit of an investigation. I think I'm allowed to show this video and I'm going to anyway even if I'm not. It's one of the funniest things. I don't know if anyone's seen it. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen, at least. Well, I exaggerate slightly. In a certain manner of speaking it gives a little throttle. It's a video, let me explain a bit. It's one of my favorite writers, Jeff Dyer. Has anyone read anything by Jeff Dyer? Go and read Jeff Dyer of the summer holidays. He wrote books such as Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It. He wrote a book, a book about not writing a book on D. H. Lawrence, which is all about procrastination and tedium. He wrote a book, which is a sort of riff, the title is at least a riff on Death in Venice. It's called Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He's very funny, very good. I recommend you. He's giving a talk in a literary festival in Australia, in Adelaide, and he's being introduced by J. M. Kurtzay. So, J. M. Kurtzay introduces him. He's a very short clipper, but J. M. Kurtzay introduces him. J. M. Kurtzay lives in Australia now. And then Jeff Dyer, as a sort of semi-comic writer, tries to make a joke. The joke's pretty funny, but what's much funnier is the way it utterly fails. It utterly falls flat. So, it's one of the funniest, I think, examples of unintended comedy when the joke fails. I was going to say, because this is worth it. In some ways it's not that worth it. But in every single lecture before, I promise you, no jokes, here's a joke coming up. The guy on the left is J. M. Kurtzay. At least one of my students writing blogs about this book thought that J. M. Kurtzay was a woman. I don't think that's interesting. And I'm going to mention why I think that's interesting in a minute. And the guy on the right is Jeff Dyer. Okay? I'm going to try it. Jeff has published four works of prose fiction, books Paris Trance, The Search, The Color of Memory, and most recently, Jeff Inves, J. M. Kurtzay's reaction to the joke. So, Jeff Dyer. Thank you, everyone. And thank you, John. I mean, what an honor if someone had told me 20 years ago that I'd be here in Australia and I'd be introduced by a Booker prize-winning, South African Nobel prize-winning novelist. I don't know what I'd have said. I mean, yeah, what would I have said? I probably said, well, it's incredible because Nadine Gordimer is my favorite writer. So, that's the comedy part over with. We're going to now move into a realm of what Matthew Arnold called high seriousness. So, the point is, not so much Dyer's joke, which he thinks is remarkably funny, as you can see, right? And then he looks to his right to J. M. Kurtzay, who doesn't even begin to crack a smile. That somewhere, somebody says that they'd only ever seen J. M. Kurtzay smile once. But I think that this also reminds us that in everyday life, social interactions are dependent on what's often called mirroring. Unconsciously, when we like someone, get on with someone. Now, this is the sort of thing you want to check out on your first date or something like this, right? We unconsciously mirror their gestures. Now, they go to pick up their glass, they go to pick up their glass, and so on and so forth. This shows that we're feeling comfortable. This mimicry, this mirroring ritual. We also look for confirmation, more generally, about our own sense of self in what other people are reacting in the same way. Again, Dyer's laughing. He's looking to see, okay, am I getting the same thing? Is there a mirroring going on here? It's Kurtzay laughing. But Kurtzay's not laughing. He's breaking the mirroring. He's showing there's something wrong here. Everything breaks down. So the embarrassment here and the inadvertent comedy comes from this failed interaction, this failure of mirroring. Dyer looks at Kurtzay, expects him to share the same affect, the same emotion, the same humor. But what he gets is a stony indifference. And this book's also about stony indifference at the heart of it all. Of an inscrutability, a figure who can't or won't mirror our speech, our affect emotion. I mean Friday, of course. Okay, so this is a slide that I've now shown you four times. I do think reading is important. I think this is a course which is about reading. So you've read this slide four times, in fact. Rather than three times that I tell you, you should normally read. Again, I've just said this before. First, a quick preliminary foray or assessment. Second, you know, this is sort of about flipping through it, looking at the sort of para text. To use the fancy word, the text about the text, as much as anything else. Second, read the actual thing. This is the sort of start of the beginning. Go to the end. Reading for flow, plot, and narrative. And third, going back to particular moments, moments of particular intensity, particular difficulty, particular interest, particular oddness perhaps. Reading, rereading for detail. So reading selectively and reflectively. Again, notion of reflection, like mirrors. Here, then, in this lecture, I'm going to try and bring all these elements together. I mean, in the lecture in Columbus, we mostly did the preliminary foray. I think we spent half the lecture on the cover or the title page. If in the lecture on on default, I talked mainly about plot, narrative, frames, and so on and so forth. In the lecture on Baucus, I tried to focus in on a few details. Here we're going to try and do all three things. Okay, so first of all, the preliminary foray in terms of multiples. So in a preliminary foray, we're asking what kind of text. This is a slide that I've shown you before as well. I showed you in the Columbus lecture. These are the questions that we're asking. What kind of text is this? To what genre does it belong? What expectations does it raise? What expectations does the text raise about what we are to expect in the text? That's my little sort of definition of genre. A genre is a kind of writing, but it's also a kind of writing that signals to us often early on what we're going to get. So the murder mystery body in the library, we expect at the end everyone to succumb in and the little Belgian with the waxing mustache to pinpoint the murder. There's going to be a resolution to the problem, for instance. And also what expectations does it ask of us? What demands does the text make on us? This preliminary foray is about charting the voyage ahead. Here's one of my little quotations from through the looking. That's about names. I'm going to be talking about names and titles. My name is Alice, but this is a stupid name enough. Humpty dumpty interrupted impatiently. What does it mean? Must a name mean something? Alice asked doubtfully. Of course it must. Humpty dumpty said of a short laugh. My name means the shape I am and a good handsome shape it is too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape. Almost. Question of naming and its relationship to the thing itself. This is an author who has a name. He also has a picture. That's his picture. This is a name. He's renowned. Famous. Partly because of multiples. He was the first author to win the book prize twice in 1983 and 1989. I've got a slightly different version of the book than you have, but I just checked with Rob's version and it has many of the same features that mine has. One of the first things, the name is bigger than the title. My name on the front cover of your text, the mine too, is more prominent than the title. The name is being used to sell this particular book. I'm wandering into Real McLeely territory here, but I hope you won't mind for a while. The name is kind of interesting because it's a name of initials, I think. J.M. Kurtzling. That's partly what enables my student mistake as to whether this is a woman or a man. We might think about what are the, I don't know, what are the characteristics of other authors who go by initials. In part it's, I think it's, I mean TS Eliot is another, after all. Although perhaps this is also the one thing that J.M. Kurtzling and TS Eliot share with J.K. Rowling. So maybe there's not too much to be named about the fact that people who go with by initials. But something's being withheld. Something's being withheld when you just get the initials. There's some, maybe not secret, but there's some information that the author is from the very start, from the outside, from the title page, from the cover, not conveying to you. But also indicating through the initials that it's there. So there's some kind of, something given and withheld at the same time. In this case it may raise questions of gender ambiguity. My student thought this was written by a woman. It's narrated by a woman. It's not written by a woman. As we said we only have one and a half texts this year which are written by women. This is not one of the one and a half texts. What difference would it make if it were written by a woman? What's the difference between a woman writing as a woman, whatever