Category: Parerga

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Epigraphs: or, beating oneself with another man’s hands

As it stands, the manuscript of my book-in-progress, A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!, bears three epigraphs. Those three are very dear to me and the fact that there are exactly three of them is important in the book. So I’m not inclined to monkey about with them.

Notwithstanding, I am repeatedly coming across other passages that would make fantastic epigraphs or that somehow encapsulate something vital about my project. Hence, I am currently considering adding to the front-matter of the book a substantial number of these passages, making up their own section. (Fittingly for a book that is so much about the parergon, I see an interesting copyright issue on the horizon if I do pursue this idea. Quotations in the body of a text generally do not require copyright permission but the same quotations, if used as epigraphs, do. On which side of this divide will my Moby-Dick-like collection of quotes about slaps fall, placed, as it will be, between the epigraphs proper and the main text?)

Here is one marvelous passage which so accurately seems to capture how I have used  the image of Batman slapping Robin that I gasped when I first read it. I will certainly include it in the envisaged section, if I do decide to go with that. The passage is from David Grossman’s bravura novel A Horse Walked Into a Bar and it concerns a stand-up comic who is failing to get a laugh from his audience:

Now he screams: “No? Not at all? No, no, no?” He slaps his face, ribs, stomach. The spectacle looks like a fight between at least two men. Within the whirlwind of limbs and expressions I recognize the countenance that has passed over his face more than once this evening: he is uniting with his abuser. Beating himself with another man’s hands.

Perhaps this theme is most clearly sounded in my book in the commentary I have provided to a meme in which Robin says only “I am being slapped by Batman” and Batman replies “I am slapping Robin.” The commentary itself is in the form of another meme, in the genre Increasingly Verbose. In this kind of meme a pair of image and text is iterated several times, the image becoming more abstract and the text becoming increasingly verbose with each iteration. Here it is, made public for the first time.

Slap-Itself-commentary1slap-itself-commentary2slap-itself-commentary3

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Excisions: 4 (Aye)

I mentioned in a couple of previous posts that I decided to excise a number of the memes that were going to be part of my book. It was sufficient for a meme to be excluded that I did not envisage being able to write anything of interest (to me) in the commentary on it. I have now set myself the goal of posting the excised memes here, in an occasional series, and trying to write something of interest (to me) about them, thus proving my decision to exclude them mistaken! Also, in this parergonal space around the book, I will write about the memes without the pretense that their maker is someone other than myself. I am curious to see how this affects the nature of my writing about the memes.

Aye

This was an occasional meme that appeared (on March 10th, 2016) in the comments on another meme, which will not be excised, “I thought your boat was longer than it is”:

boat

“Aye” is actually, in my opinion, not a bad meme overall, and there would have been some quite interesting stuff to write about it. I think my decision to get rid of it was made in a fit of “throw-it-out” house-cleaning that perhaps went too far!

Its interest lies in the fact that the dramatic scene it represents is unlike any other in the corpus of memes I created and stands in an interesting relation to the slap. The language for eliciting votes in a meeting is highly codified and both Batman and Robin are just following procedure, as far as their speech is concerned. In no other meme do I have the Dynamic Duo performing to a kind of script. In fact, the imposition of the ‘already written’ script (as it were) onto a surprising choice of image almost reverses the normal way that image macros work, where an ‘already given’ image is modified by spontaneous and freely-composed text. Overlaying the image with this text means that Batman’s response, in which he goes along with the process initiated by Robin, is accompanied by a simultaneous rebuke. Is the slap an objection to Robin’s having called for a vote? Is it an embodied “Nay,” which cannot be explicit given the limits of the form? Is it, itself, part of some rule-governed activity, so that, despite appearances, the scene depicted is not one of vote-taking but merely includes that language as part of another formally specified activity? Continue reading “Excisions: 4 (Aye)”

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Excisions: 1

I mentioned in a couple of previous posts that I decided to excise a number of the memes that were going to be part of my book. It was sufficient for a meme to be excluded that I did not envisage being able to write anything of interest (to me) in the commentary on it. I have now set myself the goal of posting the excised memes here, in an occasional series, and trying to write something of interest (to me) about them, thus proving my decision to exclude them mistaken! Also, in this parergonal space around the book, I will write about the memes without the pretense that their maker is someone other than myself. I am curious to see how this affects the nature of my writing about the memes.

