On Sat, 10 May 2008 10:08:05 -0500
Dorothy Stephens <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Okay, I know I let the cat out of the bag, but let's not start quoting
>lists
> of somebody else's student bloopers that we've read in various email
> forwards. That could mushroom beyond control.
>
> Dot
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
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