Viernes, 22 de marzo de 2013

“Hay ideas tan estúpidas que sólo se le pueden haber ocurrido a un académico.”

Esta es una frase irreverente, pero desde que la escuché por primera vez a cada rato la recuerdo. Como después de leer este reportaje del NYT sobre Philip Roth, donde citan un paper con el título…

“Queering Philip Roth: Homosocial Discourse in ‘The American Trilogy,’ ” by David Brauner, who teaches at the University of Reading in England, did not entirely live up to its title; it did not turn Mr. Roth into a gay writer. But it lingered on some passages like the one where Nathan Zuckerman talks about what Swede Lvov looked like without his T-shirt on in “American Pastoral” or the poignant scene in “The Human Stain” where Zuckerman and Coleman Silk dance together, and suggested that eros in Roth is even more complicated than many readers suspect.

¿Qué pensará Roth de esto? Ahora que lo pienso, ya sabemos qué piensa. De hecho, en este comentario que le hizo a David Remnick hace ya un tiempo, Roth lo ilustra con una metáfora:

It’s like baseball. Suppose you and I went to the ballpark together, and there’s a guy next to us with his kid. And he was saying, ‘Now, what I want you to do is watch the scoreboard. Stop watching the field. Just watch what happens when the numbers change on the scoreboard. Isn’t that great? Now, do you see what just happened up there? Did you see what happened? Why did it happened?’ And you say, ‘That guy is crazy.’ But the kid imbibes it and goes home and he’s asked, ‘How was the game?’ And he says, ‘Great! The scoreboard changed thirty-two times and Daddy said last game it changed only fourteen times and the home team last time changed more times than the other team. It was really great! We had hotdogs and we stood up at one point to stretch and then we went home.’ Is that politicizing the baseball game? Is that theorizing the baseball game? No, it’s not having the foggiest idea in the world what baseball is.”

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