[lit-ideas] "Have You Stopped Missing Your Wife?"
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 12:19:09 EDT
In a message dated 4/7/2009 11:48:08 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
teme17@xxxxxxxxx writes:
It is common to point out texts that were obviously written by a men. It
works both ways.
Donna Leon, Blood from a Stone, reading a translation so reverse-translated
and with apologies to both Donna Leon and list members: "From time time
black men said something to each other, talked this and that, the stuff men
at work talk to kill time: how someone hadn't slept well, that it was
freezing, how someone hoped his son would pass entrance exams, of how much they
missed their wives."
Having spent most of my adult life on boring jobs while chatting with other
men on topics ranging from ice hockey to Tractatus, computers to growing
potatoes, I can testify that the subject of wives is rarely discussed, and
never
have I heard about how much they are missed. On the other hand, to answer the
question on what I am reading, I could very well reply that on a lazy Sunday
afternoon my wife handed me Murder at Aqua Alta, and might as well given an
apple to go along with it. I still don't know if actually like the book,
but I am addicted.
----
Dunno. I would have to read the original. Also the gender of Donna Leon. Is
she male?
Anyway, as Geary's novella shows, there's diegesis and personal narrrator.
The "voice" (or phony) of the narrator, is not the same as the narratee's --
so Donna is obviously _not_ Donna, but the narrator. And she may be
narrating in an ironic perspective. I.e. where "missing their wives" has to be
understood with the equivalent of the emoticon
; - (
or some such.
-----
Grice used a lot of examples referring to his wife. There's this other,
A: Where is your wife?
B: She is in the kitchen or in the living room.
As D. Smith notes in _Elements of Logic_, if we assume a door communicating
both rooms, the above does _not_ implicate, "but not both".
O. T. O. H., the implicature of the header is _conventional_ and
non-detachable. (It's discussed in online "The causal theory of perception",
along with
the wife's whereabouts example.
Cheers,
JL
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