–compare stephen dedalus to K. […]
— evaluate the expression “as K is to Kafka, Dedalus is to Joyce” […]
–ask and answer a variant of this question: are there authors for whom there is not a clear proxy of themselves in their fiction? (Is there a “Faulkner Character” in Faulkner’s fiction? a “Shakespeare character” in Shakespeare’s work?) [There does not seem to me to be a “Shakespeare character” (an author character) in Shakespeare’s fiction — he makes no more of a personal appearance his in his work than a writer of sitcoms does in his, I would say. (There are few or no ‘author characters’ in sitcoms, I would guess — television audiences aren’t interested in author characters.)] Maybe the writer of the sonnets is the ‘Shakespeare Character’? Or Hamlet? There are maybe a couple clear ‘Faulkner characters’ in his lesser works, or in one of them I recall, but his best work seems without anything like that, while on the other hand Hemingway’s best work seems never without anything like that, always has the “Hemingway or author character” central.
–Evaluate “as Ishamael is to Melville, K. (or Daedelus) is to Kafka (Joyce)”
–what is the point of such exercises, would you say [the point is not: how do I parse a biography from a novel? the point is: how do we write books? Can the process be uncovered… To answer, where do books come from?]
—he makes no more of a personal appearance his in his work than a writer of sitcoms does in his… I wonder if this may actually be an important idea: sitcoms, genre fiction, commercial fiction –you don’t find writer characters in those books as much– (and “those books” are Shakespeare and Faulkner as much as they are Elmore leanord and L. Ron Hubbard and the rest — whatever is the meaning of “genre fiction.”) Why?
–[Actually: you do see writers personal lives in their sitcoms, Curb Your Enthusiasm/ Seinfeld, for instance.]
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