PERPLEXED READER: Now that you mention it I suppose I do. Although in this case, as I've stated repeatedly; I'm by no means sure every question concerning your true persona—especially those relating to your alleged femininity—have been answered to my complete satisfaction. Which is why I am—or until that last footnote was—known as the Confused and/or Perplexed Reader, is it not?
EDITORESS: Yes. But reading between the lines of your previous assertions on that issue I got the definite impression you had rejected the "absurd idea" I might be the author of Morons Awake! wearing the drag of some "makebelieve editoress."
PERPLEXED READER: If you were led astray it certainly wasn't by any design of mine! The fact of the matter is I still find my wolfinsheep's—(or shepherdess')—clothing hypothesis to be not at all implausible.
EDITORESS: That's a pity. I was hoping—after all we've just been through together—a certain sisterly rapport had developed between us that would—
PERPLEXED READER: What I am prepared to concede, however, is this: Regardless of who and/or what you are: If your introductory remarks were meant to whet my appetite for the "intellectual feast" awaiting me not that many pages from here, you might be happy to know I have acquired something of a taste for reading this kind of Forbidding155 Literary Fruit!
EDITORESS: Happy isn't the world for it! Without a doubt, this "confession" of yours is the best news I've heard since I was given the responsibility for editing Morons Awake!.
AVID156 READER: Nevertheless—
EDITORESS: Yes?
AVID READER: I'm bound to say the manner of my doing so was, at times, not unlike some even more fiendish version of the Chinese water torture!
EDITORESS: As was the painful process by which my own doubts about the author's reckless disregard for the laws of turning an artistic masterpiece and/or sociocultural manifesto into a bestselling book were eventually so worn down by his spellbinding way with words I now find myself breaking almost as many rules in establishing these guidelines for the reading of his novel as he did in writing it!
AVID READER: Since we are letting out hair down (and in keeping with what I see is my newly acquired alias) I'm almost tempted to make another, even more sensational, admission—
EDITORESS: Oh?
AVID READER: Yes. But because it's one that could destroy what little remains of my marriage and/or social life I will do so only on the condition that you assure my continued anonymity.
EDITORESS: While my ears couldn't be opened more widely these lips of mine will, as to your wishes in that particular regard, remain forever sealed.
AVID READER: The truth is—
EDITORESS: Yes?
AVID READER: My speedreading habits have been so radically altered by the hypnotic snail's pace with which this "train of thoughts" has been proceeding I can no longer turn the pages of a trashy novel or supermarket tabloid without suffering from an attack of motion sickness brought on by the velocity of those short, supersimplistic sentences propelling me so mindlessly toward the author's foregone conclusion!
EDITORESS: I couldn't have expressed that thought more neoBaroquely myself!
AVID READER: And these dizzy spells of mine aren't limited to the print media alone.
EDITORESS: I should hope not!
AVID READER: No. I'm just as likely to be nauseated by a runofthemill television program, Hollywood film, rock concert, radio talk show or, much more momentously, a casual conversation with my friends, acquaintances and/or family.
EDITORESS: It sounds to me as if you might be suffering from the same ailment that resulted in Franny Glass' celebrated lament to Lane Coutell: "I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect."157 [Believe it or not those two syllables weren't italicized by Salinger.]
AVID READER: I have no trouble understanding now the hellish torments that wretched girl must have been going through on her socalled "date" with that boring jerk, Coutell. But at the time of my original (required more years ago than I care to admit!) reading of Franny's traumatic response to the superficialities of her postpubescentfirstrealtime awayfromhome milieu I never dreamed I would one day find my Mainstream/MidwesternerAmerican self in the same sort of Irish/JewishIntellectualNeuroticNewYorkerstyle boat.
EDITORESS: Does any normal highschool or college coed ever take her English Lit. reading assignments with the lifeordeath solemnity they deserve?
AVID READER: If I had to hazard a guess; I would say—she probably doesn't.
EDITORESS: And why do you think that is?
AVID READER: Why? Because, I suppose—if ever ignorance can be truly blissful it must be during that most magical period in a girl's life when her schooldays are spent dreaming about being swept off her feet by some tall, dark and handsome foot-, basket- or baseballplayer.
