Wednesday 21 May 2014

A Book I probably will never read



A flurry of reviews of Min Camp by Karl Ove Knausgaard must mean that a new book in the saga has been published. More of how he stares at a cornflake which has somehow lodged in his navel. The death of the author has been greatly exaggerated. K. claims that his future as a novelist has been annihilated by leaving nothing out but as I maintained in my note on Pelle the ConquerorPelle the Conqueror this is a metaphysical fallacy. There is always more to know and for you to find out. The description of an event does not exhaust its meaning contrary to the positivist slogan that the meaning of a statement is the method of its verification. Or was it that the method of its verification is the meaning of a statement? Do those expressions only mean the same thing if verification and meaning are singular. One meaning, one verification. One life, one telling of it and the rest is silence.

On the other hand maybe my navel really is a portal which is to say that it is an ‘omphalos’ (Gk.navel or centre) as Delphi when it was thought to be the centre of the earth. Buck Mulligan proposed the Martello Tower as a new omphalos which is appropriate as it was built to guard against naval attack. That novel which is a perfect copy of its eternal form has sport with ‘the ineluctable modality of the visible’ by showing moyen sensuel Bloom to be a hero inside out. One due a re-read, the other a never-read.

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