Topical Guide 147
Mark Dorset
Madness, Wisdom
Biff jumped up, ran to the stage, and began auditioning for the part of Lear, too.
“‘O, let me be not mad, not mad, sweet heaven!’” he bellowed, tearing at his hair and stumbling around the stage. He lurched downstage toward me and delivered the next line right in my face: “‘Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!’”Little Follies, “The Girl with the White Fur Muff”
FOOL
If thou wert my fool, nuncle, I’ld have thee beaten for being old before thy time.
KING LEAR
How’s that?
FOOL
Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.
KING LEAR
O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven
Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!Shakespeare, King Lear, Act I, Scene V
Lines Consisting of a Single Word Repeated Five Times
“Never, never, never, never, never,” muttered Matthew.
Little Follies, “The Girl with the White Fur Muff”
KING LEAR
And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!Shakespeare, King Lear, Act V, Scene III
Despair, despair, despair, despair, despair.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Leaden Echo”
Death, death, death, death, death.
Walt Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
I am almost certain that Kraft, who began collecting these lines years ago (and has yet to find more than the three quoted above), gave them a name. When I told him that I couldn’t remember what that name was, he claimed that he couldn’t remember either.
Foreshadowing
Clarissa found something nice to say about everyone, but Matthew’s comments on the performances grew more bitter as the auditions progressed. He exercised his most cutting sarcasm on anyone who tried out for the part of Lear. As the afternoon went on, Matthew’s gestures and his bitter laugh grew wilder and wilder, his hair flew out in all directions, his shirt came out of his pants. He seemed to be going nuts.
Little Follies, “The Girl with the White Fur Muff”
Real Reality and Fictional Reality
I thought of saying a few words about the intriguing X-ray machine down at the Buster Brown store, which let you see a picture of the bones in your feet right through your shoes, but I couldn’t come up with a way to tie it in, so I let it go, with some reluctance.
Little Follies, “The Girl with the White Fur Muff”
I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships. The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit, but it is always there. We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium: “Quickness”
See also: Reality, Real and Fictional TG 27, TG 62, TG 64; Foreshadowing TG 63
[more to come on Wednesday, December 8, 2021]
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