“Even the snottiest young artiste, of course, probably isn’t going to beat personal ill will toward writers of trash; just as, while everybody agrees that prostitution is a bad thing for everyone involved, few are apt to blame prostitutes themselves, or wish them harm. If this seems like a non sequitur, I’m going to claim the analogy is all too apt. A prostitute is someone who, in exchange for money, affords someone else the form and sensation of sexual intimacy without any of the complex emotions or responsibilities that make intimacy between two people a valuable or meaningful human enterprise. The prostitute ‘gives,’ but – demanding nothing of comparable value in return – perverts the giving, helps render what is supposed to be a revelation a transaction. The writer of trash fiction, often with admirable craft, affords his customer a narrative structure and movement that engages the reader – titillates, repulses, excites, transports him – without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader an important or even real activity.”

(David Foster Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction Fall 1988: Novelist as Critic, p. 45)

“But, in the case of marriage, there is something more. By conceding the privilege of polygamy to the chief, the group exchanges the individual elements of security guaranteed by the rule of monogamy for collective security, which they expect to be ensured by the leader. Each man receives his wife from another man, but the chief receives several wives from the group. In return, he provides a guarantee against want and danger, not for the individuals whose sisters or daughters he marries, nor even for those men who are deprived of women as a consequence of his polygamy, but for the group considered as a whole, since it is the group as a whole which has suspended the common law for his benefit. Such considerations might be of some interest for a theoretical study of polygamy; but their chief importance is as a reminded that the conception of the state as a system of guarantees, which has been revived in recent years by discussions about systems of national insurance (such as the Beveridge Plan and other proposals), is not a purely modern development. It is a return to the fundamental nature of social and political organization.”

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. Doreen Weightman & John Weightman, p. 315.)

“Every European in India finds himself surrounded, whether he likes it or not, by a fair number of general manservants, called bearers. I cannot say whether their eagerness to serve is to be explained by the caste system, the tradition of social inequality or the demand for service on the part of the colonizers. However, their obsequiousness very quickly has the effect of making the atmosphere intolerable. If necessary, they would lie down on the ground to let you walk over them, and they suggest a bath ten times a day – if you blow your nose, eat fruit or dirty your fingers. Each time, they are there at once, begging for orders. There is something sexual in their anguished submission. And if your behaviour does not correspond to their expectations, if you do not behave on all occasions like their former British masters, their universe collapses: What, no pudding? A bath after dinner and not before? The world must be coming to an end&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp. Dismay is written all over their faces. I would have quickly to countermand my original instructions, abandon my usual habits and forgo rare opportunities. I would eat a pear as hard as a stone or swallow slimy custard, since to ask for a pineapple would have caused the moral collapse of a fellow human being.”

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. Doreen Weightman & John Weightman, p. 138.)

“We were then living in a strange period, such as usually succeeds revolutions or the decline of great reigns. It was no longer the gallant heroism of the Fronde, the elegant, dressed-up vice of the Regency, or the scepticism and insane orgies of the Directoire. It was an age in which activity, hesitation, and indolence were mixed up, together with dazzling Utopias, philosophies, and religious aspirations, vague enthusiasms, mild ideas of a Renaissance, weariness with past struggles, insecure optimisms – somewhat like the period of Peruginus and Apuleius. Material man longed for the bouquet of roses which would regenerate him from the hands of the divine Isis; the goddess in her eternal youth and purity appeared to us by night and made us ashamed of our wasted days. We had not reached the age of ambition, and the greedy scramble for honors and positions caused us to stay away from all possible spheres of activity. The only refuge left to us was the poet’s ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob. Led by our masters to those high places we breathed at last the pure air of solitude, we drank oblivion in the legendary golden cup, and we got drunk on poetry and love. Love, however of vague forms, of blue and rosy hues, of metaphysical phantoms! Seen at close quarters, the real woman revolted our ingenuous souls. She had to be a queen or goddess; above all, she had to be unapproachable.”

(Gérard de Nerval, “Sylvie: Recollections of Valois,” trans. Geoffrey Wagner, pp. 74–75 in the Exact Change Aurélia & Other Writings.)

“And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me. So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision.”

(KJV)

“I hope better of the goodness of God. Perhaps we are approaching the predicted time when science, having completed its cycle of analysis and synthesis, of belief and negation, will be able to purify itself and raise up the marvelous city of the future out of the confused ruins . . . We must not hold human reason so cheap as to believe it gains by complete self-humiliation, for that would be to impeach its divine origin . . . God will no doubt appreciate purity of intention; and what father would like to see his son give up all reason and pride in front of him? The apostle who had to touch to believe was not cursed for his doubt!”

(Gérard de Nerval, “Aurélia,” trans. Geoffrey Wagner, p. 36 in the Exact Change Aurélia & Other Writings.)

“The premium on conciseness and concreteness made proper names a great value – so they came flying at you as if out of a tennis-ball machine: Julia, Juliet, Viola, Violet, Rusty, Lefty, Carl, Carla, Carleton, Mamie, Sharee, Sharon, Rose of Sharon (a Native American), Hassan. Each name betrayed a secret calculation, a weighing of plausibility against precision: On the one hand, the cat called King Spanky; on the other, the cat called Cat. In either case, the result somehow seemed false, contrived – unlike Tolstoy’s double Alexeis, and unlike Chekhov’s characters, many of whom didn’t have names at all. In ‘Lady With Lapdog,’ Gurov’s wife, Anna’s husband, Gurov’s crony at the club, even the lapdog, are all nameless. No contemporary American short-story writer would have had the stamina not to name that lapdog. They were too caught up in trying to bootstrap from a proper name to a meaningful individual essence – like the ‘compassionate’ TV doctor who informs her colleagues: ‘She has a name.&rlquo; ”

(Elif Batuman, from “Confessions of an Accidental Literary Scholar”.)