The Mumpsimus

William Gass died a few days ago, and, as I do when a writer I value dies, I returned to his work. I read around in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country , and then A Temple of Texts , where, in the essay "The Sentence Seeks Its Form", I read: Between Shakespeare and Joyce, there is no one but Dickens who has an equal command of the English language. This struck me because I hadn't ever particularly thought of Gass as a Dickens man. You won't find, for instance, a Dickens novel listed in the book's earlier essay on "Fifty Literary Pillars" , nor has Gass written at length about Dickens in the way he has so many other writers. (But still, many of us have writers we cherish, or at least admire, about whom we've written little or nothing.) I found, going back through his essays, that Gass has scattered brief insights about Dickens throughout; not only is there the wonderful discussion of David Copperfield , Mr. Micawber, and details in ...

Like most words, mimesis  is a nest of meanings. Shadings fly from it like fledgling birds: imitation, representation, replication, impersonation, or portrayal do for Plato; nowadays we could add copy, counterfeit, dupe. Grammatically different forms of what is called "the mimesis group" designate the action of mimicry — or the actor, mime, or mockingbird that performs the tune — while others aim at either the subject of imitation or its result, or sometimes indicate the arena of representation itself: the agora, law courts, or the stage. Mimesis calls the theater home, some say; it is derived from the dance; it belongs to mockery and mime, not always silent, and is often concerned with events and situations in daily life; no, it is the creation of effigies — statues, scarecrows, voodoo dolls — it is the means by which we call upon the gods. But did these meanings of mimesis really compete, or is the competition to be found in the disputatious pages of contemporary schola...