摘要：The subject of the first part of ‘Holes’, John Hughes’ fictional essay on Walter Benjamin, is turning into a piece of Swiss cheese. He is not without consolation. As he watches himself desubstantiate he converses with a radio which tells him what he already knows – reasonably enough, since the voice of the radio is probably a projection of his own. Most of these essays – overwhelmingly most – are troubled attempts, in styles done after the manner of the name on the masthead, to square solipsist enislement with a belief in the adequacy of language to its represented thing. The theme is ongoing, from the essay after the Benjamin piece, the fifth, on Proust, through ‘Bob Dylan’s’ riff on self-enclosure in the eighth essay (‘The traveler who left these pages . . . no longer had a tongue’), to the image of Osip Mandelstam offered in ‘Stone’, where word and world are coincident, to the essay on Jorge Luis Borges, where language is as blind as the writer himself. The drama is re-enacted in different guise between these same antagonists: the expansion of language into the world’s immanence, and solipsist self-contraction.