EDITORESS: While remaining oblivious to the price she will continue to pay throughout her entire adult life as just another brainless blonde, brunette or redhead when—as they invariably do—her Sleeping Beauty/Prince Charming (or /VarsityJock) fantasies fail to materialize!
AVID READER: Funnily enough, in my case they actually did!
EDITORESS: Oh?
AVID READER: Yes. As it so happens my highschool sweetheart (and first husband) was a tight end with "NFL Hall of Fame" written all over his career as a recordbreaking passcatcher at B*******d High.
EDITORESS: Well, as they say: For every rule there is usually an exception.
AVID READER: If only that had been true for Lance and me!
EDITORESS: You're naming names now?
AVID READER: Ooops. You'll change that to L***e, won't you?
EDITORESS: Trust me.
AVID READER: Thanks.
EDITORESS: Don't mention it.
AVID READER: Anyway; getting back to my sad—
EDITORESS: And mercifully short!
AVID READER: —story. L***e's Freshman AllAmerican dreams were literally cut short during the very first game of the season when he tripped on a seam in that g*dd*m Astroturf and ruptured his A******s' tendon.
EDITORESS: I don't think we need to be coy about such an ancient name—and one which, by the way, adds a certain Grecian flavor to this "AllAmerican" tragedy of yours.
AVID READER: You can say that again! Sophocles himself couldn't have scripted a more pathetic scenario of a Footballer's Fall From Gridiron Glory.
EDITORESS: You'll get no argument from me on that score.
AVID READER: Although the university did reconstruct L***e's heel with one borrowed from a fresh cadaver, his pass catching days were definitely over. As a result of which he not only lost his 4year scholarship and his athletic raison d'être but every other excuse he might have had for continuing his miserable being. The last I heard he was doing hard time at S*n Q*****n for statutorily raping ("By only a lousy three weeks!" according to him.) one of the cheerleaders at our old alma mater; where he was still considered a "living legend" among the female student body of a school that hasn't had a winning season since he led the oncefearsome "Black & Blue Wrecking Crew" to its last state championship.
EDITORESS: By going into these lurid details aren't we running the risk someone familiar with them might unravel the "mystery" of who you really were and/or are?
AVID READER: I seriously doubt whether anyone from my past—or present—"sociocultural" circle is likely to read, let alone be caught dead even browsing through the "Introductory Remarks" of, a book entitled Morons Awake!.
EDITORESS: I wouldn't count on that. If my Morons Awake! massmarketing plans are only partially effective its worldwide sales could reach 8, or even 9, figures.
AVID READER: According to my math that's—more than one hundred million copies!
EDITORESS: And you can double that astronomical number if the Chinese government accepts the lucrative terms of a joint publishing venture we are offering it.
AVID READER: I hate to rain on your promotional parade but doesn't that seem like an awfully ambitious target for a book whose reading requires what amounts to a PhiBetaKappa mentality!
EDITORESS: Not when you remember we aren't talking about just any bestselling novel—but a literary masterpiece destined to reverse the decline of Western Civilization, launch a second American revolution and forever alter the course of human history!
AVID READER: Well; all I can say to that is: I hope to God you're right. Otherwise the few hundred (or thousand) of us who actually do take the "Klutzian plunge" and—figurativelyspeaking—hurl our flagwaving and barebreasted (or at least braless) selves onto the revolutionary barricades of a Brave New SocioCultural Order might (like those Führer groupies, female Fascisti and Bolshevixens of yesteryear) discover we've been left without a paddle up one of the 20thcentury's s**ttier ideological Creeks.
EDITORESS: That's the kind of chance a woman must expect to take when she invests her heart, her soul and her mind in an enterprise of such truly monumental proportions. As I have done by staking my editorial future on a novel whose profitmaking prospects are, in current publishinghouse parlance, "about the same as those for Yasir Arafat winning the f***king Nobel Peace Prize."158 But, to bolster your sagging morale, I can let you in on a notso little trade secret if you promise to keep it under your hat.159
AVID READER: You can count on me to be every bit as worthy of your trust as you have been of mine.
