templates

....further question on templates and their denseness: what is it about an earlier writer that provides resources for future writers? It must be something to do with the texture or physiology of  the template supplied; the pre-modern imagination has a physiological aspect; inner life is represented in this aspect. Nabokov, translating Lermontov, refers to code sentences which do this job: lips go pale, arms are seized, ground is stamped etc. Above all people physiologically change eg change colour: 'a dull colour spread over his face'. This is particularly true of Conrad; in the Nigger of Narcissus, following a storm, the mariners seem thinner or starved. In Outpost of Progress the physiognomy of the two Europeans alters. These code sentences leave us free to work out or infer what is going on without having every psychic move exhaustively listed for us. The same freedom allows Munoz to visually develop into drawings the Outpost of Progress. The code sentences work for the artist as well. Same conclusion!  Is it probable that Will Self will act as a resource in the same way for writers or artists a hundred years from now?

gaslight

What does it mean to read a text in different ways?  Will Self said recently that his work can be read differently much as can Conrad's. How does a text come to be capable of this?  Consider the example of Benjamin's use of gaslight: developing his theory of modernity he draws on R. L. Stevenson's depiction of gaslight in Victorian Edinburgh; R.L.S, he says writes the epitaph of gaslight after which it is electric light that illuminates the life of the gloomy city dweller. R.L.S. did not intend a use of this kind but what he says has to resonate deeply enough for Benjamin to exploit; the earlier intellectual resource has to be sufficient as in the form of a template. Consider further, Munoz who made a series of drawings on the theme of Conrad's Outpost of progress. Are these examples simply 'variations on a theme by...'?  Perhaps there needs to be an equality of imagination between the former and the later. A reader in the far future will need to weigh Heart of Darkness with Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes.A final thought: does Achebe's charge that Conrad is a racist apply equally to Munoz?