MemeMachineGo!

Y’know, about the best part of this job is finding good blogs ‘cause they found me first. From Badgerbag :

I spent all morning trying to write a serious academic paper on heterodiagetic vs. homodiagetic narratives and “Green Eggs and Ham”. Managed to confuse myself greatly, but wrote a few pages of rambling stuff.

I can’t manage to leave myself out of it with proper academic formality; instead having fascinating long thoughts about how cool it would be to have various comic book artists re-illustrate the story in gritty film noir style, so that when Sam-I-am finally persuades the other creature to taste the G.E.&H., it is because he is holding a gun to his head. I leave the fox, the box, the dark, and the goat to your imagination.

Then instead of getting serious I took jim’s idea about Levi-Strauss and the raw and the cooked, and just ran with it. The eggs are sunny-side up; ham is not actually cooked but smoked; the green-ness is partly vegetal, partly raw; Sam-I-am and the other guy are not human, not any recognizable animal. Smack in the middle between nature and culture!

After hours and pages of rambling crap about narrators, focalization, and implied authors, I had this happy feeling of a lightning flash of genius, realizing that in G.E.&H., the reader IS the narrator. “The Reader IS the Narrator!!!!!” I write excitedly in my notebook. About 2 seconds later the genius part of it eluded me. Paper still unwritten. Still not king.

(That last bit’s a reference to The Very Secret Diary of Aragorn )