Professor Nohrnberg, I'd be grateful if you could take a run at the
Ghost of Hamlet's father hoovering in the background--which I think you
haven't yet commented on. It's the one of all of these wonderful
bloopers that has me erupting into giggles every time I think of it--and
yet, I can't figure out how this approach can be used to account for its
risibility.

Jane Hedley

James C. Nohrnberg wrote:
> I don't say the student actually has had the more difficult thought in
> mind, or known both discourses, only that these things were implicit in
> the language he/she ended up using, and which he or she may have
> mismanaged to telling effect ("dozing wit"): guilelessly unsuspecting,
> for the most part, the possible relevance (or violent questioning or
> flouting of usage), like Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop, or earlier,
> Shakespeare's Dogberry. But we remember these mistakes because we
> suspect that they are not altogether mistakes, but potentially ingenious
> in either how wrong they are, or how right: like new inventions,
> striking interferances of one word with another one seemingly
> phonetically twinned with it, or like verbal experiments serving as
> probes, or as ironic deconstructions. Of course the question raised is
> perhaps being treated in Pyramus and Thisbe in Midsummer Night's Dream,
> where Theseus is charitable to those bent on entertaining and honoring
> him, and Hippolyta reacts somewhat snobishly to the earnest bumpkins and
> thickskins who unkowingly mangle the proper words:
>
> Thes. The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are not
> worse, if imagination amend them.
>
> Hipp. If must be your imagination, then, not theirs. (V.i.18)
>
> -- But the last words in the play are therefore critical: "restore
> amends." E.g.:
>
>
> "It's a doggie dog world out there!" (I.e., it's a world gone to the
> dogs, good dogs or bad dogs.)
>
>
> 'This idea "has subcutaneously seeped into the minds of African
> Americans today."' (I.e., 'I may have a subconscious problem with
> dark-skinned people.')
>
> "... or in lumens terms,..." (This one I don't get, or only dimly:
> is it "luminous/human terms"?)
>
> 'The Prioress' Tale is a satire of "such violently anti-semantic
> attitudes."' (This one almost declares 'I have trouble with some big
> words that seem suspiciously like other ones.")
>
> "When I was a baby still in the wound..." (This one is two discourses,
> or perhaps three: babe in the woods / babe in the womb / babe causing
> an injury to the mother.)
>
> "If I put my mine on what I am doing and consecrate, I can do a better
> job on writting." (This one may perhaps possess -- "mine/mind" -- a
> vocation as a priest, and perhaps takes us from script to scripture.
> Words sufficiently intensely attended to do seem consecrated.)
>
> "This play is actually quit entertaining and mind-bottling." ('This
> play quit entertaining me quite early, but I've nonetheless gotten
> trapped in it.')
>
> "... we see this when Hamlet says: You cannot, sir, take from me
> anything that I will more willingly party withall." (This gets at
> something Hamlet is to say later -- in so many words -- that the party
> ends, so far as you are concerned, whenever it is that you leave it, and
> stop partying.)
>
> "The old woman in the Wife of Bath's tale is actually kind and
> genital..." (The older meaning of 'kind' [gens] sticks out here; the
> phrase "kind and genital" has got to be in Finnegans Wake somewhere.)
>
> My dear typist, not always able to read my handwriting, guessed the
> title Fables of Green Fields for Tables of Green Fields, and I stuck to
> it. Restore amends.
>
> -- Jim N.
>
>
>
>
>>>
>>> Perhaps the question is not really the blooper's source, but it's
>>> interest, its tellingness, insofar as the blooper might also be said
>>> to have
>>> let a cat out of a bag. Interest actually means, here, relevance, or
>>> stake
>>> in meaning. The interference of the "mis-take" or "mis-stake" seems to
>>> emerge through the dozing wit of 'bloopers' that somehow seem made
>>> accidentally on purpose, i.e, that are really metaphors, translations
>>> between different discourses: as in the example of the student who
>>> substituted the first act of Hamlet for that of Othello. For both
>>> tragic
>>> protagonists want proof. If Hamlet had been an Othello, there would
>>> have
>>> been no second act of Hamlet, Claudius wouldn't have stood much of a
>>> chance;
>>> if Othello had been a Hamlet, Desdemona would have had a rather
>>> better one.
>>> Cleopatra's "naval" looks like both her navy in the discourse of
>>> battle,
>>> and her navel in the discourse of bedrooms. As that example shows,
>>> the kind
>>> of condensation of two discourses we are talking about is regularly
>>> achieved
>>> in the pun. For the mind that is allegorically or hermeneutically
>>> inclined,
>>> a pun is a more difficult thought that has found a way of breaking
>>> through
>>> or condensing itself with a less difficult or familiar thought: the
>>> pun is
>>> a primitive form of polysemy. For the rationalist, of course, puns are
>>> merely discourse behaving badly, and turning thought -- that is, its
>>> linguistic distinctions and discriminations -- back into static or
>>> noise,
>>> that is, back into the babble they have originally emerged from. The
>>> 'telling' blooper is the telltale one that makes one laugh, but then
>>> causes
>>> us to look again. -- Jim N.
>>>
>
>
> [log in to unmask]
> James Nohrnberg
> Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
> Univ. of Virginia
> P.O Box 400121
> Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121