This whole Boojum business is what literary wallahs like to call a Catharsis, a purging and expelling of unsettling emotions, resulting in a post-Boojum state of relaxation, gleaming white teeth and little or no underarm perspiration.
In this state of enlightenment all of one’s troubles softly and suddenly vanish away and one is left with only the minty fresh after-taste of … Boojum-Orientalism!
Boojum-Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Boojum because the Boojum is weaker than the Baker, a doctrine which elides the Boojum’s difference with its weakness. . . . as a cultural apparatus Boojum-Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge … the whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Boojumistic essence — in which I do not for a moment believe — but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting …
Yes, dear reader, aided only by my trusty power-packed pen and buckets of second-grade-fresh ink, I have created a Boojum-ridden Baker casting aside the dehumanizing gaze of the oppressive Victorian Boojum … (pauses for breath) …
… and a resurgent postcolonial Boojum reasserting his Snarkitude by rejecting the anapestic snares of the oppressive Victorian Snark Hunter … (dabs brow with gin-soaked compresses) …
… ergo, hurrah for the disappearance of the Author-Function! Hurrah for the justified tyranny of the Reader-Boojum! Hurrah for everybody! … (fans gyrating nautch girl with freshly minted rupees earned from Snark royalties).
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