I just finished reading Feyerabend’s Against Method – rather, I just finished the back matter, as I finished the core of the book some time ago. I debated reading this part of the book, and sorry, but I often don’t – despite writing back matter for some of my own academic publications. I treat them as asides.
I’m glad I read this material because, aside from the endnotes, it was meta and biographical, so the perspective was nice. In fact, it got me thinking. He talks about his struggle with Relativism™. I used to struggle with the same thing; there seemed to be a false battle between objectivists and relativists or subjectivists, but in my mind these were always straw-man caricatures nobody seriously defended, yet somehow people were vocal about avoiding. I’ve written extensively about my own position on mediation, so I won’t info dump here.
As people familiar with my habits, I tend to read several books in parallel. In fact, you can review what I am reading on Goodreads.
Besides a new translation of Heidegger’s Being and Time, I just started a close read of Leurs enfants après eux.
To be fair, I don’t tend to close-read fiction books very often. I find it to be slow and cumbersome. For non-fiction, this is the default, but not generally for fiction. But, since French is a second language, my attention needs to be focused. I don’t feel that I can read casually and catch the sort of embedded grammatologie that I can absorb through osmosis in English-language books.
Why slow read then? I have a desire to maintain and advance my French, so I think that reading contemporary books connects me to current language trends, terms, phraseology, and metaphor. I am using Claude and ChatGPT to assist with the close reading. They’ve already helped me to better understand the opening paragraphs. It opens like this:
Let’s discuss this, word choices, and any implications. This is the first paragraph of the first chapter:
Debout sur la berge, Anthony regardait droit devant lui. À l’aplomb du soleil, les eaux du lac avaient des lourdeurs de pétrole. Par instants, ce velours se froissait au passage d’une carpe ou d’un brochet. Le garçon renifla. L’air était chargé de cette même odeur de vase, de terre plombée de chaleur. Dans son dos déjà large, juillet avait semé des taches de rousseur. Il ne portait rien à part un vieux short de foot et une paire de fausses Ray-Ban. Il faisait une chaleur à crever, mais ça n’expliquait pas tout.
This scene starts to set the tone of the narrative from the onset – lentement, insouciant. It’s midsummer. The heat is overbearing – stifling. It tracks the life of our antagonist, Anthony, a 14-year-old in between grades, in fact, getting ready to enter Year 10 or high school, ninth grade. But not yet. We haven’t reached this paragraph quite yet.
Besides the heat references, we see emergences of weight, falling. Again, loading up on metaphors. Anthony doesn’t have an easy life. Many don’t at these junctures.
He, himself, is at that awkward adolescent stage, where his body is outgrowing his childhood, whilst his mind is trying desperately to keep up.
A challenge I have with French is that I know dogs, cats, trees, and fish, but I don’t know the types of these. Here, we see the word « un brochet ». It’s a pike fish. Honestly, I don’t even know what a pike looks like, though I am familiar with the English term.
Another language challenge is polysemous terms – in this case, « vase ». As I am reading, I am trying to imagine the smell of a vase, all the while recalling that vases don’t exactly have a distinct scent. It turns out that vase also translates to mud or silt. quite the difference.
Since I started, I might as well continue exploring this paragraph: Anthony is wearing fake Ray-Bans. This is an insight into class and station.
As for register, Mathieu mentions these things matter-of-factly without judgement. Later on, we’ll notice differences, but these are narrational and through the eyes of Anthony, as he compares himself with his environment. Class projections might be imported by the reader. I won’t invoke Barthes here.
The final sentence leaves us hanging. It reminds us again that this July is hot, but somehow it doesn’t explain everything, likely, about Anthony.
Philosophics 