that means. And in this case a man, a male author of a certain age, a white male author incidentally, writing as though from the perspective or from the perspective of a woman. Does it make any difference at all? Does it matter? Does the authorial, just the gender or identity or other characteristics of the author matter? My copy, and I see your copy as well, has fairly prominently on the front. The winner of the Nobel Prize in literature and as if that weren't good enough. Also Booker Prize winning author. Here it says Booker Prize winning author of disgrace and waiting for the barbarians. Although actually only one of those was a book for which he won the Booker Prize. I guess they liked disgrace or waiting for the barbarians better. He won it for the disgrace and he won it for a book called The Life and Times of Michael K. My mother used to buy me the Booker Prize winner every year. She thought, this is a good book. I should have it. I should read it. That's one of the things that prizes do, right? They confer authority. They tell people who perhaps don't know very much about literature or even people who do know something about literature. This is a book worth reading. This is a book you can give to your child or your friend or your lover or whatever. And you'll be seen to be classy and well-read and so on. These are titles. These are names that confer cultural capital. So it's the first multiple winner of the Booker Prize. This is the preeminent award for I guess Commonwealth fiction in English. He's about as assuredly canonical as you could get without dying. I mean, we'll still be reading. We'd place bets on who will still be read in 50 years time and you're not going to lose any money if you're betting on on J.M. Goetze. He's been utterly consecrated by the literary institution. Interestingly, he doesn't turn up to the ceremonies. He hasn't turned up to his Booker Prize ceremonies, which on the one hand is a measure of some sort of disdain but precisely that disdain confirms the fact that they were right to choose him. If somebody's too eager to get an award, then they shouldn't really get the award. That's the logic of cultural capital. They're thinking about the award and the Booker Prize is not to be written for people who are thinking about awards. The Booker Prize is to be written for people who are thinking about high and lofty things. Art, literature, great writing. If they get the award, so be it. So he's got this gesture of appearing to be of awards, which is confirmation that he's someone who deserves the garlanding. It's a gesture of transcendence and I think that's an issue of this book as well. It's a gesture of being above these matters of the world and that's one of the reasons why this book in particular was criticized as we'll see. At the same time, he's well known as a white South African author and being a white South African author, especially at the time that this book was written in 1986, carries or carries a particular burden, I think, a burden of political representation, a burden of speaking out, speaking against. We're talking about the last stages of the apartheid regime. We're talking about probably the height of the worldwide anti-apartheid movement. Mandela would be released finally in I think 1990, 1991, but here it's more and more discussions. His name is being known throughout the world as somebody who's been in captivity at this stage for 25 years or so. And there's a burden of, especially on the privilege, the elite, and Kutzi is definitely a member of the South African elite, not only white but also African speaking, to speak out and protest. But this is the burden of the writer, perhaps in particular, that they should be. They should write in a manner that is political and makes political statements. But Kutzi has a problem with not only the first notion of representation, representation of mymesis, representation as the reproduction of an object in some other medium, representation as picture or portrait, but he also has a problem with representation as proxy, political representation, this other notion of representation. I think this book is trying to undermine or interrogate both forms of representation. In German there are two different words for what we have a one word for in English. I think it's doorstilung and vastilung. I never remember which is which. But these two notions, political representation and aesthetic representation, he finds problems with both. But he came out of criticism in 1986 when this came out because this was seen as an apolitical book or not sufficiently political book. This is seen as a book in which cultural capital, engaging with the canon, engaging with Daniel D. Fowl, showing he matched up to David Daniel D. Fowl. It seemed that Kutzi was more interested in that than in the nitty gritty of what was going on in the ground in South Africa. So here's one critic in the 80s speaking about Fowl, in our knowledge of the human suffering on our own doorstep. In other words, what's here? Not transcending up above, but what's here? A thousand of detainees who denied recourse to the rule of law. Fowl does not so much speak to Africa, it's provided a kind of masturbatory release. Those aren't words of praise, by the way. In this country, for the Europeanizing dreams of an intellectual culturing, that he's up and out of it, he's part of the elite. He doesn't care. I want an elite to sit around and masturbate through literature. The art, it becomes irrelevant in their hands. Though we should know at the same time that Kutzi's fault does prominently feature a character identified as African, that's one of the ways in which he changes or mutates or modifies a defosed book. And I want to argue that this criticism is wrong, basically, that in some ways this is a very political novel. It's about who can speak, who can tell stories and make histories, whose stories and whose histories count. In this sense, in some ways I think it's a classically postcolonial novel, a novel dealing with the colonial and postcolonial situation that's been read by other critics as such. But it's also, I think, fundamentally about an issue that this comment takes for granted, the relationship between literature and politics, between literary history and political history. And it questions and troubles that relationship. Again, it consistently refuses or refutes claims to representation by the current. And we can contrast this, I think, with Primo Levi, amongst others. Primo Levi is writing for others, where he's writing in the name of the many people who were killed in Auschwitz in the Holocaust and who weren't able to speak. He writes always, it seems to me he's writing at least in survival in Auschwitz as the ordinary person. It could have been who's there as a matter of chance, bad fortune, and then he survives as a matter of chance, a good fortune. There's nothing particularly special. We don't learn very much about him. A few minor things, right? He's got this chemistry degree, for instance. Whereas Kurtzsee refuses to write in the name of anybody, I think. So we can see this quite clearly in the Nobel Prize speech that he gave. If you ever get a Nobel Prize, let me tell you a few things that they ask you to do. They ask you to go to Sweden in, I think, it's December, November, December, cold. And there's a big banquet and they bring all the prize when it's together. Kurtzsee turned up at the Nobel Prize. He can shun the Book of Prize, but he's not that big that he can shun the Nobel Prize. The authors have. Sartre refused to turn down the Nobel Prize, partly because of reasons of commitment. Sartre meant the epitome of the committed intellectual. So they give you a big banquet and all of the prize winners in all of the different areas, subject areas, have to give a little, are introduced. There's a speech about them. And then they have to give a little banquet speech themselves to the assembled multitude. Then later on the week, they also give a little lecture. Well, a longer lecture, longer than the banquet speech. Banquet speech is like 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Kurtzsee writes a particularly short banquet speech, as it happens. I'm going to show you a bit of extract from it. And then often there's a whole etiquette about these banquet speeches. This is where you're accepting the prize. And often people are accepted in the name of other people. And this is gesture of humility. There's no need to be proud when you've got the Nobel Prize. It's like, whoa, I got the Nobel Prize. You just hit the jackpot. So there's all this sort of gesturing for the people, particularly amongst political, politically committed writers. Let me give you one example. It happens consistently. But amongst politically committed and also non-European writers. That's sort of acknowledging there's a politics to this, that somehow in choosing, for instance, a whatever, Colombian novelist, they're giving the