EDITORESS: I have no problem with that.
AVID READER: I didn't think you would.
EDITORESS: Well then, I'm sure you'll be delighted to know there are several very large deals in the works for making Morons Awake! into a Major Hollywood Motion Picture, a multi(maybe 36)episode BBC/PBS "Masterpiece Theatre" and America's first Primetime Network Television Talk Show—"dedicated to exposing the neoEgalitarian plot weaving its un American way through the deceptively prurient pages of a book that pretends to be just another trashy bestselling novel."160
AVID READER: That is nice to hear
EDITORESS: Good!
AVID READER: but it doesn't address my major concern.
EDITORESS: Which is?
AVID READER: That even if Morons Awake! does somehow miraculously manage to turn most of the civilized world into a "Klutzian Utopia" I might still find myself stuck smack in the middle of this smallest of smalltown ponds (not unlike G****r's Corners, New Hampshire or W***sburg, Ohio) whose stagnant sociocultural waters have remained stubbornly undisturbed throughout more than 2 centuries of earthshaking economic, political, scientific, theological and artistic upheavals.
EDITORESS: In this era of the "Global Village" that statement doesn't make an awful lot of sense—unless you were attempting to speak metaphorically.
AVID READER: Maybe I was! And then again—maybe I wasn't.
EDITORESS: In either event, I think it would be wiser for you to take more of a "brass tack" approach to this thesis of yours.
AVID READER: Well then; I suppose when you get right down to the nittygritty, what really bothers me more than anything else about Morons Awake! is this nagging question: Exactly what kind of literary and/or intellectual lurch will I be left in when I've finished reading it?
EDITORESS: That's better. But it would be even more helpful if you could amplify on what's beginning to sound as if— accidentally or otherwise—you might actually be putting your finger on a point of interest to the general readership of these Introductory Remarks upon whose pregnancy I myself could be tempted to elaborate at some length.
AVID READER: I'm trying to be as forthcoming as I can; but this is an extremely delicate matter.
EDITORESS: Surely—after all we've been through together I've earned the right to share even the most intimate of your feminine hopes and fears?
AVID READER: Having come this far there doesn't seem to be any excuse for not revealing my innermost secrets to you.
EDITORESS: That's the spirit!
AVID READER: Let me begin, then, by stating for the record, that by nature I'm not a promiscuous woman—
EDITORESS: I see no reason for not stipulating to a fact without which the prurient nature of the "shocking" disclosure you are presumably about to make would evaporate into thin air!
AVID READER: I'm not sure I can agree to the terms of such a stipulation as you just stated them. But, for the sake of brevity I will proceed without quibbling over that particular fine print.
EDITORESS: Good.
AVID READER: As I was saying: While by nature I'm not the promiscuous type, there have been a few occasions during my married life when, under certain extremely stressful circumstances, I did eventually yield to the seductive advances of a man who wasn't my husband.
EDITORESS: Why not be blunt about it and admit that, like most housewives, your adulterous proclivities border on being pathological?
AVID READER: Because they don't! Not that I have "adulterous proclivities." Or, even if I did, that just having them means I'm in need of psychiatric treatment. We aren't talking about the kind of habitual promiscuity diagnosed as n*********a. Or anything even remotely resembling it!
EDITORESS: We're not?
AVID READER: No.
EDITORESS: Exactly what sort of promiscuity are we talking about then?
AVID READER: The sort of harmless little "extramarital fling" even the most happily married woman has from time to time with some stranger she just happens to meet in circumstances where, for a variety of totally understandable reasons, her scruples against such an ordinarily unthinkable act of infidelity are temporarily abandoned.
EDITORESS: One of those "totally understandable reasons" being the average husband's inability—or unwillingness—to fully satisfy (or come even close to doing so) his wife's sexual needs?
AVID READER: If what you said at the beginning of these Introductory Remarks about the "glamour of the book publishing business" is true that's something about which you probably know more than an "average housewife" like me.
EDITORESS: Touché!
