W.D. Clarke’s Reviews > The Seventh Function of Language > Status Update

At Cornell for the conference, all the usual PoMo suspects are in attendance, alone with one Morris J. Zapp [presenting] "Fishing for supplement in a deconstructive world"...

...according to Morris Zapp’s theory there is, at the source of literary criticism, an original methodological error of confusing life with literature...
Yeah, so sez the fictional character who is only gate crashing here in this novel:

Kristeva thinks that phobia does not disappear but slides under the tongue, under language itself, that the object of the phobia is a proto-writing and, conversely, all use of words, inasmuch as it is writing, is a language of fear. “The writer: a phobic who succeeds in making life a metaphor in order not to die of fear but to come back to life in the signs,” she thinks.

[Umberto] Eco addresses him as if he had been there since the start of the conversation: “When reading a novel, what does it signify to recognize that what is happening is ‘truer’ than what happens in real life?”

Althusser looks at the great mess piled up on his desk and thinks of Poe: ...The [Purloined] letter will be safe here. There are also a few books—Machiavelli, Spinoza, Raymond Aron, André Glucksmann—that look as if they have been read, which is not the case (he thinks about this often, as part of his carefully constructed neurosis that he is an impostor) for most of the thousands of books that fill his shelves:

When the police divers fish the corpse out of the water, they will find in his jacket pocket not a firearm but Barthes’s copy of Essays in General Linguistics, and Bayard, still drying himself, will ask Simon: “For fuck’s sake, who is this Jakobson guy?” And so, at last, Simon will be able to finish his lecture.

Emerging briefly from his coma,Barthes looks at [the policeman] without understanding, or perhaps understanding all too well, and starts singing in a hoarse voice: “The text is comparable in its mass to a sky, at once flat and smooth, deep, without edges and without landmarks; like the soothsayer drawing on it with the tip of his staff an imaginary rectangle wherein to consult, according to certain principles...,

The superintendent sits in a café , orders a beer, lights a Gitane, and opens Roland Barthes Made Easy . (Which café ? The little details are important for reconstructing the atmosphere, don’t you think? I see him at the Sorbon, the bar opposite the Champo, the little arthouse cinema at the bottom of Rue des É coles. But, in all honesty, I don’t have a clue: you can put him wherever you want.)

Parfait choix for a part-time snack break from my seemingly full-time (de) foe!