prize to Latin America. In the same way like making the Pope Argentine is a reward for the whole of Latin America. It felt like that. And the Pope did the same kind of thing. It's not me. Pray for me. I was about Argentina. Aren't we marvelous? Argentines know that God is Argentine and they've had it proved now this week. Okay, so this is an example of someone giving a banquet speech in precisely that mode. This is Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, also a communist. I mean, he's, if you want to pick a committed intellectual, committed writer in Latin America, this would be your one of your top examples. And in this banquet speech, this is what he says. So he's in Sweden and he got in, I think, 1971, 1972. And he says, I'm a representative. I mean, that's the term he uses. It's not me. It's these other people. I'm a representative of these times, which are 1971, 1972, we're in the middle of the Chilean, the Chilean road to socialism shortly before the Pinochet coup. Salvador Allende, the left wing leader, is the left wing leader of Chile. I'm a representative of these times of the present struggles which fill my poetry. I am proud to belong to this great massive humanity, not to the few but to the many, by whose invisible presence I'm surrounded here today, in the name of all these peoples. Okay, so it's in the name of, it's about names again, but it's in the name of all these peoples, and in my own name, I thank the Swedish Academy for the honor which has been shown me today. This is Kurtzl, his banquet speech. It's quite different. This is almost the whole of it, by the way. It's very short. If you go to the Nobel Prize Internet site, you can actually see a video of it. He says, my partner Dorothy, worst doubt has followed, on the other hand, she said, on the other hand, that repeated phrase, whenever someone repeats a phrase, you've got to think, bing, why, why is something going on here. On the other hand, this is obviously an interrupted conversation, in which presumably he's saying, damn, they've given me this Nobel Prize, and she's saying, but, but, but, like, on the other hand, on the other hand, don't just think about the the downsides of winning the Nobel Prize. Think of, think of your mom. How proud your mother would have been. What a pity she isn't still alive. I said, he's this dour, he's really a dour on humorous chap, isn't he? I said, she would be 99 and a half. She'd probably have seen our dementia. She'd not know what was going on around her. But of course, I missed the point. Dorothy was right. My mother would have been bursting with pride. My son, the Nobel Prize winner. And for whom, anyway, do we do the things that lead to Nobel Prizes, if not for our mothers? Neruda didn't mention his mother. But Neruda, he writes for very different people. I'll give you one more example. This is Nadine Gordema, who is not J.M. Goodsley. This is Nadine Gordema's banquet speech. When I began to write as a very young person and originally racist and inhibited colonial society, it's politics from the start, right? Gordema's, I mean, that politics outside of writing. It is not that Goodsley did not declare himself against apartheid, but Gordema much more so. She's an activist. She's a member of the ANC. I felt that I existed marginally on the edge of the world of ideas of imagination and beauty. It took the realization that the color bar, I used that old, concrete image of racism, was like the gates of the law in Kafka's parable, to make us realize that what we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place. So this call for concretion, for entering the world, rather than transcend it, which is very different, I think, from Goodsley. But Goodsley is saying, in this book, amongst other places, how difficult it is to enter the world. Much easier said than done. So some of the issues here. Okay. For whom does an author speak? So whom or what is he or she responsible to his mother? To the masses of the poor in Latin America? To the victims, the detainees of the apartheid regime in South Africa? Or to the idea of literature? To some kind of universal transcendent value? What are writers' ethical responsibilities? What are the policies of literature? What is the relationship between policy and literature? Is it just a masturbatory act that distracts from what's really going on? Detention, torture, murder, violence? Or is there a way in which literature can be committed and have a political effect? And what way is literature political? Novels useless, secondary, ornamental. Just at best, pretty mirrors or pretty frames around mirrors or something like that. Is literature singular or multiple? Is it an individual or collective? Is it untied from the world? A release from the world? Or does it owe the world some debt, if so what? What kind of debt? Is it an epistemological debt that it's about what we know about the world? Is it a moral debt? Is it a political debt? What does it mean to be a committed writer? Now again, Kurtz is particularly interested. He often doesn't even speak for himself. I mean by that note there's only does he not turn up, say the Booker Prize celebration. But when he gives lectures, he's well known for giving lectures in the voice of someone else. Particularly in the voice of a woman called Elizabeth Costello, an imaginary character. And people will ask him, so come and give a lecture and he'll pronounce it in this voice. In fact he does something very similar in the Nobel Prize seminar that he gives a few days after this banquet speech. He is a very strange lecture which you can read online, which is in fact indebted to Robinson Crusoe. And it's sort of in the voice of Robinson Crusoe. A sort of impersonation of Crusoe. Is this refusal to speak even for yourself? Is it humility? Is it self-deprecation? Or is it just another twist in the game of cultural capital? I am so important that I don't even have to say how important I am. Don't you know who I am, as it were. What to state in particular here, but also in this Elizabeth Costello lectures and book, in the impersonation implied by the act of writing as a woman. Is what's going on here restoring a woman's voice to history? Telling Defoe's tale from the perspective of a woman? Is this a feminist text in that sense? Or is he actually usurping the place of woman by showing I, Jam Kersey, can even write as a woman? So we don't need women writing if Kersey himself can write as a woman. Is he merely mimicking the woman's voice, silencing women, therefore, all the more effectively? And we could ask similar questions, I think, as these of the literary critic. What are we doing? Is this just masturbation? I think some of my seminar students think so. Why all this close reading? What are the reader's responsibilities if at all? Okay, let's continue with this preliminary foray. Turn to the title. I mean, we talked about the author's name for half an hour or so. Now the title. Is it interesting the title is also in part a name? It's both a common and a proper name. It's both generic in particular. It's both foe meaning enemy. And, of course, it is foe as one of the characters in this book. Which is it? Can we specify? No, I don't think we can. It's the title is already multiple for three letters, and it already causes an amount of confusion. Is this universal or generic on the one hand or is it particular on the other? And even if it is, even if we take it as the common noun, foe meaning enemy, who or what is the foe? Is the foe, is the foe Friday? Is the foe himself? Is foe aptly named or in aptly named? Is there an irony about his being named foe? foe, of course, is a distortion. We're already getting the sense that there's a distortion undergoing in this mimicry. Although it could also be seen as a rectification. Daniel Defoe, the person, the author we know as Daniel Defoe, he's got his name on Robinson Crusoe as Daniel Defoe, was actually born Daniel foe. This is his original name. It's courtesy just returning foe to his origins. Why did he put, he put the little de, de, foe in there to look fancy? French. I'm not your average Daniel foe. I'm Daniel de foe, you know. So is by deforming de foe, making him a foe again, is he bringing him back to earth? Is this unmasking or demythologizing? Is he revealing the true origins of this canonical author? I think these are questions of interpretation. They are as such uncertain, undecidable. Even this three word title raises more questions than it answers. But it tells us that here there will be games, perhaps quite serious games, games in which you end up with a foe, with an enemy, with an opponent, games in which you want to win. You don't want to lose when there's quite a lot at stake. Here everything is going to be double voiced in a book that is all about voice or voices or their lack, their absence. This also points again to the fact that this is a book with what I call an agonistic structure. It's structured as an