AVID READER: On the other hand, don't get me wrong. While I'm not pretending to be a femme fatale, or "expert adulteress"—far from it!—I've learned from my limited escapades as a "scarlet woman" to think twice about the lingering emotional problems of having it off on the spur of the moment with some smoothtalking stud in the "boudoir" of his bachelor's pad, the sack of a sleazy motel, the backseat of a hotrod or the balcony of a 24hour pornomoviepalace.
EDITORESS: Well, well; this little divertissementG of yours is proving to be well worth the precious space it's taking up in what began as my Brief Introductory Remarks!
AVID READER: If that was a compliment I accept it.
EDITORESS: And so you should! Why wouldn't I praise one of my "students" for expressing herself in complete sentences— if not sentences which are completely intelligible.
AVID READER: Well, it isn't every day a complete nobody like me is given the onceinalifetime chance of having herself "immortalized" on the pages of a Great American Novel—or the Introductory Remarks to one. So it's really not all that surprising I've been extra careful about constructing my sentences with the kind of precision you exhibit in crafting yours, generally speaking.
EDITORESS: Ignoring that "generally speaking" for the moment-my motto has always been: The best teaching is that done by example. And, since any teacher worth her (or his) salt is also obligated to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; I must in all honesty admit to being somewhat confused by what you said a few moments ago.
AVID READER: You? Confused?
EDITORESS: Let's say; rather more perplexed than confused.
AVID READER: Perplexed about what?
EDITORESS: About how engaging in a string of onenight stands with a long line of strange bedfellows leaves you feeling threatened by the kind of "lingering emotional problems" normally left behind by a lover with whom an adulteress has established more than just a temporary sexual relationship.
AVID READER: Maybe "emotional" isn't the right word. But I can't think of a better one for it?
EDITORESS: Better one for what?
AVID READER: What a lovelorn housewife feels when she is slowly (but ever so surely!) led to the highest peak of her Himalayan aspirations for copulatory bliss by the sherpalike skill of some transient Foreplay Artist, KamaSutraMeister or PhalloPrince Charming—only to be plunged yet again into that nightmarish pit where, as in Woman in the Dunes,161 the nightly accumulation of sand from the constantly crumbling walls of her personal hellhole must be excavated if she is to avoid being buried alive by it.
EDITORESS: That was much, much, much better!
AVID READER: Are you serious?
EDITORESS: By God I do believe I am! Yes! It's true! What began as a (more or less) typical exercise in mindless "girltalk" is actually turning into the kind of "exalted conversation" which, according to the author's Klutzian Credo: "Even the most intellectually deprived and/or downtrodden of [his] female readers can engage themselves if they are given the slightest chance (or flimsiest excuse?) to flex their mental muscles!"
AVID READER: Then you don't think my elaboration on the "WomanintheDunes" motif might have been just a tad too long, esoteric and/or convoluted?
EDITORESS: Not when the magnitude of the idea you were trying so valiantly to express is taken into account.
AVID READER: Are my ears deceiving me or did I hear you say: "Not when the magnitude of the idea you were trying so valiantly to express is taken into account?"
EDITORESS: Perhaps I was being a trifle pettyminded. Why don't we treat my "trying to express" putdown as a payback for that previouslymentionedbutfarfromforgotten "generally speaking" one of yours?
AVID READER: Your t*t for my tat.
EDITORESS: Or v**e versa.
AVID READER: So; as things now stand is it fair for me to say that: At long last our thoughts on the potentially negative (if not disastrous) side effects of reading Morons Awake! (or any other literary masterpiece) are indeed traveling on the same train?
EDITORESS: Ah, well; since you put it in those specific terms I don't know if I'm prepared to go quite that far at this time.
AVID READER: J***s b****y C****t! Here we go again!
EDITORESS: What's the problem now?
AVID READER: You are—you arrogant, vituperative, sadistic, b**lbreaking, heartless, smug, supercilious,G fatuous,G stuckup, snotnosed, highbrowed condescending c**t!
EDITORESS: Fatuous?
AVID READER: G*dd*mit! You know perfectly well what I mean!
