Schrödinger's plumber?
The martian school always seemed limiited. Was there ever anyone other
than Craig Raine? does a single poet make a school?
Roger
On 2/28/07, Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The key to *de dicto* v *de re* is modality: for example, does 'yesterday'
> or 'definitely' refer to when or whether I said something or when or to what
> extent it was true? There's a similar effect with probability: a 50% chance
> of something bad happening doesn't, for example, mean a 100% of something
> 50% less bad.
>
> UK plumbers make the distinction between the two all too clear. Water is
> dripping through your ceiling so you phone the plumber. 'He should be with
> you in an hour.' Ho hum. You interpret this *de dicto*, as a qualified
> assurance that the plumber is going to come. So an hour later, you phone
> again: 'Any news about that plumber?' 'Yes, he should be with you now,' a
> *de re* interpretation: after the elapse of one hour there now exists a sort
> of qualified presence (a state of I-should-be-thereness) on the plumber's
> part; but he still hasn't shown his face.
>
> As to the question,
>
> <snip>
> Does one apply more to fiction and the other more to poetry?
> <snip>
>
> conventions such as (in English) using the past tense are certainly one way,
> by making the _saying_ modal, of rendering what is narrated more immune to
> disbelief: these events are not true any more (or not necessarily true),
> only *once upon a time*. And that allows for a certain coexistence between
> reader (or writer) and what is in the text. When Faulkner writes, 'My mother
> is a fish' in *As I Lay Dying* he is creating a problem that gets much worse
> in poetry, where the certainty with which things are said and the certainty
> with which disparates are yoked together seem to grow in inverse proportion
> to the certainty with which the underlying propositions may be read.
>
> Incidentally members of the UK Martian school, just to take a passing swipe,
> seem to me to domesticate that rather threatening effect, to say (in effect)
> I am looking at reality with this funny pair of glasses rather than, say,
> allowing a new reality much more weird (and much more weirdly present) than
> they (or the reader) might have expected it to be.
>
> CW
> _______________________________________________
>
> 'What's the point of having a language that everybody knows?'
> (Gypsy inhabitant of Barbaraville)
>
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