agon, a debate, a contest. It is a contest that structures this book. Are we asked to take sides? Whose side are we going to take and on what basis? Okay, let's talk briefly about the genre. This is a novel, again, on my cover. Actually, I think this is the one way in which my cover differs from yours. It says, hopefully, at the bottom, a novel. But then when I ask, maybe, what kind of novel? In part, it's a historical novel. It is set in the past and mimics parody's pastiches, perhaps, some of the language of the past. It is also, in part, an epistolary novel. It's composed of a series of letters, at least the second, the middle section. It's not the middle section, but a large part of the middle of the book is composed of letters. It's an episodic novel. It's a novel in parts. We've got part one, part two, part three, part four. We'll talk about this a little bit more. It's also a novel that it is, is it parody, is it pastiche? Is it, is it, I mean, what's the, what do I mean by the difference in that? A parody, both parody and pastiches are forms of mimicry, forms of copying. I guess I suggested a parody is a form of copying that has hostile intent. You're making fun of the thing that you're copying, whereas a pastiche is a more, I guess, sort of sympathetic form of copying. You're taking, in part, I don't know, if you're taking strength or inspiration from the style or the form that you're, that you're copying. It's parasitical. Are we expected to have read Robinson Crusoe before we've read Foal? As it happens, everyone here has, but would one be advised to read Robinson Crusoe before one read Foal? In which case, again, it's about expectation of the reader. Is this, does this book expect a cultivated reader, an educated reader, a reader who is already familiar to one or expector another with the canon of the English novel? Is parasitical a novel that already exists? Would it, does it stand up on its own or not? Does it live or die with Robinson Crusoe? Is it a postmodern novel? Precisely in these games that are being played? In part, it's a meta-fictional novel, meta-fiction is something which is often associated with postmodernity. Let's, let's, let's, let's think of postmodernity in, in the terms that, that Kevin talked about, that Eliot, Eliot is someone who's aware that the narratives are no longer working and he feels bad about it. That's making him, I suggest that makes him modern. He's looking for, what's one final narrative that can possibly glue all these fragments together? Well as I suggest that a postmodernist is someone who sees that there's no grand narrative left anymore and says, well hey, we can start playing games. Anything is possible. The world is open. We can do what we like. Is, is it a postmodern novel in, in that sense? And it's certainly a novel that questions the notion of narrative, a grand narrative, narrative, one authorized narrative. Does it see that as a matter for anguish or does it see that as a matter for, I don't know about celebration, but does it see that as a positive thing, opening up the canon, allowing other voices in? Is this, is this a novel that opens up to other perspectives in the way that perhaps Nietzsche said, the more perspectives the better. We shouldn't be seeking the truth. We should be seeking the greatest number of always subjective truths. Only then will we get close to something like objectivity or that's the only objectivity that matters. Is that's what's happening here with this fragmentation, this opening up? I think there's certainly no anguish and, well I don't know, you might want to think about that. I suggest to you that there's, there is anguish in this novel that's not about the loss of a grand narrative. It's, it's in part it's demythologizing, right? It's saying that default, he's just a foe, like any other foe. It's a novel though the multiple divided fissured because of all that. It offers no single account but keeps on multiplying, like an endless series, like an abyss, a mise on a beam. I think that's a term I used before, of reflections and other reflections and other reflections in mirrors. Okay, Mora, it's a novel which is in quotes. The first, again we, now we've got to the first typographical mark in the book. We've dealt with the cover and the title page. We've reached what's page five in my book. We'll notice that after the one for the part one and that's important where there's a one it shows is going to be at least a two, turns out there's going to be four parts as part of the division. And then after that the first typographical mark we get is a quotation mark. And fully two-thirds of this book is in quotations. The whole of the first two sections, every single paragraph begins with a quotation mark. This is a novel which is for a large part of its time in quotes. What does that mean? And it means a bunch of possible things. Again, we've got to decide between them but we can't decide between them. On the one hand quotation marks are a sign of voice that someone is speaking. They're also a sign when we use them, like when you use them, the difference between using quotation marks and using paraphrase and paraphrase where you don't use quotation marks. You're using quotation marks when you're actually citing while you're giving us the exact words that were said by whatever source that you're using. Or you should be. If not you're plagiarizing. And that's a bad, bad thing. But you know one ever needs to plagiarize. It's foolish to plagiarize. All you need to do with these magical little things, quotation marks, put them around the stuff that you've taken from elsewhere. It is fine to take stuff from elsewhere. But quotation marks around them. That's a sign that you are quoting, that you are taking this material and that you have not changed it in any way. Paraphrase is slightly different. You don't use quotation marks because you're summarizing, you're condensing or whatever. So quotation marks should be a sign of veracity, should be a sign of accuracy, should be a sign that this is a representation that is as perfect as we can make it. But they're also used these days as a sign of irony. Right? You know, when you say, I don't know, somebody has, you know, this is the best restaurant in Vancouver. It means you don't think it's actually the best. You're undermining what's put between the quotation marks. Irony is also very much a characteristic of post-world literature. Is this an ironic text? Is this a text which seems to be saying one thing but is actually saying something else? If so, what? If so, where's the the tension? Is this a novel that says what it means? This is a novel that means what it says. Do the quotations help us to determine that? Or hinder us from determining that? And then finally, before the break and before we finish saying this is a preliminary foray out of the out of the way, it's multiple in that is a remaking or rewriting of a classic text. It's somewhere in Now what does that mean again? Is this an homage to Robinson Crusoe? Or is this a criticism of Robinson Crusoe? In some ways it's both. I mean it's unavoidably both. If you're taking as your foe, if you're taking a text as your foe, you're also saying it's somehow a worthy foe. You'd go to an award dinner with it, right? Otherwise you'd ignore it. Things that you think are unworthy, you ignore. So in some ways it's bolstering, supporting, affirming the canonicity of the foe, of Daniel D. Foe, of Robinson Crusoe at the same time as saying but this can be rewritten. This isn't fixed. This isn't cast in concrete. This is, these are just words and those words can be rearranged, rethought, reread, reimagined. Again, multiplying perspectives. It takes on and rewrites not just any old novel of the canon but the first great modern novel in English and it changes it. We'll talk about those mutations after the break. Okay, as someone here has fallen asleep, is it that bad? St. Patrick's Day, it can be tough. Okay, so so far we've read the author's name and the title and the first typographic mark. Now it's time. Have you done our preliminary foray? Jack it off. Shirts, sleeves rolled up. Time to read this book, Oh Plot Narrative. This is a slide you've seen before. I showed you it in the lecture on Robinson Crusoe. What does it mean to read for flow, plot or narrative? Question of one damn thing after another. What follows what? Plots, subplots, flashbacks, flash forwards, looking for diversions, eddies, undercurrents, thinking about narrators, and thinking about the way in which narrative encodes time. We won't actually do all of this. Again, we're scratching the surface. Here's another little quotation from Lewis Carroll. This may be how you feel after more than one of the books or how you felt after more than one of the books that you've read this year in Arts One. It seems very pretty, she said when she had finished it, but it's rather hard to understand. You see, she didn't like to confess ever to