Page "Archimago" Paragraph 124

This is not a transparent account of Archimago's shenanigans, but rather an operatic parody that puts the mark of camp on both him and his narrator.

An air of high-spirited impersonation distances the narrator from Archimago.

Like Bela Lugosi playing Count Dracula, he conveys the joy of spooking with such verve and histrionic self-delight as to make fun of the very conventions of diegetic performance at which he excels.

In both the text's impersonation of the narrator and the narrator's of Archimago, the childlike enthusiasm for melodramatic mumbo jumbo, dark incantations, and energetic mummery dominates the scene of evil-doing.

But notice how my very effort to distinguish between the two figures further identifies them and thus registers the ambivalence of the narrator's performance.

A reader who detects a critical edge, a touch of Protestant mordancy, in this narratorial enjoyment, is justified in seeing it as a taut response to the difficulty of maintaining distance.

At the very moment in which, with his parenthetical admonition, the narrator archly and melodramatically dissociates himself from Archimago, he marks their similarity as wordsmiths.

No matter how strenuously he resists contamination, their two methods and projects sinuously intertwine.

Even as he transfers responsibility to Archimago, the narrator proceeds with his own words and verses to do an Archimagian thing, or what would nowadays be called " a poet thing " ( and " a man thing "), when he executes a literary tour de force in his account of the Morpheus passage.