You always have to pay attention to the inverted commas, y'know. The
visible ones and the invisible ones.
When I was first learning to write (I mean "write" as in "do what a
writer does"), I picked up a lot of moves from writers like Derrida
who sometimes nest inverted commas, visible and invisible, several
layers deep. It's still not unusual for me to read someone else's
account of "what Derrida is saying" in a particular passage and think,
"no, you've got that wrong, that bit's a paraphrase of the person he's
talking about, obviously not a straight paraphrase as he's applying
some wicked backspin to it, but anyway it's not direct speech in his
own voice, and even as he's saying it another part of the text has
started blinking urgently at you telling you to bracket part of it off
and treat it with suspicion...", and so on.
Some people read that kind of polyvocal, irony-upon-irony-layering
rhetorical display as a symptom of some dreadful (perhaps even
specifically "Gallic", although D. was actually Algerian Jewish)
preening narcissism. And they get impatient, and they make mistakes,
and then it's dead easy (assuming adolescent-pissing-match rules
rather than grown-up-conversation rules) to dismiss everything they
say because they keep tripping over their impatience and demonstrating
their "inability to read", and why then should one even dignify their
infantile posturing (note invisible inverted commas) with a response,
hein? Not that Derrida often fought shy of responding anyway, although
it's not always clear whether he did so out of a desire to be
understood better or just to rub it in.
Anyway, the point is that I tend to unconsciously assume the kind of
reader who reads the way I read, and gets off on the kind of
rhetorical prestidigitation I get off on. The trouble is that not
everybody does read that way, or get off on that sort of thing; and
some of those who don't get off on that sort of thing are not just
indifferent but actually *allergic* to it.
I hope I may be forgiven for making use of that observation, which
stems from about twenty-five years' experience of rubbing certain
sorts of people up the wrong way, in trying to understand the causes
of your exasperation. If I say that I am used to it, I mean that I
believe I recognise it as - broadly - the same thing as something that
I am used to. If it is something else entirely, then the error is
mine.
Dominic
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