herself that she couldn't make it out at all. Somehow, it seems to fill my head of ideas only I don't exactly know what they are. Okay, let's start with the opening. We're reading for a flow narrative plot. This is a story that's both like or at the beginning at the opening, at the outset, both like and unlike to force. If I want to compare the scene, the two scenes, the scene in which the narrator in Robinson Crusoe reaches the island through the waves, through the waters, finds himself on the beach, and the manner in which the narrator here, a foe, does the same. They both go through the same ritual, if you like. It happens that in foe, much more directly, both literally and figuratively, Susan Barton dives right in. At last, I could row no further. My hands were blistered, my back was burned, my body ached. With a sigh, barely making a splash, I slipped overboard. And then of this, this preamble, remember that endless preamble, the numerous frames that began Robinson Crusoe. Here, we, as they dive right in, we get a promise of something much more like immediacy. I notice that it begins in a rather literary way. It begins with a number of similes and metaphors that flow almost like the narrative itself, like the flower of the sea, for instance, she talks about her hair, like a sea anemone. There is a frame here. We've already looked at the frame, we've already seen the frame, the mark of the frame, which is that little quotation mark. But this is a frame that's only implied. It's implied in that the quotation mark suggests that this is being told to somebody. But we might quickly forget that. The very repetition, what are the effects of repetition? One of the effects of repetition is that it becomes habitual and we forget, we no longer notice it. The very repetition, the fact there's a quotation mark, that opens every single paragraph. We soon learn to forget. It seems to be much more immediate, much more direct. It seems to be that this narrator who we discover is a woman called Susan Barton, she seems to be speaking almost directly to us, to the reader. It's only much later on page 48 that we are brought back to our senses as it were. We're brought back to our critical senses in that it is we are told or that in fact we're reminded of this quotation mark. We're reminded that this is a quotation. We're reminded that this is a speech directed to someone and that someone is not us or not necessarily one so. So of course it's always doubled. It is directed to us. We're reading it. This is a book published for us to read. But within the convention of the narrative it's directed to elsewhere. It's directed to and we get this on page 48. I only after this quite long 40 pages or so section has taken place. One of my fellow servants told me you were Mr. Foe, the author who had heard many confessions and were reputed a very secret man. Now once we know that this is a narrative being told to Mr. Foe, the author we might pause to wonder then who is Susan Barton. If she is not the author what is she? We know that she is the one who is speaking. She tells us fairly early on but only retrospectively might we doubt the veracity of what is in quotation marks. Well we might or it might work both ways. We might think Mr. Foe is the author and she is the witness. This is testimony that she is providing. She is not crafting this narrative. However literary it may have appeared at the start this is a direct record that and it will unfold that this is the conceit and part of the book. Mr. Foe will then turn into a book but we already might begin to doubt that conceit of the book when we remember how very literary it is even from the very start. So is this a narrative that has in fact already been worked over? Perhaps already been worked over by Mr. Foe the author. Is this really a pure unmediated testimony? In other words we can doubt it's it appears to be so very direct diving right in straight to us but not only is it not directing that we recognize that there's another address within the book but we also might wonder about what work has been done to this narrative already. Even though it is presented to us as simple testimony and by whom? By Mr. Foe by Susan Burden by someone else by J.M. Kurtzig amongst others. So do we start doubting this narrative or does the fact when it's interesting that this is an author who had heard many confessions was this long first part a confession which implies a whole series of things implies again a notion of witness or but but witness to a guilt what is she confessing? What is her sin? If the author is presented as a sort of priest here a high priest perhaps what nature of a sinner is or might Susan Burden be? And I suggest incidentally that it's not so much of the frame is broken we've talked quite a bit about broken frames before the more there's this delay in revealing it there's the point when this narrative ends or this part of the narrative ends this long account of what's happened in the island but we suddenly realize the ways in which this story is mediated rather than immediate that this is a story in some ways like any other story an arrangement of words that somebody has thought about how to arrange those words it does not simply arise from the things themselves it is not that experience is suddenly and simply given voice voice has to be given style given order given a form of expression experience is subject to modification mutation to put it another way back to the terms that we were saying every representation is inevitably some kind of distortion and we might think back when we get back to the third time of reading go back to the moment of detail in which she admits as such the things that she doesn't tell us things she doesn't want to tell us that the secrets that she herself keeps that she doesn't even reveal to the author Mr. De Faul we realize that we've been lulled in some ways into a false sense of immediacy perhaps it's not so much that the opening have been direct or indirect as we have been misdirected okay so let's keep stick to this this first 40 pages or so which is the account on the on the island which is the I guess it's the part of the story that most clearly reflects Robinson Crusoe Daniel De Faul's story we can think about the various changes that have been made what's been mutated along the way there is much that is familiar there is an island it is located in more or less the same place you get to it after a voyage from northeast Brazil it is somewhere in the mid-Atlantic North Atlantic mid-Atlantic around Guyana or somewhere like that one assumes we have a similar cast of characters in that we have a castaway named Crusoe again there's a slight deformation of his name the E is locked off telling us that this is a repetition but again we have a slight difference what difference do that difference make we might ask ourselves there is a man called Friday though Friday is a African and B mute he has his tongue ripped out cut out in some way but otherwise he stands in more or less the same relationship to Crusoe as Friday does in Defoe's novel of course the big difference we also have this addition of a new character Susan Barton there is a woman on the island which I never was before or there wasn't apparently so in Daniel Defoe's account in the canonical classical version of the story we have a new perspective therefore I think that's the most obviously significant mutation the addition of this a new perspective a voice in some ways from the margins to one side a slant we're getting the same story but we're getting it told slightly differently because Crusoe is no longer the center of the story there are other differences too though for instance Crusoe has no tools in this version we have we saw in in Robinson Crusoe in Defoe's version how Crusoe takes pains to take everything he possibly can out of the ship before it finally disappears under the waters here he has no interest in doing that here he does not have any corn any grain there is no agriculture there is none of the same sense of technological progress and the imposition of civilization upon barbarism or nurture upon nature that we get in Robinson Crusoe or at least it's much more attenuated what we have instead is this mighty labor on terraces but these terraces have no obvious use I'm going to talk about the terraces again shortly and Crusoe himself is not interested in the slightest in telling a story Friday is mutes but Crusoe has his own muteness Crusoe's is perhaps a muteness of refusal or disinterest again we saw that question of disinterest or indifference in Kurtzay himself in some ways Crusoe here is much the same a rather humorless man who has no interest in memory in recording the time all these things that in Daniel Defoe's account are the foremost forefront of Crusoe's mind absent here there's no footprint the sort of classic image or scene that is in Robinson Crusoe doesn't exist here that moment of contact of imprint of the other's