. . . or coincidence?
Pretty obvious, and as such surely intentional. Not half as clever as it’s meant to be, though.
Yeah but, random? Shouldn’t a reference, well, *refer *to something? I don’t get how it relates to the article. Which of course I didn’t read word for word, cuz, well, Adam Sandler and all. Still, what the?
I’ll take a stab at it. In FW, HCE is an everyman (duh) and represented Joyce’s view of males in the same way the the Sandler (and Ferrell and Black and Carrey) character represent a different kind of everyman—an everyboy, if you will.
Hmm. HCE isn’t really much of an everyman, IMO. But still, it’s better than any theory I’ve got.
It has been a while, and I do not claim to really have understood FW, but isn’t HCE a stand in for Adam and all of mankind?
Well, he stands in at various points for a lot of different things, but he is a man who has seduced his own daughter, just for starters, which is pretty specific.
Ehhhhhh… I don’t see any real parallel. They might have been going for the ‘everyman’ vibe as 2.5 suggests, but if so, they seriously missed the point. HCE is, of course, the male dynamic that exists to balance ALP, but an everyman? No, part of the point was that HCE represented not any person, but male-personhood, complete with our evolutionary history and all the blood on our hands, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, after all. It’s packaged with everything from ultimate connection and unity with all of creation (literally creation, as the ‘comes’ in Here Comes Everybody is important), as well as a powerful isolation that forms the basis of all individuality and ego (Howth Castle and Environs). Etc, etc, etc… and that’s not even getting into any elements of Caballah, Gematria, Tarot, etc… that Joyce plays with, especially with how HCE interrelates with ALP (Aleph, Lamed, Peh, and so on). No, no, no. Scott doesn’t have a clue. I do think it’s possible that he’s taking the back-of-a-napkin approach and going for the ‘everyman’ gloss, but, blech.
The metaphor is mangled if that’s what Scott was going for, but I wouldn’t put it past 'em in any case. It’s quite possible that’s what he was shooting for. In fact, having read the whole article (I don’t recommend it, it hurt), he spends more time babbling than talking about the movie and, as far as I can tell, ties absolutely nothing in to the Wake.
In short, my vote is for pretentious bluster.
And the one quote that typifies the whole damn mess of an article?
What a schmuck.
You might want to remember that the headlines for newspaper articles are written by editors and are usually never seen by the writer until the paper is published.
The reason for this is that the writer has no idea how the article will be formatted (one column or four, e.g.). And the size and style of the type has to fit in with the styling on all the other articles on that page. That’s something only the editor (or compositor) sees.
Editors love puns, wordplay, and catchiness in feature article headlines because they draw the eye and make people want to know what the joke is based on.
Titles in general are usually written by editors in newspapers and magazines. Titles are split between writers and editors in books, with the editor always having the last say.
So. A Joyce pun over an Adam Sandler article? In The New York Times?
Yeah. Exactly.
Misrepresentation!
Perhaps, but still, pretty accurate. Even if you agree that “immature” is not necessarily meant to be pejorative, Sandler is part of a long line of comics–from Fatty Arbuckle to Stan Laurel to Jerry Lewis to Danny Kaye and on up through Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, and Sandler–whose paradigm is entirely, and explicitly, infantile; the context-fuck of an adult person affecting the behavior of a child. Which, for good or ill, has always been extremely popular to American audiences.
Well, the problem as I see it is that without actually seeing the movie, it’s silly to talk about what Sandler exemplifies. If, for instance, it turns out that the movie ‘becomes’ all about responsibility and shedding childish things, Scott will look like a jackass. That’s my only point, it takes some serious stones to comment on a movie that you admit you haven’t even seen yet.
In general I agree. But I haven’t seen the movie. I haven’t seen all of Jerry Lewis’s movies either, or Laurel’s or Kaye’s or Arbuckle’s. If you see my point; it’s perfectly valid to comment on what Sanders represents, without having seen this or that movie.