TMI

This was posted on Facebook on February 21st, 2016. It is the first of a group of memes that deal with being in analysis. (Mostly, in the memes, I use the term “analyst.” Here, for reasons I can no longer recall, I have used “therapist.” My preference for the term “analyst,” I fear, betrays a kind of seedy one-upmanship on my part – of which I am not proud! – as if to say, “I’m not talking about any old therapy but honest-to-goodness, genu-ine psychoanalysis.” I wonder if I wasn’t deliberately trying to slap down that tendency in myself by here going with “therapist.” Indeed, as I write this, I now feel I remember that very thought process.) I decided to omit the meme from the final tally because it is quite similar to, though not quite as good as, another, later meme. Continue reading “Excisions: 1”

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Repellent intimacy

Gerard Genette (yes, I’m still reading Genette’s Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation – it’s endless!) is now discussing the various functions of different kinds of prefaces (all quotations below from pp. 203-5). One function of the most common kind of preface (by the author; published with the text originally) is to explain the unity of the work it stands before. This is especially the case when the work is a collection of some kind. But some authors, he notes, make a point of eschewing the unity of the work and embracing its disunity. Roland Barthes, writing later of his collection Essais critiques, said “I explained in my preface why I didn’t want to give these texts, written at different times, a retrospective unity” but, somewhat contradictorily goes on to say “The unity of this collection can only be a question: What is writing?” As Genette wryly comments: “The retrospective unity that is virtuously shoved out the door sneaks back in through the window in the form of a ‘question’.” (And, talking of Barthes, how brilliantly the lack of punctuation speaks in his title Sade Fourier Loyola, the preface to which “emphasizes indirectly… the incongruous – indeed provocative – appearance of such a grouping.”) More resolutely, Borges, in many of his prefaces, appears to prize diversity over unity: “This book is nothing more than a compilation,” “God grant that the essential monotony of this miscellany… be less evident than the geographical and historical diversity of its themes,” and so on.

I have come to realize that A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! is about exactly this – privileging disunity and disorganization over their opposites. The Wunderkammer, again: a curious assortment, a serendipity, a heap. But just how far down can disunity go in the book? Continue reading “Repellent intimacy”

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Title/subtitle

At a recent presentation in London of A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!, I structured my remarks entirely around an explication of the work’s difficult title. There, it was a matter of associating each component of the title (including, I hasten to add, its punctuation) with either knowledge an audience would need to understand what the book will be (i.e. what a meme is, what a Batman meme is) or with aspects of the book itself that I wanted to present to the audience. But, now continuing to plough my way through Gerard Genette’s maddening book Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (maddening because the topic is so interesting and yet the discussion of it so long and boring), I am inspired to say something about the rhetoric of my title.

Genette notes that it is virtually routine for academic books to have a title that “evokes symbolically or cryptically” (by means, often, of metaphor, metonymy, antiphrasis, etc.) and a subtitle that “gives a more literal indication of the theme.” American publishers, he says, call the main title “catchy” (or even “sexy”!!) but the subtitle “is often a complete cure for love.” Occasionally, however, he notes that the relation between title and sub-title, with regards to their capacities to enflame or douse the reader’s ardor, may be reversed.

Continue reading “Title/subtitle”

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Some thoughts on onomastic fetishism

As you may know if you’ve followed anything about my current project, A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! will be presented as a catalogue of Evnine’s (my) Batman memes by an editor who is, as I have started putting it, notionally distinct from the creator of the memes. That is, the editor will write about the artist in the third person, will conjecture about him and his motivations, will draw on evidence to substantiate those conjectures, etc. But I will not conceal the fact that the artist and editor are in fact the same person.

I am now reading Gerard Genette’s book Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation and one of the paratexts he discusses is the author’s name. And as it happens, I have wondered for some time how this will work in my book. The full title is A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!. I had initially thought that that the ‘authorship’ of the book would take the form “edited by Simon J. Evnine.” But a doubt about this way of proceeding arose from the crassest of material concerns. Would a university administrator see “edited by” and count the book less towards future pay raises than an authored monograph? Should I, to lay claim to my work, follow the title simply with “by Simon J. Evnine”?

Genette distinguishes between mere pseudonymity and the creation, by an author, of a genuine alternative, imaginary author, replete with her own paratextual presence (prefaces, honors, etc), as, for example, is the case with Kierkegaard. In my own case, there is no pseudonymity involved, but something of the same problem of classification arises. Have I, with paratextual repletion, created two personae here, both of whom share my name? Or is there a mere “onymity” (the term Genette coins to refer to the standard case in which an author uses her own name), but with some weird stuff added in which I refer to myself in the third person?

On top of it all, naming itself is one of the themes that will run through the work. Genette writes that “use of a pseudonym unites a taste for masks and mirrors, for indirect exhibitionism, and for controlled histrionics with delight in invention, in borrowing, in verbal transformation, in onomastic fetishism” (52-3). Perhaps the moral to be drawn from my own case is that all of this is true for the use, not just of a pseudonym, but of any name, even one’s own. I am certainly planning for my book to engage in all those things Genette lists.