foot in the sand doesn't exist there are no cannibals there are no pirates there'll be some discussion later on as to why there are no cannibals or why there are no pirates whether there should be whether the story will be a better one if they were but at least in this first go around this first account the first 40 pages or so these are simply absent and not only absent actually they're denied which explicitly says there's no such thing and again perhaps a major shift major mutation major modification of the story Crusoe dies on route between the island and home and rescue salvation supposed salvation the question is how safe anyone is back in Britain is also right so it's both recognizable we can see certain patterns we can see overlaps we can see the ways of the debt that this story has to the original story but it's also radically different at the same time and Crusoe dies and this is what this is these are the very last these are the last lines of this first part of the book and the narrator Susan Barton says think what you may it was I who shared Crusoe's bed and closed Crusoe's eyes as it is I who had disposal of all the Crusoe leaves behind which is the story of this island that's what it says but does it mean what it says is there some kind of irony here because what will come afterwards radically questions that summation that summary of the first part of the story will be questioned whose story is it is it was it ever Crusoe's in what sense is it now Barton's to dispose of whose will again is presented as a legacy we what we have here is something on the right the image is a will will as a physical object not just will as I don't know force as some kind of will to power or whatever in in nature or something this is the physical object a will which is of course a legal document this is the will of Alfred Noble as it happens which is the means by which he bequeaths the money which he makes out of does anyone know how Noble made his money dynamite violence gets transmuted into into literary prestige in economic and actually not economic anyone tells you they've got a noble prize in economics they're lying doesn't exist in mathematics and peace and so on and so forth all the terms of the noble prize are in his will but the noble prize committee often has to try and figure out how to negotiate a few things about the will for instance the will says that the noble prize literature is given to the person who has written the best book in a realistic mode in the previous year so presumably people are right I don't know fantasy or magical realism or something like that aren't eligible for it but they ignore some aspects of the will they've distorted or mutated or modified certain aspects of the will in some way so there's a debate wills cause leave debate however accurate and precise they try to be and the question of whose will or what will or what reading of that will takes precedence what is the law that governs the letter as well as the letter of the law and we see here very much we see here a story under dispute a legacy under dispute is for the person to dispose of this that story is even susan is this susan's story does she really have the right that she claims to have is it perhaps friday's story what would that mean if it was friday's story again the notion of the will is a literary document that attests to something that is a testimony but now of a slightly different sort invoking the law but throughout the story we get multiple questions of affiliation of descendants of inheritance of recognition mary baden's child who does or do not exist or does or does not turn up we have the question of repeatedly that it suggests that it suggests it suggests that one can father the story or mother the story but more often father the story also questions of litigation liability forward for some reason being pursued by the law has to leave his house supposedly we don't know we begin to doubt everything right the foe says the pardon says we don't doubt anything that friday says but that's because he's not able to say anything by who's right and the question of right by who's right was the island even crusades to start with but there's the notion that there is some kind of urgency that there is some kind of obligation to turn this experience into a story the question is who should do it how it should be done how it should be arranged how it should be ordered this is the this is the captain of the ship taking mary baden back from the island who says it is a story you should sit down in writing and offer to the booksellers it is a story from which you can make capital of course baden is often telling friday we're going to be famous we're going to be rich our problems are going to be solved once this book is published and she says aliveness is lost in the writing down which must be supplied with art and i have no art so there's aliveness which is lost a life likeness which is lost in reproduction in the turning of an experience into a story but can be somehow compensated for in some way by art but only by certain people certain people have that art and other people do not and the captain applies again you may depend upon it the booksellers will hire a man to set your story to rights and put in a dash of color hit two here and there and it's precisely that question the question about rights both as legal rights and also rights as a matter of correction or emendation which is at issue here and making something readable sellable publishable pleasurable enjoyable something that will cater to an audience and to an audience's expectations what does an audience what does a reader expect of so questions of genre and so what does an audience or a reader expect of a story of a castaway on a desert island foe has a pretty clear idea about this he is after all a professional he's an author who's listened to many confessions and um he's a bit like an arts one tutor I suppose he tells you how a story should be written we therefore have five parts in all the five paragraph theme the loss of the daughter the quest for the daughter in Brazil abandonment of the quest and the adventure of the island assumption of the quest by the daughter and reunion of the daughter of her mother it is thus that we make up a book this is what books look like loss then quests then recovery beginning then middle then end it's all about the plot it's all about the narrative it's all about what should follow what in what order things should go of course this book is not structured in that way this book goes against the rules that foe provides for what books should look like this book is fragmented and fished this book goes forwards and backwards this book reflects upon itself rather than simply proceeding to its end point how does it work this is more or less the structure you've got four parts first of all Barton's testimony of island life then a series of letters this is where it becomes it becomes a different kind of book it becomes a different genre for a while it becomes an epistory narrative we're listing into these letters these letters the foe doesn't seem actually ever to receive so we're reading from Barton to foe then Barton meets up with foe and we get a series of conversations or dialogue between Barton and foe in part three and then we get the shortest and perhaps most mysterious part of the book which are the final four pages or so in which we receive to return to the island do we do we really what sort of what claims are being made for the veracity of this final section is this a fantasy is this a dream is this reality is this memory what kind of there are many ways in which one could flash back or return to a topic before what status does this have I don't think it's it's typically clear nor is it clear that who speaks or who writes in this section is this Mary Barton is this foe is this Friday is this someone else is this an author who has not yet been mentioned before is this it's not clear so the story gets more and more difficult to understand I think more and more contentious it seems simple enough it starts off directly enough it seems to be straightforward but gradually it induces doubts by a number of different methods some by explicit debate and discussion there's meta-fictional reflection upon what it is to make a book but sometimes stylistically as in this in that final section and then there's a question of what book is here being made in all this discussion if this is what is this a story of is this the story of the making of a book if it is is it the story of the making of this book or is it the story of the making of another book Robertson Crusoe is this is this the notion that this is how Robertson Crusoe was made we're revealing the mechanisms the debates the differences the perspectives that were silenced there had to be silence in the making of a book like Robertson Crusoe in which the white European man is placed once more at the center of the narrative the woman is erased