The Critic (#1482)

(an instance of Generic Speaking Wandering Automaton made by melusina)

     He wears a black turtleneck and faded jeans. His hair is longish, darkly slicked back from his face. The long nervous fingers of one hand toy with an unlit Galuoise, in the other he clutches a tome of obscure and inaccessible literary criticism. He isn't really sure why he's here, but is happy, in his gloomy intellectual way, as long as he has an audience.

The Critic has some things to say:
      If we consider all three serial kinds -- the connective synthesis on a single series, the conjunctive synthesis of convergence, and the disjunctive synthesis of resonance, we see that the third proves to be the truth and the destination of the others, to the degree that the disjunction attains its positive and affirmative use.
      It is because the Real itself offers no support for a direct symbolization of it -- because every symbolization is in the last resort contingent -- that the only way the experience of a given historical reality can acheive its unity is through the agency of a signifier, through reference to a 'pure' signifier.
      The poem itself was as opaque to rational enquiry as the Almighty himself: it existed as a self-enclosed object, mysteriously intact in its own unique being. The poem was that which could not be paraphrased, expressed in any language other than itself: each of its parts was folded in on the others in a complex organic unity which it would be a kind of blasphemy to violate.
      The ambivalent logic inscribed into cultural representations of dead feminine bodies presents the desire for immutability only to undo it again, because, in the end, the corpse is reanimated or allowed to decompose and be replaced by its tropic reversion, by a commemorative sign.
      Power consists not only of using the means of power, but also of concealing power's reliance on means; and oppositionality therefore demonstrates its knowledge of power's secret in its symmetrical recourse to those means -- the duplicities of discourse as a mediated phenomenon -- for its own purposes.

Go to location of this object, The House of Freaks.



VERB SOURCE CODE:

shutup gag: 
if (!this.talkative)
    player:tell("Someone has rather rudely stuffed a candied apple in ", this.name, 
"'s mouth.  He has been quite effectively shut up.  In fact, he seems to be turning 
rather blue.");
    this.location:announce(player.name, " glares at ", this.name, " but sees that 
he's already been silenced.");
else
    this:set_talkative(0);
    player:tell("You find most of a candied apple on the ground, and, driven into 
a blind fury by his babble, stuff it into ", this.name, "'s mouth.");
    this.location:announce(player.name, "crams a candied apple into ", this.name, 
"'s mouth, nearly gagging him.");
endif
.

unshutup ungag: 
if (this.talkative)
    player:tell(this.name, " is talking as fast as he can.  Are you sure you want 
him to be more verbose?");
    this.location:announce(player.name, " begs ", this.name, " to talk even MORE.");
else
    this:set_talkative(1);
    player:tell("You thump ", this.name, " on the back, and the bit of candied apple 
that was gagging him flies out of his mouth.");
    this.location:announce(player.name, " gives ", this.name, " a solid whack on 
the back and he stops choking on the apple.  He's free to share his wisdom with you 
now.");
endif
.


PROPERTY DATA: