i'm simply crushed. eleanor cook has gone and written a book about poetics that is based on the riddles as literary trope that is so exactly the kind of book i meant to. no one has been working on riddles for such a very long time now, and no one who has worked on it before has tried to approach it in this way, except perhaps, passingly by frye, and maybe you could count someone like andrew walsh (although his was within the larger context of examining different "primitive roots" of lyric poetry). i just can't think of one significant work on the subject from the 1980s onwards (except the shulam/hasan-rokem which was brilliant, but that was a collection of conference papers largely from outside the literary field). and the two or three more recent works, and papers given, (when i say recent, i mean 2003 and later, anything that was published after i had written my thesis) on riddles have either been on specific bodies of riddles within a period or culture, or the effect of riddling within a text - so that i was hoping to trump them by range and scope (easily - because i mean to do this as a comparatist, and invest my riddling poetics in both the literatures of the very old and what was written the-day-before-yesterday - i am told i'm good at that sort of thing anyway) - or else they examine riddles in anthropological light - the folklorists do this - whereas what i am trying do is to construct a unified and specifically literary poetics that would allow us to examine literature systematically through the riddling mode.

and she's gone and done both!! her scope is nearly as wide as i intended - and her study is of riddles as literary trope and its function in poetics. just look at her content page. i'm seized with self-pity! of course i read her 1983 essay on wallace stevens in which some of this relationship between riddle and metaphor was talked about, but only passingly - she never gave you the impression that that was a major point of scholarly interest to her, and i didn't follow up on that line anyway, because i got more interested at that time in the riddle's relation to questions of identity - especially the idea that multiple identities might be mathematically-eliminated by equating them with themselves - apollonius you know, incest riddles, riddles about familial relations, but that's all a different story.

and i always knew that what i had done was exciting, or perhaps "cool" - nohrnberg word, not mine! there! - to people because it was novel in subject and approach, and because it attempted to build a system rather than present an argument, but i also knew that it is far too whimsical to be of lasting value, or to make any impact unless it can be developped in more detail, and elaborated in sophisticated ways - and for me to be able to apply it. and i knew that what i needed to do was to write the sort of book eleanor cook has done - create or describe a riddling poetic - and to become a "riddle person" and then to sneak the identity riddles in by the back door. damn it, is that what an undergraduate thesis is for? no one said we were contributing to scholarship, and at least i wasn't bloody writing yet another bright undergraduate thesis on virginia woolf or milton. at least people had to acknowledge it was different. and therein lies the problem doesn't it? this is worse than miltonists and shakespeareans feeling that everything they have to say is already being said by everyone else - precisely because no one else has been saying it. i am on the verge of tears because i actually do feel that someone has stolen my thunder - that my one big chance of debuting - in five years' time - is taken away - and that is of course a childish reaction, it is of course - but good god - what on earth am i going to do one day - what do people do - if just before the completion of their dissertation, a new book by an established academic is published on the exact same matter? i feel as if i'm always fearful - that i'm disadvantaged by the fact of still being a student and being still stuck in my coursework years and doing what i have to do instead of what i want to do while people are all getting ahead publishing. and i do think it's very hard that people that have been around for years and years and years have to take away the living of young people.

at the same time, i am also aware for the first time of this intensely territorial and competitive feeling - and shocked by it too. i really wish that i was delighted by, rather than crushed by, this news and i feel terribly guilty that when i was told of the book this evening i burst out with oh dear, rather than oh good. is this how academics feel? (the younger nohrnberg, at any rate, warns that academics are so competitive precisely because there is so little to fight over. which shows that being in grad school has done at least one negative thing to my outlook.)

but i suspect i'm also just envious of those who could be said to come from what i think of as "the toronto school" - and she is squarely in it - those people were all frye's real heirs - which, in many ways, is where i'm desperately trying to locate myself in terms of my intellectual ancestry, through nohrnberg, you know. but she's the real thing, and my attempt to find myself a place (though at several removes) in that genealogy is probably the academic equivalent of a kind of middle class, naive bourgeois striving towards becoming educated in order to capture or acquire an imaginary aristocratic origin.