the man is made the agent of progress vitality memory narrative is that what's going on but this is a kind of critique of the canon and everything that has got left out and silenced or is it some other book that is being made or is the very project of making books somehow also being put under question okay let's do some let's pick on a few details and one could pick on many more and I'm just picking on a couple of here again this is a slide this is a slide I showed you in my last lecture lecture on Borges what are we doing when we read the detail well hopefully the second time you read you've been marking with a pen or underline or on your computer or however you're reading things particular words to seem to crop up or seem to have difficulty now you're going back to these words that you may have stumbled upon the first time round words that you see repeating a strange pattern words that may have been apparently superfluous or decorative that may have had nothing to do it seemed at first sight with the narrative that seemed to be carried along like seaweed and the tide or something is there a figure in the wallpaper a pattern behind the pattern what kind of tensions do we see that may undercut or derail the narrative I mean here we get less of that I suppose in that the narrative is already self because destructive self derailing it's a narrative that already goes in many different directions but still there are certain details they're worth picking up with and maybe that's the way that we'll get to the monster always in the details here's another bit from through the looking glass when I use a word Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less the question is said Alice whether you can make words mean so many different things the question is said Humpty Dumpty which is to be master that's all relationship between meaning and power here okay the first of the minutiae a fancy word for detail of course but it happens to be in with M so they made me happy is the island itself page 26 actually the bottom of page 25 when I lay down to sleep that night I seem to feel the earth sway beneath me I told myself it was a memory of the rocking of the ship come back unbidden but it was not so it was the rocking of the island itself as it floated on the sea I thought it is a sign a sign I'm becoming an island dweller I'm forgetting what it is to live on the mainland the island rocks the island floats the island is somehow detached this is one of the things the main one of the little hints as we go through this apparently realistic narrative apparently truthful testimonial in the first 40 pages that some things are not quite right it's a little like the floating island in the life of pie if any of you either read the book or more likely saw the movie does that derail or undo this narrative that is being presented by Susan Barton in the first 40 pages for Barton or for our account of the narrative of the narrative too I think it's both comforting and disconcerting Barton eventually decides that is a matter of comfort but it's disconcerting because it goes against it is unfamiliar or rather it is unexpected it is more like a ship than what we think dry land or land is like it makes us question what's certain here and what is and not and of course a question of a foundation what kind of foundation is there here this seems a foundation that is literally not so much rocky but rocking a foundation that is contingent perhaps in some ways this is again more nature than Plato nothing essential here and the narrator Barton goes on to say she says I fell asleep smiling so again for her it becomes a matter of comfort I believe it was the first time I smiled since I embarked for the new world first then he goes on with the comment they say Britain is an island too a great island but that is mere geographers notion the earth under our feet is firm in Britain as it never was on Crusoe's island so here the question is what's the difference between how do things look or feel differently when one is in Britain as opposed to the island when one is in the center the imperial center as opposed to the colonial periphery in the center one could at least feel the one is on solid footing solid ground but as soon as one begins to move towards the periphery towards the colonies then suddenly things start to rock things start to get a little bit more unsteady what is overturned as soon as we start to move out in what ways does the imperial project itself as I was suggesting with Columbus too begin to make us question the center in what ways does the empire write back against the center how does the colonial encounter undo the certainties of imperial stories and who gets to decide on these things and if Kurtz is narrative an instance of this is this is this the is this in that sense a post-colonial narrative this is a post-colonial author grabbing hold of what seems to be so certain what seems to be so steady the canon of English literature an author such as Faux a text such as Robinson Crusoe and showing and making it rock pushing it slightly and moving it backwards and forwards okay another detail statues statues come up in a bunch of places it's a word that repeats now we've great frequency but it repeats like everything on the repeats every time it repeats it is different at every iteration there's some change we saw this in Borges of course most obviously with the Pierre Manard story something that seems to be exactly the same can also be read as relatively different we see a little more obviously I think in Faux the first time in which the statue comes up it is in a for a longish metaphor about memory about the instability of memory but even a statue in marble is worn away memories fade memories are uncertain they have to be fixed somehow that's the purpose of writing writing in a sense of fix a narrative to prevent the rocking to get down an authorized story but the book is going to tell us it's not quite so easy the writing is also the subject of dispute this statue on the right by the way is a statue of Alexander Selkirk the original Robinson Crusoe in his home village in Scotland so even a statue but a statue too is a work of art a statue is solid but it changes a statue is lifelike but not lively as we've seen before this interest in liveliness that Barton has her concern that by turning something into a story by turning something into literature by turning something into a book one undoes the liveliness that the original experience had so statue is I mean in at this period and whatever the 18th century statues being three-dimensional figures and the same size and so on are often figured as the most lifelike which isn't Shakespeare and so on all the time right so statues can be made to move but for Barton this point they're not lively they don't have life themselves they're both artificial and material but fundamentally dissatisfying or unsatisfying so this is the original this is the original quotation the longer context for the short citation I just gave you with every day the passes our memories grow less certain as even a statue in marble is worn away by rain till the last we can no longer tell what shape the sculptors hand gave it so context and time and history undo authorship or authorial authority the work about becomes deformed again if we're seeing what what Kurtzay is doing here to default as a form of deformation or what he's doing to the book as a form of Robert Crusoe was of kind of mutation she's saying this happens anyway this is inevitable this is what happens with history history undoes stories could be another way of saying that history as the passage of events rather than the writing of events or narrative events undoes the narratives that are meant to explain it but statues come up in other points as well so here for instance Friday compared to a statue Friday stood like a statue the unnatural years Friday had spent with Crusoe had deadened his heart making him cold and curious so Friday here becomes that cold lifelike but lifeless thing in Barton's eyes thanks to his contact with Crusoe this is the problem of the indifference of the statue Barton's the girl who purports to be Barton's daughter who herself is a copy of Barton right the name is the same she's a reflection there's another mirroring going on here a mirroring however that Barton the narrator refuses she's compared to a statue by Barton it was late in the afternoon she stood before me stiff as a statue wrapped in a cloak and then there's a longer quite long reflection on statues a little bit further on in which again Barton is interested in the difference between art and life history and story the thing the work of art and the person why do you think we do not kiss statues and sleep with statues in our bed of course we noticed that in Uruguay we're fantasizing about sleeping with statues or at least oversized dolls but here why do we not sleep with statues in our bed men with the statues of