Postmodernist Camilleri.

Have just got back from Leslie’s funeral. We went to England on Monday, staying at Candy’s. The funeral was on Tuesday at Southend and the wake held in Leslie’s second home, the Conservative Club at Leigh-on-Sea. A good service conducted by a South African Anglican priest, Father Bruce, with an address by Leslie’s solicitor and friend. Sophy flew over from Dubai, and Candy and Quinn drove up. As well as Leslie’s friends from the club, three of his late wife’s relatives came. On the plane over I finished Camilleri’s Il campo del vasaio. Camilleri’s protagonist, Commissario Montalbano picks up a vital clue to solving the crime by reading one of Camilleri’s historical novels. A postmodernist touch, I thought, but perhaps I’ve got the terminology wrong. Despite having taught two undergraduate modules on critical theory most of the jargon has faded from my memory. I was never very enamoured by theory, a reaction shared by most of my students and colleagues. I found Bakhtin’s concept of the polyphonic novel and dialogic discourse illuminating, Wofgang Iser on reader response theory was good, but Stanley Fish’s ideas from the same critical school seemed quite batty. On the other hand, Hilary Schor’s feminist article on Great Expectations led me to fundamentally re-evaluate my reading of Pip and Estella’s relationship. Structuralists, post-structuralists and psychoanalysts , however, with a few honourable exceptions seemed to have raided the emperor’s wardrobe. I think the following quotation from David Lodge’s introduction to an essay by Lacan makes the point: ‘… the present writer does not claim fully to understand everything in this essay.’As well as being a highly successful novelist, Lodge held the chair of English at Birmingham. If he couldn’t follow Lacan what hope was there for a hack FE lecturer like me. Or perhaps it’s simply that Lacan was writing bollocks!