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WILLIAM HARMON
She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.
--The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
James Joyce stands as the champion favorite of explainers--from the original village explainer himself (Ezra Pound, according to Gertrude Stein, herself the author of "Composition as Explanation") down through Samuel Beckett, Edmund Wilson, Joseph Campbell, Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye, and Anthony Burgess; on to a brigade of gifted epigones (including the village explainer's village explainer, Hugh Kenner) and less gifted epigones of epigones; thence overseas to Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and chauvinists and sycophants unto the seventh generation. The explaining reaches a gallant if clownish climax in Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans (1958). Although, along the way, the novel issues a few Joycean molecules ("BeFinneganing," "I the great Finn Macpossipy"), the exhalations reach gale force at the end, when, the heroine Mardou having observed that "the man has it in his hand, but rushes off to build big constructions," the narrator explains parenthetically, "I'd just read her the first
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few pages of Finnegans Wake and explained them and where Finnegan is always putting up buildung supra 'buildung supra buildung' on the banks of the Liffey--dung!" Although that may be one "supra buildung" more than Joyce's text, it remains pretty impressive. We need explainers because there is much to explain, and Kerouac delivered us into the cozily self-sustaining hammock of having to explain a modest book by reference to a grossly immodest one, a chore daunting enough to turn young exegetes off the beatniks. (It's sad that the Beat canon, once so starry-eyed with mystic quests, has now turned into another shelf of campus novels that the young cannot understand without footnotes.)
Explainers ran things for decades, until Harold Bloom--he of the double name and vast accumulation--cranked out maps and gadgets that explained everything, whereupon explanation ended and explainers became obsolete. Bloom, the Lincoln of our Literary Criticism, liberated us drudges who had long been indentured to analysis, exegesis, hermeneutics--in short, Explanation--so that we didn't have to read literature anymore. What a relief! No more Middlemarch, no more Proust. All those dreadnoughts were consigned to television and the elephant graveyard of ivory-merchant movies. Poetry died...