women and women with the statues of men statues carved in postures of desire there is no game in which each word has a second meaning in which the words say statues are cold and mean bodies are warm so here there's a question of statues as prosthetic of what I call prosthetic objects of desire again like we saw the dolls in the Daisy dolls but history's refusing that possibility saying we don't do that there's a difference there's a fundamental difference there's a dissatisfaction she's expressing with representation and in particularly now in terms of desire desire is a central theme throughout this book as well how desire is to be expressed to be preserved where is present where is not present and so on representation cannot satisfy desire it can only provide postures of desire in this account of the statue a sort of second order the attitude is there by the thing itself is missing but maybe this certainty in the first part of this passage is undone in the second part of the passage because here's an attempt where she says there's no game in which each word has a second meaning we see that that is simply untrue we've seen the multitude of games throughout this story from the very title in which words have many meanings she's trying to be Humpty Dumpty here words are what I say words mean what I say they mean it's just a question of who is master she's trying to fix meaning but in fact every word we soon see has at least a second meaning and like the statue which gets weathered away in the rain over time a work always escapes its author like a statue is deformed and mutated so language always gets away from the person who is writing it okay one more bit of minutiae the terraces so the terraces are what again in the in the version that we have here in the rewrite in the remake in the remodeling of Robinson Crusoe what does Crusoe do all day not a lot is deadly boring deadly tedious but insofar as he tries to fill these empty days it is not through obvious or and it's not through the same means of technological progress and development though or even salvation right and moving closer to God that we saw in Robinson Crusoe but in building these immense terraces pardon is skeptical from the start about the purpose of doing this she says I wonder who would cross the ocean to see these terraces these terraces here by the way are are not useless they're Inca terraces that which were used for agriculture but in in in the version that the curts say gives us Barton giving us of Crusoe's terraces this is an enormous but futile useless effort is it it seems like activity of the sake of it it seems to have no obvious meaning or should they be seen as monuments as art is precisely the futility or the uselessness of these terraces what makes them interesting and important in the same way the art can't be reduced to its use or its use value to its utility to what you can do with it same way the art can't be reduced to a political line curts they may say and always has to be something more something excessive is that what is that what Crusoe is engaged in an immense labor of apparently useless but fundamentally aesthetic I was going to say representation but not even representation activity construction so we see for Crusoe we've read the bit in which Barton says that the legacy the will the testament the bequest that Crusoe gives is his story but Crusoe himself says nothing of the sort again where that there's in her narrative in her testimony there are details that seem to contradict each other that seem to be at odds because Crusoe himself says when asked what he will what his legacy will be he says I will leave behind my terraces and walls they will be enough they will be more than enough and he fell silent again Crusoe has no interest in providing a story and still less in leaving that story to others after his death it is his terraces throughout his legacy Barton asked Crusoe how many stones have gone into the walls a hundred thousand or more he replied a mighty labor I remarked but privately I thought is bare earth baked by the sun and walls about to be preferred to pebbles and bushes and swarms of birds so already even before we've got to Mr. Foe even before we've got to the sections two three and four there's already I suggest a debate about the purpose or purposelessness the use of art and in the end so so Barton says Barton the first contrast stories with stones stories are of interest stones are not stones do not speak do not have meaning do not provide any kind of narrative the world expects but stones also don't live up to expectations don't satisfy the demand of a reading public or a public which is thought of in terms of its readership the world expects stories from its adventurers better stories than tallies of how many stones they moved in 15 years and from where and to where Crusoe rescued will be a deep disappointment to the world and yet at the end of the book or almost at the end foe is explicitly compared to Crusoe in the foe's labor is compared to Crusoe's labor of shifting mighty big stones from one place to the other it's a point of which Barton seems to be reconsidering some of her earlier judgments might not foe be a kind of captive too I had thought him dilletry but might the truth not be instead that he had labored all these months to move a rock so heavy no man alive could budget okay so I've just got a few minutes left I want to talk about a couple more things okay first for muteness we've got their silence at the margins those furthest from the center and there's a sort of hierarchy here right I don't know foe Crusoe Barton Friday those furthest from the center speak the least and this silence but the science is not natural the science is a result certainly in Friday's case as a result of violence right his tongue has been excised what would he say what would he have said we do not know he has no chance to give testimony but what was marginal become central Friday's silence become central and undoes or makes even Barton question the notion that this is her story that she's telling she says Friday's grown to be my shadow this sort of inextricable connection do our shadows love us okay what relationship this links with this question of can one should one kiss the statue Friday's like a statue do our shadows love us for all that they are never parted from us and then this is a foe in every story there's a silence some sight conceals some words are unspoken I believe till we have spoken the unspoken we've not come to the heart of the story do we ever get to the heart of the story here do we ever have spoken the unspoken I suggest the foe dramatizes the limit dramatizes the limits of literature and that these are internal not external they're not accidental they're essential the so-called depth the apparent depth such a plumbed in art this notion we can get behind the mirror is always an illusion a mirror necessarily distorts and no more so in when it suggests that there is more to it than just a sheet of glass with a backing behind it but even so literature is still the object of struggle so does it tell us that these ghosts and there's a whole series of connections we can follow let's see where the word ghost is used that these ghosts is apparently in substantial spirits in fact matter here's a this is Barton on Friday and his silence he is a substantial body he is himself Friday's in Friday but that is not so the silence of Friday is a helpless silence he's the child of his silence so there's all discussion about the difference between ghosts and substance substantive bodies and what the relationship between the substance the real as it were is the flesh the body and the story all of which makes up a story this is Barton speaking again I do not choose to tell I choose not to tell it because to no one not even to you do I owe proof the question of obligation right to what does the story to what or to whom does the storyteller owe or have obligation do I owe proof that I'm a substantial being which is a substantial history in the world and I can't finish without 60 seconds on monsters are there monsters here in some ways they're not lots of the monsters we saw in Rumson Crusoe we see here revealed to be literary monsters there are no cannibals here we see the multiple references to ghosts and to phantoms maybe writing is monstrous maybe speech is monstrous the only monster that appears to us is the kraken lying on the floor of the sea staring up the kraken in the depths staring up through triangle fronts of weeds though it's at the very beginning returns at the very end in this strange final section if the kraken lurks anywhere it lurks here if but that's an if right there's an uncertainty watching out of its stony hooded undersea eyes is this monster then a fantasy is it a substantial body is this a fantasy of depth but beyond or beneath writing or is what's truly monstrous that there is no depth that there is no other side of the mirror that's it