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: Babycakes wrote, : " Of course, our friend L. Swilley may argue that it was Hemingway who created an ideal Paris, and that the "real" Paris is only a particular. : : I would prefer to say that there may be an ideal Paris, that Hemingway's is a little less "ideal" and that the actual brick and mortar Paris is perhaps the most real but least ideal." : [Swilley's position is that you might as well call Hemingway's Paris "City X", because it is all and only defined by the words used to describe it in the novel. (See my remarks below,[in the posting,"I *knew*...that d*mned bee!"] concerning a similar treatment of "Jake Barnes.") The use of the term, "Paris," no more opens infinite doors than does the use of "Jake Barnes."] : Babycakes continues, : "L. Swilley and I disagree on the "degree" to which one may incorporate the milieu and the additional knowledge of the author while interpreting a work. My contention is that even using a dictionary, which Swilley agrees to, is really opening up the floodgates to using the exterior, the milieu (sic) because a dictionary is, by definition, based on the meanings of words of a culture based on time and location, precisely the items Swilley rejects." : [More precisely, my conviction is that there must be an agreement on the limits of the external help. We may apply the meanings of words commonly understood in 1924 (there is an element of universality in *that*). but we may not, but at our peril, go into the life of Lady Duff Smith, "understanding" by that means particulars of the character Brett. You would soon have the dog-in-Madagascar situation that I described earlier, the complications of which would make "Finnegan's Wake" seem but a nursery rhyme. Where there are no limits in a gloss there can be no confidence in the glossing; the end is confusion rather than knowledge, gossip rather than insight.] : " But it really is only a matter of intensity. I open the gates earlier than he does, that is all. BC" : [Except that on the other side of *your* gate, there is no bridge; one drops into the moat, where thousands of crocodiles, infinitely multiplying, are all eager to snap at one's a*s. ] : [L. Swilley] : :

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