Saturday, December 19, 2015

A FUNNY FREUDIAN? SLIP

Because this is not really a quotation, I am going to be brief. 

The other day I was searching for the latest publications on Bernard Shaw - I use Google Books and Google Scholar for that, among other repositories - when the title of one of the books that made reference to Shaw caught my eye. It was Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities

It took me a while to find the two references to "Bernard Shaw" in the book, and it took me a while more to understand what was going on. 

It turns out that in Chapter 8 ("Petronius' Satyrica and Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar"), the author (Nikolai Endres) discusses the depiction of homosexual relationships between a young boy and an older man. When he describes the case of Jim in The City and the Pillar, he mistakes the name of the actor he has an affair with in the novel (Ronald Shaw) for that of Bernard Shaw. Thus, a rather unexpected paragraph follows, reproduced here: 


Although it is simply a small typographical error that does not subtract from the quality of the chapter, let this be a warning to all my readers about the perils of the internet. And also a token of the type of chaff that the editor of the Continuing Checklist of Shaviana has to separate from the wheat. 

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