EDITORESS: Believe me, darling, I'm utterly clueless about this latest bee buzzing so busily under that bonnet of yours!
AVID READER: Well let me enlighten you then—
EDITORESS: If you must. But; while I can't ask you to make them sweet, please: keep your remarks as short as you humanly can.
AVID READER: All right. Here it is—in as close as I can come to a nutshell—not that you deserve any f**gging medals for trenchancy!G Well: After working my intellectual a*s off to prove I'm not the complete "birdbrain" you and your finelyfeathered bookpublishing friends take me for; what kind of thanks do I get but this constant drumbeat of innuendoes about the "less than perfect way I've tried (and failed) so valiantly" to express ideas whose f***king complexity the world's b**lsiest philosophers, theologians, aestheticians, psychiatrists and sexologists (not to mention poets, playwrights and novelists!) have had one h**l of a tough time articulating!
EDITORESS: I'm sorry you're disappointed with my lessthan magnacumlaude verdict on your minidissertation linking the perils of promiscuity with those of reading a literary masterpiece; but it can't be helped.
AVID READER: Why the f**k not?
EDITORESS: Because I still have some serious reservations about this rosy picture you paint of the "bliss" a randy housewife from Hicksville, USA gets by fornicating with the first fasttalking Tom, Dick and/or Harry she hooks while trolling for a quick extramarital fix in the wider watering holes of a bible/rustbelt version of Marienbad, Monte Carlo or midtown Manhattan. Moreover; based on those hackneyed cliches—like "Himalayan aspirations," "femme fatale," "scarlet woman" and "heaving bosoms"—woven into that overwrought description of your "extramarital flings" one wonders whether they were actually coined in the epiphanal thrall of a real life romance; or lifted from the pages of those trashy romance novels you're so addicted to reading.
AVID READER: That does it, you mealymouthed motherf**ker! I've had all the bulls**t I'm going to take about the lack of "majorleague" luster in my "sandlot" lovelife! In the first place I don't recall mentioning my, or anyone else's, "heaving bosom." And, as for any "plagiarizing" of mine—let's put it this way: My extramarital flings are no more fictional than the "legendary" one you brag about having with the "Messianic Superman, Foreplay Artist Extraordinaire and Literary Prince Charming" whose Great (but unreadable) Moronic Manifesto was (as a result of your editorial expertise and martyrdom) transformed into a blockbusting American masterpiece!
EDITORESS: Careful now, darling; you're treading on some very dangerous ground!
AVID READER: I don't give a s**t about what kind of g*dd*mned "ground" I'm treading on! In case it still hasn't dawned on you, Miss Smartypants, my "miraculous" appearance on this scene represents more than just the whimsical caprice of some lifelong wallflower desperately seeking her immortality—or 15 minutes of fame—on the pages of (an introduction to) a timeless bestseller!
EDITORESS: Oh I had a pretty good hunch from the first moment we met that you were going to be more than just a minor pain in the—
AVID READER: Please! I'm not finished; and there isn't room on this soap box for the two of us!
EDITORESS: Whatever you say, darling. There's nothing I wouldn't do—or not do—to speed this diatribe of yours on its way pointward. If it has one.
AVID READER: My point, darling, is simply this: For some mysterious reason I have been chosen to represent all those other Plain Janes who, like me, fate has cruelly condemned to spend their lives of quiet desperation on the farthest frontiers—the "Hicksvilles," if you will—of this vast wilderness known as the United States of America! Without my actually saying so (especially to someone of your "erudition") it should be obvious that: Women who find themselves foraging on the fringes of such a sociocultural wasteland for the meagerest measure of marital and/or extramarital bliss can't be quite as fussy about their choice of husbands and/or lovers as the big deal "editoress" of a big deal "publishing house" in the big deal "Big Apple" can be about hers! So it's not surprising that in the pursuit of our romantic happiness, frustrated females such as myself will take any man we can get who comes even close to playing Romeo, Siegfried, Daphnis, Tristan, Paris and/or Prince Charming to our Juliet, Brünnehilde, Chloë, Isolde, Helen of Troy and/or Sleeping Beauty! And when, for all practical purposes, the pursuitofromantichappiness pickings are slimmer than locating a pin in the proverbial haystack what else can a "lovelorn" housewife do but curl up on a sofa and satisfy her adulterous cravings between the covers of a "trashy" gothic novel?
Intro Part 13 Return to Index
Footnotes
155 She obviously meant forbidden fruit.
156 This most gratifying revelation concerning the altered state of THE PERPLEXED READER's literary taste accounts for the latest revision in the manner by which she is pseudonymously described.
157 Franny and Zooey, p.20. See also "J. D. Salinger: Everybody's Favorite," The Atlantic Monthly, August 1961; wherein Alfred Kazin construes Salinger's separate stories of "Franny" and "Zooey" as "a single chronicle [of two] pilgrims seeking their way in a society typified by [Seymour's] Fat Lady, and even by Lane Coutell's meaningless patter of [phony] sophistication." If Kazin was right, as I believe he was despite his general disparagement of Salinger's cultlike popularity, the argument can be made that: Based on the millions of Franny and Zooey books sold since 1963, what might otherwise seem to be the "snowball'schanceinhell" of Morons Awake! ever becoming a blockbusting bestseller are actually enhanced by the virtue of its Salingerlike evangelical motifs!
158 After 1994 this was changed to: "About the same as those for Judith Krantz winning the f***king Nobel Prize for Literature."
159 For those first edition readers who've kept their thinking caps on throughout my dialogue with the CONFUSED AND/OR PERPLEXED (but now AVID) READER the time has come for me to explain what might seem like the impossibility of her role in a conversation that could only have occurred before the book she is supposed to be reading was actually published. While there are several totally plausible explanations I could offer on this "issue"— for example she could have received a complimentary prepublication copy (as a result of which her comments were incorporated in this final version of my Introductory Remarks)—the most likely one is this: That, like so many others who believe they are reading a genuine first edition, you have been duped into buying one of the counterfeits which have been churned out by the millions since Morons Awake! became "the rarest of literary collectibles since the Gutenberg Bible."
160 If this pilot project succeeds (which, given the notoriety of Morons Awake! seems more than reasonable to assume) the number of spinoffs dealing with similar cultural causes célèbres should be virtually unlimited. One can, for instance, easily imagine that under the copyrighted title, "SMART TALK¨—THE THINKING WOMAN'S GUIDE TO PENETRATING THE MYSTERIES OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST ARTISTIC MASTER MINDS," the once esoteric subject of Mahler's 5th Symphony, Manet's Dèjeuner sur l'herbe, Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, Eliot's The Wasteland, etc. could become so popular it might rival the overnight ratings of "Roseanne" or "America's Funniest Home Videos."
161 Woman in the Dunes, adapted by Kobo Abe from his novel, Suna no Onna, and directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara pretty much says it all about the plight of not simply an illiterate Japanese peasant who, for some unspecified "crime," is serving a lifetime sentence of hard labor in the solitary confines of a sand quarry—but the penal servitude imposed on all women by the barbaric practices of every patriarchal society. Having viewed this extraordinary film for the first time only because it was mentioned by the AVID READER (none of her cultural "name dropping" goes unverified) I can't recommend too strongly that you follow my example by begging, borrowing or (if need be) stealing a video tape of what is, without a doubt, one of the "feminist" movement's proudest malemade (what else is new?) artistic moments.
Glossary
divertissement noun, [F, lit., diversion, fr. divertiss- (stem of divertir)](1728) 1 : a dance sequence or short ballet usu. used as an interlude 2 : DIVERTIMENTO 1 3 : DIVERSION, ENTERTAINMENT
supercilious adj [L superciliosus, fr. supercilium eyebrow, haughtiness, fr. super- + -cilium eyelid (akin to celare to hide) ¦ more at HELL](1598) : coolly and patronizingly haughty syn see PROUD
fatuous adj [L fatuus foolish](1633) : complacently or inanely foolish
trenchant 1 : KEEN, SHARP 2 : vigorously effective and articulate